The world ended quietly.
No thunderous roar. No triumphant cries. Just the clean note of a sword cutting through air and the long, slow exhale that followed.
Reinhardt van Astrea, Sword Saint of his homeland, stood alone on a shattered plain. The calamity he had just defeated was already fading—its immense, hateful presence collapsing into dust, then into less than dust. The scars it had carved into the earth seemed to blur at the edges, as if someone were repainting reality over the damage.
He remained still, the Dragon Sword balanced in his hand.
Silence pressed in on all sides.
There should have been sound: soldiers groaning, armor clattering, healers rushing to work. Instead, there was only the faint echo of his last step, stretched out longer than it should have been.
His fingers tightened slightly on the hilt.
The world folded.
There was no warning, no flash of magic. The horizon bent inward, sky and ground curling in on themselves like a page rolled from both ends. Colors bled out, replaced by a colorless blur. The sense of up and down slipped away, as meaningless as direction in a void.
Sword Saint correction responded before his mind had time to name the sensation.
His stance shifted to perfect neutrality, weight distributed so that any sudden change could be met with equal ease. Muscles loosened, never tensed, as if he were passing between one step and the next.
Darkness pressed in for a heartbeat.
Then wind rushed out to meet him.
It smelled of grass and leaves and open spaces. Cool and clean, it wrapped around him like an unseen cloak. His boots touched ground with a muted thud, and he sank into the landing easily, knees bending as if he had simply hopped down from a low ledge.
The Dragon Sword pulsed once in his grip.
Then the weight changed.
Not the weight of steel—the weight of will. An invisible pressure ran along the blade from tip to guard, telling him with quiet finality that it no longer wished to remain bare.
Reinhardt let his hand move with it.
Click.
The sword slipped back into its scabbard as smoothly as if it had always belonged there.
He looked down at the sheathed weapon for a moment.
"…Not worthy, is it?" he murmured.
There was no answer, of course. Just the steady tug of the wind and the sound of new grass brushing against his boots.
He released the hilt and looked around.
A different sky stretched above him: a deep, vivid blue scattered with slow-drifting clouds. Rolling hills spread outward in every direction, cloaked in green that rippled under the wind. Scattered stone ruins rose from the earth—arches snapped in half, pillars broken, strange platforms with worn symbols.
Far off, walls and towers wreathed a city. White windmills turned lazily beside it, their blades bright in the sun.
This was not Lugunica.
Reinhardt drew a slow breath.
The air felt… full. Not with mana as he knew it, but with something broader and wilder. It moved not only as wind, but in deeper currents, like invisible rivers flowing through sky and earth. When it brushed his skin, it tingled faintly, leaving behind the sense of something unbound.
He closed his eyes, just for a moment.
Sword Saint correction accepted it at once. His posture shifted by tiny degrees, weight and balance adjusting to the way sound carried in this world, to the pull and give of those hidden currents, to how the ground responded to his touch.
He opened them again.
On the horizon, beyond the hills, the city watched. Up close, the ruins murmured of a civilization older than his own. And beneath everything, a quiet presence seemed to be listening, like an audience waiting to see what he would do next.
Before he could take a step, the world's currents shivered.
A sharp disturbance rippled through the unseen flow—concentrated, strained, then violently released. It felt like power being forced through channels not entirely suited to it.
Along with it came sound, carried by the wind.
A deep mechanical rumble. The whine of stressed mechanisms. Human voices shouting in an unfamiliar language. The pitch shifted between command and alarm. Something roared that was not a living throat.
Reinhardt turned his head toward the source.
His hand hovered near the Dragon Sword's hilt.
The weight in the scabbard pressed back—steady, unmoved. The blade did not stir, did not itch to be drawn.
"…I see," he said softly.
He let his hand fall.
This was not his world.
He knew nothing of its rulers, its laws, its faiths, or its enemies. Walking into a battle with his full strength on display would be irresponsible at best. Dangerous, if those who saw him decided he was some new threat.
If help was needed, he would give it.
But he did not need to show everything to do so.
He began to walk toward the disturbance.
The hill sloped downward, the grass whispering underfoot. He did not hurry, but every step carried him farther than it should have. Pebbles that might have slipped under a careless foot stayed stubbornly where they lay. A stray gust that tried to throw grit in his face bent away at the last instant.
Sword Saint correction erased inconveniences silently.
He passed through the first ruins—fallen stone frames, shattered pillars, broken slabs half-swallowed by earth. Symbols and motifs, worn nearly to nothing, hinted that once this had all meant something. He brushed a hand against one cracked column in passing, acknowledging the weight of time he could not read.
The sounds of conflict grew sharper.
The whine of machinery cut through the air.
A feminine voice barked an order, serious and composed.
Another replied in quicker, brighter tones.
A third voice rose in something like a song, trembling but steady.
Reinhardt rounded a toppled arch and stepped into a clearing.
An ancient war machine towered in its center.
It walked on two heavy legs, each step driving its weight into the ground like a piledriver. Armor plates and circular rings formed its frame, held together by a dull orange glow pulsing from within. Segmented, ring-shaped structures floated as arms beside it, rotating with mechanical precision. A mask-like plate was set into its front, and in the center of that mask, a single eye blazed.
Around its feet, short, mask-wearing creatures swarmed—humanoid shapes wrapped in fur and scraps of armor, clutching crude clubs and spears. Painted wooden masks hid their faces, each marked with simple, rough designs. Crooked totems and effigies made of bone and dark wood poked up from the earth near them.
He did not know their names.
But the rhythm of danger needed no translation.
Opposing them were Knights.
A blonde woman in a blue-and-white uniform with a lion crest at her chest stood at the front. A sword hung in her hand, and a jewel at her side glowed faintly with a symbol Reinhardt did not recognize. Wind gathered around her with each breath, curling near her boots, coiling along her blade.
She moved with practiced certainty, each command she gave cutting through noise like a blade of its own.
To her flank, a girl in light gear with rabbit-like adornments at her head loosed blazing arrows from her bow. A crystal at her hip burned with Pyro light, forming arrows of fire even before she drew them. Each shot exploded among the masked creatures or hammered the machine's armor.
Behind them, a young woman in a church dress held a staff and a worn book. A shining Hydro jewel at her waist pulsed to the rhythm of her song. Circles of water and gentle light formed at the feet of injured Knights, closing cuts and washing away pain.
They were not losing.
The commander—Jean, though he did not yet know the name—stood firmly between the machine and her people. The archer's fire chipped away at the enemy with stubborn persistence. The church sister's Hydro song stitched wounds before they could grow fatal.
They were managing.
But the machine made "managing" dangerous.
As Reinhardt watched, its floating arms shifted, aligning one in front of its central core. Panels slid open along the inside of the ring, exposing channels of raw light. The orange glow inside its body flared, power surging through its frame.
The single eye narrowed.
The arm boomed—no, fired.
A tight volley of small, cylindrical projectiles burst forth from hidden compartments along its shoulders and torso. They launched upward first, arcing, then tipped and came screaming down in a rain of concentrated force.
The masked creatures leapt aside with inhuman jerks.
The Knights scrambled behind rocks and broken walls.
Jean snapped out a command, raising her sword as wind gathered around her, ready to knock the missiles away if she could.
Reinhardt watched the path of the projectiles.
He knew, in an instant, that she could handle it.
Perhaps a few would slip through, causing injuries. Perhaps the church sister's song would strain under sudden demands. But no one would die—not easily, not with that woman standing there.
He also knew what it would look like, to the eyes of this world, if he were to cross the clearing in an instant and smash the machine to pieces in a single blow.
Too much.
Too fast.
Too strange.
He did not want to announce himself that loudly.
So he stepped forward.
And did nothing else.
Sword Saint correction stirred.
The world had already started to bend around his existence in small ways. It had removed loose stones from his path, shifted dust from his eyes. Now, as he walked calmly toward the machine, it took hold of the projectiles' fates as well.
The first missile locked on to him.
Its guidance systems recognized a new target—largest threat, most exposed, walking in a straight line as if daring it to hit. Its internal mechanisms adjusted, compensating for wind, distance, movement.
Reinhardt kept his eyes open and his hands at his sides.
The missile screamed toward him.
At the last instant, the world gave it a different future.
Sword Saint correction reshaped the smallest details: a fraction more wind resistance, a fraction of internal instability, a fraction of misaligned force. Its path bent. The projectile veered sharply to the right, missing him by an arm's length and plowing into the ground harmlessly behind him.
Grass flew.
The masked creatures yelped, scrambling out of the blast radius.
Jean, seeing the attack curve away, blinked in momentary confusion.
Reinhardt took another step.
Another missile angled toward him.
Its guidance shifted, recalculating.
He did not change his stride.
The projectile shuddered mid-flight, spun, and then arced almost gracefully over his shoulder to explode somewhere off to the side, close enough that he felt the rush of air, far enough that he remained untouched.
To the machine, this was error.
It compensated.
More ports opened.
It launched another volley, this time focusing most of them on the strangely unaffected man walking straight toward it.
From the outside, it looked as though fate had decided Reinhardt would not be hit.
From the inside, Od Laguna quietly picked up its brush.
Reinhardt felt it: the invisible hand that had shaped his lineage and his blessings in his world touching this one as easily as if the distance between worlds had never mattered. As the war machine fired, that vast, indifferent law traced his situation and wrote a new protection into it.
A string of words without sound formed in the depths of his soul.
—Divine Protection of Ancient Machinery.
No fanfare. No flash of light. Just a new concept written into him, as casually as if someone had added a line to a very long ledger.
Reinhardt's eyes did not widen.
But the corners of his mouth tugged very slightly upward.
The missiles curved.
Some dipped suddenly, driving into the ground short of him. Others tilted up just enough to pass over his head and explode harmlessly behind. One even spun entirely around him in an almost comical arc before detonating in an empty patch of grass.
To those watching, it looked like impossible luck.
From Jean's vantage point, it was a man walking through a storm of guided death as if taking a stroll—and every shot meant for him missed by margins too precise to be chance.
The archer lowered her bow for a second, forgetting to nock the next arrow.
The church sister's song faltered, a note catching in her throat as she stared.
The masked creatures, some hit by their own war machine's shots, snarled in confusion.
The machine's eye flared, calculations collapsing.
Its targeting systems adjusted frantically. It tried sweeping fire, wide and wild. It tried concentrating on his chest, on his legs, on the ground at his feet. No matter what pattern it chose, Od Laguna calmly shifted the world by the smallest increments.
Every shot that should have hit him missed.
Reinhardt walked.
He did not hurry. He did not dodge. He did not raise his arms. His boots pressed into the grass one after another, his cloak swaying softly behind him. The explosions that bracketed him only made the air warmer and the ground slightly more uneven—details Sword Saint correction erased without asking.
By the time he reached the machine, it had exhausted an entire pattern of attacks and gotten nothing.
Up close, the war machine loomed over him.
Its eye glared down, burning bright with mechanical frustration. Its arm-rings spun rapidly, trying to bring some other weapon to bear. Internal mechanisms whined. Hidden compartments opened, closed, opened again as it searched its arsenal for something—anything—that would connect.
Reinhardt placed his palm against its leg.
Cool metal met his glove.
He felt the hum of energy beneath the armor.
With the new divine protection settled into him, the hum was more than noise. It was language. The machine's design unfolded in his mind, not in exact schematics, but in understanding: how its limbs moved, how its joints locked, how the flows of power traveled through its frame.
He knew nothing of this world's history.
In that moment, he knew this machine better than its makers had.
"Forgive me," he said quietly.
He did not channel brute force.
He simply applied his fingers.
A slight twist at a joint. A push at the wrong seam. A subtle pull at a ring that should never have been moved in that direction. His hands moved with the same clean efficiency he would use to dress a wound or buckle armor, except now he was unmaking instead of mending.
The machine tried to respond.
One arm swung down, but the inner ring that controlled its rotation suddenly slipped on its axis, seized, and then detached entirely, crashing to the ground. Its leg tried to lift, but a critical locking pin came free under the lightest touch, and the limb sagged uselessly.
To anyone watching, it looked like he was… taking it apart.
Piece by piece, with his bare hands.
Armor plates that should have required tools to remove popped free under his fingers. Anchor points slid out like loose pegs. A vital spine-like structure connecting its upper body to its core came loose with a sharp, almost embarrassed click.
The machine's eye flickered wildly.
It tried to step back.
Its power channels stuttered.
It fired one last desperate burst from a half-functional launcher, aimed squarely at his back at close range.
The projectile exited the barrel.
The world, with quiet certainty, decided no.
It tilted.
Instead of drilling into his spine, the shot curved in a lazy arc, passed by his shoulder, and detonated harmlessly above him.
Reinhardt did not even glance at it.
His fingers found the central coupling that fed power to the eye and plucked it free.
The pulsing glow in the machine's chest guttered.
The ancient construct gave a final, grinding groan.
Then it ceased to be a threat and became, simply, a very large pile of dead metal.
Reinhardt stepped back as its weight settled into the earth.
Silence spilled into the space the battle had occupied.
The masked creatures stared.
One took a hesitant step, clutching its club. The instant Reinhardt's eyes swept past, its body recoiled as if pushed. Without understanding why, it turned and fled. The others followed, stumbling over each other in their haste to escape into the rocks and brush, leaving their crude totems and camp behind.
The archer's hand trembled around her bow.
The church sister's song had stopped entirely; Hydro light at her side dimmed to a soft, uncertain glow.
Jean stared at the man who had simply walked through an onslaught of guided fire and then calmly taken apart a war machine as if it were a misassembled piece of armor.
Reinhardt flexed his fingers once, feeling the unfamiliar divine protection settle comfortably into his long list of blessings.
—Divine Protection of Ancient Machinery.
"I see," he thought. "So Od Laguna's hand reaches this world as well."
He did not smile outright.
But the knowledge that the same law had followed him here—quiet, impartial, endlessly accommodating—brought a certain ease to his chest. No matter how strange this land was, some things had not changed.
He turned to face the Knights.
Jean stepped forward.
Her sword was lowered but not sheathed. The wind around her had calmed, but not fully. Her eyes were steady, measuring him with the same seriousness she applied to crises and responsibilities.
She spoke.
The words were foreign, but he recognized gratitude in her tone, and caution. She did not know what he was. She did know what she had just seen, and that alone was enough to demand answers.
Reinhardt placed his hand over his heart and inclined his head.
"Reinhardt van Astrea," he said. "A knight."
The language barrier made the name meaningless, but the posture, the tone, the word "knight"—those carried.
The archer brightened, stepping closer and jabbing a thumb at herself as she rattled off a name in quick, friendly syllables, then pointing at him with an excited grin. The energy of her voice sounded very much like, We're both Knights, right?
The church sister clutched her staff with both hands, Hydro jewel glimmering faintly as she murmured something soft and reverent. Her gaze flicked between him and the now-harmless wreck behind him.
Jean watched all this, then looked past them, toward the city walls visible in the distance.
She pointed.
"Mondstadt," she said clearly. She looked back at him, repeated the word, and pointed again. "Mondstadt."
Reinhardt followed her gesture.
Walls. Windmills. Red roofs and towers.
"Mondstadt," he echoed.
She nodded, satisfied that at least this much was understood.
Her next gesture was more complex but no less clear. She pointed at the disassembled machine, at the fleeing monsters, at him, and finally toward the city, her gaze sharpening.
You're coming with us.
You will answer questions.
Reinhardt dipped his head slightly.
He had no intention of running. This was their land. Their law. Walking with them into the city would teach him much about this world—for a relatively small price.
Besides, if Od Laguna still watched, there was no need for him to rush.
"My role is not to tear this world apart," he thought, stepping closer to her. "Not unless it demands it."
For now, hiding most of what he could do was the wiser path.
He glanced once at the inert machine, its shell lying open where his hands had found its secrets. The new divine protection hummed quietly inside him, waiting for the next time gears and circuits tried to stand against him.
"That fate of yours extends here as well," he thought, addressing the unseen force that had granted it.
He turned and fell into step behind Jean as she led the way toward Mondstadt.
The archer walked a little too close at first, curiosity burning in her eyes. The church sister stayed on his other side, stealing nervous, fascinated glances whenever she thought he might not notice. The wind brushed past them, tugging at cloaks and hair, carrying the scents of the city ahead.
As they walked, small accidents continued to fail to happen.
A loose stone that should have rolled into a Knight's path stayed put. A snapped branch falling from a tree landed just behind their group instead of on top of them. A masked creature watching from afar turned away, heart hammering, only to forget why it had been interested at all.
Reinhardt felt the world adjusting around him.
Od Laguna's ledger updated.
Teyvat's currents swirled.
And high above, in places no human eye could see, something vast and distant took note of a man whose sword did not draw and whose misfortune refused to exist.
Reinhardt van Astrea walked toward Mondstadt with his power hidden, his blade sheathed, and the quiet, absolute certainty that as long as Od Laguna followed him, this new world would keep giving him exactly what he needed.
For now, all he needed was to observe.