Reincarnated Hero System

Zara Dredgesea had just returned from an evening gathering with several important Alpha Continental nobles, and she was far too exhausted to deal with any of the paperwork waiting on her desk.

Mentally exhausted, that was. Physically, she felt completely fine, and her Sovereign Level body was bursting with energy.

‘And to think I used to enjoy loud events like that…’

Zara dropped onto the couch in her office with a sigh as memories surfaced from her younger years, back when she had first taken to the seas as a pirate, raiding merchant ships and similar targets.

Back then, at the end of every successful raid, she would have everyone celebrate until dawn, marking their victory with loud revelry, sometimes even wasting a portion of their haul in drunken excitement.

She had genuinely enjoyed those noisy and unruly celebrations, and she viewed the nobles’ ‘evening parties’ as little more than opportunities for them to parade their wealth, boast about their fortunes, and whisper gossip about who had spoken to whom and who had ignored whom.

Over the decades that followed her early years of piracy, her preferences had changed considerably.

Now, parties in general tired her out.

She only hosted them occasionally to keep the morale of her subordinates high, making only the briefest required appearances before withdrawing back to the quiet of her office.

Her change in preference was only natural. If someone repeated the same activity over and over across the years, there could come a time when it stopped being enjoyable and simply became tedious.

Zara might look like a woman in her twenties, but she was currently 173 years old. There were many things she had long grown tired of over the nearly 2 centuries she had lived, and several more were gradually finding their way onto that list.

With another sigh, Zara rose and walked over to her desk, picking up the small rectangular device resting on it, something the Alpha Continent’s Major World Powers had recently been promoting heavily.

“A Smartphone, that’s what they called it? It certainly makes communication easier.”

Zara understood the applications and how much the world could gain from the arrival of this technology, but she still found herself frowning lightly whenever she thought about the man responsible for it.

“Evan Eris…”

Her investigations into his activities over the past few years showed that he had played an active role in the development of TVs. He had met with the Utraria Republic’s President several times during their development, and before long, the Republic had become the No 1 manufacturer of those devices on the Continent.

There was no possibility that he had not arranged some kind of agreement with the President.

Not long after the incident in Tarse, where the lives of millions in Kreah Trade City were lost, rumours about these smartphones started spreading, and only months later, they had already appeared on the market.

“Communication. Both those TVs and these smartphones are communication devices. He’s trying to make communication easier, and I doubt it’s simply because he wants the world to develop,” Zara said to herself as she slid the screen upward and read through the messages that Leoniel, her old friend, had sent her.

[Be on guard. Something will likely happen on or before the 30th. Evan is already preparing something and will come to meet you soon.

Remember what I told you earlier. Listen carefully to his words and pay close attention to his actions.]

Zara had known Leoniel for close to a century, and the man was one of the few people she could truly say she ‘trusted’ without it being a lie. Leoniel appeared to feel the same, and the concern he had for her was clearly visible in the message he had sent.

She closed the messaging platform and switched over to the calling one, immediately starting a group call with the Pirate Lord subordinates she had stationed throughout the archipelago.

Zara then spent the next half hour requesting reports about any suspicious activity or unusual events, beginning with the ones stationed on Solen, the island where the entrance to the underwater dungeon, the issue that currently worried her the most, was located.

After each of them reported that nothing unusual had occurred, Zara was preparing to instruct the ones stationed on Ashkel, the island that currently hosted the largest number of nobles and where the gathering she had just left was still taking place, when the Pirate Lord overseeing Solen suddenly spoke.

[Huh? Wha the—!? This is bad! Boss, the dungeon’s magic power readings are rising!]

[What?!]

[All of a sudden?!]

[Send out the coast guard quickly!]

The other Pirate Lords shouted through their lines, and Zara, picking up the phone, hurried over to her office balcony and looked toward the far east. Her brows furrowed deeply when she saw the waters surrounding Solen Island beginning to glow beneath the moonlight.

Powerful waves of magic power burst out from the dungeon, sending rising waves spreading away from the island, and riding those waves were both fish and aquatic monsters.

“Someone go drag that Guildmaster out of Ashkel and get him to issue an Emergency Guild Quest!! This isn’t the time for him to be buttering up nobles!”

[Boss?!]

[On it!]

Zara’s hand gripping the railing of her balcony nearly crushed the metal beneath her fingers as she felt the magic power pouring out of the dungeon increase.

She quickly suppressed her irritation, which was rising just as quickly, possibly even faster, and continued calling out orders.

“Initiate all emergency procedures! Prepare our gunship fleet!”

Turning around and hurrying out of her office while pulling the shining ornaments from her hair that matched her dress, she declared the situation they were now facing.

“We have a dungeon break on our hands!”

The moment those words left her mouth, a massive explosion echoed across the sea, and water erupted from the ocean in towering geysers that rose hundreds of metres into the sky as the barrier of the Solen Dungeon collapsed.

The magic power pouring from the dungeon cast a pale blue glow across the water, a beautiful radiance that illuminated the bodies of the ravenous monsters leaping out of the dungeon and racing across the sea toward land.

◇　◇　◇

The response of Zara’s subordinates to the sudden dungeon break came quickly.

If there was one thing Zara’s Pirate Lords feared even more than making her angry, it was disappointing her.

They were all members of Zara’s original crew from a century ago, and they understood better than anyone that just as Zara had built Zeraxes and granted them their high positions, she could just as easily strip those positions away and reduce them to nothing more than dogs on leashes.

‘No, even with our positions of power, we’re still dogs on leashes, and she’s the one holding every leash.’

That thought passed through the mind of one of the Pirate Lords as he clutched his neck, attempting to feel the invisible leash Zara had placed on him, a leash that had been placed there after the first and last time a member of their crew had betrayed Zara and stabbed her in the back.

“Varek.”

The cold voice calling his name made the man raise his gaze immediately, and when he met the piercing pair of almond-shaped eyes, blue like the ocean, that belonged to the woman he served, he spoke without delay.

“Your ship is ready, Boss.”

“Good. We’re sailing out in five,” Zara said as she walked past Varek while he lowered his head.

The moment she moved out of sight, the man immediately turned and began shouting orders to the crewmen, rushing them to load ammunition onto the gunships as though their lives depended on it.

A first response team composed of Zara’s private army and adventurers stationed on Solen was already dealing with the monsters pouring out of the dungeon and rushing toward the coasts of Solen.

However, not every monster was heading toward Solen. Some were moving in other directions, swimming toward the other islands of the Zeraxes Archipelago.

Two of those islands within Solen’s range were Erganth and Corsis, both of which were currently open to the guests from the Voyager.

Even if those islands had not been open to the Voyager’s high-profile guests, she still would not allow monsters to attack them, because those islands were part of her territory, and she had no intention of allowing her lands to be ravaged by monsters for any reason.

A plan of action already existed, one created in preparation for the possibility that the Solen Underwater Dungeon might ever break.

Her fleet would spread out and create a perimeter around the area surrounding Solen, blocking every possible route the monsters might use to reach the nearby islands, both major and minor.

The ships would even deploy special nets suspended between them to slow down and trap any monsters that managed to pass through the long-range bombardment, holding them in place long enough for the close-range combatants on smaller boats to finish them off.

The gunship fleet being deployed, composed of standard frigate ships and littoral combat ships, was not stationed at the Central Island, Zera, which was too far from Solen in the far east.

Those fleets were positioned around islands closer to Solen to ensure a faster response and to contain the situation as quickly as possible.

Zara travelled to those islands alongside several of her Pirate Lord subordinates and other high-level combatants through teleportation waypoints, where they then boarded the ships along with the flagship, which only moved under Zara’s command as it led the fleet.

She had not deployed all of her forces to deal with the dungeon break because the Zeraxes Archipelago contained numerous islands, and concentrating every available force on the dungeon break alone would have been a terrible decision.

Such a choice would leave several openings on the other islands, especially since security was still a top priority due to the presence of several high nobles and wealthy individuals from both the Alpha and Beta continents.