Chapter 10 : The Heist
Piltover's air tasted like nothing. That was the wrongness of it — after weeks of copper and chlorine and the particular chemical signature that Zaun wore like a second skin, the absence of flavor hit Declan's tongue like silence after an explosion. Clean air. Air that had never been breathed through a processing plant's exhaust or filtered through corroded pipes or seasoned with the runoff of a hundred unlicensed chem-labs.
He hated it immediately.
The rooftops of the Academy district spread beneath them in ordered geometry — slate tiles and copper guttering and glass skylights that caught the moonlight and threw it back in white shards. Below, the streets were empty except for a single lamplighter making his rounds with a long brass pole, touching flame to the gas lamps that lined Scholar's Row. Everything was maintained. Everything was deliberate. Even the shadows fell in predictable patterns because the buildings had been designed to account for the angle of the sun.
Vi moved ahead, her silhouette low and fast against the tiles. Claggor followed — heavier, each step placed with his characteristic deliberation. Mylo came next, his tool bag clinking softly despite the padding he'd wrapped around it. Powder brought up the rear, her satchel of devices pressed against her hip.
Declan ran fifth. Last position by choice — it gave him sight lines on the whole crew and the route behind them.
"Third rooftop from the clock tower. Jayce's apartment is the fourth window from the left, second floor. The balcony faces the courtyard. One lock on the door — standard Piltover residential, five-pin, better quality than anything in the Lanes but not security-grade. The crystals are in the back room. Hextech gemstones, blue-white, unstable when agitated. Powder will find one and keep it. The rest we grab and go."
The meta-knowledge played like a film strip behind his eyes — the show's heist sequence, shot by shot, every camera angle burned into memory by a mind that had treated entertainment as a puzzle to be solved. He knew the layout. He knew the timing. He knew the explosion was coming.
Vi reached the edge of the target building and signaled. Two fingers: approach. One fist: hold at the lip.
The crew gathered on the roof above Jayce's apartment. The courtyard below was empty — the Academy's security relied on the assumption that no one from the Undercity would be crazy enough to cross Topside at night, which said more about Piltover's understanding of desperation than it did about their security protocols.
"Mylo." Vi pointed at the balcony door. "Get us in."
"On it." Mylo dropped down to the balcony — a controlled descent, hands finding the guttering, feet swinging to the railing with practiced ease. His picks came out and he went to work on the lock. Ten seconds. Fifteen. The mechanism resisted.
"Having trouble?" Declan kept his voice low.
Mylo's jaw tightened. "It's a Piltover lock. Different tumblers."
"Here." Declan dropped beside him, pulled his own improvised set, and examined the keyhole. The pins were brass, not iron — smoother, more precisely machined, requiring finer tension control. He adjusted his wrench angle, felt for the binding order.
The lock opened in eleven seconds.
Mylo stared at the open door. His face went through something complicated. Then he pocketed his tools without a word and slipped inside.
"Bond Value damage. He'll remember this. Not the help — the humiliation. In front of Vi."
The apartment was dark and silent. Books everywhere — stacked on tables, piled on chairs, opened and face-down on every surface as if the occupant had been reading twelve things simultaneously and hadn't finished any of them. Scientific instruments gleamed on a workbench. Diagrams papered the walls — geometric shapes, arcane symbols, equations in handwriting so dense it looked like a language from another world.
Jayce Talis's workshop. The birthplace of Hextech. The beginning of everything.
The back room held the crystals.
They sat on a metal shelf in a padded case — six gemstones, each roughly the size of a walnut, glowing with a blue-white luminescence that pushed shadows into the corners and made the air hum with a frequency Declan could feel in his teeth. Beautiful. Alien. The concentrated potential of arcane energy, waiting to be harnessed by a science that hadn't been invented yet.
Vi's eyes went wide. Even she — pragmatic, mission-focused, impatient with anything that couldn't be punched — stopped at the sight of them.
"Take them all," she whispered. "Move fast."
The crew moved. Claggor produced a padded bag and began transferring crystals with the careful hands of someone who understood that fragile things broke. Mylo secured the case clasps. Vi watched the door.
Powder drifted toward the workbench. Her eyes had locked onto a crystal that had separated from the others — smaller, partially exposed, sitting on a nest of copper wire beside Jayce's tools. Her fingers reached.
Declan palmed the sixth crystal from the case while Claggor's back was turned.
The stone was warm. Not surface warmth — deep warmth, radiating from the core, as if something inside it was alive and aware of the hand that held it. Blue-white light leaked between his fingers. He slipped it into the inner pocket of his jacket where it pressed against his ribs like a second heartbeat.
[ITEM ACQUIRED: HEXTECH CRYSTAL (ARCANE GEMSTONE).]
[CLASSIFICATION: UNKNOWN ENERGY SOURCE. SYSTEM ANALYSIS: PENDING.]
[NOTE: THIS ITEM IS NOT PART OF THE CANONICAL THEFT INVENTORY. DEVIATION REGISTERED.]
The notification was clinical. The system tracked the deviation without judgment — a ledger noting an irregular transaction, filing it for future reference. Declan's fingers tightened around the crystal's warmth and let go.
"Insurance. In a world where every power has a price and the currency is suffering, an energy source that runs on something other than despair is worth more than the system can calculate."
"Got them," Claggor said. The padded bag was full. Five crystals — one fewer than the case had held, but nobody was counting in the dark.
"Let's go." Vi was already at the door.
They made it to the balcony. They made it to the roof. They made it three buildings toward the bridge before the world turned white.
The explosion came from behind them — a concussive bloom of blue-white light that punched through the Academy building's windows and sent a shockwave rippling across the rooftops. Glass shattered. Tiles cracked. Declan staggered, his left shoulder slamming into a chimney stack hard enough to send fire down his arm.
He'd positioned himself near the lead edge of the group. Not obviously — a half-step faster than natural, angling toward the side with the most cover. The explosion confirmed the positioning; debris rained behind them, not on them.
"Powder's crystal. She touched it, triggered the instability cascade. Canon holds."
Vi spun. Her face — already tight with adrenaline — cracked open into something worse.
"POWDER! What did you DO?"
Powder stood three rooftops back, her satchel smoking, her hands raised in the universal gesture of a child who'd broken something irreplaceable. Her mouth opened and closed. No sound came out.
"We gotta move!" Claggor grabbed Vi's arm. "Enforcers — they'll be here in minutes."
They ran. Piltover's rooftops became a blur of slate and copper, the crew leaping gaps and sliding down guttering with the desperate speed of people who understood that being caught Topside meant something worse than punishment. Below, voices shouted. Lanterns swung. The sound of boots on cobblestone organized itself into the rhythmic cadence of a patrol forming up.
Declan's shoulder screamed. His legs burned. The crystal in his pocket pulsed with every impact.
The bridge approach materialized out of the darkness — the transition point between Piltover's ordered geometry and Zaun's corroded chaos, where clean stone gave way to rusted metal and the air changed temperature by ten degrees.
They crossed. The Enforcer pursuit pulled up at the checkpoint, unwilling to follow into the Undercity's maze at night. Professional cowardice dressed as jurisdictional restraint.
On the Zaun side, the crew collapsed against a wall in the shadow of a defunct pump station. Breathing hard. Shaking. The padded bag with five crystals sat between Claggor's feet.
Vi turned on Powder.
"You set off a bomb in the middle of Piltover."
"I didn't mean to— it was the crystal, it was unstable, I just—"
"You just WHAT? You just blew up a building? You just lit a signal flare for every Enforcer in the city?"
Mylo's voice came from the darkness, quiet and venomous. "Jinx."
The word landed like a slap. Powder's face — already crumbling — collapsed entirely. Her eyes filled. Her chin trembled. Her hands, still blackened from the explosion, clenched into fists at her sides.
The first time. The first use of the name that would eventually consume everything Powder was and replace it with something sharper, wilder, broken in ways that couldn't be unbroken.
Declan said nothing. The system pulsed.
[SUFFERING SPIKE: TARGET "POWDER." DESPAIR INDEX: 74/100.]
[PROXIMITY HARVEST: 5 DE.]
[INNOCENCE RATING: LEGENDARY (STABLE — RESILIENCE THRESHOLD NOT BREACHED).]
Five DE from Powder's pain. Deposited into his reserves while she stood three feet away with tears running down her face and her brother's judgment crushing her chest. The system didn't distinguish between the suffering of enemies and the suffering of family. Currency was currency. Pain was pain.
Claggor put his hand on Powder's shoulder. She leaned into him, and the tears came harder, and the night swallowed the sound because the Undercity had practice absorbing the grief of its children.
Declan's own left shoulder throbbed where it had hit the chimney. His legs ached from the sprint. And in his jacket pocket, a crystal that no one knew he'd taken pressed warm against the bruise on his ribs, pulsing with stolen light from a stolen city.
The bag of crystals would be dumped during the fallout — too dangerous to keep, too hot to sell, too connected to the explosion that was already drawing Enforcer attention like blood in water. Powder had her hidden crystal. Declan had his.
Vander's face, when they pushed through the Last Drop's back door, was the kind of expression that made grown men reconsider their choices. Not anger. Disappointment — the particular devastation of a father who'd trusted his children to be better than this and been proven wrong in the most spectacular way possible.
"Sit down," Vander said. "All of you."
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