King of the Sea (3)
...Death draws near, does it. As epithets for a mere pirate went, that was grandiosity to the point of absurdity.
A short while later, my companions came up onto the deck. Uld wore her usual indifferent expression, and Groll looked not the least bit tense either.
"So they call him the King of the Sea." I tipped my chin toward the pirate ship. "Isn't that a rank above 'Harpoon King'?"
"Cheeky little punk." Groll snorted. "Back when I was still sailing, nobody would've dared run under a nickname like that."
"A three-million-bhat bounty says he's no pushover, though?"
"Three million, you say?"
Groll's eyes gleamed. "Then he's no greenhorn. A man worth that much might be worth a trial as navigator on my fleet."
Groll had been drilling his crewmen relentlessly as the man slated to lead the privateer fleet under the Maritime Bureau, but by the look of it he still hadn't found a navigator worth his salt.
While we traded remarks with the pirate ship in our sights, all hell broke loose across our own deck.
"Get the cannons up here!"
The captain screamed himself hoarse. Sailors groaned and wheezed as they hauled out ancient lumps of iron — breech-loading guns so antiquated that, had they been in my own territory, I wouldn't have accepted them as a gift.
The cannonballs were damp enough to make their upkeep doubtful, and the bores were rusted through inside. Worse still, there were only three guns in all — hardly enough to answer a pirate ship mounting several dozen.
"Is there no Awoken aboard?!"
The captain cried out in desperation. "Or anyone with military service, that would serve just as well! We'll hand out weapons — if you can fight, for the gods' sake, speak up!"
"...Leave this to me."
A stern-faced old noble stepped forward — the man who had taken the VIP suite across from mine.
"All this fuss over a pack of common bandits? Vermin are vermin, whether they crawl the land or sail the seas."
Three sturdy men stood flanking him like a bodyguard detail. Proper knights, equipped with armor and weapons of cold steel.
"Ooooh, it's Viscount Dubois himself!"
"To think we'd actually witness the White Rose Knights in battle!"
Viscount Dubois, hm... So even among the central nobility, a few had real backbone.
His knights looked to be mid-tier Awoken at the least — and mid-tier Awoken were superhuman elites whom ordinary bandits could never hope to lay a hand on.
BOOM———!
White smoke belched from the pirate ship's flank, and a cannonball came hurtling straight for our deck.
"Hyaah!"
A knight threw up his shield and caught the shot head-on. With a deafening crash, the ball ricocheted away.
SPLOOOOSH——!
The deflected cannonball struck the sea and threw up an enormous geyser of spray. The knight had absorbed a point-blank bombardment, yet had given ground by barely two steps.
"He blocked it!"
"Wooooah!"
"That's the White Rose Knights for you!"
The passengers cheered, fists clenched tight. In eyes that had been dead with terror only moments before, something like hope began to glimmer.
Good. Exposing myself would have been awkward — I would simply have to trust the viscount's knights.
The Emperor's spies were sown into every corner of the realm, and the whole point of this operation was to slip into Sirakos with as little commotion as possible. Fortunate, then, that the viscount had stepped forward exactly when he did.
"FIRE!"
This time it was our side firing. The sailors' shots fell woefully short — not only missing, but failing to carry even to the end of their own range.
By then the pirate ship had closed to point-blank. Their vessel was black through and through — not merely the sails, but the hull itself.
A black hull meant the ship was built from black steelwood... and now that I looked properly — weren't these customers of my own duchy?
The pirates stood in armed ranks across their deck. There was nothing of the brutish, filthy rabble one expects of pirates; blue sailor's uniforms worn beneath leather armor — you would sooner have believed them navy.
"You bandits!"
Viscount Dubois roared, beard bristling. "I am Viscount Dubois! You will have heard the name of the White Rose Knights. Withdraw now, and I shall be magnanimous — but if you dare test a vassal of the imperial house, you will not live to keep your heads!"
"Listen to the imperial pig, squealing away."
The pirate captain was, unexpectedly, a young man — a twenty-something with sea-blackened skin, arms crossed atop the bridge beneath a wide-brimmed captain's hat.
"Insolent wretch. You dare call me a pig?!"
"If not a pig, then what?" The pirate captain sneered at him. "With the empire and the Esterzy Duchy at each other's throats, here you are idling away on a pleasure cruise in foreign waters. You've fallen on very soft times, my lord."
"Silence! Common thug! What business is it of a wretch like you where I take my leisure?!"
Viscount Dubois went scarlet. The barb had struck home.
"Oh, it is my business, Viscount Dubois. It turns my stomach, watching you imperial pigs live fat on coin wrung from other nations."
The pirate captain looked up toward our bridge.
"Hey. Captain."
"...Yes?"
"We're boarding you. Have your passenger manifest ready."
"Wh-what is that supposed to—"
"We've no interest in civilians. Our business is with imperial nobles, and no one else. So prepare things properly — I'd rather no innocent blood be spilled."
The pirate captain jerked his chin toward his men.
"Go."
CLANK-K-K——!
Grappling hooks came flying. The pirates hauled in the chains and lashed the two ships together with practiced ease. Planks thudded into place, and they began streaming across.
"Protect the Viscount!"
The knights threw themselves in front of the planks.
Three White Rose Knights. Three planks, as it happened. A narrow plank overhead, and beneath it a sea seething with marine monsters.
Under such conditions, being outnumbered meant nothing at all. The terrain favored the knights overwhelmingly.
"Gwaagh!"
One knight plunged overboard with a scream. His fellows lasted mere seconds longer. In the blink of an eye, the pirates had subdued all three and seized the deck.
The ground had favored the knights; the skill gap belonged to the pirates, and it was a chasm. Not one of them had weathered even a single proper exchange.
"Wh-what...? My knights... the White Rose...?"
Viscount Dubois clutched his head, murmuring in disbelief.
"High-tier Awoken."
I glanced back at Groll. "Are high-tier Awoken common among pirates?"
"...Not common." Groll's face was graver than I had ever seen it. "They're ex-navy by the look of them. Their sword work has proper fundamentals — nothing like the gutter styles of the likes of us."
"Which navy, exactly?"
"Couldn't say... but seeing as they prey on imperial nobles, I'd wager they're not from the empire."
With the deck in pirate hands, the passengers collapsed into panic. Women clutched their children close and wept; men dropped their gaze to the deckboards, praying to every god that no one's eyes would meet their own.
"Honestly, the way you all carry on — a man might almost think I was the villain here."
The pirate captain vaulted neatly over onto our deck.
"Aren't you, though, boss?"
"The manifest?"
"Secured."
"Then sort them."
The pirates paged through the manifest, dividing the passengers into two groups. Their system was simple: commoners to the left, nobles to the right.
"My knights..."
Viscount Dubois offered no further resistance. Looking as though he had aged twenty years in as many breaths, he shuffled along as the pirates led him away.
"Which of you is Count Naiden?"
The pirate captain addressed the passengers whose sorting had yet to be finished.
"Hiding is pointless. We knew your name was on that manifest — that's why we came."
The passengers glanced at one another and murmured.
"Step forward, Count Naiden."
Count Naiden was a fabricated identity that Adras had procured for me. The pirates, it seemed, had gotten wind in advance that a count-ranked noble would be aboard the cruise.
"...I am Naiden."
I stepped out a pace ahead of the passengers. Uld fell in at my side.
"You're Naiden?"
The pirate captain's brow furrowed. "No one said the count was some squirt."
"Squirt, nothing — he's plainly all grown up. And that would be the Countess beside him?" A hulking fellow who seemed part of the captain's inner circle asked this, and Uld gave a small nod.
"What business does a hairless pup have on the open sea?"
"We heard Sirakos Bay was a sight to behold. A cruise, to celebrate our engagement."
Curious how things worked out. Only yesterday I had been racking my brains over the best way to strip someone else's ship — and now here I stood, about to be stripped myself.
"An engagement again, of all things. Now that's a mite suspicious." The captain grumbled.
"What's suspicious about it? Born to the right parents, fed and clothed comfortably all the way to that tender age — that's the whole story. When have imperial nobles ever stopped to weigh the circumstances of the likes of us, one by one?"
"Fair enough."
The captain nodded as though persuaded.
"Oi."
He beckoned to me.
"Both of you, over here. And no funny business."
"And if I refuse?"
"Then I'll make you food for the sea monsters with your fiancée watching. Your choice."
"We'd be as good as dead following you anyway, no?"
"Listen, pup. Whatever stories you've heard, we're pirates, not butchers. Why else would we hit a passenger liner over a merchantman? Killing hostages we went to the trouble of taking — you think we're starving that badly?"
I looked back at my companions.
Lucian wore the placid expression of a man on holiday. From Uld came not a flicker of agitation, and Groll glared like a man ready to dice anything that so much as touched Mariella.
Half the duchy's fighting strength was packed aboard this little ship. I was a transcendent sage of the Immortality Realm; Uld was something beyond even a Grand Master. Groll was a great pirate with a 6.8-million-bhat bounty, and Lucian carried a tongue that could talk its way back alive from hell itself.
No matter how high these pirates flew, turning the situation on its head would have been as simple as flipping my palm.
"What's the holdup? Move."
The captain prodded.
"...Very well. We'll come."
I made my decision.
"On one condition — I pay the ransom for every person aboard."
"...What?"
Astonishment rippled through the crowd. Most stunned of all was Viscount Dubois.
"My lord, y-you really mustn't...!"
"Shh."
I pressed a finger to my lips.
"I'll cover it all — double whatever ransom you intended to demand. On those terms, I'll consent to board your filthy tub."
"And why would you do that? Altruism?"
"I'd rather not share an already beggarly cabin with a crowd of strangers. That's all."
"Hahahaha!"
The pirate captain burst out laughing.
"Now there's a rare specimen. Is this what counts are — thinking on an entirely different scale?"
The truth was, I meant to wreck his ship to splinters the moment things turned sour. Witnesses would be inconvenient — and one can hardly buy the silence of one's fellow nobles.
"Boys. We have honored guests. See them aboard — and see them gently."
The pirates came toward Uld and me.
I sent a voice transmission to my people:
"— Go on ahead to Sirakos and wait for me there."
"— I'll be along once I've had a proper look at the competition."
Next — "The Northern Grand Duke's Daoist Arts Are Nothing Ordinary" (Episode 111)