Tales of Runeterra: Waking Up In Another World

Tales of Runeterra:

Chapter 6:

Waking Up In Another World

 Crusted eyes strained open, before closing swiftly against the harshness of the sweltering sun. Nathan moved, but his muscles protested the action, and it felt as if blocks of sand was clogging every limb in his body. 

Still, it wasn’t any worse than he was used to. He pushed past the aches and planted his palms firmly on the ground. With a huff, the man pushed himself off the ground. He blinked, his eyes still bleary and his vision still swimming, but he managed to get himself into a sitting position. 

The first thing he noticed was the sound. There were voices around him, more than just the one he was supposed to be hearing, off in the distance. There were people near him, and their animated conversations were only slightly muffled by their distance. 

He was outside. That wasn’t where he fell asleep. 

The second thing he noticed was the smell. There was an acrid smell around him, trickling in from everywhere he turned. He was either in a garbage dump or a sewer, or some horrid combination of both. 

Finally, the last thing he noticed was the feeling. His cheek felt slimy and raw, as if he had fallen asleep on a wet mattress. 

Upon clearing his vision, however, he realized that he basically had. 

“What…” he asked, his hand coming up to rub at his eyes. When he did nothing but make his face slimier, he scowled. He rubbed his hands on his shirt, which he could now feel had holes in it, before trying again. This time it worked, but he wasn’t sure whether he liked the gift of returned sight. 

The floor was wood, but it was obviously not in the best of shape. The ends of planks were ripped up and frayed, splinters and strands left out to dry in the sun. Holes dotted the entirety of it, some big and cracked as if someone had shot a cannon through it, while others were eaten through by both erosion and bug. Through those holes, Nathan could see waves crashing against crags and breaking against the coastline. 

And that’s when he noticed one last thing. The smell of the ocean. It was the same as usual, which was a calming thought in the mounting dread that he felt ready to overwhelm him, but something was off. There was another feeling there that arrived with the smell of the ocean—a sensation that numbed the tips of his fingers and sent shivers down his spine. 

“You come back here, you spineless cur!” a deep, gravely voice called. The sound of a gunshot, a sound that Nathan was familiar with, echoed around the alley that Nathan found himself in. The conversations off in the distance halted for but a few seconds, before starting again, and Nathan found himself drawn to it. 

He followed the sounds— though he couldn’t figure out why—and found himself at the opposite end of the alley from the talking crowd. He was about to exit it when—

Crash, boom, POW. 

The wall just shy of where his head was exploded, striking Nathan’s face with shrapnel made of wood. Nathan flinched, his pain tolerance more than enough to resist the impact of wet and weathered wood, and turned to where the danger had come. 

The numbness reached from his fingers, threatening to consume his hand whole, and the tingle in his spine had spread out like the reaching fingers of a lightning bolt. Nathan’s eyes widened, while a smile stretched his cheeks something fierce. 

In front of him, a familiar bearded man chased a much thinner one through the streets of an almost archaic port town. The bearded man held a shotgun in his hands that was closer in size to a small cannon. The thinner man was dressed as if he were a performer from the eighties, and in his hand he held a single, yellow card. 

The thinner man grinned, before flipping his card in his hand. The thing sizzled, before glowing. Light bled from it like dust from a sieve, and the man’s smile seemed to grow in proportion with the glow of the card. 

The bearded man, however, seemed to only grow madder. He growled, before lifting his cannon-shotgun and taking aim. How one aimed with such a thing was beyond Nathan. Another shot rang out, and Nathan could almost follow the path of the shrapnel as it arced towards the thinner man. Before it could reach its target, however, the thinner man threw his card. 

The flimsy yellow square met the iron pellets and disappeared, but not before releasing the yellow glow. The light seemed to grab at the metal, freezing it all in the air. 

“Damn it, Fate!” the grizzled man yelled. He cocked his shotgun, the emptied the ridiculously sized barrel. He retrieved two shells from the belt hooked diagonally around his chest. “You know that we were to share that bounty fifty-fifty!” 

The thinner smiled, and it was so cocksure that Nathan could feel it even from how far away he was. “Is that right, Graves? I remember saying that we would share it 60-40. Pardon me for thinking you could understand fractions.” 

The grizzled man growled once more, before picking up the chase once more. The thinner man ducked around a corner, just barely avoiding a face full of shrapnel. The grizzled man wasn’t far behind. 

Nathan watched them as they went, and with them went the numbness of his fingertips. The smile on his face was so wide that it started to hurt his face, but he didn’t seem to care. 

That… was Twisted Fate and Graves, two characters from one of his favorite video games. Loud, rowdy, and very real, they had just raced around a corner, and he had the welts on his face to prove it. 

He wasn’t sure how, but he had somehow ended up inside the world of League of Legends. There was magic in this world, and sword arts and spirits and all other kinds of fantastical things. There were gods and ghosts and dragons. 

Nathan was in League, and he couldn’t be more excited. After wiping his hands on his clothing, he rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and rushed off after the two Champions. 

Not once did he notice the electricity that jumped between his dreads.