Kalev took to the cold streets of the city again and moved through them with long strides. He felt that the night had been too long, and now all he wanted was to get to his lonely, warm store to sleep and not wake up for a long time. While he walked, placed his hand under the collarbone and felt his upper chest where Ava had shot him. He checked to see that the wound had healed, leaving him with only a rounded mark on the skin.
"Why are you always attracted to women who are unhinged?" he thought, as images of that encounter with the young woman also came to his mind.
He kicked over an empty food can that was crushed at one end only, and it continued to spin down the street until it fell down a gutter.
He continued down a dirt alley that reeked of urine, and in that place dimly lit by small campfires, the homeless huddled together like rats to conserve some of their body heat. Kalev walked steadily on the wet mud that stuck to his boots, and looked carefully at that decadent place that darkened his heart. He was undoubtedly on the road to hell.
Some looked at him sideways and spat at his feet in a hostile way, others slept covered in dirty blankets or pieces of cloth, without noticing anything.
He took one of the alleys and drove through it to the corner, where he stopped when he heard the unrestrained crying of a woman along with some strange shrieks, difficult to identify from where he was. When he reached the place where the sounds were coming from, he found a disgusting man violently beating a woman. She was lying on the ground with her body covered with bruises, and a few meters away from them, two rickety children who seemed to be her sons. They were dressed only in rags and were crying and trembling incessantly. Faced with such a decadent image, a feeling of hatred came over him. And before he could realize what he was doing, he grabbed the guy from behind and pushed him hard into the mud, pulling him away from the woman. Without giving him time to react, Kalev pounced on him and started punching him in the face repeatedly, losing control of himself. He hit him, over and over, until the screams of the woman tugging at his clothes snapped him out of his frenzy of rage.
“No! Please stop! You'll kill him! He's my husband and he's a good man! It's only the alcohol that turns him into a demon!” she added, even though her face was disfigured from the beating her husband had given her.
Kalev grabbed her face and turned around to look at her small children, who were crying and scared.
“What kind of mother are you? Look at the condition your children are in! They won't survive the winter if they continue to sleep on the streets, and you only care about your scum of a husband!”
The woman sobbed wordlessly as her husband turned to them, moaning in pain. His nose was broken and a trickle of blood flowed from his mouth.
“Take this!” Kalev added, putting a handful of coins in the woman's hand, “with these coins you can rent some room and buy some food for your children. Agreed?” asked Kalev helping her to stand up.
The woman nodded her head but stood there in the same place, as if she could not react. At that moment another wanderer appeared behind Kalev, holding a wooden stick. And he took advantage of his distraction to hit him in the back.
“Who do you think you are to come here and meddle in matters that don't concern you?”
Kalev fell to his knees on the ground, leaning with one hand on the violin case and with the other he lessened the impact, keeping it extended in the mud. Despite this; due to the inertia of the fall, his glasses slipped off his face and fell into the mud. In addition to another metallic object that escaped from one of the pockets of his jacket, although he could not specify at the time what it was. When the tramp showed himself ready to strike another blow, Kalev managed to anticipate it and pushing him back with a kick in the stomach, which gave him enough time to get to his feet and remove the element with which he had hit him.
The warlock, looking him straight in the face, was paralyzed with terror:
“A warlock! A hunter of death! A demon!” shouted the man as he ran away at full speed in panic and asked the god Aion for help. The man's flight was also joined by the woman, who, shrieking loudly, escaped in the same direction the wanderer had taken, leaving aside her small children who, like wild animals, crawled on the ground, collecting a few coins that their mother had thrown away in her haste to flee. In the end, the children also escaped and ran in a direction opposite to their mother's.
Kalev picked up his glasses that were on the floor and cleaned them before putting them back on. He then did the same with the mud-covered violin case, and watched for a moment the man who lay unconscious in the mud, shivering with cold.
Until he decided to resume his way through the alleys, without being able to stop thinking about the hilarious outcome of all his actions.
“Definitely, another night to forget...”
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