He had all but given up on his hopes to make it work. But there he sat, visualizing the elven village with its large square, the fountain and the jovial atmosphere of the night before when the world around him lurched. It’s quite difficult to describe what Albert saw when the teleportation happened, but he felt the world lurch and shift while he remained still, and then all of a sudden he found himself in the very same square that he was picturing in his mind. There was no sense of having traversed the distance, only a profound sensation of simply having ceased to be in one place and having begun to be in another, instantly and without delay.
He looked around, blinking, rubbing his eyes. Indeed this was not a mirage or an illusion. He was there, at Elvenhome. In one piece, save for a distinct lack of mana in his body. The teleportation almost depleted his entire pool, leaving him with some miser FUs to use until he replenished it with crystals. There might have been elves around when he appeared, but his mind didn’t even register their presence. Later Eurus confirmed that he was seen appearing and disappearing briefly, but since he was a traveler and travelers were known to be quirky nobody thought much of it.
[Skill acquired: Teleportation I]
He immediately tried to add some context to the skill, working out what notes to append to it. Firstly: he activated it again to try to go back to his resting place on the mountain near the golem. He found that he could do it quite easily, finding himself back in the same position he was in before departing without delay, once again at the cost of most of his mana pool. There were more than five hours of walking separating the two locations, which meant that he was traversing quite the distance with the skill at a fairly reasonable cost.
Secondly: he tried to use the skill without any target location in mind. That’s when things got interesting. Something like the idea of a map formed in his consciousness, appearing like any other thought or sensations. The description that came closest to it was the sensation of having a body, and the knowledge of where his own body rested in space. That is how he perceived the feeling of all the locations he could reach with [Teleportation], not like a map but like a cloud of sensations he could hone his attention on specifically. Narrowing down the scope of the cloud of feeling made the locations appear with more detail, until an image appeared associated to what he was thinking about.
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He could travel to any location in the valley without problem, provided it was a place he had previously visited it. All the locations were comfortably in range. He then tried to reach the locations he visited outside the valley, in the wastelands around, but trying to teleport was impossible. Perhaps those places were inaccessible due to some sort of disruption.
Next, Albert tried to think about places in the real world. Another cloud of sensations opened up before his mind’s eye, a synesthesia of images sounds smells and colors all appearing at the same time, chaotic yet perfectly ordered. Unfortunately, none of the locations there were accessible, but he was sure that it was only temporary. Interesting was the fact that only the places he visited after the system were in the ‘map’, and not other locations that he knew he visited before the system.
That was all for now, however, because a sudden dread immediately derailed any other thought. The golem was gone.
Albert decided to teleport down to the glade where the golem used to rest. He closed his eyes, summoned the map and… nothing. No map appeared. His mind was too agitated, too many thoughts intruding upon the delicate process of selecting the coordinates to jump to. And all this, despite knowing full well that he had a plan to deal with this very situation.
“I’ll go on foot.”
He descended as quickly as he could, and in less than ten minutes he was right where the golem was last seen in its deactivated state. Surely by now the golem was already wreaking havoc somewhere in the valley, getting ever closer to the village. Perhaps it was already there, and it was decimating the few surviving elves with no mercy or compassion. It didn’t matter, though. Now it was finally time to execute the master plan to get rid of the thing once and for all.
There were three steps making up the plan to destroy the golem before it could even have a chance to react.
Step one: Albert gathered materials from the area around the glade, felling trees and moving huge rocks around with his [Strengthening]. He tried to work out exactly where the golem had been standing in place earlier, down to the most minute of details, using landmarks and perspective he carefully calculated from his advantage position on the cliff.
Step two: he arranged the huge tree trunks to be exactly where the limbs of the golem where, and made a spear by melting many great stones with his fireballs. After enchanting the spear to be as tough as possible with [Magical Item Creation], he placed it where he was sure the golem core was.
Step three: Albert gripped the Hazegem tight, taking it out of its pocket for good luck, and retrieving as much mana as he needed from his crystals. He also kept the gems gifted to him by Eurus at the ready, having already appraised them earlier between rounds of teleportation experimenting. He then consulted his phone, where a timer displayed how long his preparations took him.
“Rewind time: five hours.”