"Dropping kayfabe? That's a first."

What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck???

"You're - you're the closest fucking thing I have to a friend, you prick! You're the only human that's anything like me and if you go off to die in a corner like a pathetic little worm where I can't even see -!"

The false Hye-jin in front of him fades away, and the environment starts... shifting. Alarmingly.

Like it wants to trap Jaeha (and also the humans that are with him, but mostly Jaeha) inside.

...Nightmare just called him a friend.

Nightmare. The dungeon. Just called him a friend???????

He drops the control over the others' senses so they'll perceive this, too.

"We need to move. Something's happening. We need to get out."

The esper with the tracking power freezes. "What—"

    The esper with the movement power doesn't. "Get ready to go in three seconds."

"NO," growls a disembodied voice, and the dark alley environment that had been simulated from the victim they were tracking falls away to total darkness, "stop him, he's going to - !"

The three of them are surrounded by a glowing transparent dome which shoots back towards the portal at a very alarming speed.

It would have options if everyone on the team weren't shielded, but Jaeha had the foresight to get himself shielded, so - there's -

- not really much this dungeon can do to stop them.

They break through a few disembodied walls on their way out, but that's about it.

They're spat out, and as soon as the shield pops out of existence Jaeha falls to his knees, hit by a belated panic attack.

What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck.

What has he done? What has he become? Nightmare? Thinks he's a friend?

Jaeha's entire life as an esper, the one thing that has always been his antithesis was Nightmare. He's its ultimate foil, no other esper can negate its powers as thoroughly as he can.

And it considers him a friend.

No. He cannot, he cannot let it win. He cannot let it have anything it wants. He cannot let it have him. He cannot.

And the best way to do that is—

And it's what he wanted, isn't it? He has lost. Everything he worked for, worked towards, for the past six years. Everything, all of it, just gone. Because of that woman. He fought her and she won. She won, and he lost.

He doesn't have a plan. He doesn't have a next step. There's nothing more he can do. There's no more future ahead, for him, now even more than back then. Tae-gun is gone. Tae-gun is gone forever. He will never have Tae-gun back. Even if he removed her somehow, even if she was removed by completely external circumstances, Tae-gun will never take him back.

Jaeha has lost.

There is no Jaeha without Tae-gun. There has never been Jaeha without Tae-gun, and if he can't have Tae-gun, then...

There's a procedure, for when someone comes out of Nightmare actively suicidal.

The person being marked as such being Kang Fucking Jaeha means that the ensuing alert goes out to, approximately, everyone involved with Nightmare, instead of 'a small team that will handle it delicately.' Which is what usually happens, for rescued victims.

Jaeha is oblivious. Has been oblivious for the handful of seconds it took for his brain to go through that line of reasoning, and continues to be oblivious as he opens his commscreen and requests a teleport home.

...which doesn't go.

What... the...?

Oh.

It's that woman.

He should've gotten rid of her the way he threatened to do, when he was trying to scare Kim Hye-jin away. Having a fucking empath around all the damn time is a fucking liability and now they're going to try to stop him.

He stands up, calmly, and gets everyone onsite to forget that they got the warning. His teleportation rights are still revoked, of course, since he'll only be allowed to use it once he's been cleared of risk of harm to self or others but if no one else knows that he's a risk at all they won't know to lift the lock, but that's fine. He doesn't need to go home to do what he must do.

What the - why is -? Everyone's acting like everything's fine, but Hana is for some reason terrified and concerned and - and she notes that her emotional state is the firm and unnaturally solid feeling of what it's like to have used her powers on herself.

Like she just suddenly had a time sensitive emergency dropped on her lap and the only way she could possibly handle it according to procedure was to do the one thing that always makes everything worse, even when it seems like it'll make everything better.

"Wait," she says, standing and - stumbling - out of the tent, "wait, don't -"

The perimeter around Nightmare is very, very large, partly because the portal is very, very large, so he's not out yet by the time she walks out of the tent.

He is, however, surprised by her appearance. Did she manage to remember, somehow? But obviously that makes no sense, no esper can actually perceive or resist his power, so she's probably—making some inferences about her own emotional states, goddamnit.

Fine. Shoo those memories, again, and make her think she's still in the tent for the moment, and erase himself from her perception for good measure.

That - doesn't - help - !

Fugimura Hana doesn't understand what's going on, and her emotional state doesn't make any sense, and she's - under some kind of hostile mental attack -

- so she does the only reasonable thing one can do in this situation, which is slam her own powers into projecting her confusion and terror, at, at - the thing she was afraid to face in front of her, which she remembers just being a tent but that doesn't make any sense and if there's anything that Hana knows, it's when and how her backlashed anxiety acts, and it doesn't look like this.

Wh.

Jaeha hasn't felt anything this strongly in years. Anything, anything at all. Not even his love of Tae-gun—or the fear of losing him—is this strong.

He doesn't know what to do with feeling something this strongly, it's distracting him from everything else, he doesn't remember what he was doing—no, he does, but it's not important right now—where is he—no, he knows that, but it feels like he doesn't—he needs to go, needs to run away, he's not sure where to and his brain is too full, he doesn't know what to do—

And everything that was an illusion falls away in front of Hana. The tent is gone, and she's instead on her knees - on the ground -? and pushing her emotions at the person in front of her, which is horrifying (and he can feel the flavor of horror and self hatred and disgust at this, since she's just projecting her own emotional state at him) but - also. It makes everything make sense.

She was resisting another esper's mental tampering. And - and - she won.

".... help," she says in a small voice, to, to - anyone that is nearby, there are probably some people nearby. She's afraid to let up on her power and afraid to keep going, and feeling awful and hating herself and continuing to push it at Kang Jaeha just so she can - keep - some kind of hold on this situation, let the other normal people without mind powers figure out what the fuck is going on and maybe tell her what the fuck to do.

There are, indeed, procedures for this kind of thing. Nightmare is a psychic dungeon, psychic espers are constantly coming in and out, weird unexplained shit can happen all the time.

(Granted, the procedures were not designed with the level of complete fuckery Kang Jaeha is capable of in mind so if it weren't for Hana's timely intervention they wouldn't have caught him. A fifty-page postmortem incident report detailing everything that went wrong today and what they should've done instead will be landing on someone's desk soon after anyone knows what to write in it.)

When something strange and unexpected happens involving psychic espers and/or dungeons, you send in robots. Drones, to be more precise, as well as some operatives with strong mental shielding making zero decisions on the ground and following step-by-step instructions given remotely by people nowhere near the incident site.

(There are no known espers with the power to affect targets remotely through technology.)

...self-hatred and disgust, that he knows what to do with. That was pretty much what he'd been feeling before, and he's—realising—that the jig is up, that that woman caught him and stopped him despite everything, and of course she did, because he's not good enough at this, he's never been good enough at this, he's been lying to everyone and most of all himself for years and it was bound to catch up to him someday and today is that day, apparently.

That's fine. It's fine. He was already planning to do it. He wanted a more foolproof method but he knows where his carotid artery is and he has a knife on him and if his hands are trembling and he feels like vomiting and his vision is swimming, well, he still has proprioception, so before the friendly men in the full-body armour can do anything he can grab his knife and close his eyes and—

When Hana wakes up, she's in a room on her own. It's not a prison cell, there's a sofa and a table and a chair and an open door leading to a bathroom, but there's something that looks quite a lot like a one-way mirror, a camera, and a locked door, and all of the furniture is bolted to the floor.

To someone as fond of procedure as Hana is, this will be familiar as one of the possible responses to a psychic esper who may have been compromised. It might take her a bit to actually realise this as she's coming to, though, since the effects of the sedative doesn't wear off immediately all at once.