King of the Pirates: The Rise of the Red - Chapter 002

The morning sun had barely emerged from the hazy horizon when the boy awoke.

His small body was curled up on the makeshift bed of dry straw and rags, his knees drawn up to his chest as if, in his sleep, he were still trying to protect himself from something. He was eight years old—or perhaps nine. It was difficult to be sure. His extreme thinness made his age a guess: the prominent bones beneath the pale skin, the ribs visible just below the oversized clothes that hung from his narrow shoulders like a tunic stolen from an adult. His reddish hair, disheveled and dusty, fell over eyes that, that morning, carried a weight that did not belong to childhood.

He had woken up with no certainty about what had happened.

One night he was a twenty-nine-year-old man, hunched over columns of numbers under the cold light of an office. The next, he was this: a frail, hungry body, sheltered in a hut of crooked planks and damp straw, with no door that truly closed—just a cracked wooden frame that creaked in the wind like a living, unsatisfied thing.

He lay there for a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the grey light that filtered through the cracks in the ceiling. The smell of old straw and damp wood was the only familiar thing. Everything else was unknown.

He stood up slowly.

His bare feet touched the dirt, and he felt every pebble, every splinter of wood against his thin, sensitive soles. He stepped out into the open air without quite knowing why—only that the interior of the cabin had suddenly become too small to contain the restlessness growing in his chest.

The harbor opened up before him like an open wound on the shore.

It was a tangle of rotten wood, frayed ropes, and the acrid smell of salt mixed with decaying fish. Rats scurried fearlessly among the piles of rubble and broken barrels, their gray bodies gleaming in the pale morning light. Large men—muscles hardened by the sea and violence—carried heavy loads on their shoulders, veins bulging on their tattooed arms. Weapons hung from their waists: makeshift knives of bent metal, axes with handles wrapped in worn leather, and occasionally, well-forged swords that spoke of recent raids. They walked with the raw confidence of those who knew that might was the only law there.

The boy walked slowly, his curious eyes absorbing every detail with a hunger that mixed the innocence of a child with the cold rigor of the adult who still lived behind them.

In shadowy corners, women in dirty rags and disheveled hair leaned against the damp walls, their faces marked by hunger and exhaustion. They called to the sailors with hoarse voices, whispering promises in exchange for coins or a piece of bread. Their thin, poorly covered bodies revealed lives spent in the gutters of the port, where desire was a commodity as cheap as watered-down wine. He looked away. There was a tightness in his chest that he couldn’t name.

Further on, other children—as thin as him, or worse—worked alongside the sailors. They ran between crates, pulled ropes, washed ship decks that smelled of tar and sweat. It wasn’t work for small bodies, and that became clear when a slightly older boy tripped and dropped a wooden box. The crack echoed like bone breaking. The nearest sailor didn’t hesitate. A sharp slap, then a kick that threw the child to the dirty ground. Short screams, the muffled sound of fists against flesh. No one intervened. The port continued its cruel and indifferent rhythm, as if nothing had happened.

The boy continued walking, his thin legs trembling slightly.

There were few merchants—isolated figures guarding meager wares: dried fish, rusty knives, rolls of stained fabric. Their eyes passed over him as if he were just another rat among many.

The small open square appeared at the end of a winding alley.

It measured no more than forty or fifty square meters of compacted earth, surrounded by low shacks and walls covered in dark moss. In the center, a rough wooden platform stood like a stage for somber performances. Around it, merchants waited—some with bored expressions, others with calculating gazes that weighed each risk before landing on the next thing.

The boy stopped.

His small, racing heart pounded against his protruding ribs.

A man stepped onto the platform with confident strides. He was adorned with relative wealth for the occasion: colorful cloaks in shades of crimson and faded gold, fabrics that had seen better days but still exuded a comparative prosperity. His dark skin glistened with oil, his lips full, his completely shaved head reflecting the pale sun. Thick gold rings adorned his fingers, jingling as he raised his hand toward the small crowd.

‘Today you will have the best batch of slaves that has ever passed through my hands!’ he proclaimed, his deep voice, trained for commerce, overflowing with forced enthusiasm.

The boy observed the expressions of the buyers. Hard, cynical faces. No one was impressed. There, in that forgotten corner of the world, promises of quality were as rare as fresh meat. The merchant frowned, realizing that his words were falling on deaf ears. His commercial smile faltered. With a curt gesture of his hand, he called someone from the shadows behind the platform.

Then a huge man climbed up. Over six feet tall, his skin as black as night, his muscles seemingly sculpted from stone. A heavy axe hung from his belt, and in his thick hands he held a thick chain and a braided leather whip. He pulled the chain forcefully.

Nothing moved.

His face contorted with anger. He turned and shouted an order to the shadows.

The crack of the whip cut through the air. Then came a guttural howl of pain. After that, the shuffling sound of bare footsteps and the steady clinking of metal against metal.

The boy’s eyes widened.

Seven figures were dragged onto the platform: men and women, all naked, chained by their wrists and ankles. Pale skin marked by old bruises and fresh wounds. The women were not beautiful—too thin, bony, with faces sharp as blades, prominent noses, and expressions devoid of any hope. One of them was missing a front tooth, the dark hole visible when she parted her mouth in a low groan. The men were no better: hollowed-out bodies, countable ribs, sunken bellies as if days—or weeks—without decent food had consumed them from the inside. Their hair had been shaved unevenly, leaving short tufts and wounds on their scalps.

The air seemed heavier.

The boy’s stomach churned.

He knew, with a chilling clarity that needed no learning, that this was a hostile world.

The sailors he had seen were no simple navigators—they carried the air of pirates, of men who took what they wanted from the sea and the land. The children who worked in the port were orphans, disposable like the rats that scurried between his feet. The women on the street corners lived in a misery that slowly devoured their dignity, bite by bite. And now, slaves. Chains clinking, bodies exposed like merchandise, auctioned off before eager or indifferent eyes.

This caused the soul to freeze inside the small body.

He took an involuntary step back. His bare foot slipped on the damp earth. No one noticed. To them, he was just another gaunt ghost among many, invisible in the crowd of lost souls.

Fear rose like bile in my throat.

The twenty-nine-year-old mind—with its spreadsheets, its bedside water glass rituals, its competent mediocrity—completely dissolved. What remained was the raw instinct of a child:

Run.

He turned and ran.

His small feet hammered against the ground, his heart pounding in his ears, the wind cutting his sweaty face. He ran without looking back, without seeing the first bids of the auction, without hearing the shouted values ​​or the clinking of the chains being tested. He ran as if the devil himself were chasing him, crossing narrow alleys, jumping over piles of garbage, ignoring the curious glances of those who saw him pass like a red flame cutting through the gray of the port.

The makeshift shelter appeared ahead as a precarious refuge: crooked planks, straw on the roof, the entrance covered by a frame that hardly deserved the name of door.

He threw himself inside, panting, and huddled in the darkest corner, hugging his knees to his thin chest. His chest burned. His throat burned. And there, in the relative silence of the cabin, a sensation hit him like a wave—not of invulnerability, but of absolute vulnerability, naked, without mitigating circumstances.

He was no longer the man who controlled numbers and routines.

She was a child of eight or nine years old, weak, alone, in a place where life was worth less than a piece of moldy bread.

It remained like that for a period of time that I couldn’t measure.

Then, slowly, he raised his gaze to the makeshift door in front of him. The wide cracks let in rays of dusty sunlight that illuminated particles suspended in the air—like tiny hopes adrift, about to be extinguished. Through the holes, he saw the distant movement of the port: shadows of men, the occasional glint of a blade, the world following its relentless course as if the terror he had witnessed were just another texture of the morning.

He understood, with a clarity that ached in his small chest, that this place did not forgive weakness. It could consume him at any moment—a whip, a chain, a careless kick, the hunger that already gnawed at his insides. The options were simple and terrible in their simplicity: find strength, from somewhere, somehow—or be swallowed whole.

The red-haired boy closed his eyes.

He breathed in the scent of damp wood and old straw, letting the silence settle over him like something tangible. The blood still throbbed at his temple, a remnant of the previous day’s wound. The first day had been one of confusion. This one, of pure terror. And the world, indifferent, continued to spin beyond the cracks in the door, demanding its price in flesh, in chains, and in silence.

He still didn’t know how to pay him.

But I knew now that I would have to learn.