"This looks good," Reinhard said, leaning back and looking at the thick book he had written. It was the Law of Reinhard—a comprehensive legal code he had spent hours drafting by hand, page after page of carefully considered rules and principles that would serve as the foundation for everything this new society would be built upon.
He had built many laws, laws that everyone would have to follow without exception, from churches to organizations, companies, and even the government itself. No institution was above these pages, no individual exempt from their reach. There were many things one could do to earn death under these laws, but those were reserved for extreme cases—crimes so severe and so damaging that no lesser punishment could serve as adequate justice or deterrent.
'I can't say this is perfect, but I did what I could do.' Reinhard thought, closing the book and resting his hand on its cover. Indeed, he had drawn knowledge from many religions he remembered studying or encountering during his time on Earth, pulling the ethical principles that resonated with him and weaving them into the framework.
He had also examined how the many states managed their land back on Earth, looking at what worked and what didn't across centuries of governance, and he had even taken a page directly out of the United States government.
He was going to call this land the Land of the Free, as one had the freedom to worship any god here, to speak how they wanted, dress as they wanted, to assemble without fear, to own property regardless of race or origin, and so on. The freedoms he enshrined were not suggestions—they were absolutes, protections that no authority within his territory could override or suspend.
This land even pushed for the weak. Instead of the survival of the fittest—the brutal, primal doctrine that governed every other corner of this world, where the strong took what they wanted and the weak were left to endure or perish—it would be the land of the strong helping the weak survive. Power came with obligation, not entitlement. Those who had strength had a responsibility to use it in service of those who didn't, and that principle was woven into every law Reinhard had written.
Reinhard suddenly paused as he felt something wash over him, a pull that didn't belong to this world. His head began going light, his vision blurring at the edges as reality seemed to thin around him, before he found himself standing before Veronica in a space that existed between worlds.
"They have summoned people from earth; your mission is going to be harder than ever." She said with unease, her expression carrying a weight of genuine concern that Reinhard hadn't seen from her before. Whatever had prompted her to pull him from his work for a direct conversation was clearly serious, and the worry on her face made Reinhard frown.
"How so?" Reinhard asked; he didn't want to sound arrogant, but he was pretty powerful. He was sure he was the strongest person in the world. He had been growing every minute since his arrival, and nothing he had encountered so far had come close to threatening him.
"They were given a leveling system. Each got to craft their own unique leveling system; there are 12 of them, and adding that they are all favored by a god." She sighed at the problem her world was bringing her, the exhaustion of managing a world that seemed determined to tear itself apart evident in her voice.
Twelve heroes, each with a custom-built system designed specifically for their strengths, each personally sponsored by a god who had handpicked them—it was a concentrated effort to produce weapons capable of matching what Reinhard had become.
"And the character of these summons is to the liking of the gods, most likely, expect some anime system, and such things being thrown around. Act quickly before they level up." She said softly, her eyes meeting his with a gravity that conveyed just how narrow his window of advantage truly was.
If these summoned heroes were given enough time to grow and develop their systems, each one of them could potentially become a genuine threat—and there were twelve of them working simultaneously. Reinhard nodded with a light sigh, understanding the urgency immediately.
As soon as he appeared back on the table he was on, he ignored the blessing he got—something that made him immune to anything trying to influence his mind. It was useful, but not something he had time to examine in detail right now.
He went on to step outside the house, and instantly, the ground under him began to crack, fractures spiderwebbing outward from where he stood as his body prepared to unleash a level of force it had been holding. The earth groaned beneath his feet, unable to bear the weight of what he was about to do.
Before those nearby could even understand what was happening, Reinhard burst into the sky, the ground below him exploding from the force of his launch. A crater formed where he had been standing, and a shockwave of displaced air knocked back everyone within the immediate vicinity.
Reinhard shot miles into the sky in an instant, quickly reaching the clouds and then piercing through them entirely, continuing to climb higher and higher until the city below shrank into a speck against the vast landscape beneath him.
He stepped onto the air as if it were solid ground, his footing stable and sure on nothing but empty sky, and began running toward the capital, moving so fast that he moved faster than the speed of light itself.
The distance between his city and the capital was enormous, but at this velocity, it would be crossed in mere moments. As he neared the capital, Reinhard suddenly moved, his body reacting on pure instinct before his conscious mind had fully registered the threat.
He twisted sharply to the side, avoiding a massive beam of concentrated energy that nearly took his head clean off, the attack tearing through the space where he had been a fraction of a second earlier with enough force to split the sky behind him.
Reinhard's eyebrows raised as he looked at an old man who stood at a good distance away from him, hovering in the sky with a presence so vast and heavy that the air itself seemed to bend around his body. Even from this distance, Reinhard could feel the sheer density of the power radiating from the ancient figure before him.
"With the changes that happened to you, it helped me break my limits and reach higher levels." The old man said softly, his voice carrying across the distance between them with unnatural clarity. Despite the overwhelming power emanating from his body, his eyes were filled with sadness as he looked at his descendant—a young man separated from him by centuries of lineage, standing on the opposite side of a conflict neither of them had wanted.
"It saddened me to see my own descendant betray humanity… but today I will erase the shame of my bloodline," the old man said, as his weak figure suddenly exploded with muscles. His frail, ancient body transformed in an instant, the illusion of age and fragility shattering as dense, corded power packed itself onto a frame that had been concealing its true form behind a mask of withered flesh and brittle bones.
In his arms, a spear appeared, summoned from whatever spatial storage he possessed, and he pointed it toward Reinhard with the practiced ease of someone who had wielded that weapon for longer than most civilizations had existed.
"You say that, but look at humanity. All I see is those strong stepping on the weak. If that's the way you want things to be, since I'm stronger, shouldn't I have all rights to step on the weak? Or does that rule disappear when you enter the picture?" Reinhard asked with a raised eyebrow, his voice calm but carrying a challenge that cut deeper than any blade.
"Foolish!" The old man roared in anger, the single word cracking through the sky like a thunderclap. And with a flash, moving at the speed of light, the old man shot toward Reinhard while casting a spell with his free hand.
He was shockingly a magic spearman—a hybrid combatant who wielded both martial prowess and magical power in tandem, a combination that was extraordinarily rare even among those who had reached the ninth rank. But the old man quickly realized, within the first exchange of blows, that he had to alter his spells mid-casting if he hoped to have any magic touch Reinhard at all.
Standard spells simply disintegrated before reaching him, their mana structure unraveling and being consumed by Reinhard's passive absorption before they could make contact. Only spells whose composition was actively changed in real time had any hope of slipping through.
The sky suddenly turned bright white as the two of them clashed, the initial collision of their powers releasing a flash of energy so blinding and so intense that it was visible across the entirety of the human domain.
Down below on the surface, many watched in shock as the heavens lit up and trembled from the aftershocks, and within the church at the capital, the many people summoned into this world watched in equal shock and disbelief.
Earth was a magicless world—none of them had ever witnessed anything remotely like this in their lives, and to think that as soon as they arrived, before they even had a chance to process what had happened to them, the demon lord would come to kill them… but why did the demon lord look like Reinhard from Re:Zero?
"As you can see, the demon lord has come to try and kill you all. But worry not, you are all safe, the gods are with us, those who dare to stand against us is fated for defeat." A woman with a blindfold said with a gentle smile while looking at the summons.
Her calm confidence was reassuring despite the chaos unfolding in the sky above, and the twelve summoned individuals nodded, their initial terror settling into something more manageable as they turned their attention back to the clash above, not wanting to miss a single moment of what was unfolding.
In the sky, Reinhard clashed with the ancestor blow for blow, exchange after exchange, neither of them yielding an inch to the other. Something about Reinhard's current strength—he was currently at the peak of the eighth rank.
Naturally, his adaptation and growth rate had slowed down as he had no target to adapt toward. Without a specific threat pushing against him, without a stimulus forcing his body to evolve, his passive adaptation had lost some of its urgency, plateauing as it only had the 8th rank he had faced before.
Still, even with him only at the peak of the eighth rank, he was fighting on par with his ancestor as if they were on the same rank. The gap between the peak of the eighth rank and the ninth was supposed to be an insurmountable chasm—a wall that no amount of skill or combat mastery should have been able to bridge through conventional means.
And yet here Reinhard was, matching the old man strike for strike, meeting every technique with an answer, trading blows at speeds that would have been completely invisible to anyone below the seventh rank.
The two fought high into the sky, climbing miles above the ground with each passing exchange, ascending to altitudes that left even the highest mountain peaks far below them. With the size of this world dwarfing Earth in every dimension, clouds could be found far higher into the sky compared to Earth, and the two combatants had long since passed even those distant formations.
"Dragon God Spear!" The old man roared while pulling back his spear and aimed toward Reinhard, whom he had kicked backward to create the distance he needed for this technique.
The spear in his hands seemed to transform into a massive eastern dragon, its serpentine body coiling around the shaft of the weapon, its scales shimmering with ancient power, its jaws opening wide in a silent roar of fury. As he threw the spear forward, the dragon roared toward Reinhard and shot forward at speeds far higher than light, closing the distance between them almost instantaneously.
This was the ancestor's strongest attack, perfectly timed and launched toward its target at the optimal moment. Even if the target could move to dodge, this spear was moving at speeds faster than light; it was far too fast to avoid, far too fast to dodge, and that's not adding the piercing power this attack held—enough concentrated force on a single point to punch through virtually any defense that existed in this world.
It was, by all means, an attack no one can face head-on. The destructive capability packed into this single technique represented the pinnacle of what the ninth rank could produce. No one below the 9th rank could hope to face this attack head-on… With the sole exception of Reinhard Pendragon, of course.
A thunderous impact split the sky apart. Reinhard punched forward, meeting the Dragon God Spear with nothing but his bare fist. A clash of fist and spear, and the shockwave that erupted from the point of collision was massive—it spread across the entire human domain in a visible ripple of distorted air and displaced energy, rattling windows, shaking buildings, and causing every living being on the surface below to feel the tremor of two titans colliding far above their heads.
If they were not so high up in the sky, if the clash hadn't canceled out most of the power behind this spear through the mutual destruction of their opposing forces, then the land for over a hundreds in every direction would have been erased from such a clash—scoured clean of every mountain, every forest, every city, and every living thing, reduced to nothing but a barren, smoldering wasteland from the fallout of a single exchange between two beings who had no business existing on the same battlefield.
[A/N: The 9th rank is Country Level. The human domain is the size of Earth.
MC is holding back and isn't using his blessing or adaptation. He is also not blocking any attacks in this battle, so it didn't trigger the backlash that broke that which he defends against.
MC is weaker than his ancestor and is only keeping up with him while holding back, thanks to his raw skills in combat.]