The Challenger's Return: Rebirth of the Rainbow Mage

Otto reached his stone house in under half an hour.

Once inside, he took the chance to cut his new poison golem's mana line.

Severing its connection with its previous superiors.

The golem would now be his, and his alone.

Morning was approaching quickly.

Otto heard Jackal muttering to himself in a low voice within another room.

He was probably trying to solicit the locations of high-value coins from his favorite audience helper.

When Jackal heard Otto arrive, he instantly got up to greet him with a hint of fawning demeanor.

He patted his chest and let out a breath when Otto returned, feeling like a large weight was lifted off of him.

In a way, Otto was like a security blanket. With him around, Jackal felt much more at ease with regards to his safety.

"Otto! You're back."

He grinned,

"There were no intruders while you were gone."

Rather than being relieved, though, Otto nodded with a hint of disappointment.

"I should have expected that not all of those Throskarts are so stupid."

Jackal inwardly cursed,

'More like you keep scaring them out of their wits…who'd want to face you in battle?'

Of course, while roasting Otto on the inside, Jackal didn't dare to show a hint of it in his expression.

Otto was too scary!

"What's the plan for tomorrow?"

Otto looked at him and thought for a bit.

He…didn't seem to have a plan for the next few days.

Since this was currently the preliminaries of the game show, the game masters wouldn't introduce any pointed 'mini-death games' like they would in subsequent floors.

The preliminaries were a contest of strength and wit more than anything else.

Perhaps the weakest contestants would find this 'survival game show' a deeply arduous struggle for survival.

They would search and dig for coins, fill their stomachs with only the cheapest food or even subsist on the plants in the forest, kill the occasional intruder to their hiding spot, and perhaps eventually get lucky enough to join a larger faction.

But Otto obviously wasn't included in these ranks, despite being the so-called enemy of the world as a member of a hostile race.

Unfortunately, as only one person, his speed of gathering points by finding coins would inevitably be several orders of magnitude slower than those of other large factions.

Thus, Otto's only recourse was to carry out large-scale murders, ideally against Throskarts with plenty of points to spare.

Sadly, he had cleared out most of the nearby factions of the great majority of their points over yesterday's hunt.

Otto eventually looked at Jackal and said,

"I suppose I'll carry out some hunting further away tomorrow."

Jackal just nodded, gave Otto another bowl of stew and recommended he sleep to prepare for tomorrow's events.

Otto just smiled mysteriously and thanked him for the thoughts.

A few more hours went by.

Otto recovered from his strenuous activities and decided to take a long sleep in his mental space.

He was only woken up after eighteen hours in his mental space by a tug on his mana alarm.

His eyes lit up, the sleep pushed from them almost immediately.

An intruder!

He quickly attuned his senses to his array.

A sneaky looking man appeared in his view.

His figure was blurry, indicating that he was covered by some sort of weak stealth tool.

He was also very fast.

Otto's eyes glowed.

This kind of person, in his experience, usually had a lot of points to offer!

Was he going for an assassination?

Different from what he expected, though, the man did not hesitate with regards to the direction.

Instead, he made a beeline right for the stone house.

Otto's eyes narrowed.

Who had been able to give this person such an accurate location?

Was there a watcher he didn't know about?

Then he almost face faulted at his own stupidity.

Yes, his own watchers were off, but didn't Jackal also have watchers on him?

Just because Jackal didn't have very many audience members didn't mean there were none.

Jackal himself had once apologized to Otto on precisely this point.

And a few of them with sharp eyes were bound to spot the stone house's location…

Otto took a glance at the man's token and promptly exited his mental space.

The man's token was a light yellow color.

An excellent find!

He was the perfect supplement for Otto's points right now.

Otto didn't get greedy, though. Nor did he disregard his instinctual caution.

Rather than going out to face the man himself, Otto decided to remotely operate one of the outer line of traps.

Yes, the outer line.

The man was extremely fast, indeed. Well, compared to the typical contestant.

But he had barely passed the house's two kilometer radius.

It was just that the range of Otto's sensing alarm was a little too extraordinary, and had detected him approaching even from almost a full kilometer away…

The man continued to approach, sprinting at top speed.

He felt the wind run through his hair and barely restrained himself from smiling in satisfaction.

After a few minutes, the man finally started to approach the stone house.

He could even envision his success once the mission was completed, all those rewards laid out before him…

Suddenly, nine arrows seemed to materialize out of thin air pointed directly at him.

Ignoring the sense of alarm that shot through his brain, he sneered contemptuously.

Wasn't it just a few arrows?

He was still running very quickly, leaving himself little time to dodge.

The arrows only left him with a single path.

But the man wasn't too worried.

He boasted a yellow token. Among the single-player contestants, this was quite extraordinary.

An employer had contacted him for the job of assassinating the human and offered an immense reward once he left the game, and had even provided a substantial down payment.

He didn't hesitate to jump at the opportunity, either, having long heard of this dastardly human and his heinous crimes against his people.

Though he was a little fearful of the human's might, taking the chance to kill him when he was sleeping shouldn't pose a problem for him, right?

He was also expecting traps like these surrounding the home, so he didn't flinch when the arrows came flying at him, dodging them all by a hair's breadth, showcasing his perception.

Oddly, the man felt a tug on his neck.

Suddenly, his speed shot up. The man was confused. Why was he suddenly running so quickly?

A sense of deadly danger belatedly erupted.

The man's eyes widened, and he had a bad feeling.

Still flying through the air, he looked down…only to find that he wasn't running at all.

More accurately, his legs were entirely gone, along with the rest of his torso. An instant later, his vision turned black.

Jackal followed Otto a kilometer outside the house.

Then, he simply watched as the so-called intruder ran head on into a wickedly sharp blade.

His head was separated from his body but continued flying forward with built up momentum.

The man's eyes widened, and then he died.

A chill shot down Jackal's spine.

Who knew what terrible things the man had been thinking to want to kill himself so horribly…

A low voice interrupted his thoughts.

"Why are you still watching?"

Jackal jumped so high in alarm he nearly hit his head on the tree branch in front of him.

"Otto! That man..." He pointed a trembling finger at the man's severed head.

Otto shook his head and walked past Jackal to reach the pile of coins that had appeared beside the man's corpse.

It was large enough that Otto felt a bit more at ease in maintaining his place in the Top 10, at least for a while.

This death was the work of one of Otto's more ingenious traps.

The arrows that flew at the man weren't real, but projections created with an array that trapped the man in an illusion.

Then, it slowly led him to run around for a while before the man 'discovered' the stone house.

'Arrows' came flying at him to block off his areas of dodging, leading him to cut his head off with his own speed.

This array wasn't typically used when dealing with too many enemies.

But for a party of one, it did its job quite well.

The morning sun started to shine through the canopy as Otto leisurely walked back to the house.

Jackal shouted at him from behind,

"Otto! There's news!"

Jackal really didn't dare leave Otto's side after witnessing that scene. What could he say? His courage was small, or else why couldn't he hide and kill his own way to victory?

Well, if he was chased like Otto had been, he might not have made it out alive in the first place.

Otto leisurely raised a brow and sprinted back through his traps to reach the abode.

"My spectator found us a coin!"

Jackal's voice was high and fast.

"It's a whopper this time! A 100,000 point coin! Quickly use your coin finder effect to nail it down."

Otto's eyes widened.

"So big? It was found so quickly? Show me your game screen, let me see the comment."

Otto once again secretly bought the lie detector.

On Jackal's screen was a comment:

[100,000 point coin in your vicinity. Was found simultaneously by two different camps, and the commotion attracted a third party.]

Otto quickly used the lie detector and discovered that the statement was true.

He immediately decided to join in on the action.

"Okay. Stay here. I'll get the coin."

But Jackal immediately squawked in indignation,

"No way! Bring me with you!"

Seeing Otto's fierce expression, his posture wilted, but he remained firm,

"I can update you if there are any changes!"

Otto fixed his gaze on Jackal, and eventually relented,

"Suit yourself. I'll just bury you in the ground once we're there to keep you safe."

Then, they took off, Jackal strewn haphazardly over Otto's shoulder as the sun bathed the forest in brilliant golden light.

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