My name is Trident. Captain of the Barbarossa Pirates.
One day, that absolute idiot Ollie stole a gem called 'Tears of the Saint' from the Royal Cathedral. It's no ordinary rock—it's a crystallized mass of magical energy the Empire spent a century collecting. Without it, every defensive mechanism in the Empire shuts down. That means monsters flood the city.
And that's not all. After stealing it, Ollie had the nerve to say, 'That's half my objective complete.'
I chase him. I need to know why h
Crazy Ollie: A Thief's Requiem - Tempest of Lamentation, the Saint's Light
Only seven survived.
The sea after the storm's eye had passed was eerily still. The wind had died. The sky sagged, leaden and low, as if the world itself had perished. The half-shattered Red Bull drifted among the swells, its timbers groaning like something quietly sobbing.
The broken foremast had gouged a hideous wound across the deck, and torn canvas clung to the wood like clotted blood. Smoke rose from a dozen places. The charred remnants of the rigging gave off an acrid, burnt stench.
Trident felt his knees sinking into the pool of blood spreading across the deck.
The old wound in his left shoulder burned with a searing heat. The place Garnet had shielded. Beneath the bandages, the gash had split open again. A mixture of pus and blood dripped onto his sea chart, blurring the ink.
(*So hot.*)
A haze was settling deep in his skull. His thoughts wouldn't cohere. The edges of his vision flickered and flashed, and the roar of the sea echoed in the depths of his ears.
He crawled through the mountain of wreckage, searching for something.
"Where… where are you…"
He shoved aside a charred timber. Splinters bit into the pads of his fingers. A fingernail peeled back. He felt none of it.
And then, he found it.
"────"
A sound that wasn't a word leaked from his throat.
It was First Mate Rolf's severed right arm.
That giant of a man, one eye always covered by a brass patch. A former gunnery officer of the Imperial Navy. The first comrade who had thrown everything away to follow Trident twelve years ago. A man like a father, who had guzzled rum on deck every voyage and roared the sailors into line with his booming voice.
His arm now lay there, just a lump of meat.
It had been torn from the shoulder with brutal indifference. White shards of bone peeked through the flesh. The fingers were still slightly curled, as if trying to grasp something even now.
"…………*gh*"
Trident's throat made a strangled, convulsive sound.
His hands trembled. He tried to lift the arm, to cradle it, and dropped it. So heavy. Was a human body always this heavy?
Beside it lay a sea chart, soaked in blood.
Jonas's chart.
A young sailor, nineteen, his face still holding the ghost of boyhood. His hometown port had been burned by monsters, and the crew had picked him up. He'd wanted to be a navigator, and he'd carried this chart on his person at all times. He could barely read or write, yet he could memorize the positions of the stars more accurately than anyone.
That chart was now dyed utterly black with Jonas's blood.
"…………Ah… …Aah…"
A groan, like an animal's, escaped Trident's lips.
He was a pirate. He had believed he understood that death was always at his side.
But this was different.
He couldn't protect his crew. As captain, entrusted with forty-two lives, he had only seven left.
Rolf. Jonas. Lutz, the assistant gunnery chief. Claudio of the sail crew. Dario, the boatswain. The twin lookouts, Michael and Gabriel—their faces surfaced in his mind, one after another, and vanished.
Lutz's smile, always fond of his rum. Claudio's stooped back, his pipe perpetually clenched in his teeth.
None of them were here anymore.
Trident drove his broken cutlass point-first into the deck. The blade was shattered halfway down, and what remained was hideously warped. He gripped the hilt with both hands, hunched over it as if in prayer, and curled into himself.
A silent scream tore through his entire body.
It was a wail of anguish. The man they called the Captain of Steel, weeping and crying out, for the first time in his life.
"…Gh… …Uu, AAAAAAAHHHHH!!"
The deck grew wet with his tears.
From the shadow of the wreckage, Garnet watched him.
Her nun's habit was fouled with blood, brine, and mud. Her silver hair clung to her forehead in damp strands. The countless scars on her left arm were visible through her torn sleeve, swollen and raw and red.
(*This man… is crying.*)
That pirate, cold and ruthless as steel, savage as a beast.
On his knees, clutching the remains of his comrade, sobbing like a child.
Garnet's crimson eyes wavered.
She rose on trembling legs, and with a sharp *rip*, tore the hem of her own habit. The formal vestments of a saint became mere rags. She began to wind the cloth into makeshift bandages.
She approached Trident and gently touched his left shoulder.
"…Trident. Captain."
He didn't respond. He just kept sobbing, his shoulders shaking.
Garnet carefully began to unwrap the bandages on his shoulder.
"…This is a terrible wound."
The sutures were pulling apart, and a yellowish pus was seeping from the gash. The skin around the wound was red and inflamed, radiating heat. Left like this, blood poisoning was a certainty.
She began to clean the wound with a cloth dampened in seawater.
"…I was chosen as a saint in my thirteenth spring."
She began to speak, not to anyone in particular, just letting the words fall.
"My mana sensitivity just happened to be high. For that reason alone, I was taken from my family and shut away in the Grand Cathedral."
She bound the wound and wrapped fresh bandages around it. Her hands were terribly practiced. She had spent years tending to her own wounds.
"The role of a saint… I was taught, and told, it was to protect the people. But the truth was different. Every day, they pressed crystals to this arm and drained my mana. I was just… a sacrifice."
In Trident's arms, Rolf's severed limb lay still, as if listening to her words.
"I was afraid to die… but there was no way out of there except death… I told myself it was to protect everyone… I lied to myself, and prayed, and prayed… and that's how I lived…"
Tears traced down her cheeks and fell onto the burn scars on Trident's shoulder.
"I just… I just wanted someone to see me. The real me. Not Garnet the Saint. Just… a seventeen-year-old girl…"
Her voice was thin and trembling. Words she could never have spoken inside the cathedral. Her true feelings. Out of her cage, on the sea for the first time, she spoke of her loneliness in her own words.
Trident slowly raised his head.
His face, smeared with tears, blood, and mud, was gaunt beyond recognition. But the light in his deep navy eyes had not gone out.
He gently squeezed Garnet's hand in return.
"…Me too."
His voice was hoarse.
"I've been… dreaming of that fire, all this time. The faces of the ones I couldn't save… they come to me every night. Even today… I feel like Rolf and Jonas are watching me… 'I'm sorry I couldn't protect you'… that's all I can think…"
He gripped Garnet's bandaged shoulder with one hand.
"Both of us… had everything important stolen from us by that goddamn Empire. Isn't that right?"
"…Yes."
"Then it's not over yet. Like hell I'm giving up while they keep what they stole. Your life… and my life… they start now."
It was a resonance of souls, transcending their positions as saint and pirate. Just two people.
At that moment, a desperate cry rang out from below decks.
"Captain!! The code—I've deciphered the code!!"
Klaus, the navigator, crawled up onto the deck, clutching a sodden sea chart. His face was pale, his whole body trembling.
"That bastard Olly… he's planning something insane…!"
Trident rose, using his broken cutlass as a cane. The fresh bandages on his left shoulder glowed starkly, the white of Garnet's habit.
"Show me."
He spread the chart out. It was the coded chart Olly had left behind in the ship's lower hold. Anomalous Aether Current readings were crammed into every corner. A flow utterly unlike any natural current stretched in a perfectly straight line through the heart of the Stormveil Strait, as if artificially manufactured.
"A safe passage… huh."
"Exactly! That bastard is using the current-control power of the Saint's Tears to create a wall of current right through the middle of the Siren's Teeth! With this, you could cross the strait without interference from monsters or storms…!"
With a trembling finger, Klaus pointed to the final line of the cipher.
"And these are the coordinates for the final destination. Off the coast of Kalista… the former Canaria Island."
The moment she heard that name, Garnet drew a small, sharp breath. The scars on her left arm flickered with a momentary phosphorescence.
"…The Saint's Tears are calling. In that direction… without a doubt."
Klaus, his face still pale, continued.
"Canaria Island is a major nexus of the sea currents. If the Saint's Tears are fully unleashed there… it won't just be Midgards. The nations of the Peryton Trade Federation too—a three-hundred-meter tsunami will wipe out… everything…!"
Trident gripped his broken cutlass.
(*Olly… you'd go that far…*)
An island erased by massacre. The reason Olly had chosen it was painfully clear. A symbol of vengeance. He intended to end everything where it all began.
Garnet squeezed Trident's trembling hand back.
"Captain… I've been thinking."
Her crimson eyes held no more hesitation.
"Just reclaiming the Saint's Tears isn't enough. If we don't stop his hatred itself… it's meaningless. I… I want to stop Olly. And then… I want to save him."
It wasn't a mission as a saint. It was her first act of will, as a single human being.
Listening to her, Trident stared at his broken cutlass.
"…I don't have any confidence. I thought of him as a friend. Even now… I don't know if I can really kill him."
Feverish and delirious, he voiced his agonizing resolve.
"But I have to stop him. If I don't stop him… this time, I'll never be able to forgive my own life."
He looked over the seven crew members gathered on the deck—Elmer the ship's surgeon, Klaus the navigator, Heinz the chief gunner, and three nameless sailors.
"Listen up. I'm the worst captain, who couldn't protect any of you. So this isn't an order. It's my last request."
He fixed his gaze on the bearing of Canaria Island, where ruin awaited.
"From here on, I'm going to punch that bastard's lights out. I won't ask you to come. If you want off this ship, now's the time. No one will blame you. You don't want to die, right?"
Silence fell.
It was broken by the hoarse voice of Heinz, the chief gunner.
"What the hell are you saying, Captain?"
He sat perched on a fragment of a shattered cannon, his face grimy with gunpowder, and grinned.
"Olly was our comrade. We've got a duty to settle the score too, for letting him carry it all alone. No way we're letting the captain shoulder this by himself."
"I'm with you."
Elmer, the surgeon, continued in a calm voice.
"I wanted to be the one to sew up First Mate Rolf's arm. I wanted him to live longer, to get into more stupid fights. …I can't let his regret be for nothing."
"Isn't it obvious, Captain! Even in this wreck of a ship, I'll follow you to the depths of hell!"
Klaus the navigator laughed, wiping away tears.
"I'm staying too!" "Me too!"
The three remaining sailors, in their tattered clothes, rose powerfully to their feet.
The regret of forty-two had transformed into the resolve of seven.
Trident looked at each of their faces, one by one, and bowed his head, deeply, deeply.
"…I'm in your debt."
He wound bandages around the hilt of his broken cutlass, wrapping it tightly. The blade, stained with blood, tears, and the bone-dust of his sister, gleamed dully.
He gripped the helm and turned the ship toward Canaria Island.
"Set course for Canaria Island. We're going to show that bastard Olly exactly what my answer is. All hands, to your stations. From here on out—this is the real, final voyage."
The seven sailors, wearing quiet, beast-like grins, began to move.
Then, still gripping the helm, Trident whispered so only Klaus could hear.
"…And one more thing. There's a high chance an Imperial Navy reserve fleet is waiting at the mouth of the strait. That bastard Gustav isn't impatient for war. He'll have a detached force moving to secure his prey for certain."
Klaus's face froze over again.
"But don't tell anyone this yet. Just keep it in th
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