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

Chapter 194: Wives Being Wives [II]

The collision between the tens of thousands of dense blood spears and the wall of darkness was apocalyptic.

The sound was deafening… a continuous thundering roar that shook the very foundations of Star Mansion above them, sending vibrations through the structural pillars all the way up to the residential floors.

The red crystals shattered against the darkness in trillions of blinding sparks, exploding into high-velocity crimson shrapnel that tore through the surrounding environment.

But the darkness didn’t break.

The wave aggressively devoured the momentum of the spears, swallowing the blood, neutralizing the magical energy binding the crystals, and dissolving the ancient matter into harmless inert mist.

The shockwaves battered the arena walls like a hurricane.

The glowing blue runic protections on the walls and ceiling flared to their maximum capacity, whining at a terrifying pitch as they desperately tried to contain the expanding dome of raw destruction from breaching the upper levels.

Tej stood behind the apex of her barrage with both hands gripping the hilt of her blade.

Her entire body trembled violently as she continuously pumped massive, soul-draining amounts of mana from Bloom directly into the assault.

She was burning her own lifespan, forcing the barrage to sustain its output with both her and Bloom’s power, determined to grind Hakai into dust by sheer volume of fire.

But through the blinding flashes of shattering red crystals and churning black mist, Tej’s enhanced eyes caught movement.

Her breath hitched in her throat.

Hakai was slowly walking forward through the storm.

The First Wife of Star Mansion wasn’t behind a shield anymore.

The wall of darkness had dispersed into an atmospheric field around her body and within that field, Hakai was simply weaving through the absolute densest pockets of the incoming barrage.

Her movements were minimalistic and utterly inhuman.

She tilted her head a fraction of an inch to the left, allowing a high-velocity blood spear to slice cleanly past her ear without disturbing a single strand of her dark hair.

She sidestepped smoothly by three inches, letting a tight cluster of five converging javelins plunge harmlessly into the floor where her boots had been a microsecond prior.

She shifted her shoulder back, letting a spinning blood-saw buzz past her chest by a millimeter.

She wasn’t blocking, she wasn’t parrying. Hakai wasn’t even running.

She was simply strolling through the apocalypse with her hands at her sides with her face completely expressionless, reading the complex randomized trajectories of tens of thousands of high-speed projectiles simultaneously and inserting herself into the microscopic pockets of empty space between them.

It looked like a leisurely walk through a mild summer rainstorm.

‘This is impossible…’ Tej thought with a cold icy knot of panic finally taking root in the bottom of her ancient heart.

Her hands began to shake on the hilt of her blade. ‘She’s not just simply reacting… What the hell… she’s calculating the drag, the velocity, and the spatial vectors of every single construct in real-time! Her processing speed… her brain shouldn’t be able to handle this level of data without hemorrhaging!’

Tej realized, with a sickening hollow feeling in her stomach, that she wasn’t just losing a fight.

She was being fundamentally outclassed.

She was being out-maneuvered, out-endured, and out-calculated by a human who hadn’t even broken a sweat, whose breathing was still as even and measured as if she were reading a book by the fireplace.

The gap between them wasn’t just wide.

It was an abyss.

Her pride as a Queen… the ancient stubborn arrogance of a ruling bloodline that had bowed to no one for a thousand years snapped like a dry twig.

“Fine!” Tej roared, her fangs fully extending as her eyes bled a blinding terrifying crimson light that illuminated the room.

Her aura exploded outward in a violent, shockwave-inducing displacement of raw mana that shattered the surrounding blood crystals into dust.

“You want to see my true power?! You want to treat me like a stepping stone?! Let me show you the undeniable weight of the Vampire God Clan!”

She abandoned her sword entirely, letting the blade dissolve into mist as she slammed both of her bare hands flat against the shattered, vibrating concrete floor of the arena.

“Domain Manifest,” Tej intoned with her voice suddenly dropping into a deep sound that resonated with the authority of the Queen Of Vampires. “Infinite Blood Palace!”

The reality of the training arena shattered.

The pristine white walls, the high-lumen lighting, the whining blue defensive runes, the reinforced observation deck where Victoria stood… everything was instantly overwritten and erased from immediate reality.

The world was swallowed whole by an infinite ocean of dark boiling blood that stretched out endlessly toward a dark stormy horizon.

From the depths of that churning scarlet sea, massive, towering architecture made entirely of crystallized bone, hardened marrow, and solidified blood tore upward into the sky with deafening world-shumping rumbles.

Massive gothic spires, flying buttresses forged from human ribs, and terrifying gargantuan statues of winged vampire deities blotted out the crimson clouds overhead.

Tej stood atop the highest, central spire of her newly manifested Domain with her black suit billowing around her as she looked down from her throne of bone.

Below her, standing on a small, floating platform of crystallized blood in the dead center of the endless scarlet ocean, stood Hakai.

Within this space, Tej was no longer just a combatant.

She was a god…

This was the apex of her power multiplied thousands of times over with her new awakening… a pocket dimension where the concepts of distance, mass, and energy were dictated entirely by her will.

Within the Infinite Blood Palace, her mana reserves were truly infinite.

Her physical speed was multiplied a hundredfold.

Every drop of blood in this endless ocean was an extension of her own nervous system, ready to crush, slice, or drown her enemies at the speed of thought.

“Drown in the weight of a millennium!” Tej commanded, pointing a single, trembling blood-soaked finger downward from her high spire.

The entire Domain answered her wrathful call.

The endless ocean of viscous blood beneath Hakai violently erupted, surging upward in massive, churning vortexes miles wide, designed to drag the human down to the crushing depths of the abyss.

From the towering gothic spires above, thousands of massive, guillotine-like executioner axes forged from black bone rained down from the sky, accelerating to hyper-sonic speeds.

From the surrounding architecture, thick heavy chains of solidified crimson energy erupted like striking vipers, crisscrossing through the space to securely bind Hakai’s limbs, neck, and torso.

Simultaneously, Tej manipulated the thermodynamic properties of the fluid.

The blood spraying toward Hakai’s left side dropped to absolute zero, meant to flash-freeze her cells and shatter her physical structure, while the blood surging toward her right side superheated to boiling temperatures meant to vaporize her skin and lungs instantly.

It was a flawless and inescapable multi-layered execution. An omnidirectional nightmare designed to kill an immortal ten times over in a single second.

Hakai stood alone in the center of the collapsing apocalyptic world.

She looked up at the towering bone spires, watching the literal ocean of death freezing ice, boiling plasma, and falling iron crashing down upon her from every direction.

She didn’t summon her shadow soldiers to shield her and she didn’t raise her hands to fire an erasure beam.

She simply let out a soft disappointed sigh that was somehow audible over the world-ending roar of the collapsing Domain.

Hakai stopped moving entirely.

She stood perfectly straight, her posture relaxed, and raised her right hand toward her face as she extended her index finger and gently, deliberately pressed it vertically against her lips.

“Shh,” Hakai whispered.

The word wasn’t spoken with force.

It wasn’t shouted but the vibrational frequency of that single quiet syllable carried across the entire infinite expanse of the Blood Palace.

It sliced cleanly through the deafening thundering roar of the blood ocean, cutting through the screech of falling bone axes and the rattling of crimson chains like a razor blade slicing through fine silk.

“Domain Manifest,” Hakai said. Her voice sounded like the cold inevitable end of the world itself. “Phase One.”

SNAP!

There was no grand explosion of clashing energies.

There was no blinding flash of light, nor was there a violent shockwave to signal the struggle between two competing Domain fields.

The transition was instantaneous and silent.

The towering gothic spires of crystallized bone and ancient marrow? They turned pitch black from the base upward, instantly decaying into fine, weightless ash that dissolved into nothingness.

The churning, infinite ocean of boiling crimson liquid beneath them?

It was overwritten in a microsecond, instantly transforming into a perfectly still, boundless sea of suffocating viscous black ink.

The stormy, blood-red sky above shattered like a fragile glass dome hit by a hammer, stripping away the clouds and revealing an endless, oppressive, completely starless void.

Hakai’s Domain didn’t clash with Tej’s Domain.

It simply opened its jaws and effortlessly swallowed the Infinite Blood Palace whole, deleting its parameters from existence.

Tej gasped with her lungs seizing as she stumbled backward atop her high spire… only to find that the spire was no longer there.

Her footing vanished entirely. She was floating, utterly suspended in the center of the boundless pitch-black void.

And then, the feeling hit her.

The light wasn’t just dimmed… the very concept of photons was deleted from the space.

Tej couldn’t see her own hands held an inch from her face.

The sound of her own terrified breathing was completely erased, swallowed by an acoustic vacuum so profound it made her inner ears ache.

The reassuring scent of her ancient blood vanished, replaced by an empty nothingness.

She couldn’t feel the air entering her lungs.

She couldn’t feel the beating of her own heart in her chest.

She couldn’t even feel the weight of her own limbs as she had been plunged into a perfect infinite vacuum of sensory-deadening nothingness.

Panic that she hadn’t experienced since she was a child a thousand years ago seized her mind in a crushing vice.

She tried to scream, opening her jaw wide, but absolutely no sound escaped her throat.

She tried to manifest her crystallized Blood Blade, frantically calling upon Bloom, but the ambient mana in the environment had been completely neutralized, reduced to an absolute zero state where magic could not ignite.

She tried to activate her spatial folding to blindly teleport away from the coordinates, but the spatial fabric of the Starless Abyss was locked, scrambled into an indecipherable knot of gravity.

She was completely paralyzed.

The unique dense nature of Hakai’s shadow mana wasn’t just obscuring her senses… it was actively binding her physical and spiritual form.

It pressed down on her from all directions with an atmospheric gravity so immense that Tej couldn’t even twitch her little finger or blink her eyes.

She was an immortal Queen reduced to a helpless, frozen statue floating blindly in the dark.

And then, the silence of the void was broken.

Tej felt a terrifyingly soft, chilling sensation ghosting against the shell of her right ear… the distinct feeling of warm human breath.

Someone was standing directly behind her in the void.

“You did really well, Tej,” Hakai’s voice whispered softly into her ear.

Her voice was gentle and almost comforting, like a mother praising a child for completing a difficult puzzle.

And that gentle warmth made it infinitely more horrifying than any threat or snarl could have ever been. “For a relic.”

Tej’s eyes widened to their limits in the darkness.

Her pupils dilated until her eyes were entirely black, trapped in her own frozen body, unable to turn her head, unable to see her executioner and unable to offer even the slightest resistance.

She felt a pair of cold manicured hands reach out from the darkness. They gently grasped the sides of her face with one hand pressing smoothly against her left cheekbone and the other cradling the base of her jaw and chin.

The grip was soft at first… like a lover’s caress in the dark and then, without a shred of hesitation, the hands twisted violently to the right.

SQUELCH! SNAP!

The sound of her own vertebrae shattering was the loudest, most agonizing thing Tej had ever experienced in all of her years of existence.

Thick neck muscles tore like wet paper.

Tough Vampire tendons snapped like over-tightened violin strings.

The blinding white-hot explosion of agony was absolute, shooting down her spinal cord and overloading her nervous system in a fraction of a second.

Tej felt her physical perspective violently shift.

The starless void spun wildly around her as her perspective tumbled end over end through the empty darkness.

As she spun, she realized that she was looking directly at her own headless, paralyzed body floating in the ink-black sea.

Blood fountained from the ragged stump of her severed neck, tumbling away into the infinite abyss as her severed head drifted further and further away from her torso.

‘I’m dying,’ the thought echoed weakly in her fading consciousness, stripped of all pride, all anger, and all royalty. ‘The regeneration isn’t working… the link is severed… I’m actually, truly dying.’

The cold embrace of the abyss washed over her brain. Her vision rapidly narrowed into a tiny pinprick of fading light, and then… completely blacked out.

GASP!

Tej’s eyes snapped wide open.

Her lungs violently expanded, sucking in a massive gulp of air.

“Haaah!”

She fell forward heavily with her hands slamming palms-down onto hard runic-inscribed concrete.

Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump!

She could feel her heart hammering furiously against her ribcage like a trapped bird trying to break out of a cage.

She could feel the cold sweat completely drenching her black tactical combat suit, pasting her silver hair to her face, her neck, and her shoulders in damp freezing strands.

Tej scrambled backward across the floor like a terrified animal with her boots scraping frantically against the concrete as her shaking hands flew upward, gripping desperately at her own throat.

She dug her fingers into her flesh, feeling for the torn stump.

‘Wh-where?’

She felt for the fountaining arterial blood and the exposed shattered spinal column but it was smooth.

It was entirely intact.

Her skin was unbroken and her head was still firmly attached to her shoulders.

She blinked rapidly, her chest heaving as her blurry, tear-stained vision slowly cleared with her brain desperately trying to reconcile the phantom agony of her severed neck with the reality of her physical body.

There was no infinite ocean of boiling blood… There were no towering gothic spires of bone… There was no starless abyss of darkness…

She was right back in the training arena of Star Mansion.

The glowing blue runic lights along the reinforced walls were humming peacefully, casting a calm glow across the room.

The massive, ten-foot vacuum trench from Hakai’s earlier erasure beam attack was still etched silently into the far wall, smoking slightly in the cool air.

The broken rebar and shattered concrete from the initial greatsword clash still littered the floor around her knees.

Up in the observation deck above, Victoria was standing pressed against the glass with her hands clapped tightly over her mouth.

Her eyes went wide as she stared down at her sister in awe.

Tej slowly lowered her shaking, trembling hands from her throat as her fingers were slick with cold sweat.

She looked across the unbroken section of the arena floor directly in front of her.

Hakai was standing exactly where she had been before Tej had triggered her Domain.

The First Wife of Star Mansion had already finished rolling the pristine white sleeves of her blouse back down to her wrists.

She was currently standing with her head slightly bowed, calmly and meticulously adjusting her silver cufflinks, securing the intricate clasps with a soft audible click.

Her breathing was perfectly even, her chest rising and falling in a slow rhythm that showed zero signs of exertion.

There wasn’t a single drop of sweat on her pale brow… There wasn’t a speck of dust, ash, or blood on her immaculate dark skirt or her polished leather shoes…

She looked like she had just stepped out of a high-end corporate boardroom meeting.

She had never moved.

She had never taken a single step.

‘It must be fake… That makes sense.’ Tej thought while trembling.

The entire sequence… the overwhelming clash of their Domains, the instantaneous swallowing of the Infinite Blood Palace, the Starless Abyss, the paralyzing terror, and the brutal soul-shredding decapitation in the dark… it had all been an illusion.

It was an instantaneous realistic mental overwrite forced directly into Tej’s consciousness through Hakai’s mastery of darkness mana.

Hakai had invaded her mind, bypassed her thousand-year-old mental defenses without triggering a single alarm, and simulated her absolute death with such terrifying physical fidelity that Tej’s own immortal body had genuinely believed it was dying.

‘She’s a monster… I know that’s what she did!’

Tej remained on her knees among the shattered concrete with her entire body trembling uncontrollably as the adrenaline crashed out of her system, leaving behind a cold hollow exhaustion.

Her pride, her arrogance and her unshakable belief in the supreme physical and magical superiority of her god-clan bloodline… it was all completely shattered, ground into fine dust beneath the heel of Hakai’s authority.

She had lost.

Hakai finished securing her right cufflink. She smoothed down the cuff of her sleeve and slowly looked down at the kneeling shivering vampire.

The terrifying light-devouring darkness that had completely consumed her purple pupils during the clash slowly began to recede, bleeding away like receding water until the warm remarkably human light returned to her gaze.

“You have excellent combat instincts, Tej,” Hakai said mildly with her voice returning to its normal tone as she turned her body toward the heavy steel exit doors of the arena. “And your raw mana output is highly commendable for your level but your application is far too linear. You rely too heavily on brute-force volume to solve technical problems, and your mental defenses leave massive blind spots when you initiate a Domain.”

She paused for a brief moment, her hand resting on the push-bar of the double doors, casting a calm glance over her shoulder.

“We can work on that next week. Take the rest of the day to let your nervous system recover.”

Hakai didn’t wait for an answer, nor did she offer a hand to help Tej off the floor.

She simply pushed the heavy steel doors open and walked out of the training facility with her polished leather shoes clicking softly against the corridor tiles until the doors swung shut behind her with a heavy, final thud.

Tej knelt alone in the quiet silence of the destroyed arena, drenched in a freezing shivering sweat that refused to stop.

She didn’t try to stand up.

Tej simply tilted her head back and looked up at the runic ceiling with her pupils shrinking to tiny trembling pinpricks as the residual terror of the void continued to echo through her ancient bones.

‘What kind of monster is this…?’