Wrapped tightly around her left forearm was a thick iron chain.

It trailed down her leg and across the ground, ending in a massive jagged naval boarding anchor that scraped against the stone.

She stood there with water pooling around her boots.

Her chest heaved violently.

Morwenna took her very first breath of actual air in five hundred years...

Her lungs expanded aggressively.

She pulled in the freezing rain with the scent of the muddy courtyard and the smoke of Thora’s forge fires burning nearby.

A violent shuddering gasp racked her frame.

It tasted like freedom!

The crushing weight of the ocean was gone.

The dark was gone.

The phantom faces of her dead crew vanished from her peripheral vision.

She slowly raised her head.

Her eyes swept her new environment, processing data at terrifying speeds.

She saw the towering black plates of the Steel Palisade.

She saw the heavy reinforced iron gates.

She saw the jagged craters blown into the earth just outside the walls, and the lingering, corrosive black blood of the Tide staining the mud.

Her mind relaxed slightly.

’Good,’ Morwenna thought with a dark vicious satisfaction settling into her bones. ’This isn’t a pristine marble temple built for soft cowardly gods...This is a war zone!This is a fortress forged in blood and iron! This is a place where things die.’

And then, her stormy eyes locked onto the man standing just a few feet in front of her.

Silas stared back at her.

He was entirely unbothered by the murderous aura she was projecting.

He didn’t flinch as the heavy rusted boarding anchor scraped against the stone.

He didn’t step back from the terrifying pressure of an SSS-Rank mythic entity.

Morwenna analyzed him with the sharp ruthless instincts of a veteran ship captain.

He wore no golden crown.

He draped no holy, glowing robes over his broad shoulders as he was dressed in simple black clothing.

But as she focused her senses, her breath caught in her throat.

The man radiated a terrifying gravity.

His Mythic Gold Core burned like a trapped condensed sun inside his chest.

He exerted a physical pressure on the air around him that made her cold skin tingle.

’Wow...’

She looked down at his heavy boots.

They were stained deep black with the dried gore of actual monsters.

Morwenna looked back up at his face.

She saw the sharp jawline.

She saw the cold confidence of a man who didn’t take orders from anyone.

She saw the burning golden rings in his blue eyes.

He was not a soft cowardly corporate deity sitting on a gilded throne, playing political games from the absolute safety of the clouds.

He was a warlord.

He was a man who stood in the freezing mud and slaughtered his enemies with his own bare hands.

’He’s a true Captain...’ Morwenna realized.

Inside her chest, the centuries of crushing isolation, the agonizing hollow grief of her murdered crew, and the suffocating despair of the deep ocean violently shattered.

The yawning void in her soul was instantly filled by the gravity of his presence.

He had reached down into the darkest most inescapable prison in the entire cosmos.

He had shattered her divine chains and he had pulled her back into the light.

He had given her air.

A fierc infatuation ignited directly in her blood.

It was a possessive obsession that entirely consumed her broken mind.

She had spent five hundred years drowning, waiting for a sturdy anchor in the dark... perhaps at the bottom... she had been wishing for someone to save her.

To give her the chance for revenge.

The man standing in front of her was an unyielding mountain of iron.

Silas remained perfectly still on the marble step.

’I mean everything points to it... a heavy-bladed cutlass. An iron boarding anchor wrapped around her arm and an aura of bloodlust,’ Silas thought. ’I asked the world for violence and I guess I got what I wanted.’

He looked into her stormy eyes.

Morwenna didn’t speak a grand formal greeting.

She didn’t even demand a logistical explanation of her new contract.

She stepped forward.

The heavy iron chain of her anchor rattled loudly against her thigh.

She raised her right arm and drove the massive heavy-bladed mythril cutlass directly downward.

CRACK!

The thick mythril tip bit deep into the solid stone tile of the courtyard, anchoring her to the ground.

She dropped heavily to one knee, bowing her head.

Her dark wet hair fell over her face, obscuring the scars on her neck.

"You called into the abyss, and I have answered," Morwenna spoke.

Her voice was incredibly raspy.

It was obviously rough from centuries of inhaling saltwater.

She looked up at him from her kneeling position.

Her stormy gray eyes burned with a hungry intensity that would have terrified a lesser man.

"I am Morwenna," she declared. "And from this breath until the stars burn out, this blade belongs to you."

She didn’t sound like a hired mercenary.

She sounded like a religious zealot pledging her soul to a new dark god.

"Point me at your enemies, Captain," Morwenna vowed as her words dripped with sincerity "Tell me who needs to bleed. I will slaughter anyone who dares to threaten your ship."

Silas looked down at the kneeling Dread Queen.

She wasn’t just offering her martial skills or her high-tier physical stats...

She was offering him her fanatic loyalty.

Silas slowly pulled his hands apart, uncrossing his arms.

He stepped off the marble stair, closing the final distance between them and he reached out and firmly grasped her cold mythril-plated shoulder.

"Welcome aboard, Morwenna..." Silas rumbled, his golden-ringed eyes locking onto hers. "Welcome to the Blessed Land."

The exact microsecond the words left his mouth, the atmosphere in the courtyard violently changed once again.

Morwenna didn’t stand up gracefully.

She lunged instead.

Moving with the sudden terrifying speed of a striking viper, the Dread Queen stepped cleanly inside his personal guard.

Her right hand abandoned the hilt of her anchored cutlass.

She grabbed the heavy collar of his dark coat, hooked her left foot directly behind his ankle and violently pivoted her hips.

She attempted a flawless high-speed judo throw designed to flip a two-ton armored knight directly onto his neck.

Silas didn’t panic.

’Testing the waters, huh?’ Silas thought.

He didn’t try to pull away.

He simply dropped his center of gravity by exactly two inches and then he ignited the dense mana in his core, channeling the weight of his authority directly down his spine and into his boots.

His iron-plated soles dug inches deep into the solid stone tiles of the courtyard.

CRACK!

The marble spiderwebbed beneath them.

Morwenna grunted with her water-logged muscles straining as she pulled with enough raw physical force to snap a ship’s mast in half.

Silas didn’t budge a single millimeter.

He stood like an immovable mountain of iron, looking down at her with a calm deadpan expression.

Neither of them gave an inch.

The sheer friction between their clashing auras made the freezing rain around them physically vaporize into steam.

Behind Silas, the women reacted instantly.

"Hey!" Brida roared from the Garrison threshold.

The heavy infantry commander ripped the massive axe from her back.

Tamsin drew her chained daggers.

The sharp sound of seventy weapons being drawn from their sheaths echoed across the courtyard as the girls prepared to swarm the hostile summon.

Morwenna didn’t reach for her cutlass as instead she let go of Silas’s collar.

A sharp barking laugh erupted from her throat. It was a raspy, genuine sound that carried the heavy resonance of the sea.

"Ha!" Morwenna grinned as her eyes burned with respect.

She took a step back, looking up at him. "You didn’t even flinch! You are truly a Captain!"

She slammed her fist against her chest in a crisp naval salute.

"I am proud to be your subordinate," Morwenna declared with her previous hostility evaporating into pure loyalty.

Before Silas could formally accept the compliment, a blur of emerald green stepped directly into the space between them.

Eluned aggressively shoved her way forward.

The SSS-Rank Goddess wrapped both of her arms tightly around Silas’s left side, pressing her soft curves against his ribs in a blatant territorial display.

Morwenna immediately rose to her full height.

The playful grin vanished from the Dread Queen’s face.

Her stormy gray eyes narrowed into dangerous slits.

She stared directly at the silver-haired woman clinging to her Captain.

The air in the courtyard instantly thickened dropping twenty degrees.

The atmospheric pressure became physically suffocating as the two SSS-Rank entities locked eyes.

Morwenna’s combat instincts, honed by five centuries of betrayal flared to life.

She analyzed the mana signature radiating from the silver-haired woman.

It was incredibly dense and it was suffocatingly powerful.

It was near in strength, if not functionally stronger, than her own but worse than the power level was the flavor of the mana.

It was pure... It was pristine... It was unmistakably divine.

’This woman...’ Morwenna thought coldly. ’She has that kind of Divine energy. She is most certainly a god!’

The phantom memories of burning ships and butchered crewmates flashed through Morwenna’s mind.

She had just spent five hundred years drowning because of the Righteous Pantheon.

She hated deities with every single fiber of her soul...

Morwenna’s hand hovered dangerously close to the hilt of her mythril cutlass.

"Captain," Morwenna asked with her voice dropping into a deadly rasp. "Can I smite this god?"

Silas sweatdropped.

A massive migraine immediately began forming right behind his eyes.

"N-no," Silas shut that down instantly, holding up a hand to pause the impending apocalyptic collateral damage. "Eluned is my first Hero. I summoned her first... She’s the territory’s primary anchor."

He looked Morwenna dead in the eyes.

"And you cannot smite Eluned."

Eluned didn’t help the diplomatic de-escalation.

The Goddess of Nature leaned her head against Silas’s bicep.

She looked at the drenched Pirate Queen and offered a petty smirk.

"You can certainly try, trench-rat," Eluned taunted smoothly. "But you would just be murdered."

To punctuate the threat, Eluned boldly stuck her tongue out at the pirate.

Morwenna’s jaw tightened.

The rusted iron anchor chain wrapped around her forearm rattled ominously.

"I should have been the person you summoned first, Captain..." Morwenna complained bitterly, glaring daggers at the deity. "I don’t like gods at all. They’re all treacherous suits."

"That’s perfectly okay," Eluned shot back brightly as her glowing green eyes flashed with intense jealousy. "Because I don’t like you either! You smell like dead fish!"

Eluned paused, tapping her chin thoughtfully.

"And besides," the Goddess added, narrowing her eyes. "Judging an entire species based on the actions of a few... isn’t that being godist?"

Silas closed his eyes.

He dragged his hand slowly down his face, letting out a long exhausted sigh.

He decided to ignore the petty squabbling entirely as he needed hard data.

"System," Silas muttered. "Pull up her profile."

A glowing blue holographic window materialized instantly in his eyes.

[Hero]: Morwenna

[Title]: The Astral Dread Queen

[Rank]: SSS (Mythic)

[Level]: 1 (EXP: 0/1000)

[Loyalty]: 100 (Diehard)

[Vitality]: 160

[Mana]: 4500 / 4500

Silas inhaled sharply.

The cold rainy air filled his lungs, but it didn’t calm his racing pulse.

He stared at the numbers, his pragmatic gamer brain rapidly crunching the sheer, terrifying math of her stats.

’At Level 1, my baseline mortal Vitality was exactly 20,’ Silas analyzed with surgical precision. ’Hers is 160.’

That wasn’t just a high stat. That was a localized biological anomaly.

With 160 Vitality at Level 1, Morwenna was essentially a walking monster like Eluned.

She could probably take a direct hit from a heavy iron ballista bolt straight to the chest, casually brush off the splintered wood from her leather armor, and just keep walking without breaking stride.

Her bone density had to be equivalent to solid mythril.

He shifted his gaze to her energy reserves.

’Furthermore, her Mana pool is absolutely staggering....’ Silas noted.

However, his mind caught the subtle limitation. It wasn’t limitless.

4500 points was a massive reservoir, but it meant she still had to carefully manage her magical output in a prolonged, grinding war of attrition.

She couldn’t just spam her highest-tier skills endlessly like Eluned could when tethered to nature.

He raised his hand, swiping the holographic screen down to review her foundational combat abilities.

[Active Skills]:

[Tidal-Blade Arts]: A fluid martial art that generates phantom heavy-water pressure to crush enemy guards. Redirects incoming momentum perfectly. (Passive/Active)

[Abyssal Anchor]: Summons a spectral, unbreakable iron chain and boarding anchor from the void. Used to manipulate battlefield positioning, rip targets through space, or crush heavy armor. (Cost: 200 Mana/cast)

[Drowned Sovereign’s Domain]: Floods a 50-meter radius with the suffocating, crushing atmospheric pressure of the deep ocean, violently slowing enemy movements and draining their oxygen. (Cost: 600 Mana/minute)