By nightfall, I still hadn’t reached a safe area. I’d stopped to hunt, or to take out pursuers, quite a few times of course, but after a while, people stopped prioritizing going after me over making for a safe zone themselves. I’d broken into the qualification places, just, but I needed more. I didn’t want to scrape in by the skin of my teeth, either, since I’d surely get a crappy clear rating for that.

Unfortunately, I had no choice but to buy one of the game’s discount air purifiers. But was I going to stop making for a safe zone just because night had fallen?

Hell no! I wasn’t about to just tank this crap with my health potions, no way. I had to keep going. But as I made a course correction to avoid another open area—roving gangs of contestants tended to settle down in such places, and those were numbers I really had no choice but to avoid—a sudden image appeared in my head.

In the image, instead of avoiding the clearing, I went into it. I wasn’t hurrying either. I had a light with me, and I was walking forward while sweeping with it, as though searching for something.

What was that bonus class trait I got before...? Oh yeah, Sense Opportunities! In my status, I confirmed that it had activated and was now on cooldown. I decided to act on what I’d seen, purchasing a bargain-budget flashlight from the game store. I went into the clearing, sweeping the light in front of me, eyes glued to the ground.

After about five minutes, I saw the unmistakable glint of a coin. And this coin clearly wasn’t a bog-standard coin, either. It looked easily of higher quality of the 1s and the 2 or 3 10s I’d picked up near the start.

When I picked it up, my score increased by 10,000. I now had over 22,000 points and my ranking indicator updated from Top 2% to Top 1%. “That’s what I’m talkin’ about,” I whispered.

My “adoring audience” went ballistic.

[Okay what the @#$%, he’s deadly AND lucky?!]

[@#$%, who can even stop the human now...Korrin was probably our best chance...]

[Is he a machine or something? Go to sleep so someone can kill you, human! Or better yet, the poison!]

[But it would probably take a gang leader to stop him now, and he clearly figured out about the poison...]

[He may have survived today, but tomorrow will be different. And if he survives tomorrow, he’ll keep being worn down from lack of sleep the way he’s going. He’ll die sooner or later.]

The joke was on that last guy. All nighters were something I was quite familiar with. Well okay, even for a NEET I hadn’t done it very OFTEN, but this was also another area that my time-dilated training was of great help with.

See, the thing about staying up really late, for all night or even multiple days is, it’s not actually that hard to just keep your eyes open. The real trick is simply having better things to do than just going to sleep. I always had the most success before coming to the Tower when I was really, REALLY into a video game.

But after training for a year twice without hardly stopping to rest, my definition of things that were better to do than sleep had expanded greatly. Plus, it wasn’t as though this place was short of sources of adrenaline. I didn’t feel the least bit sleepy.

A few hours after I found the 10,000 point coin, I finally felt the absence of poison in the air. The “unreliable” air purifier turned out to reduce my intake of the stuff to better than barely survivable levels, so I had about 2/3rds of my HP left. I decided to go ahead and find a good, concealed spot to sleep for however much darkness there was left.

The game changed quite a bit at that point—very few contestants were willing to venture outside the safe zone once they’d reached it, so the playing field’s area had been vastly shrunk down. The fighting got even more intense, but my points had expanded my Mana Pool and the other magic-related stats as well as my physical ones. Even my Psych stat had burgeoned. Meanwhile, the mana cost for my Fireballs hadn’t increased at all, the spell’s level staying stubbornly at 4, so I had long stopped needing to use my mana potions almost altogether. And even with my opponents getting stronger, most of them didn’t have my kind of points, and even ones who had nearly as many, or even a few more than me, still took 3 or fewer Lesser Fireballs to eliminate. The damage-dealing capabilities of the Psionic Pyromancer class were definitely living up to its hype. I only needed to run and hide when someone with substantially more points than me—of which there were a few in the area—or a legit mob hunted for me.

Otherwise, I operated like a wild, predatorial beast—operating around the fringes of the locations where contestants had grouped into herds, mostly picking off the careless who I knew had few enough points that I was guaranteed to kill them with one fireball, then using Lesser Telekinesis to secure the dropped coins, swiftly running away, picking off pursuers when I could, and always staying on the move, never staying in one place for long.

Unlike an actual predator animal, though, that would typically limit themselves totally to the sick and weak, I didn’t hesitate to go for bigger point prizes. My most common sort of those were other contestants who hadn’t managed to join a gang, who had collected points at least remotely close to mine to be able to survive. However, I was hardly above taking out “elite” members of herds who were much closer to me in points, if a chance presented itself.

The one type of player I refused to target were who I referred to as the herd alphas. Only a few I knew of had substantially more points than me, but their way of getting through this round was truly despicable. They ran their herds like dictatorships, only appeasing and accepting into an inner circle those “elites” who had enough points that they could put up a fight against the alpha when they were allowed in. The alphas and their favored elites demanded tribute in points from the weak majority of the herd, under threat of culling. So they stayed safe, remaining in their camps at all times, lording lavish gifts from the shop over the others, while their subjects struggled to survive.

It did not escape me either, that there was a “sell goods” option in the game store. Probably most of the elites and alphas got their positions in the first place by being popular and crowdsourcing gifts that they spun into pure points with that option. As soon as they had enough to establish themselves, they could gain points day and night by sitting on their asses while their herds fought each other.

So, they were simply too well protected, without exception, for me to go after. Until that is, on day 4, the game changed again. The herds that had been settled got on the move once again, and after some time I concluded they were moving in roughly the same direction. Another use of a Lucky Arrow confirmed it—the safe zone was gone, and we had to move to another one, or face the poison.

Here, I saw an opportunity. There was one herd in particular that I’d been starting to think it might be possible to take down their alpha for a ton of points. Unlike many of them, this one genuinely enjoyed fighting—he might have even volunteered on that basis rather than being forced to play this game. I’d been thinking about ways to possibly lure him to face me away from his herd. But now they were on the move again...

Wouldn’t it be better to take out all of them at once?