A few months pass and Tom get’s accommodated with the environment. He also learns how to somewhat read, write and speak the local language. It was pretty easy for him since it was mostly Russian with some german tendencies.

Today Tom wakes up a little drowsy and sees that Iuustin was on his sofa reading a book.

Iuustin:”Good morning!”

Tom:”Good morning…” said Tom half asleep.

He gets out of bed and heads for the kitchen where he eats his breakfast and goes back to Iuustin.

Tom:”Well today we have to fold the laundry. I would like to get it done right away so let’s go.”

Iuustin:”Aight’.”

After they get the chore done they come back and both of them start to read a book about geography.

When Maria came back she took both Iuustin and Tom for a walk in a park that was placed next to a lake, since they all got bored of the walk they usually took around the block.

On the way there Tom saw a bunch of soldiers walking on the street holding their PPSh-41 (a infantry sub machine gun mostly used between the 1941-60)on their backs.

This was not a rare sight around there for them to walk around. But not in that a big of a number.

The soldiers start to sprint and pass Tom, Iuustin and Maria, leaving them a little confused, but they don’t pay too much attention to it.

They walk for while longer and they hear a voice coming from the entrance of a block of flats that was on the same side of the road as them. The voice was that of a man yelling:” We found them!! We found them, sir!!!”.

Hearing this Maria, Iuustin and Tom traverse the street on the sidewalk opposite to the building.

They only take a few steps, while trying to look like they didn’t hear that and the two soldiers throw out a woman and a man in a white shirt.

Man:”Please! At least hear us out!”

The man stands up and a soldier grabs him by the back of his white shirt and throws him to the ground.

The woman cries and tries to crawl away from the soldiers that were starting to surround them and block people’s view of her.

One of them starts to approach her and a loud bang comes from their direction.

The woman stops crying and drops on the concrete beneath her and her green, flower themed dress slowly starts to turn red…. And redder… And redder.

Tom was petrified by what he just witnessed.

The soldiers that were blocking the view move away and let people see her suffer in her last moments, after being shot in the back.

Tom hears some people screaming, but he just couldn’t look away from the scenery that was unfolding before him.

The soldier that shot the woman leaves the place with a troubled look on his face.

The man in the white shirt starts to scream and tries to run away but he gets shot in the head a few times by a soldier’s PPSh that blew a spray of blood so big it almost reached the opposite side walk.

Tom hears people starting to cry and sees the fountain of blood that was coming out of the immense crack in his head.

Out of the man’s skull starts to slowly crawl out. Something that looked like his brain.

Seeing this people started to run away screaming in a panic.

Tom almost faints, but Maria with a trembling hand grabs him and start to run away. They were closer to the park that they originally went out for than to their home, so they go there to calm down and sit on a bench.

Sometime later Maria goes to a nearby stand and buys a vanilla flavored ice cream cone for each one of them.

They sit with the cone in their hands and Tom was so shocked by what he saw that he does not acknowledges the ice-cream only when it started to melt and a drop of it ran across his fingers, while Iuustin starts to eat it only when Maria waves her hand a few times in front of his eyes and slaps the back of his head.

They all gaze at the lake and feel the wind stroking their cheeks.

Normally that kind of wind would be pleasant, but this time it felt like it was judging them and saying:”You just someone die and you eat ice-cream like nothing happened? You know will remember this your whole life right?”.

When it was almost dawn Tom, Maria and Iuustin take a different than the one they came there where those two people were killed, even thou it meant to walk half an hour more to get back home.

When they arrive home they go straight to sleep, trying to erase those events from their mind what they saw a few hours prior.

Tom was skeptical before, but now he knows for sure that this world is not a videogame and that he had protagonist status and could die as easily as any other kid would. Those two deaths felt too real to be fake.

The next few weeks were spent trying to recollect from the “Street execution event” as the locals came to name it.

Some more time passes and rumors spread about similar events happening in other cities, but they seemed that those did not take place on main streets like the one Tom witnessed.

After a few months Tom and Iuustin are able to come back to their former routine, but Maria still seemed very troubled about these killings.

Whenever this kind of subjects arisen it felt like she was trying to solve a mystery all by herself.

She refused to talk about it whenever Tom or Iuustin asked her about it, but in rest she acted as usual.