"It's definitely hematite," Henrietta confirmed, running some of the grains of red rock through her fingers and letting it crumble. The smell of the mana wafted out, confirming the richness of the iron they were looking for.

"Didn't you believe me?" Alyssa asked indignantly.

Henrietta looked at her unapologetically, "It's a new skill, one which none of us are familiar with. Of course I'll verify what it tells you. But if I didn't believe you, I wouldn't have come this whole way out here."

"Mmm," Alyssa shifted into a more passively pretend-offense state, which when combined with some of the lingering bruises along her eyebrow still managed to give her a bit of a wounded-puppy look.

Henrietta, meanwhile, kept studying the area. The little black nodes that Alyssa had pointed out seemed to still be just an unusual form of hematite, but she tried to make a mental note to investigate them later once they had better measuring equipment, to see if there was anything else going on with them. There were some stable iron-based minerals that were black, but she couldn't remember much else about them. Perhaps Oliver, with veritable internet access, would know. She could ask him later.

With Jacob working to clear out some of the foliage from nearby, Henrietta gave Alyssa a nod of approval, "Well done, I believe. With luck, this will have enough iron to propel us towards modern living."

The Ranger did her best to hide her preening, but didn't do well enough.

"I'm going to work with Veeran to clear out the area," Henrietta continued, "I want you to look for creatures that will work for our purposes. Specifically, I want something that can dig - through stone is optimal but not required - and something big and strong, and built for heavy loads. They don't have to be the same creature."

"How far should I head out?" Alyssa asked.

"As far as needed. I can travel." In truth, Henrietta had wanted to have Alyssa find the creatures they'd be needing for the mine earlier, before they left to actually set it up, but some mostly unrelated conversations with Jacob had convinced her it wasn't needed.

Leaving Oliver and Clark unprotected was something of a gamble, but she trusted the duo to protect one another well enough if they were attacked by something. If they were still beset by the elemental vinebeasts that had attacked them regularly while still at Shelter, she would of course never have taken the risk, but they hadn't had any encounters more dangerous than a particularly stubborn parrot in well over a week.

She was possibly jinxing it, thinking about it this much, but with probably no spirits deliberately messing with them, that was another risk she had to take....

No. It wasn't. And it was something that a good leader would have already thought of and dealt with before now. She really needed to get better at that.

"Addendum," Henrietta called out, catching Alyssa before she left. "Before you begin there, I want you to return to First Tower first. Use your [Rustlewind] to look for and clear out any dangerous creatures in the area, then start looking for the creatures."

"Head back, clear out dangerous stuff, rock-digger and packbeast," Alyssa was jogging away backwards, lightly bouncing on her feet as she got further away, "Got it, boss!"

Then she was gone, leaping up into the air, kicking off between a pair of tree trunks to gain height, and vanishing into the canopy above, leaving nothing but the scent of falling leaves in her wake.

"Veeran!" she called out, getting the Warrior's attention as she beckoned him over. "Do you have particular preferences for your skill slots?"

"None which cannot be overridden, what do you have in mind?"

"I'm thinking something area-based would be useful. Area and volume are some of our greater constraints, and there's a lot of trees that need to be felled here."

"I can do so, Commander. Though not to countermand your request, did you not say you wished to find an inkling capable of doing that?"

"I do, and will. But I imagine it's likely to wind up feeding a charcoal supply line, rather than being something I can call upon whenever, and anything that can take down one of these trees," Henrietta motioned towards one of the larger trees in the area, one whose trunk trunk was easily twice as thick as she was tall, nearing four meters across. "If it can take one of those down in a reasonable timeframe, it's not going to do as well for all the little things."

"Very well. I can begin work on that, though I will clarify that it shall likely be my final subskill for some time."

"Don't worry, I remember. If you're willing, some more points to Skill wouldn't go amiss." Trying to dictate [Status] choices could be... a bit delicate. The System was designed as a means to return autonomy to the individual, grant power in a way that spirits and humans alike couldn't truly suppress. Knowing what someone's abilities was a given for any kind of team expected to work together long-term, giving skill preferences was acceptable, but mandating a particular stat distribution was generally seen as uncouth and abusive.

Fortunately, Jacob understood. "It was already something I was considering, Commander."

"Good. Trending larger or smaller?"

"If my goal is to obtain an ability to clear out mass amounts of area, it is best that I direct my efforts towards the smaller foliage," he answered.

"Let me know if you need anything, then."

"We shall have to see. It is possible without a suitable catalyst to leverage my capabilities against, I will not be able to build up sufficient weight for my efforts. But I shall endeavor nonetheless."

Henrietta had to agree with Oliver. She didn't know nearly as much about how the System worked as their young Archmage, but she did know that skills were mostly a matter of 'formalizing' existing magical power within the soul. Jacob's approach, enabling him to get skills which would assist him at the appropriate times was... unorthodox. But he seemed like he knew what he was talking about.

"Do you need me to attack you, then?" She risked a bit of a joke. It wasn't really a joke, which ought to make it acceptable, but there was humor to be found.

Jacob didn't verbally respond, but Henrietta was content and began to assess the enormous trees around them, trying to find a good angle to start felling them. 'A saw' was the obvious answer, but she didn't have one. Something large enough to fell one of these forest titans would require far more iron than they even had, let alone could spare.

Instead, Henrietta withdrew a handful of reed-paper cards and conjured for herself an even ten ink-flail tendrils with the aid of ⟨Epizeuxis⟩, allowing the constructs to spread forth around her body as she found comfortable.

Controlling them all was a bit tricky, but so long as she was generally focusing on a single task it usually worked out. Smaller trees were uprooted with little more than a thought, and Henrietta quickly worked to establish a perimeter around the iron-rich boulders. The truly massive trees she left for the time being, while the more mid-sized ones she found could be taken out by using a slightly smaller tree as a club.

Some of her targets were neatly felled as a result, uprooting them to a sufficient enough degree that she could use her tendrils to finish the job. The others were broken and splintered, some of which also were disturbed from the soil enough to pull out the rest of the way, others which she needed to leave alone for future use.

The logs, for their part, were piled up near the edge. Henrietta wasn't entirely certain what use she'd have for them, but it seemed like a shame to just have them go to waste.

"Do you sense that?" Jacob startled her as he approached, "I do not recognize the sound."

Henrietta, after a brief moment to recompose herself, closed her eyes to focus. When she didn't hear anything unusual - plenty of bird calls, insects buzzing, the distant howls of various predators, the trees rustling in the wind, and so forth - she took a deep breath and allowed the scents of the forest to wash over her.

The smell of upturned soil and sap were the strongest, of course. Those were mundane scents, not connected to her scent-based arcanoception, but permeated the clearing thanks to her logging efforts. Underlying that were plenty of other mundane scents; fungus and decay, fallen and decomposing leaves, the smell of dew, the sickly sweet scent of some flowers and fruits...

Nature was the most predominant smell, of course. It had some loose associations with Shadow and she could sense it through that affinity as a result, but beyond that there were the impressions of Wood and Earth - Shadow was quite obvious as well, but that was primarily due to her rather than the Jungle itself - and a thousand other elements and elemental blends, none of which stood out to her.

"I don't think I do," she finally answered, opening her eyes as she did so. "Trouble?"

"It always is," Jacob replied.

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Henrietta didn't quite agree, but that was beside the point, so she grabbed Jacob and relocated both of them to the top of the boulders to await whatever was coming.

After a minute, nothing had happened, and Henrietta glanced at Jacob, "Still coming?"

He nodded, and Henrietta refocused. If she was going to trust Oliver to know what would be needed for him to make something, she would trust that Jacob would know when something dangerous might happen.

"Almost here," he warned shortly thereafter. "Still nothing for you?"

Henrietta shook her head. If it was magical, it was clearly closer to Ice, Force, and Metal than it was Shadow, Rune, and Card. Or perhaps it simply wasn't a scent she could pick out from the surroundings. Or wait, was that the smell of elemental Flower she could sense?

Her musing was cut short by a flood of orange bursting from the treeline.

With a flourish, Henrietta finished her sketch of draconic wings, an identical flourish mirrored across the array of crude cards spread across the boulder-top. Then, with a pull on her Sketchbook, those wings began to twitch and stretch, pulling themselves off of their pages and expanding to their full size as the inklings were animated by Henrietta's command.

One pair of the wings returned to her shoulders, pulling her into the sky, and she directed the other nine like a conductor. The person-sized wingspans swooped through the tide of attacking elementals, cutting through some and sending others scattered.

Individually, none of the attackers - which looked like a slightly tropical peach-orange five-petaled flower - were much of a threat at all, but there were so many of them. Within seconds of their first arrival on the scene, they had absolutely blanketed everywhere, and were causing rapid expansion of the undergrowth wherever they lingered for too long. The shrubs and vines they landed on would coalesce into a mass covered in flowers and then... well, it was hard to say for sure.

They didn't just focus on Jacob and Henrietta, though they were clearly part of the elemental tide's target. Instead, the lumbering and varied behemoths of biomass struck tree trunks, the ground, even the boulders, to very little apparent effect.

Henrietta had subsumed one of the flowers, and found it to be little more than a basic, unremarkable plant. Interesting botanically, not interesting combat-wise. Which meant that there was something more going on.

"It seems you were right!" Henrietta called out as she flattened a huge chunk of the flower elementals with a tossed tree trunk, "The vinebeast wasn't unique!"

It was growing increasingly clear that the nature here didn't like to be disturbed. Alyssa simply finding a particular tree had caused them to be attacked daily by animated vines in the shape of various predators. Jacob killing said tree had instituted a wild magic storm which had radically terraformed a substantial section of The Jungle, the full effects of which were still unfolding. And now, when they were clearing out trees to build an iron mine, they were being attacked by elementals with vine-animation powers?

Definitely not a coincidence.

"Of course," Jacob responded, "This world clings tightly to its ways, it will not allow us to alter them lightly."

It was emblematic that Henrietta had given a non-negligible amount of thought regarding how they might transport the iron from this mine to First Tower without it being attacked by predators, but she'd never considered what it might take to defend the mine itself. To her, it simply hadn't been a target. But now, she needed to figure out what to do with all of these things.

They definitely were dangerous, having destroyed two of her ink-flails, but even though both she and Jacob were less than a tenth of their prior levels, fighting a horde of flowers still wasn't much of a challenge. Jacob was like a walking blender, every flower that approached within his reach instantly shredded by his blade-dance. Henrietta was directing her pseudowyvern wings in crowd control, corralling the flowers and trying to keep them somewhat contained so that she could drop heavy things on them.

"At least now we know not to go after the flower's source," she noted. "We don't want another Shelter incident."

"Indeed," Jacob said tersely, then looked up sharply. "Ah. I have it now."

Henrietta didn't have much of an opportunity to ask what - though she had her guesses - because the ground suddenly began to shake. Given she was flying, that didn't affect her, but Jacob did stumble as his footing suddenly betrayed him. It was so bad, a handful of flowers managed to nearly get within an armspan of him... which still resulted in them being annihilated a moment later, but it was still telling.

The shaking concentrated on the boulders, which bucked and wrenched violently as they began to pull themselves out of the ground. The new elementals absolutely dwarfed Henrietta, Jacob, and the flowers alike, and an array of smaller stones were pulled into the orbit of the boulders as they formed basic legs obviously held together through magic.

The massive elemental caused minor quakes in the ground as it advanced on her, shaking off more and more of the soil with each thunderous step... and then it proceeded to slam into the ground on the flowers, crushing thousands in a single instant.

Henrietta blinked. That was unanticipated.

The boulder began pulling itself off the ground again, and Henrietta warily waited to see what it would do. The moment it started heading towards where Jacob was, she knew action was needed.

Her tendrils were doing nothing against the legs - restraining them did nothing save destroying one when its strength was overwhelmed - and ramming one pair of her pseudowyvern wings into it simply resulted in the inkling flattening itself into graffiti against the dirty, rocky surface. She didn't have the weapons to deal actual damage to something made of stone, and it was frustrating.

"Veeran!" she called out in warning.

The soldier didn't directly respond, but he did change his stance such that he was looking at the rock elemental and slowly moving away from it.

However, instead of directly pursuing their Warrior, the boulder slammed into the ground once again, crushing several of the animated flower-biomass creatures and sending Henrietta's mind spinning as to what exactly was going on.

Her wondering about whether it was somehow on their side was quickly dashed when it swing one of its rock-legs with surprising speed at one of Henrietta's nearby psdueowyvern ink-wings, utterly destroying it.

Not on our side, then, she decided. Just its own entity.

There were, if she was being honest, too many ways for elementals to come about. Though that really was only to be expected, given it was something of a catchall term for living things with non-chymical biology but a material form, minus a dozen exceptions and plus a half-dozen other inclusions for good measure. But still, something about the elementals here struck her as odd.

There were two giant, lingering questions regarding the Jump. The first was simply 'what is the Calamity,' with the second being 'what local magic exists.'

There absolutely was a Calamity of some kind. The very physical phenomena which the Jump exploited ensured that they could only land on a world which had recently had a substantial degree of Fate destroyed, some potential apocalypse that starkly divided and limited the number and kinds of future a world could have. Then, there was the fact their Jump had been specifically timed to ride a particularly noteworthy 'wave' of Fate - for which they had mysteriously been the only team available - and that eliminated the slim possibility of a glitch.

A local 'magic system' was less guaranteed, but still overwhelmingly likely. Magic was much like life, both in that it was an emergent phenomenon based on much simpler rules and had enormous variation that would never be predicted by simply looking at its building blocks, but also in that it tended to arise wherever the conditions were right, given enough time. Those local magic systems tended to be quite symbiotic with life - though it had to be mentioned life was sometimes thought to be a type of magic all its own - though usually had enormous idiosyncrasies with who, how, and what it could be used for.

With the Tapestry far from dead here, it seemed inevitable that there was some kind of local magic here. And though there were certainly other possibilities far more mundane that could have led to the two forces of elementals clashing here above their future iron mine, Henrietta's gut told her that this was connected to either their Calamity or local magic, if not both.

A sweep from her ink-flail cleared out a small horde of the flowers, though it killed less than half. To her right, Jacob was moving with far less speed but far more purpose, each sweep with his sword growing slightly faster and killing more and more flowers. All the while, he was slowly accelerating towards the rock elemental.

That the elementals seemed fairly passive was a point in favor of them being the local magic. Perhaps it was some kind of defense response or regrowth factor to account for the gigafauna of the world - though gigafauna typically were dependent upon the local magic themselves. But perhaps the flowers were some kind of aggressor, seeking to overtake all other plants, and they'd arrived due to sensing weakness, itself provoking a response from the anti-gigafauna defense of... a really big rock.

There was something more going on here, and she didn't like not knowing what.

Off to the side, Jacob was now moving at a full sprint as he circled around the battlefield, still on a trajectory set to meet with the rock elemental. Flowers died by the dozens, hundreds.

Then Jacob met the stone elemental, and then he was past it. His sword had flashed out and severed the stone limbs it used to 'stand,' and after a moment of toppling over the enormous rock hit the ground with a thud. It attempted to reconnect a bunch of smaller rocks into itself, but it was too late.

Veeran had struck again. The same man who had slain countless spirits and half-spirits had done his job once more, killing the rock and leaving it motionless on the ground. He didn't stop there, and a glimmer of magic accompanied him as he swept his blade out, killing hundreds or thousands of the little enemies as he got his ranged subskill.

What remained of the fight was cut rather short.

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