"Gotcha. Ballpark how big is the place, do we have a guess?"

"No clue! Dungeon's new, though, so it won't be city-sized probably? And it's spent a lot of energy on making those monsters real bad and tough and it kidnaps people so best guess would be, hmm, handful of city blocks max? ...I guess that's a clue."

"Sounds like a clue to me. Doodads ready to go? Shall I head in nowish or is there more to cover?"

"Doodads ready! Should be in your inventory. Also there's a second kind of doodad if you happen to find a kidnap victim that'll make it easier for Woo-young to TP them. ...or so we hope. Field testing! Worst-case the map itself will still be good enough.

"So, if you've got no more questions, then godspeed and please don't die on us, we'll be poking our heads in every couple of minutes to check if you left us any messages or are in dire danger but the portal surroundings are very dangerous so we can't leave anyone inside too long."

"Here goes nothing." Inventory check. Are his shoes tied, he doesn't have dyspraxia anymore but old habits and anyone can trip on a shoelace. Comms are up and behaving.

In he goes.

It's sunny in the dungeon. The sky is blue, there is birdsong just out of sight, and ground is grassy and there are flowers and shrubs. He is in the center of a large circular room with stone walls about twice as tall as he is split by irregular gaps leading out into proper mazelike corridors going around in spirals.

And the monsters are, indeed, right there. They're made of the same stone the walls are, large minotaur-shaped golems patrolling the corridors, visible through the gaps in the walls at regular intervals. They move surprisingly quietly for animated statues that large, but as soon as Haru looks at any one of them he can feel the mounting pressure of his backlash.

He is going to have to show that guy so many fucking cat pictures. Maybe get Cricket on a video call. That's a terrible idea because Cricket hates everyone but maybe this time he'd get along with a new person??

He wants to get through here quickly and not become lost; he'll fly for a second to get on top of a wall so he can run and not have to try to left-hand-rule his way through the optional physics zone. Unfortunately, because of the optional physics zone, the wall Alice-in-Wonderlands out of his reach. He gives up and touches down again. Through the maze it will have to be.

The pressure of the minotaurs on him diminishes if he doesn't look at them, and is gone altogether if he renders himself completely incapable of perceiving them, such as by covering his eyes and ears well enough. Of course, that'd defeat the purpose, so he'll have to deal with minotaurs that really want to pick his brains re. whether he's looking at them. 

It is, otherwise, a pretty unremarkable dungeon run for Haru, who is by now probably used to going into situations where he's walking through and past huge supernatural threats that completely ignore him like he doesn't exist or matter. The stone maze theme continues, with occasional environmental hazards like spiked pits and swinging pendulum blades and so on. 

The first victim he finds is a young woman in ski clothes trapped behind iron bars at the end of a corridor, in a cell about four square metres in area, with nothing but grass in it. She's been here long enough that the fear got mostly replaced by boredom, and she's sitting on the grass playing on her phone when Haru sees her. There isn't a minotaur directly guarding it, but occasionally one does come into view; it seems to not care that she's seeing it, though.

The lady's allowed to see him. "Hey. Teleporter's gonna get you out of here in a minute," he says, in Korean if she looks local and in English if she's a white tourist.

She looks local, and she shrieks when he appears out of nowhere. 

"O-oh," she says, heart hammering nearly through her ribcage. "Th-thank you, esper-nim," she says, standing up to bow to him. "A-are you Korean?" She doesn't think she recognises him, maybe he's an esper that doesn't usually make the news?

"Nah, just visiting." Experimental doodad, behold this lady. "This is supposed to tell the teleporter where you are so he can grab you. Do you want me to message ahead for anything?"

She accepts the doodad. "...could you tell my husband that I'm okay, if he hasn't also been kidnapped? I'm Kim Jeongtae and he's Nam Dal-pyeong."

"I'll let the support folks know. Kim Jeongtae, Nam Dal-pyeong," typety typety. .........tactically speaking he should not stand around talking to this person till she's teleported out. That's minutes he could be spending mapping instead of indulging his backlash. Any messages or pings or anything on the system indicating how long they're going to take about it?

Next check-in is in two and a half minutes.

"It's gonna be a couple minutes before they get that. I... should... cover the rest of the dungeon, but you won't have long to wait, okay?"

"Oh. That's—faster than I expected. Thank you, esper-nim." She bows again, more deeply this time.

"You're welcome!" he says, and he dodges a passing minotaur and jogs off.

There are more kidnapping victims, all of them in similar cages, some of them more scared than others, all of them being completely ignored by the monsters. It'll take a while to get to all of them, but once he's about 70% through the best estimates for the number of people this dungeon is thought to have kidnapped he finds the exit to the maze, opening out into a beautiful flowery meadow.

The centaur resting peacefully on the grass, not at all made of stone, looking like it'd be a good three stories tall if it were standing on its hooves, is probably guarding the dungeon core.

Haru doesn't have basically any combat applicable powers. He could have gone in with a rocket launcher, but a) he didn't and b) there's still people in there. He puts down one of the mapper doodads, snaps a picture for his blog, and starts circling back, trying to cover different ground while still heading exitward, because he was very worryingly tempted to introduce himself to the centaur.

When he's out of the dungeon Min Woo-young's in a wheelchair. "Verdict is that the doodads are useful but not by enough that I can eat the backlash cost so we're going to need people to actually be inside near the rescuees," he says immediately.

"And to help with that, let me introduce my best friend Lee Tae-gun!"

Lee Tae-gun, Korea's only S-rank esper, is indeed now with the group, looking irritated by being referred to as "best friend" by Park Yoo-min but not willing to pick a fight about it. "Nice to meet you, Swan Haru-nim," he says, bowing.

"Good morning!" Fistbump? Ha ha the barbarian Canadian actually wants to know which of the people around him can make him less insane, he finds that important information, let's discover it together? "I found most of the folks, not the whole list because it's a literal maze that wouldn't let me overfly it, but they're not really hidden beyond being in a maze."

Lee Tae-gun is looking at Haru's fist like he might've looked at a strange dungeon monster that looked like it was dangerous at first but then turned out surprisingly docile: with extreme distrust and mild bafflement.

"That's a fistbump, Tae-gun. You bump your fist against it."