Gear

In Zaun, gadgets make the man. As a skilled inventor, Ekko has a few to call his own, entirely of his own design. Every device his carries is a product of his own mind, built by him and him alone with nothing but scrap, sweat, and brilliance. Every gadget is a testament to Zaunite ingenuity and resourcefulness: rough, salvaged, and undeniably his.

The following descriptions reflect Ekko’s original, accepted design lineage: inventions he created himself in Zaun from scavenged technology and his own engineering brilliance. This page maintains the canonical depiction of his equipment as it was first introduced, grounded in primary game materials and developer commentary.

For Ekko’s time machine, the Zero Drive, we offer technical descriptions and its theory of operation.

Slugger

Timewinder

Zero drive

Slugger

Ekko’s slugger (sometimes referred to as his “swordbat”) is a blunt weapon made out of a hand from the Piltovan clock tower Old Hungry.

The bat is roughly 3.5 feet (~100cm) in length. The barrel makes up roughly two-thirds of the bat, and glows green-blue with hextech energy from Ekko’s Z-Drive. The hilt and other metal accents on the bat are polished nickel silver, a pale alloy used throughout Piltover and Zaun. The end of the hilt has a circular loop made of the same material as the rest of the bat, and it glows similarly. A hose connects this loop and the glowing barrel. This hose wraps around the hilt and is secured with tape.

When Ekko is holding his slugger, four equally-spaced points can be seen; The loop at the end, the round switch on Ekko’s right glove, the decorative hole separating the hilt and barrel, and the end of the decorative metal accent that holds and stabilizes the barrel.

In a forum Q&A post, a writer elaborates on the design decisions that went into Ekko’s slugger:

It’s actually a clock hand that he stole from Piltover! We intentionally went with a blunt weapon for a few reasons:

• Gameplay-wise, we knew he was AP (gypsylord has talked about this elsewhere), so wanted to differentiate him from somebody like Yasuo in terms of weapon
• Ekko is young, and probably wouldn’t have the kind of training to wield a sharp weapon as effectively
• Zaun might be a rough place, but Ekko isn’t a killer at heart. A blunt weapon gives him what he needs, without the deadly side-effects

Timewinder

Ekko’s Timewinder (originally the flashbinder) is a grenade that pulls objects and people closer to itself, before “unexploding” and returning to Ekko. When not in use, it is secured to the center of his belt. In League, it is the most frequently used ability, used for farming and setting up combos, delivering damage on both paths to and from Ekko.

The device which would become the Timewinder is described in Ekko’s color story, Lullaby:

After a few dozen rewinds, he changed tack and pulled out his latest toy: the Flashbinder. It was meant to explode in a dazzling flash and pull anything not bolted down in toward its center.

But the Flashbinder didn’t work. Well, at least not as intended. It exploded. And that’s when things got interesting. Unlike most of Ekko’s inventions that exploded, the blue-hot magical detonation froze in mid blast. Columns of billowing blue energy fanned out from the epicenter. Bits of the disc’s shrapnel twisted at a snail’s pace along what, at normal explosion velocity, would be a deadly trajectory. Even the spherical blinding flash itself was frozen in space.

And then it got even more interesting. The explosion imploded, reforming itself into the palm-sized Flashbinder, and rewound back toward Ekko, landing square in his palm, as cold as the wind.

Cool, Ekko thought. He rewound the moment so he could throw it at the vigilnauts a few more times. For science, of course.

Zero drive

Ekko’s time machine, the Zero Drive (often shortened to Z-Drive) is an hourglass-shaped capsule that is slung across Ekko’s back. It allows Ekko to set a point in time, and “rewind” back to that point an arbitrary number of times.

Appearance

The outer shell of the Zero Drive is a glass cylinder with metal caps on both ends. The metal ends have large ventilation holes, and rounded “peaks” that slightly cover the glass. Flexible tubing on one of the caps carry magical energy throughout the machine.

Within the outer cylinder are two glass cones that join to form an hourglass. A set of metal blades is present within each half of the hourglass. When the Zero Drive is used to rewind time, these metal blades spin in opposing directions, manipulating the hextech crystal shards to perform time travel.

Operation

A handle on the outer shell is connected to a pull-cord, which is used to start the Zero Drive, and set the point in time it is to return to.

A dial-shaped switch is strapped to a glove on Ekko’s right hand. Twisting this switch activates the Zero Drive, causing the metal blades to spin, returning Ekko to the point at which the machine was started.

When in operation, a bright blue trail can be seen coming from the Zero Drive, leading to the place at which it was turned on. At regular points throughout this trail, similarly colored “ghosts” of Ekko can be seen, stuck in the pose that he was in at that point in time.

Repeated use of the Zero Drive will always return Ekko to the point at which it was turned on, regardless of how long ago that was. Ekko can rewind a large, possibly unlimited number of times. In Chronobreak, Ekko rewinds 93 times in an attempt to save his friend Ajuna.

After rewinding, Ekko is returned to the time and place at which he started the Zero Drive. The world is similarly returned to the state it was in when the machine was started. People other than Ekko have no memory of what has transpired or how many times he has rewound. This means that, all other things being equal, they would behave the same as they did the first time Ekko encountered them.

The Zero Drive does not necessarily undo injuries to Ekko, and he continues to age while using the machine. For example, if Ekko were to rewind a 6 minute period 20 times, he would age two hours in that 6 minute span when the timeline is “finalized”.

The limit to the amount of time the Zero Drive can rewind has increased as Ekko has stabilized it. In Chronobreak, this amount of time is revealed to be in excess of 4-5 minutes, but is likely much longer, on the order of tens of minutes.

Throughout an entire duty cycle of the Zero Drive, an outside observer would only see the events of the “last” rewind. This would give Ekko the appearance of perfect premonition and skill.

Creation

The creation of the Zero Drive is described in Ekko’s extended biography:

One night, while Ekko scoured the rubble of a recently demolished laboratory, he made an astonishing find: a shard of a blue-green gem that glittered with magical energy. He quickly searched and discovered other fragments of the glowing jewel. The shards hummed like they were trying to sing a broken melody, the song growing louder when near other pieces. He painstakingly searched for every splinter of the broken crystal, though some were buried deep beneath tons of debris that required him to squeeze and wiggle between chunks of smelly rubbish. Every child of Zaun heard tales about hextech crystals. They powered weapons and heroes. They could create energy on their own. Hextech crystals had the potential to change the world. Now he held a broken one.

Before he could celebrate his find, the place was crawling with vigilnauts scanning the ruins, searching for something. Ekko knew it was the pieces of the crystal he held in his hand. He barely escaped detection.

After meticulous study, Ekko noticed that faint traces of energy surged when the crystals were brought closer together; the edges crackled and sent waves of rippling distortion through the air. When he pulled the pieces apart, a magnetic-like resistance fought his efforts. It was as if the splintered crystals remembered being whole. Even curiouser, Ekko felt the strangest sensation; a haunting feeling of remembering a moment, only slightly differently.

His hands couldn’t keep up with the ideas his mind had for the crystal. During one of his less-than-scientific experiments, the gem exploded into a vortex of shimmering dust, triggering eddies of temporal distortion. Ekko opened his eyes to see several splintered realities - and several ‘echo’ versions of himself - staring back in sheer panic amid the fractured continua.

He’d really done it this time.

After some tense coordination between Ekko and his paradoxes, they contained and repaired the doozy of a hole he’d torn in the fabric of reality.

Eventually, Ekko harnessed the shattered crystal’s temporal powers into a device that would allow him to manipulate small increments of time - well, at least in theory.