Dead Men Tell No Stats

Skylar Dannon died in a prison parking lot doing a job for the mob. The one thing he got right that day was turning the wheel. Death offered him a brochure. Summoned Hero: executed in month three. Harem: eleven days, average. Then the package nobody picks. An island in the Black Reefs, a sword that takes a skill from whatever it kills, a shadow that used to be a B-movie actor and will not shut up, and a debt. Find the eleven lost Keyswords and his mother’s cancer stays frozen where it is. Fail, and she has a few weeks. Six months of crabs and bananas later, he has one skill nobody can measure. Fortune. Then a boat full of dead men drifts into his cove against the tide. Dead men make a decent crew. So does a ghost pirate who once froze twenty-two Navy ships, a lizard girl who is done gutting fish, and the last survivor of the Cat Pirates. The Navy wants him alive. The bounty hunters would settle for his head. His mother’s clock does not stop for any of it. Isekai pirate LitRPG. The numbers go up, the crew evolves, the heat is on the page, and the captain’s luck is the one stat nobody can read.