“What?! You escaped from the capital?!” Ram exclaimed, staring at the Solaris Hero in shock while his wife, Aimi, sat beside him and looked amazed.

“Yup,” admitted Lakshman after he recounted the events that he could guess had happened at the castle knowing well what Asura was capable of while sipping from his glass of water.

After returning to Ram’s home, the taller man and the shorter man said they had errands to run and departed immediately. So, the two men walked over to sit back in their respective seats from before while Aimi brought them a tray carrying two glasses of water. After taking a glass each, Ram asked what had happened for Lakshman to come there, and the Solaris Hero told them his version of the story, excluding the fact that it was Asura who caused the mess.

“Phew!” Ram said, leaning back and looking amazed. “That explains why you’re sporting so many injuries because what you did was crazy!”

“Beyond crazy! It’s suicidal!” Aimi added, looking worried. “You’re lucky it was you, otherwise, any other person would’ve perished there! Those Royal Guards are equipped with the latest M.E.D.s and possess a modified version that boosts their potential and ability to fight and protect the royal family.”

“Oh,” said Lakshman, smiling a little and looking at himself all over at the injuries he once sustained, which were now healed because of his magic. “Well, they did a good job of hurting me, I guess?”

As he laughed, he heard the fairy inside his mind say, “And they did it with you having the handicap of not utilising me. Seriously, this other you is a ridiculously arrogant man, lodging me into the ground and fighting them head on with no sense of fear or concern for his safety. Just what kind of person would do that?”

“A person with a troubled history,” thought Lakshman sadly.

Back in the reality, Ram was shaking his head at his comment and was saying, “They did hurt you, but you probably didn’t feel it seeing as they didn’t leave a dent in you at all.”

Lakshman chuckled while heard the fairy respond inside his mind, “I agree,” even though Ram could not hear her.

As the conversation between him and Ram paused, the Solaris Hero took this opportunity to speak in his mind, “By the way, I have a few questions for you, pixie.”

Instantly, he received an angry response from her, saying, “I’m not a pixie! I’m a goddamn fairy! Get your facts straight!”

“Oh. Right. Sorry,” apologised Lakshman, feeling silly by her response. Still, he went on to ask her, “I was wondering how I’m able to converse with the people of this world despite not having my Hero Weapon with me.”

“Probably because I’m here?” She asked back, sounding slightly confused herself.

There was a moment of pause before Lakshman asked, “And that’s supposed to answer it all?”

“Not everything can be answered, young man,” she replied, sounding annoyed, “but it’s safe to assume that since I’m here, and I possess the power of knowledge of this world, it’s being shared with you and that’s how you are able to make conversation with him and anyone else from this world.”

Lakshman nodded his head in agreement and replied, “Yes. That explains that, but it doesn’t explain how I can use my powers so freely.”

This time, there wereas a few seconds of pause as if she was taking her time to think before finally giving her reply to him.

“I don’t know about that,” she said to him a little hesitantly. “I mean, this is a first time for me as well, and I was also confused why you’re able to use your magic to freely.”

“Yes, because I couldn’t have possibly jumped from the capital to here, so Asura must’ve flown and fell down from the exhaustion,” thought Lakshman, imagining the scene of his past-self flying through the air and then slowly fall until he reached Ram’s safe haven. “But that doesn’t explain how I can fly, nor why I was able to use Restoration earlier on myself. If flight is a smaller type of spell that required less energy, I can understand, but Restoration requires a heavy energy usage, and when I came to this world, I couldn’t even use it if I wanted to.”

“Argh!” She suddenly exclaimed in his mind, and he felt he could see her scratching her hair in a frenzy from the frustration. “I don’t have the answers to everything, but I assume some portion of the weapon’s ability to let you use your magic retained within you and is allowing you to use spells that don’t put a strain on your body.”

“Such as having you with me?” Lakshman asked her, and she became surprised.

“Y-Yes! That might be it!” She stuttered into speaking, trying to sound as if that was the obvious, which made him chuckle and form a smile on his face.

“Is something the matter?” Ram asked him, surprised to see him suddenly smiling.

“I was just thinking about my circumstances that brought me to the leader of the Raven’s Guild,” said Lakshman, shifting conversations with ease. “It’s like we were destined to meet.”

This made the couple laugh, and brought Ram to say, “Maybe. Maybe it was meant to be.” Then he looked down at his hand and clenched it as he said, “Funnily enough, I was a hero myself, but that was in the game that’s now a non-existent thing.”

“Ram…” said his wife slowly, putting her hand on his shoulder consolingly and looked sadly at him. “It’s okay. We had fun.”

“We sure did,” he agreed with a smile. “Ah. Escaping from that castle, hopping on the Midnight Express and adventuring around the infinite landscape. It sure was a memorable experience before we got unplugged from the environment and forced to face reality again.”

“Yes,” she replied and nodded in agreement with a sad look on her face. “At least, they let our memories intact and allowed us to meet once again.”

Ram grinned and said, “Yes. One of the only good things they ever did for us.”

Lakshman watched the emotional drama play out between the couple and wondered what they were talking about but decided against interrupting them due to how emotional they were. He took a sip from the glass and immediately regretted it because it got caught in his throat and made him splutter, snapping them out of their reverie and become aware of his presence again.

“Oh! Wow!” Ram exclaimed while Aimi blushed and hid her face behind her hands. “Are you okay?”

He rose to his feet, but Lakshman held his hand out to him in a gesture to stop him while continuing to cough a little. Then he looked at the man and smiled while wiping away the water from his mouth before speaking.

“Yes. I’m fine. Sorry for interrupting you,” he said, wearing a sheepish grin while facing those two.

“Ah. No worries. You weren’t really interrupting,” said Ram, glancing at his wife, who peeked up at him by folding one of her fingers. “It’s just that… our relationship goes way back.”

“I can tell,” agreed Lakshman with a smile, then he looked confused and asked, “but I don’t understand your story at all. You keep calling yourself a hero, this Infinity Hero or something, and you keep saying you were a hero as part of a game. Can you explain?”

Ram nodded, and as he sat back down, Aimi uncovered her face and looked at Lakshman in embarrassment for their conduct earlier that they performed in front of him. Lakshman glanced at her once and smiled a little before looking back at Ram, who began to speak about their past.

“Well, my story takes place way back, more than 200-years-ago to give you an idea,” began Ram, and Lakshman nodded in understanding. “On my sixteenth birthday, my parents bought me a new game from the company that I owned an older edition of that game, which they released as a new variant. The old name was called Infinite, while the new game was called Infinity.”

He paused when Lakshman raised his hand and asked looking a little amazed, “Is this going to take a long time?” When Ram nodded, the king from another world looked troubled by it and requested, “I hope I don’t offend you but… could you, um, shorten your story to the most important details since it could get… um… boring?”

The leader of the Raven’s Guild widened his eyes in amazement before smiling and saying, “Yeah. Sure. You just made me realise the obvious. Thanks!” Then he nodded in agreement and went on explaining, “Well, Infinity was an RPG game. Role Playing Game,” he elaborated the name of the shortened name for Lakshman to understand. “Anyway, after trying to boot up the game, it failed and completely crashed my computer. So, I went to sleep, but the next time I woke up, I was in another world.”

“Huh?!” Lakshman exclaimed, staring at him in disbelief. “You mean… you got transported to another world during your sleep?”

“That’s what I thought at that time,” admitted Ram with a small smile, “but I was very cautious and didn’t trust anyone. Well, I somehow ended up in a battle to save a pregnant woman from her deranged husband and then I got picked up by the kingdom’s princess because she saw potential in me.”

“Wait,” said Lakshman, holding up his hand and looking amazed. He glanced sideways at Aimi and asked, “By chance, was the princes… Aimi?”

Ram looked amazed and asked, “How was it so obvious?”

“It quite obvious,” began Lakshman with a wry smile, “because one of my wives was a princess and then became queen, whom I married later and became king of the kingdom in my home world.”

“Oh wow!” Ram exclaimed, looking amazed, and his expression was also reflected on his wife’s face. “Did you never have the trouble of getting accustomed to being married into a female side of the family?”

“Not really since, in my world, it’s believed that no matter who marries whom, the male becomes the head of the family and the partner changes their family name to match his,” explained Lakshman, to which Ram and Aimi nodded in understanding.

“Well, unlike you, I didn’t become king, but our love was at first sight,” said Ram, looking sideways at his wife, who smiled a little from embarrassment. “You see, she was apparently bed ridden from a curse, and her maid was performing her duties by taking on her identity. So, when I found out about the princess’s problem, I immediately went out into a dungeon to get the medicine, which was quite a battle. After levelling up, I finally beat the boss and got the medicine to her, which was when I first met the real princess and finally fell in love with her at first sight.”

“That’s great,” said Lakshman, smiling warmly at the couple in front of him as they grinned at him. “So, you later decided to escape because…?”

“Well, the king was in great debt with another kingdom for losing betting matches against them, and the terms of the loss was that he marries away his daughter to that kingdom’s prince,” said Ram, looking a little annoyed as he recalled that event while Aimi looked a little sad. “By then, we were both deeply in love with one another and decided to leave the castle together, so on one moonlit night, we escaped from the castle and jumped onto the Midnight Express, which tours around the world. That’s how our adventuring journey began, and we finally came to unravel the mystery of that world.”

His words made Lakshman narrow his eyes and ask, “Do you mean that it was all a fictional world?”

Ram nodded and replied, “Yes. You see, for years, we adventured the world, helping people along the way and having fun spending time together. Finally, we ended up facing off against the Demon King, who revealed that this fictional world was created as a simulation by the military for the purpose of developing aan Artificial Intelligence, which used our bodies as hosts and fought in wars across the world.”

“What?!” Lakshman asked, widening his eyes in shock.

“Tensions were sky high between the countries that ruled over the world,” explained Aimi, while Ram fell silent looking sad. “That set of a chain reaction of nuclear bombs and the devastation that followed it was unmatched. Apparently, foreseeing the war to come, our country’s military intelligence deemed it was the best thing to do by creating artificial intelligences and modify our host bodies to fight in wars for them while our consciousness was stuck in the virtual environment, which they created for us.”

“That was the Infinity Plan,” said Ram, looking very serious as he faced Lakshman again. Then he smiled and said, “It felt good dismantling their plan from inside the game.”

“What do you mean?” The Solaris Hero asked, looking confused.

“You see, no system is perfect, and every game has bugs, glitches waiting to be exploited,” said Ram, his smile widening as he remembered the events like it happened only yesterday. “I use that to my advantage by glitching myself into receiving admin rights and freeing everyone from their imprisonment.”

Lakshman did not understand half of what he said, but he still decided to go with the flow and said, “That’s incredible! How did you find this… glitch?”

Ram looked at him silence for a moment before wearing a sheepish grin and saying, “Well, there are certain things that only a gamer would know,” and winked at him while his wife giggled by his sense of humour.

While Lakshman stared at him in amazement, Ram went on to say, “Unfortunately, the programmers acted quickly and took away my rights, but the damage was done and people escaped. Once word spread of their operation, the officials intervened, arrested the culprits, and freed us.”

“Well, 200 years after they promised to free us,” Aimi corrected her husband with a sigh. “Well, it seemed that our bodies were already in the modification stage and had to be restored to their original state, which took a lot of time.”

“Yes,” agreed Ram, looking upset. “I couldn’t say goodbye to my parents, or even be at their funeral.”

“Well, they did keep the virtual environment going and kept up their experiment on learning to use the collected data in programming what would become the A.I. that the people use nowadays,” explained Aimi with a sigh.

“Yes,” admitted Ram with a nod of his head, “and after that, for all our trouble, we were given a low-class rank and shoved into this place. It’s been five years since then, and I’m not making any headway with our settlement.”

There was a moment of silence in which Lakshman looked at the couple in silence with a small smile on his face.

He finally decided to break the silence and ask them, “I don’t understand everything you’ve been through because I didn’t experience that with you, but… after everything you two have been through, you’re glad to be together again, right?”

The two glanced sideways at each other for a moment before grinning and replying to him in unison, “Yes!”