Sunk

Abner seemed to have killed a Sequence 6 pirate with a 7,500 Gold Pound bounty almost effortlessly. In truth, he had made extensive preparations to ensure his final sword strike succeeded.

First, he had set up a ritual in advance, luring the enemy fleet into a trap. That forced Gravina to confront him personally and buy the other two warships time to destroy the altars.

Without Gravina's charge, Abner could even have used the ritual to pull in the warships and destroy all three at his leisure.

Gravina's best choice would have been to abandon the two ships and gather every Beyonder aboard the King's Blade, using their numbers to force Abner back.

But before the battle, Gravina had no idea how strong Abner was. How could he possibly have made such an extreme decision?

Second, under the cover of "negotiation," Abner had used the Thread Marionette to control Gravina's Spirit Body Threads, denying him the initiative from the start. He had then used Bribery to weaken Gravina's attacks and Combat Hypnosis to interfere with his choice of abilities, keeping him within the rhythm Abner had set.

On top of that, Gravina had commanded a Ghost Ship for years, and its corruption of his mind had been unavoidable. It let him communicate with the ship almost instinctively, but it also made his thoughts somewhat sluggish—with the sluggishness of the dead.

Only with all those factors combined had Abner managed to kill a Dawn Knight of the same level with a single strike!

Of course, the most important point was that the King of Immortality's Fourth Fleet had no Mid-Sequence Beyonders of the Devil Pathway. Otherwise, forget scheming against Gravina—they probably would never have entered the Death Gate Ritual I'd prepared.

*It looks like Vice Admiral Iceberg Edwina paid particular attention