Half an hour ago.
In an unremarkable rented apartment on the third floor of a building that had seen better decades, Marcus sat on a stained mattress, wrapped in a blanket like a burrito of misery, and tried very hard not to make eye contact with anyone in the room.
His eyes were bloodshot. Not from crying — from not sleeping. He hadn't slept in two days. Not because he couldn't, but because he didn't dare.
Empty bottles littered the floor. Wine. Rum. Something that might have been whiskey or might have been paint thinner — the label had fallen off sometime during what the crew referred to as "Tuesday evening" and Marcus referred to as "the worst night of my life."
"God, it's stuffy in here! Martin, you idiot — why did you have to trash those college kids' stuff? Now there's nothing left to do. No games, no music, nothing. If I don't find some entertainment soon, I'm going to twist your head clean off!"
"Blame me? You didn't stop me when I was doing it. You were cheering me on! How was I supposed to know the only thing in this dump was a TV that doesn't even get a signal?"
"Hey... why do these feel so smooth?"
"GET YOUR HAND OFF MY— those are mine, Pasdin!"
"..."
Marcus pulled the blanket tighter around himself and stared at the wall.
He couldn't figure it out. He genuinely, sincerely, from the bottom of his soul could not figure out how his summoning had gone so catastrophically wrong.
The affinity system was supposed to match your Servant to your personality. Your values. Your wavelength. And Marcus — a man whose entire life had been built on opportunism, calculated risk, and the pursuit of profit — had somehow been matched with the most infamous pirate in naval history.
Edward Teach. Blackbeard.
And Blackbeard hadn't come alone.
He'd brought his crew.
A crew of ghostly, foul-mouthed, morally bankrupt pirates who were, technically speaking, extensions of his Noble Phantasm — fragments of the Queen Anne's Revenge given human form and very human appetites.
Marcus's mind drifted back to the moment they'd first broken into this rented apartment. The college students who'd been living here hadn't stood a chance. The crew had descended on the place like locusts — eating everything in the fridge, drinking everything with a proof rating, destroying the furniture, and engaging in behavior that Marcus absolutely refused to think about in detail.
He clenched involuntarily.
Because that was the real reason he couldn't sleep.
It wasn't the war. It wasn't the Berserker. It wasn't the existential terror of a death game with a seven-day countdown.
It was the very real, very justified fear that if he closed his eyes, he'd wake up to find one of these animals had decided he looked like good company.
This is not how the protagonist arc is supposed to go, Marcus thought miserably.
In fairness to Blackbeard — and Marcus hated being fair to Blackbeard — the Captain himself was actually an exceptional Servant.
The legendary pirate. The man who'd defined piracy. Whose name had become synonymous with maritime terror across three centuries of history. The fame bonus alone gave Blackbeard a stat sheet that would make most Servants jealous.
Strength at B+. Endurance at A. The second most physically powerful Servant in this entire Holy Grail War, behind only Darius III himself. In a straight fight, Blackbeard could trade blows with almost anyone.
His only weak point was Agility at E — which basically translated to "can't run worth a damn." A stat so low it was practically a joke entry on his Spirit Origin. The man could hit like a siege engine and take punishment like a fortress wall, but ask him to sprint and he moved like he was wading through molasses.
And his Noble Phantasm — the Queen Anne's Revenge — was more versatile than it appeared. Most people saw "pirate ship" and assumed it was just transportation. But the Revenge was a composite-type Noble Phantasm — it didn't just summon the ship. It summoned the crew. Every pirate who'd sailed with Blackbeard, every loyal subordinate who'd fought beside him in his final stand, manifested as part of the Noble Phantasm's framework.
And there was a reason these particular pirates were the ones who appeared.
Because Blackbeard's death had been legendary.
When the Royal Navy had finally cornered him, Blackbeard hadn't run. Hadn't surrendered. Hadn't begged. He'd stood on the deck of his ship, outnumbered and outgunned, and fought. Five gunshot wounds. Twelve sword cuts. And still standing, still swinging, still roaring — until his body finally gave out from sheer blood loss and he collapsed with his blade in his hand.
The pirates summoned by his Noble Phantasm were the ones who'd been there for that last stand. The ones who'd fought beside him when retreat was impossible and survival was a fantasy.
They were loyal. Genuinely, fiercely, irrationally loyal.
They were also, without exception, the worst human beings Marcus had ever encountered.
"Could you please keep it down?"
Marcus's voice came out thin and strained — the voice of a man running on caffeine, adrenaline, and the desperate hope that this was all a bad dream.
"Keep it down?" The pirate called Dingding — a wiry, sharp-faced man with a permanent sneer and a talent for saying exactly the thing you didn't want to hear — spread his hands in mock offense. "Boss, you said we were too quiet before. You wanted noise. Now we're noisy and you want silence. Make up your mind!"
"Exactly," Martin added. Martin was the drunk. Not "a drunk" — the drunk. The platonic ideal of alcoholism given human form. "If you ask me, boss, your problem isn't the noise. Your problem is stress. Tell you what — I'll let you use my cheeks to—"
"Don't finish that sentence."
"Boss!" The third pirate — Galadin, the self-appointed "ideas man" of the group — stepped forward with his hands raised in a placating gesture. "Look. Don't take this the wrong way. Pasdin talks garbage, we all know that. But the kid's got a point buried in there somewhere. Stress that doesn't get released will crush you."
He paused for effect.
"When Martin and I were scouting the city yesterday, we found this really nice spa in the commercial district. High-end place. Very clean. Very... relaxing."
He wiggled his eyebrows.
"What do you say, boss? Go get a spa treatment? Blow off some steam? You'll think clearer afterward. Right, Martin?"
"Absolutely," Martin confirmed, nodding sagely. "Nothing like a hot bath and a—"
"I get it," Marcus interrupted.
He sat there for a long moment. Blanket around his shoulders. Bloodshot eyes staring at nothing.
The truth was... Galadin wasn't wrong. Marcus knew it. He'd spent his whole career managing stress through... outlets. Back when he was riding the stock market — win or lose, bull or bear — the first thing he did after closing his portfolio for the day was decompress. Restaurants. Clubs. Whatever it took to drain the pressure before it cracked him open.
And right now, after two days of no sleep, no escape, and the constant company of four pirates who collectively represented humanity's absolute moral floor, the pressure was threatening to split his skull.
But there was still a sliver of rational thought left in his exhausted brain.
"Relaxing sounds fine," Marcus said carefully. "But we could just order something in. The Captain told you to keep me here. If you drag me outside and something happens, he'll—"
"Oh, boss." Galadin's grin was somewhere between sympathetic and predatory. "Don't overthink it. We're pirates. We drink today, worry tomorrow. Carpe diem and all that."
"And if you don't want to come," Martin added, "that's fine. Me and Galadin will go on our own. You can stay here. With Pasdin."
A pause.
"Hehe," said Pasdin.
Marcus looked at Pasdin. Pasdin looked at Marcus. Pasdin's smile widened.
"Besides," Galadin continued, his voice taking on a more reasonable tone, "think about it logically, boss. The Captain went to find Archer and Lancer to team up against Berserker. That means the only Servant not accounted for is Caster. And with Caster's combat power?" He scoffed. "I could handle Caster with one hand tied behind my back. The real question is: do you want to stay locked in this room with Pasdin, or do you want to go get a bath?"
"Hehe!" Pasdin said, more enthusiastically this time.
Marcus stood up so fast the blanket fell off his shoulders.
"Fine. Let's go. You win."
Gay Pasdin. Drunkard Martin. Ideas-Man Galadin. Sharp-Tongued Dingding.
These four pirates had, in the space of five minutes, accomplished something that logic, strategy, and common sense had failed to achieve for two full days.
They'd gotten Marcus out of the safehouse.
Not through persuasion. Not through tactical argument. Not through any grand strategic reasoning. Through the simple, primal, unanswerable threat of being left alone in a room with Pasdin.
And so Marcus — wrapped in a coat, flanked by four ghostly pirates in civilian clothes, walking through the city streets toward a spa he didn't need to visit — became the wild card that nobody had planned for.
Not Maverick, with his eighty-seven invisible assassins and his meticulously constructed intelligence network.
Not Napoleon, with his Light of Possibility and his three-dimensional battlefield analysis.
Not even Blackbeard himself, who had specifically ordered his crew to keep Marcus indoors.
Because no amount of genius-level planning could account for the one variable that had toppled empires since the dawn of civilization:
Horny pirates with bad ideas.
All of Maverick's brilliant schemes — the fake death, the church infiltration, the invisible surveillance network, the political manipulation — had been designed to control the board. To predict every move. To stay three steps ahead of every player.
And none of it could have predicted that Marcus would leave his safehouse because four degenerate sailors had threatened him with unsolicited companionship.
A wise man plans for a thousand contingencies.
But even the wisest man can't plan for a fool's impulse.