Kaen blinked. He was standing in the middle of a bright, warm workshop. The air smelled of freshly cut wood, gear oil, and the soft perfume of flowers sitting on the sill of an open window. Tools hung on wall panels, perfectly arranged by size and function. Brass and copper prosthetics—both beautiful and functional—shone with a flawless polish. The wooden floor had been swept clean, and sunlight poured in through a wide window, illuminating dust motes that danced lazily in the air. It was a place of pure, happy creation.
He looked down at his hands. They were smaller—those of a child—clean and uncalloused. He wore the simple clothes of an apprentice: a linen shirt and work trousers. A strange, overwhelming sensation of familiarity and comfort washed over him, a warmth that wasn't his. He felt… at home.
The workshop door opened with a cheerful creak.
"Kaen! There you are!"
He turned. Orianna skipped inside, her ballerina dress swirling around her and a smile as bright as the sunlight flooding through the window. She was vibrant, brimming with life and innocence. She bounded toward him, her ballet slippers making soft sounds against the wooden floor.
"Papa said we could take a break! I've been waiting all morning," she announced, her laughter like tinkling bells, her eyes sparkling with excitement. "Let's go to the park! I want to show you the new dance move I learned! I call it the 'Pirouette of the Laughing Automaton'!"
Kaen found himself smiling. Or rather, the body he was in smiled. It was a small, genuine smile that felt utterly foreign to his own face. He was a passenger, watching through the eyes of the original Kaen, feeling the echoes of his emotions.
"A break sounds good," he heard his own voice say—higher, softer, younger. "But Master Corin said we had to finish calibrating the arm actuator."
"Papa can wait!" Orianna insisted, pouting. "The sun can't! Come on, Kaen, please!" She stepped closer and grabbed his hand. Her touch was warm, real. "Besides, you need to see this. It'll be the inspiration you need! Come on, come on, come on!"
He let himself be dragged along, a sense of happy resignation filling him. It was a simple, pure emotion. An emotion his current self had never experienced. They left the workshop for the sunlit, pristine streets of a Piltover that looked like it had been plucked from a storybook.
Their conversation was simple and innocent. She spoke excitedly of her dream to dance at the Grand Theater of Piltover, to wear dresses made of silk and light.
"When I become the best ballerina in all of Piltover," Orianna said, her eyes dreamy, "I'll travel the world. I'll see Valoran, and Shurima, and the frozen lands of Freljord. And you'll come with me."
"Me?" asked the young Kaen's voice.
"Of course! I'll need a dance partner who can keep up with me on stage and not trip over my enthusiasm," she said, laughing.
He—the young Kaen—spoke of his own dream: to build the most perfect automaton in the world, a dancer of metal and gears who could join her on stage, one who would never grow tired.
"She'll be beautiful," said young Kaen, his voice full of childish seriousness, and the transmigrant's consciousness felt a surge of affection and determination that wasn't his. "And her movements will be as fluid as yours. No one will know the difference."
"Of course they'll notice!" Orianna laughed. "She won't have my smile!"
The conversation felt too perfect, almost scripted. The words flowed with rehearsed ease. Kaen—the real Kaen, the transmigrant—watched from the backseat of this mind, an unease growing in him. This was a memory, yes. But it didn't feel like a memory. It felt… alive. And far too good to be true.
That was when the cracks began to show.
As Orianna laughed at the boy's promise, the sound faltered for a moment, a metallic echo distorting beneath her melody.
Kaen blinked. For a fraction of a second, the golden sunlight bathing them flickered, shifting into a sickly violet glow—the same that emanated from the Hexcore.
"Kaen? What's wrong?" Orianna asked, her smile wavering. "You went quiet."
"It's nothing," replied the young Kaen's voice, but the strangeness intensified. He looked at a lute a craftsman had left on a bench. For a moment, the instrument seemed to melt, its edges soft and waxy before solidifying again.
He ignored the feeling. He didn't want it to end. The sense of peace, of simple happiness, was too seductive.
But the illusion couldn't hold. It was an imperfect construct, a loop of data based on the shattered memories of a dead child.
"Come on! Last one to the park is an iron golem!" Orianna cried, dashing through Piltover's streets.
But she stopped suddenly. A small cough shook her body.
Then another. Stronger.
"Are you okay?" young Kaen asked, genuine concern in his voice—a faint echo of a terror long past.
She turned toward him, her face suddenly pale, not in a healthy way but a sickly one. "Kaen… I don't feel…"
The coughing turned violent, wet, and racking. She brought a hand to her mouth. Orianna's wide eyes locked on him. Slowly, she pulled her hand away. Her fingers weren't stained with blood. A thick, glowing purple liquid—the same color as Shimmer—dripped down her chin.
The world around Kaen began to break apart in earnest. The blue sky tore open, revealing glimpses of the dark void beneath. Piltover's buildings stretched and warped, their straight lines melting like hot wax. The sound of birds was completely drowned out by the rising, piercing hum of the Hexcore.
The perfect workshop, the sunny day—everything melted away. The walls dissolved into strands of corrupted light. Sunlight was replaced entirely by the Hexcore's sickly pulse, now the only source of illumination in a collapsing world.
Orianna looked at him, her body flickering between the healthy child and a spectral, diseased figure. Her face twisted not in pain, but in infinite sorrow. Her eyes, once a warm sky blue, now glowed with the cold, empty light of a Hextech gem.
Her voice, when it came, was a distorted cacophony—a blend of her childish tone and the static hum of an overloaded machine.
"Why?" whispered the monstrous fusion of girl and machine. "Why didn't you save me, Kaen?"
The illusion shattered.
Her corrupted question echoed into nothingness as the final fragment of the dream dissolved. The world didn't go black. It simply… stopped existing. Kaen found himself floating in a colorless, formless void, a liminal space between reality and simulation. The weight of borrowed emotions, the warmth of young Kaen's friendship, the agony of his guilt—all of it sloughed off, leaving him cold and strangely light.
His body was his again. The tall, pale, absurdly fit body he had inherited. He wore his anarchist-noble attire. He was back.
"Well," his monotone voice said, sounding oddly small in the vastness. "That was unnecessarily traumatic. Performance rating: ten out of ten in psychological horror."
As he floated, two forms slowly began to coalesce beside him, taking shape out of nothingness like ink blooming in water.
On his right appeared a tall, elegant, slender figure, carved entirely of polished dark wood, taut metal strings stretched across its body like tendons. Its features were sharp, aristocratic, moving with the arrogance of a violin virtuoso. It was the personification of his bass, The Beast of Noise.
It spoke, and its voice was Kaen's—but imbued with arrogant theatricality."A masterful performance!" the wooden figure declared. "The symbolism of decay, the tragedy of lost youth! The corruption of innocence! The creator's existential guilt… Truly first-class drama, my dear self! We should stay. There's material here for a full concept album. I can feel it."
On his left, with a soft poof, another figure appeared. Small, round, covered in white fluff. It wore crooked welder's goggles and a stitched-on bomb pouch across its chest. It was Boom-Boom, the Poro that had once been Distortion. He bounced in the nonexistent air, plush eyes staring up at Kaen with worry.
It spoke too, in Kaen's voice, but simple, blunt, and laced with practical concern."Masterpiece my fluff! We almost got turned into purple soup!" the Poro squeaked, tiny paws flailing in the void. "That thing was sucking us in! It tried to fry our brain with a tragic soap opera! We need to get out of here!"
Kaen tilted his head, looking between his two manifestations.
He turned to the Bass. "You're right. The aesthetics of reality collapsing were impeccable. Very avant-garde."
Then he turned to the Poro. "You're also right. Being trapped in someone else's greatest failures on repeat sounds unbelievably boring long-term. And probably comes with no snacks."
"Art requires sacrifice!" the Bass proclaimed, striking a dramatic pose. "Our consciousness is a small price to pay for such pure tragedy!"
"But sacrifice doesn't require starvation!" the Poro shot back, bouncing agitatedly. "And assimilation by an unstable arcane machine is not okay! Plus, Jinx is probably worried. She might start blowing things up if we don't wake up soon."
"A valid point," Kaen conceded.
The Bass sighed theatrically. "Always spoiling the fun. Can't you see the beauty in torment? Agony is the purest muse."
"Agony doesn't help you dodge Enforcers," the Poro muttered.
Listening to his halves bicker, the truth crystallized in Kaen's mind with sudden clarity. The Bass—his ego—was entranced by the drama. The Poro—his survival instinct (and his tether to Jinx)—was terrified. And he, in the middle, was the observer.
Kaen finally understood. The Hexcore, in its attempt to ensnare him, had used fragments of the original Kaen's memories, the leftover shards of trauma, to build an illusion. An emotional loop designed to trap and analyze.
And the only reason he wasn't completely caught—sobbing in some psychic corner—was because he wasn't the original Kaen. His consciousness, that of the kid from Earth tripping on banana peels, was a firewall. The trauma wasn't his. He could appreciate it as a performance, but he couldn't feel it as reality.
"I get it," he said aloud. This wasn't an attack. It was a honey trap. A very well-made one, but still a trap. And the bait wasn't meant for him.
He turned away, facing the void where the illusion had been, ignoring his two advisors.
"Alright, team," he said, raising his hands to silence his halves. "Thanks for the consultation. Consensus reached."
The Bass and the Poro stared at him expectantly.
"Here's the conclusion: the performance was excellent, but the service is terrible, and the risk of existential annihilation is unacceptably high." He turned, facing the infinite darkness. "Plan of action: we're flipping the script."
He took a deep breath, though there was no air.
"Hey, shiny melodramatic machine!" he shouted into the void, his monotone voice ringing with newfound authority. "I appreciate the effort! The performance was moving! But the soap opera time is over! Show me what's behind the curtain!"
Kaen's demand echoed through the void, a discordant note in the symphony of illusion. For a moment, nothing happened. The darkness remained, absolute and silent. The Bass at his side cleared his throat, as if to say, Told you so.
But then, the void shuddered.
The darkness didn't fade—it shattered, like black glass breaking apart. Cracks spread, revealing pure white light beneath. The fragments fell away, and his two manifestations—the Bass and the Poro—vanished, leaving Kaen alone in sterile immensity.
He stood in an infinite white space. No up, no down, no walls, no floor. A blank canvas stretching endlessly in all directions. Pure, absolute, and profoundly unnatural.
And at the center of this space, floating in majestic stillness, was a single, enormous sphere.
It was iridescent, almost organic. It pulsed slowly, like a cosmic heart, and with each beat, its surface swirled with impossible colors, shifting like oil on water. Tendrils of pure blue and violet energy arched outward, only to be reabsorbed. The "hum" here wasn't sound, but presence. A deafening chorus of pure magical consciousness singing in perfect, terrifying harmony. This was the source.
He felt himself strangely drawn to it. The same force that had guided him here, but amplified a thousandfold. It was a feeling of… kinship.
Kaen drifted toward it, not by choice but as if the space itself pulled him in. He felt incredibly small, a dust mote before a star. Curiosity—his most defining and most dangerous trait—outweighed any flicker of fear. This was what his body had been responding to.
Kaen extended a hand. As he neared, the sphere's surface rippled, responding to his presence. Tendrils of light stretched out to meet his fingers.
When his fingertips brushed the sphere's swirling surface, there was no electric shock, no explosion of power. There was only absolute connection. It was like plunging his hand into the ocean of creation itself. And that ocean pulled him under.
The white world vanished.
He was thrown into a place of total darkness and absolute cold.
This wasn't the clean, formless void from before. This place teemed with presence. An icy fog, so cold it burned, coiled at his feet, clinging to his boots. The silence was deep—but not empty. He heard whispers at the edges of his perception, in no language he could understand. Dry, crackling sounds, like mountain-sized insects grinding their jaws.
He felt eyes on him.
Not one. Countless.
Not visible, yet their weight pressed on his mind, unbearable. The primal feeling of prey, magnified a billion times.
The perspective shifted, as if a camera pulled away at impossible speed. He saw himself—a lone, white-haired figure drifting in vastness, a point of faint light in an ocean of cold darkness.
And in the distance, through the fog, shapes began to form.
They were colossal. Of a size that defied physics and sanity. Their forms twisted, never solid, made of the same darkness that surrounded them. No detail—only massive, unnatural outlines against deeper black.
And within those outlines, eyes opened.
Eyes the size of moons blinked slowly in the dark. Others, tiny and clustered like insect nests, flared open in groups. Their gazes carried no malice, no intent. Only vast, ancient indifference.
There was no sound. No communication. No direct threat. Only the crushing, silent weight of entities too immense to comprehend. A vision of pure cosmic horror. The realization that humanity, with its little wars and petty ambitions, was less than a grain of sand on an endless beach of predators.
The Watchers. The Void.
The Hexcore, in its attempt to parse Kaen's strange biology, had gone too deep. It had touched not just the original Kaen's memories but the very nature of Singed's mutation—a science that had unknowingly cracked a microscopic rift to this… otherness. The Hexcore was showing Kaen what it saw at the heart of his own power. It was showing him the abyss.
Kaen didn't scream. His transmigrant mind—the same firewall that had spared him the emotional trap—now fought to shield his sanity from a truth too vast to hold. For the first time in his new life, he felt a long-forgotten emotion: primal fear. Not fear of dying, but fear of insignificance. The fear of an insect suddenly realizing it lived in the palm of a hungry god.
The vision lasted both an eternity and a nanosecond.
And then, with the same violence that had pulled him in, he was expelled.
Hurled out of the abyss, back into the sterile white space. The image of those colossal eyes was seared into his mind. Then, with a wrench that felt like his soul was being torn out, he was ripped from the mental plane entirely, thrown back into his body.
...
Moments earlier, in the laboratory, when Kaen reached out toward the Hexcore—
"No, you idiot, don't touch it!" Jinx screamed, a heartbeat too late.
The instant his fingers brushed the surface of the orb, the laboratory transformed into the heart of a storm.
A blast of pure, blinding, soundless light erupted from the point of contact. Jinx staggered back instinctively, throwing an arm over her eyes, a growl of shock and fear caught in her throat.
A hurricane wind surged out of nowhere, born from Kaen and the Hexcore. Viktor's papers and notes whipped through the air like a flock of paper birds. Tools rolled across tables, vials shattered on the floor. It was a vortex of raw power, and Kaen was at its center.
Jinx ducked low, struggling to stay upright against the gale. She squinted through the crook of her arm, her eyes fighting to focus in the overwhelming light. What she saw stole her breath away.
Kaen wasn't being electrocuted. He was… changing.
His body, suspended inches above the ground by the energy, was being rewritten. She watched as his silver-white hair grew at an unnatural pace, lengthening, its metallic sheen fading into a pure, albino white. His muscles, already lean and defined, tightened further—not swelling, but densifying, as if reforged under crushing pressure.
And his skin was the most terrifying of all. It flickered. One instant it was his normal pale shade, the next it warped, adopting the same smooth, unnatural texture as Viktor's mutated leg, streaked with veins of violet and blue light running beneath the surface like living circuits. The pattern shifted, flowed, a tide of mutation washing over his body again and again.
The Hexcore itself seemed to be consumed. It shrank, light and tendrils of energy streaming straight from the orb into Kaen's chest, as though his body were a black hole devouring it whole.
The chaos was so violent it stirred the only other occupant of the room.
On the floor, Viktor groaned, amber eyes snapping open. His first conscious sight was that of a white-haired stranger levitating in the middle of his laboratory, wrapped in a storm of arcane energy, while a blue-braided girl clung to a table for dear life. His exhausted mind struggled to process the nightmare scene. He saw his Hexcore—his salvation, his magnum opus—merging with this intruder. Horror paralyzed him.
The light from the fusion grew so intense it spilled out of the laboratory. Blue and violet brilliance pierced through the window, shooting into Piltover's campus like a silent beacon.
Several blocks away, an unlikely trio had just crossed the bridge barricade. Heimerdinger, with the authority his name still commanded, had convinced a jittery Marcus to let them through. The venerable inventor's presence was a shield the corrupt Sheriff dared not openly challenge.
"Uff, we made it through," Caitlyn sighed in relief as they entered the streets of Piltover.
Then they saw it—the beam of light. Cutting across the night sky, radiating straight from the Academy district. From Jayce and Viktor's laboratory.
"What the hell…?" Vi whispered.
"The Hexcore," Heimerdinger said, his face a mask of dread.
Back in the laboratory, the storm reached its peak. The light pulsed one final time, so intense it bleached the world, and then—just as abruptly as it had begun—it was over.
The wind died. The deafening roar dwindled into a silent hum. The Hexcore was gone.
Kaen was hurled backward, as though flung by an invisible hand, crashing into a workbench with a clatter of metal tools scattering to the floor. He lay there in a disheveled heap, motionless.
The silence that followed was absolute.
Jinx was the first to move. She scrambled up, legs trembling, and ran to him, tripping over debris. "Kaen!"
She reached him, dropping to her knees at his side. His new, longer bone-white hair spilled across his face. He was gasping, heart hammering against his ribs, cold sweat beading his brow.
"Hey! Kaen! Wake up!" she shook him, panic sharp in her voice.
His eyes opened.
Jinx froze. They weren't just violet anymore. They were… different. The base was still a deep purple, but now it was streaked with fine filaments of Hextech blue and bright pink, the colors swirling and shifting like liquid energy trapped beneath crystal. They no longer had their sharp, playful gleam. Now they held a strange depth—a solemn, melancholy gaze, as though they had just witnessed the birth and death of galaxies.
He looked at her, his strange new eyes struggling to focus. He carried an emotion he had never shown before: pure, unfiltered awe, laced with a primordial terror.
"I…" he croaked, voice hoarse. "…I think I just saw something very, very bad."