The Hunter Rankings, which lined Hunters up from top to bottom across the entire world. There had always been a steady stream of criticism over why people felt the need to rank Hunters in the first place when this wasn’t the BillXrd charts or the Olympics. Even so, there was a reason the Hunter Rankings were still going strong.

Because they were fun.

Of course, they couldn’t put that reason right out front, so there were all kinds of excuses instead. Things like needing to know Hunters’ rankings so priority assignments could be made when a high-risk Gate erupted somewhere in the world, or needing an intuitive way to indicate mana volume, or even that if people judged celebrities by brand reputation, why shouldn’t Hunters get the same treatment?

At this point, when everyone was already used to it, reconsidering the reason the Hunter Rankings existed didn’t mean much. In the first place, they weren’t divided up in meticulous detail based on mana volume alone. Rankings were assigned with things like the number and Rank of Gates a Hunter had cleared, plus the actual danger level of their Skills, all taken into account.

In other words, once you got past a certain tier of ranker, the Hunter Rankings themselves stopped meaning much. But at the same time, that also meant there was definite significance in separating out those “above a certain tier.”

Chase Holt, who had never once been pushed below third place in the Hunter Rankings and was, by any standard, the strongest fire-type Hunter alive, was—borrowing his father’s words—“a born degenerate.”

From the time he was young, Chase had pursued entertainment to an absurd degree, and if something seemed fun, he never hesitated to hurt other people for it. His family had some money, so paying settlements and bail and going in and out of holding cells had been an ordinary part of life.