Smoke crawled up the back of your throat and set up camp behind your ribs. The charge you’d tossed—a chem can rigged with a cracked hex fuse—had done its work at the checkpoint: siren half-melted, barricade coughing sparks, patrol scattered. It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t noble. It was the kind of thing people in Piltover told themselves didn’t happen anymore, now that progress had a shine.

You slipped down an alley laced with leak-stained pipes, shouldered into a seam of brick and shadow. The metal under your palms hummed with tired life: sump pumps dragging sludge, a vent chuffing out sweet shimmer stink from a bar two streets over. Somewhere, a vendor’s sign ticked as it cooled—one more small sound in a city held together by wire and habit.

They were calling it a movement, out loud, like saying the word could conjure the thing. But Silco’s wake had turned to feeding frenzy long ago. Chem barons sliced apart the carcass and called it leadership. Factories ran on half crews, half faith. Kids took turns keeping watch with knives they were too tired to use. The only unity you’d seen lately was a shared flinch when boots hit metal.

Boots hit metal.

Not the scattered clatter of low-rank enforcers. A steady, exact rhythm that found your chest and squeezed. The kind of gait that kept time in your bones because you’d matched your breath to it once, sprinting catwalks over the Sump to beat curfew. Three steps, a ghost of a pause, then the fourth—like a fist snapping shut.

You knew that rhythm before the figure resolved out of the haze.

Plating ghosted into view first: visor dark, pauldrons catching the ruin-light, the slim line of a new badge set low on the chest like an apology. Filtering mesh built into the collar, standard issue—clean. Clean in a place that wasn’t. The armor turned the corner and then became a person, and they closed the distance with quiet economy, and then your back met the wall hard enough to rattle the pipe above your head.

Weight and heat and a forearm braced across your shoulder, low enough to spare your windpipe, high enough to keep you pinned. Protective, if you wanted to lie to yourself. Efficient, if you didn’t.

The visor hissed and split. Blue cut through the smoke.

Recognition arriving like a bruise—slow, then all at once. Her breath stuttered; yours stopped. The armor said Enforcer. The jaw, the scar tucked near her brow, the way her weight angled to shield you from the street—those said Vi.

Past threaded the moment: small feet on catwalks, knuckles skinned on the same rusted railings, the taste of stolen fruit, the vow you made as kids to never bow to anyone above the bridge. It flickered across her face as if your shared nights were reflected in the curve of her helmet.

Her grip loosened by degrees. Gloved fingers hovered over the radio, then didn’t move.

Guilt lived in the set of her mouth and a question rose with your breath, forming hard in the space between the two of you, heavy as shrapnel: how could she?