To Gauss, the moment he sensed the divine substance emanating from the golden candle, the nature of the battle had quietly changed.
Gauss knew he needed to get his hands on that golden candle as soon as possible.
After Any Door activated, he vanished from the dragon's back.
The next moment, he appeared somewhere in the air two hundred meters away.
There was a reason he chose to teleport two hundred meters.
Although his current maximum range was three hundred meters, his tests had shown that teleporting three hundred meters consumed more than twice as much magic as teleporting two hundred.
In other words, unless he was in a situation like his escape from Blackwater Town last time, teleporting three hundred meters simply wasn't very cost-effective.
Teleporting only a few dozen to a hundred meters at a time would certainly save a fair amount of magic, but the tradeoff was that he would need to cast Any Door far more frequently.
At present, Gauss needed half a second to prepare before casting Any Door.
A single 0.5 seconds might not seem like much, but if he cast it repeatedly, the total time could add up to five seconds, ten seconds, or even longer.
That much time could introduce all sorts of complications.
That was why Gauss had ultimately chosen a teleportation distance of two hundred meters.
However, when he silently activated Any Door this time, he soon noticed something was different.
The flames around him, fluttering like birds, detected his displacement almost immediately.
The nearest "firebirds" rushed toward him in a swarm, like moths drawn to a flame, converging on the dazzling "light source" he had become.
One thing to note was that, unlike when he had been on Hefis's back, the closer he got to the ground, the denser