Chapter 60 Theater: Coiled and Twisted Like a Snake

Chapter 60: The Theater—Coiled, Twisted, Serpentine

The three of them crawled along the right-hand passage for a while before another fork appeared ahead—one going straight, the other turning left.

With no vents in sight, the passage was pitch black. In such a cramped, dark environment, it was easy to lose track of distance and time. Fortunately, thanks to her prior training, Everly had a good sense of direction.

Stopping at the fork, she pulled out her phone and opened the emergency evacuation map she had snapped earlier. Comparing it to the route she'd crawled, she deduced that the left turn likely led to the performance hall.

The performance hall was the heart of the entire theater, connecting the waiting hall in front to the stage and backstage in back. It was also the area with the largest audience capacity besides the waiting hall. Earlier, from the restroom, Everly and the others had faintly heard gunshots and screams coming from the performance hall, but what exactly had happened there, they still didn't know.

Both Everly and Old John agreed it was necessary to enter the performance hall to assess the situation and learn more about the masked intruders. Thus, the three made a detour and crawled into the left-turn passage.

The duct probably widened because the hall was bigger. Once they entered this passage, it went from barely one-person-wide to roomy enough for two to crawl side by side.

This passage was not long, but its curve sloped upward, which made it slippery and steep. Everly had to roll up her sleeves and pants legs, pressing her bare skin directly against the stainless steel duct to get enough grip to inch her way up.

After crawling about three or four meters, the duct finally came to an end, and ahead, strips of warm yellow light showed through a stainless steel baffle.

Everly slowed down, crawling over quietly to peer through the gap at the edge of the baffle. Sure enough, the hall outside was bathed in warm yellow light.

The ventilation duct's outlet was located high on the side wall of the performance hall, roughly four or five meters above the ground. The wall here tilted slightly toward the stage, presumably to focus sound, which made it easier for Everly to see. Through the slits of the grille, she could see the entire stage and a small section of the seats in front of it.

The seating area below was in disarray, with corpses sprawled everywhere. Splattered blood and countless bullet holes dotted the seats. Chairs covered in red cloth had been pierced by bullets, their white cotton stuffing spilling out. The entire auditorium was a gruesome, ruined mess.

Who would've thought that just minutes ago, this place was bright and packed, with elegant music in the air and people gathered, excited and eager for a rare dose of culture...

Everly looked away, unable to bear the sight.

At the very front of the seating area, right in front of the stage, was an open space. The survivors in the performance hall were now crouched together, hands on their heads, huddled in that open area. Surrounding them stood seven or eight masked figures in black, each holding a gun, facing the crowd, looking tense. Among the crowd, an elderly man, uncomfortable from squatting too long, shifted a little too noticeably. The horse-mask figure behind him immediately raised his gun and shot the man in the back of the head.

"Bang!"

The crisp gunshot echoed through the cavernous performance hall. Blood splattered, and the body fell stiffly forward, landing on a young girl. Even after that horror, the entire hall remained dead silent—no one dared make a sound. The girl trapped under the body didn't even dare to move.

They knew all too well that if they screamed or made a sudden move, they would be the next to die.

The masked figures thus used killing and fear to control the crowd.

Besides the few guarding the hostages, another dozen or so masked figures were scattered throughout the hall. They worked in pairs, hauling bodies out of the seats, carrying them up onto the stage, and stacking them into a huge pile in front of the curtain.

Occasionally, they encountered someone playing dead or not quite dead yet, and they would raise their weapons and finish them off. Blood dripped from the bodies, leaving red trails across the floor. The vast stage, already dimly lit, was made even more sinister by the towering, seemingly endless pile of corpses, like hell itself.

But none of that was as horrifying as what was happening in the center of the stage.

In front of the pile of bodies stood four masked figures. Among them, the rabbit-mask and dog-mask were each gripping one arm and shoulder of a male audience member, holding him still. A third, the goat-mask, stood at the man's side, one knee jammed into his back. With his left hand, he yanked the man's hair back, tilting his head backward to expose his neck, while his other hand gripped a weird black knife shaped like a willow leaf. Like slaughtering livestock, he sliced the blade across the carotid artery on the man's neck.

A gush of blood sprayed from the man's neck, flowing into a metal bucket placed below. Unwilling to die, the man's forehead veins bulged as he screamed "ahh," struggling desperately. But one person's strength could never match three. No matter how he resisted, his body remained pinned in place, like a fish on a chopping block, helplessly watching his blood drain away until, with reluctance, he closed his eyes and died.

The entire performance hall echoed with the man's dying roars of defiance and cries of agony—from loud to faint, from anger to despair. Yet the audience below seemed to hear nothing, remaining numb and motionless.

As long as it wasn't their turn, as long as it wasn't them being killed, they could continue to deceive themselves.

The man was clearly not the only one being bled alive. Behind the goat-mask stood several more buckets, all already filled to the brim with red blood. Once the man was drained dry, his body was discarded like trash onto the pile behind. The buckets filled with blood were then carried by the three masked figures to the center of the stage and handed to a pig-mask figure.

The pig-mask was busy at the very center of the stage.

Using a mop dipped in the human blood from the buckets, he was drawing a massive inverted pentagram magic circle on the stage floor. The inner part of the circle was inscribed with incomprehensible writing and mysterious totems, looking both eerie and evil. What the pig-mask was currently completing was the central symbol of the circle.

Coiled and twisted, writhing like a serpent.

Even though it was unfinished, Everly recognized it at once—it was the totem of a certain cult that she had encountered twice before.

"Look at this!"

Just as Everly was breaking out in a cold sweat from the memory, a suppressed exclamation came from Misha behind her. Everly turned around, and a phone with a pink case was thrust in front of her. On the screen, a video was playing.

In the video, a figure wearing an eagle mask faced the camera, speaking. Since the ventilation duct was far from the ground and the performance hall was filled with groans and other noises, Everly cautiously turned the volume up one notch and leaned close to the speaker to listen. She heard the man say in a hoarse, strange voice:

"I know the Mikano police have surrounded the entire theater. Just moments ago, one of the officers fired at us, wounding a companion's arm. What I'm telling you now is: don't mess with us. Every pain inflicted on us will be repaid tenfold, a hundredfold, on these innocent hostages."

As he finished speaking, the camera pulled back, capturing the row of captives kneeling behind the eagle-mask and several masked figures clutching weapons, eager and restless. Judging by the background, they were in the theater's waiting hall.

"Go."

At the eagle-mask's command, the masked figures raised their blades in unison and swung them down at the captives' arms... What followed was bloody and cruel, and Everly couldn't bear to watch. She dragged the progress bar to the end, only to find the video still showed torture—after stripping the flesh from the captives' arms, the cruel executioners raised their blades and beheaded the barely-alive hostages one by one...

The more she watched, the more nauseated she felt. Suppressing her rage, Everly tapped the top-left corner to exit.

Leaving fullscreen mode, the page returned to the video's posting page. Shockingly, the video had been posted on Mikano's largest local public forum. The post was titled "Revenge," with a posting time of 10 minutes ago. The poster was a new account, and the avatar was unmistakably a pig mask!

Because the content was so horrifying, the post had already amassed hundreds of replies. The comments were a chaotic mix—people worried about family, berating the police for incompetence, begging the criminals to release their loved ones, and those simply stirring the pot... The information was too scattered, and Everly had no intention of sifting through it, so she exited the most popular post.

Sure enough, on the local forum, besides this threatening post from the thugs, there were over a dozen other posts related to the events at Shinkaran Theater. Everly randomly clicked into two of them and quickly pieced together the sequence of events through the photos, videos, and text descriptions posted.

It turned out that shortly after the murder at the theater entrance, the Mikano police received a citizen's emergency call. With Old John's "false report" laying the groundwork, the police took the matter seriously and immediately dispatched seven or eight patrol cars and dozens of officers to the scene, surrounding the theater completely.

By then, the front and back doors of the theater were already under the masked figures' control. Armed with firearms and holding the lives of over three hundred people in the theater hostage, the police dared not engage in direct confrontation. Upon arrival, while attempting to negotiate with the masked figures—asking what they wanted by taking so many hostages and probing whether there was any possibility of freeing them—they also dispatched several officers in an attempt to infiltrate the theater by scaling the walls, hoping to retake it from within.

However, the masked figures were highly vigilant. Even though the theater's perimeter wall was nearly three meters high and very difficult to climb, they had still assigned dedicated personnel to patrol along it. The police infiltrators had barely gotten over the wall when they were spotted by the masked figures' accomplices, sparking a small-scale gunfight. During the skirmish, one officer managed to hit a masked figure in the arm.

The police didn't linger and seized the opportunity to escape the theater.

Unexpectedly, no sooner had the police left than the masked figures uploaded that video to the local forum. Their actions were like a slap in the face to the Mikano police and to every resident of the area, making everyone realize just how cruel and inhuman the demons occupying the theater truly were.

The masked figures truly would kill at the slightest provocation, and clearly, they took pleasure in abusing and slaughtering others—the more agonizing the captives' screams and the more terrified their expressions, the more excited and delighted the masked figures became.

No one dared harbor any illusions of luck anymore. Everyone was just doing their job at the police station; if a forceful breach resulted in even greater casualties, no one in the department could bear the weight of so many lives.

And the masked figures seemed to be kidnapping for the sake of kidnapping, showing no signs of revealing their motives or making demands of the police.

And so, the police and the masked figures remained deadlocked—one side outside, the other inside.