Chapter Text
For all her three years as a pro player for Runeterra Online, Luxanna Crownguard has never thought of herself hitting any mental blocks or experience any hardship. In her rookie year as a battle mage player for Team Radiant, Lux had an explosive debut by leading the low tier team -Team Radiant regularly finishes amongst the last 4 places in standings in the regular season- into the playoff stages through pure mechanics and skills alone. Sure, the team lost in the first stage of playoffs, but it was impossible for a single rookie to brute force her way through it with just individual skills and a team that had close to no chemistry with her.
Her second year into the pro league was even more explosive than the previous year. Team Radiant invested most of its resources into upgrading Lux’s character, giving her complete sets of custom-made equipment whereas Lux had finally built enough chemistry with her team after playing with them for more than a year. She was, by all means, the ace and face of Team Radiant. The team’s main strategies were always centered around her ability to clutch matches with her precise mechanics and decisive attitude. When Lux jumps into fights aggressively, the whole team follows through like a well-oiled machine and Lux always manages to perform to her expected level by securing the winning point for her team.
Her second season in the pro league didn’t just end with high standings; they made it into playoffs by placing second place in the regular season standings and Lux unsurprisingly led her team to stomp their way into the playoff finals with consecutive 2 – 0 matches. Although they struggled in the finals and went into the deciding match 3 with their opponents, the Piltover Gunners due to nerves and having lesser experience than most teams, Lux still clutched the final team fight to earn the winning score of 11-10 and won the championship title for her team.
At the end of the season, she wasn’t just the ace of her team anymore, fans all over the world were hyping her up to be the face of the game. Brand sponsor deals were all going to her, and even massive transfer deals from other teams too, but Lux never took the offers; only accepting sponsors deals the organization claimed could fund help the team’s expanses. Team Radiant accepted Lux when she was at her lowest, so she’d stay loyal to the team for as long as she plays professionally.
In her third year, the current ongoing season of Runeterra’s pro league, the team was still standing strong, placing in third place after the fourth week of the regular season. So, why is it that Lux is currently struggling to deal with a nobody named, ‘TheLooseCannon’ in the open world map of the Runeterra?
“Can you just shut the fuck up!” Lux exclaimed as her character’s blade glowed in orange hues and activated the blade dancer skill, ‘Triple Slash’. A skill that allows its user to rush forward a direction while slashing their blade to send out three waves of sword energy. She dashes forward with a slash, sending out a wave of sword energy toward her opponent who expertly dodges it narrowly.
“Wait, are you actually tilted?”, she bursts out laughing and returns fire, shooting a magically enhanced special bullet at Lux with her shotgun.
Ice bullets glow in pale blue hues but Lux knows that they move at a slower speed than most special bullets, so she took advantage of the speed to dodge it using the second slash of her currently active skill.
For her last dash and slash, Lux had wanted to use it close in on TheLooseCannon and connect it with an ‘Upward Slash’, a skill that allows its user to slice upward and knock up their opponent, only for a ‘Burst Grenade’ to be shoved in front of her character’s face. The special grenade’s explosion knocks her away from her opponent and there was nothing she could do about it, ‘Burst Grenade’ was a special grenade that ignores even Super Armor, a crowd control immunity buff.
TheLooseCannon then reloads and shoots off a new special bullet at the knocked away Lux; this time, a ‘Stun Bullet’ that has a strong stun effect of 5 seconds and it doesn’t help that she immediately capitalises on the effects of her bullet as she starts to release fusillades of different bullets and grenades at Lux to combo her to death
“Argh! Seriously! Who the fuck name themselves TheLooseCannon!”
*****
It all started that afternoon when Lux was having her lunch at the cafeteria of Team Radiant’s headquarters. The Demacian organization provides free lunch for all employees and usually orders catering services, while providing employees with drinks and snacks through its cafe. There wasn’t much going on that day for Lux, all she had in her schedule was to go through her morning practice and she’d be free for the rest of the day. That is, until a colleague sat down in the seat opposite her.
“Kian?” Lux questioned; her eyebrow raised as she twisted her fork on the plate of pasta. Truth be told, Lux wasn’t a spaghetti enjoyer, she felt that it just doesn’t hold onto the sauce well enough for her, but free food is free food so there is no point complaining.
“Hey Lux, I have something I want to discuss with you” said Kian, settling down his utensils and his meal. Unlike Lux, Kian opted for a bowl of salad, sandwich and fries.
“Sure, what’s the problem?’’
“Well, it’s just that we’ve been having some difficulty farming wild boss materials lately.”
Runeterra Online is currently the most popular MMORPG across the globe with an open world map that hosts hundreds and thousands of players. In the first-person perspective game, wild bosses spawn weekly in the open world that players can compete to raid for the boss materials. As the pro scene is very huge and active, it wasn’t a surprise that many organizations in the pro scene would establish their own guilds and hire employees to raid for materials. It also helps that the guilds can act as gathering hubs and communities for fans to gather around.
The common dropped materials and equipment gathered from dungeons and boss raids are usually stored in the guild storage for players to use whereas rare materials such as equipment and dropped items from wild boss raids will contribute to developing new equipment and weapons for the teams’ pro players. Having fans join and help raid for dungeons and bosses allows them to feel as though they are contributing to the team’s success too.
Equipment in the game come in varying rarities ranging from white, green, blue, purple to orange. White equipment provided nothing but low basic stats, green equipment do give players additional stats but compared to the higher graded equipment, the stats were too low. Blue equipment was the most used since players can earn them through dungeon and boss raids and the stats were at least decent. Purple and orange equipment though, require at least some skill and luck from the player to earn them as they were the rarest equipment players could obtain.
Players can also use an equipment editor provided by the developers to create their own equipment indicated by its silver-coloured rarity. The custom silver equipment is the true pinnacle of Runeterra equipment that the game has to offer and materials like boss drops, weapons and other equipment are used to create them. However, not all silver equipment were powerful, self-made equipment does not guarantee better stats than equipment found in-game if the creator does not know what they’re tempering with. Silver equipment weren’t necessarily the best but the best equipment were definitely silver.
“Hmm, problems like?” Lux asked, it wasn’t weird for guilds to have difficulties fighting for materials, she had first-hand experience in fighting those raids and competing against other guilds when she was but a trainee for Team Radiant. Before her debut, Lux tried to contribute to the team’s success in different ways outside from winning matches, she’d help lead the team’s guild raid dungeons and bosses and though, she wouldn’t admit it, some of the wild boss raids she had fought were harder than her matches in the regular seasons. If ten guilds each brought more than ten players to the raid, then the raids would be chaotic in nature as the number of players and guilds competing for the bosses were up to hundreds.
“Recently, we’ve been getting interrupted from farming and raiding wild bosses by a player, and we suspect it’s a pro player we’re dealing with,” the guild leader said, “It isn’t just us though, the other guilds are also getting the same treatment.”
“And your solution is, to come look for me to beat them up?” It wasn’t unusual for pro players to help their guilds, sometimes it’s even encouraged by their management as an act of fan service, but it only happens during off season where players aren’t as busy, “How good is this player for them to cause trouble all for the guilds?”
“I don’t know how to explain it to you, she’s... very chaotic.” Kian’s answer peaked Lux’s interest, amongst the many female pro players she’d met, there weren’t many players that had a ‘chaotic’ playstyle and wild boss raids were always so random anyways. There’s a good chance it could just be some random online player who’s good in hijacking boss raids.
“Look, I don’t need you to help every time, management will kill me for not doing my job right if I ask you every time. I just need help with some wild bosses causes the R&D’s been nagging me to get the materials.” Kian pressed further, doing his best to convince Lux.
“Okay, if I do help you, what do I get out of this?” Lux was just messing with him at this point, she was already interested in this player Kian mentioned but it’s never wrong to want to get something in return, right?
“Sigh, fine. I’ll pay for your disgusting coffee for a week, how about that?” He tried to negotiate; his face grimacing at the thought of Lux’s favourite choice of coffee.
“Disgusting? It’s perfectly fine, keeps me awake and energize throughout the whole day.” She retorted, what’s so bad about her choice of coffee? It’s just eight shots of espresso and ice.
“I’m not going to argue with that.” Kian held up both his hands as he gave up the argument, all he needed was to get Lux to help him, “So, what do you say? Just like the old times?”
*****
When nighttime came, Lux logged into the blade dancer account she was provided with. Something about not wanting the public to find out that Team Radiant’s guild needed help from their pro players, “It’ll give bad rep to the guild, fans wouldn’t trust in the org’s ability anymore,” Kian reasoned with her. Whatever, Lux didn’t care, she knew she was good with any class in Runeterra.
In Runeterra, there were a total of six classes each with their own three sub-classes. The classes were swordsman, mage, marksman, fighter, warrior, and nightwalker. Lux is a battle mage player, a sub-class of the mage class that specialises in mid to short range combat with polearms. Sure, Lux was at her best when she’s playing a battle mage, but she believes can do just fine with a blade dancer.
“It’s not like she’s going to be some sort of god gamer, right?” she murmured to herself; her character sprinting along with twenty other players to reach their target wild boss’s area.
Immediately, she could see the small differences between normal and pro players, a normal player would just sprint without a care and use up all their stamina in one go then they’d wait until their stamina was back up to sprint again. The better players managed their stamina better by timing their sprint in between walking moves but they couldn’t manage it like a pro player would. Lux was able to sprint without running out of stamina during their whole run to the wild boss area, The Shimmerlight Sewers.
In the Runeterra’s lore, Shimmerlight Sewers was a massive underground sewage location that was plagued with chemically mutated rodents. It was said that the mutation was caused by unmoderated and illegal chemical waste dumping from the upper society. In the sewers, players can find trash related items such as the infamous ‘bug-infested cupcake’ which buffs all attack stats but also applies poison damage over time to the user. Even with the DoT debuff, some players still choose to use it for the attack stat increase of 20% as it was just too worth it.
“Which one of Twitch’s drop do you need anyways?” Amongst the swarm of mutated rats in Shimmerlight Sewers, there stands a plague rat by birth, but a connoisseur of filth by passion. Twitch the Plague Rat is the wild boss that spawns in Shimmerlight Sewers and with his chem-powered crossbow and venom, he vows to destroy the filthy upper society of Runeterra.
“We’re looking to get the orange material, ‘Venom Cask’. R&D mentioned something about wanting to add poison debuff to the Sylas’s weapon I think.” Aside from equipment and weapon drops, each boss has a special material drop. The special material and weapons from wild bosses above the level of 60 are all orange rarity items but only the material is guaranteed whereas the equipment and weapon are all up to chances.
“I see, I've seen the list of wild bosses you sent me just now, think we can get it all done in a week,” said Lux as she turned around a corner to enter Twitch’s spawn area.
“I really hate dealing with this boss,” it wasn’t that Lux hated the boss; Twitch by himself was not hard to deal with, he was a standard long ranged boss with the occasional stealth and poison bomb. What Lux hated was the area, Shimmerlight Sewers’ sewerage was filled with wastewater that slows down players’ movement speed.
Right as the group of players enter the area, they could immediately see other groups of players from different guilds gathering at the area. Twitch’s spawn location was a massive circular dead-end of the sewerage where the ceiling spans higher up than the rest of the Shimmerlight Sewers. Although, green lit chem-powered lanterns were hanged around the walls of the hall, the place itself was still considered rather dark.
“The other guilds got here before us, huh,” Lux noticed two other separate groups of players standing not far away from Twitch the Plague Rat in his full glory, his chem-powered crossbow hanged on his back as he crouched on the wastewater flooded floor with his hind legs, studying the cupcake he had just picked up somewhere. The players standing around were all in a stalemate, no one wanting the other to step into the Plague Rat’s aggro range. In wild boss raids, the boss drops don’t go to whichever party that got the last hit, it was given to whoever had the boss’ aggro when it dies.
In a single glance, Lux could guess which of the two guilds the players were from. On one side were players from one of if not the most prestigious guild of Runeterra, Sentinels of Light. The guild belongs to the team, ‘The Sentinels’ which produces multiple all-star pro players and has achieved more championship titles than any team in the league’s history. It wasn’t a surprise that the guild was trying to compete for Twitch’s drop, big guilds like Sentinels of Light, Dauntless Vanguard, and the Trifarian Legion would compete for all wild bosses. After all, when you have the manpower, why not get everything even if you don’t necessarily need it, just pile it all up.
“Where’s the other two big guilds?” Kian questioned sarcastically as their group arrived in front of the other two guilds, “Finally got sick of rats or something?”
“According to my intel, it seems they’re busy fighting over Fiddlesticks. He just spawned about a minute ago,” the player who looks to be the leader of the guild spoke up. From a glance, Lux could tell his character was of the blade singer class; a swordsman subclass that uses magic based attacks to buff and debuff their targets.
Bo was the guild leader of the Firelights, a guild that had the same name as the team and organization they were representing.
Team Firelights was a mid to low tier team that occasionally reaches the playoffs stages if the team does well enough throughout the regular season for their star player, Ekko to carry them into playoffs. While the guild, Firelights may not have a big chance in contesting for wild boss drops compared to other major guilds, they always favoured materials from the Shimmerlight region of Runeterra.
“God, I fuckin hate guild politics, so what now? We just gonna stand here and wait for Twitch to despawn?” Kian cussed out loud but his actions behind his words were the total opposite, ‘Go start the boss fight, I’ll try to stall them’.
Lux read the in-game message he sent before shaking her head and sighed, “God, I hate guild politics.”
Immediately, she casted the blade dancer skill, ‘Triple Slash’ to dash forward and gain distance between herself and the rest of the players. She notices that the others had the same intention as two other players dashed out from the horde to make way toward the wild boss. Amidst the shouts of, “What are you doing!”, from the three guild leaders, Lux’s third and final slash was the first to connect with Twitch, causing him to aggro on her.
The Plague Rat starts shrieking and takes out his chem-powered crossbow to shoot her, but before she could parry the arrows to further increase her aggro points, Lux was interrupted by the Knight player that the Sentinels of Light sent out. He used his shield to block the arrows and casted the Knight class’s skill, ‘Provoke’ to compete for Twitch’s aggro. For the next three seconds, enemies around the user would be under the taunt effect and can only attack the user. He then immediately pulled himself away to create distance between Lux and the wild boss.
With the aggro taken over by the Knight while she herself was also taunted, Lux decided to not compete for Twitch’s aggro and opted to just kill the Knight instead. Afterall, if there’s no one to compete for the aggro with you, the wild boss will just naturally start attacking you, no?
So, with the decision made, Lux immediately casts the skill, ‘Sweeping Blade’, a skill that allows the user to dash and crash toward their enemy. However, she cancels the skill mid animation as her intention was only to close the gap between herself with her opponent and starts casting another skill, ‘Lunge’ that stabs multiple times where the last hit causes a knock back effect. Her blade emits cold streaks of lights as she charges forward to stab the Knight who eats up all her attacks and was instantly knocked back. With quick work, she starts to combo her opponent to death, not forgetting to kill the other player from the Firelights guild afterwards.
Soon enough, Twitch changes his aggro on her, and the battlefield becomes a pit of chaos with players from the different guilds fighting each other and competing for the Plague Rat’s aggro.
*****
“When is she going to show up?” Lux asks Kian, “Twitch is going into half health, and this supposed hijacking menace you were talking about for the whole day hasn’t even showed up.” After the fight started, Lux had taken it upon herself to clean up players from the other guilds to secure the boss raid for the team. The players could come back to fight again, but they would be coming back from respawn point which was quite far away.
Speak of the devil and she will appear as Lux starts hearing a loud cackle; not far away from her, grenades and bombs starts exploding, engulfing the whole battlefield in smokes. “Hey! Hey! Hey!” she hears next as she tries to navigate herself out of the smoke.
“Lux! You have to kill he! Her stupid smoke’s covering up everyone’s vision!” Was this how she had always done it? Coming into the fight late, bombing everyone to cover their vision and steal the boss away? Lux had to admit, it was a quite a simple but smart move from the spitfire. Not many could just solo hijack a boss raid, let alone making it out of the chaos successfully. It wouldn’t work on Lux though, she’s confident that she will obliterate this player.
The spitfire class was a subclass of the marksman class; a class that focuses on using special bullets and grenades. Spitfires usually prefer to use pistols and revolvers in one hand while using their offhand to throw grenades. Occasionally, there would be players who use shotguns instead for the higher attack damage while trading off attack speed. The more niche playstyle of the subclass though, was switching between grenade launchers and guns or just straight up abandoning the gun for the grenade launcher.
Grenade launchers were good for increasing range and attack speed of grenade skills while having higher base attack than guns. The caveat, however, is that spitfires needed to keep switching between the two weapons which was too much of hassle as Runeterra does not support primary and secondary weapons. Thus, many opted to use the pistol and hand thrown grenade playstyle instead of opening their inventory to swap weapons every few seconds.
Silently, Lux makes her way to the spitfire to ambush her from behind. Now that the spitfire was in sight, Lux could finally see what the character looked like. ‘TheLooseCannon’ was donned in mismatching sets of blue and pink equipment that was so messy it was jarring to look at. Both of her boots were mismatched in blue and pink, her lower body equipped a pair of blue leather pants, and her upper body wore a pink plate cuirass along with an unnecessarily long red cape. To top it all off, she had worn a bright pink top hat and a pair of extra shiny red earrings. Even though it was a mess, all her equipment were orange in colour.
Before Lux could land a hit on her target, said target made an overhand grenade throw toward her face, forcing Lux to dodge away to the right to avoid getting knocked back from the explosion. This was the problem with spitfire, if you try to get close, they throw a grenade at you and even if you try to hit it before it explodes, it only lessens the knock back.
It’s okay though, all Lux had to do was just sidestep it and she’ll be right back on track as she casts the skill, ‘Shadow Steps’, a high-level blade dancer skill and immediately, her character splits and creates five other afterimages in pursuit of TheLooseCannon. Her opponent turns around and pulls out a gatling gun out of thin air as she starts spraying bullets and bullets over Lux’s afterimages. The ‘Gatling Gun’ was a level 5 skill that belongs to the Launcher subclass however, Runeterra allows sharing skills for subclass under the same class as long as it’s a below level 20 skills. Players must choose to advance into a subclass to access skills above the level 20.
Fortunately, her opponent only manages to shoot her afterimages as they flickered from her gatling gun’s bullets. She then tries to shift her position with her afterimages to conceal herself, but it seems as though the spitfire had already caught on to her as she accurately focuses her shots on Lux.
“Think I wouldn’t see through your petty trick? Think again!” She hollered as she swapped between throwing grenades and shooting special bullets at Lux.
Trading health to close the distance between a melee class and a ranged class is a textbook technique that everyone knows but Lux still tries her best to mitigate the damage dealt by her opponent as she paths towards her opponent in zig zag motions to dodge her bullets.
“Floating bullet!”
“Grenade!”
“Stun bullet!”
“Thermite grenade!”
‘Great, she’s shouting out her skills’ names,’ her opponent’s constant blabbering is starting to get to her mentally as she keeps trying to get closer to her, to no avail.
“Stop running away!” Lux complained as she finally catches up to the spitfire, ready to rain down combos of skills and attacks on her.
“Gee, you’re one persistent fucker, no one gives you attention at home, huh?” Okay. If Lux wasn’t already annoyed, she is definitely pissed off now as she releases her combo of skills on her opponent, weaving in normal attacks every few skills to connect her combo and making sure her opponent stays airborne, unable to move.
“Kian, finish the boss quick!” she commands as she rushes to kill her opponent, “You’re good, but not good enough. Come back and try again next time!” she proudly proclaims, feeling proud of herself for teaching the player a lesson.
“Sword draw!”
“Triple slash!”
“Alpha strike!”
Great, now she’s just shouting out skills that Lux is using.
Lux’s thought process is haltered when she hears a loud shriek across the field; Twitch the Plague Rat has finally reached red health, the final 10% of his health bar. When the Plague Rat reaches red blood, his aggression is increased, and his form will keep changing to camouflage with his surroundings.
Strangely though, he ignored the rest of the players that were attacking him as he threw out casks of venom, dealing AoE damage to those around him and charges toward Lux and TheLooseCannon. She reacts a second too late as she is knocked away from the wild boss’ mad rush whereas her opponent safely evades him by using the recoil of her gun shots to fly backward.
It was only then, she starts to realise that during their whole fight, TheLooseCannon was allowing Lux to attack her while raking up aggro points on the wild boss to take over the boss’ full aggro at the same time. She didn’t fight back at all because she was trying to win over the boss’ aggro. How didn’t Lux realise that?
“Did you even take this fight seriously at all!” Lux complains, watching her opponent drink up healing potions while expertly evading Twitch’s arrows and venom.
“What? You wanted to attack me, and I did let you, no?” For whatever reason, she could feel that the person behind the stupidly bright pink and blue character is stupidly grinning widely at her computer screen right then.
“I’m seriously going to kill you.”
“Don’t threaten me with a good time, sweet stuff.”
Lux immediately starts going after her again, meanwhile the rest of the guild tries to fight over the boss’ aggro from the spitfire.
“You two, go help her kill the TheLooseCannon! Tanks, provoke Twitch, and healers, prepare your cures and heals! The rest, dish out as much damage as you can!” Kian orders but was immediately met with a push back from Lux, “I’ll deal with her alone, you just focus on killing the stupid rat!”
“Aww, somebody’s pride got hurt?” the spitfire teases sarcastically, not forgetting to throw bombs at the incoming Lux while shooting the plague rat.
“Can you just shut the fuck up!” she exclaims as she casts Triple Slash once again, her blade lighting up in bright orange hues.
The first slash, she dashed forward.
“Wait, are you actually tilted?”, she bursts out laughing and returns fire, shooting ice bullets at Lux with her shotgun.
The second slash, she dashed sideways to dodge the spitfire’s Ice Bullet.
“I mean, no hard feelings, okay? This is just how it is in this game, gotta level up my weapon somehow, ya know?”
The last slash never came out as her opponent shoves a Burst Grenade up her face, completely knocking her away. TheLooseCannon then reloads and shoots off a new special bullet at the knocked away Lux, this time, a ‘Stun Bullet’ that has a strong stun effect of 5 seconds.
“I’ll deal with you later, rat! Got something sweet I haveta deal with!” The spitfire announces amid her annoying her laughter and focuses fire on Lux instead of the wild boss.
“Dancing Grenade!”
“Ice bullet!”
“Flame Chompers!”
Lux knew she was getting comboed hard by her opponent, but she was receiving heals from her party members, so she bides her time looking for the spitfire to make a mistake. Her patience is rewarded as she finally noticed a small mistake, small enough for most to not notice but big enough for her to make an opportunity out of it to strike back.
She knew the gunner’s going to use up her last bullet when she throws her Chomper grenade at Lux and in the small window where she reloads, Lux could break away from being airborne and attack her. She instantly casts the skill, ‘Falling Light Blade’, a plunge attack that releases sword energy and shockwaves.
Unfortunately, Lux is hit with another grenade right after the last bullet was shot. The grenade was no special grenade, it was just a regular frag grenade that had enough knock effect to buy time for the gunner to reload her shotgun and continue her combo.
“How!” Lux yells and slams her table as she watches her screen turn gray and her whole party wiped out minutes later. It doesn’t make any sense at all! Spitfires can’t throw two grenades at once!
System Announcement:
Wild Boss: Twitch, the Plague Rat has been slain by TheLooseCannon.