He opens it on his commscreen, making the hologram bigger so everyone can see.

"I assume you've seen the bad news already," she says rapidly. "I'm going to mark worm locations for you two by priority. Engage at will, and let me know if you need any backup." 

"Understood, we will. Thank you."

She nods briskly. "Good luck out there." 

"Thank you."

"Thank you."

And: locations?

Highest priority is this wor -

no, actually it's this worm just breaching over here at this central train station! 

Vworp.

Status?

Well. This was a perfectly normal train station, a few minutes ago.

It's still most of a perfectly normal train station, but there's a rapidly-growing zone of disaster and destruction, right there.

The wormsong is almost-unbearable, at this range, the maw of the just-now-breaching worm barely 10 meters from the two of them.

Oh wow! He hates that!

Does the location with the victims look obvious?

Nope! All that's visible is 4 meters of mouth.

...8 meters of mouth...

(there's a horrible crunching noise as it breaks through the high rooftop above them and continues upward)

Which unless these worms are much longer than usual (the reports haven't said so) means that the safe spot in case this worm has already eaten victims should be—there—

—and now a couple of worm segments, which used to have a speed relative to him, Instead Don't.

"Fuck," he says, stumbling in place.

His partner is right there on snuggling duty.

This causes several things to happen!

The first is that the worm's head and upper segments briefly continue their motion and then snap backwards, pulled violently out of its intended motion, with a truly horrible wet squelching sound that is abruptly the loudest sound present as the wormscream cuts out in surprise. 

The second is that the worm's lower body slams into the stopped segments. The noise of this is muted, because it's happening underground, but the internal damage is far heavier. These things are not designed to slam into each other at maximum speed.

The third is that the pain signals travel between the segments from horribly mangled and squished parts of the worm upward to the mouth!

It wails in pain and anger, and begins to thrash around violently.

"Hyung, get the civilians clear of the worm?" he asks.

"On it," he says, and teleports to the upper floor to find any civilians that he needs to rescue.

The backlash cost is less than he'd feared, because the worm segments are pretty separate, so he can hold on for a bit. The worm segments he's holding still in the air are kept in place so as to not hurt civilians that may or may not be trapped inside, but the head is going to...

...Tae-hwan's had years to perfect this. He thinks this is really cool. It's really cool when he gets to do this.

What it'll feel and look like is that the worm head is banging its head against an invisible wall. This turns out to be really backlash-efficient, because he doesn't need to hold for long, just let the momentary impact disorient the target.

This sucks!!! The worm hates this!!!! A lot!!!!!

-but it's less stunned than most things would be, getting this kind of heavy physical impact in the head. (The briefing material explained that each segment handles some of the worm's thinking - even decapitated, they're still a major threat.)

It will, each time it recovers, keep trying to squish and murder everything it can reach, and maaaaaybe emerge further from the ground? (It's having a lot of trouble with the latter, though.)

That's fine, Tae-hwan just needs to wait until hyung has managed to clear everyone nearby, short distance teleports are really cheap and he thinks the worm won't be very good at moving much after this. 

...he'll start jogging in circles, though.

SLAM!!!

SLAM!!!

SLAM!!!

SLAM!!!

SLAM!!!

SLAM!!

SLAM!!

SLAM!!

SLAM!