Five minutes later, Yu Lian was sitting comfortably in the most comfortable chair on the bridge. A small table beside him held snacks and sugarcane liquor. The food and drink were crude, but the pirates had done their utmost to offer him what they could.
The pirate group's leader, an Umbara with a lionlike face, stood cautiously beside Yu Lian, bent so low that he seemed to be trying to keep his face lower than Yu Lian's.
That wasn't easy. He stood over two meters tall, while Yu Lian was sitting down.
The pirate chief had a thick, imposing mane of black hair and features that looked as if they'd been carved from cast iron. A purplish scar marked the side of his face, an old wound that looked like it had been caused by an energy weapon piercing through him. It had pulled the muscles on one side of his cheek out of shape, making him look even more fearsome.
With modern medical technology, which could even regenerate lost limbs, almost any external injury could be healed perfectly. Yet this Umbara pirate had kept his ugly scar, presumably to show off how intimidating he looked.
But he wasn't intimidating at all just then. He was trying very hard to smile in a friendly, almost foolish way, doing his best to look less like a lion and more like a chow chow.
His name was Taka, and he was the leader of the Glorystone Pirates. He commanded fourteen ships and nearly ten thousand hardened old hands, making his crew one of the most notorious pirate groups in the Abyss Nebula.
As it happened, in his previous life, when Yu Lian had been taking refuge in the Great Freedom City, he'd worked with Captain Taka a few times. All in all,