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

Outside The Sovereign Grand Hotel & Towers, the atmosphere on the street level had subtly shifted.

While regular civilians walked the neon-lit sidewalks and luxury hover-cars glided down the elevated highways, several shadowy figures had quietly gathered in the surrounding area.

Across the street from the hotel entrance, inside a dimly lit, 24-hour street-side cafe, a five-person mercenary team sat at a corner table.

They wore civilian jackets over dark body armor, trying their best to blend in with the late-night coffee drinkers.

This was the Night-Hound Strike Unit... a mid-tier bounty hunting group specializing in urban target extraction.

They weren’t the strongest group in Isle Supercity, but they were notoriously efficient, ruthless, and heavily equipped with military-grade gear.

"God, I fucking hate rich people," one of the mercenaries grumbled into his coffee cup with his eyes fixed on the towering white granite structure across the street. "Some spoiled silver-haired brat drops ten million to buy three floors, and some bitter noble drops five million just to have his head brought to a platter... Must be nice to throw millions around like pocket change."

Sitting opposite him was the group’s leader... a broad-shouldered scarred man named Jax.

He was leaning over a holographic tablet, reviewing the bounty listing that was currently trending on the underground registry.

"Shut your mouth and focus, Drake," Jax barked in a hushed whisper. "Five million Crowns is enough to get us out of the mid-tier rank for good. We aren’t the only ones who saw the listing. Look around."

Drake casually glanced around the cafe and the street outside.

He noticed it immediately.

Sitting two tables over was a pair of rogue Awakened with concealed daggers tucked into their long coats.

Parked along the curb was a heavily armored, blacked-out SUV belonging to the Viper Syndicate... another notorious hitman squad.

Even inside the hotel’s lower lobby lounge, several disguised operatives were casually sipping drinks, eyeing the private VIP elevators.

The hotel was completely surrounded by hungry wolves.

"Boss," a young woman sitting beside Jax spoke up.

She had short spiky hair, a headset, and a pair of dual combat daggers strapped to her thighs.

Her name was Val.

"Did our insider get into position yet?"

Jax turned to the group’s tech specialist... a scrawny guy wearing VR goggles connected to a portable server rig.

From their names and accent, one could tell that they were from Omni City.

"Tech. Bring up the visual feed from Maya’s body-cam. What’s her status?"

Maya was Jax’s younger sister... an expert infiltrator who had disguised herself as one of the hotel’s floor maids ten minutes ago to plant a tracking beacon outside the 90th-floor suite.

"Connecting now, Boss," the tech specialist typed rapidly on his virtual keyboard. "Maya’s camera feed should be live..."

A small holographic window projected above the center of their cafe table.

The screen flickered with static before establishing a clear high-definition video feed from Maya’s chest-mounted camera.

The moment the feed stabilized, every single member of the Night-Hound Strike Unit went completely rigid.

The color drained from Jax’s face.

Drake’s coffee cup slipped from his fingers, shattering against the floor. Val gasped, slapping both hands over her mouth in horror.

The camera feed wasn’t moving. It was static, angled weirdly upward toward the ceiling of the 90th-floor private hallway.

Maya’s body was currently pinned flat against the marble wall directly outside the Imperial Penthouse double doors.

A thick razor-sharp spear constructed entirely of condensed solid crimson blood was driven squarely through her chest, pinning her to the wall like a grotesque butterfly display.

Viscous dark blood was slowly dripping from her wound, flowing down the pristine white wall and pooling onto the floor, forming a long sickening red carpet that stretched all the way to the threshold of the door.

On the camera feed, Maya’s face was visible in the reflection of a nearby wall mirror.

Her eyes were wide, bloodshot, and bulging with a look of soul-crushing terror... as if, in the final second of her life, she had looked directly into the eyes of a true ancient demon.

"M... Maya...?" Jax whispered, his voice trembling violently.

"B-Boss..." the tech specialist stammered, his fingers shaking as he read the environmental mana sensors on his rig. "Her... her heart stopped three seconds ago. The mana spike on that floor... it didn’t even trigger the hotel’s security alarms. The blood spear... it materialized out of thin air inside her chest..."

Jax stared at the holographic screen showing his dead sister pinned to the wall like trash.

A wave of suffocating murderous rage exploded in his chest.

His eyes ignited with a violent Red Crest aura with his knuckles cracking as he slammed his fist onto the cafe table, shattering the glass top into powder.

"FUCK!" Jax roared, his voice thick with grief and fury. "FUCK! FUCK!"

"Boss! Calm down! We’re in public—" Drake tried to grab his shoulder.

"I don’t give a fuck!" Jax snarled, tears mixing with the veins bulging on his forehead. "He killed Maya! That bastard killed my sister! Fuck the plan! We’re going up there right now and blowing his head off—"

Before Jax could finish his sentence, Val froze with her eyes widening as she looked up at the skyscraper across the street.

"Boss... look," Val whispered, her voice trembling with a sudden dread.

Jax and the rest of the crew instinctively turned their heads, looking up through the cafe’s glass window toward the towering structure of The Sovereign Grand.

On the 89th floor... directly beneath the Imperial Penthouse... a single brilliant blood-red light suddenly ignited behind the panoramic glass windows.

It wasn’t a standard spell aura.

It was a dense suffocating crimson light that bled through the glass, illuminating the night sky with an eerie unnatural glow.

Before anyone in the street below could even process what was happening—

VWOOM.

A single hyper-condensed needle of pure blood-red energy shot straight down from the 89th floor, punching cleanly through the roof of the blacked-out SUV parked along the curb... the vehicle belonging to the rival Viper Syndicate hitman squad.

There was no sound and there was no fiery blast.

The moment the crimson needle touched the roof of the SUV, the entire vehicle along with the four high-tier bounty hunters sitting inside was instantly vaporized into nothingness.

The metal, the glass, the tires, and the human bodies didn’t explode... they simply ceased to exist, leaving only a glowing perfectly circular hole in the asphalt where the car had been parked a second prior.

BOOM!

A second later, the atmospheric pressure displacement caught up, unleashing a shockwave of hot wind that shattered the display windows of three adjacent shops and blew the flaming debris of nearby street lamps across the road.

Panic exploded across the street level.

Civilians screamed in terror, dropping their bags and running wildly in every direction as warning sirens began to blare across the sector.

Inside the cafe, the Night-Hound Strike Unit sat completely frozen in their chairs.

Val stared at the smoking circular hole in the street where an entire squad of elite hitmen had just been deleted from reality in less than a fraction of a millisecond.

Her heart hammered against her ribs so hard she thought her chest would burst as cold sweat completely drenched her neck.

’What a monster...’ Val thought, her mind completely short-circuiting as she looked up at the glowing crimson light on the upper floors. ’Is that... is that who we were sent to kill...?’

Up on the 90th-floor balcony, standing in the dark with the wind blowing softly through his silver hair, Koya slowly lowered his hand with his glowing crimson eyes looking down at the fleeing insects on the street below.

He slowly licked the trace of blood from his lip, a dark smirk stretching across his face.

"Come on," Koya whispered softly into the night air. "Make this interesting for me."

...

Inside the oak-paneled sanctuary of his 85th-floor penthouse office, General Manager Marcus was rapidly losing his mind.

The air in the room was suffocating, thick with the heavy scent of expensive cigar smoke and the cold smell of his own frantic sweat.

Marcus paced back and forth across the thick hand-woven Persian rug, his manicured fingers digging so violently into his slicked-back grey hair that silver strands were literally being ripped from his scalp.

His silk tie was pulled askew, his high-collared shirt soaked through at the armpits and spine.

Floating in mid-air directly above his heavy mahogany desk was an encrypted high-frequency holographic communications window.

On the other side of the glowing blue projection sat the Administrator of the Isle Supercity Underground Bounty Registry.

The man was a shadowy unidentifiable silhouette lounging in a high-backed leather chair, casually swirling a crystal tumbler filled with amber liquor.

The ice cubes clinked rhythmically against the glass, sounding to Marcus like a ticking time bomb.

"Take it down! I am begging you on my knees, take the listing down right now!" Marcus practically shrieked into the receiver, his voice cracking with hysteria. "Do you have any idea what kind of catastrophic situation you are creating?! The Sovereign Grand Hotel & Towers is a seven-star establishment! We are the premier host of continental diplomacy! Right now, beneath this very roof, we have foreign trade delegates, imperial nobility, and senior executives from Star Enterprises! Having a public five-million-Crown bounty posted on a guest residing in our 90th-floor Imperial Penthouse is dragging every bloodthirsty and ravenous mercenary in the Outer Sectors straight to our front doors! It is completely ruining our reputation!"

The shadowy silhouette on the screen leaned back, letting out a long deeply amused laugh that vibrated through the office speakers.

"Reputation?" the Administrator chuckled, taking a slow sip of his drink. "My dear Manager, the Black Market doesn’t give a damn about your hotel’s Michelin stars, your floating chandeliers, or your velvet carpets... Money is the only language this city speaks. A bitter, high-ranking noble paid a non-refundable five-million-Crown deposit to register a verified hit on this ’Albano Shirou.’ Once a contract goes live on the public board, it remains live until the target’s head is brought in or the client personally cancels it... Those are the unbreakable rules of the registry. You know this..."

"He is a primary affiliate of Star Enterprises!" Marcus roared, slamming both of his trembling palms onto the mahogany desk so hard his crystal pen holder rattled. "If Hakai decides to hold our establishment personally responsible for a security oversight regarding her business partner, she won’t file a lawsuit! She will deploy the Order, level this entire ninety-story building, and burn every single one of us to ash! Please... I am pleading with you... just remove the name Albano Shirou from the public board!"

The Administrator paused.

The shadow on the screen tilted its head with the ice in his tumbler settling into silence.

Through the dark distortion filter of the hologram, two sharp glowing yellow eyes suddenly ignited, burning with a wicked sadistic light.

"Well... since you asked so politely, Manager," the Administrator purred, his voice dropping a bit as if he was a predator. "I suppose I can adjust the parameters to make things a little more... interesting."

Marcus froze. A faint, desperate glimmer of hope flashed in his bloodshot eyes. "You’ll... you’ll remove it? You’ll pull the listing?"

"Remove it? Heavens, no!" The Administrator threw his head back and laughed aloud... It was a villainous sound.

Off-screen, his finger tapped a glowing virtual console.

"I am placing a strict high-priority one-hour countdown timer on the contract. If no hitman successfully claims Lord Albano’s head within sixty minutes, the listing expires automatically and the contract is permanently voided."

Marcus let out a long wheezing breath, clutching his chest as if his heart might burst.

"Sixty minutes... okay. Okay! We can fortify the lobby and seal the elevators for one hour—"

"Oh, and one more small detail," the Administrator added. "To ensure that every elite squad rogue Awakened, and syndicate assassin in Isle Supercity gives this their maximum effort before the clock runs out... I have decided to personally match the client’s bounty out of my own private reserve."

Marcus’s jaw went slack.

The blood drained from his face so fast he felt dizzy. "You... you did what?"

"The new open bounty on Lord Albano Shirou," the Administrator declared, his silhouette leaning forward until his glowing yellow eyes dominated the projection, "is now officially One Hundred Million Crowns."

CLICK!

The holographic feed went completely dead, dissolving into harmless blue light.

Marcus stood frozen behind his desk, staring blankly at the empty air.

His arms hung limply at his sides with his chest heaving, his pale lips quivering as he tried and failed to articulate a single coherent word.

"One... hundred... million..." Marcus whispered, the unimaginable weight of the number crushing his sanity into dust.

BOOM!

A catastrophic violent explosion rattled the entire 85th floor.

The massive panoramic glass windows of Marcus’s executive office vibrated so violently in their brass frames that hair-line fractures spider-webbed across the reinforced corners.

A shockwave surged upward through the floorboards, knocking a heavy crystal vase off the side table and shattering it into a thousand sparkling pieces against the hardwood.

"Agh!" Marcus stumbled backward, his knees buckling as he grabbed the edge of his desk to keep from collapsing.

Desperate to see what was happening, he frantically slapped the touch-panel on his desk, bringing up the hotel’s external street-level surveillance hologram.

A three-dimensional, high-definition projection of the front portico materialized above his desk.

Marcus’s eyes bulged in absolute terror.

Parked along the curb directly across the street where the heavily armored blacked-out SUV belonging to the elite Viper Syndicate hitman squad had been idling just seconds prior... There was now only a smoking perfectly circular crater drilled six feet deep into the solid asphalt.

The SUV was gone.

The four high-tier Awakened bounty hunters inside were gone.

There was no twisted metal wreckage.

There were no severed limbs or burning tires. The vehicle, its armor, and its occupants had been instantly vaporized into nothingness.

And high above the street, radiating from the 89th-floor balcony directly beneath the Imperial Penthouse, a dense suffocating crimson light was slowly receding back into the shadows of the night.

Marcus stared at the holographic feed, his teeth chattering so violently he nearly bit his own tongue.

Cold sweat poured down his chin, dripping onto his ruined silk tie.

"Lord Albano... is that strong...?" Marcus whimpered, his voice barely above a raspy squeak.

He remembered standing before that silver-haired lord at the reception desk mere hours ago.

Marcus had carefully scanned the man’s face and hands... he hadn’t seen a single Crest mark or magical tattoo.

The man didn’t look like a registered high-ranking combatant but Marcus, despite being a non-Awakened civilian manager, possessed an innate survivalist sensitivity to ambient pressure.

And the subtle presence radiating off Albano Shirou had felt like standing inches away from an ancient slumbering god of death.

Marcus turned his trembling gaze to a secondary holographic tab floating near his monitor.

It displayed the live, public page of the Isle Supercity Underground Bounty Registry.

A massive, blood-red digital clock was ticking down: [59:42]...

And beneath the glowing, silver-haired profile picture of Albano Shirou, bold crimson text burned into Marcus’s retinas.

[CURRENT REWARD: 100,000,000 CROWS.]

A hundred million Crowns.

For a brief toxic second, a wave of dirty greed flashed through Marcus’s mind.

His eyes widened as he looked up at the ceiling... toward the 90th floor where Albano was currently resting.

’One hundred million...’ Marcus thought with his manicured hands clenching into tight, white-knuckled fists. ’If the hotel’s internal defense force took him down... if we activated the ceiling suppressors and turned his body in ourselves... I could retire forever. I could buy a private land outside of the Supercities. I would never have to bow to another noble, corporate executive, or mafia boss for the rest of my life...’

The thought had barely fully formed in his mind when the memory of Albano Shirou’s face suddenly flashed before his eyes.

He remembered those glowing depthless crimson eyes looking down at him with freezing indifference.

He remembered the casual terrifying way the man had crushed military-grade listening bugs to fine dust between his thumb and forefinger without even looking from the cameras.

He remembered the cold dark smirk the man wore as he dropped ten million credits onto the counter as if it were worthless pocket change.

A sharp violent shiver ran down Marcus’s spine, instantly dousing the flame of his greed like a bucket of ice water.

"No... no, no, no!" Marcus gasped out, shaking his head furiously, slapping his own cheeks with both hands until his skin turned red to snap himself out of the suicidal delusion. "Are you out of your mind, Marcus?! You’d be dead before your foot even touched the 90th-floor carpet! That man isn’t prey... he’s a monster! A complete unstoppable monster!"

Desperate to protect his hotel, avoid collateral damage, and save his own neck from both the incoming tidal wave of bounty hunters and Albano’s potential wrath, Marcus slammed his fist down on the large, red emergency console built into the center of his desk.

WROOOOOOOOOOOOM!

A deep deafening siren echoed through the structural walls of the ninety-story skyscraper.

Outside, massive interlocking plates of heavy, rune-carved blast-alloy slid down over the hotel’s glass facades, sealing the building into a steel fortress.

At the same time, the primary anti-siege mana barrier activated, enveloping The Sovereign Grand in a shimmering translucent dome of protective blue energy.

Marcus grabbed his master comms unit, overriding all security channels to connect directly to the internal security barracks on the 80th floor.

"Attention all Elite Security Squads!" Marcus roared into the microphone, his voice trembling with frantic authority. "The hotel is now under Class-1 Emergency Lockdown! A hundred-million-Crown bounty has just been posted on Lord Albano Shirou! Every rogue hitman, mercenary guild, and street syndicate in the city is going to try to breach the building within the next hour! I want all four-liner and elite Awakened security units deployed to the upper elevator shafts and service corridors immediately! Guard floors 88, 89, and 90 with your lives! Lord Albano must remain safe and undisturbed at all costs!"

Five floors below, inside a heavily fortified reinforced security prep room on the 80th floor, the air was thick with the scent of gun oil.

The room was expansive, lined with wall-mounted weapon racks displaying enchanted tactical rifles, energy batons, stun-cannons, and high-density alloy riot shields.

Five Awakened guards... three men and two woman were standing near the central armor locker, strapping on their sleek white-and-gold hotel security body armor.

"A hundred million Crowns..." one of the male guards muttered, tightening the leather straps of his chest plate until the metal buckles clicked into place. "Can you believe this shit? Some mystery whale checks into the penthouse, and suddenly our cozy night shift turns into a damn warzone."

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