The streets of Manhattan swallowed Yasuo whole.
He'd slipped from the hospital through a service exit while staff scrambled to respond to whatever crisis had sent that armored figure streaking across the sky. Now he stood on a sidewalk teeming with more people than he'd seen in entire villages, each one moving with purpose through canyons of steel and glass that clawed at the heavens themselves.
Yasuo's breath caught in his chest. The buildings gods, the buildings stretched so high he had to crane his neck to see their peaks. Fifty stories. Sixty. Some even taller, their upper floors disappearing into wisps of cloud. In Ionia, the tallest structures were pagodas that reached perhaps five levels. These monuments of glass and metal dwarfed them like adults towering over children.
A yellow vehicle roared past, its horn blaring. Then another. And another. The street was choked with them, dozens of cars moving in ordered chaos, their engines purring with mechanical precision. No horses. No oxen. Just metal and wheels and some invisible force driving them forward. The smell of exhaust mixed with street food, perfume, and the accumulated scent of millions of lives compressed into too small a space.
"Watch it!" A man in a suit shouldered past him, barely glancing up from the glowing rectangle in his hand.
Yasuo stumbled back against a building's wall, his stolen hospital scrubs and bare feet marking him as profoundly out of place. Everyone wore strange clothes tight pants, colorful shirts with incomprehensible words, shoes that looked more like art than function. And nearly all of them held those glowing rectangles, their faces illuminated by shifting lights and images.
His Sharingan activated reflexively, and the world transformed.
Energy signatures blazed to life everywhere. The glowing devices in people's hands pulsed with intricate patterns of electrical current, data flowing through invisible channels in waves of light. The buildings themselves hummed with power cables running through walls like veins, carrying energy to thousands of devices simultaneously. Traffic lights changed colors in precise rhythms. Security cameras swept streets with mechanical eyes. Even the air felt charged, filled with invisible transmissions that his enhanced vision could almost see, like radio waves made visible.
And some of the humans themselves...
Yasuo's eyes locked onto a woman across the street. Beneath her skin, something glowed. Not the natural energy of a living being, but something artificial. Metal and circuits integrated with flesh, a seamless fusion of technology and biology that made his stomach clench. She wasn't alone. As he scanned the crowd, he spotted others a man with what looked like a mechanical arm hidden beneath his sleeve, another with implants along his spine visible only to his supernatural sight.
This world had bent the very definition of human.
"I got to get out of here," Yasuo muttered, deactivating his Sharingan before the sensory overload drove him mad. The normal world flooded back, slightly less overwhelming but no less alien.
He forced himself to move, to walk with the flow of pedestrian traffic even as his mind reeled. Every storefront displayed wonders glowing screens showing moving pictures, clothing that seemed to shift colors, food from cuisines he couldn't begin to identify. The noise was relentless: voices in a dozen languages, music bleeding from open doors, the constant hum of machinery that never stopped.
Two blocks down, he passed what appeared to be a small park, a pocket of green surrounded by concrete and steel. Yasuo turned into it instinctively, desperate for something familiar. Trees, at least, were trees, even if these city-dwellers had imprisoned them in tiny squares of dirt.
That's when he heard the scream.
His body moved before his mind caught up, years of training overriding confusion and displacement. The sound came from deeper in the park, beyond a curve in the path where shadows gathered between street lamps. Yasuo ran, his bare feet silent on pavement, his borrowed scrubs billowing behind him.
Three men had cornered a young woman against a brick wall. One held her purse while another pressed a knife to her throat. The third kept watch, his eyes scanning for witnesses.
"Please," the woman sobbed, "just take it. Take everything. Please don't hurt me."
"Shut up," the one with the knife snarled. "Give us your phone too. And that necklace. Move slow."
The lookout spotted Yasuo first. "Yo, we got company. Some homeless guy."
All three turned. The woman's terrified eyes found Yasuo's, pleading silently.
"Walk away, man," the leader said, brandishing his knife. "This ain't your business."
Yasuo stopped ten paces away, his body falling into a ready stance without conscious thought. The familiar weight of his sword should have rested at his hip. Its absence felt like a missing limb. But the combat instincts remained, honed by hundreds of duels, sharpened by years of survival.
"Let her go," he said quietly.
The three men laughed, the sound ugly and confident. They saw what everyone else saw a lean man in hospital clothes, unarmed, barefoot. Easy prey or easy to intimidate.
They didn't see what was behind his eyes.
"Last chance, crazy man. Walk. Away."
Yasuo reached for his wind techniques, for the power that had been his constant companion since childhood. He felt for the currents of air, for the connection to the element that had defined him. He gathered his focus, his will, preparing to send a gale-force blast that would scatter these thugs like leaves.
Nothing happened.
The wind didn't answer. Not even a breeze stirred in response to his call. The connection he'd relied on for so long, the power that had been as natural as breathing, was simply... gone. Severed. Dead.
Panic flared in his chest for a heartbeat.
The knife-wielder charged.
Yasuo's Sharingan blazed to life, and the world slowed to crystalline clarity. He saw the man's footwork, read the angle of attack, predicted the knife's trajectory before it began. His body moved with fluid precision, years of muscle memory compensating for absent magic. He sidestepped the blade by inches, his hand snapping out to catch the attacker's wrist. A sharp twist. The man screamed as bones ground together. The knife clattered to pavement.
The second thug rushed in from the left. Yasuo read his movement, saw the wild haymaker coming before the man had fully committed. He released the first attacker's broken wrist, ducked under the punch, and drove his palm into the second man's solar plexus. The air left his lungs in a whoosh, and he folded like paper.
The lookout pulled something from his jacket not a knife, but a strange angular device made of black metal. A gun, Yasuo realized, recognizing the weapon from glimpses on the street. More advanced than any firearm from Runeterra, but the principle was clear enough.
"Don't move!" the man shouted, his hand shaking. "I'll shoot, I swear to god I'll "
Yasuo's Sharingan tracked the minute tremors in the man's hand, the tension in his trigger finger, the fear in his eyes that screamed he'd never actually fired at a person before. In the space between heartbeats, Yasuo closed the distance. His hand struck the gun's barrel, deflecting it toward the sky as it discharged with a deafening crack. His other hand came up in a precise strike to the gunman's throat controlled, non-lethal, but utterly incapacitating.
The third man collapsed, gasping.
Silence fell over the small clearing, broken only by the woman's ragged breathing and the groans of the defeated criminals. Yasuo stood among them, his chest heaving not from exertion but from the realization of what he'd lost. His wind techniques, the power that had defined him, were gone. In this world, he was just a man with exceptional reflexes and supernatural eyes.
"Thank you," the woman whispered, clutching her recovered purse. "Thank you so much. I thought they were going to "
Sirens wailed in the distance, growing closer.
"You should go," Yasuo said, his voice rough. "Tell the authorities what happened."
"What about you? You saved me. You should "
"I can't." He was already moving, his Sharingan picking out the approach vectors of multiple police vehicles. "I don't exist here. Not yet."
He ran before she could protest, his bare feet finding purchase on pavement as he fled deeper into the park. Behind him, the sirens grew deafening. Ahead, an apartment building offered a fire escape. Yasuo leaped, his fingers catching metal rungs, and he began to climb.
Up. Always up. Away from questions he couldn't answer, from authorities in a world whose rules he didn't understand. The Sharingan guided him, showing him which handholds would support his weight, which windows were occupied, which paths led to the roof.
He emerged onto a flat rooftop seven stories up, the city spreading before him in all directions like a carpet of light and sound. The night sky glowed orange, too bright to see stars, polluted by the radiance of millions of lights below.
Yasuo deactivated his Sharingan, letting the exhaustion wash over him. Without his wind techniques, even those supernatural eyes drained him faster. He was weaker here. Diminished.
"Hey there, mysterious guy with the glowing red eyes."
Yasuo spun, dropping into a defensive stance.
A figure perched on the rooftop's edge, silhouetted against the city lights. Red and blue costume that clung to a lean frame. A mask that covered his entire face, with large white eye-pieces that reflected the ambient light. The figure raised one hand in a casual wave, completely at ease despite standing on a ledge seven stories above the street.
"We need to talk."