Meanwhile, a lot of mayhem had flared up back at the Institute of War. There was an intense amount of commotion and confusion pertaining to why two champions had just left the League without a trace. The Institute stated that they were investigating the cause, but no further information was available at the time. People started to question how this could happen in such a high security place; and question the League's power and authority in general. The League had seemed to be taking a few steps, but for the most part, they were allowing freak shows and creeps among their ranks. Some thought that it was to divert attention from the issue at hand and some thought that the League used these new "champions" for their own purposes rather than just to compete on the Fields of Justice.
While there were always some champions in the League in which fellow champions and summoners alike would question their acceptance, none of the additions stood out as being as controversial Thresh. The first League match, held on the Fields of Justice, that he was about to partake in, unfolded in quite the grueling manner.
Thresh came from the Shadow Isles, as far as anyone knew. He wore a long cloak that dragged along the ground behind him and walked in such a manner that made him appear to be at a casual stroll no matter how fast he was truly traveling. He carried two items with him: one being a hook and the other a lantern. Both were tethered to him and appeared to come from his back; vanishing into a hole in the back of his cloak. The tethers are referred to as chains that emanated a spectral glow, nut some people said that the chains were not even chains at all, but bones of the people he has killed. Thresh's entire body was covered by clothing or hidden in his cloak, except for his head. He opted to have his hood drawn down, and had no neck in which it sat around. His head was no more than a skull being supported by a spectral fire that created a greenish-blue glow around his skeleton no matter the time of day. His appearance alone was enough to set nightmares into an individual's sleep.
The match started off at a decently slow pace, in which the champion Draven was also summoned and chosen to protect the bottom lane's tower alongside Thresh. Draven himself was somewhat of an oddity.
He was known as the Glorious Executioner. The man came to fame from executing prisoners of Noxus who were sentenced to death. It was not the sheer number of executions or his precision in performing them that got him his name – while either factor alone would be more than enough – it was the manner in which he preformed the executions. Almost always, Draven would allow the prisoner one last "chance" at redemption. He would remove their hood and tell them to run. He would point to the exit and tell them they had one last chance to survive. Draven would perform his executions in front a large audience and it eventually escalated to the point in which he had his own stage amidst a coliseum in which he would hold his performances. Because of this, the path to escape would seem impossible. But when given the chance, most men would try. Never once did one escape. Draven would always catch up, running on seemingly impossible speeds fueled by nothing more than pure adrenaline in his own excitement and the roar of the crowd around him. Equipped with his spinning axe-like blades, Draven would throw them at escaping prisoners. The blades would cut deep into their backs, leaving trails of blood behind them as they continued to run; if they were capable of doing so at that point.
The manner in which Draven would spin his axes prior to throwing them would insure that they always managed to ricochet off of their backs. He would then run out to catch them, simply to throw it again and again. Often times he would find himself doing tricks and jumps between each toss, throwing them over his shoulder, under his leg, or however he saw fit. Most of the time the prisoner had been dead long before his third – or fortieth – axe had been thrown. He would throw his axes horizontally, to trip them as they ran, and on occasion he would allow the prisoner to almost reach the exit, having waited for minutes at this point, receiving boos of hatred from his crowd being quite convinced he had ruined their show. But at the last minute he would wind up both of his axes and throw them along the ground, watching them cut through the soil in such a perfect manner that it would appear the two were merely wheels connected by an axel. If the axes somehow managed to miss the fleeing prisoner, intentionally or not, he would use his control of mana to reverse the direction of these whirling blades of death, and cut them down on their return path.
But even a psychopath Draven was nothing in comparison to the monster Thresh revealed himself to be.
Part way through the match, there was a large fight in which every member of both teams participated. At one point, a champion by the name of Sarah Fortune was fleeing the fight, making her way towards her team's base. Thresh noticed this and decided that he did not approve of her escaping death while so heavily wounded already. He took chase of the woman, leaving his team and the current battle behind, but noticed he was not fast enough to do anything about it.
"Get meee… clossserr…" he told his summoner. The summoner who was in charge of watching over Thresh muttered a spell and, within an instant, Thresh vanished from his current location and reappeared about fifty yards from his original location. Thresh grinned, presumably, seeing as his face is purely skeletal with a fire burning around it. He firmly grasped the chain attached to his hook-like weapon in his right hand, and began twirling it in a circle; the tip of the hook seared the tips of the blades of grass on ground below, knocking another chuck off of it with each rotation. He only spun it around once or twice, but the manner in which he did so made it seem to be a lifetime.
Miss Fortune looked back over her shoulder to see what was headed her way, but it was too late to do anything about it. Thresh released his hook and threw It towards her, leaning forward on his throw as if he had just pitched a baseball at ninety miles an hour. The hook whistled through the air with its chain snaking in a manner reminiscent of a Chinese dragon kite in the wind. The hook made contact with her back and coiled down her body to create a vortex of chain around the helpless woman. Thresh grasped his end of the snare and tightened its grip with a sharp tug. Thresh laughed wildly as he turned and began dragging the woman along with him. After a few of the world's longest seconds, Miss Fortune had begun to wrestle free of the chain coffin, much to Thresh's displeasure. He turned back to face her, and leapt through the air. The chain retracted into his back as he flew and led him straight to her location and the hook straight back into Thresh's hand. Seeing she was free from Thresh's entanglement, she scampered back to her feet and began to run, but Thresh had many other tricks up his sleeve.
He took his hook in hand let it slide down to the floor, gripping the chain connecting it, then proceeded to drag it along the ground; this time, he started it behind him, and in a pendulum-like motion he moved it forward, latching onto her feet. Thresh pulled the chain back and retracted the hook to his hand to watch her fall face first to the upturned soil beneath her. She tried to scramble back to her feet again but this time she could not get up. The soil had been coated in ghostly plasma, making movement almost impossible while standing atop it. Face first in the ground, just in front of Thresh, all she could do was endure what was to come. Thresh let out a psychotic laugh and proceeded to thrashing his chains against her back. The wounds appeared with a spectral luminescence about them and inflected continual pain into the open gashes in her skin. Again and again, Thresh lashed out at her backside, like a slaver with a whip: cracking at her flesh with his chain but making sure never to go near the neck or back of the skull where a lethal blow could have been placed a long time ago. The summoners on Thresh's team looked at each other, all with faces of shock and horror. Finally one of them shouted at the one controlling Thresh.
"Well do something! Tell him to finish her!" he shouted in a shaky voice. The summoner in control of Thresh snapped back into reality like someone had just punched him in the face.
"Thresh, finish her off," he demanded.
"AHAHAHA HAAHA HAHAA! You want her dead now, do yooou? Here, come on over and plaayy…" Thresh's voiced echoed amongst itself and left a chill in the spine's of anyone who could hear it. As Thresh finished his sentence, he threw out his lantern to a location about seventy-five yards behind him. One of the summoners on Thresh's team ordered Draven to go to the lanterns location. Draven approached the lantern and was surrounded by a bubble that was clear with a slight green glow around it. The bubble suspended Draven into the air, and from inside it he could hear nothing and feel nothing. Not even the wind blew through to the inside. It was a strange feeling, almost as if he was protected, but he was at the whim of Thresh's demented mind. Thresh tugged on the chain connecting him to the lantern, and the collection moved towards him; the lantern, Draven, and the bubble containing them.
Draven arrived at Thresh's location and saw what had befallen Miss Fortune. As Draven stared, Thresh continued to lash out at her backside, inflicting more and more wounds, covering almost every inch of the back of her body. Draven quickly snapped to his senses and threw one axe into the back of her skull. Not even Draven had the strength to finish her in a flashy performance after seeing her in as much pain as she was. He could not even muster the strength to laugh or taunt the sky about how good he was, like he normally would. Miss Fortune's body hit the ground with a thud from having been held a foot or so off of the ground be her out stretched arms; but not before she let out a blood curdling scream. The cry was of such despair that even the summoners who were not watching over Thresh, shuddered. But Thresh himself laughed, yet again. But this time more loudly than before, as if he had just become empowered to hear her scream in death. Potentially, seeing people die literally did give him power as if he was fueling himself with their very souls.
Such acts persisted for the rest of the match; Thresh would rarely finish off a champion on his own. The act made him accepted as a supporting role, allowing for his allies to receive the gold for finishing off a champion in combat. No one wanted to have to go against the demon on the battlefield, so very often his name would show up before a match as a champion banned from being summoned. However, allowing for him to spend more time around the Institute of War, than on the battlefield, was not a very pleasurable option. Upon questioning as to why such a disgustingly heartless monstrosity would ever be allowed into the League, the Council of high summoners answered with a question.
"Would you want him on the streets instead of in here?"
In addition to the lack of a proper response, after the match, the "man" was seen patrolling the perimeter of the Institute, twirling his chain and lantern as he strode. The behavior was ignored with the excuse that he was happiest as a jailer, as he was in his previous life, and was allowed to do as he pleases around the Institute so long as it remains within the realms of the summoner's code of conduct; and walking around a perimeter was not an action of disturbance, or problematic to them. Others considered the beast to be the League's response to the sudden disappearance of champions, acting like a last line guardian to its doors.