Cyborg

Cyborgs of Runeterra are mortals who have augmented or replaced significant portions of their bodies with mechanical, chemtech, or hextech components, blurring the line between the organic and the artificial. They are found primarily in the twin cities of Zaun and Piltover, where the practice has evolved from crude chemtech prosthetics into sophisticated hextech implants. People come to augmentation through necessity, ambition, or ideology, and among the broader ranks of the Augmented, cyborgs are set apart from fully mechanical constructs by the living flesh that remains beneath the machinery. In Zaun, augmentation is a fact of daily life. Many laborers replace limbs lost to industrial accidents with chemtech prosthetics, and the practice is bound up with the undercity's poverty and pollution. The most infamous Zaunite cyborg is Urgot, once a powerful Noxian headsman who believed in the doctrine of strength above all. Betrayed and exiled into the depths of Zaun's prisons, his faith shattered, and among the desperate and the damned he rebuilt his broken body into a monstrous engine of chemtech machinery, his mechanical legs tipped with grinding, chainsaw-like weapons. He now preaches that true power comes only through pain, that suffering is a crucible which leaves a person worthy or dead. Also of Zaun is Viktor, a brilliant inventor who systematically replaces his own flesh with mechanical components in pursuit of a philosophy he calls the Glorious Evolution: the belief that humanity can transcend its flaws through technology. His creed has drawn a following among those who see machinery as salvation from the city's hardship. In Piltover, augmentation is more controlled and refined, associated with wealth and the elite. Camille, a Piltovan operative, embodies this precision. Her legs are literal blades and a hextech heart keeps her alive and ageless, allowing her to serve as her family's enforcer for decades. The exclusivity of such hextech work reinforces the class divide between the two cities and raises the same unsettling question in both: how much of a person can be replaced before they cease to be themselves.