Unlike the fantastical stories Leo had devoured in his downtime—where heroes arrived with modern weaponry, cheat skills, and platoons of soldiers—he had arrived with nothing but the sweat-stained clothes on his back, a backpack containing a half-eaten energy bar, and a pocketful of loose change. He wasn't a general; he was a broke college student with a knack for mechanics and a barely-passing grade in thermodynamics.
That first night, the cold drove him back. As the twin moons of Astra rose—one silver, one a pale, sickly green—the temperature plummeted. Leo, shivering in his short-sleeved shirt, scrambled back up the hill towards the distortion. He half-expected it to be gone, a one-way ticket to a frozen death. But it was there, shimmering faithfully in the dark.
He stumbled through, collapsing onto the dusty floor of his grandfather's shed. The humidity of Tokyo hit him like a physical blow, but he had never been so happy to feel sticky and gross. He was safe.
Over the next few days, Leo treated the anomaly not as a miracle, but as an engineering problem. He tested its boundaries. He threw rocks through it (they went). He tied a rope to his waist and walked through (it held). He quickly discovered that the gateway was anchored exclusively to him.
When he tried to bring his roommate, Mark, to see it—dragged away from a raid in his favorite MMO—the shimmering tear simply wasn't there.
"Dude, it's a shed," Mark had said, looking around at the rusty tools. "Is this about the heat? You look dehydrated."
Leo had stood there, staring at the empty space where the portal should have been. "It was right here," he insisted.
"Right. I'm going back to the AC. Drink some water, man."
The moment Mark left and the door clicked shut, the distortion reappeared, humming its silent invitation. It was his. Exclusively his.
Armed with this knowledge, Leo began his exploration in earnest. The world of Astra, as he'd come to call it, was a paradox. The very air crackled with a mystical energy the locals called 'mana'. He could feel it—a static charge on his skin, a taste like ozone on his tongue. It allowed them to cast spells that defied physics and forge blades that never dulled.
Yet, for all their magical prowess, their society seemed frozen in amber. No steam engines hissed in the distance. No electric lights broke the darkness of night. No factories churned out goods. The streets were filled with the stench of animal dung and unwashed bodies. It was the Middle Ages with magic, a place where a wizard could summon a fireball but a peasant couldn't boil water without a wood fire.
Leo saw the gap. And where an engineer sees a gap, they build a bridge.
He started small. He needed to test the local economy, to see what they valued. His first export wasn't a weapon or a machine, but a simple, wind-proof butane lighter he'd picked up at a convenience store for 300 yen.
He walked into the frontier town of Oakhaven, pulling his hood up to hide his short hair and strange features. The town was a sensory assault. The clatter of iron-rimmed wheels on cobblestone, the shouting of merchants, the smell of roasting boar and open sewers.
He found a smithy at the edge of the market district. The sign above the door depicted a hammer and anvil. Inside, the heat was intense. A dwarf with arms like tree trunks was hammering a piece of glowing steel.
Garrick, as Leo would later learn his name, stopped hammering and wiped soot from his brow. He eyed Leo with suspicion. "You're not from around here, lad. Your clothes are… thin. And you smell like alchemical soap."
"I have something to trade," Leo said, his voice steady despite his nerves. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the translucent blue lighter.
Garrick snorted. "A toy? I don't deal in trinkets."
"It's not a toy," Leo said. "It's a fire starter. Instant. Windproof. No flint needed."
He held it up and flicked the wheel. Click-hiss.
A consistent, blue-orange flame sprang to life, unwavering in the drafty workshop.
Garrick's eyes widened. He dropped his hammer. The dwarf leaned in, his beard dangerously close to the flame. "Sorcery?" he grunted. "There's no chant. No mana signature."
"Engineering," Leo corrected, though he knew the word meant nothing here. "Pure mechanics. Compressed fuel and a spark."
He let go of the button. The flame vanished. He clicked it again. Whoosh. Fire.
Garrick snatched it from his hand, his thick fingers surprisingly distinctive. He clicked it a dozen times, laughing as the flame obeyed him instantly. "By the Stone," he whispered. "Do you know how much time my apprentices waste striking flint in the damp mornings? How much coal we waste waiting for the forge to catch?"
The trade was made within the hour. Leo walked away with a handful of silver coins—heavy, roughly minted discs stamped with the profile of a king he didn't know—and a raw, glowing mana crystal the size of his fist.
The crystal pulsed with a warm, rhythmic light, unlike anything on Earth. It felt alive in his hand, vibrating with potential energy.
Holding the crystal up to the sunlight, a grin spread across Leo's face. He wasn't just going to be a merchant. He was going to be an innovator. He was going to see what happened when Earth's engineering met Astra's magic.
He had a feeling he was going to need a bigger backpack.