Jaeha doesn't succeed at broaching the terrifying horrible mortifying subject—mostly because it doesn't even occur to him to try, it being terrifying and horrible and mortifying to think about—and it is still too early in the year for the Rainbow Fountain shows to happen, but it is nevertheless a really nice date with his extremely cute boyfriend and he even manages to get over himself and not obsess over the fact that there absolutely totally are people thinking homophobic thoughts in their direction for a good fraction of the time! A success, in his opinion.

And then they can go home for the evening. And probably have sex. Because of the narrative powers of picnics.

Jaeha was not aware of the narrative powers of picnics pertaining to sex but is he ever going to refuse Haru anything? That's right, he is not.

Jaeha doesn't figure out a way to do the terrifying, mortifying, horrible thing over the next day. He also doesn't think about his mother, because that sounds like a can of worms. He also doesn't want to think about Lee Tae-gun, not for now, not until he does his first dungeon.

...

He's just been doing a lot of introspection and thinking about hard things lately and it's made his brain kind of fried and he has no idea how Haru does it every day except that it's obviously because Haru is perfect in every way. Jaeha, however, is not, and needs breaks from trying to get his brain to do difficult and unpleasant things. Which means he isn't the man of Haru's dreams, either, because the man of Haru's dreams wouldn't just run away from his problems like Jaeha does, but he thinks he's probably on a good trajectory? He might eventually become the man of Haru's dreams, someday? But not if he burns himself out completely on the concept of having thoughts, which he was risking, there, for a bit.

Gahh. It's fine. They have a dungeon to do together.

App working? Gear all checks out? Is Haru scouting or do they know what this one looks like?

Yes, yes, and it's already been mapped; they get briefed when they arrive.

The terrain is really annoying, interconnected vines and enormous trees with linked roots, tripping hazards everywhere. The plants move around a bit, too, usually not so much that paths become impassable but the "usually" is an important caveat.

There isn't a passive psychic effect, though; instead, there are bark-skinned dryad monsters that attempt to wrap you in tentacle-like vines, who then proceed to make you fall asleep and feast on your dreams, turning them into nightmares. Just physically removing the victim from the dryad isn't enough, though, as the dryad also has psychic vines wrapped around the victim's mind which need to be individually released, lest they damage a victim's mind. 

Or, well, that's the case at least if you aren't Kang Jaeha.

He is Kang Jaeha, thankfully, so hopefully it'll be easier with him there.

"Ready?" Jaeha asks... himself, really. Of course Haru's ready. But he still needs to ask.

"Sure thing." In they go.

The dungeon is open air, and it's permanently night, the moonless sky carpeted with stars hidden by the occasional wispy cloud. They can't see the ground at all, all covered in vines and bark pulsating and rubbing wetly against each other. Fireflies as big as a fist and dragonflies as long as a person is tall circle the treetops, and the air is filled with the buzzing of unseen cicadas. The internal support team's set up around the portal and an esper with defensive powers is posted with them in case any of the monsters decide to come harass them, though it hasn't happened yet.

The monsters can't see Haru. He's sticking quite close to Jaeha in case he needs to grab him in flight, and when he brushes close enough, Jaeha can feel the little licks of backlash come into existence as firefly vision passes through Haru like he's not there.

Haru has a headlamp and another light he mounts on his shoulder, the one he doesn't brace weapons against. "How aggressive are the bugs?" he asks their defense escort. "Are there harvest priorities in here yet or are we still on some-of-anything-as-convenient?"

"The bugs seem to be strictly cosmetic. They haven't done anything yet, anyway. And we're on some-of-anything-as-convenient but mostly because nothing has seemed to be particularly useful yet."

"Alrighty." Glow in the dark spraypaint to mark paths, every ten steps or as needed whichever is more frequent. In they go.

The spray paint... doesn't stick. Something about the wet surfaces, or the way the vines keep rubbing against each other, the paint doesn't last more than minutes.

Well that's fucking annoying. Labyrinth style paracord, then?

That works!

Jaeha... doesn't have much to do, yet. He's keeping his attention out but he's stopped keeping the attention of the apparently strictly cosmetic bugs off them so as not to accumulate more backlash than necessary.

Once the paracord is secured they can get underway. Thataway looks like a fine first direction to go looking for people to rescue.

They have a 3D map with the approximate locations of kidnap victims, fed by sensors earlier. The monsters don't move very much once they've trapped someone, but they do move any, and most importantly the vines are doing their best to make the paths change. There are also reportedly dryads hidden in the dark crevices blending into the surroundings that move surprisingly quickly.

Like this one.

Hmm. Jaeha doesn't think so, actually. He thinks that dryad is really mistaken about where they are, and is most importantly very mistaken about what actions it can take and how it can move.

His reaction time and precision are both sufficient to catch it off-guard, and these dryads seem to have independent wills from the dungeon, which means that once this one is finding its body moving in ways it doesn't expect to it doesn't get overridden by the dungeon itself puppeteering its body, and starts thrashing in confusion.

That dryad doesn't have a victim with it so it's fine to shoot it, right? Right. Die, evil dryad. Haru will mourn the inoffensive de-dungeoned dryad you could have been in his downtime.

That all happens so fast their defense escort barely has time to raise a shield to protect them. She supposes it was silly of her to expect she was going to be of any use when Kang Jaeha is on the team.

Jaeha isn't listening—is quite explicitly excluding her from his sonar-like pinging of everything he sees for whether it contains a mind. He can have this much self-control, at least.

Onwards.

Haru swings his whole head around to cast the headlamp into all the corners and crevices and is relying on Jaeha to "watch" their backs.

Jaeha can't directly detect minds as they come "within range"; rather, he has to pick something in his awareness and then check whether it has a mind, constantly. Usually, that's "a person" or "a monster", so it's reasonably simple to lock and go. In this case, where the monsters camouflage and blend into the background, he has to be constantly pointing his powers at things and going, "is that a mind? is that a mind? is that a mind? is that a mind?", in all directions. He's used enough to it that it's almost automatic, and it's how he catches every single dryad that tries to ambush them before their defense escort can, but it's a constant passive backlash generator. Then, whenever he locks on, he psychically shreds the monster, locking it in its own illusory cages for long enough for it to be disposed of elsewise (though he actually suspects that if he used his illusions to make the dryad believe it had been killed it would in fact also die, that sounds like the kind of psychic these monsters are).

Compared to that, freeing victims feels like almost nothing. He can release them from the dryads just like that, leaving absolutely no trace of them behind, and no way for them to do any damage on their way out. It's an almost careless flick of his metaphorical wrist, while simultaneously faking the feedback to the dryads' minds themselves to make them not realise they've lost their targets.

So his backlash steadily grows, tick by tick, and he slowly starts to forget why he's doing any of this in the first place, at least in his heart of hearts.