Ah fuck he didn't even notice he was—wait. Warming up. 

Warming up???

"Oh?"

"Yeah. I didn't really take note of it at the time but if that's what pops out when you think I'm gonna die it's sweet."

That's an incredibly weird way to put it and yet Jaeha is incredibly endeared and he gets to keep calling him Haru-ya and he's just going to be uncomplicatedly happy about this. As a treat.

"I was so scared."

 ...that's not what he'd been planning to say. In hindsight he feels like it's probably fine, though. "When I got a message saying you were really badly backlashed and a suicide risk, I—"

"I'm sorry." Cling.

"No, it's—I'm not trying to—you don't have to apologise. I just—" Really, really like you.

"...okay, so, I'm not at zero yet and am known to over-apologize as a backlash symptom, but, also, I made a serious error that, among other things, frightened you? And I'm sorry about that!"

"I—guess—but like you said you've been apologising a bunch already. I—forgive you, to the extent that makes sense? And we'll figure out ways to make it less likely to happen in the future and that's—better than an apology."

"Okay. Thank you." Kiss.

God he's not sure how he'll survive something like this happening again. He'll make sure to follow up on that "figuring out how to not" thing. He needs his Haru to be alive.

Haru cancels his scheduled fourth dungeon for the day - the stalactite one displaced his scheduled #3, since it was such a power match. He writes up an incident report, once he's debacklashed enough to do it with his own two hands, and he doesn't let go of Jaeha all night, even down to zero.

In the morning he assesses himself and says he can do normal dungeons but if anything fucky shows up he wants Jaeha waiting outside for mini-breaks.

Eeeeeeeee.

Yeah, of course. Jaeha is more than happy to help.

Cricket has not yet begun to make a serious study of Korean, but he knows "ana", "kata", the conventional directions, "you idiot", "please" and "thank you" (Haru convinced him that if he says them with withering sarcasm it will be very effective in certain situations), "yes" and "no", "now", "teleport", and several people's names. There's enough people with passable Japanese for that to do for the time being.

Haru is busy slumming it with that smelly awkward man because Haru is far too good a person to let the opportunity to go around saving the unworthy pass him by, so Cricket is doing some of his dungeons without Haru, which is just as well because Haru has no four-dimensional maneuvering advantages at all. (It is useful that he can be imperceptible even to a monster approaching from directions he can't see, but mostly just in that it means he's safer standing there helplessly than most people whose M.O. in a four dimensional dungeon is to stand there helplessly.)

Cricket likes going into four dimensions. He's not very big in the fourth dimension but his fur can fluff out that way and he feels a little less pressurized when it has room to do so, a little less like he's been dunked in water and combed to within an inch of his life till every hair lays flush against every other. When he steps inside his eyes go from slit-pupiled to four-pointed stars, and some of his fur and downfeathers glitch in and out of apparent existence to human viewers even when he's standing quite still.

Park Yoo-min is completely useless in a 4D environment so he ducks out after escorting Cricket to it.

Min Woo-young, on the other hand, is in going in experimentally to discover whether his power works in four dimensions.

"Oh wow you're even more handsome in person."

"Of course I am." He flicks his tail; it disappears from view and settles back into place around his feet. "Which part of your job am I doing for you today?"

"Probably seeing where things and people are, if my power works in 4D, or being a reference point to drag people to our projection here, if it doesn't. Does that sound okay?"

"Well, there's someone over there." He points, but the tip of his paw foreshortens away into nothing as he does it.

"—what, this close to the portal, really? Uh, I don't know how to look—hang on." He points at a random rock. "I'll try to teleport that, can you tell me which direction it went and how far?" Vworp.

"Congratulations. It landed on their face."

...well that's actually pretty useful, then! Vworp comes the person to this projection.

"I can't see anyone else from here but I can see a monster and it is bigger than I am. Who is coming with me to be less important than I am when monsters attack?"

Woo-young cackles then covers his mouth when one of the espers looks at him funny. "Cricket is asking who's going to bodyguard him while exploring the dungeon," he explains in Korean, then back to his lackluster Japanese: "I'm going to stay near the portal. Were you given something to connect to the Comms system?"

"This thing?" Paw paw.

"Yeah! Okay, keep in touch."