Chapter Three: Unlucky Fortune

As Sun Li was basking in the pride of his eloquent speech, he was unceremoniously escorted to the cargo hold by several wood elves. Gazing at this place—clearly unfit for human habitation—Sun Li began to suspect that perhaps what he’d said earlier wasn’t entirely appropriate.

How much must they dislike me to toss me into a place with such “good feng shui”? At the very least, I’m a young master, am I not? I even told them I’m fabulously wealthy! How could that girl be so devoid of social sense? To treat a man of my means like this—no wonder she’s reduced to piracy! It serves her right to be penniless for life.

Sun Li felt wounded. After all the grand things he said about himself, even if he didn’t expect special treatment or intimacy, he thought he deserved at least decent food and a place to stay. Even now, he refused to admit that his own shamelessness had landed him in trouble.

In truth, Sun Li hadn’t been entirely dishonest. Aside from the exaggerated boasts about his charm and dazzling looks, his other claims were not far from the truth for a monarch. If he wished, it would have been a simple matter for him to prove himself. Yet the truth is often harder to believe—especially since who could imagine a king, on a whim, would venture alone into the world?

As for a king possessing the combat prowess of a Grand Knight, that was pure fantasy. No Grand Knight achieves such strength without decades of arduous training, and Sun Li looked to be a youth in his twenties. If he truly had a Grand Knight’s power, had he started training in the womb?

Thus, Sun Li was inevitably taken for a braggart and a spoiled young master.

“Considering you’re as beautiful as a goddess, I’ll let you off this time. This young master is nothing if not magnanimous…” Sun Li muttered gloomily to himself in the cargo hold, trying to find solace in his own forbearance. For a king to be brought so low and still endure it—he felt he could be proud of his willpower, though he didn’t find it anything worth boasting about.

While Sun Li sulked in the cargo hold, Su Yunyun was busy with her grand pirate enterprise. The pirate ship was not large, equipped with only sixteen cannons—eight on each side. It was no match for even the smallest cruiser of their mortal enemy, the English Empire, whose seafaring ships boasted at least thirty-two guns and double decks. The English navy’s formidable firepower was the result of years of naval warfare with the Madrid Empire and their efforts to suppress pirates.

In the heyday of piracy, these wealthy pirate lords spared no expense on their ships. Most pirates owned vessels similar to Su Yunyun’s, armed with sixteen cannons, and the most powerful even had double-decked warships, giving them tremendous might. To counter and eradicate these threats, the English and the Frankonian Empires had to continually escalate the size and firepower of their fleets. The results spoke for themselves: save for these death-defying wood elf pirates, all other human pirates had vanished from the seas.

Now, in the Caribbean Strait, life for Su Yunyun’s wood elf pirates was growing ever harder. With the English tightening coastal defenses and wood elf casualties mounting, hers was the last pirate ship in the region still harassing English shipping lanes. Su Yunyun knew well that the gains from intercepting English merchant ships at sea were no longer worth the losses. The cost of a single ship and its cannons could instead buy enough muskets to arm a wood elf guerrilla unit. English merchant ships grew ever more heavily armed, making piracy increasingly costly. Once a pirate ship was sunk, there was no hope of replacement—this vessel was now the most powerful that the wood elves of the Caribbean possessed. Otherwise, as the wood elf leader in the region, Su Yunyun would never have come aboard to command the ship herself.

“Once we get this ransom, we’ll return to the Golden Continent and join the guerrillas. Attacking English merchant ships at sea has become too costly. We cannot afford to lose more of our people. The real battle to drive out the colonizers is on land,” Su Yunyun said to a few trusted companions as they sat in a small meeting room.

As her confidants lamented the hardships of pirate life, an urgent alarm bell suddenly rang out.

Bang! The meeting room door burst open and a panicked wood elf stumbled in. “Chief, we’ve been spotted by an English cruiser! They’re racing towards us at full speed. Their new warships are incredibly fast—we can’t outrun them!”

Su Yunyun and her lieutenants sprang to their feet. The inevitable had arrived. Even though they had long been prepared to sacrifice themselves, the moment still brought a wave of dread.

“Get everyone ready for battle! Even if we die, we’ll make the English pay. Wood elf warriors never surrender!” Su Yunyun rallied them, her words stirring the spirit of defiant resistance against the English colonizers.

Inspired by her resolve, the wood elf pirates remembered that though captivity might mean survival, a life of slavery under humans was too terrible to contemplate. Their spirits soared. Gunners rolled out the cannons and readied them to fire; sail hands, helmsmen, and melee fighters all rushed to their posts.

Each wood elf took up their weapon, prepared to slay the enemy or end their own life if defeat was imminent. A spirit of heroic sacrifice swept the ship—one could sense, in that aura, all the old wounds and the iron determination to fight to the death.

Amid this fevered preparation, Sun Li was entirely ignored. Sitting in the cargo hold, he’d heard the alarm bell, but, knowing nothing of sailing, he had no idea what it meant. Confident in his own safety, he even mused aloud on the sound of the bell, finding it more melodious than the ones used on his merchant ships—though slightly too hurried for musical taste. He felt no sense of approaching danger at all, a perfect example of “ignorance is bliss.”

As Sun Li idly listened to the bell to ease his boredom, the wood elf pirate ship was finally overtaken by the English cruiser. They were now within cannon range. From the side of the English warship, rows of cannons extended through the gunports, ready to unleash their devastating might upon their enemies.