Chapter 347 - My SI Stash #47 - Jokers Wild by Bowler Hat Guy (WormXLeagueOfLegends)

-It's pretty much Ben 10 in Worm but without the watch and in the place of aliens we have League of Legends champs! For the top mains out there, the first champ he gets is Jax~

Synopsis: A Self Insert ends up in Brockton Bay with 148 Heroes sharing head space with him.

Rated: ???

Words: 45K

Posted on: forums.spacebattles.com/threads/jokers-wild-worm-league-of-legends-self-insert.839822/ (Bowler Hat Guy)

PS: If you're not able to copy/paste the link, you have everything in here to find it, by simply searching the author and the story title. It sucks that you can't copy links on mobile (´ー｀)

-I'll be putting the chapter ones of all the fanfics mentioned, to give you guys a sample if you wan't more please do go to the website and support the author! (And maybe even convince them to start uploading chapters in here as well!)

Chapter 1-3 (exceptional)

So as it turns out, being stuck at home for weeks is really boring. It's been like five days for me and I've mostly just been chewing through my video game back log. Then it dawned on me that theres lots of stuff I never cared to write because of the time investment involved and that I suddenly had the time to do. So heres one of those Self Insert things no one really reads. Have fun with it.

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I woke up in an alleyway.

I think at least. You read a lot of stories about characters waking up in unexpected places, and almost all of them lurch up and start looking around. For combat hardened badasses and their ilk, I'm sure rapidly getting yourself situated for another fight was probably pretty standard fare.

I myself am the kind of heavy sleeper who once missed a hurricane because it wasn't loud enough to wake me up.

This is why instead of my eyes fluttering open to take in my obviously changed surroundings, I just sort of kept them closed while part of me noted how hard and wet my bed suddenly felt.

"Mggg?" I gurgled after what must have been a solid five minutes of just accepting the new sensations without investigation, cracking one eye open.

Only to find myself making direct eye contact with a rat the size of a small dog.

"Guh!" I caveman screeched as the primal part of my brain my ancestors used in order to hunt prey and hide from predators punched into overdrive. It sent a jolt of adrenaline down my spine, setting my heart to jack hammering and giving me the impetus to finally lurch backward, shoving myself upward and away from the perceived threat.

Of course, because that threat was a simple rat, I ended up half sprawled against a dumpster, watching the damnable thing scuttle away in shock at the sudden movement.

"The f.u.c.k?" I hissed out, only now fully taking stock of my circ.u.mstances.

It was an alley, obviously, but more than that, it was like an artist's rendition of an alley from Gotham City. The brick walls framing the alley were in stark disrepair. Not just scuffed or marred, but actually missing in some places, leaving tiny holes into the neighbouring buildings. Bits of garbage and what looked like several used needles littered the ground, surrounding an oily black puddle of some substance I was afraid to investigate, mostly because I had just been laying down in it, and I did not want to know what it was.

To my right was the big blue dumpster I had pressed myself against in my surprise, it's paint weathered and its surface rusting almost comically. To my left was the mouth of the alley, which let out onto an empty and pitted street that looked like no one had bothered to repair it since it was made.

"Why!?" I blurted out, confused and terrified in equal measure.

I would love, love, to be able to say that I had a reasonable expectation that this was a practical joke of some kind. If I was better at deluding myself, I might barely be able to see one of my very limited number of friends doing this for fun.

But honestly, I just straight up knew they wouldn't. I am, overall, an extremely prickly person. I'm antisocial and have a low tolerance for 'excitement'. I'm the kind of guy who gets annoyed at the crowds in Disney Land and tries to nap or read in the hotel room for the whole trip.

So the handful of friends I had who tolerated me, definitely, knew better than to do shit like this to my ornery ass.

Which, of course, still didn't explain why I was in what might as well be crime alley with no memory of how I got there.

I started to breathe hard. Not from exertion but from stress. My heart began to pound, not audible in my ears like so many action hero's would have you believe, but still so hard that every heartbeat felt as though the organ was trying to escape my rib cage.

Despite my obvious panic, I managed to do the bare minimum to keep up with my situation. It's a habit of mine. When panicked or confused I almost instinctively act instead of freezing up. That action isn't always smart, and in fact I'm often told I tend to behave like a lunatic when responding this way, but hey it's better than crying and doing nothing... right?

So I did a quick check. There were needles in the alley that I was sleeping in, so the first thing I had to do was make sure I hadn't accidentally gotten HIV or something. I looked down at myself.

It was probably for the best that I had already hit my maximum threshold for stress by that point, because while there was nothing overly out of place with my clothes - which at the very least I recognized as my own - what I was struggling with was how freaking skinny I was. I mean what the hell? I looked like my kid brother! I was basically a day of not eating away from being borderline skeletal! This was not normal. I'm easily three or four times this size! I'm big boned! I'm supposed to look like my kid brother ate my kid brother!

Well. That might be a slight, exaggeration. Still, a lot of my girth was earned working my ass off at one job or another. It wasn't particularly flattering but it was mine! There are no words to describe the sudden sense of violation that accompanies the sudden knowledge that your body is not fully your own. It was both frustrating and humiliating. Everything was just... wrong. My gait was off. My scars were all gone. I was like a vaguely skeletal pastiche of myself, completely devoid of the imperfections that my life had left me.

Confused and now kind of angry, I quickly checked my hands, which were blessedly still at least the right color. I could put up with a lot of weird shit, but suddenly being Caucasian or Asian or something would be... weird beyond even that. I can't say being a mocha skinned biracial kid was always fun, but much like my fat ass, it was uniquely mine.

"So how the f.u.c.k do my clothes fit right now?" I asked aloud to no one in particular, tugging on an old tattered long sleeve sweater that I recognized as being a little big even on my formerly wider frame.

Jesus was this f.u.c.k.i.e.d. I had no idea where I was or how I got here. My first thought was to go to a police station but I would have to find one first so... I guess just ask the first person I see?

Chapter 2

Now provided with a direction to move in, my anxiety and panic calmed down a little. It was always like that for me. For me panic is inaction. It's doing nothing while the serial killer chases your friends. It's having an argument with someone and then leaving the result to fester. It's feeling helpless basically. If I was doing something then I couldn't be panicking. At least not so much that I stopped functioning.

So without really thinking beyond the surface goal of locating another human being, I stepped out of the alley, glad that I'd been dumped wherever the hell this was with my work boots on. Even if the fact that my familiar work boots had clearly been resized somehow got thrown on the pile of worrying things I was trying not to think about along with everything else.

The sun was high overhead, only just past its zenith, and I guessed the time to be around one-ish in the afternoon, which was about the best anyone could expect a stupid city boy like me to figure out just by looking at celestial bodies. The air was chilly, but not so cold that my sweater was insufficient - yet. If I had to spend all night out like this I would definitely be missing my jacket, but for now I'd live.

The area I came out into looked like those pictures of abandoned towns like Chernobyl sans the plant life. It was just... completely empty. No people, no cars - nothing. Just big run down building after big run down building. It looked like I was in a warehouse district. Or what used to be one anyway. The aforementioned warehouses were periodically broken up by squat little office buildings where all the paperwork was probably getting done. Keyword. was, since they were just as abandoned as everything else.

I grimaced at the barren streets, and for a second entertained the thought that I might be in an entirely abandoned city - which is when I looked up. Wherever I was, the entire place appeared to be constructed on a fairly high slope. High enough that from near its bottom I was capable of seeing much farther into the city than I should really be able to.

On the one hand, it helped me figure out which direction to move in. On the other, it was kind of a lot of ground to cover. I could only hope that I would run into someone inclined to help me out sooner rather than later. I could easily see myself getting turned around in an unfamiliar city like this.

So it was that I tramped into the early afternoon, dodging small puddles of murky water and paying approximately zero attention to my surroundings.

I did this often. Not get lost and wander into the sunset, but become so distracted by my own thoughts I would lose track of real life. It was easy for me to sort of phase out what my eyes were seeing and my ears were hearing. I could just let my body run on autopilot, while my mind was elsewhere, often agonizing over things that stressed me out.

I mean, can you blame me? If I laid out all the facts I had about my situation, the only obvious conclusion that I could come to was that I had been kidnapped, kept in captivity long enough to lose most of my weight, and then dumped somewhere afterward. I couldn't remember being kidnapped, and that didn't explain my inexplicable lack of scars, but I also knew for a fact that something that traumatizing would be grounds for some repression. Because while most people might jump to 'I was isekai'd by truck-kun' as an explanation for something like this, I tended towards pessimism wherever possible.

I was rarely wrong.

That's probably why I wasn't as surprised as I probably should have been when someone lurched out of a nearby alleyway as I passed it and dragged me back into it with them. Terrified? Yes. God yes. But surprised at something completely random and objectively horrible happening? Not so much.

Slightly dazed by the jarring sensation of being dragged sideways mid-step, I was unable to effectively fight back against my attacker - a non-descript looking guy wearing a cobbled together combination of tattered clothes that I could charitably say made him look like sort of a vagabond. Less charitably, he looked like a deranged transient. Without any leverage, I stumbled further into the alley, still being held by his shaky grip, and found myself looking the man in the eyes for just the briefest of moments.

They were beady, bloodshot, and almost completely devoid of what I would consider higher thought. He wasn't a zombie or anything, but he almost definitely wasn't fully mentally present. I'd seen similar in drug addicts before. People who had given up so much of their individuality in the never ending quest for the next hit that they were almost drone like in nature outside of their rare moments of lucidity.

"Wai-" I tried to open my mouth to say something, knowing that in all likelihood he only wanted whatever cash I had on me, which was quite obviously none, but he didn't bother threatening me. Heck, he barely even bothered to acknowledge I had spoken. The second we were safely out of view of the main road he lunged towards me.

"F.u.c.k!" I yelled, leaping backward with all the grace of a wounded elephant, narrowly avoiding the knife the man had drawn from somewhere on his person to swipe at me.

"Just-" I started again, trying to reason with the guy, only to be pushed further into the alley as I was forced to leap away from him again. Only it was less of a 'leap' and more of a graceless bunny hop that would have sent me sprawling on the ground if I didn't have the nearby wall of the alley to hold myself up.

Look I'm not a fighter. I have literally, never, been in a significant combat of any kind. So despite the fact that I intellectually knew that a knife would be mostly useless if I just had the balls to step into his reach and actually attack him, I also was incredibly scared of dying in an alley to a crackhead.

'Holy shit.' I thought to myself as realization began to set in. 'I'm going to die. He's not even trying to rob me. Just kill me so he can loot my corpse.'

Frantically, I scampered backward, doing my best to juke left and right in the vain hope that my attacker might get turned around enough for me to run past him to safety. I didn't have a lot of space left to dodge, and I was rapidly running out of alley to escape through though.

I needed a plan. I could... my legs are pretty long right? I could kick him? But aren't their arteries in your legs that are nearly as bad to have cut as just slicing your wrists open? Would my pants be enough to prevent that? What if he got a lucky shot in? I just didn't know. Mostly because I didn't have even the first clue of how to fight, let alone how to fistfight a guy brandishing a weapon at me.

And then, like the heavens opening up and shining a singular light of salvation down on me, I felt it. A vast grid of stars opening up in my mind's eye that - in retrospect - had probably been there ever since I woke up in this shit hole. I just hadn't noticed it because I was busy freaking out about the situation. It was... beautiful. Each star twinkled in a unique and different way, each one calling out to me to be grasped, to be used. One star, in particular, called out to me, it's fractal incandescence somehow conveying a sense of martial mastery and... smugness?

I didn't have long to think about it because back in the real world the crackhead lunged at me one final time, his knife blade on a collision course with my torso that I simply knew I couldn't evade. No longer left with a choice, I allowed instinct to take over, and my mind leaped outward to grasp at the star, yanking it out of its position in the sky and dragging it towards me.

The change was nearly instant. A blinding flash of blue light burst forth from me, warping my body and filling my mind with new knowledge. The five fingers on each of my hands fused together into three much thicker ones, my skin became an unnatural shade of purple, and the next time I blinked I was suddenly seeing out of six sets of distinct eyes.

Without any conscious thought on my part, my body reacted, stepping just slightly out of the way of the bladed weapon being swung at me. Then my hands snapped upwards, one hand grabbing my attacker's wrist, pulling to fully extend the limb, and the other slamming mercilessly into his elbow, inverting it's position and breaking the arm at the joint.

He screamed piteously as I moved, jumping away from me to stumble into a wall, nursing his elbow.

"Listen man, I don't want to hurt you any more than this so-" I started, now feeling much more confident somehow. I didn't know the exact details of what was going on, but the stream of knowledge telling me how to dismantle this man using my bare hands was also telling me I was now one of the greatest fighters on the planet. I didn't have all that much to fear from something as trivial as a hobo with a knife.

"C-cape!" The guy screamed, doing his best to transfer his knife from his broken arm to the hand on his still functioning one. I was... honestly getting kind of tired of being interrupted like that. Also, what the hell kind of cuss word is cape? Was that English? I had just sort of been assuming I was somewhere that spoke English, but if I was elsewhere I guess it would make sense if I couldn't understand everything being said.

I turned to leave the alley as I pondered that, feeling a new sense of confidence and strength in the background of my thoughts helping me to calm down from my earlier panic, but as I did so I found several more thugs staring at me from the mouth of the alley. I took careful stock of them, all six of my eyes absorbing all the information I would need to respond efficiently in a crisp level of detail that I couldn't describe any better than I could teach a blind man about color. There were six of them, three unarmed, two wielding knives, and one in the back fingering a gun nervously as they all stared at me with that particular mix of angry and scared that you can only really find it crackheads.

"F.u.c.k you doin' on our turf freak?" The man with the gun said, eliciting a hum of curiosity from me. So they did speak English. Useful. Still, rather than answer him in a way he no doubt was expecting, I just rolled my neck, kicking up broken broom handle from nearby and deftly catching it in one hand before taking a stance.

There was, after all, one language that pretty much everyone understood regardless of nationality.

"Who wants a piece of the champ?" I crooned.

Chapter 3

I threw myself forward, unnaturally flexible muscles and bones allowing me to turn my body almost entirely horizontal in the air before whipping a leg forward and arresting my momentum, transferring every ounce of the force generated to my makeshift bo staff. My torso rotated as I whipped the stick forward, dozens of small movements in my body combining to create a godlike physical attack that no one with human physiology could possibly replicate.

The thugs barely had time to think before I had moved, basic combat doctrine refusing to let me cede the advantage to such unworthy opponents. Even still, I doubt they were expecting my strike to take the lead man in the side and send him flying into the nearest wall. Heck, I wasn't expecting it and it was my attack.

In response to my sudden appearance amongst their ranks, the two knife wielding men to either side of me turned to swipe haphazardly at my sides. It was... it was honestly pathetic. A chimp could beat these goons.

Almost purely by reflex, my weapon rotated, one end slamming into either man's hand exactly at the right moment to force them to drop the offending weapons. Then, keeping my weapon horizontal I shifted it left then right, the quick jerking motions once more enhanced by the full body movement technique I had been using to increase my already quite potent strength. It was barely more than a sharp jab, but the force of each attack was enough to send the two disarmed goons stumbling away from me, if not take them out of the fight like the first guy I had hit. I looked around at the remaining combatants. Gun guy was hurriedly fumbling something out of his pocket while backing away from me, the two idiots I had just disarmed were eyeing me more warily now, rubbing at their chests where I had struck them, and the two as of yet unmolested unarmed guys were a bit ahead of me, looking at each other with expressions that just about scream 'no you go first!'.

"Hah! You know, I'll letcha go if you want." I said again, in a voice simultaneously mine and not my own. It was a little weird, but the presence that had been providing me with all my calm confidence and tactical ac.u.men assured me that this was only right. As though this was the way my voice was always meant to sound. The worst part was, something about it, about the way I was fighting and the sound of my voice, it tickled a memory in the back of my head. I wanted to grab the thought and chase it back to its source, to figure out what I was obviously missing but unfortunately current circ.u.mstances didn't really allow for it.

"-S'a big purple dude with a stick! No man I'm not f.u.c.k.i.n.g high! Like, I'm a little buzzed but I ain't seeing things man!" Gun guy yelled into his phone, apparently having decided to call for help. Hopefully not the cops or something. Depending on what country I was in, even defending myself in such a violent manner could get me in some real legal trouble.

"Hey! I said I'd just leave! I don't even want to fight you!" I yelled at him, absently swinging my staff around and sweeping the legs out from under one of the nearby goons who had decided to charge at me while I was distracted.

"Mel man, maybe we should let 'im go?" One of the thugs - notably one of the ones I hadn't yet struck - said keeping his eyes on me and miming a horrible approximation of a boxing stance.

"Shut the f.u.c.k up! Skids don't want no capes in his turf! It doesn't matter if they're just passing through! You're either with us or against us!" The man with the gun scowled, pointing the hand holding his phone at his compatriot.

"Well. You tried buddy. I'll make it painless alright?" I said with a shrug, turning at an acute angle and stepping to the left just in time to avoid two of his friends, who promptly ran into each other with a comical clonking noise as their heads cracked together. I took the opportunity to swat the man I'd tripped in the temple with a perfectly measured blow, knocking him out instantly and leaving a glowing arc where my weapon had passed. I hadn't noticed the glow before, but I supposed I had to be doing something to make a broom handle hold up under the forces I was applying to it. The flow of energy passing from me to the handle and back again was just such a natural and reflexive action in this form that I hadn't noticed it right away.

The guy who had suggested they all leave looked at me for a second as though actually considering my words, clearly getting ready to step forward to try and hit me, when a flicker of motion caught my uh... eyes.

So, here's the thing about whatever species I presently was. Humans have two eyes offset from each other in order to provide us with depth perception and a few other sensory goodies we've since used in order to achieve our top spot in the food chain. Whatever I was currently, it was clearly geared towards a lot more than that.

Almost as if in response to the motion, my dynamic vision kicked into overdrive, and I quickly found myself doing napkin math in my head as I watched gun guy raise and fire his weapon at me. It wasn't like I was experiencing time any differently than before - things didn't suddenly slow down or speed up in order to allow me to respond better. I could just see the bullet traveling in a way human vision simply isn't designed for.

Combined with my obviously advanced physique and reflexes, it was child's play for me to thwack it out of the air and into the ground with my stick, creating a slight cracking noise as it punctured the concrete.

I turned back towards the smart one, ignoring gun guy and slapping a handful more bullets out of the air using nothing but my reflexes.

"...Nah." He said flatly after a second, turning and sprinting away nearly as quickly as he had come.

"Good for him. He's gonna go far." I said mirthfully, then turned to everyone else.

"Offers still open. I don't mind a good fight, but this? This ain't one." I chuckled. I thought I had them for a second there too. I certainly know that I wouldn't randomly fistfight an obviously mutated superhuman just for existing.

"Skids says everyone here when Mush arrives gets a free hit!" Gun guy yelled over me, immediately setting crackheads one and two - the only people still left standing - back to leaping wildly at me.

"Seriously?" I complained. Who the hell was Skids, why was that name familiar, and why was he such a god damn asshole? Whatever, I was getting bored anyway.

So thinking, I used my stick to pole vault over thing one and thing two, landing in a spinning strike to the back of gun guys head. Before he even had the time to hit the ground I snatched the gun out of his hand, separating it from its ammunition cartridge and throwing both the ammo and the gun at the aforementioned idiots.

If I put just a bit more force into the throws than was necessary then no one was awake afterward to call me out on it.

Now having dealt with my immediate threat, I meandered over to everyone I had just downed, rolling them onto their sides and grumbling about morons the whole time. Don't get me wrong, I didn't care if these guys lived or died, I just didn't want to be personally responsible for said death. Which meant it was for the best that none of them choke on vomit or drown in street water or something after I had left here.

Once that was done I stood, turned, and began to jog away, setting a quick pace for myself that I would never have been able to achieve before this transformation. Naturally I was highly curious about my newfound magical powers, so once I was sufficiently far away, and after several quick turns to throw off pursuit by whoever the hell Mush was, I stopped to look at my reflection in a nearby window.

It was at this point that I finally noticed my clothes had changed. I wasn't wearing pants and a t-shirt anymore - I was wearing a huge voluminous purple robe with patches and baubles hanging at random points along its surface. A thick black fur was sewn into it at each of my shoulders, following the line of my body down into a V-shape that ended at the comically oversized belt holding the entire thing shut. My face was entirely hidden by the shadow of my hood, with only the six glowing blue coals of my eyes to prove there was anything under the hood at all.

"Wha- Jax!?" I blurted, instantly recognizing the character, no the person I had become.

Jax was a popular character from a game called League of Legends. Easily one of the most popular games on the planet (last time I checked anyway), the game was about a world where conflict was solved by nations fielding teams of champions in five versus five deathmatches. I played the shit out of it when I was younger, but of particular note to me was always the world's lore. Despite having a rich and full world that anyone who cared to could get lost in for hours, very few of the games players knew the first thing about the characters outside of the game.

But me? I loved reading about them. Jax for instance, joined the league in search of a challenge. He was such an unstoppable combatant that even when faced with gods, monsters, and heroes straight out of legend, he refused to fight with anything but a lantern on a stick. Because anything else would be 'too easy'.

Slowly, I brought my hands up to my hood, staring intently at myself. What Jax looked like under that hood of his was one of the great mysteries of the game. And now I had the chance to solve that mystery by-

A blast of light temporarily blinded me, and all my knowledge of combat left me at once. My muscles and bones shrunk and warped, and my vision condensed back down into the normal array of colors and sensations for a human. I would have probably wept at the loss of such wondrous perception if I wasn't presently dealing with the excruciating pain of having most of my body rearranged. It was a pain I hadn't felt upon initially transforming, but that I was apparently going to have to learn to put up with if this was going to be at all common.

I dropped to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut the minute the light faded, pulling into myself and panting as the last of the aching grinding sensation finished off. The starfield returned to prominence in my mindscape, and the smug little star that I now knew represented Jax dimmed, becoming boring, grey, and still as it retook its position.

"F-fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck." I hissed, pushing through the pain to stand again.

I was going to get back to trying to find help, but then my vision caught on the hand I was using to lever myself up.

My very purple hand.