His girls were incredibly strong, but their technique was severely lacking.

They swung their weapons like brawlers as they didn’t have the lethal martial arts required to systematically dismantle larger smarter prey in highly fluid close-quarters combat.

’Or without using the stuff that Brida taught them... I just want them to be self sufficient.’ Silas thought ’I need a martial arts instructor. A blademaster or a spear-saint who can forcefully forge these brawlers into untouchable elites...’

Silas stepped entirely forward, fully approaching the center of the white marble archway.

He reached into his dark coat pocket though it was for no reason as he pulled out the glowing Hero Summoning Card he had extorted from the elites of Valoria City.

The density of the magic locked inside the encrypted card made the surrounding air physically vibrate.

With a smooth motion, Silas slammed the silver card directly onto the central dormant runic pedestal of the archway.

CRACK!

The reaction was instantaneous and absolute.

A blinding roaring column of incandescent, pure golden light violently erupted from the marble archway.

The golden shockwave of pure mana blasted outward, violently rippling the muddy puddles in the courtyard and forcing the front row of the women to physically shield their eyes.

The pillar of light shot hundreds of feet directly into the ash-choked sky, completely piercing the heavy gray clouds above the territory.

Silas stood perfectly still, just inches away from the roaring portal.

The intense divine wind whipped his dark hair wildly around his face.

His golden-ringed eyes narrowed, staring entirely unblinking into the blinding void.

’I need to summon a really strong hero!’ Silas thought.

He didn’t care about their age... He didn’t care about their tragic backstory or their personality quirks.

He needed pure combat utility.

’And she should be able to use a sword, dammit!’

...

[Somewhere Deep In The Sea Of Darkness]

Total darkness.

It wasn’t just the absence of light... it was a heavy weight.

The pressure was unimaginable, thousands of atmospheres of crushing unyielding force pressing down from every conceivable angle.

The water here was freezing, hovering just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero.

It tasted of ancient salt, decaying minerals, and centuries of undisturbed rot.

Suspended in the absolute center of this sunless void was a woman.

She was bound to the rotting splintered mainmast of a sunken galleon.

Thick chains forged from unbreakable divine iron wrapped tightly around her wrists, her waist, and her throat, pinning her securely to the water-logged timber.

Her dark wild hair floated in the freezing current like a halo of shadows.

Her name was Morwenna... The Astral Dread Queen or the Void-Sea Scourge.

Whichever one anyone called her.

Centuries ago, she had been an SSS-Rank mythic entity, the undisputed Sovereign of the Drowned Fleet.

She had not ruled over a static boring piece of land or a stuffy pantheon of marble temples.

She ruled the Astral Seas... a chaotic boundless dimension where oceans floated between the stars and gravity was merely a suggestion.

Her ship, the Leviathan’s Wake, had been a sanctuary.

Morwenna had not commanded an army of mindless zealots or religious fanatics.

She took in the outcasts... The exiles... The discarded mortal souls and broken spirits that the "Righteous" Gods had thrown away.

Her crew was her family.

She offered them freedom, sailing the cosmic tides, raiding the floating corporate treasuries of the divine pantheons, and answering to no one.

But freedom was an unforgivable crime to the architects of the cosmos...

’It all started then...’

A massive coalition of Corporate Deities and Righteous Gods had formed an alliance.

They realized they could not defeat the Dread Queen in open naval warfare.

Morwenna’s martial prowess with a blade was terrifying...

To understand how an SSS-Rank mythic entity ends up chained to a rotting log at the bottom of a frozen trench, one would have to rewind the clock.

You have to look back to the day the sky caught fire above the Nebula of Orinon.

The alliance of Righteous Gods hadn’t sent a diplomatic envoy this time... They had sent an armada!

WHOOSH!

Three hundred towering golden dreadnoughts, their hulls forged from sun-washed celestial bronze and their sails woven from captured starlight, had completely surrounded the Leviathan’s Wake.

They formed a tight multi-layered sphere, blocking out the purple nebulae and locking down the spatial coordinates so no one could warp out.

Standing on the raised quarterdeck of her flagship, Morwenna casually leaned against the polished mahogany railing.

She wore a long weathered black captain’s coat draped over her shoulders, the hem stained with the stardust of a hundred raided galaxies.

A silver-hilted cutlass... The Abyssal Fang, forged from the primary incisor of a star-devouring kraken rested casually at her hip.

She took a slow sip from a heavy pewter mug of spiced astral rum with her glowing cyan eyes scanning the surrounding golden armada.

’Three hundred warships just to arrest one woman and a bunch of misfits?’ Morwenna thought with an amused smirk touching her lips. ’The Corporate Pantheons must be hurting this fiscal quarter... I think we dented their quarterly profit margins when we looted that cathedral shipyard in the Seventh Quadrant last week.’

"Captain!" a loud booming voice rumbled from the main deck below.

It was Garrick.

He was a towering, eight-foot-tall, four-armed abyssal troll who served as her primary quartermaster.

He currently held two massive customized naval cannons in his lower arms like standard handguns, while his upper hands casually loaded heavy mythril grapeshot into the barrels.

"The shiny bastards are charging up their main orbital batteries!" Garrick yelled up to her, grinning with a mouth full of jagged yellow teeth. "Looks like Lord Aurelius is leading the vanguard himself! Should I give him a broadside of dark-aether shells to ruin his paint job?"

Morwenna waved a dismissive hand, taking another sip of her rum.

"Save the ammunition, Garrick," Morwenna called back smoothly. "Those celestial bronze hulls are expensive to repair... Let them waste their mana first. We’ll strip the gold off their wreckage after they tire themselves out."

Right on cue, the lead dreadnought at the front of the golden armada flashed with blinding, incandescent holy light.

A massive multi-tiered magic circle... measuring easily two hundred yards across materialized directly in front of the dreadnought’s bow.

Thousands of complex golden runes locked into place, spinning rapidly as they channeled the collective faith-energy of a million brainwashed mortal worshippers.

"In the name of the Righteous Pantheon and the Universal Trade Coalition!" a magically amplified voice boomed across the vacuum of the Astral Sea.

It was Lord Aurelius, a corporate deity who treated prayers like stock options and wore a halo made of solid diamonds.

"Morwenna! Your piracy ends today! Submit your vessel for asset seizure and surrender your soul for mandatory purification!"

Morwenna rolled her eyes.

’Mandatory purification...’ she scoffed internally. ’That’s just corporate double-speak for stripping my ego, wiping my memories, and turning me into a glorified divine guard dog for their celestial banks. I’d rather drink bilge water.’

She didn’t bother shouting back.

She just raised her pewter mug toward the glowing flagship in a mock toast and took a heavy gulp.

"FIRE!" Aurelius roared.

The golden magic circle fired.

A colossal hyper-condensed beam of pure, blinding holy artillery erupted from the array.

The laser was thick enough to vaporize a mountain range, tearing through the cosmic tide with a deafening, reality-warping screech.

It shot straight toward the broadside of the Leviathan’s Wake.

On the main deck, none of her crew flinched.

Barnaby, a six-armed goblin rigging-master, didn’t even drop his mending needle.

Sylvie, a dark-elf sniper sitting high up in the crow’s nest, casually kept cleaning the lens of her long-rifle.

They didn’t care about the apocalyptic beam of holy light barreling toward them.

They knew their Captain’s stats...

An instant before the orbital laser hit the hull, a dark pulsing sphere of deep-sea mana flared to life around the Leviathan’s Wake.

It was The Morwenna Aegis... a passive SSS-Rank territorial defense matrix Morwenna had personally anchored to the ship’s keel after developing it for a very long time.

BOOM!

The holy artillery beam slammed directly into the dark barrier.

There was no explosion and there was no shattering glass.

The hyper-condensed light hit the deep-sea mana and simply... stopped.

The dark barrier rippled like a calm pond disturbed by a pebble.

The terrifying mountain-destroying kinetic energy of the Righteous Pantheon’s main battery was instantly absorbed, distributed across the hull, and quietly dissipated into harmless ambient steam.

A collective gasp of disbelief echoed over the divine scrying channels from the surrounding armada.

Morwenna lowered her mug, wiping a drop of rum from her chin.

She looked out at the smoking bow of Aurelius’s dreadnought and let out a loud mocking laugh that echoed cleanly across the water.

"That’s your opening move, Aurelius?!" Morwenna shouted as her voice dripped with spite and arrogance. "My grandmother hits harder than that, and she’s been dead for three centuries! If you want to seize my ship, you’re going to have to get off your golden ass and come take it with a blade!"

Aurelius’s diamond halo visibly trembled with divine rage.

"Deploy the Wariors!" the Corporate Deity shrieked over the comms. "Board that filthy vessel! Kill the crew! Bring me her head!"

The golden armada responded instantly.

The side ports of the three hundred dreadnoughts slammed open.

Thousands of Righteous Knights, clad in glowing silver plate armor and wielding enchanted broadswords, poured out of the hulls.

They were accompanied by hundreds of six-winged divine demigods, flying across the gap between the ships on trails of golden light.

They descended on the Leviathan’s Wake like a swarm of angry glowing locusts.

"Alright, boys and girls!" Morwenna yelled, tossing her empty pewter mug over her shoulder.

It hit the deck with a dull clatter as she gripped the silver hilt of The Abyssal Fang. "Party guests are here! Try not to get blood on the new sails!"

"YEEHAW!" Garrick roared.

The four-armed troll raised his heavy naval cannons and squeezed the triggers.

BANG! BANG!

Two deafening explosions rocked the deck. Massive, solid-iron grapeshot shells ripped through the air, instantly obliterating a dozen flying demigods in a shower of golden feathers and shattered armor before they even reached the railing.

High above in the crow’s nest, Sylvie’s long-rifle cracked.

Every single time the dark-elf pulled the trigger, a Righteous Knight’s helmet violently exploded into shrapnel.

The first wave of divine boarders slammed onto the main deck of the Leviathan’s Wake.

They landed with heavy thuds, raising their glowing broadswords to slaughter the pirate crew.

But they had completely miscalculated the reality of fighting an SSS-Rank crew on their own home turf...

Morwenna didn’t stay on the quarterdeck.

She stepped up onto the mahogany railing, smiled a wicked sharp-toothed grin and simply let herself fall backward off the platform.

She dropped fifteen feet, landing dead-center in the middle of a squad of twenty elite Righteous Knights who had just breached the starboard railing.

"In the name of the light—" the lead knight bellowed, raising a two-handed greatsword wreathed in holy fire.

He didn’t finish the sentence.

Morwenna didn’t even draw her cutlass from its scabbard.

She just stepped inside his guard with blinding fluid speed, grabbed the front of his polished silver breastplate with her bare left hand, and violently slammed him face-first directly into the hard ironwood floorboards.

CRACK!

The enchanted silver plate armor buckled instantly under her raw physical grip.

The knight’s helmet shattered against the deck, rendering him instantly unconscious.

"You guys talk way too much..." Morwenna complained, rolling her shoulders.

The surrounding nineteen knights swarmed her instantly, thrusting their glowing spears and broadswords from every angle to pin her down.

Morwenna sighed.

’Here we go with the generic l mob tactics,’ she thought. ’Surround the boss, spam basic attacks, and hope the realm registers a critical hit.... Boring.’

Her right hand blurred as she finally drew The Abyssal Fang.

SHING!

A crisp terrifying metallic ring echoed across the entire battlefield.

The temperature on the main deck plummeted instantly as the ancient kraken-tooth blade met the open air.

Morwenna didn’t block their incoming weapons.

She didn’t need to...

She pivoted on her heel, executing a flawless, high-speed rotational sweep...

Tide: First Form - Severing Horizon.

A thin condensed arc of dark blue sea-mana erupted from the edge of her blade, expanding outward in a perfect 360-degree horizontal ring.