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"Who is this kid?"
"Does the Council just have an open-door policy for street rats now?"
"He's from the Zaun; I can smell the Sump from here. He doesn't have the 'Upper City' look. At all."
"If this was one of Professor Heimerdinger's clockwork pets, I might be impressed, but where did he dig up this brat?"
The Councillors didn't even try to hide their disdain. They looked at Chen with the same mix of arrogance and prejudice they'd shown Jayce back in the day. To move these political fossils, a speech wasn't going to cut it. He needed to hit them with something tangible—something that would make their gold-lined pockets feel light.
Suddenly, Chen's internal HUD, silent for a while, flickered to life.
Main Quest: Twin Cities War Hidden Quest: The Industrial Revolution. Objective: Convince the Council to initiate a technological pivot. Reward: Cloudtop Bond System.
Chen paused. Cloudtop Bond? What am I, playing Teamfight Tactics now? He didn't have time to second-guess the RNG; he had a job to do.
He took a slow, deep breath, then pointed toward the massive floor-to-ceiling glass windows of the Council chamber. "Gentlemen, Madam Medarda... please. Look outside."
The Councillors froze. Their collective jaw hit the floor as a gargantuan steel beast drifted slowly across the Piltover skyline.
It was a titan. It dwarfed the standard hot-air balloons and made the Hextech airships currently in development look like toys. To anyone from Chen's old world, the silhouette was unmistakable: it was a Zeppelin.
Back in 1900, Count Zeppelin had perfected the rigid airship—a beast with a complete structural keel to hold its shape, powered by massive piston engines. It wasn't just for show; it was a high-performance heavy-lifter. Building it hadn't been cheap, but fortunately, Heimerdinger was loaded, and the resources Chen had pillaged from the Academy were top-tier.
The sight of that behemoth floating over the City of Progress didn't just stun the Council; it stopped the entire city in its tracks. Thousands of people poured into the streets, necks craned toward the clouds.
Down in the lower laboratories, Jayce and Viktor were elbows-deep in Hextech stabilizers when Sky, Viktor's assistant, burst in gasping for air. "Viktor! Jayce! Get outside! Now!"
Viktor, leaning heavily on his cane, looked up with a strained cough. "Sky? What's happened?"
"The airship! The sky!" Sky's voice was climbing an octave.
Jayce wiped grease from his forehead. "What about the airship? Sky, use your words."
"Just look!"
She dragged them to the balcony. The moment they stepped out, the sheer scale of the shadow falling over the lab silenced them. Jayce stared at the giant beast, his eyes wide with disbelief. "Wow. How is that thing so much bigger than the Hextech cruisers we're building?"
Viktor shook his head, his mind already racing through the physics. "It's at least seven or eight times the volume. I heard Heimerdinger was tinkering with something 'traditional,' but this? This shouldn't be possible without a Hex-core."
Jayce looked rattled. "Heimerdinger hates the Arcane. You mean he built that giant without a single crystal?"
Back in the Council room, Chen watched the chaos with a smirk. He turned to the stunned politicians. "This airship is 128 meters long with a diameter of nearly twelve meters. It's held aloft by sixteen internal gasbags—over eleven thousand cubic meters of hydrogen. To make sure it doesn't just drift like a lost balloon, I've equipped it with two 8.82-kilowatt piston-driven fuel engines."
The Councillor with the golden monocle swallowed hard. His brain immediately bypassed the science and went straight to the bottom line. "How fast is it? And what's the payload capacity?"
The rest of the Council perked up. They didn't care about keels or hydrogen; they cared about ROI.
"It's several times faster than your current merchant fleet," Chen explained, "and unlike your current models, it doesn't need manual propulsion. Compared to a Hextech airship? I'll be honest: I don't know who's faster. But I do know ours is cheaper. Way cheaper."
Chen walked toward the center of the rotunda. "Hextech is a luxury. It's powered by magic crystals. And as everyone here knows, those crystals aren't exactly growing on trees. They're rare. They're finite. And they're harvested from the Brackern."
He was talking about Skarner's kin—the Crystal Vanguard. The raw magical energy in those crystals was literally the life-force of a sentient race from the Odyl Valley. Every Hex-core Jayce built was essentially powered by a stolen soul. If Skarner ever found out what Jayce and Viktor were doing to his family, he wouldn't just be 'in the sewers'—he'd be tearing Piltover apart stone by stone.
The Councillors knew the cost of crystals was skyrocketing. It was a supply-and-demand nightmare waiting to happen.
Mel Medarda stood up, her golden ornaments catching the afternoon sun. "Innovation has a price, boy. Hextech is worth the cost of the crystals. The wealth the Hexgates have brought this city is irreplaceable. Can your 'pure science' do what magic does? Can it move goods across the world in an instant?"
She was leaning on the 'Teleport' factor. To a world without quantum mechanics, magic was the only way to cheat space-time. Mel was betting everything on Jayce, and she wasn't about to let an Zaun strategist tank her investment.
"Hexgates are a miracle," Chen conceded. "But a miracle that relies on a dying resource is just a tragedy in slow motion. Let's see how irreplaceble they are when the well runs dry."
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