"And in most of those you can get my alarm to stop beeping regardless." It's so good that he can now stop thinking about Haru dying which he had been—not thinking! Because thinking about it would be bad! But now he's definitely extra not thinking about it.

"Speaking of covering for unforeseeable events has anyone talked to Tae-gun for you yet - or were you going to do that yourself - if there is a situation where I can't see you -"

"—ah. I ought to, oughtn't I. I—forgot to think about that." He opens his commscreen to write "figure out what to do about Lee Tae-gun" down.

Pet pet.

"I'll leave that for the next time I schedule myself to think about things though because I think I have some feelings to untangle about it."

"Totally legit, you've got like a day and a half till I start doing dungeons again and I don't think you're even thusly committed - actually it might make sense to schedule me along with you all the time. Because you're a specialist and I am mostly capable of operating in those specialist dungeons but am not in my own right worth calling across international borders for most of them, and you are, so I think I'm going to wind up functionally your sidekick."

Okay the idea of doing dungeons with his BOYFRIEND sounds incredibly appealing.

Except...

"I would love to have you with me but I'm not sure you're best positioned to go to the majority of the dungeons I'm usually sent to?"

"No? I mean, maybe not in the ones where the floors are illusions, that'd be a lot of flying for me, but I think even if you need to shield me from something because it goes around my own defenses the marginal cost of one shield'd be offset by the backlash efficiency of working with a partner..."

"I'm more thinking about the more unique cases. I suppose if you came with me to literally just hang out with me while I dealt with, say, a monster waging war inside someone's brain and guide me? But that feels very—wasteful, your powers are useful."

"They're fine, they're just kind of generic, for dungeon purposes. Well, I guess we can present these cases to the guild and leave the scheduling to the professionals, just means we can't plan on me being your external conscience."

"We should see how I do without you at least a couple of times for stress testing anyway, but given how long it's been since my last dungeon it might be a good idea to start small, do a couple of dungeons with you next week, see how that goes, then try one without..."

"Yeah, that sounds right to me."

"Are they generic, though?" he wonders. "It seems like you should be useful for scouting many kinds of dungeons that sensors have trouble with, and the combination of stealth and mobility ought to be pretty good for rescues, too..." Have people considered that Haru is perfect and good at everything. Just a thought.

"I do scouting missions, yes, but sometimes it turns out that in addition to giving sensors trouble the dungeon is also trying to melt off my skin, or it's louder than a heavy metal concert in there for some reason, and I have to turn right around. Admittedly that's not the typical case. And I'm good for rescues but since every dungeon involves rescues everyone has a way to do it or has allies who know how locally and doesn't need me in particular there."

"I suppose that makes sense." But have they considered that they should instead use Haru so he gets to be a big damn hero like he deserves to be. Have they. He thinks they should.

Once the pasta salad is mixed up and chilling in the fridge he writes up these considerations for the guild, though since it will be seen by a relatively large number of people he doesn't identify Jaeha's backlash, just that he was stuck in a hole full of it for years and needs to ease back into balancing it more appropriately.

Quasar can accommodate that! But it might be a good idea to just offer them the dungeons they'd offer them and let them just pick which and how many of them to do? It'll be slightly more work than if they use the opt out system they usually do but only slightly, they'd just need a bit of advance warning.

That sounds fine to him!

They can do that, then!

"Whatcha doin'?" he asks, exaggeratedly stretching his neck over to look over Haru's shoulder.

"Opting in to opting in to dungeons," Haru says, moving it so Jaeha can see easier. "So we can see what comes up in practice while working out how to approach it."

"Oh, I see. That makes sense." He kisses Haru's cheek and gets back to his own cooking. "So that's the plan?"

"For now, at least."

"I gotta say I'm kind of excited to run a dungeon with you."