Jack didn't have much time left. Blood still welled from his heart, internally as well he was sure. Its rate was slow, but irrepressible. He had spent the time he had, whittling down the hours until his hands looked deathly pale. He couldn't seem to ever catch his breath. He was so cold.

The first stages of shock; soon to be followed by confusion, unconsciousness, and death.

Jack wanted to rush to the elementals, to strive against them before they could advance any further. But it would be a pointless gesture. He needed to heal himself before anything else.

The silver water poured into his cupped hand smoothly, faintly luminescent as it pooled unnaturally in his shallow palm.

"Show me the way."

An arrow of light formed, pointing south.

"What's the distance?"

After a moment a number appeared, but the unit was one Jack didn't recognize. Thinking quickly, he took a precise step—one meter to the decimal. "The distance you just traveled, how many multiples of it to the chamber?"

For a second, he worried the request was too complex, but with scarcely a pause a new value appeared.

Jack smiled, calculations were already humming through his mind: trajectories and angles of incidence, velocities and the dash heights required to generate them. His reaction time was still human but it was easy to incorporate those variables into his equations. Vector Sight's influence on his mind would be disturbing if it wasn't so immediately essential.

He started the calculations for a precise series of leaps, bootstrapping each subsequent jump into the next, reaching higher and higher until he had exactly the height he needed, but was surprised when he realized he could reach it in a single cycle.

For the first, he didn't even need to jump. Pivoting forward and slamming the dash gave him the energy he needed. Both charges of momentum dash sent him hurtling upward, slower than he'd previously managed, but he was seeking precision over power. Figures ran through his mind, a seamless flow of perfect understanding of his position and speed.

He knew the exact speed he left the ground, 'Thirty-two meters-per-second, doubled to sixty-four.'

He knew the precise moment he reached the goal height, 'Four-point-six-one seconds after leap, four-hundred and eighteen meters peak height.'

He even knew the speed he would achieve through his use of the uncapped-dash from that height, 'Seven-hundred and seventy meters-per-second,' but he was unprepared for the reality of it.

'Barely a second.' He had just reached the apex of the jump, nearly half a kilometer in the air, when he dashed downward. The next conscious thought was how long it had taken him to reach the ground. A strong wind pushed at his back from above, and when Jack dropped the silencing effect of Flow, the remnants of a booming echo were still reverberating over the mountain. He turned over onto his back and saw the already dispersing remnants of a pillar of vapour: water that had been ripped from the air by his passing.

Gotcha Dash, the broken, death-wish card of his nightmares, had reached its fullest potential.

Jack hurried to orient himself, recognizing the target he had just placed to his exact position. The arrow displayed in the silver water was his heading, all that was left... was the leap.

There are moments that exceed comprehension. Growth for the mind is a process of expanding horizons. Most commonly, this process is eased by appealing to memories of the familiar. The mind seeks metaphor, similarity to past experience, to understand the new.

To be thrown from the familiar, far beyond the edges of one's understanding, into the oceans of the unknown where the shore is figment... it is terrifying. It is exhilarating.

This is what Jack saw.

He felt no acceleration. The charges of momentum were instantaneously applied. To him, cosseted within the vacuum of his card, it seemed as if the earth simply... dropped away.

Forests, mountain ranges, rivers, plains, they all disappeared. The texture of landscapes dulled, became rough, then trivial. To the west he could see a line of light, evening falling on land where the sun still shone. Further still he saw the reflecting blue of water, holding dominion of the far horizon—his first ever view of the ocean.

The stars were brighter. It was a small thing, but it lingered in his mind above many others, the way their light felt more piercing, more strange. He saw that they didn't twinkle, this high above the earth. He wondered why.

He could see the layers that made up the air of the world, the distorting role of what he'd always imagined as invisible.

Below him, a behemoth snake stretched through the lower sky, twisting in the currents of the air. The cloud of dust released by the elemental's march. Lightning flashed through it, like the nerve impulses of the viper it resembled, arcing slowly towards his city. Far above the lightning's hot streaks, massive blossoms of smoky red manifested, an effect he suspected only visible from on high.

It was easier, in some ways, to be so high. The rush of motion was lost in the scale. He had ascended, transcended above the reality of landmarks.

When he turned, he could see the streak of white his passing had left, and the point where it faded to nothing, as he left the air that cradled the planet.

The descent, when it came, was tinged with regret. He had grown beyond himself in that passage, gained a memory unique to the world. It was a beauty he didn't know he'd ever return to.

Falling, he returned to the world. His chest hurt. The taste of blood seemed inescapable. The horizon drew back, a collapse of possibilities that felt all the more stifling now that he knew what lay beyond it. now that he'd seen beyond the curve of the earth.

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He had tracked the path of his flight carefully and knew the exact moment he was above the hiver city. He dashed down, and after a careening rush towards the earth, found himself standing five meters from the subterranean entrance Calre and him had taken less than a fortnight ago.

Jack tsskd. 'Aim was off. Next time it'll be a step away.'

Then, by the guiding light of the silver water, he descended to the chamber where his hopes lay.

Jack's stumbling journey into the dark showed him how dire his condition really was. On the surface, in open air, his cards could send him around the world. In the depths, reliant only on his own feet, every step was a struggle.

When Jack finally arrived, vision fading, thoughts fracturing into delirium, he didn't hesitate before stepping into the central column of liquid. It would save him, or he would die, there was no time for caution.

The water was warm, quickly disappearing from his perceptions as he slipped into unconsciousness.

Time passed, and at some point Jack awoke. The faint glow of the chamber illuminated the work. His shirt was nowhere to be seen, dissolved or stripped away as an impediment to the chamber's labour. His flesh and muscle had been peeled back, exposing the inner workings of his body. His damaged heart was clearly visible. Grant's blade had been unnaturally destructive, the cardiac muscle in tatters from some card effect.

He could feel pressure inside of his chest, gentle touches as if invisible hands traced gentle paths over his injury. A thin stream of dark clotted blood and excised flesh flowed up and away into the far reaches of the column.

His chest rose and fell without his will, the water pulling and compressing his body steadily. Water filled his mouth and lungs, it felt sluggish to a body used to a thinner medium.

As he watched, new flesh was formed around the damaged portions of his heart, first clear matrix, slowly darkening into dark muscle as the substance was filled in.

He could only wait while the work continued. Wait... and plan.

The Flowstone Mountains had been broken, and their prisoners unleashed. A cataclysm marched on Calamut and Jack meant to stop it.

In the darkness, held by an ancient power built to heal, he plotted. Jack mused on the cards he held and how he had used them. He wondered at new combinations and what they may achieve. He tested what little he could, and in the midst of his puzzling stumbled upon... something. He spun hypotheticals for the consideration of Vector Line, disbelieving at first, but slowly realizing that within his cards rested something dangerous, something that could see his city saved.

There was one card Jack hadn’t yet used. He had sensed the limitation of it, a cooldown measured in hours if not days. Ever mindful, he hadn’t committed to its use—unwilling to forgo any future advantage. His caution proved itself as his plan formed, and the keystone to its success was the card Extend.

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Jack was released from the chamber what seemed an eternity later, but when queried, the chamber managed to communicate that it had been only fourteen hours. The elementals were a handful of hours from Calamut. It would be enough. It would have to be.

The return to the surface revealed that a new day had come, as a weak sun attempted to pierce through the loose cloud of dust that hung in the air. A thin coating of grey powder covered every surface, the residue of the elemental's self-destructive movement. After a handful of breaths, his tongue was coated and he wondered at the taste of flint and dirt. Of his wound there was no sign, only a patch of pale flesh to mark the point of injury.

His sky-leap took him above the cloud, the light brightening until it achieved the brightness and clarity of a late summer sun. Laid out before him was the trail he must follow—the elemental's path of destruction.

He was cautious, taking the pursuit in stages and leaping no further than his jump from the mountains. He had realized how tenuous his grip on the earth had become, how easy it would be to simply leave it altogether and become lost in the void of the stars. Still, it took him only a quarter hour to overtake the elemental horde. A journey of weeks, done in less than an hour.

From on high he could see their myriad of ever-shifting forms; the trench they tore through the land as they advanced. Then he was gone, past their crushing wave and into pristine lands.

He needed to be ahead of them, he needed time to prepare. One more leap, shorter than the others, and he judged himself far enough ahead to begin the work.

The air was clear, untainted by the flowstone dust, but still he imagined he could hear and feel them. A faint shaking upon the ground, the tremble of an imminent doom. And there, in the sky, he saw the rising cloud of their approach. It wouldn't be long before it was visible from Calamut as well. The city would be thrown into turmoil, if it hadn't already been, as desperate evacuees fled with their worldly belongings into the fields. Jack knew the toll it would take, the stubborn few who would stay behind, the suffering that would no doubt ensue as unprepared refugees attempted to reach other cities hundreds of kilometers away.

The cards he'd been waiting for arrived, the set of four that would enable everything. Jack did not hesitate before leaping again into the air, ascending high above the clouds, returning once more to that surreal place where the earth became the heavens. He was surprised to find that as he rose, the sky darkened, the sky-blue becoming night, even as the sun shone directly upon him. Calamut was there, the merest speck to his sight, easier to find through the ordered lines of its fields and the thin roads that converged on it. Everyone he cared for was there, no doubt afraid, desperate. Some of them would wonder if he was alright, and it pained him to realize they would never know what became of him.

He reached his zenith and played the critical cards in a precise order. Enhance. Extend. Flow. Return.

Jack fell, he was waiting for his cards to cycle again, for that critical last piece to arrive.

It was obvious to him now, the role he was taking. He had been made a pawn of something larger, something fundamental to the nature of carding. What he had been given was too refined, to perfect for this exact purpose for there to be any doubt. The nobility had tried to establish a balance, an equilibrium where the upheaval of the growing power of cards would not throw their world into disorder. They could not have known the forces that worked against them. Jack was a pawn, a sacrifice to push the world into change once again, but he didn't care.

'I would break the world before I'd lose what's dear to me. That it costs only myself? It is a fine bargain.'

There it was: Gotcha Dash.

Jack fell.

Gotcha Dash drove him at seventy-two times the normal rate of gravity’s acceleration, a tolerance only possible with the power of his enhanced Vital Flow.

Flow removed his wind resistance, stripping away the fail-safe of his dash so his speed could increase without limit, and ensuring his ability to survive in the hostile environments he travelled. For this he needed to be high, where the air was close to non-existent.

He reached the limit he'd set on Return, the maximum distance it allowed for, and found himself continuing his fall, unabated, from the exact position he'd played it only moments ago.

Flow would normally limit itself to five minutes, enough time for serious speed to be gained, but not enough for his needs. Return, similarly, only allowed for a single minute before it expired. In their default state it would have been impossible to attempt what he now strove for. But Extend increased the duration of the next card played after it to two hours. While Enhanced, it allowed for two.

Jack shut his eyes and settled in to wait.