Heroine-Saving System: Reborn In A Third-Rate Manga As The Protagonist-Chapter 46: Helpless

The fat man leaned his massive head backward as he bellowed in deep, genuine laughter that echoed off the warehouse walls.

"Of course you don’t know the answer... you’re just Class 5 trash!" he said between laughs, slapping his knee with his pudgy hand. "You won’t get any confidential information like that at a bottom-tier Academy. Anyway, I just wanted to kill those annoying brats. They’ve been crying and disturbing me for quite a while now with all their screaming and begging."

He waved his hand dismissively, as if discussing pests he’d exterminated from his home. Kōya’s palms tightened slowly until his hands formed trembling fists, his nails digging into his palms hard enough to draw blood.

’Wh... Why...’ he thought, his vision blurring red at the edges. ’There was never a right answer. He killed them just because they annoyed him. Just... just because...’

Something snapped inside him. He rushed forward without thinking, his feet stepping directly through his own vomit as he closed the distance between them.

He threw a desperate punch at the fat man’s smug, laughing face with everything he had left. However, his punch never landed. The mana suppressor device strapped to his leg suddenly vibrated intensely.

An overwhelming shock of electricity surged through his entire nervous system.

Kōya’s body went completely limp mid-swing, and he collapsed face-first onto the ground, consciousness abandoning him instantly.

The fat man’s laughter continued echoing as everything went black.

...

When Kōya’s eyes slowly opened again, his entire body ached with deep, penetrating pain. He blinked several times, trying to focus his vision in the oppressive darkness.

He realized with growing horror that he was now inside a cell... a dark, cramped prison cell with rusted metal bars.

Though it wasn’t the same cell where the children had been murdered, it wasn’t much different in terms of condition or smell.

This one was somehow even worse.

It was the source of the flies and maggots he’d noticed earlier... their buzzing filled the air with an incessant drone. On the far edge of this cramped cell was a dead man’s body, already in advanced stages of decomposition.

The corpse was slumped against the wall, and its eye sockets were completely full of writhing white maggots that seemed to pour out like tears.

The man’s mouth hung open in a silent scream, and more maggots crawled freely across his bloated, discolored face. This rotting body was the cause of that absolutely wretched smell that permeated everything.

Kōya’s stomach heaved violently, and he wanted desperately to throw up at the sight and smell.

He really, genuinely wanted to vomit.

However, there was absolutely nothing left in his stomach to expel... he’d already emptied everything when the children burned.

He looked down at the metal strap around his ankle which was the mana suppressor device that kept him completely powerless and without really thinking it through, he reached down and tried to drag it off with his hand, pulling at it desperately.

The next thing that followed was a major electrical shock that shot through his entire body like lightning.

The voltage was incredibly high... high enough to make every muscle in his body seize up simultaneously.

He collapsed backward onto the ground hard, his head cracking against the concrete floor as stars exploded across his vision.

He lay there staring up at the dark ceiling, gasping for breath as residual electricity made his muscles twitch involuntarily. The ceiling above was concrete and cracked, with only a tiny sliver of light coming through from somewhere far above which was barely enough to see by.

’System... are you back yet?’ he thought desperately, reaching out mentally for that familiar interface.

He had enough FP saved up... he could probably buy some kind of skill to suppress the effect of the mana suppressor, or maybe something to help him escape but there was absolutely no reply from the System at all.

It was just empty silence where that annoying but helpful voice should be.

’Fuck,’ he thought bitterly.

He was still deeply shaken by everything that had happened... the children burning alive, their screams, the smell of their cooking flesh but it seemed like his Calm Mind skill was finally working again properly, at least to some degree.

He felt significantly calmer and more collected than he had been during that horrific moment when the children died. The skill was helping him process the trauma and think more rationally, even if the memories still haunted him.

He slowly forced himself to stand up despite the pain, his legs shaking slightly. His body still hurt intensely from the electrical shock, every nerve ending feeling raw and oversensitive.

But he was a two-liner, almost at the level of a three-liner now according to his recent progress, so his physical resilience was higher than a normal person’s.

He could endure this much, at least.

He walked unsteadily over to the gate of his cell, gripping the cold metal bars and tried bending them with his enhanced strength, putting everything he had into it.

The bars didn’t budge even slightly... they were reinforced with some kind of magic or simply too thick for his current weakened state.

"I wouldn’t advise doing that," a feminine voice suddenly said from somewhere nearby. The voice was elegant and smooth, with a slight accent he couldn’t quite place.

Kōya looked in the direction where the voice had come from. It was coming from the cell directly opposite his own, across a narrow corridor.

He squinted into the darkness and looked past the bars to see a strikingly beautiful woman with long silver hair that seemed to almost glow even in this darkness. Her eyes were a deep crimson red that caught what little light existed and reflected it back like a cat’s eyes. 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

Somehow, even in this oppressive darkness where he could barely see anything else, he could see her perfectly clearly as if she was illuminated by some internal light source.

Her pale lips were stained with something dark that could only be blood, and when she smiled slightly at him, he could clearly see two elongated, sharp fangs.

There were several distinctive two-puncture bite marks visible on her exposed forearm and hand.

She sat with her back against her cell wall, looking directly at him with those unsettling crimson eyes.

"He’s watching," she said simply and the instant those words left her mouth, Kōya’s Danger Sense exploded with warning signals.

He threw himself backward away from the cell door on pure instinct, his body moving before his mind fully processed the threat.

A dagger stabbed violently through the bars exactly where his head had been just a fraction of a second earlier, the blade glinting in the dim light. Kōya landed hard on his knees and sat there breathing heavily with his heart pounding in his chest.

’Even with Danger Sense alerting me, I barely sensed that attack until the last possible moment,’ he thought with growing dread.

His Sensory skill was still technically active, though operating at significantly reduced capacity but he should have detected someone approaching from much farther away than that.

The mana suppressor was clearly weakening all his abilities substantially.

"Where’s Renji?" Kōya asked urgently, looking up at the figure now standing outside his cell. The man with four distinct lines across his face stared down at him with cold, emotionless eyes.

It was Tetsu, the brown-haired man with the crossbow still strapped across his back.

"Your friend is alive and secured in one of these other cells," Tetsu replied in a flat voice. "And don’t worry about his condition... he’s perfectly fine for now. We need all of you alive and in good health for what’s about to happen very soon."

He turned his head to look back at the silver-haired woman in the opposite cell.

"You will all be sacrificed for the greater good," he continued, and that crazed, fanatical look suddenly entered his previously emotionless eyes. "Your deaths will facilitate our god’s glorious descent into this world. You should be honored to serve such a purpose."

Kōya didn’t understand what the hell he was talking about with this "god’s descent" nonsense.

However, what he understood perfectly clearly now was that they were all going to be killed as sacrifices in some kind of insane ritual.

"Tetsu! Get over here right now!" the fat man’s voice suddenly bellowed from somewhere deeper in the warehouse. The sound echoed along the walls and ceiling, making it difficult to pinpoint the exact location.

Tetsu continued staring at Kōya for a few more seconds with those intense, crazy eyes then he turned without another word and walked away into the darkness to go meet his boss.

’I don’t really know what to do anymore...’ Kōya thought with a sinking feeling of despair in his chest.

If he tried to look back on the events and plot points of the manga he’d read, he genuinely couldn’t remember anything like this situation happening at all.

He didn’t recognize anyone here... not the fat man, not Tetsu, not this warehouse location. He had no meta-knowledge about their weaknesses or how to defeat them.

The System wasn’t active to provide helpful information or let him purchase emergency skills.

His Enhanced Strength ability wasn’t nearly powerful enough to tear through these reinforced cell bars and Renji was somewhere nearby in danger, probably in just as bad a situation as he was.

And most of all... the most damning of all, he had done something that he had always absolutely hated protagonists for doing in manga, light novels, anime, and every other form of fiction he’d consumed.

He hadn’t taken this world seriously enough.

If he were completely honest with himself and admitted his deepest flaw, he had subconsciously thought that the people here weren’t that important or real since this was supposedly just a manga world he’d been reincarnated into.

That’s why he had been very okay with killing monsters so casually, without any hesitation or remorse.

It was just a manga to him on some level. The people weren’t actually real... They were simply characters, NPCs, plot devices but those two children who had just died screaming in front of him... calling for their mother as they burned alive, they had knocked that delusion completely out of him.

These people were very, very real, their pain was real, their fear was real and their deaths were real and permanent.

’How would their parents react when they find out...?’ he couldn’t help but wonder.

Would they even get bodies back to bury? Or would they just disappear, with their families never knowing what happened to them?

He felt a sudden light weight land on his shoulder and turned his head to see a small bat with glowing crimson eyes staring directly at him.

The bat was unusual-looking, with silver-tinted fur and a distinctive heart shape at the end of its tail.

He glanced back at the opposite cell where the silver-haired woman had been sitting.

The cell was now empty.

’She turned into a bat?’ he thought with surprise.

"Get off me," he said tiredly, swiping at the bat with his hand but the creature flapped gracefully out of range of his attempted slap and spun through the air in a small loop before landing on the ground in front of him.

"Quiet down before he comes back here," she whispered urgently, her voice somehow coming from the bat’s small form. "Tetsu has very good hearing."

Kōya weighed his options for a moment, then decided he had nothing to lose by at least listening. He sat down carefully in the corner of his cell that was farthest from the rotting corpse, trying not to breathe through his nose.

The bat fluttered over and settled down comfortably on his lap, looking up at him with those intelligent crimson eyes.

"Talk in whispers only," she whispered directly into his ear, her voice barely audible.

Kōya gave the bat a closer look now that it was right in front of him.

The heart-shaped tail tip was actually quite cute in an odd way, and her fur looked surprisingly soft and well-maintained despite being imprisoned here.

"Who are you?" he whispered back.

"My name is Princess Victoria Reine Bloodworth," the bat announced with clear pride in her voice, placing one small wing over her chest in a formal gesture. "And I am the youngest princess of the Crimson Court of Transylvania."

Kōya’s eye twitched as he looked down at the bat sitting on his lap.

"We’re not in a cartoon..." he said with a tired sigh. "Please tell me you’re not seriously claiming to be—"

"I can absolutely assure you that we are not in any kind of cartoon or fictional story," Victoria interrupted him, her tone becoming more serious. "This is real life, and I am very serious about my identity. I understand your skepticism, but—"

"So what, you’re telling me those two men out there are gathering people for you to drink from and planning to awaken some ancient vampire god?" Kōya scoffed quietly, though part of him was already starting to believe it might be true.

"Wellll..." Victoria trailed off, her wings drooping slightly. "You’re not entirely wrong about that assessment, actually..."

Kōya looked at her with wide eyes, genuine shock replacing his skepticism. What the hell did she mean by that?

"They’re the ones who found my ancient seal in a ruin." Victoria explained in a rushed whisper. "And they’re planning to use a very dangerous ritual scroll that was sealed together with me to awaken the Vampire God of Blood and Night. They need a number of sacrifices to complete the ritual... that’s why they’ve been kidnapping so many people, right now, they almost have enough to trigger the first phase."

Kōya bit his lip hard, trying to process this information. He hadn’t heard about anything even remotely like this in the manga and he couldn’t confirm whether she was telling the truth or not with the System being offline.

’I’m relying on the System too much,’ he thought with growing frustration. ’I need to be able to think and survive without it.’

He was supposed to be an innovative, intelligent person who had read hundreds of manga and light novels. He had knowledge and perspectives on fantasy worlds that nobody else in this reality possessed.

He should be able to survive and thrive using his own wits.

And in a manga... especially a third-rate, low-quality manga like this series had been, this kind of thing was absolutely not impossible.

Secret vampire princesses, ancient evil gods, cult rituals, mass sacrifices... these were all standard tropes.

"Okay, fine. I’ll accept that you’re telling the truth for now," Kōya whispered. "So how exactly are we going to deal with this situation? We need to escape from here somehow. Where even are we right now?"

"Well... you actually can’t escape from this place," Victoria said sadly, shaking her small bat head. "Not easily, anyway. Those men implant a small bomb device into the bodies of all their captives. So even if you somehow managed to run away, all the fat one needs to do is press a button on his remote control and you’d explode from the inside out. And even if you somehow managed to steal that remote from him, the bomb device is also a tracking beacon, so Tetsu would eventually hunt you down no matter where you ran."

Kōya’s eyes darkened as the full horror of his situation became even clearer. What kind of nightmare had he gotten himself into?

And the Academy had somehow classified this as a simple D-rank investigation mission?

"I’m guessing the bomb is already implanted inside me as well," he said quietly, feeling sick.

"That’s correct," Victoria confirmed with a nod of her small head. "The fat man forced it down your throat while you were unconscious. He seemed to enjoy doing it, too... he was laughing. And your friend Renji has one implanted in him as well. I can move anywhere within this warehouse building as long as I don’t try to leave through the exits, so I witnessed the whole process."

’Alright... just be calm... be calm...’ Kōya thought, trying to activate his Calm Mind skill more deliberately but the skill was wearing off rapidly.

It was really, genuinely hard to remain calm when there was a literal bomb implanted in your stomach and your captor could just detonate it for fun whenever he felt like killing you.

’I still don’t fully trust her though,’ Kōya thought as he looked at the bat on his lap carefully.

It seemed that either she was secretly working with the traffickers as some kind of manipulator, or she genuinely had the same goals as him and wanted to escape.

Either way, he would definitely keep his guard up around her.

"Well, how are you planning to get out of here?" Victoria asked, looking up at him with those large crimson eyes. "Do you have any ideas at all?"

"I don’t have any concrete ideas yet," Kōya admitted reluctantly. "What about you? You can turn into a bat and move around freely... surely you’ve thought of something?"

"I’m completely fresh out of ideas, I’m afraid," Victoria said with a small shrug of her wings. "But from what I’ve observed, it’s only the two of them actually here in this place most of the time...Tetsu and the fat one. There might be—"

"Gotta fly!" she suddenly interrupted herself urgently.

She immediately soared out of his cell through the bars and flew rapidly back to her own cell across the corridor. By the time Kōya blinked, she was sitting in exactly the same position she’d been in before, looking perfectly natural.

Tetsu arrived at Kōya’s cell door once more, this time carrying a wooden bowl in his hand.

The bowl contained what looked like some kind of gray, lumpy pudding or gruel.

The smell coming from it was absolutely awful like spoiled milk mixed with rotten meat.

Tetsu simply dropped the bowl carelessly onto the ground inside Kōya’s cell without even opening the door, letting the disgusting contents splatter all over the dirty floor.

"If you get hungry enough, you’ll eat it," the brown-haired man said in that same flat, emotionless voice. "If you’re not hungry enough, then just starve to death. I really don’t care either way what you choose."

Just as he was about to turn away and leave, Kōya cleared his throat deliberately.

"Oi, Tetsu..." he called out, and the four-liner’s cold eyes flicked over to him.

The man definitely didn’t seem too happy about being addressed so casually. "You ambushed me and used poison the first time we fought. That wasn’t a real victory. I want to fight you again in a fair match... you can even gather everyone else here together to watch if you want. We’ll do it hand-to-hand, no weapons, no tricks, just—"

"Not interested in the slightest." Tetsu interrupted him coldly.

Before Kōya could say anything else, he felt his whole body being violently electrocuted again.

This time the voltage was even significantly higher than before... it felt like every nerve in his body was on fire simultaneously.

The electricity shook him from the inside out, making his teeth chatter and his muscles spasm uncontrollably.

He hit the ground hard with actual steam visibly rising from his body, his clothes singed and smoking.

Tetsu walked off without another word or backward glance, his footsteps fading into the distance.

Victoria flew back over as a bat once Tetsu was definitely gone and landed near Kōya’s twitching form.

"Are you... okay?" she asked with genuine concern in her voice.

Kōya didn’t reply immediately.

He just lay there and slowly curled up into a tight ball, his body still occasionally spasming from residual electricity.

If there was one single word that could accurately describe exactly how he felt right now in this moment, it would be:

Helplessness.

Complete and utter helplessness.

’What am I supposed to do now?’ he thought desperately as consciousness started to fade. ’How do I save anyone when I can’t even save myself?’