[Hope In Ruination] Chapter 2 - The Sellsword

(996 AN, Valoran)

It was a hot and dry night in August, but despite the late hour, the red district of the city was even livelier than during the day. Bars, clubs, and brothels were bustling with customers, and the streets were packed with partygoers. 

A lone traveller walked purposefully through the sea of people, with the crowd parting before him like a miracle wherever he went. Even with how inebriated they were, most people knew better than to get in the way of a dangerous-looking sellsword. 

Unlike the name would suggest, the traveller did not have a sword but a massive polearm on his back. It was a sort of axe with a long handle and a large blade. Nevertheless, it only made for a more intimidating sight. 

Wearing a grey cloak that hid most of his body, a conical bamboo hat on his head, a mask that covered the lower part of his face, and a huge backpack on his back, the sellsword was obviously not there in search of the pleasures that the red district had to offer. He was there for a bounty if the piece of paper he was carrying in his hand was anything to go by.

Name: Hans Garrow 

Nationality: Demacia (fugitive)

Age: 39 years old

Physical traits:
- height: 1.9 metres tall
- blonde hair, black eyes

Wanted for:
- robbery
- murder
[...]

Above the writing, there was a black-and-white drawing of a thin and intellectual-looking man wearing spectacles.

The sellsword let out a humming sound. 

‘I know better than to judge a book by its cover, but this guy really doesn’t look like a murderer and robber to me. I’d bet my trusty axe that-”

“Trusty axe my ass,” rumbled a deep voice in his head mockingly. “That’s the 8th weapon you bought in the last 4 months. They rarely last you more than two weeks.”

The owner of that voice was Kyuubi, and the sellsword was none other than Naruto. 

‘This one lasted longer than the rest! And I don’t remember asking you a damn thing!’ Naruto shot back.

Kyuubi let out a harrumph and stopped speaking. 

The reason for their rough interaction was the incident that happened 1 year ago, in the Elemental Nations, when Kyuubi demanded Naruto to kill himself and set him free instead of trying to sail across the ocean to some unknown, uncharted lands. Naturally, the blond didn’t have a death wish; he wanted to live. Following that argument, the fox stopped supplying his jailer with his chakra. 

Naruto exhaled in annoyance at the bijuu but stopped paying him attention and started searching around for his target again. Going back to his previous train of thought, he talked to himself:

‘I’ll have to check my Negative Emotions Sensing whether he’s guilty of all those crimes or not.’

“Your Negative Emotions Sensing? That’s my skill, you stupid brat!” came Kyuubi’s snarky voice once again. 

‘For the last time, can you shut your trap? Your bum ass is living in my body like a freeloader anyway. Your skills are mine, and so is a portion of your power too. It’s the very least you could do, freeloader.’

Calling the fox a ‘freeloader’ two times must have hit a nerve because the bijuu started roaring all sorts of expletives at him. 

“Hold up, some of those are actually good,” Naruto snickered in amusement. 

He stopped next to the wall of a building, turned the Wanted poster face down, and started noting down some of the funnier insults Kyuubi had screamed at him so that he could remember them for future use: inbred monkey, worm-eyed cretin, crippled bitch [...]

Realising that none of his insults and swear words were working and that Naruto was actually having fun at his expense, Kyuubi finally shut up for good. 

In the end, there was nothing the fox could do. Due to the nature of the 8 trigram seal, which constantly siphoned some of the bijuu’s chakra into Naruto’s system, even with Kyuubi actively trying to lock away his chakra and not letting his jailer borrow any of it, Naruto could still use a tiny portion of his power. After all, he had spent over 20 years with the demon sealed inside of him.

Now that his tenant was quiet, Naruto let out a sigh and started searching for his bounty again. 

‘According to the intel I bought from the information broker, Hans Garrow likes to spend his time at the Swan.’

The Swan was a high-end pub in the red district. It did not explicitly forbid ‘low-class’ customers per se, but its exorbitant prices acted as a deterrent for the poor people. A regular labourer or a run-the-mill bounty hunter could never afford to spend their night there. 

‘That only further fuels my suspicions. It would make sense for a mage not to want to spend their time together with the rough adventurers or the common folk.’

Naruto’s suspicion was that Hans Garrow was, in fact, neither a murderer nor a robber. Not only that he did not look the part, but the social context of the place he was currently in pushed him to think so too. 

He was in Valoran, the northern continent of Runeterra, in a country called Nockmirch. 

He had arrived in this part of the world nearly 1 year ago, after a 2-month-long voyage by sea with the exploratory expedition from the Land of Moon. 

Unfortunately, of the original six sailboats that had left on the expedition, two of them were lost to the violent storms and three succumbed to sea monster attacks. The ship on which Naruto had been lasted longer than the rest, but even that one did not make it until the end. He was the only survivor who washed on the shores of Demacia, the westernmost country of the Valoran continent. 

‘Fucking Demacia.’

Weakened from running atop the water for more than a week straight, with no sleep and no rest, Naruto had been close to death by the time he finally reached the land. But his act of walking on top of the water had been noticed by the military guarding the coast of Demacia, who then proceeded to attack him, thinking that he was a mage. 

‘They got what they deserved. I hope they all go to hell.’

Demacia was one of the 3 major powers on the continent of Valoran, alongside Noxus and Freljord. If there was one thing that set Demacia apart from the other two powerful countries, it was their rabid hatred for mages and anything related to magic. In Demacia, merely being born as a mage was considered a crime. Mages, regardless of their age or sex, were often executed, tortured, or imprisoned, with the lucky ones being exiled from the country. 

But after centuries of suffering that harsh and brutal treatment at the hands of the royal family and the government, the mages of Demacia revolted.  A few months ago, a great rebellion exploded, seemingly out of nowhere, throwing Demacia into chaos. The head of the rebellion, Sylas, escaped from his prison, and the King of Demacia, Jarvin III, and many other nobles were killed. It became the talk of the whole continent. 

Now, months after Jarvin the Third’s death, the persecution of the mages in Demacia became even more violent than before, so many people started fleeing the country for their lives. 


⁂


Having lost his left arm in the battle against Uchiha Itachi, Deidara, and Hoshikage Kisame a year ago, Naruto could no longer cast ninjutsu techniques that required hand signs. Therefore, seeing as he was unable to Henge himself into a more pleasing appearance, he chose not to enter the classy establishment. Instead, he spied on its insides through its windows. 

Eventually, he spotted his target: he was sitting at the bar, sipping on a drink that Naruto had never seen in the Elemental Nations but had taken a liking to after arriving to Valoran—whiskey. 

‘Lucky bastard,’ he muttered when he noticed Hans’ companion. 

Wearing a tight red siren dress that could barely cover her voluptuous curves and with her long, golden hair cascading freely over her back, the woman sitting on the bar stool next to Hans and clinging flirtatiously onto his arm was a beauty like no other. 

A few minutes later, he noticed the giggling woman standing up and dragging a stupidly grinning Hans after her out of the luxurious local. 

Naruto tailed them from a distance, grimacing every now and then at their displays of flirting. But he couldn’t just stop following them either because Hans was his bounty. He had to ascertain whether he was guilty of the crimes the Wanted poster blamed him for or not. If he was innocent, he would let the man go; despite having lived as a nuke-nin his entire life, Naruto still had his own code of morals. But if Hans happened to be guilty of his alleged crimes, he would kill him on the spot, remorselessly. 

But, as minutes went by and the couple walked without stopping past two inns where they could have booked a room to hook up, a feeling of uncertainty washed over him. 

‘Something is amiss,’ he thought when they left the red district and headed towards the slum area on the outskirts of the city. 

At some point, Hans and the woman in the red dress ducked into a tiny, dark side alley. However, instead of hearing sounds of lips smacking together or moans, what came from the side alley was a cry of terror and a scream of agony.

Naruto grabbed the handle of his massive polearm and burst in an explosive sprint, dashing across the street like a phantom.  

“Oh, for god’s sake!” he groused. 

He had not even had the chance to ascertain whether Hans Garrow was innocent or not because, by the time he arrived in the alley, the man had been turned into a corpse. 

The gorgeous woman from before had shed away her red dress and beautiful appearance, turning into a pitch-black creature who still had the curves of the former appearance but none of its beauty. It was a black, shadowy demon with magenta-coloured horns and two blade-tipped tails of the same colour. One of those blade-tipped tails had impaled the man through the heart, holding him up in the air effortlessly. 

A sweet, seductive voice came from the demonic creature as she spoke to him:

“I usually like to take my time and savour their precious agony. . . but I noticed you following us.”

She flicked her bladed tail, throwing the man’s corpse away like a dirty rag. She giggled and licked her lips as she started walking towards him, her hips swaying with every step she took.

“How about you and I play a game?”

Naruto didn’t deign her with an answer. His large polearm became covered in deep red flames as he pushed Katon chakra into it. 

“Uu, a fiery one. But don’t worry, honey, I’m open to all types,” the demon moaned.

“Genjutsu?” Naruto scoffed and let out a burst of chakra from his body, dispelling the illusion of the demon before it could ensnare his mind. “So that’s how she lured that poor dude all the way here.”

The demon was startled when her charm spell failed and let out a hiss-like sound of anger. 

Five-foot tall magenta-coloured spikes grew out from the street explosively, and Naruto was quick to jump up, dodging the wide attack. 

The demon’s yellow eyes widened at the sight of him defying gravity when he started to run on the wall of the buildings towards her. 

She let out another yell as her blade-tipped tails elongated and slashed at him wildly, but his speed was far too much for her to keep up with. Her bladed tails missed their mark, leaving deep scars on the walls of the building. 

Appearing above the demon with a Body Flicker movement, Naruto raised his flaming poleaxe and chopped down savagely. 

There was hardly any technique or finesse to it. It was just the simple slash of a poleaxe covered in flames. But the monstrous strength behind the polearm caused a shockwave to explode and the wind to howl for dozens of metres around him. 

The demonic creature brought her two large, blade-tipped tails in front of her in an X-shaped guard to parry his attack, but the flaming polearm chopped through them like a hot knife through butter. 

She shrieked in pain but, at the very last moment, as her tails were being sliced off, she pushed the poleaxe to the side slightly, just barely managing to divert its course. Instead of having her entire body split in half, the demon managed to preserve her life, but Naruto’s flaming polearm severed her right arm from the shoulder. 

Ignoring her piercing, inhuman screams, Naruto pulled back his polearm and swung again, going straight for the head, intent on killing her where she stood. 

The demon jumped back and then broke into a mad dash, stirring great winds as she ran faster than she had ever run in her entire life. Never in her existence had she been injured so grievously; never in her thousands of years of life had she felt such pain. She had never been in danger of dying until then. 

Naruto chased after her, leaving after images in his wake as he focused his chakra on his legs. Even with her desperation giving her untold speed, he started catching up from behind fast. He was only a few metres behind her, almost in range to strike her down with his poleaxe, when the shadows covering the demonic creature suddenly increased in intensity and she vanished from before his eyes. She had turned invisible. 

Due to his Negative Emotions Sensing ability, he could still sense her general direction, so he swung down his polearm, throwing a blade of fire through the air in front of him. 

However, his flaming blade technique hit nothing but empty air.

“Tsk. She got away.”

Letting out a sigh, Naruto gave up on the chase because there was no meaning to it. He started walking back to the place where Hans Garrow’s corpse lay. 

‘Fortunately, his face is not disfigured.’

Whether Hans had been an innocent mage who fled Demacia or a vicious criminal, Naruto would never know. But now that he was dead, it did not matter anymore; he was going to turn him in at the Demacian border and collect his bounty. 

Swinging his polearm down, Naruto cut off the corpse’s head. Then, he grabbed a sealing scroll from his backpack, unfurled it, and put Hans’ head on it. A moment later, the decapitated head disappeared into the scroll with a plume of smoke. 

“Time to go back to the inn,” he muttered and grabbed his polearm to hang it on his back again. 

But when he raised the weapon in the air, its metallic handle snapped from the middle and its blade fell down (the blade was cracked too).

“You’ve got to be kidding me!”

Kyuubi burst into laughter from inside the seal. 

“Trusty axe you said? Bwahaha!”

Naruto let out a grunt of annoyance and kicked the broken weapon away, his mood sour as he returned to the inn that he had booked for the night. He may have caught his bounty, but now that his weapon broke, the money he would earn in exchange for Hans Garrow’s head would go to a blacksmith for another weapon instead. 


⁂


Other than Demacia, Freljord, and Noxus, the three strongest countries of the Valoran continent, many other smaller countries and city-states existed, such as Piltover, Zaun, Nockmirch, etc. 

Located on the northern side of the Argent Mountains, in the central part of the Valoran continent, Ardmavar was one of those many smaller nations serving as a “buffer zone” between Demacia and Noxus. With its subpar infrastructure, predominantly rural settlements, and weak military, Ardmavar was a weak, mountainous country that made a living out of deforestation. 

Alas, that was not a lasting business strategy, and the King of Ardmavar was aware of it too. They needed to find something else to trade. Therefore, at the encouragement of his advisors, the king emptied the royal treasury to buy technology and machinery from Piltover to excavate and mine the reserves of coal that they had found in the mountains. 

The plan seemed to work wonders, and the king’s men dug up deep mines, bringing an age of relative prosperity to the small country, making the citizens of Ardmavar sing the king’s praise at every step. . . and rightfully so. Coal mining may have been a tough and exhausting job, but it was simple, honest work, and most people were just happy not having to worry about what they would put on the table the next day. 

Momentarily putting down the intelligence report, Naruto grabbed the fried turkey leg on his plate and ripped a big chunk out of it with his teeth. 

Then he grabbed the intelligence report and started reading again. To make a long story short, the Ardmavar’s king’s plan was great, but he was unlucky. His men had dug too deep, and they had woken up a terrifying creature that would have been better left asleep. 

‘Another demon, huh?’ he mused as he put the report down and returned to eating. 

Due to the narrow and complicated terrain of the mines, the King of Admavar could not attack the demon with the full power of his military. He had tried so already, but his people suffered a cruel defeat, with barely any survivors left to tell the tale. 

What was needed to defeat the demon lurking in the depths of mine was not an army but a small group of elite, powerful warriors.

Thanks to his successful mining operations up until that moment, the King of Admavar had amassed a significant amount of wealth (for a nation as small as his) and he did not let it rot; he made good use of it. A bounty was issued throughout Admavar and over a dozen of its neighbouring nations, requesting skilled adventurers and sellswords to take down the demon and promising worthwhile rewards. 

Each country in Valoran had their own local dialect and language but many people also spoke Va-Nox, the language of Noxus - Naruto had learned how to speak Va-Nox too because despite how many people hated Noxus’ expansionist, warmongering policy, Noxus’ influence in Runeterra could not be denied. Not only was Va-Nox one of the most well-known languages in the world, but Noxus’ influence was to the point where their existence even changed how years were counted: the history in Runeterra was split in two, Before Noxus and After Noxus. 

‘A hextech arm. . .’ he thought wistfully when he remembered that among the rewards offered for the demon’s defeat were also ‘hextech prosthetic limbs’. 

He had heard about hextech before, Piltover’s ground-breaking technology, and he had even met one mercenary who had enchanted guns. Although he doubted that a prosthetic arm would ever be as good as his real one, it was definitely a desirable alternative over remaining a cripple. 


⁂


A tall, white woman with long, black hair tied in a ponytail and wearing red shades opened the tavern’s double doors widely with both hands as she stepped inside. Her stern face scrunched up when she took in the appearance of the people inside. 

‘They’re really letting in all the riff-raffs, huh?’ she thought irritated when she saw that there was even a cripple, a one-armed man, among the bounty hunters and mercenaries in the tavern. 

Her high heels made a loud clanking noise on the hardwood floor as she walked straight to the counter, and her fancy blue catsuit, red cloak, and large crossbow strapped at her back attracted a great deal of attention from the rest of the people inside. 

“Is this the meeting point for the ‘Demon of the Mines’ bounty?” she asked the clerk without as much as saying a ‘hello’ first. 

“Y-Yes, this is the place,” the girl behind the counter stammered. 

“Is it possible for me to take on this mission by myself? I’d rather go alone than have useless baggage with me. I’m Vayne, the Monster Hunter.”

The mercenaries were about to bristle at her and stand up to make her pay for her derogatory words. . . until they heard her name, that is. Instead, a chorus of murmurs broke out. 

‘Vayne? That Vayne?

“You mean the crazy Demacian bitch?’

‘I heard this lunatic even killed her adoptive mother.’

‘Shit, I might give up on this bounty.’

Whether Vayne heard what they were saying or if she was affected by their words would remain a mystery because her stony facial expression did not change one bit. 

“I’m sorry, madam, it’s not possible,” said the clerk. “The king requests a squad of at least 20 mercenaries.”

“Understood,” Vayne replied, not insisting on having her way. “When does the operation start?”

“Tomorrow at 6 o’clock. The mine is very deep, so it may take a few hours to reach its depths. Please prepare accordingly.”

Vayne scrunched her nose again. 

“Thanks for the advice, but I know how to do my job.”

And with that, she turned on her heels and left the tavern. 

⁂

The following day, led by a scout sent by the royal family, the mercenaries who came for the ‘Demon of the Mine’ mission arrived in front of the mine where the demon resided. 

“I know you’ve all signed the waivers, but I’ll say it one last time. If anyone wants to back away, this is your last chance. Better to pay a small penalty for ditching the job than to lose your life. As per our agreement, [...]”

Naruto tuned out the words of the king’s representative as he glanced at his surroundings with interest. It was his first time in a coal mine, so he was curious. 

He only started paying attention to the scout after he began explaining the characteristics of the demon they were about to face and recounted a short version of what happened when the king’s men attempted to defeat the demon and their crushing defeat at its hands. 

Vayne let out a sigh of disappointment. 

‘Another bust.’

It was a demon, alright, but not the demon she was chasing. It was not the target of her revenge.

‘Regardless, I will kill it just the same,’ she thought resolutely. 

Killing monsters and demons was the only thing that kept her going. Getting revenge on the demon that had brutally murdered her parents was her sole reason to live. 

Every time she closed her eyes, Vayne could vividly remember the memory of that fateful day. She had returned home from her violin lessons and walked inside, filled with joy, excited about telling her parents about her success in being recommended by her mentor to enrol at the Music Academy when she saw it. It was a monstrous creature who resembled a woman but it could not be any further than human. It was a dark, shadowy demon with blades for tails and two bright, magenta horns. 

‘I’ve spent 20 years chasing you around, monster. And I’ll spend 40 more if I have to.’

She knew the name of that monster, but she refused to utter it. It was Evelynn. A creature like her did not deserve such a pure and lovely name. Alas, that was what her cult of worshippers called her. 

Vayne had lost count of how many Evelynn-worshippers she had killed over the years, but she had yet to meet the real thing. She had spent her entire youth chasing Evelynn all across Valoran; she was in her mid-thirties now, but her hatred burned as strong as ever while her heart only grew colder. 

There was no room for mercy or second thoughts in her heart. Only vengeance remained a deep hatred for anything demonic. Anyone who got in her way or tried to help the demons in any way would meet their end at the silver bolts of her crossbow. 

⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂

AN: Nockmirch is canon. The fact that there are dozens (if not more) nations in between Demacia and Noxus is canon.

The name Ardmavar is not canon; it’s just a name I gave to one of those many small countries.

I have attached some pics of Vayne and Evelynn.