Dark Shadow had been feeling utterly miserable lately.
The Dark God Temple he had painstakingly built up had been uprooted, and he himself had walked into an ambush. Even the Shadow had nearly been scrapped.
As if that weren't enough, the enemy had been swindling people in his name, replacing the genuine article with an impostor and leaving him with grievances he couldn't even voice.
With no other choice, he had opted for a strategic retreat and fled the Shattered Star Region.
He had just decided to seek refuge with his equally unfortunate neighbor and form an "Avengers Alliance" when, barely a moment after he left, more than five thousand pirate ships came pouring out behind him.
The densely packed red dots on the radar had nearly scared everyone aboard into wetting themselves!
How much do they hate me? They mobilized almost every pirate just to hunt me down? How many hundreds of millions is the bounty on my head?
Fortunately, Dark Shadow later realized he had been flattering himself. They hadn't paid the slightest attention to his little spacecraft. They just happened to be heading the same way.
In an ironic twist, the initial chaos and his ship's rather awkward position had led the pirates to mistake him for one of their own, eagerly answering the Pirate King's call. Before he knew it, he had been swept along with the main force.
And so Dark Shadow arrived, in a textbook case of letting the wolves through the door...
The look on Kloros's face when he heard that Dark Shadow had actually arrived alongside the Pirate Alliance's main force had been something to behold.
If not for Dark Shadow's special status, Kloros would probably have dealt with him as a traitor on the spot!
Only after painstakingly explaining his embarrassing