/Nico’s 1st Person POV/
With my hands shoved deep into my pockets and a massive grin stretched across my face, I sent the world around me grinding to a near halt for the nth time in the last few minutes.
[This is completely broken...] I thought, while my heart did absolute cartwheels in my chest.
Temporal Step gave me a strict three-second window of bullet-time to pick my landing zone before reality resumed its normal speed and the magic failed.
So for the next three seconds, my body and the world around me faded into a dull monochrome, crawling in slow-motion while the very fabric of spacetime ruptured in front of me.
And following exactly my line of sight, at the exact point I was looking at, hovered my Exit Point.
It looked like a blooming flower constructed entirely out of violently fractured space-time, appearing as though made out of shattered glass.
I shifted my eyes, watching the jagged, floating shards representing my Exit Point instantly snap across the damp tunnel to perfectly follow my line of sight.
And the next second, I locked the exit point in.
-Kzzzt!
The world snapped the exact microsecond, and I felt my boots hit the new patch of uneven stone.
I glanced over my shoulder to check my wake, and found a jagged, shattered glass-like rupture in space-time along the path I had teleported.
The glitch warped the dungeon’s blue-green light for a second before smoothing itself out like a crumpled piece of paper being flattened back into shape.
From what I had gathered, that terrifying spatial anomaly was completely harmless to anything it touched.
But damn, it was massive. Absolutely not something I can use with others around.
Temporal Step carried a flat cost of exactly sixty mana, and since my absolute maximum capacity had just hit exactly sixty points, a single teleport across its 10-meter range took my entire pool, but my infinite regeneration replaced the mana the literal millisecond I spent it.
And since it had no cooldown... I could spam this.
So I did.
The echoing drips of the water dripping from the ceiling dragged into a crawl while the dungeon sank right back into bullet-time.
Trailing my point of focus, I guided the exit point further down the dim path before triggering the temeport, and-
-Kzzzt!
I popped into existence another ten meters away before-
-Kzzzt!
Yeah, walking was officially for peasants.
This Young Master kept his hands buried in his pockets and spammed Temporal Step as fast as his brain could process the spatial coordinates, blinking in and out of existence through the winding dungeon tunnels like a glitch in the system.
Without having to worry about cooldowns or ever running out of mana, I just kept leaving a continuous trail of crumpled space and shattered reality behind me.
I blinked past stalagmites, zipped over shallow pools of water, and bypassed entirely empty stretches of the cave without taking a single physical step.
Until the narrow corridor suddenly dropped off.
I popped out onto a wide stone ledge, and the sheer scale of the space ahead forced me to an actual awed halt.
The path I was on opened up high on the wall of a massively wide cavern, featuring a winding, sloped ramp hugging the stone all the way down to the bottom.
The entire place was bathed in the aquatic glow of blue-green spirit moss clinging to the ceiling above.
But it was the breathing carpet of green down below that made my stomach drop.
Well over a thousand Goblins lay packed shoulder-to-shoulder across the ground, completely inert, curled into tight fetal balls like a sprawling sea of dormant little green zombies.
A cold sweat broke out on the back of my neck. Any sane person would have slowly backed away.
But then again, I’m not just another sane person.
[Time to farm...] I grinned, finally pulling my hands out of my pockets.
Activating a 40 MP evenly spread Ice Reinforcement, I boosted both my cognition and turned my body into the perfect conduit of Ice Magic, before raising both my hands and aiming finger guns at the thickest cluster of the sleeping monsters.
A thought alone, and four Fragmentation Ice pebbles took shape before me, two on each ’finger gun’.
And with a final adrenalized breath, I pulled the mental trigger and held it down with reckless abandon.
-Ta! Ta! Ta! Ta! Ta! Ta! Ta! Ta! Ta!.....
The pebbles broke the sound barrier the absolute microsecond they left my fingertips before slamming into the cavern floor and detonating like the magical equivalent of carpet-bombing.
-Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
A massive shockwave of ice shrapnel and concussive force instantly shredded the center of the horde, shattering the eerie silence of the cavern with the deafening booms of my Ice Pebbles and the unified shriek of agony of dozens of goblins that my pebbles didn’t manage to vaporize right then and there.
More than a thousand pairs of glowing red eyes snapped open in the dark before locking onto me.
And even with all my magic and skills, I felt the shiver of dread run down my spine.
Not even a moment later, the sleeping green sea surged to its feet in a blind rage, instantly forming a rabid tsunami of flesh, spit, and snapping maws.
Screaming and shrieking, the massive horde charged up the sloped wall path straight toward my ledge, practically trampling their own dead, quaking the ground by their sheer numbers.
My pulse vaulted into my throat, but I forced my boots to stay planted and kept the supersonic stream of explosive ice raining down the ramp.
-Ta! Ta! Ta! Ta! Ta! Ta! Ta! Ta! Ta!.....
Every single pebble that connected blew the frontrunners into a spray of green blood and severed limbs.
But there were just too many of them. The sheer mass of bodies pushed the horde forward through the explosions, scrambled up the path until the frontline was barely a few feet away from my face.
They leaped into the air, arms outstretched, mouth wide open, and ready to rip me apart.
With a manic, terrified laugh, I cut the MP feed from the Ice, and a split second later, the roaring horde dragged into a heavy bass drone as the world slowed down to a crawl.
[Three seconds...]
The exit point perfectly followed my line of sight back into the tunnel I had just come from before-
-Kzzzt!
I popped into existence ten meters down the corridor just as the tsunami of green flesh slammed into where I was just a second ago.
Between the point where I had just stood and the path to the exit point, the space-time ruptured, and the charging goblins slammed right through the glitching space.
Their green bodies visually stretched and crumpled along with the broken canvas of reality before popping out the other side completely unharmed.
They shrieked in absolute fury, funnelling themselves into the narrow corridor to chase me down.
While I teleported again.
-Kzzzt!
Blinking backward in perfectly timed ten-meter stutters, I kited the massive, screaming horde deeper and deeper into the narrow tunnel, leaving a continuous trail of crumpled space-time in my wake.
And a few hundred meters of spamming Temporal Step, I had kited the horde to hardened pitch-black roots I had set up earlier.
A little trap I had made of a massive, heavily reinforced "V" shaped funnel would choke the entire corridor down to a single, thirty-centimeter gap at the apex.
Projecting my final exit point right through the tiny gap, I locked it in.
-Kzzzt!