Arcane: The Gods Want Me to Pick a Route

The sudden arrival of three powerful gods drew the attention of every old god in the Freljord.

The same was true for a group of celestial beings beyond the stars, all of them staring in stunned silence.

As the former "rulers" of Runeterra, the Celestials had lived through countless ages and knew this world better than almost anyone—but even they had never seen these three gods who had just appeared over the Freljord.

Their presence was utterly foreign to the Targonian celestials. The white-skinned one smelled of sunlight, holiness, and warmth, while the two purple-skinned ones didn’t quite feel evil, but they gave off a chaotic, oppressive aura.

"What is this?"

"I have no idea. But judging by their faces, I feel like I’ve seen them somewhere before. Damn it... where?"

"Say... that little one... could she be a yordle?"

"She looks like one, but I can’t be sure. Yordles live in Bandle City and are mysterious beyond compare. There may be some among them with strength close to demigods, but no yordle should be able to truly break into the demigod realm, because they can’t wield the power of laws."

"Then what the hell is going on? That little one is definitely a yordle, but damn it... her aura isn’t any weaker than mine?"

In the void of space, fragmented voices traveled from tiny world to tiny world. The place Serylda had called the heavens was, in Zaunite terms, the star-river, and now in that star-river beyond Runeterra, the Celestials were gathered around the planet, discussing what they saw.

The celestial race had been born in the celestial realm. Across endless ages, they had traveled to countless worlds and seen countless forms of life. But even so, they still had to admit one thing:

Runeterra was the most special planet they had ever seen.

No exceptions.

And it was precisely because Runeterra was so special that the Celestials had become what they were today.

By taking advantage of one immensely powerful being’s concern for Runeterra, they had managed to bind him and seize authority that bordered on absolute dominion.

And now... Runeterra had surprised them again.

This planet truly was the most unusual of them all.

"Logan, just say the word. What do you want Tristana to do? I always keep my promises—but you’d better keep yours too! You promised me this time was a mission, not a play trip, but next time you’ll let me come out to have fun!"

The little purple demon stood on empty air, a giant purple gourd strapped to her back, grinning so wide her sharp teeth showed.

She only came up to about Logan’s thigh, ridiculously tiny, but she had a big head, short little limbs, and a face so cartoonishly cute that it made her look like a lively little sprite.

What was funny was that none of it made her look awkward or doll-like. Everything about her proportions somehow fit perfectly. Add in her purple skin and the little tiger fangs that peeked out when she laughed, and she looked wonderfully alive.

"This time, I’ll help you. Next time, you help me. I need to... find something."

A cool, androgynous voice sounded behind Logan.

He turned and saw white hair tied behind the head, with the bangs in front covering the right half of her face. Her oval face was beautiful and fine-boned, the visible eye a deep blue with no visible pupil. Her nose was straight and perfect, and her thin lips, faintly tinged purple, parted slightly as the woman who looked like a demon general gazed at him in silence.

She wore a patterned robe with colors and fabric somewhat similar to Thresh’s, though styled as a short skirt that left her strong, full purple legs exposed. She wore embroidered boots, and in her right hand, her broken sword radiated terrifying pressure.

"Who do you want dead?" Riven asked flatly.

Hearing that, Ahri pressed her lips together and looked at Logan with utter helplessness. She silently mouthed to him: Keep a close eye on Riven, or this is going to become a huge problem!

Logan nodded to Ahri.

He understood exactly what she meant.

Tristana was manageable. She was mischievous, yes, but also straightforward, good-hearted, and willing to listen to Logan.

Riven was another matter entirely...

To put it bluntly, in the Akana faction, if the Spirit Blossom core was number one, then they were number two.

The Akana gods were the kind who refused to submit to anyone. Even within the Spirit Blossom land, they were nothing like the Kanmei gods. They were never united, never warm, never especially friendly.

You could tell that just from how Cassiopeia and Tristana argued nonstop, how Vayne couldn’t stand Riven, and how Darius kept saying Lillia was too timid.

Meanwhile, on the Kanmei side, Evelynn and Syndra got along wonderfully, Yasuo and Yone were as close as brothers, and Teemo somehow got along with absolutely everyone.

As for why the three gods Logan had brought out this time were two Akana gods and Ahri...

Well, there was a lot to explain there.

First of all, now that Logan had become the Spirit Blossom Guardian, he no longer needed to spend emotion points just to enter Spirit Blossom, and there was no time limit anymore either. If he wanted to go, he could go.

And just now, while only a few minutes had passed in outside Runeterra, for Logan inside the Spirit Blossom land, nearly half a day had gone by.

He had spent almost that entire half day calming down all the gods of the Spirit Blossom realm, and getting that lunatic Thresh—who still couldn’t stop obsessing over him—to settle down too.

The Spirit Blossom Guardian ability was incredibly useful. Even though Thresh had tried several times during Logan’s meeting with the other gods to suck him into the lantern, none of it worked. So in the end, Thresh could only sit there and listen obediently, basically drooling while Logan talked.

It had pissed Logan off beyond belief.

Thresh’s eyes were terrifying.

To put it simply, the way Thresh looked at Logan was exactly the same as the way Logan looked at Ahri.

But damn it, Logan had absolutely no interest in being anybody’s boy toy.

After that, Logan told all the gods of the Spirit Blossom land about his journey—how he had met Ahri, how he had come to know Kindred, and everything that had happened between them. Nearly twenty powerful gods sat in a circle and listened to him with absurd seriousness.

Tristana and Teemo interrupted him several times, asking questions over and over.

The reason for that was simple.

These gods were bored.

Truly, unbearably bored.

The gods of Spirit Blossom were not like Ornn or Lissandra. They were not born demigods, nor had they cultivated themselves into divinity on their own.

Before entering the Spirit Blossom land, they had been people with memories of their mortal lives. Only later, through Ionia’s powerful spiritual boundary and the nurturing of the spirit of Ionia, had they gradually become gods.

So in a certain sense, they were gods with very human emotions.

They were people.

They felt attachment, sadness, happiness, grief.

And when you spent too long in a world with no real civilization, boredom naturally set in.

That was why stories of the outside world were an enormous thrill to them.

But when Logan finally said he needed help, and that he wanted to invite three gods out of Spirit Blossom to help him fight, the situation changed a little.

The Kanmei gods also wanted to go out, of course, but many of them openly admitted that they had no desire to fight and kill people. After thinking it over, a number of them declined Logan’s request.

The Akana side, on the other hand, was the complete opposite.

Every single one of them agreed.

Every last one wanted to leave Spirit Blossom and go into the outside world.

In the end, Logan had no choice but to pick the relatively obedient Tristana and Riven.

After all, Darius was a spirit of war, Cassiopeia was a spirit of temptation, and Vayne... Vayne was even worse.

She was a spirit of the hunt.

Every one of them had a bigger temper than the last, and every one of them was stranger than the last.

And why didn’t he let Thresh out?

Please.

If Logan let Thresh out, he was pretty sure the first thing Thresh would do was go after him.

Even with a contract in place beforehand, Logan was still scared. He was genuinely afraid that the moment Thresh got outside, he’d violate the agreement and make a move on him anyway.

Logan absolutely believed Thresh was capable of doing something like that.

When Riven asked who needed killing, Logan released his divine consciousness. A lotus mark appeared at the center of his brow. Now he could do something similar to what Janna did—his powerful soul erupted with spiritual force, and the Freljord spread out before him like a giant map seen from above.

Then Logan’s face darkened as he looked south.

"Help our own people first. Riven, go. I want that black wolf dead."

His gaze locked onto the south.

He had seen Janna getting bullied.

Swain was there too. That guy had finally stepped in after all. But he was still too weak. Even with demonic power, he was at a disadvantage against the old god Kinl and was currently getting beaten down.

Janna, meanwhile, had been forced into fighting two enemies at once. And if one-on-one was already hard for her, fighting two at once was obviously much worse.

If not for the fact that Janna was a god born from faith, with no true physical body—so long as faith endured, she herself would not truly perish—then by now she might already have been gravely wounded, or even dying.

That was why Logan was angry.

Along Logan’s path of growth, besides Spirit Blossom itself—the cheat that had carried him this far—two gods had always been helping him.

One was Ahri.

The other was Janna.

Especially Janna.

Whether it was with Logan or with Jinx, Janna had often filled the role of an older sister. She protected Logan, and she spoiled Jinx.

So of course Logan was furious now.

Riven glanced at him, pressed her lips together, and the instant she raised her sword, she closed her eyes. When she opened them again, violent black mist exploded from her body, spreading for kilometers in an instant. Then her killing intent locked firmly onto the black wolf.

"Watch your tone, Logan. You are not my superior, and I am not your soldier. This is a transaction, nothing more."

Just before her body vanished from in front of him, she said coldly, "Do it again, and when this contract is fulfilled, the next thing I cut down will be you."

"What about me, what about me?!"

Tristana reached up with her tiny hand and tugged at Logan’s pant leg.

"That little snake—"

"Okay!" Before Logan could even finish the sentence, Tristana burst into giggles and accepted at once.

A purple glow spread through her chin-length hair, and she swung the giant gourd from her back into her hands. On her round little face, her large eyes turned red, and in the pink-red whites of her eyes appeared vertical pupils.

Then Tristana disappeared too.

And Logan flew south after them.

Ahri hurried after him.

The instant Riven’s presence locked onto Rilfen, far to the north, the giant blood shark’s face turned grim as he shouted:

"That’s impossible! Those three gods... they’re not from Runeterra!"

His expression grew serious. The many eyes on both sides of his head turned toward the two old gods beside him.

And what answered him was the same solemn expression on their faces.

Especially the whale—his meaning was clear.

Not Celestials.

The Celestials would never help Lissandra.

After all, one of the enemies the Three Sisters had fought back then had been the heavens themselves. To put it plainly, Serylda had fought the Celestials of Targon.

Karma was flying through the air at that moment. The hem of her dress was torn. One of the fans in her hands had dimmed to a weak green glow, with broken fan leaves and damaged ribs. And the octopus she had been fighting was in no better shape, its body covered in horrifying sunken blood pits.

Each crater was dozens of meters across.

Though they had only been fighting for a short while, Karma had gone all out, while the octopus had been trying to protect himself. He wasn’t stupid enough to risk his life for real.

After all... if he got badly hurt, then when the time came to divide up the Freljord, the two beside him...

In short, the situation in the north sea was even messier.

And the Seal Sister wasn’t in much better shape than Karma.

She had already shifted into her true form—a giant seal thousands of meters long, half-submerged in the sea, her upper body rising above the waves. Her body was covered in wounds, but the most horrifying injury of all was the bite the blood shark had torn from her.

In the Seal Sister’s thick, fatty side was a massive wound over a hundred meters wide and dozens of meters deep. That chunk of flesh had already been swallowed by the blood shark.

"Those are your people too?" the Seal Sister asked Karma, dazed.

She had sensed the battle in the south.

Her body trembled.

Until now, she had thought the fighting on her side was already brutal. It wasn’t as desperate as the life-and-death struggle between Lissandra and Volibear, but everyone here had truly been fighting seriously.

But now, compared to what was happening in the south, even the battle between Volibear and Lissandra didn’t feel as bloody.

Down there, they were truly trying to kill gods.

Karma was silent for a long time.

Then she nodded.

The moment she did, the blood shark, whale, and octopus gods all made their decision at once.

"Retreat!"

Are you kidding?

The three of them weren’t united in the first place, and even if they worked together, killing Karma and the Seal Sister would still be difficult. When demigods fought, if one side truly wanted to run, it was almost impossible to kill them outright. The worst-case scenario was severe injury.

Death?

In the Freljord, over tens of thousands of years, only a handful of gods had truly been killed.

And most of those had been killed by Volibear.

The rest had been the witch’s work.

But... if they got surrounded, then that was a different story.

Karma and the Seal Sister could sense the battle in the south—did the three of them somehow not notice it too?

Of course they did.

That purple-skinned swordswoman was a complete maniac.

As the three gods fled the Freljord and rushed back toward the northern sea, Karma and the Seal Sister did not stop them.

"Thank you," the Seal Sister said to Karma after a brief hesitation.

Karma nodded, then turned and flew south.

After hesitating for a moment, the Seal Sister took human form and followed her.

"Damn it, are you insane?! You’re not a god of this world!"

"Why are you listening to that human?!"

Rilfen retreated in pain, his enormous body shrinking down to the size of a normal wolf.

What, was he supposed to keep that several-hundred-meter body and make it easier for her to cut him apart?

His wolf eyes stared at the silent woman leaping toward him. Black mist rolled around her as she resembled a war goddess from some demonic hell, her giant purple-blazing sword crashing toward him head-on.

Boom!

A sword scar stretching tens of thousands of meters ripped through the land of the Freljord, shaking even the Dragonbone Mountains.

"Oh, come on, can’t you tone it down a little?!"

A complaining voice rang out.

Ahri extended a hand and protected the humans who had nearly been caught in the blast.

Seriously—if she hadn’t stepped in, that single slash from Riven would have affected at least ten thousand people.

So Riven and Tristana were handling the fighting.

Ahri was handling protection.

Logan hovered silently beside Janna, watching the battle unfold.

"I asked you, why are you listening to that human?! What did he give you? I can give it to you too! I can give you more!" Rilfen howled in pain. One wolf claw had split apart, and the rigid bones along his back, hard as divine iron, had been broken as well.

This woman’s sword was too heavy.

Too vicious.

And worst of all, she didn’t fear his attacks in the slightest. She was fighting with a completely suicidal, trade-your-life-for-mine style.

What kind of joke was this?

He had come here to answer Volibear, take territory, and make himself stronger—not to actually lay down his life for Volibear.

"What did he give me..."

Riven lowered her head and thought for a moment.

Then she raised it again.

Her Spirit Blossom broken sword slashed toward Rilfen once more.

Light and graceful as a butterfly, Riven leaped into the air, shattering space beneath her feet. With one step on the void, she crossed a thousand meters in an instant and appeared right in front of Rilfen.

As the broken sword fell, she said softly:

"He can give me freedom."

"And your talking is getting annoying."

"If you won’t fight, then die."

Riven’s arm dropped.

Purple fire blazed in her eyes as an asura-like aura engulfed the black wolf Rilfen.

BOOM!!!

//Check out my P@tre0n for 10 extra free Chapters //[email protected]/Razeil0810