To be honest, seeing the tickets was one thing, but processing what I was going to have to do was something else entirely. I kept staring at the confirmation screen like it might suddenly say Just kidding!, but the words stayed stubbornly real.
Valid: 3 days from now.
Three days.
I wished Mr. B had forgotten about it. I wished he'd gotten busy and lost the ticket and moved on with his life like a normal shady broker. But alas, I was left with no options—at least, none that didn't involve me being a terrible person.
Which, for the record, I was not. I was merely… morally flexible when under pressure. Still, I'd agreed. And apparently my life had decided agreed meant contractually bound by the universe. I'd never been to a concert before. Guess this was going to be my first.
'Yay. Lucky me.'
I leaned back on my bed then forward again, because I couldn't sit still when dread was fermenting in my ribs. If I was going to be dragged into an idol event, I wanted to at least know what kind of circus I was walking into.
So, like any responsible adult who totally had their life together, I went online and searched the event name.
What was it called again?
Ah, yes. Idol x Idol.
The moment I hit enter, my screen exploded with results: news articles, clip compilations, fan discussions, "Top 10 Idol x Idol Moments That Ended Careers," and an alarming amount of thumbnails featuring dramatic stage lighting and people crying prettily into microphones. Clicking the first link because it looked official-ish and had the best SEO, led me to an official wiki page.
'Of course it did.'
The wiki was laid out like a shrine: dates, winners, controversy, iconic performances, and a notable incidents section that was longer than the history section, which was never a good sign. According to the page, Idol x Idol started around fifteen years ago in the Narakimi district and quickly grew from a local showcase into a national event.
It wasn't just a concert. It was a contest, a performance gauntlet where rookies and rising stars tried to stand out enough to get noticed by agencies, sponsors, or the kind of industry people who wore sunglasses indoors and called everyone kid.
It was described as a rite of passage.
Which, in modern terms, translated to: if you don't do this, nobody takes you seriously. The wiki framed it like a gatekeeping ritual. Not necessarily fair, not necessarily kind, but painfully effective. Apparently, the winners tended to go on to have great careers, but even the page admitted something more important.
Winning wasn't everything. Making an impact was.
'So you don't have to win,' I thought, scrolling, 'you just have to make a spectacle.'
That… sounded familiar. It was basically the entertainment version of a gate dungeon. You weren't trying to survive. You were trying to be remembered and sometimes those were the same thing. I kept reading and found the part that made the whole thing feel even more ridiculous. Idol hunters. It wasn't just singers.
In the hunter world an idol was a category, a niche. People who fought monsters and did public-facing work. Actions like performances, charity raids, sponsored clears, branded weapons, fan meets, and yes—apparently—events like this.
A part of me found it fascinating. The hunter world had so many lanes. Gate hunters, tower hunters, bounty hunters, gourmet hunters, scouts, support types, artifact specialist, the list going on.
Whole careers were built around the same phenomenon, twisted into different shapes depending on what people wanted out of it. Fame, money, safety, purpose. All of them were legitimate goals.
Looking inwards, my out-view of hunters was quite shallow. I'd always pictured hunters as one thing, strong people who collected cool gear and killed monsters along the way. But it wasn't that simple. It never was.
'And of course,' I thought dryly, 'I chose the most generic version possible. The go into dungeon and almost die path.'
Classic me. Still, I doubted I had the talent for any of the other paths. I wasn't charismatic enough to be an idol hunter, nor patient enough to be a gourmet hunter, and definitely not stable enough to be a bounty hunter. I mean... I could barely handle my own existence without causing property damage.
And yet…
Three days from now, I'd be walking into Narakimi, ticket in hand, attending Idol x Idol because a broker with a fake name decided it would be funny to hand me a side quest. I stared at the screen for a long moment, then sighed.
"Alright," I muttered. "So I'm going to an idol event in three days and I'm somehow still more scared of dungeons."
Closing the wiki tab didn't help settle my thought which haunted me like an annoying ghost. My situation right now wasn't the best. I had three days before I had to attend an idol-hunter event on behalf of a man who kept calling me a child and giving me gifts like an emotionally confusing uncle. And that wasn't even the worst of it.
A bigger problem hit me. What was I going to do until then? My fridge was basically a museum exhibit at this point. I had missed a couple days of work at that crappy sales job because of this unnecessary transformation and I had no funds to boot.
'Oh yeah, I had a job.'
Really the fact that I had missed my minimum wage job, had only hit me now. But it wasn't like I could return in this form anyway.
'Hey it's me guys, I know that I've considerably shrunk, have blue hair and erm... am a girl. But trust me it's the same old me.'
Yeah, like that would work. They would probably think I was crazy, not that I even wanted to return there. Still, my bank account was not thriving.
My core was unstable and I had no real ID. So many things could go wrong. Not to mention, I'd nearly met my end in my first dungeon run, which was… not a great sign for long-term planning. My gaze dropped to the floor, then to the faint glow of core residue dust still clinging to my palms.
"…I'm so broke," I whispered.
And then, because my brain loved irony, another thought surfaced.
'I don't actually know what I'm doing.'
Yeah, I'd read the forums for years. I knew rankings, drama and even which guild leaders cheated on their spouses as well as which A-rank had been caught buying fake cores. But practical knowledge? Actual survival knowledge, bar a few in and out cases? The knowledge that stopped me from getting turned into soup. I had none.
I rubbed my face.
"Okay," I muttered. "We do research like a responsible person. So we don't end up dead!"
I opened the Hunter Forum app on my phone again, but this time I didn't go to the drama boards. I didn't go to builds, or highlights.
I searched:
gate basics
tower vs gates
hunter types
how to survive
The results were messy, but one name kept popping up across multiple threads, linked in replies like people actually respected it.
CarlTheExplorer
I clicked his profile. It was nice to see such an organised post for once. No edgy avatar or cringe signature quotes. Just a clean profile and a long history of guides written in plain language.
His pinned post was titled:
[GUIDE The Gates, The Tower and Why You're Probably Confused By: CarlTheExplorer]
I clicked.
And for the first time in my entire life, I read a forum post without scrolling immediately to the comments to see people fighting. Carl's writing was structured, calm, and informative. He started with history. How gates appeared first, eighty years ago. The chaos that followed and all the other stuff that I had learned recently.
Eventually the post segued into information about the tower and how it appeared later than the gates. According to Carl, the Tower manifested around twenty-five years after the gate era began across multiple different contents ranging from Asia to Europe and even Africa.
It came after the world had already learned to fear portals, after guilds and licenses existed and after people thought they understood the new normal. My understanding was that the Tower wasn't a natural extension of gates but something else entirely.
Carl didn't speculate too hard, but the way he wrote made it clear that nobody truly understood the Tower, not the Association, scientists, or even the old guild founders. It just existed. And society built around it because society didn't have a choice.
He compared it to the space race, which I thought was either very smart or very pretentious. His point was that the Tower turned climbing into ambition rather than survival. Gates were work, something necessary to prevent an outbreak.
Whereas the Tower was more a matter of national pride. Climbers rose with the ambition of getting further and earning money from the towers treasures. Then came the part about how multiple hunters existed. For once, I was proud in the fact that I knew this information. There were categories, roles, niches, entire careers built off different forms of hunting.
Carl listed examples with the casual tone of someone describing hobbies. Gate/Dungeon Hunters were your gate clearers, raid teams, core harvesters. Tower Hunters were the climbers, the challengers, people obsessed with floors and records.
Bounty Hunters were legal hunters who tracked rogue awakened and illegal gate runners. Gourmet Hunters hunted monsters specifically for rare ingredients and sold them to luxury markets. And Idol Hunters were public-facing, media-friendly hunters.
All of this information paled in front of the next line.
The Tower is unregulated.
This was the best thing I'd heard all day. I'd barely known anything about the Tower—footage was practically impossible to find, and nobody even agreed on what caused the damn thing. However, the unregulated part didn't mean lawless. It meant the Association had no jurisdiction—but guilds usually had some sort of influence.
By floor twenty most serious climbers were sponsored, tagged, and running under some sort of guild banner. Well whatever information existed came from the people who survived it and bothered to share it with the outside world so this was what I could go by.
I was still thankful for this though. It was because of effort from people like Carl who didn't mind sharing information that basic knowledge could be spread.
"All hail Carl. "
If I ever met the guy, I'd make sure to give him my thanks.
Reading further, I found out that a prerequisite of entering the tower was awakening. Gatekeeping it from people like the old me. Furthermore, the reason why it was unregulated wasn't because the Association didn't want too, but that they couldn't.
According to Carl, the Tower didn't function like gates. Gates were instances with measurable mana density, known rules, known risks, and clear entry/exit mechanics, things you could license and control.
The Tower, on the other hand, behaved like it had its own will. It generated floors and set conditions. It created environments that weren't consistent across entrants. Carl described it like a tourist spot with a knife hidden under the brochure. People visited the Tower even if they weren't hunters, as long as they had awakened with a system.
Most stuck to the safe zones, where shops had formed nearby and a real cash marketplace had taken root. Tours existed, and merch creating an entire ecosystem. And then, for hunters, the Tower offered something gates couldn't.
A structured path, a climb, a challenge that didn't require a black market broker or an illegal entry fee or preventing a gate outbreak. Just a leisurely activity, you could engage in.
The kicker? The first ten floors were individual instances.
Tutorial floors.
Carl explained it in a way that clicked instantly:
When you enter the Tower as a new challenger, the early floors aren't shared. They're tailored. Personal. Designed to test and teach, or at least to filter out people who had no business climbing.
Only after Floor 10 did the Tower start mixing people together, turning into the real Tower where teams formed, rivalries happened, and the world's strongest hunters chased records. I sat back, letting it sink in. If the Tower had tutorial floors that were unique per person… Then it meant I could train. Safely-ish.
I mean how bad could it be, it's not like I would face an existential threat. Without going back to the black market and paying to enter dungeons. Best of all the association couldn't track me. I stared at my wall in contemplation thinking about my nearly empty fridge.
Three days.
A concert event in Narakimi. A mysterious gate anomaly. Hunters dying in the news. And me, an unlicensed, unstable Bronze core lightning mage with two skills and a talent for bad decisions.
I exhaled slowly.
"Alright," I muttered. "No more illegal dungeons for a bit."
I opened a new tab and searched New Tokyo Tower location. For the next three days, before the Narakimi event, my plan was clear.