Chapter 6: Echoes of Other Worlds
The longer Steven lived in Piltover, the harder it became to ignore the itch in the back of his mind. Hextech was unlike anything from Earth, yet eerily familiar. The way it pulsed with energy, responded to mental discipline and creative engineering—it was magic and science merged into one. Not entirely unlike the worlds he'd once watched unfold on a screen or page.
It was during one sleepless night, staring at the glow of a half-dismantled capacitor core, that the idea struck him.
What if I stop copying what they do here... and start building what I already know?
...
...
The next day, he skipped his afternoon break and headed straight for the workshop. Ideas buzzed in his head like bees. He jotted them all down, page after page—sketches, labels, calculations. He wasn't trying to replicate the full version of what he'd seen in Marvel or DC or anime. That was impossible. But versions of them? Crude interpretations built with hexcrystals, brass, and ingenuity?
That was doable.
His first creation was more proof-of-concept than practical. He called it the Repulsion Bracer. Inspired by Iron Man's palm blasters, it was a hextech gauntlet with a front-mounted crystal array, powered by a compressed energy coil in the wrist. It didn't fly or stabilize—but when he activated it in a controlled environment, it expelled a forceful shockwave that knocked over a stack of lead weights.
It wasn't efficient. It drained all its energy in one shot. The crystal cracked under stress. His left eyebrow nearly got singed. But when the dust settled and the smoke cleared, he stood in the middle of the workshop, heart pounding.
It had worked.
He stared at the smoldering gauntlet and laughed to himself.
One of the instructors nearby raised a brow. "Steven?"
"Sorry! Minor overload!" he called, trying to hide his smile.
At one point, while reworking the gauntlet's power limiter, Steven muttered under his breath with a tired smirk
"Right. Just need a containment stabilizer, a reinforced power loop... and maybe a billion-dollar R&D budget. No problem. After all, I'm just a genius, orphaned, broke, entirely-not-a-playboy, non-philanthropist."
He snorted to himself. The joke fell flat in this world, but in his head, Tony Stark gave him a thumbs up.
He didn't stop there.
...
...
A week later came the Recon Visor, a project loosely based on My Hero Academia's support gear and Cyclops' scanning tech. Using slivers of attuned crystal and a tiny hexcore mounted on the temple, Steven built a wearable interface that detected nearby energy fluctuations. He tuned it to pick up hex resonance and thermal signatures, making it useful for locating weak currents or dangerous leaks.
When he tested it in the maintenance tunnels beneath the lab, he found three structural faults that had gone unnoticed for weeks. One of the junior engineers actually commended him for it.
"Where did you get the concept?" she asked.
Steven hesitated. "Just... thought it'd be useful."
Some of his builds were less stable. A grappling cable—built around a spooling mechanism and a burst-fire propulsion rune—tore itself out of the ceiling mount and crashed into the floor when tested. A shock-ring, modeled after a Batarang's stun function, overloaded and scorched the test dummy beyond recognition. His pulse boots didn't even lift him an inch off the ground.
But for every failure, he learned.
He wasn't just copying fantasies. He was adapting them to hextech, grounding imagination in physics, converting fiction into engineering.
It was a lonely process, though.
He didn't tell anyone where the ideas came from. Not Elsie. Not his mentors. Not even in his logs.
Every success made him proud, but also reminded him of how alone he was in this knowledge. No one here had ever seen those worlds. No one would understand if he said the word "arc reactor" or "quark engine" or "vibranium." He was building ghosts from memories no one else shared.
Sometimes, he felt like a liar. A fraud. Using knowledge he didn't earn in this world.
But then he'd look at the results burnt circuits, glowing crystals, sketches filled with revision after revision and know he wasn't cheating. He was earning it, one painful step at a time.
One afternoon, as he tuned the focusing crystal on his updated Repulsion Bracer, Professor Halvord approached.
"This isn't standard coursework," the professor said, inspecting the device.
Steven tensed. "No, sir."
"You designed this yourself?"
"Yes."
There was a pause. Steven braced himself for criticism.
But Halvord merely nodded. "Unusual. Unrefined. But inventive. Keep going."
Steven blinked, unsure if he heard correctly. "You're not... disapproving?"
The professor glanced at the bracer again. "Piltover was built by those who dared to be strange."
Then he walked away.
That night, Steven sat alone in his dorm room, visor on his desk, gauntlet cooling beside his bed. He opened his notebook to a fresh page.
At the top, he wrote:
"Project Archive – Echo Tech"
Beneath it, a growing list:
Repulsion Bracer – v2: internal cooling required
Recon Visor – needs lens stabilization
Shock Ring – reduce charge intensity
Grapple Hook – too heavy. Consider float crystal for counterbalance
Pulse Boots – maybe... magnetic boots instead?
He tapped the pen against his chin, eyes scanning the list. These weren't fantasies anymore. They were blueprints.
If I can't become a mage... then I'll become something else. A builder of the impossible.