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

Chapter 195: Order No.1

The air in the clearing was amazing carrying the clean scent of crushed pine and blooming wildflowers.

It was a secluded, private expanse of lush grassland completely hidden away from the suffocating industrial sprawl of the supercities.

The sky above was a brilliant uninterrupted canvas of azure, unmarred by smog or floating advertising drones.

It was a fake place after all but still... Mio wished this Apocalyptic world could be like this sometimes.

Mio sat perfectly cross-legged in the center of the emerald sea of grass. Her eyes were closed and looking deep.

With every inhale, the ambient mana in the environment responded.

It was cool and shimmering with a distinct silver hue.

Lunar mana.

It gathered around her frame in a swirling luminescent vortex, illuminating her pale skin and her signature bobbed black hair.

’I haven’t been somewhere so beautiful in a very long time...’ Mio thought, allowing herself a rare moment of genuine peace.

The serene silence, however, was immediately shattered by the voice echoing loudly in her mind.

"I don’t like this. I don’t like this one bit, Mio," Pale complained.

The astral goddess floated lazily in the air just a few feet away, her translucent silver form hovering completely parallel to the ground like she was lying on an invisible bed.

As usual, nobody in the physical world could see or hear her, a fact she normally used to her advantage to mock people right to their faces.

Right now, though, she just sounded anxious and annoyed.

"You came out to the middle of nowhere," Pale continued, crossing her astral arms over her chest. "To an isolated warded private property. With one guy. And that guy is very distinctly not Koya-kun... Do you have any idea how many true-crime documentaries start exactly like this? What if he betrays you? What if he tries something funny? I swear to the ancestors, if he tries to pull anything, I am going to forcibly take over your body and blast a void through his chest."

Mio didn’t open her eyes, but her brow furrowed slightly in concentration.

She kept her breathing steady, regulating the flow of the silver light seeping into her pores.

’He is the Principal of ALI Academy, Pale,’ Mio replied dryly. ’For what reason would he go through all the trouble to bring me here, actively unlock my mana pathways, and personally train me, if he didn’t actually want to teach me?’

"Because people are creepy!" Pale shot back instantly. "And I simply do not like it. Or him. At all. The guy gives me bad vibes, Mio. My divine intuition is tingling, and it’s telling me this bald old man is a massive red flag."

’He isn’t bald,’ Mio corrected. ’And I don’t care about his vibes.’

Mio finally opened her eyes.

The silver light swirling around her slowly dissipated, absorbing completely into her body.

She clenched her right hand into a fist, feeling the raw energy pulsing beneath her skin. It felt entirely different from the usual physical enhancement that came with her natural Red Crest.

This felt potent and overwhelmingly destructive.

’As long as I get stronger...’ Mio thought as her gaze hardened with determination. ’I can match Koya-kun. I have to match him.’

The gap between them had been widening at a terrifying pace.

He was ascending to a realm of power that regular humans couldn’t even dream of reaching... She could feel it...

Mio refused to be left behind. She refused to be someone who just stood on the sidelines while he fought the real battles...

’And beyond that,’ Mio continued her internal monologue, ’I need to become strong enough to actually rise in the Order Rankings myself.’

Currently, Pale held the rank of Top 3 within the Order’s elite hierarchy.

But the only reason Pale was stuck at rank 3 instead of climbing higher was because of the physical limitations of Mio’s own human body.

When Pale took over and forcefully converted Mio’s crest to Blue, the output of elemental mana severely taxed Mio’s physical vessels.

She was a bottleneck holding the goddess back.

And Top 1 and 2? Those individuals were simply too monstrous to even comprehend.

If Mio wanted to push herself to their level, she couldn’t just rely on Pale bailing her out of every life-or-death situation.

She needed to forge her own strength. And in turn, if Mio’s body grew stronger, Pale’s upper limits would rise alongside her.

They were a team.

"Excellent focus."

The voice came from behind her.

Mio stood up quickly, turning to face the newcomer.

The Principal of ALI Academy stood at the edge of the clearing, his hands resting casually behind his back.

He wore a simple unadorned traditional martial arts gi instead of his usual expensive suits.

He didn’t look like one of the most powerful and influential men on the continent; he just looked like an attentive teacher.

"How was the Mana Breathing technique that I taught you?" the Principal asked, his pale gold eyes studying her closely.

Mio gave him a deep, respectful bow. "It was incredible, sir. I thank you."

She stood back up, looking down at her hands. "I can actually feel the mana rushing in without resistance. It feels... lighter and easier to control."

"That is because you possess a very unique and contradictory physiology, Kamemori," the Principal explained, taking slow deliberate steps toward the center of the clearing. "The reason I selected you as my personal disciple is because you have the raw enhanced physical durability and potential that being a Red Crest user provides, but you simultaneously harbor the capacity to wield pure Lunar mana."

He stopped a few feet away from her.

"Normally, a Red Crest body explicitly rejects elemental mana. The channels simply burn out," he continued. "But your body has adapted. However, the reason you have been completely unable to access your Lunar mana without taking drastic, self-mutilating measures... is because of an invisible seal."

Mio blinked, genuinely taken aback. "A seal?"

The Principal nodded slowly. "I am an expert in sealing techniques. It is one of my original specialties and even with a passing glance, I could see the dense restrictive magical weave placed over your core."

Mio frowned deeply.

She turned her head slightly to the left, glaring at the empty air where she knew Pale was floating.

’You never told me about a seal,’ Mio accused mentally.

Pale threw her hands up in exasperation. "Hey, don’t look at me! I didn’t see any seal either! Do I look like an inspection scanner to you? I’m a goddess of combat, not a magical locksmith!"

The Principal watched Mio’s slight head movement, though his expression didn’t change.

"The seal is an incredibly complex kind," the Principal continued, drawing Mio’s attention back. "Given its specific lunar signature and the sheer density of the mana used to create it, it could only have been cast by the Head of the Tsukuyomi clan for some specific reason. Or, perhaps, by someone ranked even higher than them."

Mio’s jaw tightened.

Kaguya’s father.

The Head of the Tsukuyomi Clan.

The man who had treated her like garbage, who had allowed her to be humiliated and discarded simply because she couldn’t master the full Beautiful Moon Dance...

For some reason, Kaguya’s father had placed a limiter on her core to ensure she could never access her true potential.

The realization made Mio’s blood boil with a sudden intense surge of hatred.

"Is there a way to solve it?" Mio asked.

The Principal rubbed his chin thoughtfully, looking at her torso.

"The nexus of the seal exists directly over your stomach area, right above your solar plexus," the man replied smoothly. "In order to break it, I will have to cast a high-level reverse-sealing matrix to forcefully unravel the magical threads. However, to do so, I will have to physically touch your stomac—"

SWISH!

Mio didn’t even let him finish the sentence.

She leaped backward with explosive speed, the sudden burst of force tearing up the grass where she had just been standing.

She landed in a low defensive crouch a dozen meters away, her hand instantly dropping to the hilt of the katana strapped to her hip.

"Absolutely not," Mio said flatly. Her eyes were sharp, evaluating him for any sudden movements.

Pale cheered in her mind.

"Yes! Good girl! Stranger danger! See? I told you this old creep had bad vibes! Nobody touches the stomach!"

The Principal didn’t look offended. Instead, he simply chuckled. It was a low genuinely amused sound that sent a strange chill down Mio’s spine.

"Very well," the Principal said, lowering his hand. "If you will not allow me to do it, then you will have to tell the fragment that’s floating around you to do it instead."

Mio froze.

The wind blowing through the clearing suddenly felt ice cold.

"What?" Mio breathed out with her eyes widening.

"HOW THE FUCK DID HE KNOW THAT?!" Pale screamed, her astral form dropping out of the air and landing on the grass. "Mio, let me take over! Let me take over right now! This guy can see me! He can actually see me!"

Mio’s heart hammered violently against her ribs.

She drew her blade an inch from its scabbard with the metal gleaming in the sunlight. "How... how do you know about her?"

The Principal didn’t lose his calm demeanor. He simply smiled.

"How did I know?" he asked rhetorically. "Well, it isn’t actually classified information for the Top members of the Order."

Mio’s breath hitched. Her grip on her scabbard tightened until her leather gloves groaned.

’Top members of the Order?’ Mio thought frantically. ’Hakai is the Boss. Pale is Number Three. Could he be...?’

"List your Order ID," Mio demanded through clenched teeth.

Her voice was steady, but adrenaline was flooding her system, screaming at her to fight or run. "List it right now."

The Principal looked at her, his pale gold eyes completely unbothered by her hostility.

"Zero-Alpha-Omega-One," the Principal recited clearly.

He didn’t just give a random string of numbers.

He gave the exact perfectly formatted cryptographic identification sequence belonging to the highest-ranking operative in their entire underground syndicate.

Order No. 1...

Mio blinked and Pale blinked.

The apex predator of their organization.

The person who stood above even Pale’s divine power.

The person second only to Boss Hakai herself... It was the Principal of the Academy?

But in that single fraction of a second where Mio’s focus wavered from shock... in the microsecond it took her brain to process the enormity of that revelation, the Principal moved.

He didn’t use an explosive burst of mana and he didn’t break the sound barrier.

He simply stepped forward, and the distance between them vanished as if space itself had folded to accommodate his stride.

Mio’s combat instincts honed through endless life-or-death struggles, screamed at her.

’FRAME SKIP!’

The world plunged into the darkness of the Frame World. Translucent animation panels materialized all around her.

Mio moved with blinding speed, stepping through a frame to instantly reposition herself behind the Principal’s back.

SHING!

Her katana cleared its scabbard in a flawless arc.

"Beautiful Moon Dance... Step 1!" Mio roared.

The massive crescent moon formation illuminated beneath her feet, instantly charging her blade with devastating concentrated lunar energy.

She unleashed the invisible spatial slash directly at his neck... an attack that had effortlessly carved through the reinforced stone of the ALI stadium.

The Principal didn’t even turn around.

He casually raised his right hand backward, extending a single, bare index finger.

CLANG!

The invisible stadium-destroying slash collided with the tip of his finger. A shockwave exploded outward, flattening the grass for fifty yards in every direction, throwing dirt and debris into the air.

The slash didn’t cut him... It shattered into a million harmless sparkles of silver light...

"Excellent reaction time," the Principal praised calmly, still facing away from her. "But your footwork is too reliant on the temporal skip. You leave your center of gravity exposed upon exit."

"MIO! SWITCH OUT! LET ME HANDLE THIS!" Pale was screaming at the top of her lungs with her astral form glowing with volatile blue energy as she tried to force a synchronization but she couldn’t...

She had already exhausted her own swap.

"NO!" Mio yelled aloud, rejecting the spiritual link. "I have to do this myself!"

Mio didn’t retreat.

She dropped her stance low, pivoting on her heel, and unleashed a ferocious relentless barrage of close-quarters strikes.

CLASH! BAM! CLANG!

She poured her Red Crest enhancement into her muscles, her blade becoming a silver blur.

Mio struck at his ribs, his throat, his knees, raining down blows with terrifying precision.

Every swing generated shockwaves that tore up the earth beneath them.

The Principal finally turned to face her, moving with a fluid grace that completely defied human logic.

He didn’t draw a weapon... He didn’t even assume a fighting stance. He simply parried her katana with the back of his bare hands.

BAM!

Mio faked a high thrust and spun into a devastating low sweeping kick, aiming to shatter his shin.

The Principal casually lifted his leg an inch off the ground, letting her leg pass harmlessly beneath him.

At the same time, he extended his palm toward her chest.

Mio saw the strike coming as she twisted her torso violently mid-air, bringing the flat of her blade up to block.

KRA-KOOM!

The open-palm strike connected with the side of her sword.

The raw force was unbelievable. Mio felt like she had just been hit by a freight train.

She was launched backward through the air with her boots carving two deep trenches into the soil as she desperately tried to arrest her momentum.

"You’re fighting with desperation, not intent," the Principal analyzed, stepping forward again.

Space seemed to compress around him as he was instantly in front of her again.

Mio gritted her teeth, tasting copper.

She gripped her katana with both hands, funneling every single ounce of her latent Lunar mana into the steel.

"Multi-Strike!" she screamed.

A dozen invisible spatial slashes erupted simultaneously from all directions... above, below, left, right converging on the Principal in an inescapable sphere of death.

The Principal sighed and then he simply flared his aura.

A wave of pure purple mana exploded outward from his body. It didn’t just deflect the slashes; it completely annihilated them, erasing the force from existence.

The backlash of the purple aura hit Mio like a physical wall. Her arms went numb, and her katana was violently ripped from her grasp, spinning away into the tall grass.

She was completely defenseless...

The Principal stepped inside her guard.

His right hand shot forward with fingers extended, moving with a speed that Mio’s eyes couldn’t even register.

WHAM!

His open palm slammed directly into the center of her stomach, right over her solar plexus.

"Ghk—!"

Mio’s eyes bulged.

All the air was violently expelled from her lungs.

A shockwave of pure condensed energy exploded through her body and blasted out of her back, tearing up a massive cone of earth behind her.

She coughed violently, a spray of dark, crimson blood erupting from her lips.

Simultaneously, the force of the sealing-reversal matrix detonated.

The shockwave ripped outward, instantly shredding her shirt and combat jacket to absolute ribbons, reducing the fabric to confetti that scattered in the wind.

CRACK!

Mio heard something deep inside her spiritual core fracture and break.

She was launched backward, tumbling through the air before crashing heavily onto her back in the dirt.

She skidded for several meters with her bare skin scraping against the grass and soil.

She lay there, completely naked from the waist up, gasping desperately for air. Her entire body was paralyzed.

Her muscles refused to respond to her brain’s commands. She couldn’t even lift a finger to cover herself.

But the pain... the pain was immediately eclipsed by something else.

A sensation of overwhelming liberation.

It was as if a dam that had been holding back an ocean for her entire life had suddenly collapsed.

Pure Lunar mana erupted from every single pore of her body... It didn’t just flow, it geysered outward in a brilliant, blinding pillar of silver light that shot straight up into the azure sky.

The ambient temperature in the clearing plummeted. Frost began to form on the blades of grass around her.

The volume and density of the mana she was currently radiating was unfathomable.

It was heavier, purer, and vastly more expansive than anything Kaguya had ever displayed.

It was a suffocating ocean of power.

"See?" the Principal’s voice called out calmly. "Much better."

Mio trembled, coughing up another speck of blood. She forced her eyes to focus, glaring up at the man standing victorious over her paralyzed, exposed body.

But as she watched, something happened.

The Principal’s body suddenly erupted in vibrant roaring purple flames. He didn’t scream.

The flames simply consumed his flesh, his clothes, and his features, melting away the illusion like hot wax.

When the purple fire dissipated a second later, the balding unassuming old man was completely gone.

Standing in his place was a woman.

She was tall, with a voluptuous, hourglass figure and a remarkably large chest that strained against the fabric of her tight, dark purple leather suit.

She had cascading vibrant green hair that fell past her waist, and a pair of mesmerizing predatory violet eyes.

She bent over at the waist, placing her hands on her knees as she leaned her face close to Mio’s paralyzed form.

A wicked playful grin stretched across her lips, offering Mio an unrestricted view down the deep plunge of her cleavage.

"Surprise~!" the green-haired woman cooed.

Mio’s silver eyes widened in shock.

"What... what happened to the Principal?" she managed to wheeze out.

The woman giggled, tossing a lock of green hair over her shoulder.

"Oh, him? I killed that boring old fossil about a year ago. Snapped his neck. I’ve just been wearing his face and running this stuffy little Academy ever since. It’s been great for gathering intel, honestly."

Mio’s brain completely stalled.

The Principal of ALI Academy had been dead for a year? Replaced by Order No. 1?

The woman straightened up, stretching her arms above her head.

Her massive breasts bounced heavily with the movement, a fact she didn’t seem to mind highlighting.

"And speaking of gathering intel..." the woman hummed, tapping her chin with a manicured finger. "I’ve been keeping a very close eye on that boy. Koya... he is Boss’s Husband, isn’t he?"