Kuri was a sailor who had served aboard the cargo ship Oseberg for three years and twenty-seven days.
Named after the Oseberg housed in Norway's Viking Ship Museum, the freighter had traveled back and forth along trade routes in the Baltic Sea ever since it was launched four years ago.
Whenever they put out to sea, the crew liked to joke that hauling cargo was like going to the Baltic Sea to shake down travelers. But Kuri had never expected that, after sailing the calm Baltic Sea for so many years, they would actually get shaken down this time...
"Behave."
Kuri had merely wanted to stretch his numb calves. Yet the instant he moved a toe, he was kicked in the back.
Seeing the shadow of a rifle reflected on the deck, Kuri did not dare make a sound.
Although he shared a name with Aquaman, he did not possess even a trace of superpowers, nor did he have muscles bulging all over his body. Faced with something like this, as an ordinary man, he could only lower his head submissively, terrified that the vicious people behind him would smash him with a rifle butt and toss him into the sea to feed the fish.
Behind him stood a group of men who called themselves pirates—yes, in the twenty-first century, a band of pirates had actually appeared on the tranquil Baltic Sea.
Judging by their skin color and accents, they were clearly from East Africa. What Kuri could not understand was how they had made it all the way to distant Northern Europe.
God, there had not been pirates here for two hundred years.
After kicking the unruly hostage, the dark-skinned man with a cloth wrapped around his face carried his AK toward the deck railing. He stopped behind a