Heroine-Saving System: Reborn In A Third-Rate Manga As The Protagonist

Chapter 193: Wives Being Wives [I]

Hakai came to a halt looking down at the smoking trenches she had just carved into her own floor with a look of mild annoyance.

“That was quite impressive,” Hakai said.

Her voice was perfectly calm, without even a hint of breathlessness in her tone.

She didn’t sound like a combatant who had just weathered a relentless flurry of strikes from a millennium-old Vampire Queen.

She sounded like an executive evaluating a slightly flawed spreadsheet, well probably because that was what Hakai was…

She slowly raised her head.

Her brilliant purple eyes locked onto Tej, but the warmth and light that usually resided in them when she looked at Koya were completely gone.

They were flat and devoid of all light.

“My turn,” Hakai said quietly.

She reached up with her left hand and took hold of the loosened black tie hanging around her neck.

With a casual effortless tug, she pulled it completely off her collar. She didn’t throw it aside… she simply let it drop.

But the silken fabric never touched the runic floor of the arena.

The moment the tie descended past her knees, the perfectly cast shadow beneath Hakai’s feet rippled violently like boiling pitch.

The darkness rose up, opening like a jagged soundless maw, and swallowed the fabric whole.

Tej’s crimson eyes narrowed.

Her grip on her crystallized Blood Blade tightened until her knuckles turned white with her nails biting so hard into her palms that fresh, immortal blood began to bead along the hilt.

The air in the underground training facility of Star Mansion had suddenly turned frigid, stripping away the lingering heat of their initial clash and replacing it with a suffocating graveyard chill.

‘What is this…’

‘Master, brace yourself!’ Bloom’s ancient, urgent voice echoed inside Tej’s mind, the Blood Generator familiar practically vibrating with anxiety against her spine. ‘The ambient mana density is spiking… It’s mutating too. That isn’t standard elemental magic! The wave signatures are completely inverted… it’s actively eating the energy in the room!’

‘I can see that, Bloom. Shut up and keep my circulatory output at maximum,’ Tej thought back, gritting her teeth so hard her elongated fangs scraped against her lower lip. ‘Why are you even overreacting? It’s just a human woman…’

She had fought demigods, ancient dragons, and high-tier domain masters across her thousand-year lifespan.

Tej knew what raw power looked like but the phenomenon occurring beneath Hakai’s polished leather shoes didn’t register as magic to her seasoned senses.

It registered as an error in reality.

The shadow beneath Hakai didn’t stop expanding. It poured outward, bleeding across the pristine magically reinforced floor of the arena like an overturned inkwell.

The darkness spread for ten, twenty, thirty feet, completely ignoring the harsh artificial lighting of the underground facility.

The high-lumen tactical lamps overhead seemed to dim with their photons literally being devoured the moment they touched the perimeter of that expanding black pool.

Then, the ink-black pool began to bubble upward.

SQUELCH! SQUELCH! SQUELCH!

The sound was nauseatingly wet like heavy boots pulling out of deep coagulated mud.

Three distinct pillars of pure, hyper-condensed darkness extruded themselves from the floor.

They rapidly took shape, hardening and texturizing until three towering, fully armored Shadow Soldiers stood before Hakai.

They were easily seven feet tall, clad in jagged, perfectly forged plate mail made of solidified abyss.

The edges of their armor actively bled black mist into the air.

Ethereal purple flames burned fiercely inside the empty visors of their helms… flames that gave off no heat, only a freezing soul-withering dread that made the hairs on the back of Tej’s neck stand at attention.

Each soldier wielded a different weapon of execution, forged from the same light-devouring substance as their armor.

The vanguard on the left held a massive, double-edged greatsword with a blade wider than a man’s torso.

The scout on the right held twin, curved daggers dripping with shadowy miasma that hissed as it dripped onto the floor.

The executioner in the center brandished a brutal wicked halberd with a hook designed to rip through heavy cavalry shields.

Hakai didn’t issue a verbal command, she didn’t raise her hand nor did she even point a finger.

She merely looked at Tej with those dead, depthless purple eyes and the Shadow Soldiers moved.

BOOM!

The sound barrier shattered instantly as all three soldiers launched themselves forward simultaneously.

The force of their acceleration cracked the underlying bedrock through the multi-layered runic reinforcements of the floor, sending jagged fissures spider-webbing across the concrete.

They moved with a terrifying synchronization… there was no wasted motion and no preparatory wind-up.

It went just zero to max in a microsecond.

They closed the thirty-foot gap in the blink of an eye.

Tej barely had time to raise her blade.

Her ancient combat instincts, honed through centuries of slaughter, were the only things that kept her head attached to her shoulders.

CLANG!

The central soldier thrust its halberd forward, aiming directly for the dead center of Tej’s chest.

Tej deflected the massive polearm with the flat of her Blood Blade, angling her wrist to let the strike slide harmlessly past her ribcage but the physical force behind the blow was monstrous.

‘How the hell is it physically stronger than Apophis…?’

A jarring bone-rattling vibration shot entirely up her right arm, instantly micro-fracturing the radius and ulna beneath her flesh before her vampire regeneration could snap them back together.

‘What kind of ridiculous physical output is this?!’ Tej screamed internally, her boots skidding backward across the runic floor, leaving two burning trails of melted rubber in her wake. ‘They’re constructs! They shouldn’t have the density of a collapsed star!’

Before she could even stabilize her footing, the vanguard on the left was already airborne, bringing its massive greatsword crashing down in a devastating overhead cleave meant to split her from crown to groin.

The air split with a deafening screech as the weapon displaced the atmosphere around it.

Tej’s eyes flashed crimson.

She didn’t try to block… Blocking a strike with that much downward momentum would only shatter her guard and drive her to her knees. Instead, she tapped into her ancient spatial manipulation.

ZRRRIP!

The fabric of space above Tej’s head visibly distorted, bending and folding like a warped funhouse mirror.

The greatsword slashed downward with the force of a falling meteor, but the spatial warp violently redirected the weapon’s trajectory by three degrees to the right.

The massive blade missed her shoulder by a fraction of a millimeter, the wind shear slicing a clean line through the fabric of her sleeve, and smashed directly into the arena floor instead.

KRA-KOOM!

A blinding web of glowing blue runes flared desperately to life beneath the floorboards, whining at a high pitch as the facility’s defense systems tried to absorb the impact.

But the yield was too high.

The magical shielding shattered like cheap glass, and massive chunks of concrete, rebar, and runic plating were ripped upward into the air in a explosion of debris.

Tej didn’t waste the opening.

Using the momentary grounding of the greatsword wielder, she pirouetted elegantly around the lodged blade with her movements fluid and hypnotic.

She swung her right hand in a vicious horizontal arc as a crescent-shaped blade of hyper-pressurized blood shot from her fingertips, compressed to such an extreme degree that it glowed with a blinding, laser-like luminescence.

SHING!

The blood-slash caught the greatsword-wielding Shadow Soldier squarely in the waist.

The dark abyssal armor offered absolutely zero resistance against her apocalyptic magic.

The soldier was instantly bisected, its upper torso sliding cleanly off its lower half with a sickening hiss of dissolving shadows, tumbling into the rubble.

‘Fools,’ Tej thought with a cold smirk touching her lips as she spun on her heel to face the twin-dagger wielder flanking her from the blind spot on her right. ‘Constructs without a physical core are nothing more than glass cannons. One hit and they’re—’

Her smirk vanished in an instant.

The bisected Shadow Soldier didn’t dissipate into ambient mana.

The purple flames burning inside its hollow visor didn’t even flicker.

As the upper torso hit the floor, the inky darkness connecting its severed halves simply reached out like thick grasping tendrils of liquid pitch.

They lashed onto the fallen ribcage, yanking it violently back onto its legs with a wet sucking snap.

SQUELCH!

The soldier reformed completely in less than a tenth of a second.

There wasn’t a scratch on its armor… There wasn’t a single drop in its terrifying aura. It simply hoisted its massive greatsword from the ruined concrete and swung again with renewed ferocity, totally ignoring the physics of momentum.

‘They regenerate?!’ Tej realized with her pupils shrinking to pinpricks as she threw herself backward. ‘No, that’s not standard regeneration! There was no mana expenditure for the repair! It’s like the concept of damage simply doesn’t apply to their integrity!’

Even Bloom was trembling… they weren’t going their full power obviously since they didn’t want to destroy the mansion but Tej had a feeling that if this was the same place where she had fought Apophis.

It would be a whole different story entirely…

Tej didn’t have time to process the horror of it.

The twin-dagger wielder was already upon her, becoming a blur of black steel and violet trails. It attacked from impossible angles… slashing at her throat, her kidneys, the tendons in her knees, and the femoral arteries in her thighs in a chaotic unending flurry of strikes that pushed her defensive speed to its limit.

CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-SHING!

Sparks of crimson and black rained across the arena as Tej’s Blood Blade danced in a desperate high-speed parry.

She was being forced entirely on the defensive, her boots continuously giving ground as the three immortal constructs synchronized their assaults, creating a relentless, grinding meat-grinder of steel and shadow.

“Don’t get distracted, Tej,” Hakai’s voice echoed across the arena.

The voice wasn’t loud, but it cut through the deafening roar of shattering concrete and clashing metal like a scalpel through skin.

Tej risked a split-second glance past the overwhelming onslaught of the three regenerating soldiers.

Hakai was still standing exactly where she had been at the start of the match.

She hadn’t taken a single step forward or backward.

She had her left hand casually tucked into the pocket of her tailored dark skirt, looking like she was waiting for a bus rather than fighting for dominance against an immortal vampire.

Her right hand was raised at shoulder level, her index and middle fingers extended and pointed directly at Tej like the barrel of a handgun.

At the very tip of Hakai’s extended fingers, a sphere of absolute, light-devouring darkness was condensing.

It was tiny… no larger than a simple glass marble but the gravitational pressure radiating from that tiny sphere was astronomical.

The air around Hakai’s hand was visibly warping, twisting into a violent spiraling vortex as light, ambient mana, and physical matter were forcibly dragged toward the event horizon of that black marble.

The density of the attack made the fillings in Tej’s teeth ache and her eardrums pop from the localized drop in atmospheric pressure.

‘Master! MOVE!’ Bloom shrieked as the familiar’s voice cracked with terror. ‘That isn’t a projectile! That is a spatial collapse! If that hits your core, your immortal regeneration will not trigger! You will cease to exist!

FWOOSH!

‘The hell? Why can she use spac—’

Hakai fired.

There was no sound of an explosion and there was no thunderous crack of displaced air.

The hyper-condensed beam of pure darkness simply shot across the arena in terrifying silence. It erased the air it traveled through, leaving behind a perfectly straight vacuum-sealed tunnel of nothingness in its wake.

‘Hehe~ So I can use Void too?’ Hakai thought, Void and Darkness were not far apart… they were sisters in a way and since she had been studying Riffi, Hakai was confident that she could easily do even more with it.

Tej’s survival instincts honed over a thousand years of surviving wars against apex predators screamed at a frequency that felt like physical agony.

She didn’t try to parry as she knew, with certainty, that touching that beam meant permanent, irreversible death.

She abandoned her defensive stance against the three Shadow Soldiers entirely, throwing herself into a desperate backward roll across the shattered concrete, completely ignoring the twin daggers that sliced deep into her left shoulder and flank as she retreated.

The darkness beam clipped the outermost edge of her spatial shield.

The defensive barrier, an ancient vampire technique layered with spatial folding that could normally withstand a direct point-blank hit from a meteor without buckling didn’t shatter…

It was simply deleted.

The section of the spatial shield touched by the beam vanished instantly, leaving a perfectly smooth circular gap in the energy matrix.

The beam continued onward without losing a single fraction of its velocity, bypassing Tej by inches and striking the massively reinforced, mana-plated wall of the underground arena behind her.

VWOOM!

Again, there was no explosion.

A perfectly circular hole, exactly ten feet in diameter and White King-knew how deep, was instantly bored into the solid magical bedrock of Star Mansion’s deepest vault.

The edges of the hole weren’t melted by heat, nor were they fractured by blunt force.

They were perfectly smooth atomic-level clean, as if the ten-foot cylinder of solid rock, reinforced steel, and high-density runic plating had simply never existed in the universe at all.

Up in the observation deck overlooking the arena, Victoria pressed her hands flat against the high-stress bulletproof glass as her crimson eyes went wide with shock.

Her breathing was shallow, leaving patches of fog against the cool surface of the pane.

‘She’s not using regular magic,’ Victoria realized, a cold shiver running down her spine as she stared at the bottomless silent hole carved into the facility’s indestructible foundation. ‘Destruction leaves energy behind… It leaves heat at the very least. That is… that is erasure. Complete, absolute deletion of matter and mana. By the ancestors… what kind of entity did Koya marry? She’s not human… She can’t be human…’

Down in the arena, Tej flipped back to her feet with her chest heaving violently as she sucked in desperate breaths of air.

Heavy beads of cold sweat rolled down her pale forehead, stinging her eyes.

Her left shoulder and side were bleeding profusely from the twin-dagger wielder’s parting blows, the dark miasma left in the wounds actively fighting against her vampire blood, slowing her instant regeneration to a agonizing crawl.

Before she could even catch her breath, the floor shook again.

The three Shadow Soldiers were already rushing her from three different vectors, their weapons raised for a synchronized execution as they were completely unfazed by the destruction around them.

And across the room, through the settling dust, Tej could see Hakai casually shifting her stance, her right arm tracking Tej’s new position as a second marble of absolute darkness began to condense at the tip of her fingers…

‘Master! We cannot win a war of attrition against this devil!’ Bloom’s voice was a chant in Tej’s mind, pumping massive amounts of raw blood mana from her internal reserves just to keep Tej’s muscles from locking up under the sheer gravitational oppression of Hakai’s aura. ‘I am analyzing her energy output! Her mana reserves aren’t dropping! They aren’t even fluctuating by a fraction of a decimal! She is drawing power directly from an infinite source! Every second this drags on, our reserves deplete while she remains at one hundred percent capacity!’

‘I know! I fucking know!’ Tej snarled mentally, her eyes glowing like burning coals.

She was being dismantled.

Hakai wasn’t fighting her with passion or pride… She was teasing her.

Hakai was using the immortal regenerating melee constructs to restrict Tej’s spatial mobility and force her into predictable defensive patterns, all while lining up a guaranteed un-dodgeable one-hit kill from distance.

If she stayed in this mid-range tactical dance, she was going to die here.

She would be deleted from reality, reduced to nothingness in a basement training room.

Tej had to break the equation… She had to completely overwhelm Hakai’s precise pinpoint control with omnidirectional devastation.

‘I fucking hate it here…’

Tej brought her left thumb to her mouth and bit down hard with her elongated fangs, cleanly severing the tip of her digit.

A single heavy drop of brilliant gold-flecked crimson blood welled up from the wound.

She slammed the bleeding digit across the flat of her crystallized Blood Blade, smearing the royal blood from hilt to tip.

The reaction was instantaneous.

The blade ignited with a blinding terrifying crimson luminescence that cast the entire room in the color of fresh slaughter.

“Multi-Directional Blood Barrage!” Tej screamed, her voice dropping all pretense of nobility.

She swung her blade in a massive, sweeping 360-degree circle.

As the blade cut through the air, the smeared royal blood multiplied exponentially, completely defying the fundamental laws of the conservation of mass and energy.

Millions of gallons of crimson liquid erupted from the trajectory of the swing, instantly flooding the airspace of the arena like a bursting dam.

The moment the blood hit the open air, it crystallized.

CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!

The sound was like a glacier shattering into a billion pieces.

Tens of thousands of razor-sharp, jagged blood-spears… each one as long as a javelin and dense enough to pierce main-battle tank armor filled every single cubic inch of the arena’s atmosphere.

They hung suspended in mid-air for a fraction of a second, vibrating with such violent energy that the air itself began to hum with their needle-sharp tips pointed directly at Hakai from every conceivable angle.

There were no blind spots.

There was no dead zone.

There was no room to step left, step right, jump, or duck. It was a complete, saturated dome of destruction designed to shred anything caught within its radius into atomic paste.

‘Let’s see you dodge this, you arrogant monster!’ Tej roared internally.

With a downward thrust of her blade, the barrage fired.

SHING-SHING-SHING-SHING-SHING!

Tens of thousands of crystallized blood-spears shot forward simultaneously, breaking the sound barrier in a meteor shower of scarlet death.

The air displacement generated by the launch ripped the remaining floorboards from the concrete foundation and stripped the paint from the walls.

Hakai didn’t step back.

“How cute… Is this how Koya-kun felt when he backed you into a corner yesterday and fucked you silly…?” Hakai said. “Breaking your resolve is such a sweet feeling.”

She simply lowered her pointed fingers, opening both of her hands wide with her palms facing outward toward the oncoming storm of blood.

A tidal wave of pure darkness erupted from her silhouette.

It didn’t manifest as a solid shield; it rose up like a towering churning tsunami of black water… a massive wall of abyssal pitch that surged forward to meet the crimson barrage head-on.

BOOM! BOOM! KRA-KOOM!

‘How does she know that?!’ Tej thought.