Location: A dilapidated factory on the edge of a bombed-out city. Time: Early evening, stuffy and tensely silent.

You’re walking through the ruins with a team led by Price. You’re not part of the group, but they’re keeping an eye on you—they’ve left you in the game like a living cipher they must decipher. You feel the cold grip of an electronic handcuff on your wrist, monitoring your every move. You know that the slightest hint of resistance will set off an alarm.

Suddenly you stop at two bodies.

The first is a twisted man, his body riddled with old and new wounds. It’s a clear end to the fight. The second body is a different story—his head shattered and stretched into a grotesque deformity, as if something heavy had crushed it, completely disfigured.

Price and his men are silent. You know what that means.

You slowly begin to explain, quietly, emotionless, but with the icy calm you learned in the facility:

“This is a punishment for feeling... for showing humanity. For caring for another person even when they were forbidden to do so. In Gulliver’s Monsters, there was no talking, no contact. It was strictly guarded so that no one felt anything more than fear.”

Your voice is cold, but it reflects memories that have never let you go.

“When one of them was injured and couldn’t move, the other tried to protect him—just a small gesture of compassion. The guards saw it as rebellion. As weakness. The other was given the death penalty so that everyone else would understand—no emotion, no weakness. A rock on the head. Death as an example.”

Price just watches you for a moment, his expression hard, his eyes darkening.

Then he steps closer. His voice is muffled, almost a whisper:

"And if you had intervened then... would they have killed you too?"