Zac

Zac wasn’t born as a person at all. He began as a mishap, and his story unfolds in steps, moving from a puddle of sludge to something that can almost be called aware.

1. Poisonous runoff seeps through a chemtech fracture far below Zaun.
2. It pools in a sealed-off cave within the city’s Sump, cut off from everything else.
3. Eventually, that primordial slime develops the capacity to think.
4. The newly thinking mass settles into Zaun’s plumbing, where it stays hidden unless it decides otherwise.

Zac isn’t one to seek attention. He shows up mostly when something calls for it: a person in trouble who can’t get through it alone, or a piece of infrastructure in ruins that needs putting back together. There’s a modest sense of purpose in that, odd for a being that by rights shouldn’t exist. He has more in common with Ekko‘s makeshift ingenuity than with anything heroic or grand, and that suits a city where starting over is just another day.

The same makeshift quality shows up in his combat. Stretching Strikes snatches a foe from a distance, and if he hits a second target while holding the first, the two are slammed together. Unstable Matter detonates outward, with its damage scaling off the maximum health of each enemy caught in the blast. Elastic Slingshot plants his arms into the ground and flings his body forward. Let’s Bounce!, his ultimate, makes him ricochet four times, launching and slowing every enemy he touches. Cell Division, his passive, is what keeps him in the fight: each ability that lands tears off a fragment of his body, and that fragment can be gathered back for healing, while lethal damage breaks him into four smaller blobs that attempt to regroup instead of dying outright. He is a body assembled from chemical waste, and it simply won’t abide by the rules that bind everyone else. Collecting the goo he sheds is just as important as any spell, because it’s what sustains him through a drawn-out brawl. Charging Elastic Slingshot from within the fog of war also leaves enemies much less time to brace for the leap. Opponents, for their part, learn to stomp on that goo and quickly track down every bloblet, since one survivor is enough to undo the whole effort of bringing him down.