Chapter Text
The portal tore open above a muddy field on the outskirts of Fossbarrow with a sound like ripping canvas, and three men dropped out of it in rapid succession. Heavy hit the ground hard, rolling once before coming to a stop in the mud. Soldier landed right beside him a half-second later with all the grace of a falling filing cabinet. Medic came last — and would have joined them face-first in the dirt had Heavy not reached out with one massive arm and caught him mid-fall.
"Danke, my friend," Medic said, adjusting his spectacles, which had gone crooked in the chaos.
Soldier was already back on his feet, standing at rigid attention before snapping into a fighting stance, fists raised, eyes scanning wildly for a target. "Where is Merasmus," he barked. "Where is Engineer. Where is Scout. I demand answers, gentlemen!"
Heavy raised an eyebrow. "Why Scout?"
"Because I need to strangle someone," Soldier said matter-of-factly, "and at this particular moment, I am not picky about who."
"Soldier," Medic said, tone level, "calm yourself." He turned in a slow circle, taking in their surroundings — the muddy field, the strange twisted trees in the distance, the sky itself a shade of orange that no sky over New Mexico had ever been. His expression sharpened into something clinical. "We are not on Earth anymore."
Heavy frowned. "How you know this?"
"Because I know what is Earth, and what is not Earth," Medic said simply, as though this settled the matter entirely, already crouching to examine a strange, faintly luminescent flower growing out of the mud. "And this, my large friend, is most certainly not Earth."
While the two of them talked, Soldier's attention had drifted toward the horizon — and fixed there. A mass of marching troops moved in tight formation across a distant ridge, clad in strange, unfamiliar armor, banners snapping in the wind above them. Red banners.
Soldier's eyes narrowed to slits.
"Communists," he growled.
Heavy and Medic both turned to look.
"They must be slaughtered," Soldier continued, already reaching for his rocket launcher, "for the honor of America."
"Soldier," Heavy said slowly, "I think we should stay out of it."
"Agreed," Medic said, not even looking up from the flower. "We have bigger problems at the moment. Namely, determining where we are, and locating the others."
Soldier actually paused at that, chewing on the words for a long moment, his expression flickering with something almost like consideration.
"Men," he said finally, "you speak reasonably." He shouldered his rocket launcher and took off at a dead sprint toward the distant army. "Unfortunately, I have never been a reasonable man!"
"SOLDIER—" Medic started.
"FOR AMERICA!" Soldier bellowed back at them, already halfway across the field, charging headlong toward an army of several hundred armed strangers on a continent that had never once heard the word.
Heavy looked at Medic. Medic looked at Heavy.
"...Should we stop him?" Heavy asked.
Medic sighed, straightening up and dusting off his coat. "We should try," he said, already breaking into a jog after their rapidly diminishing teammate. "Though I suspect it is already far, far too late."
The Demacian line stretched across the muddy ridge in disciplined ranks, shields locked, banners of silver and blue snapping crisp in the wind. Across the field, the Noxian formation mirrored them in grim, iron-clad rows — black and crimson, cruel-edged standards raised high, the eagle sigil of Noxus glinting dully under the overcast sky.
It was, by now, a familiar sight. Noxus and Demacia had bled each other across borderlands like this one for longer than most soldiers present had been alive — two nations built on opposite philosophies, one on rigid honor and lawful strength, the other on ruthless ambition and the belief that might, wielded correctly, made its own right. Every few years the border shifted an inch this way or that, paid for in blood, and every few years the diplomats renegotiated a peace that neither side particularly respected. Fossbarrow, sitting inconveniently close to the disputed territories, had simply drawn the short straw this season.
Garen rode along the front line atop his warhorse, greatsword resting against one broad shoulder, voice booming with the kind of unshakable confidence that made men believe the sun itself answered to Demacia.
"Stand firm!" he called out. "Noxus believes strength is cruelty. We shall show them strength is conviction!"
A ragged cheer rose from the ranks. Beside him, Lux sat astride her own mount, staff in hand, light already gathering faintly at her fingertips in anticipation.
"You say that every single time," she said, not quite hiding her smile.
"It works every time," Garen said.
"It's the same six words rearranged."
"Conviction is timeless, Luxanna."
"Mm-hm." She glanced sidelong at the Noxian line, expression sobering. "Another territorial push. They never learn."
"Neither do we, apparently," Garen muttered, "since we keep coming back to argue about it."
Lux huffed something almost like a laugh, then straightened in her saddle as Garen raised his sword, drawing breath to give the command—
"SCREAMING EAGLE!"
BOOM.
An explosion tore through the middle of the Noxian formation, throwing armored bodies through the air like ragdolls and scattering the front ranks into stumbling disarray. Smoke billowed up from the impact point, and for one disoriented second, the entire field simply stopped.
Garen's head snapped toward his sister. "Was that you?"
"That was NOT me," Lux said, staff already raised defensively, eyes wide. "I hadn't even cast anything yet!"
"Look — look, General!" one of Garen's officers shouted, thrusting a telescope into his hands with visibly trembling fingers.
Garen raised it to his eye, and his stomach dropped somewhere around his boots.
"What... the... hell..."
Lux snatched the telescope from him without ceremony, ignoring his indignant noise of protest, and pressed it to her own eye.
Through the lens, in brutal, magnified clarity, she watched a man in a strange, blood-red uniform and a battered helmet tearing through the Noxian ranks alone — firing some manner of tube weapon that detonated on impact, wielding a second, smaller firearm she didn't recognize in his off hand, and, when both apparently ran dry, simply swinging a shovel into the face of a fully armored Noxian soldier hard enough to put him on the ground. When even that seemed insufficient, he discarded the shovel entirely and resorted to his bare fists, laughing — actually laughing — the entire time.
"What," Lux said slowly, lowering the telescope, "the hell."
Far across the field, Soldier was having the time of his life.
He bobbed and weaved through the ranks of stunned, disoriented Noxian soldiers with a manic energy that bordered on the supernatural, his rocket launcher long since discharged and slung uselessly across his back, his shotgun barking with every third step. He laughed — a wild, cackling bellow — as blades and spear tips grazed past him, taunting his attackers between swings with the kind of unhinged patriotic flair that no army on Runeterra had ever been prepared to encounter.
"IS THAT THE BEST YOU'VE GOT?" he roared, sidestepping a sword strike and driving his fist into the nearest soldier's jaw hard enough to spin the man clean off his feet. "MY GRANDMOTHER HITS HARDER, AND SHE'S BEEN DEAD FOR TEN YEARS!"
Back on the ridge, Garen and Lux watched in stunned, mounting horror — not merely at the man's suicidal recklessness, but at the growing, undeniable realization that he was winning. Every blow that landed on him — and several did — seemed to simply bounce off some deep well of pure, unfiltered rage that refused to acknowledge pain as a valid concept. He never slowed. He never stopped shouting.
An officer rode up beside Garen, expression tight. "Sir? Do we attack?"
Garen, for what felt like the first time in his military career, genuinely did not know. If they committed the line now, that half-mad juggernaut down there would almost certainly turn his fury on them next — and it was becoming increasingly clear he did not require any assistance whatsoever.
"Sir," the officer pressed again, still waiting.
"...Hold positions," Garen said slowly.
"Let's just see what happens," Lux added, leaning forward in her saddle, unable to look away.
Down below, Soldier ducked a spear thrust, caught the shaft with one arm, and snapped it — along with the arm holding it — with a sickening crack, laughing the entire time.
Then, from the ridgeline behind the Noxian formation, a new voice thundered across the battlefield.
"DOCTOR! ÜBERCHARGE!"
Heavy came barreling down the slope at a dead sprint, a massive, drum-fed weapon cradled in his enormous hands, Medic close on his heels lugging a strange, humming contraption strapped to his back, a thin red beam already lancing out from it to connect squarely with Heavy's broad shoulders. A faint golden glow began crawling over the big man's frame.
Soldier, mid-punch, paused just long enough to glance over his shoulder — and scowled.
"Oh," he muttered, thoroughly unimpressed. "Damn foreigners." He ducked a wild swing and countered without missing a beat. "First they steal American jobs. Now they're stealing my kills."
The Noxians watched in horror as Heavy's silhouette became something almost mythic — engulfed head to toe in shimmering red light, his eyes flaring bright yellow like twin miniature suns burning through the smoke. He let out a booming, maniacal laugh as the barrels of his minigun began to spin, faster, faster, the sound rising into a shriek of tortured metal.
Then the bullets came.
They tore through the Noxian ranks in relentless waves, chewing through shield and armor alike as though neither existed. Men who moments ago had stood in disciplined formation now scrambled over each other in a desperate, screaming crush.
"RETREAT!" an officer bellowed — the last order he would ever give, as a burst from Soldier's shotgun ended him mid-sentence.
"RETREAT?" Soldier howled, delighted. "NONSENSE! YOU JUST GOT HERE!"
Arrows and spears alike bounced harmlessly off Heavy's glowing form as the Noxian line collapsed into full, disorganized rout, the golden Übercharge shield rendering every desperate counterattack utterly meaningless.
"HAHAHA!" Heavy roared over the screaming whine of his weapon. "I AM INVINCIBLE!"
On the ridge, Garen and Lux stood frozen, watching a quarter of a seasoned Noxian battalion — men who had weathered a dozen border skirmishes — reduced to a fleeing, broken mass in the span of minutes. Three men. Three strangers in blood-red uniforms had done this. Not with magic, not with the kind of raw arcane power that shaped most battles on this continent, but with something colder, mechanical, and utterly without precedent.
"Hold position," Garen said quietly, the words carrying an unfamiliar weight. "No matter what happens. Do not advance."
An officer stepped forward, protest already forming on his lips — but Lux raised a hand, cutting him off before he could speak.
"You all just watched what three men did to a Noxian regiment," she said, voice steady despite the tightness in her chest. "I don't think I need to explain why we wouldn't fare any better."
Garen glanced at his sister, and something passed between them — gratitude, unspoken, the way it always had since they were children standing shoulder to shoulder against whatever the world threw at Demacia. He gave her a short nod.
"We will go and confront them," he announced to the assembled soldiers, dismounting, greatsword still in hand but lowered. "Learn their intentions, if they have any beyond slaughter. Should this go poorly—" he paused, jaw tightening, "—you fall back. Evacuate Fossbarrow. We will buy you and the townsfolk whatever time we can."
The soldiers straightened to attention, uncertainty plain on every face, but no one argued. They simply watched as their two commanders — the Might of Demacia and the Lady of Luminosity — turned and began walking down the ridge, toward the smoke, the gunfire, and the three impossible men waiting on the other side of it.