Morwenna thrashed wildly against the chains.

The divine iron seared her skin, burning angry red welts into her wrists and neck, but her mythic strength was entirely suppressed.

She was trapped inside a mortal shell, forced to watch the gods clean house...

Above them, the mainmast groaned.

Sylvie’s sniper nest was a raging inferno.

The dark-elf had taken out thirty angels before a stray barrage of orbital artillery clipped her perch.

The heavy ironwood platform cracked as the supporting ropes burning away into ash.

With a sickening crack, the nest collapsed.

Sylvie fell thirty feet through the smoke-choked air.

She hit the main deck with a brutal, sickening crunch of shattering bone.

She didn’t get up.

Her long-rifle, the weapon she had spent a decade modifying and polishing, skittered across the floorboards and snapped in half under the boot of a marching demigod.

"No..." Morwenna choked out with her vision blurring with hot desperate tears. "Leave them... Just take me... I’m the one you want..."

Aurelius leaned down with his diamond halo casting a sterile, mocking light over her shadowed face.

"We don’t leave loose ends, Dread Queen," the Corporate Deity whispered pragmatically. "Your crew is a liability. It’s bad for the cosmic market and bad for our brand."

Through the thick, choking black smoke, a high-pitched terrified scream cut through the din of battle.

It was Lyra.

The sixteen-year-old ward-weaver who had betrayed the ship.

The girl who had plunged her carving knife into the anchor stone, shattering The Morwenna Aegis, all because the Righteous Gods had promised to release her captive little brother.

A massive six-winged combat angel was dragging the teenager across the deck by her hair.

Lyra was sobbing hysterically, digging her nails into the angel’s glowing gauntlet, trying desperately to pry his iron grip off her scalp.

"You promised!" Lyra shrieked. "Lord Aurelius! You signed a holy contract! I lowered the shield! You said you would spare my brother! You said you would let me live!"

The angel threw Lyra roughly onto the deck.

She scrambled backward on her hands and knees, pressing her back against the splintered mainmast, directly in front of the chained Dread Queen.

Aurelius sighed, dusting a speck of ash off his pristine golden pauldron.

He didn’t even look at the terrified mortal girl.

He just waved a dismissive hand.

"Contracts signed under the duress of piracy are legally null and void under the Third Divine Mandate..." Aurelius stated in a cold monotone voice. "Corporate loopholes, child. Did you honestly think a Pantheon of light would negotiate in good faith with a filthy trench-rat?"

Lyra’s eyes went wide.

The horrific crushing realization of what she had done finally set in.

She had sold out the only woman who ever loved her for a lie...

She turned her head, looking at Morwenna.

"Captain..." Lyra whispered, her face pale with shock. "I... I’m so sorry."

Morwenna didn’t hate her.

She didn’t feel a single ounce of anger toward the scared kid.

She just felt a hollow bottomless despair.

"Close your eyes, Lyra," Morwenna rasped with fresh tears leaking into the wood. "Just close your eyes."

The six-winged combat angel stepped forward.

He raised a glowing holy spear.

He didn’t hesitate nor did he show an ounce of the supposed mercy his relgiion preached.

He drove the spear directly down, pinning the sixteen-year-old girl to the wooden deck in a single brutal thrust.

Lyra gasped once, a sharp intake of blood and air and then her eyes glazed over.

Morwenna shattered.

Something deep inside her soul...

the part of her that laughed, the part that loved the open sea, the part that cared about her found family violently snapped.

She threw her head back.

She didn’t just scream.

She unleashed a guttural soul-rending howl of pure agony that shook the very air around the dreadnoughts.

It was the sound of a breaking mind.

"I’LL KILL YOU!" Morwenna shrieked, thrashing against the chains so hard her own wrists fractured. "I’ll rip your halos out of your skulls! I’ll drown your temples in blood! I WILL SLAUGHTER EVERY LAST ONE OF YOU!"

Aurelius just smirked.

"You won’t do anything," the deity replied. "You’re going to rot."

He raised his hand.

The twelve deities standing around her began to chant in unison with their voices overlapping in a complex multi-layered hymn of divine binding.

They weren’t just chaining her.

They were casting a permanent conceptual seal over her mythic core.

They locked her SSS-Rank immortality in place, ensuring her biological functions would never truly cease.

They anchored the heavy divine chains directly to the shattered remnants of her ship’s mainmast.

Then, the golden armada pulled back.

The dreadnoughts fired one final concentrated barrage of orbital artillery.

The Leviathan’s Wake blew apart into a million flaming splinters.

The hull cracked in half.

The ship groaned like a dying beast and began to rapidly sink into the freezing, sunless depths of the Astral Sea’s Abyssal Trench.

Morwenna was dragged down with it...

The light of the burning stars above faded into a sickly twilight, and then into darkness.

It wasn’t just the absence of light.

It was a heavy weight.

The pressure of the deep sea was unimaginable, thousands of atmospheres of crushing force pressing down on her skin from every conceivable angle.

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

Because of the divine seal, she could not die but her body was still biological.

She still possessed lungs.

The freezing saltwater rushed into her nose and mouth.

She squeezed her lips shut, holding her breath until her chest burned with searing agony.

Her lungs screamed for oxygen snd her heart hammered against her ribs like a caged animal.

Eventually, biology won.

She gasped.

The freezing brine forced its way down her throat.

She experienced the agonizing blinding panic of asphyxiation.

Her lungs filled with freezing saltwater.

Her chest convulsed violently in the dark ss she thrashed against the iron chains pinning her to the rotting mast, drowning and dying in the silent void.

Her vision faded to black.

Her brain shut down.

Morwenna "died."

And then, minutes later, her SSS-Rank mythic core violently rebooted her nervous system.

She woke up chained to the wood.

She coughed up a lungful of saltwater, gasping reflexively in the dark and the freezing ocean rushed back in.

The cycle of drowning began all over again.

It was a calculated psychological torture designed by the gods to completely shatter her mind into dust.

The first century, she screamed curses into the dark.

Every time she revived, she expelled the water from her lungs just to scream Aurelius’s name, promising to slaughter the heavens.

The second century, she began to hallucinate.

The crushing isolation broke her sanity.

She saw the faces of her murdered crew floating in the dark water just out of reach.

She saw Garrick laughing... She saw Lyra crying... She begged the phantoms to cut her loose, but they just stared at her with dead eyes.

By the fifth century, the screaming stopped and thehallucinations faded.

The isolation and the endless drowning had hollowed her out.

She was just an empty vessel of endless pain, suspended in the black water, waiting for a final death that the world would never grant her.

The Dread Queen was gone.

Only a tiny razor-thin sliver of pure unadulterated spite remained burning in the deepest corner of her ruined soul.

A sharp agonizing spasm racked her chest ss her lungs demanded oxygen.

Morwenna squeezed her cold gray eyes shut.

She braced for the burning rush of saltwater to end the current cycle but the water didn’t rush in.

[Ding!]

A sharp chime cut directly through the heavy, crushing pressure of the Abyssal Trench.

It was a sound entirely foreign to the dark, underwater void.

It sounded like a piece of high-end corporate tech booting up.

Morwenna’s eyes twitched.

She slowly forced her heavy, water-logged eyelids open.

Hovering directly in the pitch-black water, cutting through the shadows and casting a sterile blue light over the rotting wood of the mainmast, a holographic system tab flared to life.

[You have been summoned to be a Hero for a Lord.]

[Accept the tether? Y / N]

Morwenna stared at the glowing blue letters.

Her mind struggled to process the text.

A Lord? A mortal commander? Was this another trick by the Righteous Pantheon?

Was this a new cruel hallucination crafted by her dying brain before the saltwater took her again?

She didn’t care.

Even if it was an abyssal demon reaching down from the deepest hells to drag her into a lake of fire, it meant breathing air...

It meant leaving the crushing sunless grave where her family had been butchered...

Morwenna didn’t hesitate.

She didn’t weigh the consequences or analyze the contract.

Morwenna opened her cracked freezing lips.

She pushed the words past the saltwater burning her throat.

"Yes."

The interface flared violently.

A secondary box materialized instantly over the first.

[Warning: Dimensional transit initiated. Your level will be forcefully reset from Level 999 -> Level 1. You will lose access to your Divine Authority skills. However, you will retain your foundational martial arts and your Mythic Weaponry.]

Morwenna actually managed a dry vicious bubbling laugh.

A stream of tiny air bubbles escaped her lips, floating up toward the distant, unseen surface.

What did she care about a level reset?

What good was being Level 999 when she was chained to a piece of rotting timber at the bottom of the ocean?

She would gladly trade every single drop of her divine authority just to feel the wind on her face again.

She would trade her immortality for the chance to wrap her bare hands around the throat of the gods who put her here...

"Take it," Morwenna snarled into the freezing dark. "Take it all... Just pull me up."

Instantly, a blinding roaring pillar of incandescent golden light erupted from her chest.

The cosmic authority of the Sovereign Realm’s foundational summoning rules completely overwrote the divine seal placed upon her by the cowardly gods.

The thick unbreakable chains of divine iron that had held her for five hundred years instantly turned to brittle rust and shattered into dust.

Before the crushing pressure of the ocean could collapse her newly freed body, Morwenna vanished from the Trench.

Back in the muddy courtyard of the Blessed Land, the massive stone archway of the summoning portal roared to life.

The heavy hum of the runic pedestal violently vibrated the stone tiles beneath Silas’s boots.

A geyser of pure blinding golden light erupted from the center of the archway, shooting upward into the sky.

It pierced straight through the bruised, ash-choked gray clouds of the Umbral Basin, illuminating the rain that had started again like a beacon of cosmic defiance.

Silas stood his ground.

He crossed his arms over his chest, his golden-ringed eyes narrowing against the glare as the portal stabilized.

Standing on the step slightly behind him, Eluned actively clutched his dark tactical coat.

The Goddess of Nature was heavily pouting, glaring at the light.

’Please be ugly...’ Eluned prayed silently to whatever system god was listening. ’Please be a grumpy old woman with a small chest. Please do not be another incredibly hot woman to compete with.’

The blinding light slowly began to recede.

It didn’t fade cleanly like usual.

It left a thick unnatural mist rolling out from between the white marble pillars of the archway.

The very first thing Silas noticed was the change in atmosphere.

It wasn’t the scent of fresh pine and ancient earth that had accompanied Eluned’s summoning.

It was the scent of the ocean.

The air around the portal suddenly felt heavy as a boot stepped out of the mist.

Clink!

The sound of heavy metal scraping violently against the stone tiles echoed loudly across the silent courtyard.

Morwenna, the Astral Dread Queen, stepped fully into the cold rainy courtyard of the Blessed Land.

Eluned’s shoulders instantly slumped.

’Dammit...’ the Goddess thought, aggressively biting her lower lip. ’She is incredibly hot.’

She was a terrifying breathtaking sight.

Morwenna was completely drenched.

Phantom seawater dripped heavily from her dark, water-logged leather armor, pooling on the stone tiles beneath her.

Thick oxidized plates of dark-blue mythril guarded her shoulders, forearms, and shins.

The metal was etched with the faded symbols of a forgotten pirate fleet.

Her wild dark hair clung to her pale flawless face in thick wet strands.

Five centuries in the sunless void had drained the natural warmth from her complexion.

She looked like a marble statue carved directly from the cold uncaring depths of a trench but her eyes were alive.

Her irises were the exact color of a stormy churning sea.

They were cold and in her right hand, she gripped the hilt of a massive heavy-bladed mythril cutlass.

The blade was thick, designed purely for brutal cleaving rather than elegant thrusting.

The dark metal was permanently stained with blood for some reason.

’Did I summon a fucking pirate?!’