"So you saw a purple monster covered in muscle fighting some kind of green humanoid goo?" Caleb looked at the miner standing in front of him. The man was obviously still badly shaken.
"Y, yes, Governor."
The man answered in a stammer.
"People have been talking about it nonstop lately," he said in a lowered voice.
"Now nobody dares go out alone during the day, and at night they only stay inside."
"I understand. You can go now." Caleb waved him off and fell into thought.
He had simply taken over Silco's office for himself. He had barely changed a thing.
"Caleb! Caleb!"
Ekko came charging through the door, shouting at the top of his lungs.
"You'll never believe what I found!"
His face was flushed red, and even the hourglass pattern on it stretched and shrank dramatically with his breathing.
"Let me guess... the Z-Drive?" Caleb offered, sounding uncertain.
"How did you know?!" Ekko stared at him in disbelief.
He had ridden here on his hoverboard. There could not possibly be a faster hoverboard anywhere in Zaun.
No. No way.
"As a matter of fact, I've explored that line of research before."
Caleb lied without missing a beat.
After all, he could hardly say, "Oh, I saw it in your backstory."
Or, "I know your big move rewinds time."
That would have been lame as hell.
"But I only knew it was a possibility."
Even though Caleb's tone carried a trace of regret, it could not hide the surge of excitement underneath.
Rewinding yourself back seven seconds, that was practically a divine ability.
Who knew, maybe he might even get to use it himself someday.
Snapping out of his wandering thoughts, Caleb looked at Ekko and asked, "How far did you get?"
Ekko vanished in an instant.
Not long after, he came back into the office on his hoverboard and held up the watch in his hand for Caleb to see.
It was about seven seconds behind the clock hanging behind Caleb.
"You really mastered it." Caleb looked at Ekko in amazement.
Zaun really was a place that produced geniuses.
Viktor, who helped create Hextech, and Ekko, who discovered the Z-Drive.
Compared to those so-called geniuses from the topside, those academy-made talents with their miserable three-percent success rate, Zaun's geniuses were like seeds scattered across salt flats.
Most could do little more than struggle to survive, yet every now and then one or two would grow taller than the rice in the rich fields next door.
That was part of the undercity's charm too.
"Anyway, it's good that you've mastered it." Caleb hurried over and pressed Ekko into the chair in front of the desk.
"There's a job that really does need you."
His expression had turned serious.
Ekko immediately straightened up as well.
He was the leader of the Firelights, and Caleb was now the leader of the entire undercity.
Now that the time had really come for him to be used, Ekko felt a little nervous inside.
"I was honestly getting a headache over this. But now that you've got this technology under control, I can hand it over to you without worrying."
Caleb patted him on the shoulder and sighed.
"What exactly is it? Why the rush?" Ekko asked, still confused.
"The undercity has hatched another monster lately." Caleb lowered his head and sketched quickly on a sheet of paper.
"Silco probably left this as one of my problems to deal with." Caleb sighed again. "He really knew how to leave behind trouble..."
"It looks something like this." Caleb held the paper out.
"Is that even a person?" Ekko asked as he stared at the terrible drawing.
"Anyway, it's really big, and the skin is probably purple," Caleb explained.
"You can try checking abandoned hospitals, the ones nobody goes near anymore," Caleb added after recalling something.
"Fine. Then I'll head out now."
"Should I check the Sump too?" Ekko asked before leaving.
That question actually mattered.
Even Zaunites wore masks in the Sump.
There was no helping it. The environment there was just too awful.
"Yeah. And be careful. He doesn't exactly fight fair."
Caleb had no idea which version of Mundo this was, or what kind of madness had twisted him this far.
For now, all he could do was send Ekko out to scout.
Ekko, with his ability to rewind, was basically impossible to beat.
Well... unless he ran into someone on the level of a demigod or an Aspect.
Mundo should not be that much of a problem.
As for the green one?
Caleb dug through his memory and finally came up with a name, Zac.
If he remembered right, Zac's title was the Secret Weapon.
So by that logic, maybe Zac thought Mundo was ugly, Mundo thought Zac was ugly, and the two of them just started beating each other senseless?
"Little psycho."
After Ekko walked out, Caleb called out calmly.
A figure dropped down from the section of ceiling reserved just for her, with two long braids flying in the air.
"What do you want?" Jinx might act like a total lunatic out in public, but around Caleb she actually quieted down.
"That miner wasn't done talking. There's another one called Zac. Go take a look."
"Fine, then I'm making a trip to the Sump too." Jinx rolled her eyes in annoyance and grabbed the mask off the desk.
"Come back and report to me after you've seen enough. Don't make too much noise." Caleb frowned.
"Depends on my mood." Jinx did not forget to close the door behind her on the way out.
Caleb sank back into thought again.
Silco had really left him a lot of problems.
Lately, the three remaining Chem-Barons had all gone into hiding, quietly continuing to produce Shimmer.
As long as those people were still around, Zaun would keep suffering under Shimmer's poison.
"What a pile of crap." Caleb pressed his fingers to his brow and felt another headache coming on.
Why was the system still not giving him a reward? Even an advance would have been nice.
Right now, he could not beat someone like Vi in a straight fight, and even Jinx was more than enough to give him a rough time.
The only weapon he had on hand was the Hex Claw Viktor gave him.
And on top of that, there was the Hextech shield he had developed earlier to block missiles.
That barely counted as a balanced set of offense and defense.
"Whew..." Sitting there any longer was not going to help. Caleb got to his feet and decided to go out for a walk to clear his head.
On the street outside his door, that Chem-Baron named Renni was still hanging there.
Caleb casually picked up a basin of water and dumped it over her.
"Didn't I feed you? Scream louder!"
Even with the icy water jolting her awake, Renni still had that dazed, barely aware look on her face.
Looks like the past two days had tortured the human shape out of her.
Well, the whole point had been to make an example of her, and that had more or less worked.
Judging by the way Renni looked now, more dead than alive, even if he fed her two more spoonfuls of hunger feed, people would probably just think she was a corpse.
"You can finish her off whenever you want." Caleb placed the basin into Sevika's hands.
"Then throw the body to the rats."
His voice was not loud, but it was more than enough for the other people on the street to hear clearly.
The Governor had already made a name for himself in Zaun. After this, the residents would probably both respect him and fear him even more.
Caleb wandered through the streets of Zaun.
The last time he had taken a stroll like this was when he had gone looking for the injured Vi.
No matter when it was, if you were the one in charge, you needed different kinds of people under you.
You needed someone like Ekko, a young guy overflowing with a sense of justice who could charge headfirst into things.
And you also needed someone like Jinx, someone willing to do absolutely anything, someone who could pull off the things ordinary people never could.
Caleb understood that clearly.
After all, Jinx was no weakling, and she counted as both one of the problems Silco had left behind and one of the resources he had handed over.
If Ekko was going to be Zaun's face in the future, then Jinx was what lay underneath.
The face could not be allowed to gather dust. It could not do dirty work.
What lay underneath could not let the blood soak through, otherwise the face would stop looking clean.
At every moment, he was thinking about what the twin cities would look like after he was gone.
After all, this place had become the starting point of his new life.