He arrived face-down in a ditch.
Not metaphorically. An actual ditch. Mud, standing water, the specific smell of somewhere that drainage had never been a priority. Rei pushed himself upright, assessed his hands, his suit, the sky above him, in that order.
The sky was wrong. Not dramatically wrong. No second moon, no impossible colors. Just slightly too wide, somehow, like someone had scaled it up by ten percent and not mentioned it.
His suit was ruined.
He stood up. Took inventory. Limbs present, faculties intact, forty-dollar coffee conspicuously absent. He was in a field at the edge of a tree line, and maybe two hundred meters away there was a road, and on the road a cart was stopped, and next to the cart a woman was engaged in what appeared to be a disagreement with three men who had made the choice to carry swords in public.
Rei looked at the scene.
Then he looked at his own hands, which were the hands of a thirty-two-year-old lawyer who had never been in a physical fight in his life.
Then he looked back at the scene.
The men were laughing. The woman wasn't. She was tall, silver-haired, and holding herself with the particular stillness of someone calculating odds and not liking the result. One of the men grabbed her cart. Another said something that made the third one laugh harder.
Rei started walking.
He wasn't sure why. Old habit. The same one that had made him take cases nobody else would touch, made him refuse the bribe, made him correct judges when they were technically wrong even when it was politically unwise. His brain supplied a clear description of his physical capabilities relative to three armed men and he acknowledged it and kept walking anyway.
He stopped five meters out.
"Gentlemen," he said.
They turned. The tallest one looked him over with the specific expression of someone who has never once lost a fight and considers this a personality trait.
"This isn't your business," the man said. His hand dropped to his sword.
Something shifted in the air. Subtle. Like pressure changing before weather.
Rei felt it before he understood it. Something waking up behind his sternum, something that recognized the situation the way it recognized a courtroom, the way it recognized a witness who was about to lie.
He exhaled.
"Court," he said quietly, "open."
The tall man's hand froze on the hilt. Not because he stopped it. Because something else did.
The woman stared at Rei. Whatever she'd expected from a mud-covered stranger in a ruined suit, it hadn't been this.
Rei looked at the three men and felt the thing behind his sternum settle into place like a key finding a lock it was made for.
"Now," he said, "let's talk about what you actually want to do here."