The room smelled of antiseptic and fading flowers—hope rendered sterile, like everything else in Piltover General. Airships passed beyond the rattling windows in a steady metallic rhythm. Viktor had once counted them.

He lay half-propped in bed, tangled in rough blankets, a thin copper coil resting in his palm. His crutch was gone—misplaced somewhere between collapse and consequence. The physicians called it exhaustion, degeneration, inevitability—careful words wrapped around an uncaring truth.

His body ached with each breath. His chest burned. His limbs felt like they were being slowly unstitched from within. And yet his mind refused to dim.

The coil in his hand felt like promise—an answer born in fevered fragments and sleepless equations. A step beyond flesh. Beyond this slow undoing. “Stupid,” he whispered hoarsely. “To push so far without accounting for time.”

A cough bent him forward, leaving iron on his wrist. Time, it seemed, was the only variable he could not solve. Footsteps approached outside—measured, unfamiliar. Not staff. Not council.

Viktor didn’t open his eyes.

“Unless you’ve brought a cure for time itself,” he murmured, “you’re wasting yours.”