The dungeon started acting weird everywhere so Woo-young is already on it for everyone. Vworp.

Cricket charges straight out the portal.

And outside, there is pandaemonium. The support team is reorganising itself so that 3/4 of it can be sent elsewhere because dungeons are spawning everywhere, and from the way some authorities have been called to try to get the crowd of onlookers to safety  it seems likely that a different dungeon appeared somewhere nearby, one that's probably started spewing monsters. His comms reconnect and if he pays attention he'll get confirmation of same, plus official warning that the guilds are quickly coming to the conclusion that the confluence has started.

It's not chaos, though, because they've been preparing for months; rather, it's the business and stress associated with putting a complicated and important plan into motion. And as it's literally only just started, this is just the opening salvo, which is typically followed by a short lull before a gradual but rapid ramp up.

He will hang around in case they want him to go back in there with a plan robust to the terrain being evil on top of the moths, but he is going to WAIT for such a plan to materialize.

They're going to need to find different espers because this dungeon just got ranked up but so did half the dungeons in the world. They get a Japanese speaker to tell Cricket that it'll be at least half an hour before they can get people to back in with him.

He will wait for half an hour. Can his escort get a guiding break in that time or is he getting a new one or what.

He's probably getting a new one, his escort isn't rated for this much danger.

Yeah the moths were pretty weaksauce. Cricket laboriously taps out a text to Haru while he waits.

Cricket's message won't be the first one Haru receives, though. Both he and Jaeha got notifications at the same time, and their schedules have been completely cleared. Quasar will also be holding an all-hands in about three hours, when every on-duty esper who isn't taking care of any emergencies is projected to be done with their current dungeons. Barring said emergencies, attendance is mandatory; all Korean guilds are doing the same thing, but staggered, so that they can all cover for each other.

"...well, fuck."

"This'll be my first one, I wasn't doing dungeons yet last time. What's to expect?" Haru asks, taking Jaeha's hand and squeezing it.

He squeezes it back, then puts an arm around Haru. "Fewer hours of sleep. As metonymy."

"Uh-huh. I'll... reschedule all my interviews." He gets on that.

Yeah.

"So... Nightmare is definitely going to show up. It always shows up for confluences."

"I should go with you for that. Force-multiplying you there is almost certainly more important than anything else I could be doing."

"I, uh, disclaim that I know that I'm being insane here but the idea of you going into Nightmare gives me nightmares."

"It won't be able to see me. I guess it can... see other people seeing me? But not me directly. I can be invisible to the victims, even, so only shielded people know I'm there."

"It almost certainly can't get to you. I can shield you for the double whammy. But the mere possibility of it touching you makes me want to hide you away forever. And even without touching you, it... sucks. It's going to be showing you horrible stuff, all the time."

"I've read about it. I don't want you to have to be alone in it, either, though, you realize?"

"oh"

Okay he's gonna hug Haru, now, because, because, because... just because.

Hug. "I love you."

Aaaaahhhhhh. "I love you too." Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!!!!

Haru kisses him. "We'll be okay."

How could he ever believe otherwise, with Haru in his life?

"...so I'm not sure what your schedule will be like, but for me they usually bias towards sending me into dungeons I don't have to actually go inside of unless there's one that particularly needs me, so that I'll be close enough to comms for when Nightmare appears. And since it tends to be most active at night I'll match my circadian schedule with it, wherever it appears in the world."

"That makes sense. I'm just assuming here they'll agree that I should be matched to you, if they don't think of it themselves is it straightforward to tell them?"

"Yeah. Most of my previous partners were also psychics so we'd often go in together anyway, and you double as having very good mobility, so it's not a bad idea. Tactically speaking."

"Yeah, I can fly you around. Shoot nightmare bears."

"The bears are fine. The bears are never the problem."

"Yeah. Just, metonymy."

"Yeah." Hug. "We'll figure out what our schedules will be after the all-hands, probably, but having to wait until then is giving me anxiety."

"Y'wanna fuck the anxiety away?"

"God, I love you so much. Yes, I do."

"I have great ideas," chirps Haru, and he kisses his boyfriend.

He does, he does have great ideas, and his boyfriend thinks he deserves his favourite sex act as a reward for them.

Not everyone is attending the all-hands in-person, and even the people who are are spread between a handful of auditoriums with the address being made virtually. Amongst the people who are in the main auditorium and visible to all cameras is Lee Tae-gun, being reassuringly S-ranked in front of everyone, and his new partner Kim Hye-jin, who is not yet S-rank but from the splashes she's been making with him it seems like it might only be a matter of time.

Yep, she's here, looking attentive and standing next to her objectively amazing partner, hi everyone, she is just going to look like she definitely knows what she's doing, hahaha definitely hasn't only been doing dungeons for like a month and a half at best, nooooo...

Jaeha and Haru are also in the main auditorium, but they don't get seats of honour like the big shooting stars of Quasar. Which if it's all the same to Haru, Jaeha really does not mind.

As long as he can, like, see what they're supposed to see. They're both taller than the average Korean, should be fine.

There isn't much to see; just the guild president plus a holographic screen accompanying his speech.

"Good evening, everyone. I don't want to take up too much of your time, especially given the time of night, but confluences aren't known for starting at reasonable hours. I'm going to go over the basics of how confluences work, for those of you who are newer or more out of the loop, and then cover some operational and logistical concerns.

"Confluences happen about two to three times a decade, and just like no one really understands where dungeons come from or why they happen, no one understands why confluences happen either. The short version is that they are a period lasting between one and six months during which the frequency and power of the dungeons that crop up all over the world reaches critical levels. A few of the big, named S-rank dungeons that no one's been able to seal yet only appear during confluences, while others always appear during confluences even if they also appear at other times. Additionally, several new dungeons appear to, and please don't read too much into this phrasing, opportunistically make use of the time when we're all busy dealing with their bigger siblings to become bigger, themselves.

"I don't want to overstate the danger, but I don't want to understate it either. We've managed to create some very good systems to deal with confluences when they happen, but they are taxing our system and they are very difficult to deal with. Both espers and non-espers will be spread thin, and everyone's workload will be necessarily increased. During confluences, you should consider every other esper your ally, and forget about guilds or what-have-you. We're all working together, here, for the good of Korea and the world, and cross-organisational teams will be the rule rather than the exception. You'll be seeing many new faces and we'll be expecting you all to be showing your best faces. Misunderstandings are always risky, but when working with people you've never worked with before they can be deadly. Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you emit, to copy a certain saying. Everyone will be extremely stressed out, backlash levels will be much higher on average, and exhaustion and frayed tempers are to be expected.

"Your comms system has numerous functionalities that will be invaluable. It's usually not worth the bandwidth cost, but for the duration of confluences, you will all have access to live maps of dungeons all over the world. It's usually best for people to stay local, of course, for familiarity and specialisation reasons, but any espers that have more niche or specific powers may find themselves being called much farther afield than they are used to.

"You all have access to information packets elaborating on all of this, and to anyone doing their very first confluence, I urge you to read it all in detail. I'm going to go over some of the most important points, here, though, to make sure we're all on the same page..."

Haru follows along in his packet.

It's very neatly organised and summarised. There's a section with a list of all dungeons known to always or often appear during confluences, in decreasing order of power and urgency by default, but with filters like dungeon type, how long it's been active, whether it tends to send monsters out, and so on. There's a section on statistics, which tracks the overall trends in the appearances of dungeons, including a couple of predictive models that try to map how likely certain areas are to be hit given what other areas have been hit and known dungeon predilections and so on. There's a section with a non-exhaustive list of guilds and agencies they're likely to be running into, with various filters. And so on, so forth.

The guild president himself is going over some highlights of the dungeons they're most likely to encounter, the resources available to other guilds that will be shared with them (as well as the resources of theirs that they'll share with other guilds, such as Woo-young's teleportation powers), the live map of dungeons, and various little tools and functionalities in their commscreens like emergency buttons and quick-summary requests for support.

Cricket, sitting on Haru's shoulder, listens attentively (to Jaeha's live illusion-translation of all this incomprehensible Korean).

(Haru's holding hands to cover for that.)

(Thankfully the illusion-translation is really cheap, backlash-wise. All he has to do is pay attention, himself, and let Cricket's own brain generate the content.)

It's not that long of an all-hands, only about half an hour all told, and then people are dismissed after being told that they'll receive updated tentative schedules soon.

Jaeha and Haru are in the first batch, and the recommended schedule they're given does place them together for lots of dungeons, though not all of them. They also receive a different schedule each that doesn't try to optimise for placing them in the same dungeons, and sends them to ones more tailored to their specific powers (so more similar to what they usually get). They can accept or reject either, suggest modifications and make tweaks, or do something more à la carte, though they're encouraged to go with the first suggestion as that's the one that's easiest on the support teams as well.

Haru looks over the reports on what's in the recommended schedule in case he needs to replace anything, but he's inclined to stick with Jaeha. Both their powers will go farther partnered, and the unpowered SWAT types can do a lot of the sort of non-psychic dungeon Haru normally handles if they, like, bring ladders and take longer about it.

"And, hey, we have a solution to the comms chatter problem in dungeons together now, if you've got the hang of picking up what I subvocalize. Like in Speaker for the Dead."

"Yeah, I think I've gotten pretty good at it now." Especially because practising it meant being able to listen to Haru's feelings and he will never ever get tired of that. It makes him feel like he's constantly hugging his Haru, it's great.

"So I can talk your... not ear... off and vice versa and nobody will be the wiser. It'll be lovely." What's first on the docket and when are they doing it?

Eheheheheheheh.

A-rank in the morning, themed around a haunted theme park that gives people this weird conviction that they're still children without actually messing with any other memories or perceptions of theirs. The effect seems to be kind of sticky, but the dungeon appeared only about an hour ago so they're not sure of much more. Jaeha can probably just stay outside and shield people and clear effects while Haru can go in and help rescue people trapped in rides from hell with evil clowns or FNAF-inspired demonic animatronics or what-have-you.

Sounds legit. How early are they meant to get up for that, maybe they should turn in.

Pretty early, they're expected there at seven-thirty.

"We should crash, might be our best night of sleep for a while."

"Yeah. Probably.

"...I love you." He's starting to get really fond of this whole "saying 'I love you'" thing, it felt weird at first but it makes him feel really giddy and warm inside.

"I love you too, my Jaeha."

And bedtime.

And bedtime.

And then wakeup time. Jaeha does not love having to wake up earlier than usual but he is not one of those people with very specific and rigid sleep schedules or who gets super fucked up when it changes, so he's just mildly bleary and in need of some very strong coffee.

Haru puts an ice cube and a generous squirt of Hershey's syrup and a splash of cream in his coffee and chugs it, pulls a hardboiled egg out of the fridge and starts sprinkling salt on that for the rest of his breakfast and munches through it dutifully, and checks for updates on the dungeon.

The effect is definitely sticky: after spending long enough under it, people start feeling uncomfortable with their senses of self and memories of their lives that are incompatible with how young they feel, with the end results varying a lot per person, as is usual for dungeons that mess with people's minds like that. The inside of the dungeon also looks a bit too big for it to be a first timer but it doesn't match any known records of escaped dungeons. It's a confluence, so it might well be a first timer anyway, but it might also be an unrecorded dungeon, or even a recorded one that refined its schtick beyond recognition while it was out.

Or it's from Indonesia because they do not have their shit together in Indonesia! In Haru goes, extracting people from roller coaster restraints and the tilt-a-whirl, gunning down clowns.

Meanwhile Jaeha shields espers and clears the psychic effects off people.

Honestly, he sometimes wishes he were a bit less OP? Like, other espers have trouble with this stuff, they need to be careful pulling dungeon yuck off people, making sure they don't break anything or cause extra damage, but Jaeha? All he has to do is kind of wave over people and poof all of the bad is gone nothing is damaged everything is fine, he doesn't even get much feedback from it other than that yep it sure did work. It makes his work occasionally really fucking boring.

And they're not in the dungeon together, which means Haru can't chatter at him and is reduced to going "hey kids, this ride's busted, we're getting you back to your family now, 'kay?" and suchlike, at least when he's not taking a guiding break.

Guiding breaks: the very few times when he remembers why he's doing all of this in the first place. Not just because he loves Haru with the very marrow in his bones, but also because it lets him remember that good things exist and are good.

Good things exist and are good! Haru can kiss this knowledge directly into the Jaeha.

He caaaaaan~

(Also he's kind of glad he's not in the dungeon itself because he is a bit of a wuss and a scaredy cat. He doesn't like horror movies or horror dungeons.)

Haru is being restrained with the photography, but he is wearing a camera that will not distract him from his job to compensate. Jaeha of course is under no obligation to look at the scary mascots.

Yeah he would prefer not to if it's all the same to Haru.

Honestly Haru's not likely to get through them himself till after the confluence beyond, like, making sure that the camera's working.

The dungeon turns out to be large enough, and has kidnapped and is kidnapping enough people, that they're pretty sure it's a repeat of some kind. Its core hasn't been found by the time Jaeha and Haru's shift ends, so they're going to be sending in a more powerful sensor/tracker soon once one can be spared. They might ask Jaeha to clear some more victims once that happens.

Before they can rest much, though, they get an emergency warning for another dungeon that seems to be spewing out psychically invisible monsters.

Yep. That's a confluence alright.

Is it in a place where Haru can safely shoot them or are there civilians all over?

It has the problem that the monsters tend to follow civilians so if they evac there will be monsters following civilians home which will be harder to contain. It has the secondary problem that they're just receiving the report that these monsters bud. It has the tertiary problem that they have the ability to hover, not so high that Haru wouldn't be able to get to them but high enough that melee is impossible most of the time.

Bright sides: they're kind of slow, and once a person is psychically shielded they completely lose interest and move on.

So, Haru carries Jaeha in flight, Jaeha shields espers and civilians and maybe confuses monsters, Haru shoots them?

"If you ride piggyback, yes, I don't think I can carry you in my arms and shoot at the same time. Do we have a place to stash monster corpses in case they bud even after they've been shot?"

"I assume we must but we can check for sure once we're there." They barely got to fuck. Fucking confluences, man.

"And I can probably snipe a lot of them from the ground if they're up in the sky, since humans are seldom up in the sky, unless they're carrying people off like birds of prey..." Are they doing that.

They are not. They just attach themselves to the humans and give the humans an unspecified bad time, psychic flavour.

In that case Haru can shoot them down with his partner clinging to his lap to un-bad the times of the humans around.

That's not the last emergency of the day. Or second-to-last. And the next day isn't much better. Their schedule is cleared on the day after to give them some time to rest after this rough start but there is another emergency call that evening, too.

Honestly, Haru wouldn't have cleared their schedule on day three. They're in this for the medium haul and he can do more than two days in a row of this, he thinks. But he'll take it; the people making the schedules are busy too and don't necessarily want quibbling. And maybe they don't want them too ragged to step lively for emergencies like the evening dungeon, or, eventually, Nightmare.

Or, eventually, Nightmare.

Day 09: Nightmare. Its location: Seoul, Korea.

Kang Jaeha gets a personal notification for that one. And since Nightmare likes appearing at night that means that he gets the personal notification at 10:22PM after having had the single busiest and most exhausting day of the confluence so far.

Sometimes he wonders if it hates him personally.

"We can just go and do a batch of shields for fresher espers and go back in the morning. It'll be around for weeks."

"Yeah. We can."

Squeeze.

"We don't usually go in the morning, because most of the time it doesn't kidnap people during the day. We could help mop up the last few rescues, but..." He feels guilty as all hell to consider the possibility of not spending the first Nightmare night active.

"We can also pull an all nighter and sleep in the morning, I can get us coffee. This is your show."

"...yeah. Let's do that. I'd—I know it doesn't make much sense but I'd feel guilty."

"It makes sense." Haru pecks him and goes to collect coffee and adulterate his.

No one knows what the very first dungeon was, but gun to anyone's head if you asked, most people who know about how these things work would say it's Nightmare. It's far from the most normal dungeon, in the most technical of senses, but it certainly is the paradigmatic one, when thinking about how bad dungeons can get. There's arguments, there'll always be arguments, it doesn't cook you inside your skin, it doesn't cause unending agony, there's lots of things it doesn't do that could reasonably be described as worse along one axis or another, but the thing it is, really, is evil. The thing it does is evil.

It reaches inside you, it finds the worst it can there, and it gives you it. It gives you the worst it can see in you, over and over and over. It shows you your worst nightmares, in gruesome detail. If you lost someone to suicide, it will show you how much their death must've hurt, or how they did it swiftly and without wasted time, or how long it took them to actually die, or it has them tell you in detail how much they hated their life and how much it was your fault just as they die. If you were in an accident that nearly killed you, you will relive that accident from every possible angle, you will see it in slow motion, you will feel it happen again and again. If there is anything you love, it will take it from you and twist it beyond recognition. If there is anything you fear, it will present you with it on a silver platter, inescapably, and it won't even give you death should you seek it. It doesn't need to burn you from the inside, when it can make it feel like you do. It doesn't need to do anything for real, and it's worse for that, because however bad it gets, you know it will just keep happening, forever.

It's not even all just an illusion. That car accident that keeps almost killing you? Those cars are there. They're really, actually there. When the rescue espers come for you—if they come for you—they will have to weave between those crashed vehicles, skip over the corpses to find you. The spiders you're terrified of? They're there, they're really there, you can't just close your eyes and hope they'll go away because they won't.

And if that's still not enough for you, you can't actually leave. Even should you find the exit, somehow—and oh, will you see it, you will be given so many opportunities to seek an end, and none will be real—you can't step through it. You can't leave, not until someone helps you. Not until they find you and create a psychic shield to protect you from the dungeon and clear the mark it leaves on you. For as long as you're marked, you're Nightmare's. It can see you, it knows you, it can find you, and you can't leave. It can find you again. It can find you again, after it's gone, and it can bring you back. You're not safe. You're never safe. You will never be safe. If you ever, ever think you'll be safe from it, you'll be wrong.

Unless, that is, Kang Jaeha is the one who rescues you. If Kang Jaeha clears Nightmare's mark from you, then it's gone. You're safe. It won't get you again.

In any case, no one really tries to kill it, anymore. There just isn't any point. It's achieved apex predator status, its core has never been found, it's too large and its layout too inconsistent—too dreamlike, even—for proper exploration. It has the highest esper kill rate out of all dungeons on record, it's extremely hard to predict when it's about to seal itself and then going back to the exit is a race against the clock during which you know you're inevitably leaving victims behind so that you yourself can survive; many espers have traumatic experiences with the entire surrounding context. Survivor's guilt is common, and Nightmare does seem to try to tempt espers by showing them victims that they could save if they took a small detour just as the dungeon's sealing itself...

The teams that are sent in are consequently always small: one or two psychic espers for the shielding and rescue proper, one esper who can find the victims, and if necessary an esper who can find the exit. Teleportation does work inside, but distances are inconsistent and constantly shifting, and that makes most types of it unreliable or more expensive than they could be. Nightmare doesn't waste time, and is constantly and continuously kidnapping victims throughout the night, without stopping. The only reason people aren't told to immediately evacuate its environs is that... it's been tried, and when that happens, Nightmare just seals itself quickly and quietly and goes elsewhere, and on net, more people are lost.

When Haru and Jaeha get there, there are two such small teams inside, plus a handful of others congregated outside. One of them looks like it's just stepped out, and the victim they've rescued looks ashen and near-catatonic, her mascara long since run from the crying. She's hugging herself and flinching whenever anyone gets too close, but the support team seems competent to handle it, and they're getting her a blanket and some food and water.

...well, Jaeha doesn't need to be the one to rescue you, exactly. Just the one to clear Nightmare's mark off you. And his range is well wider than this. So, shoo, Nightmare's mark; it will never get to her again.

Haru's right there with him to pull away the backlash from doing that. Any briefings they need to hear about what's in there today before they go through the portal?

They've been aware of the dungeon being out for less than an hour, so they don't have a very comprehensive list of who's been kidnapped, not that it's really possible to actually get one, especially given just how many people live in Seoul. There are some reports that are probably legit, but that's the extent of the preparation, is knowing the people who might be inside, and maybe having some hints about what their nightmare could be about. This person is a veteran. This person was kidnapped once. This person is one of five survivors of a horrifying accident that was caused by a dungeon portal suddenly appearing in the middle of some train tracks while a train was barreling towards it at full speed. And so on.

The tracker they managed to get on such short notice is a French esper called Colette Fauron who can hand them little wooden doodads that came from a dungeon and have an affinity with her power. While inside and holding a doodad, a trail of glowing petals will show the way to the nearest non-esper, and she's by the portal and can point them in a direction no recent esper team has gone in so that they can make sure to find a new victim rather than one that's already being tracked.

Haru doesn't really speak French but he is from Canada and can do a competent "Merci" for his doodad and attach it to his wrist.

Is Jaeha parking by the portal while Haru does mobility things?

No, he has to shield the victim once they find them to make sure Nightmare won't keep chasing after them, he has to come with. He shields Haru just before they step in—no reason to have Nightmare backlash Haru when it's a one-time cost for Jaeha—and in they go.

In they go holding hands and following the doodad in an unvisited direction, then. Haru goes a half-step behind Jaeha, so if he needs to suddenly seize him and fly into the air he can do that without having to spin around, but they'll have better stamina if they walk where that's feasible.

What's there to see?

Not... much.

The area directly surrounding the portal looks sort of like an endless flat expanse of darkness. The portal itself emits some light, and there are some chairs and unattended medical materials by it, but as they walk away following the glowing trail of flower petals it feels almost like they're falling out of the world, their only connection getting farther and farther away from them.

Haru assumes they've tried bringing floodlights in here and they just don't help that much, but will a flashlight make it impossible to see the flower petal trail? He's always got one in a dungeon.

No, the petals glow quite brightly. Neither they nor the flashlight make much of a dent on the darkness, though. It's just really, really dark. Their steps don't echo—they're barely audible—and there's nothing to see.

"Well, so far this is boring," he murmurs. "I will cherish it while it lasts."

"I've had runs where I had to walk for an hour in the darkness like this and I am unfortunately a scaredy cat so it was more dreadful than boring."

"An hour, wow. It's - admittedly spooky, but only because I know where we are..."

"And if the doodad in your hand ever stops working you're also stuck here, with no way out, just like a regular victim. —sorry, just, this fucking place gets to me."

Haru squeezes his hand.

He squeezes back.

It doesn't take them an hour for the terrain to start—well, existing. The eerily dense darkness starts giving way to something that looks like it's trying to become carpeted floor that resolves itself into the living room of a proper manor, old style (but they didn't walk into the house through a door, of course), and the trail points through the door and down a hallway.

Mindful of the possibility of jumpscares, and undetectable to victims, Haru proceeds in Jaeha's wake.

He hates this part. Hates it hates it hates it. And he especially hates it when victims have proper horror movie trauma, which this one is shaping out to be, what with...

...the way the light is still kind of precarious, and the fixtures not illuminating their surroundings very well. Or the way the house is actually kind of... too big? Like, it's... big enough that they could almost feel like children in it. Like if they were eight years old in a very big house, that's what the proportions feel like. The wood under the carpet creaks too much, too loudly, much more loudly than it should under their weight.

And there's the smell. It's so strong, so uncomfortable. It smells of alcohol, reeks of it, gin and sweat and mahogany and coffee seeping deep into the carpet, so deep it will be so expensive to deal with.

Haru hasn't been in here before. But he's read up on it. He has a guess. He has his gun ready.

The sound travels weirdly. By the time they can hear the slurred screams of "GET THE FUCK OUT HERE YOU LI'L SHIT! YOU'RE GOIN' TO LICK THAT FUCKIN' CARPET CLEAN!" and the loud thuds they're almost on top of the bizarre gangly monster trying force a door open by slamming its body against it. It's clearly meant to be reminiscent of a human, an adult in proportion to their childish sizes, but it's all wrong, its eyes are almost red and its teeth are too big and its arms are too muscled and its knuckles look like they're made of stone.

(And under all of that, on the other side of the door, their esper hearing can catch the muffled crying.)

Oh good, he was a little concerned about the possibility that the monster would look human and he'd have to make a judgment call about whether this was a nightmare of receiving or committing abuse. Both have happened on record.

Haru shoots the monster.

It dies, and falls to the ground, loudly. The gunshot sound is nonexistent to the victim, since Haru's being imperceptible to them, but the lack of the monster's screams does seem to take them enough by surprise that they stop crying.

And now Haru has backlash, though just a tick of it, eased away by brushing his hand against Jaeha's. He listens for a second, then holsters the gun. Door locked?

Locked and barred.

"I can walk through if they won't open it, but maybe you can talk them into it?" Haru murmurs.

He hates this part, too. Especially now that he's being ethical and not using his powers—hm.

("I'm worried I might fuck it up because whenever I did this in the past I used my powers to figure out how to come off as nonthreatening and helpful. I'm not sure I know how to do it by hand.")

"We're in Korea, they probably know your name. You can just be like, it's Kang Jaeha, I'm here to rescue you, and maybe that'll go over."

("...yeah, okay.")

"Excuse me!" he calls, projecting his voice. "Can you hear me? This is Kang Jaeha; I'm an esper, I'm here to rescue you."

"I-I can hear you Kang Jaeha-nim," says a thin voice, responding immediately and shakily like the expected response to a hesitation is unthinkable.