Jack logged out of the server and closed down Minecraft, the first thing he noticed were his hunger and thirst, he had been on the server for a real-time day straight and he was well aware of that. Jack pushed his chair away from the three-monitor setup on his desk. He stood up and stretched, it was like having slept for a day. Actually, his body had slept for a day just not in his bed, he had slept in the chair in front of his monitors while he was on the server.
The first thing he did after standing up was going into the room next to his computer room, the kitchen, where he drank a bit of water and ate three pieces of the bread he had prepared before going on the server. After he was done eating, he went back to his computer room and sat down again. Jack opened an application and called up Andreas, who answered the call immediately.
"Okay, what's up J?" Andreas asked.
"I just logged out, it is your shift now. I'll inform you about what happened. And let me tell you, a lot happened." Jack answered.
"I suppose not only good things happened?" Andreas assumed.
"Right. First of all, Fire escaped the quarry through the volcano. We don't know how yet but he's gone. freeZe60, TheUnchosenOne, Ambigious_Name and TehLulz9001 are also missing."
Jack could hear Andreas choke on something he must have been drinking.
"What?" He asked, still with a mouth half full of liquid.
"Yeah, they escaped. Also, the Shop Guy is out, he somehow got into a fight with Fire and lost."
"Q kicked him out because of that?" Andreas wondered.
"Nope, not because of that, Fire pointed out that that guy has some sort of mental issue, or multiple, Fire must know. It should be the truth as he was in a life or death situation at the time." Jack explained quickly.
"I see, I see… Fire is smart, we know that. This is probably part of some plan he has been cooking up while in the mine. Any idea where he is?"
"Nope, the player data says nothing about that, too bad that we don't see his coordinates or at least his dimension. But I suspect, that he is or was in the Nether because we found a portal inside the volcano, I still don't get how he managed to brew Fire Resistance pots in there or how else they got in there…"
"Did you send someone through the portal?" Andreas asked.
"Yeah, we did send some mercenaries, but… They ran into some weird wither skeleton dudes, they decayed to dust in seconds. At least that is what they said after respawning."
"Very strange, Fire escapes, the mercs are killed by wither skeletons, all that after that fight, how did he even win that?" Andreas wondered.
"He evaded the Shop Guy until he slipped up and finally killed him by slitting his throat, you know, between helmet and chestplate."
"Did anything else happen?" Andreas wanted to know.
Jack heard him taking another sip of whatever he was drinking.
"The Guy managed to get in a hit on Fire, almost killed him but one of his friends gave him a regen pot, then Q transported them to the quarry. When I think about it, that's probably where they got the potions from."
"Do you have any idea where he wants to go?" Asked Andreas.
"To his base I suppose. The bad thing is that we don't even know where that thing is and nobody, not even we with our hacks, can circumvent the tricks of the admins. You know, those skellies' Wither effect just ignores protection and everything else that could make you not die. I wouldn't be surprised if our god mode had no effect either."
"We need to patrol the server, I will wake up my bros, then we will search."
Jack said: "Why did he even try to escape if he has no way to possibly stop us… But wait, couldn't it be possible that the admins built in some kind of emergency backdoor? A lot of people do that."
"That is very true. The bad thing is that we don't have the slightest shadow of a clue to what it is, where it could be and how in the world we could get to it! Damn!"
Jack replied: "When you find him you can kill him with ease, you know, noclip on, godmode on, killaura on, you are unstoppable then. Hopefully."
"Who knows…" Muttered Andreas and then shouted over his back: "Hey, Bob, Jonathan! Get up, we are going on a Fire hunt!" He ended the call.
Jack had mixed feelings about Fire's escape, it would certainly be bad for the hacker group if he somehow managed to get them off the server, which was very unlikely, but possible. The other side was that he wouldn't be assigned boring guard shifts, now he had something else to do. He turned on the screens to the left and right of his middle screen. He had decompiled the code that the admins had written, it made absolutely no sense to him because of its immense complexity, Jack hadn't had any luck with finding out anything useful because he didn't have a point to start from. Until now.
Now he knew that Fire had to do something with this escape route that the admins had built in, he opened his browser on his right screen to find out Fire's UUID because it would be just too easy if his name would be directly in the code, that and it would be unreliable. A few minutes later he had the UUID and let his computer search for it in the files, the progress bar started slowly creeping towards the right but it wouldn't be done any time soon.
He put Fire's player data on his middle screen, maybe he could find out something from that. After staring at the numbers for a minute, he looked over to the search bar, it had only moved three pixels. He looked back at the player data: X, Y and Z velocity, health level, hunger level and so on, most didn't work properly, the velocities were among the few that did. Fire's Y velocity was significantly higher than the other ones.
"Hmm, he could be climbing a ladder but I doubt that any ladder is that tall…"
Then he knew it, Fire was in fact climbing, but not a ladder. He was climbing a mountain. Jack brought up the server map and looked for places over five hundred meters above sea level, he found about four hundred matching mountains and a strange tower on top of such a mountain, not exactly an accurate clue.
He looked into Fire's inventory and saw some strange things. "Bottled fire, active blaze core, whatever that is, empty bottles, blaze rods, diamond pickaxes, water buckets, bags… beef? That proves, that he has been to the Nether…"
Then he had another idea, he looked for obsidian near regions over five hundred blocks, which cut the number of mountains down to about fifty.
"Getting there…" He commented.
He looked into the inventory of the other runaways, the stuff that he found there was no different form Fire's inventory, only that it was missing the strange stuff like bottled fire or blaze cores.
"Damn it, that isn't going anywhere!" He shouted at the screen and looked over to his search, which was about one tenth done.
He thought about how far you could reasonably go with Nether travel. He limited the search to something he thought was the maximum distance. Fire alone might have gone further but he had four others in tow who would significantly slow him down.
Only a single mountain showed up.
"Bam! In your face!" He shouted.
The mountain he had found was one with a large glacier on it that was still reasonably close to the desert. He closed down the map and sent a message to all members of the hacker group: "Look for them in a two thousand block radius of the mountain with the glacier, exact location is attached."
After having found out about where they were, he decided to eat and drink something proper.
About half an hour later he went back to his computer, the search was done but it had five results, three of them were in a giant string of numbers and symbols, which was maybe for distraction or served some other obscure purpose, Jack wasn't sure, maybe he simply used the wrong encoding when opening those files. The other two were more promising, he couldn't exactly understand what was coded there but it was none of the admins' obscure code, this code was closer to Minecraft, it was about keeping people out of the server, basically a custom banning function. There was also a bit that he assumed to stop most changes to the server files themselves.
"What could that be?" He asked himself. "Very strange, maybe if Fire or some other people are on the server, we can't take over fully, which explains our fruitless attempts… The other thing could be this escape thing, removing keeping someone from the server that sounds like a good method to get rid of us… I need to tell Q about that when he gets out of the server, he has been in there for a very long now."
He turned off his screens and stood up, very satisfied with his results, going towards the bathroom.
He said to himself: "I have done enough finding stuff out for the time, they will survive without me for a bit. I need a bath."