"My power's kinetic energy absorption and reuse. If someone shoots me with a gun I can tank it and use that to fuel strength or speed, or to just throw something else at the speed of a bullet. Also pretty physical, like, Si-yeon's."

"That's so videogamey, I love it."

"I like it too!"

"His backlash is he gets sleepy and he is so cute when he's sleepy it makes me want to smooch him."

...B or A, guessing A.

"Cute." He assumes it's okay to call it cute if she says things like that but he is not going to opine that that sounds like the nicest backlash he's ever heard of, it might suck somehow for the guy.

"I get tired and low-energy," he clarifies, wrapping an arm around Hyun-jae. "Slow reaction times, slow thinking, start getting so tired I can't sleep and if I do sleep I spend twelve hours in a coma, and it gets worse from there. I actually did go into a weeklong coma when I manifested."

He sure hopes these people aren't expecting him to overshare about his backlash the way they're doing.

"That would definitely be inconvenient." You'd be unconscious for most of it being inconvenient though. Jealooooous.

"Does it get dangerous in dungeons?" Why is he showing an interest.

"Yes and no. I can still tank a lot of hits, but that makes the backlash worse, and if I fall asleep in the middle of a dungeon that can be a big problem because I won't wake up." He scratches the back of his neck with some embarrassment. "That happened once, actually, my partner at the time had to carry my unconscious body out."

Yeah, presumably he can't go in solo safely. Haru's kind of a liability for anyone he goes with because he's prone to comms chatter but that's not as bad as passing out.

"Mine's more of a crowd control and support power. I can dampen the energy of my surroundings, make it colder, make enemies slower. I can also make things more breakable or brittle, and I can except specific things or people from it."

"We usually go in together and she makes things slow while I mow them down."

"Dream team TBH."

Aaand she's not volunteering her backlash but she is entitled to privacy so that's fine.

Choi Seungjoo and Park Yoo-min explain theirs, though that's mostly for Jaeha's benefit since Haru was briefed on them when they went on that dungeon together. They also don't elaborate on their backlashes.

Hmmmm Baek Hyun-jae B probably, Park Yoo-min B, and Choi Seungjoo B or A, unsure which.

Also: he's relieved not everyone decided to go on about their backlashes, it would've been socially uncomfortable to be implicitly pressured about it by being the only one who hadn't.

Haru was right that if you aim for making your coworkers family you will miss but get a thing that is convenient for him personally. He's probably sold unless Juno or Hasegawa want to pay him enough to personally eradicate malaria.

Maybe Haru is used to a much warmer family than Jaeha's. That bar is very low.

Jaeha can mostly make conversation and seem warm, especially with how he's allowed to use his powers on all of these other people. He still needs to mostly approximate the things he's expressing with how they're coming off so that Haru won't be suspicious so that limits his repertoire but a big part of the limitation is just that using his powers like this on a crowd of people is a much worse idea and needs more careful management. In any event, they successfully have a social evening, meet some more people, and eventually (when it's clear they're not going to go for a second round to get drunk with Si-yeon and Ha-eun) excuse themselves.

Time for Haru to double check the route back to The House and sweep Jaeha off his feet!

He can accelerate quite well and his maneuverability is great. He can't actually get very far off the ground, but you don't have to be a helicopter to swoop along a river without running into any boats.

And he'll get to experience flying while carrying someone he's compatible with who's also carrying a reasonable amount of his own backlash. There's an immediate feeling of more freedom—espers always learn to gauge the backlash pressure of using their powers in different ways, learn to measure "if I do this then it'll affect me by this much", but with a partner nearby everything is cheaper, everything feels freer, they can do the same for less so if they try to push as much as they're used to on their own they'll go much farther. There's a lot more oomph to everything, because of that, and Haru might be finding himself accidentally going too fast, or higher than he's used to, just because it's so much easier now.

At the same time, Jaeha will get more guiding from the fact that espers guide each other better the closer they are to each other's backlash levels, and from Haru's perspective, "more backlash" is always going to be closer to Jaeha, for the foreseeable future.

It's not hard at all to play the part of someone who's excited to be flying. All he has to do is channel the feeling of being guided and pretend it's about that instead.

Wow, Jaeha has so much backlog, Haru's not sure even faceplanting on Jaeha all night in his sleep is going to make much of a dent. Didn't he have a partner? Doesn't that shit hurt if you leave it lying around too long?? He will think about that later! Right now he is flying above the Han River with Jaeha in his arms and coming in for a landing on the steps of The House.

...okay there is in fact another part of this that Jaeha appreciates. When they have safely landed he is going to pull Haru in for a kiss.