Meanwhile, while Maverick was running calculations in his church basement like a chessmaster planning six moves ahead...
Captain Blackbeard was having a significantly worse evening.
"Well, well. Would you look at that." The Captain leaned against the railing of the Queen Anne's Revenge, watching the distant warehouse district through a spyglass. "Saber's a complete moron. Left his Master behind to chase down the Assassin, and the poison did the rest. Dragged his own Master into the grave." He snapped the spyglass shut. "You wouldn't catch me making that mistake, right lads?"
"Hard to say~" his Master replied from beside him. "Would you actually prioritize protecting me in a fight?"
The Captain turned. Grinned. It was not a reassuring grin.
"Let me put it this way. If I had to choose between saving myself and saving you?" He spread his hands in an expansive shrug. "I'd choose me. Every time. Without hesitation."
"...At least you're honest."
"Honesty is a pirate's finest virtue! After all, we live for the moment — isn't that right, lads?"
The crew — a motley collection of ghostly sailors who manned the rigging and guns of the spectral warship — responded with enthusiasm.
"Aye, Captain!"
"That's the spirit, Captain!"
"Captain, can I have a turn with the—"
"Absolutely not," the Master said flatly.
"Aww."
What a delightful bunch of degenerates.
The Master — a middle-aged man named Marcus — stood beside his Servant and tried very hard to maintain his dignity while surrounded by the most morally bankrupt crew in naval history.
It wasn't easy.
Marcus had been, in his previous life, what you might generously call an "opportunist." The kind of man who bought when others were panicking and sold when others were celebrating. Sneakers to stocks, stocks to gold, gold to crypto — always chasing the next wave, always one step ahead of the crash.
Or one step behind it.
Honestly, the line between "financial genius" and "financial disaster" was thinner than most people realized, and Marcus had spent most of his career tap-dancing on it. If the system hadn't yanked him out of his world when it did, he'd have been facing some very uncomfortable conversations with his creditors. And possibly the pavement, from a very high floor.
So when the rules of the Holy Grail War had appeared in his vision — kill or be killed, winner takes all, supernatural powers included — Marcus hadn't seen danger.
He'd seen opportunity.
Superpowers. Money. A fresh start. The ultimate comeback story for a man whose entire life had been a series of increasingly desperate gambles.
The corners of his mouth twitched upward at the thought. Middle-aged renaissance. From rock bottom to the top of the world. All he had to do was survive seven days.
How hard could it be?
The universe was about to answer that question. Enthusiastically.
It was, in hindsight, extremely fortunate that Marcus and his crew hadn't visited the Holy Church to collect their startup cash.
Because if Blackbeard and his merry band of pirates had walked into Maverick's church and seen a young priest calmly handing out bags containing a million dollars each, the resulting chaos would have been... problematic.
For Maverick.
Because this shipload of pirates could be summarized in a single phrase: greedy, short-sighted, and completely without impulse control. The kind of people who'd rob a church mid-prayer if the collection plate looked heavy enough.
But fate had other plans for them tonight.
"Captain!" The lookout, perched high in the crow's nest, suddenly called down with an edge of confusion in his voice. "There's something coming toward us. From the east. Looks like... a black meteor?"
The Captain barely glanced up. "Don't be stupid. What meteor is black? You've been drinking again. If it's a cannonball, just say it's a cannon—"
BOOM.
The impact hit the Queen Anne's Revenge dead center.
Not the deck. Not the mast. Not the hull. The keel. The structural spine of the entire ship — the single most important piece of engineering holding the vessel together — snapped like a twig under the force of something that had crossed miles of open ocean in seconds and struck with the precision of a guided missile.
The ship didn't sink. It broke.
The sound was apocalyptic — a shrieking, groaning, splintering crack that split the night air like thunder, followed by the deep, resonant boom of a three-masted warship folding in half like a book being closed. The bow pitched upward. The stern pitched upward. The middle sagged into the black water like a broken spine.
Chaos erupted.
"We're going down!"
"Is the Captain dead? If the Captain's dead, I'm in charge!"
"Like hell you are — I'm the new Captain!"
"Nobody's the new Captain! Swim!"
"What hit us?!"
"It's one of those — it's a — look at the size of it!"
"A what?!"
"THAT! ON THE STERN!"
The crew — for all their many, many moral failings — were not entirely wrong to panic.
Because standing on the rapidly sinking stern section of the Queen Anne's Revenge, silhouetted against the night sky like a monument to bad news, was something that did not belong in any century, on any ocean, in any sane reality.
It was humanoid. Technically. In the same way that a gorilla was technically a primate.
Three and a half meters tall. Pitch-black skin that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. A bald head that gleamed like polished obsidian. Muscles stacked on muscles stacked on more muscles, the kind of physique that looked less like a human body and more like a siege weapon wrapped in skin. A single gold tooth glinted in the moonlight when it opened its mouth.
And when it opened its mouth, the sound that came out was not words.
It was a roar.
Raw, primal, vibrating with so much power that the surface of the water rippled outward from the sheer force of the sound.
Berserker.
Marcus had been thrown clear of the ship when it broke apart. The impact had launched him into the ocean, the freezing water had knocked the consciousness out of him like a switch being flipped, and then a rough, calloused hand had dragged him back to the surface and slapped him awake.
"Rise and shine," the Captain said cheerfully, treading water with one arm while holding Marcus above the surface with the other. "We've got company."
Marcus blinked. Coughed up seawater. Looked around.
The Queen Anne's Revenge was in two pieces. Debris floated everywhere — planks, barrels, rigging, the shattered remains of cannon carriages. Crew members bobbed in the water like corks, some swimming, some clinging to wreckage, all of them making a tremendous amount of noise.
And standing on the largest piece of floating wreckage — the stern section, which was sinking but hadn't quite finished the job — was the biggest living thing Marcus had ever seen.
"What," Marcus whispered, "is that?"
Before the Captain could answer, a chunk of broken timber the size of a baseball bat came whistling through the air, missing Marcus's ear by inches and caving in the skull of a crew member floating behind him.
The splash of red in the black water.
The wet, final sound of impact.
Every muscle in Marcus's body locked up. His breathing stopped. His vision tunneled. The seawater around him was turning from black to dark crimson, spreading outward from the floating body like ink in a glass, and Marcus — who had spent his entire life calculating risk and reward, profit and loss, the mathematics of survival — felt every calculation in his brain crash simultaneously.
He screamed.
It was not a dignified scream. It was the high, piercing, primal shriek of a man whose hindbrain had just realized that he was in the water, in the dark, with a monster, and that the concept of "opportunity" had been a very, very bad joke.
"AAAGH—"
"Shut up!" the Captain hissed. "Do you want it to notice us?"
"AAAGH—"
"Pirate Lullaby!"
The Captain's hand came down on the back of Marcus's neck in a precise, practiced chop — the kind of blow that a man who'd spent centuries knocking out hysterical sailors could deliver in his sleep. Marcus's scream cut off mid-note, his eyes rolled back, and he went limp.
"There we go," the Captain muttered, hauling his unconscious Master onto a floating plank. "Sweet dreams."
Then he looked up.
And met the eyes of the Berserker.
For one long, terrible moment, Pirate and Berserker stared at each other across thirty feet of debris-strewn ocean.
The Captain assessed the situation with the speed of a man who'd been in more fights than most people had hot meals.
The enemy was three and a half meters tall. Built like something that belonged in mythology, not reality. Had just broken his ship in half with a single blow. And was currently standing on the sinking remains of the Queen Anne's Revenge, scanning the water with eyes that burned with the mindless, indiscriminate fury of a Berserker-class Servant.
On a scale of "bad" to "catastrophic," this was somewhere around "extinction-level event."
But the Captain was, above all else, a pirate. And pirates didn't survive by being brave. They survived by being clever.
"Hello there!" the Captain called out, raising one hand in a friendly wave. Gentleman's courtesy. Always start polite.
"ROAR!"
SMASH!
Courtesy was not reciprocated.
The Berserker's response was to rip the ship's mast out of the deck — the entire mast, a solid timber pole forty feet long — and swing it at the water like a baseball bat aimed at the Captain's head.
The impact sent a wall of water skyward. The Captain was already gone — diving deep, Marcus tucked under one arm, cutting through the black water with the speed and agility of a man who'd spent his entire life at sea.
He surfaced twenty feet away, deposited Marcus on another plank, and spun to face the Berserker.
Time for Plan B.
"Who do you think I am?!" the Captain roared, pulling himself up onto a piece of floating wreckage and drawing the flintlock pistol from his belt. "I am an immortal, unsinkable, indestructible pirate! Lads — GET HIM!"
"Aye, Captain!"
"On it, Captain!"
"Right behind you, Captain!"
The remaining crew surged forward — a dozen ghostly sailors, brandishing cutlasses and boarding axes, swarming toward the Berserker from every direction like angry wasps attacking a bear.
The Captain leveled his pistol. Point-blank range. Aimed right between the Berserker's eyes.
Fired.
The blast lit up the night — a plume of flame and smoke erupting from the barrel, the shot striking the Berserker square in the face.
The smoke cleared.
The Berserker's face was undamaged. Not a scratch. Not a mark. The only visible difference was that the black skin was now slightly blacker where the gunpowder residue had settled.
The Captain's grin froze.
Oh. That's not ideal.
The Berserker backhanded three crew members into the ocean with a single sweep of the mast, then turned its burning gaze back toward the Captain.
Right. New plan.
The Captain sheathed his pistol, drew the cutlass from his hip, and planted his feet on the floating timber. The classic stance. One man, one blade, one piece of driftwood between himself and a three-and-a-half-meter monster.
This was it. The final stand. The legendary last—
The Berserker roared and charged.
"NOW, LADS! RUN!"
The crew didn't need to be told twice.
Every single one of them — every ghostly sailor, every spectral pirate, every dead man who'd followed the Captain across centuries of ocean — dropped their weapons and bolted. Dove into the water, kicked off debris, swam for their miserable afterlives with a speed that would have embarrassed Olympic athletes.
The Captain was fastest of all.
With Marcus slung over one shoulder like a sack of potatoes, Blackbeard cut through the water like a torpedo, leaving his own crew in his wake, his legs churning with a survival instinct honed by a lifetime of knowing when to fight and when to flee.
The Berserker stood on the sinking stern, momentarily confused.
One second they'd been screaming war cries and charging. The next second — nothing. Empty water. Abandoned weapons. A fleet of cowards swimming for the horizon at maximum speed.
Confusion turned to rage.
The Berserker's roar shook the harbor. He tensed to leap after them—
And the wreckage beneath his feet vanished.
One moment, the stern section of the Queen Anne's Revenge was there — battered, broken, but solid enough to stand on. The next moment, it simply ceased to exist, dissolving into motes of golden light like a Noble Phantasm being dismissed.
Because it was.
The ship wasn't a real ship. It had never been a real ship. The Queen Anne's Revenge was a Noble Phantasm — a manifestation of Blackbeard's legend, summoned and maintained by his will. And with a single thought, the Captain could dismiss it.
All of it. Including the part the Berserker was standing on.
Three and a half meters of muscle and fury plunged into the black ocean like a dropped anchor.
SPLASH.
From fifty yards away, treading water with his unconscious Master balanced on a plank beside him, the Captain cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted across the harbor.
"YOU FELL FOR IT! Classic pirate bait-and-switch! Only a fool fights a monster head-on — to match wits with me, you're two million years too early!"
He was grinning. Ear to ear. The grin of a man who'd just pulled off the greatest escape of his career.
"You want to stand on my ship? Fine! I'll just take the ship away! Enjoy the swim, big guy!"
The Berserker surfaced, sputtering, flailing.
Then sank again.
Then surfaced.
Then sank.
Berserkers, it turned out, were not known for their swimming ability.
The Captain threw his head back and laughed.
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