The Pirate Hunt had dragged on for ten long years.
A war of attrition, decreed by kings and carried out by admirals, meant to purge the seas of the black-flagged scourge. It was not mercy but extermination. Fleet after fleet hunted them down. Pirates were hanged by the dozen, their corpses swaying as warnings in every harbor. Ships were burned to cinders, their ashes scattered across the tide. Of all who once ruled the sea, seventy percent were destroyed, their banners drowned in blood and fire. The few who remained slunk into hiding, vanishing into coves and half-forgotten isles, praying to be forgotten.
But not all of them.
There was one who did not hide. One who never begged. Where others scattered like rats before the torch, he sailed straight into the fire. He had no name, not one the Crown or the people could agree on. They called him only Him—a faceless shadow, a myth made flesh. But all knew the name of his ship: the Victoric, christened by his enemies as the Maverick Revenger.
The Victoric was no ordinary vessel. Black-hulled, blood-sailed, its timbers stained with the memory of battle, it was more beast than ship. Men swore it breathed in storms and spat fire from its iron belly. Wherever it appeared, the sea turned red, and wherever it vanished, only wreckage remained. To the Crown it was a curse. To the broken pirate brotherhood, it was a legend.
The day His legend sharpened into terror came in the Shattered Straits. The Royal Fleet had cornered Him—five ships of war, bristling with cannon, led by the king's own flagship. Any sane man would have run, hidden, or surrendered. But He was not sane. He was something else entirely.
He raised no white flag. He raised only His sails.
What followed was slaughter written into the sea itself. The Royal Fleet fired in thunderous unison, cannonballs hurling death across the waves. Yet the Victoric moved like a phantom, cutting through smoke and iron. He weaved between broadsides, struck from impossible angles, and vanished into fog only to reappear where death was least expected. His crew, fanatics bound by blood oath, fought like demons. Grappling hooks dragged royal sailors into His deck, where cutlasses did the rest.
By dusk, the straits were a graveyard. Four royal warships burned, their masts collapsing into flame. The last ship fled, broken and disgraced. The Crown called the defeat impossible, a wound to their pride. The people called it a miracle. But among pirates—scattered, hunted, half-dead—it was called something else.
Hope.
For if one ship, one nameless captain, could defy an empire, then perhaps the seas had not yet been tamed.
And so His myth grew. Not a man, not a hero, but a faceless figure at the helm of the Victoric, a shadow who mocked kings and fleets alike. The Pirate Hunt would rage on, fiercer and bloodier than ever. But beneath every gallows and behind every tavern whisper, the same name lingered on trembling lips:
Him.
The captain who refused to vanish.
The last defiance of the sea.