They can meet up once Tae-hwan is at zero, yeah.

"Hello again, Ms. Novak." He will not look sheepish about his choices with the worm. They may have been suboptimal but he still did alright, he thinks.

Valerie is pretty visibly frayed at this point. It's late in the afternoon and she has had a lot of coffee and she should really probably do a hand-off soon but she has enough context that it makes sense for her to handle this meeting (and the caffeine is still in her system; she's not going to be any more relaxed if she stops).

She nods at them. "Mr. Seo, Mr. Min. You may be happy to know that your work at Union Station both saved many lives directly and appears to have slowed the worm attacks for a while. Our consulting psychic analyst seems pretty sure that Infested Wasteland has a limit to the number of secondary portals it can have open at once - while the remaining segments of the Union Station worm is slowly attempting to withdraw, you hurt it badly enough that it hasn't been able to vacate the portal yet." 

"Oh."

"That's great to hear!"

"It's one of the more optimistic developments we've had today, yes." There is currently a really heated meeting going on about high level strategy, but Valerie is pretty sure she knows which way it's going to go, in the end.

That's not why she's here, though. "We had a few analysts review the combat footage. The thing you did when the worm was trying to crush you, making it bounce off the air - could you do that to a worm that's breaching?"

"Yes. It would become more expensive the longer I held on for, because I'd need to use my power on increasing amounts of worm, but there'd probably be a cap once it got sufficiently compressed that it started rebounding back."

"If it's not dangerously expensive for you, we'd like you to try it the next time we detect an emergence; We expect that it'd be very effective if we can get you there before the worm has a chance to get much of itself through the portal. It'll have to pull itself back through, and it'll have a hard time doing so." She looks at Min Woo-young. "How good is your reaction time?"

"Very. If I have a map in front of me and I'm expecting it it'll be less than half a second."

She looks pleased. Half a second is really good - the seismograph network has been giving them an average of two seconds of warning, now that they know what they're looking for.

"Okay. There's a worm leaving" what's left of "Dominion Centre right now, which means we're expecting a new strike in a few minutes. If you two are up for it, I'd like you to try getting there as soon as possible and stopping the worm from emerging. We had someone write up a simple map that'll ping the target location as soon as we detect it - I can send you a link."

"That would be useful, thank you. We can do that."

"Excellent. The analysts are pretty optimistic about this one." The link shows up in both of their DMs. "Do either of you need anything right now?"

"Not right now, but we will probably need a place to stay overnight. We're pretty jetlagged and running on fumes a bit."

She doesn't frown, but someone should have gotten these two that already. Not surprising, though, that things slip through the cracks... she should make sure Baek Ji-woo has somewhere to stay as well.

"I can get a silo reserved for the two of you about 10 km out of the danger zone" (over in Brampton, maybe?) "and send you the coordinates, if that works for the two of you."

"Yeah, that sounds good."

"Alright. It shouldn't take me very long. Please feel free to reach out if you need anything else, and goo-"

The map pings!

He did say half a second.

Vworp.

HELLOOOOOOOOOO IT IS WORM TI-

Ha ha no.

-ME oh dear

This is still mostly experimental so he's watching the effect to see what happens. At an arbitrarily chosen distance above from the portal, any worm mass that encounters it will be momentarily locked to Tae-hwan's frame of reference, in a rapidly pulsating pattern. It has to be rapidly pulsating because if he merely locks it there, that will not have the effect of allowing the worm to rebound as if it were a wall, and would instead lock it in place there, which would be much more expensive in backlash.

So, how much damage does that do?

The rumbling of the floor beneath them is replaced with a fascinating (and rather horrifying) squelching noise as the worm's head is incrementally flattened against Tae-hwan's power and forced backwards through the worm segments. 

It can't scream, what with its mouth segment being entirely destroyed, or writhe in pain, what with it being trapped in a tunnel that fits exactly it and its digging apparatus squashed flat. But it would be doing both of those things, if it could.

"Get fu-ucked~" he singsongs, starting to bounce in place.

:(

There's a lot of civilians in this building who've been screaming and running away from the perceived center of the rumbling! 

...well, most of them are still doing that, actually.