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Chen and Ekko stood in the dimly lit meeting room of The Last Drop, facing the cold, mechanical gaze of Camille Ferros. Ekko felt a shiver of déjà vu; he had lived through this conversation a hundred times. But as Camille began to speak, the air in the room shifted.
Camille shifted her weight, the blue light of her Hextech heart pulsing rhythmically. Her eyes narrowed into predatory slits. "It seems your 'Political Commissar' is smarter than he looks, but unfortunately, he is also careless. You don't have days left. You have hours. Piltover is marching now."
Chen and Ekko froze. In every single one of Ekko's previous time loops, the war had started on a specific, fixed date. This was the first time the timeline had fractured so early.
"You have yourselves to blame," Camille continued, her voice like a razor on silk. "Who told you to send a mutated rat to assassinate Jikegar? You exposed your knowledge of the coming war. Piltover's response to a perceived threat is always the same: total eradication. They are moving to strike before you can finish your 'preparations'."
She paused, looking at the two young men with a mix of disdain and pity. "The world is a delicate gray, boys. I offered you a way to maintain that gray. To return to the balance. But you chose the black and white of a revolution. Now, you will see if Zaun can survive the light of a Hextech sun."
Without another word, her scissor-legs made a sharp clack, clack, clack as she turned and walked away. "Piltover is here. The Ferros Family is here. Do you truly think you can win?"
"Absolutely not!" she called back over her shoulder as she vanished into the fog.
Ekko slammed his fist against the table. "No! Zaun can win! We have to!" He turned to Chen, his face pale. "Chen, this is bad. Ziggs hasn't finished the heavy-duty explosives. The bridges are still standing!"
"We have to adapt," Chen said, his mind racing through tactical formations. "If the rat's failure triggered this, then the rat better be in position. But more importantly, we need to hold those bridges until Ziggs arrives. If the bridges fall, Piltover is forced into the water—and a soldier in a boat is just a target."
The Defensive Line
The alarm bells of the Wildfire Gang rang out across the Undercity. Every combat-ready soul was summoned to the riverbank. Chen scanned his vanguard: Jinx, Ekko, Urgot, and the massive, green form of Zac.
"Where are the others?" Chen asked.
"Ziggs is in a 'creative frenzy'," Jinx replied, blowing a strand of blue hair out of her face. "He said if I touch his workshop before he's done, he'll turn me into a firework."
"And Singed?"
"Viktor is still in the vat," Ekko said grimly. "The evolution is halfway through. Singed said if he interrupts it now, Viktor won't be a hero—he'll be a puddle of melted meat."
Chen nodded, his jaw set. "Then we buy them time. Every minute we hold the bridge is a minute Ziggs has to build that 'Big One'."
They scrambled to the center of the four main bridges. While Urgot suggested using high-tech blast shields, Ekko quickly corrected him. "Hextech bullets carry an armor-piercing energy frequency. They'll slice through metal plates like hot wire through butter. We need mass. Sandbags mixed with wet concrete. The loose structure of the sand absorbs the kinetic energy and the concrete hardens under the heat of the impact."
They stacked the bags two meters high and three layers thick, creating a fortified "No Man's Land" right in the center of the bridges.
"Jinx, set up the Pow-Pows," Chen commanded. "I want overlapping fields of fire. If a Piltie sticks his nose past the halfway mark, I want it gone."
The Assignment
Chen looked at the four bridges stretching across the dark water.
"Urgot, you take the North Bridge. Your presence keeps your men in line," Chen ordered.
"I can take two!" Urgot roared, his machine-gun arm whirring.
"No," Ekko intervened. "I've seen it happen. Without you standing right there, the men on the second bridge will break when the first Hextech volley hits. You are the anchor. Stay on one."
"I'll take the South Bridge," Chen volunteered.
"I've got the West," Ekko said, checking his Z-Drive.
"And the last one?" Chen asked.
Zac stepped forward, his gelatinous chest puffing out. "I'll take the East Bridge. Bullets just make me... wiggle."
On the opposite bank, inside the gleaming white tents of the Piltover military camp, Warden Jikegar watched the activity through his Hextech binoculars. He saw the sandbags rising and the machine guns being mounted.
"The rats are building a nest," Jikegar sneered, slamming his iron cane into the ground. "They think a few bags of dirt will stop the future. Ready the First Battalion. It's time to show them that the sun never sets on Progress."
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