Chapter 51 - The Great Escape

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

As though he’d been waiting to do it all along, the moment Fiddlesticks popped up in front of him, Alistar rammed into him with both horns!

Ravenous crows swirling all about him, Fiddlesticks was knocked clean out of the range of the tower by the monumental force of that impact, and was also Stunned for a brief instant.

“Damn it!” Team Pride’s Jungler hollered in shock. He’d been knocked away before he could use his other skills to apply Terror and Silence effects on them. The speed of Alistar’s reactions were uncanny!

Fiddlesticks’s ultimate ability dealt damage in an area around himself. Having been knocked out of the way like that, he ended up dealing basically no damage at all.

However, Alistar and Graves were not out of hot water yet!

Katarina leapt into the fray, knives flying and whirling about as she pounced on Alistar. Without hesitation, she began her ultimate skill, ‘Death Lotus’!

She whirled about in a deadly hurricane, raining blades upon her foes and dealing out a withering torrent of damage!

Bam!

Pulverize! Alistar slammed his massive fists into the ground. Katarina had barely managed to hurl out a volley or two before she was thrown up into the air!

This disrupted her Death Lotus, cancelling it outright. Meanwhile, the other skills she’d thrown out just before that had fallen upon an Alistar bolstered by the defensive buffs of his Unbreakable Will ultimate—it was nowhere near enough damage to leave him in any jeopardy.

Huang Mi was at a loss for a moment after his ultimate was interrupted, but then he yelled at Yi Xing, “We need more damage! Varus, hurry up and use your ulti!”

“Hah!” Varus shouted, and a mass of black tendrils erupted from his bow and snaked towards Alistar, the closer of the two enemy champions.

Bamf!

As Katarina tumbled through the air overhead, Alistar used his Flash to dodge aside, mainly because Fiddlesticks had Flashed in to use Terrify on him. Coincidentally, it had also been perfectly timed to evade the Rooting effect of Varus’s ultimate skill!

The black ribbons flew past, catching nothing, and then faded away uselessly.

Fiddlesticks and Katarina chased madly after him, while Sona and Varus moved to join the pursuit. A blue protective barrier began to glow around Katarina—even Shen was joining the battle down in the Bottom lane!

Without looking back, the wounded minotaur continued to flee up the road!

Graves had been further away from the wall to begin with, and only Sona and Varus had really managed to hit him with their attacks. Both Fiddlesticks’s Crowstorm and Katarina’s Death Lotus had barely glanced him, not to mention he’d thrown up his Barrier straight away.

Xue Haiyang had not hesitated to use both Quickdraw and Flash to extract himself from danger, saving him from what would have been a lethal Terrify from Fiddlesticks!

Now low on health himself, a frantic Graves scrambled to keep up with Alistar, and get himself away from that catastrophic ambush!

With all his speed enhancements, Alistar was running like the wind. Graves himself already had a pair of upgraded Boots, and they ran for dear life from the five murderous ruffians right behind them. Right now, if either of them got hit by any kind of crowd-control effect, like a Slow or whatever, there could be no doubt about the outcome.

It was just too bad that Shen, currently the closest to catching them, didn’t have his Flash ready, so he had no hope of catching them with a Taunt!

And then a wave of minions came down the road, and helped by intercepting the pursuers.

At last, Alistar and Graves were able to get away with their lives, making it to the safety of their second-tier tower.

They’d gotten away by the skin of their teeth!

There was silence for a moment. For the last few seconds, everyone had been holding their breath!

Seeing that Alistar and Graves had made it to safety while clinging to the last bit of their health, the entire cyber café exploded in noise!

“Oh my word, they’re still alive?” one of the elite players spectating exclaimed in disbelief.

“God… god-like skill!”

“Ah, too brilliant! I’ve gone blind!”

“Shen even used his ulti to jump down from Top lane. It was a five-man assault on Bot—and it failed!”

The cyber café echoed with slang and vulgar oaths, as the audience struggled to express the sensations they were experiencing.

A Sona ulti under the tower!

Fiddlesticks jumping in with ‘Crowstorm’!

Katarina’s whirling dance of death!

Varus’s ‘Chain of Corruption’!

And finally, Shen teleporting in from across the map with his secret ninja technique, ‘Stand United’!

Five incredibly powerful ultimate skills, activated one after another over a short couple of seconds. Death itself had come to claim them—no one should have been able to walk out of that alive!

And yet, there was no denying what they were seeing: Graves and Alistar were still standing!

It was impossible—it was a miracle!

The crowd went wild!

The members of Team Pride stared at their screens, thunderstruck!

The members of Team Scarlet were equally dumbfounded!

Xue Haiyang, Team Scarlet’s ADC, turned to stare in amazement at the high-school boy beside him, his newly appointed Support.

Having gone through the whole thing firsthand, no one understood better than him the dire peril they had been facing. At that moment, even he had lost himself to panic and given up, but Alistar had meanwhile demonstrated the pinnacle of calm judgement and perfect response!

Even now, his eyes still swam with recollections of Alistar’s graceful maneuvers, on the edge between life and death.

Unbreakable Will, to instantly break free of Sona’s stun. The speed of his response meant that he’d already anticipated the impending attack!

Headbutt, throwing back Fiddlesticks as he came swooping in for the kill! Being able to do so before Fiddlesticks disabled him with Terrify suggested that his mouse cursor had already been hovering over Fiddlesticks’s point of arrival, in advance!

Pulverize, to interrupt Katarina’s ‘Death Lotus’ as soon as it began—this required lightning reflexes and judgement!

And that last move, using Flash to dodge both Fiddlesticks’s ‘Terrify’ and Varus’s ‘Chain of Corruption’—that had probably been sheer luck, but after everything else that had happened, who would dare to say that it couldn’t also have been the intuition of an elite player?

Cool and decisive, with the tactical sense of a master, and superhuman grace!

For most people, it might only have appeared as a confused jumble of characters and colored lights, oblivious to the true level of skill involved. But when Xue Haiyang analyzed everything that had just happened, he began to understand how extraordinary this young boy sitting beside him truly was, and he looked at Yu Luocheng with new eyes!

***

“Did you manage to catch what happened?” Zhao Kesong asked Wang Qin, looking around at the deafening commotion of the crowd.

“Not really,” Wang Qin replied, “But being able to survive all that was kinda imba.”

“I wonder if Yu Luocheng might be the reincarnation of some legendary hero…” This thought had come from Zhong Xiaoyun.

“Whatever, the point is: he’s awesome!” Fang Xiaomei squealed.

Fang Xiaomei couldn’t understand everything as clearly as a player of Xue Haiyang’s level, but being able to escape a five-man ambush, and driving the crowd into such a state of exhilaration, it told Fang Xiaomei that the Yu Luocheng she saw out there—calm, composed, and in control, with his hands on mouse-and-keyboard, and his back turned to her—was the hottest guy she’d ever laid eyes on, a fascinating enigma of a man!

Yang Qianqian was also gazing out at Yu Luocheng with sparkling eyes.

She herself was not a novice to the game. Although she wasn’t going into hysterics like Fang Xiaomei was doing, it was evident that watching this latest play had left her somewhat breathless.

Watching ‘Top 10’ replay videos and actually witnessing that kind of gameplay live were two different things—not to mention how the cyber café had descended into all-out pandemonium.

It was like Fang Xiaomei had said: He’s awesome!

His serious expression, the sly tilt of his nose, the intensity in his eyes, that cocksure smirk upon his lips…

A man was most irresistible when he was wholly focused on something—even if that something was gaming!

Anyway, if you were to venture into that world yourself, you would understand that those split-second responses, seasoned tactical judgements, deft control, perfectly orchestrated teamwork, and the frenetic competition it creates… perhaps you would come to understand how exhilarating and engaging it all can be.

It was a competitive event as much as any other sport on this Earth—if not, how could there be so many people gathered here, in such shared fervor?