Chapter 7: Whispers and Wrenches
Steven didn't mean to stand out. In fact, he'd done everything he could not to.
He took the late shifts in the workshop, sat at the edge of lecture halls, kept his head down and his answers minimal. The last thing he wanted was to draw attention in a city where legacy and wealth opened every door and where his status as an orphan left most of them shut.
But then came the Repulsion Bracer test.
It had only been meant as a controlled demo. Low power. Just enough to show concept.
But when the energy discharge shoved a steel dummy clean off the mount, half the workshop turned. The ones who hadn't seen it with their own eyes heard about it within the hour.
By the next morning, the whispers had begun.
"He's not even second-year, is he?"
"Did you hear that blast? He says it's powered by a single crystal loop!"
"Someone check if he's smuggling blueprints from a higher tier."
The murmurs weren't all malicious but they weren't friendly either. Suspicion spread faster than praise in Piltover. Especially for someone who didn't belong.
Steven tried to brush it off, bury himself back into his Project Archive – Echo Tech list. But the air around him was changing. The glances lingered longer. Conversations fell silent when he passed. Even the instructors seemed more cautious when checking his work.
He couldn't blame them. After all, this was Piltover, the city of progress. A place where innovation wasn't just celebrated—it was inherited.
Every student here knew the names: Heimerdinger, the legendary professor whose genius had helped shape the foundations of modern science and magic. Jayce, the prodigy who shattered tradition and harnessed hextech with bold, brilliant strokes. And Viktor, once the quiet mind behind the curtain, now a visionary in his own right.
Those men were legends. A League Of Legends
And Steven? He was a nobody trying to cobble together scraps into something that didn't explode in his face.
The one person he could count on, Elsie, was starting to question things too.
They were eating lunch on the steps outside the main dormitory, a break between lab periods. She had her plate balanced on her knees. Steven's food sat untouched beside him.
"You're making people talk, y'know," she said, poking her spoon into a lump of baked squash.
Steven kept his eyes on his notebook. "Let them."
She snorted. "You're either the most oblivious genius I've ever met, or you're hiding something."
He looked up, startled.
"Relax," she added quickly. "I don't mean it in a bad way. Just… you come up with these things, and no one's ever seen anything like them. Not even Tier Three apprentices."
Steven hesitated, fingers tightening around his pen. He wanted to tell her. To explain everything. But how could he possibly make her understand?
That he'd watched heroes fly in metal suits, read about gauntlets that could erase universes, obsessed over stories where people built impossible machines in basements smaller than this one?
So instead, he lied. Quietly.
"I just think different."
She didn't buy it. But she didn't push either.
When the Academy announced the midterm innovation showcase, Steven felt his stomach turn. He hadn't signed up. He hadn't even considered it.
It wasn't mandatory. Most first-years used it as a soft introduction to public critique. Those who chose to present were usually legacy kids heirs to noble houses, students with funding, flashy designs, confident speeches. Not orphans with makeshift visors and gauntlets cobbled together from discarded parts.
Still, something itched at him.
He stayed in the workshop that evening, long after the others had left, flipping through his list.
Project Archive – Echo Tech
Repulsion Bracer – v3: more stable, still too loud
Recon Visor – clarity improved, signal bleed reduced
Shock Ring – reduced charge, finally safe to test on dummies
Pulse Boots – reduced weight, zero lift. Still useless
Magnetic Stabilizer Belt – theory stage. Crystal control too fragile
His work wasn't perfect. Most of it barely functioned. But it was his. Not a copied design. Not a textbook recreation. His vision, shaped by memories from a world where men built suits of armor in caves, and scientists re-engineered fate itself.
If he ever wanted to be seen not just as an orphan, but an inventor, then this was the time.
He signed up the next morning.
The weeks leading up to the showcase were brutal.
He reworked nearly every component. Scrapped his earlier visor design and rebuilt it with a thinner lens and dual-crystal sync. His fingers were constantly bandaged from burns or slips. He stopped sleeping more than four hours a night.
He didn't have a sponsor. He didn't have assistants. Just stubbornness and a pile of junk that he was determined to make sing.
What haunted him more than failure was the possibility of being noticed. What if someone asked how he came up with all this? What if Heimerdinger himself stopped by and saw through him?
You're not Jayce. You're not Viktor. You don't belong here.
One night, while calibrating the charge nodes on the Shock Ring, he caught sight of his reflection in the mirror above the bench. Gaunt. Tired. Grease-smeared. Haunted.
"Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist," he mumbled with a crooked grin.
Tony Stark would've had a comeback for this situation. He would've cracked a joke, powered through with charm and bravado. But Steven wasn't Tony. He was just a kid from another world, running on memory and desperation.
Still, he slid the ring onto his finger, aimed at the dummy, and pressed the trigger.
The jolt was clean. Not explosive. Not fatal. Controlled.
He nodded slowly.
Progress.
He finished his preparations one day before the showcase.
The visor, gauntlet, and ring were neatly mounted on a display rack built from salvaged scrap. No polished wood. No velvet padding. Just raw function.
On the desk beside it, his handwritten placard:
"Project Archive – Echo Tech"
Apprentice: Steven Liam
Tier One, Academy Welfare Program
He didn't know if anyone would care.
He didn't know if anything would work when it mattered.
But for once, Steven wasn't just reacting to the world.
He was shaping something in it.
And maybe, just maybe, that was enough.