Two months later, Leo's operation had evolved from a backpack full of trinkets to a streamlined logistical enterprise. But it wasn't easy. He was living a double life that was slowly grinding him down. By day, he was a zombie in lectures, his notes a mess of scribbles about mana conductivity and gear ratios. By night, he was a smuggler of heavy electronics across dimensional lines.
He funded his purchases by carefully converting the precious metals he earned in Astra. The pawn shop owner in Shinjuku, a man named Mr. Tanaka with eyes like a hawk, had stopped asking questions after the third gold coin. He simply weighed the metal, tested its purity (impossibly high, given the lack of modern refining techniques in Astra), and handed over stacks of yen. Leo used the money to clear out surplus stores and electronics shops.
When he stepped through the distortion now, the weary college student was gone. In his place stood a man equipped for a new kind of exploration.
He rode a modified electric fat-tire e-bike, a beast of a machine he'd customized in the shed. He'd swapped the standard battery for a high-capacity lithium-ion pack he'd built himself, and reinforced the suspension with motorcycle shocks to handle Astra's rough, cobblestone roads. It moved silently, a ghost on wheels, a stark contrast to the clattering hooves of horses and the creaking of wooden cart wheels.
As he rode into Oakhaven, the wind whipping at his face, he saw the heads turning. Farmers stopped their carts. Children pointed. Even the guards at the gate, who had grown used to his strange arrivals, still watched with a mixture of fear and awe.
Strapped to the back of the bike were portable, foldable solar arrays. He set them up on the grassy hill near the gateway every morning to charge his equipment off the grid, creating a personal power station in a world that burned oil and wood.
His toolkit had grown, too. A high-end scouting drone, a sleek quadcopter equipped with thermal imaging and a 4K camera, now buzzed through the skies of Oakhaven.
Leo parked his bike on a ridge overlooking the town and pulled out the controller. With a flick of the joysticks, the drone shot into the air. On the screen attached to the controller, the world transformed. He could see heat signatures—the warmth of chimneys, the clusters of people in the market, the patrols of guards on the walls. He was mapping the terrain with a precision no cartographer could match.
"Looking good," he murmured, adjusting the camera angle. "Northern wall needs repair. Southern gate has a bottleneck."
Below him, a group of townspeople pointed at the buzzing speck in the sky.
"It's the metal familiar!" one shouted.
"The eye of the gods!" another cried, making a protective sign against evil.
To the people of Oakhaven, Leo wasn't an engineer. He wasn't a student with a soldering iron. He was an eccentric, wandering archmage of terrifying power. They whispered that his silent, black-iron steed was a tamed beast of the void, a demon bound to his will. His drone was a scout sent from the heavens. And his smartphone—always glowing with strange runes and maps—was a scrying tablet that could see the future.
Leo didn't correct them. In a world of magic, technology was just another form of sorcery. And sometimes, being a sorcerer was safer than being a stranger with expensive toys.
But the toys weren't just for show. For emergencies, he carried heavy-duty LED floodlights capable of turning night into day, blinding anyone foolish enough to attack him. And strapped to his handlebars was a megaphone that could amplify his voice to booming proportions—the voice of a giant.
He was building a legend, one volt at a time. And he was just getting started.