The dark mana that followed didn’t just cut...

it simply consumed.

The nineteen incoming enchanted broadswords and holy spears were sheared entirely in half the exact microsecond they touched the blue arc.

The force of the slash didn’t stop there.

It tore through the silver chest plates of all nineteen knights simultaneously, throwing them violently backward off the deck and sending them crashing into the freezing waters of the Astral Sea.

Morwenna stood in the center of the cleared deck, casually spinning the cutlass in her hand.

"Come on!" she laughed loudly, mocking the incoming demigods dropping from the sky. "You’re Righteous Deities! You’re supposed to be immortal! Why do you break so easily?!"

A massive shadow fell over her.

She looked up.

A towering twelve-foot-tall divine juggernaut which was a specialized combat angel clad in heavy golden dreadnought armor and wielding a massive war-hammer was dropping straight down toward her head from the upper rigging.

"SMITE!" the juggernaut roared, bringing the massive ten-ton hammer down with enough force to shatter a meteor.

She looked up at the falling hammer as her cyan eyes glowed with spite.

’Why do these holy bastards always yell their attack names before swinging?’ She thought. ’It takes two whole business days to charge that sacred strike... By the time he initiated the swing, I could’ve made a sandwich, filed my territorial taxes, and parried him twice.’

She raised her left hand, catching the falling ten-ton golden war-hammer directly in her bare palm.

CLANG!

A deafening bone-rattling shockwave erupted from the point of impact, blowing the loose dust and wooden splinters off the deck.

The ironwood floorboards beneath Morwenna’s boots didn’t even creak.

She stood perfectly upright, holding the massive weapon aloft with one arm, completely unbothered by the impact.

The combat angel’s glowing eyes widened behind his visor in absolute, unadulterated horror.

"My turn..." Morwenna purred.

She gripped the hammer’s head, forcefully yanked the twelve-foot-tall juggernaut down off-balance, and delivered a devastating brutal roundhouse kick directly to his armored midsection.

BANG!

The heavy golden armor caved in completely.

The combat angel folded in half like a cheap lawn chair and shot across the deck like a cannonball, smashing through three incoming squads of Righteous Knights before crashing heavily through the starboard railing and disappearing into the void.

All across the Leviathan’s Wake, her crew was having the absolute time of their lives.

Garrick was actively beating a six-winged demigod over the head with the empty barrel of his naval cannon, laughing maniacally.

Barnaby was using his rigging ropes to lasso flying angels out of the air and drag them down onto the deck for the boarding boarding pikes to finish off.

They weren’t just defending their ship... they were farming the Righteous Pantheon for raw loot and experience points.

Every time an angel fell, a pirate was right there stripping the enchanted silver gauntlets off the corpse and stuffing them into their inventory bags.

"Keep it up, lads!" Morwenna cheered, parrying three holy swords with a single casual flick of her wrist and kicking a knight into the main hatch. "We’re going to be rich enough to buy our own solar system after we sell this scrap metal!"

High above on his golden dreadnought, Lord Aurelius watched his elite team getting completely dismantled by a single ship of misfits.

His face turned purple with humiliation and rage.

"She’s making fools of us!" Aurelius screamed, slamming his fist onto his scrying table. "We are losing millions in military hardware every single minute! Why won’t her ship’s barrier fall?!"

"Lord Aurelius," a shadowy four-eyed corporate deity whispered beside him, checking a glowing golden ledger. "Open combat is inefficient... The Dread Queen’ combat stats are simply too high for standard infantry to overwhelm. We must activate the insurance policy."

Aurelius stopped breathing.

A cold ruthless smirk stretched across his face.

"Do it," he ordered. "Execute the asset."

Down on the main deck of the Leviathan’s Wake, Morwenna had just finished cleaving a golden spear in half when she felt a sudden, sharp jolt in the ambient mana of her ship.

It wasn’t an attack from the outside.

It was an internal disruption.

A specific encrypted mana-signature she recognized instantly was interfering with the core anchor runes of The Morwenna Aegis located near the mainmast.

Morwenna spun around, her cyan eyes narrowing.

Standing directly next to the pulsing dark-blue anchor stone of the ship’s protective shield was a young girl.

She was sixteen years old, wearing a simple linen sailor’s tunic and holding a glowing intricate carving knife.

Her name was Lyra.

She was the ship’s ward-weaver... a quiet timid human girl Morwenna had personally rescued from a holy sacrificial altar three years ago.

Morwenna had fed her, clothed her, taught her how to read runes, and treated her like a little sister.

Currently, Lyra’s hands were trembling violently.

Tears were streaming down her pale cheeks.

She had her carving knife plunged deeply into the center of the anchor stone, actively twisting the blade to sever the mana-conduits that powered the shield.

"Lyra?" Morwenna called out with her voice dropping its playful banter, replaced by sudden confusion. "What are you doing? Get away from the core! The splash damage from their artillery—"

"I’m sorry!" Lyra screamed at the top of her lungs ss her voice cracked with hysterical agonizing sobs.

She didn’t stop twisting the knife.

"I’m so sorry, Captain!" Lyra cried out loudly, tears dripping off her chin onto the glowing runes. "I had to do it! They found me! They promised they’d let my little brother go from the purification camps if I lowered the barrier! I didn’t have a choice!"

Morwenna froze.

"Lyra, stop!" Morwenna yelled, taking several steps toward the mast. "They’re lying to you! They don’t honor deals with mortals!"

It was too late.

With a final desperate twist of her wrist, Lyra severed the primary ley-line of the anchor stone.

CRACK!

The dark blue pulsing stone violently shattered into a thousand useless fragments.

High above the Leviathan’s Wake, the massive impenetrable sphere of The Abyssal Aegis flickered once, turned a sickly shade of gray, and completely shattered into a shower of falling magical glass.

The ship was completely, entirely exposed to the open vacuum of the Astral Sea.

"THE SHIELD IS DOWN!" Garrick roared, looking up at the sky in horror as his naval cannon clicked empty. "CAPTAIN!"

"All vessels!" Aurelius’s voice screamed over the fleet-wide broadcast dripping with vindictive triumph. "COMMENCE FULL ORBITAL BOMBARDMENT! WIPE THEM OUT!"

Three hundred golden dreadnoughts fired their main batteries simultaneously.

It wasn’t a single beam of holy light this time.

It was an apocalyptic blinding rain of hyper-condensed divine artillery, falling from the nebulae like a meteor shower of pure white fire.

The first salvo hit the stern of the Leviathan’s Wake.

KRA-BOOM!

The massive ironwood deck violently exploded into splinters and flame.

Barnaby, the six-armed goblin who had sailed with Morwenna for two decades, was instantly vaporized in a flash of holy fire with his mending needle spinning away into the dark void.

"NO!" Morwenna screamed, her cyan eyes burning with pure murderous spite.

She surged her SSS-Rank mana into The Abyssal Fang, preparing to launch a massive, upward slash to intercept the falling artillery and shield her crew.

She never got to swing the blade.

While her attention was focused entirely on the falling bombs and her dying crew, the air directly surrounding her on the main deck violently warped and tore open.

A dozen Righteous Deities... the high-tier multi-dimensional leaders of the Universal Trade Coalition, including Lord Aurelius himself teleported directly onto the floorboards around her in a coordinated ambush.

They didn’t attack her with swords as they didn’t engage her in martial combat.

They slammed their glowing hands directly onto the deck, triggering a massive pre-set binding array they had teleported in with them.

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

Dozens of thick, heavy chains forged from unrefined unbreakable divine iron shot out of the floorboards like striking vipers.

Before Morwenna could even swing her cutlass, the iron chains coiled aggressively around her wrists, her ankles, her waist, and her throat.

The metal burned with a violent searing white runic heat that instantly suppressed her SSS-Rank core, forcibly draining the ambient mana from her veins and slamming her physical stats down to zero.

"Agh!" Morwenna grunted as the sheer kinetic weight of the chains violently jerked her backward.

The heavy iron dragged her forcefully down onto the splintered mahogany floorboards, pinning her to her knees in the dead center of her own flagship.

Her cutlass slipped from her numb fingers, clattering uselessly against the deck.

"Got her!" Aurelius sneered, stepping forward in his pristine golden armor.

He kicked The Abyssal Fang away across the floorboards.

"The Void-Sea Scourge is secured! Lock down her spatial conduits!"

Morwenna struggled furiously against the chains.

Her muscles strained with the veins in her neck bulging as she tried to force her mythic strength through the divine suppression runes.

"You cowardly spineless corporate suits!" Morwenna snarled, blood dripping from her lip as she glared up at the circle of deities. "You couldn’t beat me in a fair fight if your immortal lives depended on it! Let me up and I’ll carve those fake halos out of your skulls!"

Aurelius didn’t look angry.

He looked down at her with a cold pitying expression.

"Fair fights are for barbarians and dead men, Morwenna," Aurelius stated smoothly, adjusting the diamond cuffs of his armor. "We are administrators... We manage outcomes and your outcome was predetermined the moment you interfered with our trade routes."

He turned his head away from her, looking out over the burning, chaotic deck of the Leviathan’s Wake.

More orbital artillery was raining down.

The sails were burning with holy fire. Her crew...

her family of outcasts and misfits were being overwhelmed by thousands of silver-armored knights pouring onto the sinking hull.

Garrick was on his knees by the railing, his four arms pinned behind his back by three glowing spears, roaring in defiance as a Righteous Knight raised an executioner’s broadsword over his neck.

Sylvie’s crow’s nest was engulfed in flames, the dark-elf sniper falling thirty feet onto the deck below, motionless.

Even little Lyra... the girl who had betrayed them all for the promise of her brother’s freedom was currently being dragged by her hair across the deck by a six-winged combat angel, screaming for mercy that would never come.

"Look at them, Dread Queen," Aurelius commanded coldly, grabbing Morwenna by her wild dark hair and forcefully wrenching her head up so she couldn’t avert her eyes. "Look at the failure of your rebellion. Look at what your Spite has bought them."

Morwenna’s cyan eyes went wide.

She pulled against the iron chains wrapping around her throat, choking on the smoke and the smell of burning wood as her teeth ground together in powerless agonizing fury.

She couldn’t swing her blade.

She couldn’t summon her mana.

She couldn’t save a single one of them.

They made her watch.

The "Righteous" Gods slaughtered her crew.

Lord Aurelius kept his glowing, immaculate golden boot firmly planted in the middle of Morwenna’s spine.

He twisted his heel, grinding her chest into the splintered mahogany of the main deck.

The heavy divine iron chains wrapped around her throat choked off her air, but they couldn’t shut her eyes.

She was forced to witness the dismantling of the only family she had ever known.

The Leviathan’s Wake was a burning slaughterhouse.

Garrick went first...

The towering, eight-foot-tall abyssal troll was kneeling by the starboard railing.

His massive four-armed frame was pinned to the deck by three glowing holy spears driven straight through his broad shoulders and lower back.

He didn’t beg and hedidn’t ask the angels for mercy.

He was a pirate of the void-seas.

He spat a thick wad of dark corrosive blood directly onto the polished silver boots of the Righteous Knight standing in front of him.

"Is that all you shiny bastards got?!" Garrick roared with his jagged yellow teeth bared in a defiant bloody grin. "My grand-dam hits harder with her knitting needles!"

The Righteous Knight didn’t say a word.

He simply raised a massive, two-handed executioner’s broadsword high above his head.

The blade ignited with blinding searing white holy fire.

"GARRICK!" Morwenna screamed, her voice tearing her vocal cords.

The blazing broadsword came down in a flawless heavy arc.

The troll’s laughter was cut short.

His massive head hit the deck with a heavy thud, rolling lazily toward the scuppers and his colossal body slumped forward... completely lifeless.