"They hired a hit on someone. Of course they deserved it."

"I'm sure your love will agree with you. Just as soon as you explain everything to him. Or were you planning to lie to him for the rest of your life?"

"I'm obviously not planning to lie to him for the rest of my life, are you stupid?"

"No, I just have to act like it in order to walk you through the knots you've tied in your head. What's going to happen, dearest Jaeha-oppa, if all of the backlash falls away and you tell your beloved everything?"

"I'm going to die. Obviously."

"Really? That's your brilliant, master plan?"

"It's not a plan, it's a prediction."

"Oh, come on, it can't end like that! That's - that's - that's so stupid."

"Do you have a fucking alternative? Yeah it's fucking stupid, I, I, I made a mistake somewhere and I don't. I just. I don't have a plan anymore."

"Fine! Then let's - let's workshop alternatives, okay, I'll help you, I bet there's a way I can pull someone's strings to fix this -"

"What the fuck?"

"You can't just fucking die! Especially not like that! We've - look I know we haven't always gotten along but we've been together for years - !"

"Dropping kayfabe? That's a first."

What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck???

"You're - you're the closest fucking thing I have to a friend, you prick! You're the only human that's anything like me and if you go off to die in a corner like a pathetic little worm where I can't even see -!"

The false Hye-jin in front of him fades away, and the environment starts... shifting. Alarmingly.

Like it wants to trap Jaeha (and also the humans that are with him, but mostly Jaeha) inside.

...Nightmare just called him a friend.

Nightmare. The dungeon. Just called him a friend???????

He drops the control over the others' senses so they'll perceive this, too.

"We need to move. Something's happening. We need to get out."

The esper with the tracking power freezes. "What—"

    The esper with the movement power doesn't. "Get ready to go in three seconds."

"NO," growls a disembodied voice, and the dark alley environment that had been simulated from the victim they were tracking falls away to total darkness, "stop him, he's going to - !"

The three of them are surrounded by a glowing transparent dome which shoots back towards the portal at a very alarming speed.

It would have options if everyone on the team weren't shielded, but Jaeha had the foresight to get himself shielded, so - there's -

- not really much this dungeon can do to stop them.

They break through a few disembodied walls on their way out, but that's about it.

They're spat out, and as soon as the shield pops out of existence Jaeha falls to his knees, hit by a belated panic attack.

What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck.

What has he done? What has he become? Nightmare? Thinks he's a friend?

Jaeha's entire life as an esper, the one thing that has always been his antithesis was Nightmare. He's its ultimate foil, no other esper can negate its powers as thoroughly as he can.

And it considers him a friend.

No. He cannot, he cannot let it win. He cannot let it have anything it wants. He cannot let it have him. He cannot.

And the best way to do that is—

And it's what he wanted, isn't it? He has lost. Everything he worked for, worked towards, for the past six years. Everything, all of it, just gone. Because of that woman. He fought her and she won. She won, and he lost.

He doesn't have a plan. He doesn't have a next step. There's nothing more he can do. There's no more future ahead, for him, now even more than back then. Tae-gun is gone. Tae-gun is gone forever. He will never have Tae-gun back. Even if he removed her somehow, even if she was removed by completely external circumstances, Tae-gun will never take him back.

Jaeha has lost.

There is no Jaeha without Tae-gun. There has never been Jaeha without Tae-gun, and if he can't have Tae-gun, then...

There's a procedure, for when someone comes out of Nightmare actively suicidal.

Hana notices the emotional cocktail responsible, and - is briefly unable to follow the procedure for the backlash-fueled panic that rises in her throat. It's a litany of worst case scenarios and what-ifs, thinking about implications instead of trying to focus on how to deal with the emergency at hand. How the fuck did it get Kang Jaeha, and How long was Nightmare doing something like this, and, selfishly, shit it's going after psychic espers I'm next, all of which are not helpful to saving anyone's life. She does not often use her own powers on herself - the backlash is always, always worse than whatever unwanted emotion she had squashed - but there are a few times when she allows herself to be weak and indulge. This is an emergency, and it's not about her; she needs to be able to follow procedure, and her head is filled with too much screaming to manage it as it is. So she pushes at her own emotions, to a flat and unnatural driven and focused not-exactly-calm that lets her hands stop shaking to input the appropriate alert into the comm system.

The person being marked as such being Kang Fucking Jaeha means that the ensuing alert goes out to, approximately, everyone involved with Nightmare, instead of 'a small team that will handle it delicately.' Which is what usually happens, for rescued victims.

Jaeha is oblivious. Has been oblivious for the handful of seconds it took for his brain to go through that line of reasoning, and continues to be oblivious as he opens his commscreen and requests a teleport home.