What Happens If You Send S-Rank and A-Rank Summons to the Black Market? (2)

At first, it was just a report some Ability User trapped in the Black Market had posted to the status-window-only community.

But if you really wanted the world's attention, nothing beat the Hunter Gallery, where civilians and hunters alike hung out.

Naturally, the news hit the Hunter Gallery too.

To actually watch the footage, though, you still had to fire up Huntube.

And sure enough, the moment the breaking news dropped, a flood of Ability Users trapped inside the Black Market flipped on their live streams.

Some titles stuck to pure information.

Members of reasonably big-name guilds. Ability Users with a bit of fame. One after another, they piled on.

Crisis was just opportunity by another name.

Even the nobodies among Ability Users slapped their own titles up and went live.

But the place that drew the biggest crowd by far?

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The newly arrived A-Rank Hunter.

The second her stream went live, viewers stampeded in.

The reason? Obvious.

Her looks and her powers were pure aggro magnets.

Barely started, and she already had 31,054 likes. Concurrent viewers slammed into 97,886 on the spot.

Even with anonymity guaranteed, and even with an avalanche of messages flooding in real time, that kind of post was impossible to avoid.

Anyway, for all the garbage chat, plenty of genuine support still poured in.

Cheering for a strong, beautiful Ability User? A Hunter whose mission was conquering a dangerous dungeon?

Of course she was popular.

Of all places, she'd started streaming from the Black Market.

Not fully illegal, sure, but honestly a dark corner that clashed hard with a moniker like Magical Girl.

"Today I was on patrol duty, checking that nothing was wrong in the Black Market. I never expected a dungeon to just... appear."

Irene glanced somewhere off-camera, then answered with a bright little smile.

The moment she explained with that unguarded smile, public opinion flipped right back.

Donations stacked up in a row, and the cheer window for Irene went wild.

"Thank you, everyone~ It's an emergency right now so I can't call out every single Supporter by name~ Eii!"

She winked at the camera. That mood-lifting smile was free with the package.

The chat supporting her only burned hotter.

A shadow of darkness lunged toward her.

A monster closer to a ghost or vengeful spirit — and she swatted it down with her magic wand?

"Everyone! Don't let the shadows touch you! Hunters, gather on me — and if the rest of you want to live, get to my side!"

A quick sweep of the area told her no one present outranked her.

So she stepped up and started leading them all herself.

Under a dark sky and a darker space, strange wails rose as the casino-bright lights of the Black Market slowly died out.

Only she was shining on her own.

Radiant light, a dazzling outfit — somehow, she started giving people hope they couldn't quite name.

One shout from her, and every Ability User flocked in as if under a spell.

The viewers were just as fired up.

Shining like she stood under a spotlight, delivering the performance to match — they held nothing back in cheers and praise.

And as if answering that praise, she pulled everyone together and carved through the monsters of darkness.

For a moment it looked like the sudden dungeon crisis would be put down under her lead.

Chat cheering for Irene mixed with chat roasting the Ability Users who'd nested in the Black Market like parasites.

Both streams of messages piled up together.

At the same time, viewers desperate to watch Irene — now the star of every rumor — sent the concurrent count skyrocketing.

Live viewership that blew past ordinary popularity set the chat and donation windows on fire.

That cute, adorable Magical Girl look, and the way she led people toward hope.

In times this chaotic and unsettled, she was exactly the person the world needed.

"Great! If we keep this up, we can all join forces and take down the boss monster too!"

Darkness weakens before light.

Proving it, her cheers from the air and the example she set with her own body drove the dark back.

Her smile and hopeful voice made people follow without a word of complaint.

Step up now and someone would say you'd stolen her credit.

She was already handling it — stick your neck out, fail, and you'd look like an idiot.

And so, under her lead, they smashed through the pack of monsters made of darkness.

Dangerous, vicious-looking beasts — and they cut them down without a hitch.

Then, hours into the fighting.

Most of them were sweat-soaked and exhausted when it hit.

Grrrrr... KRRRRRRRRRRRUMBLE!

An earthquake rolled through the vast Black Market drowned in darkness.

At last, the dungeon's master — the true culprit behind this whole incident — the boss monster.

Far off, a vast mass of pure darkness heaved itself upright.

An unidentified shadow swelling big enough to swallow a building whole.

The Ability Users clustered around Magical Girl Irene.

Hunters and mercenaries. And the unidentified powerhouses still hiding what they could do.

Every last one of them lost their words before that surging darkness.

An existence that went past majesty and straight into terror.

No — even if you said fear itself had been compressed into one place, the atmosphere wouldn't have felt out of place.

The enormous mass had no real shape. It simply split its body open toward the people with a wet crack!

And between the halves, a black sphere condensed.

"It's going to fire a beam! Focus on defense!"

As she shouted, Irene shaped light into a hemispherical barrier.

A dome massive enough to cover everyone who'd fought beside her so far.

People scrambled to raise whatever defenses they'd prepared, and then—

KRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASH!

From the sphere and the riven gap, a colossal storm poured out.

A ray of darkness that shattered the Black Market's assorted buildings and turned everything to ash came screaming in a straight line.

Chat exploded into a mash of gasps and curses — pure chaos.

Then it locked up entirely, but Irene had no room to care.

A suddenly arrived, overwhelmingly powerful boss monster.

Everyone standing on the knife-edge between life and death shut their mouths and poured everything into defense.

Flash!

No time to brace. In an instant, darkness hammered the barrier of light.

A glare of mixed light and dark burst across the screen, and a roar layered on top of it, blanketing everything.

Countless viewers hammered at the chat, but even that was frozen solid.

All the people watching the screen could do was wonder what had happened — whether Irene was okay.

Maybe those wishes worked. The flash and the roar settled fast.

When the glare faded, the first thing the camera locked onto was Irene herself.

Her Magical Girl outfit was torn to shreds in places, a total mess.

In an instant she was coated in dust and wounds large and small, her expression saying she could collapse at any second.

The barrier she'd made had been smashed to pieces long ago.

Everyone under it had survived, at least — but they hadn't come out unscathed either.

In that sudden reversal of the tide, a few tried to slip away in secret, but—

"Gyaaaaaaah!"

"W-what is this... kh... hhk...!"

"Urgh... grrraaagh...!"

Tentacles erupted from the dark, wrapping them or skewering them through.

Then they dragged the limp bodies into the darkness and vanished.

Only then did they understand. They were already standing inside the maw of a giant predator of pure dark.

A handful of higher-ranked Ability Users who had been watching Irene — who had been quietly hiding their power — began to step forward one by one.

KUUUUUUUUUUUNG—

But a vibration rolled out as if mocking them.

Once more, a beam charged with darkness prepared to face their way.

"Hah... hah... everyone... I'll block it one more time... when I do, open a path for retreat..."

Even then, Irene floating in midair reset her stance.

She had taken the heaviest damage holding the main line of defense, and still her heart was set on protecting them again.

That was when it happened. Irene's eyes caught two people.

At the same time, the third-person camera that had been filming her swung around and closed in on the pair.

"What? Wasn't this the way out? And what the hell is that?"

"Mmmmh... that creepy feeling... this is good...♡"

Two women who had appeared from who-knows-where stood before the enormous darkness.

"I-it's dangerous! Run...!"

How they were standing there unharmed in the middle of this chaos and confusion, Irene had no idea.

But if they stayed like that, they would die.

Irene wrung out every last drop of power, raising a barrier of light as she shouted.

PWOOOOOOOM!

And then, right after, something unbelievable happened.

The woman with short purple hair drove her fist forward — and tore the darkness apart on the spot.

A dark monster dozens of times larger than her own body... popped like a balloon from a single punch?

Irene took it in with both eyes, and the live stream captured it the same way.