Chapter 1735: Pirates

Leonel's eyes snapped open immediately.

Aina sat on her knees nearby. She had already looked off into the distance, but it was difficult to see anything from this location. This room didn't have any mirrors, and although there were monitors around to observe the situation outside, none of them had been turned on. Considering what the two had been doing in this room, they didn't have time to care about such things.

Leonel tried to sit up but an aching pain took hold of his body, threatening to make his consciousness fade. If it wasn't for the fact he had used Instant Recovery once already, he might have directly passed out just now.

Aina looked back and panicked slightly.

"It's fine, I can handle it."

Leonel chuckled lightly and winced as he slowly pushed himself up.

"You don't even know what's going on outside, how could you say that so confidently?"

Seeing that Leonel was in the mood to joke around, Aina rolled her eyes. If this man didn't look like he was at death's door, she would really teach him a lesson.

Leonel's pale violet hair and irises had lost all of their color, both looking far more like a pale gray and lacking the vibrancy they had once had before. He was still naked, so it was all too easy to see his skin sticking loosely to his bone. His cheeks were sunken and the bags under his eyes were practically black. At a glance, he looked like a talking zombie with a small dash of handsomeness probably only Aina could see with her love-tinted glasses.

That said, Leonel wasn't wrong. To say that the warship with the size of a moon was actually a bit of an underestimation of its size. Without the monitors activated, Aina's mind, even with its recent buffs, had no way of seeing far enough to check on what was going on outside.

BANG!

The warship shudders again as Leonel just barely managed to push himself up.

"Even so, it's too dangerous for you to go. Your Instant Recovery didn't even work this time, at least absorb some of the demon corpses first."

Leonel shook his head. "I'll be fine. There's no need to waste the demon corpses on this, we only have a limited number of them and they're best used to help everyone else. Don't worry too much, I might look like I have a foot in the grave, but right now, I'm actually more powerful than I've ever been before."

Leonel stood to his feet, wobbling once before he regained his bearings. He slapped his thighs once and a pair of sweatpants covered him up. He couldn't be bothered to dress the rest of himself.

"I'll go see who's ruining our honeymoon."

Aina blushed slightly when she heard this. This man had no tact.

...

Outside the flagship, a fleet of spaceships surrounded the region, a number that could only be counted in the dozens and very close to bordering on the hundreds.

These ships were only a fraction the size of the flagship behemoth, but they all had their cannons trained upon the same location, clearly planning to overwhelm quality with quantity and blast a hole through the hull of the warship.

Not long after the second barrage rocked the flagship, Leonel and Aina appeared at the bow of the warship. Neither of them looked as though they were taking this matter seriously. Leonel wasn't even wearing a shirt, while Aina looked as though the only thing she was wearing was a shirt, having stolen Leonel's since he refused to give her time to prepare.

Leonel had tried to tell her that he would handle things, but she refused given his state. In the end, she rushed after him like this, leaving him more than a little amused, and another much larger part aroused. Unfortunately, he didn't have time to entertain the latter.

Leonel narrowed his eyes and looked at these ships. He had yet to activate the forcefield of the flagship although doing so would have ended this farce. He was more interested in who exactly was attacking him.

After a moment of observation, he was speechless.

Were these... pirates?

The ships looked as though they were cobbled together from scrap metal, barely weathering the astral winds of deep space.

Although the flagship had been "surrounded", in reality the just over a hundred or so spaceships had only covered a small range or else concentrating their fire would have been obvious.

What confused Leonel was what gave these people the balls to do this. Were they blind? Or were they led by an outright idiot?

There was one thing Leonel's intelligence couldn't account for, and that was outright fools. How could you deduce what someone who had been dropped on their head as a baby would do?

As Leonel was trying to understand what was happening, there was a subtle ripple that spread from a ship hidden in the center of the semi-circular formation.

'A signal.'

Leonel understood immediately.

The spaceships geared up once more, their cannons glowing with a radiant light as they aimed forward once again.

'Something is off.'

A ripple spread from Leonel. All around the flagship, his clones appeared once again. In just a small instant, the force field activated.

The beams of light converged, colliding against a recently formed barrier. However, this time, the flagship didn't so much as quake. In fact, the force field didn't even so much as ripple.

As though it had met a perfectly reflective surface, the beams of light reflected back.

Before the spaceships could even react, they were enveloped by a blinding light. By the time Leonel's vision cleared, even his lip could only twitch.

The entire fleet was eradicated in a single blow. No, not the entire fleet, there was just one straggling junkyard ship near the edge that just barely managed to stay outside of the range. But when Leonel's gaze zoomed onto their location, he found that the pilot was practically shitting his pants.

Leonel's gaze narrowed. He could smell the bullshit in the air, and it definitely wasn't coming from that pilot.

At that instant, almost on cue, space warped and shuddered.

As though they had just stepped out of a hyperdrive state, six new ships appeared in an instant. This time, however, they truly did surround the flagship. With a length of several hundred kilometers each, they were just barely large enough to do so as well.