The Future Pirate Empress
Looking at Mary Ann standing before me, I couldn't shake the feeling that she was essentially a free bonus gift.
That said, an A-grade Super was still far stronger than any ordinary soldier. Figuring I could just reassign her to base defense, I turned to the girl who had somehow been dragged in with both hands tightly bound and opened my mouth.
"Right, so… why exactly did you bring her here all tied up?"
"Exactly! You said you'd take me in, and then you go and tie me up like this? That's just rude!"
The moment I spoke, Mary Ann jumped in as if she'd been waiting for her cue. Belial, who had gone to fetch her, answered in a cool, clipped tone.
"Commander, we have yet to formalize any contract. I cannot leave a former pirate unbound and unguarded in your presence."
"Hmm."
"Furthermore, Commander, her combat instincts are far sharper than expected. Taking precautions against the unexpected is not unreasonable."
When Ignis piled on with the same assessment, Mary Ann whipped her head back and forth between the two women, then turned those damp, glistening eyes on me.
"It's not fair! After we negotiated, there's no way I'd attack Oppa!"
"…Hmm."
And that was the moment something felt off.
Judging purely by stats, she was bottom-tier even among A-grades—no, she was barely scraping the line between B and A. So why were Ignis and Belial this tense around a character like Mary Ann?
Unable to make sense of it, I pulled up her status window again just to be sure. It didn't take long. The instant I realized what this "Mary Ann" truly was, my brain went completely blank.
You. Become my comrade.
Hello, I'm Doctor Anon.
I've been researching which titles pull the most aggro on the Astral Lagrange gallery.
So hurry up and give me the Pirate Empress's real name.
Otherwise her name is Kim Soon-ja from now on.
A memory that shouldn't exist flickered through my mind—no. It was a gallery post I'd seen not long ago.
Mary Ann… MaryAnn… MariAnn… Marianne?
Only after running the name through a full mondegreen filter did it hit me. The character standing right in front of me was the very one the gallery had made infamous—the one the veterans all said would become the Pirate Empress. More precisely, she was essentially the Pirate Empress (True). The realization left me genuinely stunned.
And once I locked in the Mary Ann = Marianne hypothesis, more and more details started lining up.
Come to think of it, the Pirate Empress is an East Asian beauty type.
Sure, between illustration limits and anime modeling, most characters ended up looking vaguely similar. But the Pirate Empress also had black hair with a brownish sheen—and given how hard the gallery screamed about her being a total cutie, the developers had clearly poured serious effort into her model. Realizing that the face I was looking at now matched that model sent a full-body shiver down my spine.
My rational side, however, kept throwing up red flags. There were too many discrepancies to take this on faith alone.
The Pirate Empress players actually encounter in-game has a massive chest, is missing one eye and wears an eyepatch, and sports much longer hair. The Mary Ann in front of me…
The hips, thighs, and face looked similar enough. But instead of the Empress's classic long, loose hair, she had a roughly cut, short messy ponytail. Relative to those hips, her chest wasn't just flat—it was completely nonexistent. The face was close, but no eyepatch, no scars. She had some muscle, sure, but nothing particularly impressive.
For a second I wondered if I was just getting ahead of myself and drinking the hype Kool-Aid—
"Um… so why exactly did you have them bring me here?"
"…Ah."
—but I could dig into that mystery later. Right now, I needed to deal with the situation in front of me.
After cobbling together some flimsy excuses and shooing Mary Ann and the others out of the command center, I settled into the commander's seat and opened the community for some "information gathering."
Information gathering in name only, of course. All I was really doing was browsing the gallery. No actual research involved.
The reason was simple. If I really did have the Pirate Empress's larval form on my hands, and word got out?
Veterans would lose their minds trying to snatch a versatile powerhouse who outclassed most SSS-grades. My base and fleet would get steamrolled. That much was obvious.
So I sat there racking my brain over how to confirm whether she was truly the Pirate Empress (True).
About ten minutes later—
[smiling toad meme]
You recruit some girl whose appearance you don't even know, fire her early, and it's all for nothing, right?
And honestly, a gacha-pulled SSS-grade is probably better than whatever this Pirate Empress thing is.
After nine solid minutes of effort switching from a fixed nickname to an anonymous one, I watched my carefully crafted one-minute post go live and felt a quiet spike of anxiety. Not about baiting the gallery—about whether the bait would even work.
Fortunately, a moment later—
As the comments flooded in, the truth settled over me: the Pirate Empress (True) I'd picked up was the real deal. A rush of pure joy surged through me. I left a single reply—
—then closed the community window and started silently screaming jackpot over and over in my head.
Of course, as her status window had already confirmed, our Pirate Empress (True) was currently a washed-up unit barely clinging to A-grade. If I threw her onto the front lines just because she was the future Pirate Empress…
She'd either die screaming against the power-crept pirate fleets, or decide I was trying to kill her and steal someone else's shuttle to desert. Either was entirely possible.
So I decided to sit down and plan out how to raise Mary Ann—no, Marianne—properly from here on out.
And since that kind of planning was more than I could handle alone—
"Jessica. Jessica."
"What is it, Commander?"
"I have an incredible secret to share with you."
"Pardon?"
"We've just gotten our hands on the future Pirate Empress."
"…P-Paaaaardon?!"