The lights Jack had seen were fairly distant, at least 30 kilometers. Well beyond the visual horizon, the curvature of the earth occluded it from even the tallest trees, he had only managed to spot them thanks to the height given to him by the sky-leap combo. Getting to them through the forest would be a day of hard travel—more if the terrain was tricky or there were unexpected setbacks. It would have been totally unfeasible to investigate them by conventional means.
'Luckily for me, I don't rely on conventional means,' Jack thought, cockiness desperately warding off the next thought, 'please work, don't hit a tree, don't miss the timing, don't hit a bird...fuck, what happens if I hit a bird?'
But before he could reconsider he was climbing a tree and diving off to stock a pair of momentum charges. With those in hand it was simply a matter of finding his heading and climbing another tree to get out from the canopy cover.
'Forty-five degree launch angle; facing the approximate direction of the 'mystery lights'; momentum charges stocked; Enhanced Gotcha Dash charges ready; this is it.'
Jack released the first momentum charge. Until now he had only used the dash to rise and to fall. Academically he knew the forces at hand; an object flung at an approximately optimal forty-five degree angle would maximize the distance traveled, a simple approximation good enough for his purposes. He knew how fast he would go, he had calculated the approximate height, he had calculated the distance he was likely to travel.
He was unprepared.
All of his previous velocities, no matter how great, had given him the stable reference of the earth, approaching or receding but nonetheless remaining constant. This was unlike those occasions.
In an instant, he was flung away from the tree at full speed, hurtling over the treetops like an arcing arrow as the world below him blurred. He had gone beyond the rise and fall.
'This—' even thoughts were snatched away by the wind, '—this is flight!'
Jack reached the apex and for just a moment he hung suspended over the forest, neither rising nor falling, but still surging forward. Slowly at first, but then quickly as the draw of the earth reclaimed him, he began to fall.
The ground approached but as Jack fell he slowly oriented his body perpendicular to his trajectory until, when the moment was right, he triggered his next charge of momentum, surging back into the air with renewed speed.
He had been tempted before to stack the energies of the momentum charges, but the dangers had always seemed too great. But now—high above the earth with no obstructions, his descent secured by enhanced dashes—he could push his limits. The air whipped at him with such fury that he knew he should be half-blind with tears, but he was not; a blessing he could only attribute to the strange functioning of Vital Flow.
The final descent came too quickly and, in what felt like an instant, the treetops were beginning to grow uncomfortably near. His body was parallel to the ground at this point, the worst possible position for his dash, and he could sense his dash-shadow terminating well above the ground. The critical moment was at hand.
Pivot.
Jack rotated until his feet faced the earth, and the new orientation extended his dash-shadow down to brush the tops of the trees. The ground was approaching quickly, but with ample time to react, he dashed to the canopy with ease. In an instant Jack's downward plunge ceased, and he found himself delicately perched atop the high thin branches of a flux tree.
'That went rather well,' he thought, giddy with adrenaline.
"Thank you branch, for your support."
‘Crack,’ said the branch.
"Oh."
He clung to the branch as it sagged, and braced the blow against the trunk with his legs. Before gravity noticed him, he was clutching the trunk, breathing heavily and nervously looking down.
After a tense pause as he awaited the cycle of his hand, Jack played another Enhanced Momentum Eater, and dashed the remaining distance to the ground. He was in a section of forest much alike what he had been in only a minute before, barring that this one, by his calculation, was just over one-and-half kilometres to the north
'One-point-five kilometres in under twenty seconds, and I can do that every minute with total safety,' his friend the branch landed with a thud to Jack’s right, ‘...nearly total safety.’
There were modifications to his process that would see him travelling further, but they also meant greater heights. This method seemed reliably reproducible; never sent him more than a couple of hundred meters above the earth; and could be repeated every minute.
‘I’ll be at the site of the lights in less than thirty minutes. A day of travel, done, in no time at all.’
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When he finally came across the camp, Jack was surprised to find it was entirely abandoned. The search had gone far smoother than he expected. On one of his leaps he spotted a large clearing that had been cut into the forest, a likely source of some of the lights he’d spotted. Once he judged himself close enough he'd made his final approach on foot. He'd been careful, always taking the more difficult and hidden route, stopping periodically when his momentum charges expired to restock them—he wasn't going to take any chance to be caught out without an escape.
But when he finally neared the site he'd spotted, there was no one to be found. The evidence of occupation was there, and a lengthy one at that. Cobbled together lean-to structures were spread about the clearing, old enough that the needles of the boughs they used for roofing had gone yellow. The detritus of many meals, and the assorted waste that human presence brings was evident. Jack felt a satisfying disdain for the mysterious occupants—the caravan was fastidiously clean at every stop, even when they stayed no more than a single night. He could see the evidence of their exit as well, crushed foliage at opposite sides of the perimeter, one heading towards the mountains and the other out to the plain.
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'At least twenty denizens, here for three, four months? That matches the timeline... But where are they?'
A passing search of the clearing provided little additional information. The ashes of their fire-pit were cold, but still contained, if they'd been left for more than a few days they should have been scattered.
There were other oddities. Piled out of the way were a number of excavation tools: picks; shovels; hammers; one noteworthy sledge of unwieldy proportions; and a motley of other lesser instruments. They weren't obviously corroded, but that meant little, metalworkers of Calamut had standardized the resilience of their product.
'Spares for a major dig... But why abandon them...?' Jack mulled on the question as he continued his search. The site had been nearly completely cleared, but Jack noticed patterns in the absences.
Around the clearing were areas of cleared and flattened earth, largely scuffed beyond recognition. Of note, however, were the remnants of deep circular impressions a half-meter in diameter, still evident despite the disruption.
'Barrels. Heavy barrels, stacked on each other. Multiple locations, there must have been hundreds. You don't bring tons of material all this way without cause. All that effort, it must be key to their purpose, and they moved the last of them recently.'
Jack paused to think, drawing on all the details he had encountered until now and trying to synthesize them for any greater understanding.
'The lights I saw were scattered along a line. I must have spotted them in the middle of their move... They’re close enough that their tools are unnecessary weight at this point. I'll need to move fast.'
They were at the culmination of their plans, or at least moving towards a next phase that might see his window of opportunity disappear. Jack still had no hard evidence of wrong-doing, just supposition and circumstance, he couldn't let the chance to uncover everything pass him by.
He readily dismissed the route back to the plains, if there was more to learn it would be deeper—towards the mountains.
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The trail was easy to follow, they had made no effort to hide their route and would have had a hard time doing so if they cared to try. Wherever a footprint was discernible it sunk deep into the loamy earth. Clearly the barrels had been taken this way, and moved by hand.
Jack continued on, but the crawling pace he was subject to on foot was beginning to irk him. 'Sky, my beloved, I will return to you soon.' The lure of speed was great, but also without any chance for greater knowledge. This close to their camp he knew that depth of search would be more valuable than breadth.
The ground had begun to acquire a subtle but definite slope. The journey to the camp had brought him closer to the mountains, right to the edge of the foothills, the forested pebbles that lay scattered beneath the boulders of the mountains. He was beginning to curse the choice to ever use his legs for what flight could do better when his diligence paid off—there, nestled in the roots of a fallen flux tree, was a barrel. He hurried over to investigate, praising the graces of the ground.
The barrel was immediately recognizable to Jack, it was of a design known to everyone in Calamut: an automatic extinguisher barrel. Filled with unoxidized flux oil, it was designed to compress under extreme heat, forcing a spray of fire-suppressant mist out of cleverly shaped nozzles. They were massively over-engineered to remain sealed, the risk of air contamination turning the fire suppressant into fuel was too great. Modern designs used the viscosity change in oxidized flux oil—which turned thick and syrupy—to ensure that even if their pressurization failed and air slipped into them, they would fail so that the nozzles couldn't open and spray the changed form.
They were common in the Springworks where industrial accidents warranted greater caution. The majority of Calamut itself had little use for them, as the city was largely stone and open flame was eschewed in favour of spring-tech heating. The significant demand for them was in other cities, where the risk of fire due to burning of regular fuels was still common. The one Jack had found was heavy duty, capable of halting a major blaze in its tracks.
'They placed it against a fallen flux tree which, from the looks of it, is old enough to actually burn. So they're concerned about fires, enough to trek tons of extinguisher barrels through the forest.'
But he had no more insights beyond that. The level of precaution was extreme. The forest hadn't seriously burned in many centuries, their actions didn't make sense yet with the incomplete picture he had.
'This seems to be secondary to their purpose, insurance for high risk fire-starters, their primary effort must be somewhere deeper. Time to return to the skies.'
Jack resumed his sky-leap cycle, surging into the air and scanning for any obvious signs of activity. He kept his distances shorter at first, wary of losing their trail, but he quickly found that their route was quite straight through the forest, and so he extended the range of his leaps. Every time he paused to search he found a similar pattern, extinguishers near the occasional fallen tree, but otherwise only signs of the regular passage of people.
He was in the middle of a sky-leap over a hill when a sight made him thankful that he couldn't stumble in midair. A massive chunk of the hill’s far side was missing.
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'Well, not entirely missing,' Jack corrected to himself.
It was a pocket wasteland; densely strewn rubble—the remnants of the missing hill—made for unforgiving footing, rocks and boulders of massive scale turned out as if the hill had vomited forth its innards in some violent convulsion. Grit and dust kicked up with every step, coating Jack's lower legs in moments. When he reached down to brush himself clean, dark ash left streaks on his hands and legs as well. The desolation stood in contrast to the vital forest, which remained largely untouched at its solemn perimeter.
Jack picked his way through, advancing slowly to the yawning absence on the side of the hill. Terribly powerful forces had been at play, to wrought such destruction. An instant of cataclysmic noise and fire, a shock-wave that would be felt across the forest and then the interior of the hill would be laid bare—months of work done in an instant. If a tight timeline was the primary constraint, this would be a highly effective means of excavating. But with severe dangers.
He stood at the cavernous opening of the hill, feeling like nothing so much as a small prey animal wandering into the maw of a titanic predator. A precarious overhang of earth bound by roots left him hesitant to venture too far within.
Along the surface of the interior he could make out a repeating pattern, it looked as if portions of the inner hill had pulled away from the exterior, leaving imprints akin to pulling a stone from mud. But these looked like the imprints of densely arranged limbs, as if a nest of titanic stone spiders had spilled out and left only their impression behind. It could only be one thing: the resting sites of dormant flowstone elementals, disturbed by the blasting.
Looking down below, at the root of the hill, he spotted the reason for the elemental's presence and the tentative goal of the group that had acted here. Smooth worked stone, the remnants of a building from an ancient era, the last victim of the flowstone elemental's march.
The disparate pieces aligned in Jack’s mind. The extinguishers—liberally placed near fire-hazards, and Jack was sure, likely arranged near blasting sites like this one. Anything to avoid a greater awakening of the elementals than they already forced through their destructive excavation.
Jack suspected that if he were to check other hills he would find similar sites; the remnants of a reckless search for something. A search that had moved continually towards the mountains where, it seemed, they had finally found their target.