Chapter 1: Riven (I) - Noxus's Betrayal

On a battlefield in Ionia, where Ionia’s fighters were using a landslide to encircle a Noxian army, the scene came to an end with a flaming arrow streaking down from the ridge.

A decoy!

The moment the chemical fire from a Zaunite alchemist burst out of a ruptured container, Riven understood her position with absolute clarity.

She was not some vanguard of Noxus, nor a hero about to win glory and make a name for herself.

She was just a decoy. Nothing more than a decoy.

Piercing screams filled the night sky. Ionians and Noxians alike were dying and rotting in the savage agony of the poison.

But only she was still alive.

"W-why... why..."

Amid the chaos of flesh and green toxin, Riven trembled and dropped to her knees. Her vacant expression seemed unable to escape the betrayal just inflicted on her, and her desperate gaze spoke of her faith in Noxus collapsing in ruins.

The massive sword in her hands had been enchanted with a powerful, efficient spell. The weapon personally gifted to her by Grand General Darkwill had protected her body from the damage, but it could not shield her from the pain of being betrayed by the empire.

"Why!"

Riven’s voice sounded like someone trapped in a nightmare, or the death-rattle of a dying woman. The horrific scene of death before her cut deep into her heart.

No, impossible. Someone had to be alive. Someone had to be alive...

In the darkness of despair, Riven hungered desperately for even the faintest glimmer of dawn. She braced herself with difficulty and pushed forward through the green poison fog.

Wet earth, cold stone, the wreckage of carriages, and blackened corpses.

Her hands, made to grip a sword, groped inch by inch across the wounded ground. The longer she searched, the more hopeless she became.

One. Even if it was only one...

Please, please...

"Cough!"

Suddenly, amid the chorus of screams across the battlefield, a cough rang out that was different from the rest.

Strong!

The voice was loud!

Riven stared in surprise toward the sound and immediately rushed over.

A hand. No, a person buried beneath the mud.

It was the outermost scout!

When the Ionians had buried them with the landslide, the scout must have been trapped underground.

"Don't die, please don't die!"

Riven nearly cried in despair. She shoved aside rocks, dug through the mud, and did not care at all that her nails broke or her fingertips were scraped raw.

At last, she dug out an unfamiliar man and immediately hugged him tight.

"Alive, you're alive!" Riven cried, tears streaming down her face.

But he was not a scout, and he was not a Noxian soldier, because what Riven was holding was not Noxian standard armor, but a set of smooth waterproof fabric.

Her initial joy and excitement gradually turned into confusion.

"You..." Riven noticed a faintly glowing magical item in his arms. It had protected him from the toxic gas.

"Riven?"

To her surprise, he actually spoke her name out loud.

"Who are you?" Riven frowned. She thought of one possibility: this man was the eye that had been watching them go to their deaths, and that magical item was the safeguard Emystan had given him.

At that thought, the look she gave the man turned colder.

"Can we talk about that later?" The man stood up. He was weak, but he quickly tossed something into his mouth and said, "Let's get out of here first."

Riven could only nod at the suggestion. They really did need to leave.

...

Soon, the two of them appeared in a forest not far away. Along the way, they carefully moved through the trees and plunged into a river, leaving Riven unable to help but marvel at the man’s ability to hide his trail.

In the end, they arrived at a wooden cabin beneath a cliff.

The man opened the door and went inside. The empty cabin opened into a ventilated cave, with all kinds of medicine and glass bottles piled on a stone table. There was also a wooden bed covered with a sheet, along with other things. Several stone vats carved out of the rock were filled with water and food like fruit.

Recalling the bizarre vine-like plants she had seen, Riven’s expression suddenly turned a little speechless.

If not for the man’s unexpected calm and his native-sounding accent, Riven might have suspected he had originally been a savage, or else someone from Freljord.

Because she could tell the man had been living here for a very long time.

"Now can you tell me who you are?" Riven looked at him coldly, even tightening her grip on her weapon.

"My name is Ron," the man answered readily.

"Maybe this surname sounds more familiar to you. My family name is Trapein," Ron said.

"Trapein..." Riven’s pupils contracted as she cried out in disbelief. "You’re the Trapein family’s young master!"

"That’s right." Ron nodded. He pulled over a stone stool for Riven, but she did not sit down.

The Trapein family had been wiped out two years ago. She had received the order, and she had completed the mission.

Now, even though Riven felt she had saved the last bloodline of the Trapein family, her guilt did not disappear. If anything, it grew even heavier.

"Sit." Ron waved lazily at the stool. "I know it was you who did it."

"You..." Riven remembered that she had been masked, and her body had been altered by the mages under Darkwill’s command. By rights, Ron should not have been able to know her identity.

"I'm sorry." Riven lowered her head, her body trembling, not at all like the Noxian butcher she had been known as.

"No, it's not your fault." Ron sighed. He did not care much about it, because he was not the real young master Trapein.

Two years ago, he had transmigrated here. He had no superpowers, only some of the Trapein family’s resources and his own special magical ability.

"Now that I think about it, it's kind of funny. I came here to save you, and in the end you were the one who saved me." Ron sighed. He sat down at the table and began tinkering with the liquids and powders in the glass bottles.

"Save me?" Riven quickly caught on. "You knew what was going to happen?"

Ron sprinkled some red powder into a stone cup, then secretly dropped in a pure white crystal. They quickly turned into a bright red liquid - a life potion.

"I waited in this damned place for you for two years. What I didn't expect was that you wouldn't need my help at all."

Ron glanced at her sword, then poured half his own cup of life potion into the other.

He pushed the second cup toward Riven, then drained the one in his hand in a single swallow.

"You..." Riven looked at him at a loss. He had really waited two years just to save her. He...

Riven knew this might be some kind of magical talent, but she did not understand why.

"Why?" She did not drink from the cup. Instead, she looked at Ron and asked.

"I don't know. Maybe it's fate." Ron rolled his eyes. "You'd better rest for a bit. Your body is shaking."

"Mm. I understand. Thank you." Riven looked at the strange man in front of her, and somehow the desperate, sorrowful emotions inside her had changed quite a bit because of Ron.

"And... I'm sorry too."

After drinking the potion in the cup, Riven found a place to lean against the wall and quickly fell asleep.

As expected of a female warrior. She could even fall asleep in a position like that.

Once Riven was asleep, Ron sighed. He busied himself for a while at the stone table, then brought a tube of purple compound over to Riven.

After carefully pouring the compound into Riven’s mouth, Ron carried her over to his wooden bed.

The plan he had been waiting on for more than two years could finally be carried out today.

Thinking of that, Ron could not help but laugh.

From a psychological standpoint, everything matched his predictions.

All he needed to do now was intensify Riven’s guilt, guide her despair and unwillingness, and use the conflict in her mind between her pathological devotion to Noxus and Noxus’s merciless betrayal to take control of her thoughts.

"Sweet dreams."

Ron narrowed his eyes and looked at the sleeping Riven. Her body had a striking beauty to it, and the balanced lines of her muscles and wheat-toned skin made it impossible not to imagine how fiercely her waist would twist in the days to come.

(Riven’s side continues the original backstory line; the protagonist Ron is a transmigrator.)