Chapter One: The Life of a Minion
There is no other class nor existence as lowly and exploited as that of a minion.
I thought about these words as I and my fellow comrades emerged out of the Blue Nexus— what we affectionately called the mother gem, for it regularly birthed us from its crystalline womb— and moved, in a single file, weapons in hand, into the middle lane.
A surreal clarity envisaged the sky that day, blue with magic, bald of clouds, and misty with tension. A storm not long ago had bombarded the ground with a shower of rainwater, long before the champions had arrived, and so it was wet to step on. Wet with water, but soon, wet with blood.
Whose blood? You might think, why, the champions' blood of course!
They're the ones fighting for whatever inane and unresolvable reason spawned in the senile scrotums of the ancient summoners! Why, violence and gladiator style arena fights are the most ideal kinds of concessions one could make for peace, and so, the summoners, wise and studied, instituted the League of Legends. Of course, it is the champions, the so-called Legends; it is their blood, their sweat, that'll splatter during the melee and eventually decompose into the arcane soils of Summoner's Rift to fertilize its good land like Gromp manure and Raptor piss. It is their blood, the blood of "exceptional" nobles, "noteworthy" vagabonds, "gifted" children, angsty and abandoned adolescents armed with swords, guns, and "friendly" demons; mental asylum candidates, sadists, masochists, grotesque abominations, and circus freakshows; it is the blood they shed among one another in pointless combat that will be rewarded, that will be exalted, that will be remembered.
But not the minion's blood, no. Nobody could possibly conceive that the blood of the common melee and caster minion would stain the lanes of the Rift as well. Nobody could possibly conceive that the blood of hundreds of squads of minions, regularly spewed forth from the Nexus, only to be killed by champions or fellow minion, would also paint the rift. Nobody, not a single soul in Runeterra, dared to think that the blood spilled upon this battle-torn field was primarily shed from the flesh of the petty and insignificant minion.
How do I know all of this? I am a minion, a caster minion, the softest type, out of the three other casters in my file. My unappreciated and exploited existence has branded me with a torturous and fickle life, one that has given me enough time to contemplate the injustices inherent within the sadistic treatment towards my kind.
None of my comrades bothered to concern themselves with the sorts of thoughts I had; they were not ignorant, no, they were aware of the nature of our life just as I was, but none of them, none of them, thought it noble to ruminate on these crucial ideas, ones which involve the very point of our existence. But though I had constantly entertained these thoughts, I appeared no different from the others who would not, or would only do so in passing. My name, much like my comrades, was unique. Why? Because it was a number only I could possess. Minion three-nine-four. Threniur.
Like any other caster minion, I donned a robe of a royal blue color, though the status of my fellows was far from royalty; such a robe was plain, largely inelegant, and carried a hood so thin that flimsy amounts of rainwater often leaked through it. A wooden mask with thin, separate slits for eyes covered my face; almost squeezing it to the point that I could feel the warmth of my breath shoot back at my mouth. Why did I need a mask? Keep in mind, that, inasmuch as I never chose my name, I never chose to wear a mask, not because of desire nor necessity, but because it had been attached to my being, as a deity would attach an imperfection to a mortal's soul. Perhaps it is for an aesthetic purpose, or a way to intimidate an enemy (never worked), or a way to further stifle the individuality which we already lacked. As for me, personally, I found it useful for detaching my identity from my actions. You would soon see why.
In one hand, I wielded wand, which had an inexpensive type of power crystal at its pointing end; my only weapon, one that was obviously crafted in a cookie-cutter deep in the bowels of the most decrepit Zaunite factories, but even so, I had to use this tirelessly against my designated enemies. Why? It is every minions' purpose, implanted in their minds by the rotten system we call the Match. I was no exception.
It is this same system which had directed that my kind to be of four and only four types: the caster, which I was part of, the melee, the siege minion, and the super minion. How did our people come to such a simple stratification such as this? The inner workings of the system had mostly been concealed from all of us, and so the answers remained elusive. I, and some of the more intelligent casters, had frequently assumed that we were designed, in an artificial sense, to come in different versions, much like shoes that come in different sizes. Whatever the case, it appeared clear that the very existence of our kind had been maliciously manipulated to serve the purposes of the Match, and so scarce is our knowledge of our people's history that we have not an idea how we came about. Our history, much like our raison d'etre, has been forced by an iron and unseen hand from our very origins, and so there has never been such a thing as a nation of minions, a common soul of minions of which all minions could aspire to represent and uphold, while the champions and summoners enjoy the attribute of having a nationality, a history, a heritage, with which they could forge an identity loftier than themselves. I know this. They often talked about it. We couldn't.
The first wave, the one which I marched with now, consisted of three casters and three melees. The composition of this feeble squad was done for an equally feeble strategy: we casters delivered heavy damage (by minions' standards) with blasts from our wands, and the melees absorbed the damage. The melees were our brutes, their heads as hard as the nasty ends of their hammers, but their actual damage was as pointless as an ant's bite. Yes, they, the melees, had the weakest damage of us all, while we, the casters, the weakest health. What we lacked, they had in abundance, and vice-versa. They, the resilient cannon fodder, and we, the fragile little cannons. Common to us all was a short stature; like stunted dwarves we were, yet fleet-footed in our pace. It should be, then, obvious, that a common minion was doomed to bear this innate and irreversible asymmetry of function, all for the sake of the Match.
The champion who had begun to walk with us, a child with a teddy bear in hand, appeared to be in no excusable position to fight in a bloody battle, and was, both biologically and existentially, superior to us common minions. As you were compelled to walk in a straight line to your inevitable and redundant death, would you not feel an immense envy seeing this child skipping about to the side, walking so carefreely by virtue of a volition which my people as a whole could not enjoy, while towering above us despite her age? I have seen the face of this child, this particular champion, many times in the rift. Her name was Annie.
We and Annie (notice that I do not attach her to we) reached the exact center of the middle lane. From the opposite side, there came another squad of minions, those of the Red team, accompanied by a man with his hair tied into a wicked bush. He carried with him a slender sword and a somber expression, one of pure concentration. Wind seemed to encircle him, and not him nor his peculiar aura surprised me, for summoners picked this exact champion as common as a caster minion such as me respawned. I knew him as Yasuo.
Not long, the enemy team's melees clashed against ours, hammers against axes, shield to shield, while we casters positioned ourselves in the backline; the standard strategy, really. The scene before you would appear to be normal, almost trivial, but to me, the sight of my kin hurting and killing one another, stirred lurching feelings in both my heart and stomach. The first pangs of violence had crept into the lanes, and with it, departed the principles and decency which every individual minion had. We became what they wanted, what we were intended for: beasts of entertainment, servile to the point that we had ceased to be masters of our will.
Yasuo came forward, drew his blade, and drove it through the skull of my fellow melee, already battered within an inch of death by the axe chops of the enemy melees. Gold, exactly twenty-one gold coins (as expected), spewed forth from the wound'd Yasuo cut, and it showered, along with my poor and noble comrade's blood, upon his dour and undaunted face. And what did this innocent friend of mine hear as he rasped his last breaths and walked into eternia?
"HA SEH!"
Words as unjustifiably undramatic and short as his death. They were indiscernible to me.
Why must I witness this? I thought, as I, like any other minion, stretched out my wand to expel a hot ball of energy towards an "enemy" melee minion. Why? Yasuo approached yet another one of my comrades, but was too slow in finishing him off, that a ball of flame from my wand was the one to deprive him of life. I could not help it, as I shot another ball to switch to a different target, I could not help the welling in my eyes and the contortion of my brows as I forced myself to look away. It is for this reason that I found the mask useful, yet it could not block out the glances of my fellow casters, who knew that I, unlike others, did not take well to committing fratricide or at least had not yet succumbed to being desensitized to it (as most of them were), but there it was before me, again, as it has always been in the Match, the cursed Match. The red garments of the enemy melee lumped to the ground. And so it happened: I had subjected him to yet another round of the vicious cycle, the vicious cycle which all minions must participate in. I would see him again. The cycle ascertained it.
And soon, all our melees would be dead, the last one sliced in two by Yasuo's blade. "Our" Annie was slow to finish off the first few enemy minions, throwing only a couple of candlefire balls, in fear of Yasuo cutting her with his sword, a reasonable fear for a child. Thus, one enemy melee, the last of his squad, came at a caster comrade to my left, and began to bash him repeatedly with his axe. As I, and my other caster fellow, saw this, we turned to the attacking minion and blasted him with our magic bolts. But he did not relent, he swung his axe in mad swirls, ignoring the lobs of bolts from both us and the caster which he assaulted.
The intangible maggots of the Match had dug so deep into the minds of both the enemy melee and the friendly caster under his axe blade that, even with our rather immortal suffering, every skirmish never failed to be done so sincerely, as if dying would mean a true finality to one's crude life. And they went at it, wanting his fellow minion, one of his kind, to die so badly and for what? Even I could not stop, nor could I find an answer. Our magical flames pelted the enemy melee minion, only for Annie to scorch his head off with a dart of fire. Exactly fourteen coins sprouted from the cauterized stump that was his throat.
And the familiar realization sunk in my small body, that only us casters were left, and that feeling of mine was reinforced with yet another strike from Yasuo's sword, finishing what the enemy melee minion could not. His blade lodged itself in the right eye of the caster's mask, cracking at the sides, blood and gold surging out across the steel of the weapon plunged into the eye slit. Quickly did he turn to my comrade to his right, and sliced him against the shoulder, then the shoulder opposite to that, and, to finish him off, he drove his blade into my fellow's chest, shouted some nonsense, and a loud "pinging" sound howled with the rushing of wind and the clinkings of gold coins spilling out of my dead comrade's ripped open rib cage.
Futilely, I casted bolts of magic against Yasuo, but to that he remained unfazed, my attacks as meaningless as squirts of water. Wind began to rise all around him,as if in preparation, and immediately did I notice that Annie was standing behind me, albeit to a distance.
Yasuo came at me, twirling his sword, his blade catching the winds now constituting his aura. I threw yet another pitiful bolt at him, and he responded with a gash across my chest.
Pain. All minions felt it, in every possible way you could imagine.
Again, he struck me, the last minion of the first wave, slicing the length of my arm, as it raised to shoot another bolt, and though it throbbed out blood and seared with pain, I lifted it again, just to shoot another bolt, never minding the utter agony now clawing in my ruptured veins.
Fire came from behind me. A spear of flame struck Yasuo's chest, and with little struggle in his face, he cleaved his blade across, sending a resounding command to the winds gathered around him. It was his… "fourth kyu", and, knowing what was to come, I sighed deeply. In spite of my pain, I looked straight ahead at the violent and bladed winds of an incoming tornado. The ends of my robe lifted, and not long, so did my whole body. Patches of skin all over my form tore open. Blood splurged out, and so did Yasuo's gold, exiting me like lumps of coal breaching out of the fibers of my flesh.
And he didn't even hit Annie with his tornado.
As a blackness I had been so acquainted with greeted me again at "death's" door, I was able to glimpse at the next wave of minions. They, like me, had been aware of their coming fate, and they, like me, would experience it, and they, like me, would live again to die again.
Again, and again, and again, until the Match ends.
Trivia: As far as my research goes, three-nine-four (394) is the numerical value of the Hebrew word "chofesh", which means freedom.