Lord of Mysteries:Fire of Destruction

Sunday, September 16th...

After a long and peaceful night, the duo finally left the bed when the sun was already quite high in the sky.

After a simple but filling late breakfast, Adryan and Flora left their apartment and went to the train station for their trip.

By 7:40 p.m, they were already in a room at one of the motels that Adryan had found. Of course, they had arrived after spending the whole afternoon walking around the town.

The room was quite large, with a bed large enough for at least two people to get in and sleep comfortably. The window at the side gave a beautiful view of Lumea Forest and a little of the village where they were.

People wearing thick coats calmly passed through the streets, doing their shopping or a little sightseeing in the few hours of daylight.

The Hermits of Fate would meet in the 16th village of the Oldeah District, Bourhem Village...

Adryan was now looking at himself in the bathroom mirror of the room where he was staying with Flora.

Since he would be dealing with Beyonders, who would mostly be from the Marauder pathway, he had to make some preparations to deal with them.

The first and most important was to change his face. But this time he was finding it a bit difficult to decide on a new 'appearance'.

It could be said that he would be meeting his 'wife's' family for the first time, so he couldn't help thinking that it should be special somehow.

For obvious reasons, he couldn't enter using his true appearance. Given the kind of people attending that meeting and Flora's warning, it was obvious that they would blow the whistle to claim the reward on his head as soon as they saw him.

He could not enter under the guise of Harvey Wayne. Although it was only a matter of time before some members would associate Flora's companion with that identity, since the woman was always with him and did not change her appearance, he preferred to keep it hidden a little longer.

After about 2 minutes of considering whether to use the face of some other well-known actor, a face suddenly jumped into his mind.

For a second, his grip on the sink tightened, then he calmed down.

"Sigh... Why not?" Adryan murmured a little, and with observant eyes, he began to change his appearance.

Worms seemed to move under his skin, his face slowly changing. His skin paled a little, turning a healthy milky pink.

His black hair, combed back, became looser and curlier. His black eyes turned dark brown, no longer sharp but softer. His cheeks became a little puffier, and a somewhat groomed beard covered his chin.

His height dropped a few centimeters to 1.85. His waist bulged a little, and his chest grew a little—not the same size as his true appearance, but bigger than Harvey Wayne's.

Smiling at this so familiar stranger, he winked knowingly. The other 'he' repeated the gesture mischievously.

A nostalgic sigh escaped his lips.

'Long time no see, Joa...'

This was what he looked like before he stopped fighting and before the accident. Before he let himself go and gained more than 30 kilograms...

Of course, that was in terms of his features. He decided to keep the scars that remained after the accident; the sight of them became so common that he couldn't see his face without them.

He looked down at his left forearm and saw the numerous scars that covered it. Although they were noticeable, none stood out more than the vast white line that ran from his wrist almost to his bicep.

It did not look like a self-inflicted wound but rather a wound left behind after a significant surgery...

His fingers on his right hand traced the line slowly. He ignored the two tattoos above it and focused only on that oh-so-familiar line.

'They had to rebuild my radius and ulna practically from scratch. My arms took most of the impact when I crashed, which, while it saved my life, meant that what was left afterward wasn't pretty... heh, they had to join them with titanium...'

Honestly, he was pretty grateful to have been unconscious for most of the time while they 'repaired' him.

According to Cruyff, who was the only one who told him a little about his condition after the accident, his arms looked more like pieces of meat that a pitbull had bitten off.

The only reason he didn't lose them was a long combination of a miracle, the fact that he was wearing a seatbelt, and the best doctors he could afford...

Not wanting to remember those painful months in the hospital, Adryan just sighed and lowered his hands.

His eyes went to his right arm and the cracks that covered it, an unfunny joke coming out of him.

'Even now, I can't help but break myself... Well, at least I can say that this scar is not one that I am ashamed of.' Shaking his head, the dark-haired man adjusted the sleeve of his tunic so that the skin was not visible.

With his new appearance completed, he finally emerged from the bathroom.

Crii...

When he came out of his makeup room, the first thing he noticed was his partner. She was wearing an elegant purple dress and a thin black bandana that showed off her forehead.

"Hiss~ Not bad. Purple is definitely your color." Adryan nodded in appreciation.

"Save your praise for someone who cares... Princess..."

Flora was about to say something else, but her words died in her mouth when she saw who was coming out of the bathroom. Her gray eyes shone in confusion.

She had seen how he changed his appearance when the need arose. Although the faces were quite decent and helped to hide his identity, none had been as well thought out as this one.

The scar, together with the soft brown eyes. The slightly curly hair and the beard with red details... Some of the features seemed to be Loen's, but she could see traces of people from the South Continent...

She could feel how that face had a particular meaning for the man—a rather deep one.

'Maybe a friend from the orphanage where he grew up? It must have been someone close...' Shaking her head internally, she sighed softly and walked over to her partner.

"Is everything ready?"

"Mhm," Adryan murmured in agreement.

"Then we can leave now." In one fluid motion, Flora raised her right hand, and between her fingers was the silver coin.

Without another word, Adryan extended his left arm. The tattoos on it shone gold and particles of the same color separated from it.

Two figures began forming from the golden particles before the duo. After a few seconds, an exact copy of Harvey Wayne and his guard, Abigail Rodes, stood before them.

"Stay and act like us. Don't leave the room." Adryan ordered.

"Yes, sir!" Both soldiers saluted and, with calm steps, went to the bed and lay down on it.

In front of the originals, the soldiers embraced and fell sound asleep.

"..."

Pressing his lips together, the dark-haired man turned his head slightly to his side.

Flora was looking at him sideways, one eyebrow raised in judgment.

"I didn't tell them to do that," Adryan whispered, but he couldn't help the corners of his lips turning up in amusement.

That the first thing his soldiers did as soon as he told them to act like them was to lie down and sleep together was something he hadn't expected, but now that he thought about it a little it made a lot of sense.

'Sure, it's not like they can do anything else at this hour. Maybe if it were earlier, they would go for a walk along the Lumea Forest trail or spend some time in the town center eating the food here. But at the time it is, the only thing they can do to "act" like us is to sleep together.'

Flora seemed to come to the same conclusion as him, and the white-haired woman could only let out a soundless sigh.

"Let's just go already, shall we?"

Not seeing the point in upsetting his wife anymore, Adryan just rolled his eyes amusedly and took a small paperback book out of his tunic, an old yellow color.

Feynapotter's Children's Stories.

With a turn of his wrist, he opened the book. His spirituality flowed, and the yellowed pages of the children's storybook began to glow a soft, light blue.

With the grace of a true gentleman, the dark-haired man elegantly bowed to the woman and extended his hand as a dance invitation.

Rolling her eyes even more with a smile, Flora grabbed the edges of her purple dress and took his hand as etiquette dictated.

With their hands touching, their bodies became illusory and disappeared from the room, leaping into the farthest 'dream'.

Reappearing in the Mind World, Adryan took a moment to look around. When he manipulated Opera's dream using Flora's Dream Stealer ability, he wasn't able to see much of the landscape as he had entered directly into the woman's Island of Consciousness.

This was the first time he could really see the Mind World.

A vast and infinite gray 'sea' was under the Island of Consciousness they were on. This gray sea was made up of countless water droplets; each representing a different subconscious.

This was the sea of the collective subconscious!

'It looks like a giant brain...' Adryan couldn't help comparing as he looked at the dozens and dozens of islands of consciousness surrounding the one they were now on; each one seemed to give shape to and contribute to the breathing of this inconceivable brain.

His gaze shifted from the strange 'sea' around him to his body.

Something new had appeared besides his clothes. An illusory tunic bordering on reality and illusion completely covered his body.

'Besides... What are you doing here, Hunters Hallow?' He showed no reaction as soon as he noticed that the tunic had manifested itself incompletely, he just looked sideways at his partner who was holding his hand.

Flora looked around bored, her gray eyes passing from one island of consciousness to another. She didn't seem to notice the robe, and he had no reason to believe she was intentionally ignoring it.

She couldn't see Hunters Hallow.

Adryan didn't react, so with his partner's hand in his, he stepped into another dream.

Now, he stood at the edge of a person's dream bubble, a light mist separating it from the rest.

As he walked through the dreams, he tried to make sense of it.

'The robe has only manifested itself in extreme situations or when someone has tried to touch something it was protecting...

'Not counting what happened on Moonless Night. There has only been one other time when Hunter's Hallow acted directly...'

He could still remember how after his confrontation with Qilangos and the Machinery Hivemind and Nighthawks ambush. A member of the former had tried to use an artifact against him, but the robe reacted.

Given everything he knew about the world and himself, it was very likely that Hunter's Hallow actions were a form of protection for others and himself.

They were using the ability of a Dreamwalker to travel between dreams. Their physical bodies and spirit bodies became incorporeal, and they could travel between people's dreams.

'Considering the state of my soul. It's no surprise that it manifests slightly... Of course, it could also be so that my mind doesn't interact with anything... After all, that thing is the elephant's foot...' Sighing slightly and with 2-65 in hand, Adryan and Flora jumped through several dreams until the woman said that was enough.1

Leaving the dream journey, the duo found themselves in the deepest parts of the town...

"This way" Flora didn't even look at him and walked purposefully to the right, her gray eyes looking at the silver coin in her palm.

The dark-haired man followed her in silence, giving himself a moment to look at himself.

Seeing that the illusory tunic was gone, Adryan closed the yellowed-covered book and put it in his pocket.