Chapter 62 Theater: Doing Her Part for the Police’s Successful Infiltration

Chapter 62 The Theater: Doing One's Part for the Police's Successful Infiltration

Everly was grateful for those past meditation sessions, which had given her a strong heart. Even in such an emergency, she could still keep a clear head and think calmly.

She asked, "Rebecca, I have a question—according to what you said, when the sacrifice array activates, it automatically drains the life from anyone nearby. If so, why aren't those masked men caught up in it? How do they manage to survive it?"

"Great question!" Rebecca snapped her fingers, then explained to Everly that sacrifice rituals generally came in two types.

The first type was a fixed-range sacrifice. This was more common. Before the ritual, people would use runes, Hebrew script, or alchemical symbols inside the array to mark the sacrifices as only those within it. As long as you stood outside the array, you were safe.

The second type was a variable-range sacrifice. This was a rarer case, because it carried the risk of accidentally harming your own people.

To protect themselves during the ritual, the organizers usually needed rock-solid faith, so the deity could tell their followers apart from the sacrifices—and if they worshipped an evil god, there was usually an additional step of "pleasing the deity," because evil gods were fickle—when the mood hit, they'd kill even their most devoted followers without a second thought. If you didn't do something to please the god first, you might get hit by its indiscriminate attacks.

"Those masked men clearly worship an evil god. Their killing spree in the theater serves three purposes: first, to scare the survivors into not fighting back; second, to feed their sick, twisted love of killing; and third, to try to please their deity. The more fear, pain, and despair they cause, the happier the god is, and the better their odds of surviving."

"I see." Everly was a little disappointed.

She'd guessed the masked men might have some kind of ID item—amulets, totem badges, something—that protected them from the ritual. If that were the case, she and Old John could ambush a few masked men somewhere quiet and grab those items for themselves.

But that imagined item didn't exist.

To survive the sacrifice array, they would have to become followers of that evil god and slaughter living people to please it. Not to mention, the three of them would never do something so inhumane. And even if they were willing, they'd still need to know the evil god's name. Funny thing was, she'd run into them three times now, and all she knew was that they were a murderous cult...

That whole idea of finding something to protect herself was a dead end. Everly pushed down her frustration and started thinking of other ways out.

To escape a ritual that used lives as offerings, her options were basically: get out of the ritual's range, upgrade from "sacrifice" to "ritual host," kill or control the host to stop it, or wreck the array and its props.

The first two were out, the third was obviously impossible for now. So that left only the fourth...

As she thought, Everly crawled to the vent and looked down at the huge inverted pentagram on the stage.

After finishing the snake totem in the center, the masked men started placing props in the array: a glass bottle filled with an unknown black liquid, a heart ripped from someone's chest, a baby still wrapped in swaddling (couldn't tell if it was alive or dead), and a crow pierced through by a rusted nail...

One by one, Pighead carefully placed the ritual items in their spots. As the array filled in, the inverted pentagram's color got more and more vivid. Watching it, Everly could almost see the blood in the array flowing and pulsing across the wooden floor—like the array wasn't just a drawing, but the living veins of some giant creature.

The masked men could trigger the array any second—she had to figure something out fast!

Everly looked at the masked men below. From her earlier rough count, there were nearly twenty masked men in the main hall alone, plus others patrolling elsewhere. The numbers were way too lopsided; there was no way she could just smash the array.

Plus, she had no idea if this was one of those gore flicks where the leads were just camera stand-ins—she hadn't spotted anyone among the captives who looked like a main character.

No choice but to try a roundabout approach...

Everly's eyes swept the area around the stage and landed on the vent duct above it.

It was a square duct, just wide enough for one person, running along the outside of the wall. Every so often, metal straps hung under it, holding it two or three meters below the ceiling. Through the gaps in the lights and steel beams, she could see the duct had three vents facing down—front, middle, and back—and the middle one was right above the magic array.

Everly had also done some cramming on the occult before. She remembered a book saying magic arrays were delicate—if anything was off, or if the materials weren't pure, the array might not work. If she could splash water on it, or find something that could mess with it and drop it from the middle vent, maybe she could disable the whole thing!

She ran the idea by Rebecca, who thought it was solid.

"But forget the water," Rebecca said. "An array drawn in human blood runs on the fear and despair in the blood, not the blood itself. Even if you wash the blood away, the array won't be much affected. As for stuff that can contaminate a sacrifice array, I can ask around for you. I've got an exorcist group chat with some serious people in it—just costs a little consultation fee..."

"Money isn't a problem."

"Of course, of course. So Little Miss, you better stay safe—otherwise I'll be out a lot of money. Wait for me, I'll go ask right now... Be sure to wait for me!" With that, Rebecca hung up.

The moment that call ended, another one came in.

Everly glanced at the screen and saw it was Officer Mikano calling again. She tapped to answer.

"Finally got through! Miss Everly, you okay? We kept calling and your line was busy—we thought something happened to you." The officer's concerned voice came through the moment the call connected.

"I'm fine. I just found out something and was talking it over with a friend... Is there something you wanted to ask me?"

"No, no. The information you gave us was very detailed. Thanks to you, we finally have an idea of what's going on inside the theater. We just found in the old city blueprints that there's an abandoned sewer right under the Xincalan Theater. This sewer has an exit in the theater—when the theater was expanded 30 years ago, the exit was incorporated into the backstage area. Based on the layout, it should be in the prop room. We're planning to send people in through that exit, but there's a problem—the manhole cover is weighed down. Miss Everly, you..." The officer hesitated.

Everly totally got why he hesitated. To the cops, she was just a kid in a den of wolves—just surviving was already a miracle. Asking her to sneak into the prop room to open the way for them was basically sending her to her death.

But what the police didn't know was that Everly herself was desperately waiting for an opportunity to escape.

Destroying the magic array was indeed a viable option, but she couldn't guarantee that the materials Rebecca provided would be available in the theater. If it turned out to be something special like holy water, silver, or garlic juice, even if the answer was handed to her, she'd be helpless without the actual items.

If possible, the primary choice was still to escape the theater—the farther, the better! Everything else could be left to the police. With luck, maybe the Cultists wouldn't even have time to activate the array before being arrested.

So Everly interrupted the officer's hesitation and firmly stated that she was willing to do her part for the police's successful infiltration.

"Please send me the sewer layout. My email is XXXXX... My companion and I will head to the prop room right away. Don't worry, we're fairly agile and will be careful. We'll contact you once we have news. Also, there's something else—something I learned from consulting my fortune-teller friend..."

Everly gave the officer a rough account of the sacrifice array. Given the time constraints, neither side wasted words. After hanging up, the officer quickly sent over the abandoned sewer layout, and Everly sent over the photos of the array.

With that, the two sides reached a cooperation.

Everly compared the theater's emergency evacuation map with the sewer map the officer had sent, getting a sense of where the prop room was. The three of them discussed it briefly and decided to set out immediately, heading together toward the prop room. If they encountered masked men along the way, having more people would give them a better chance of winning.

Considering combat capability, Old John took the lead this time, Misha in the middle, and Everly at the rear. The three turned around in the spacious duct and, one after another, retraced their steps back to the earlier three-way junction, then turned left into the ventilation duct leading to the backstage.

Like the corridor outside, the backstage was in complete disarray. As they crawled past several vents, Everly looked down and saw bullet holes and splattered blood everywhere along the walkways below. Some walls even bore marks of axe and blade strikes, with severed limbs soaking in thick, viscous blood, chopped beyond recognition, silently telling the story of the tragedy that had unfolded here mere minutes ago.

About halfway through, Old John in front suddenly raised his hand and flashed his phone light backward in a "hold on" gesture. Misha and Everly immediately stopped, lying flat and waiting in place.

With no rustling sounds of crawling, the duct fell into complete silence. Through the thin wall, faint murmurs of conversation drifted up from below.

Two people were talking.

One asked, "So, is the sacrifice array ready?"

The other replied, "The boss said it'll be done soon. But there aren't enough bait gathered outside yet. In a bit, he plans to execute another batch of hostages and post the video online—that should draw more bait over."

"Wow, cool! Last time the 'Eagle' team did the execution—this time it should be our team's turn, right? I want to go viral online too!"

"Heh heh, of course. Don't worry, everyone gets a turn..."

From the content of the conversation, it seemed two masked men were chatting in the walkway below. Unfortunately, the two black-clad figures happened to be standing directly beneath the vent. If even a few specks of dust fell during their crawl, or if they made any sound, it would easily alert them.

To avoid exposure, the three had no choice but to patiently lie still until one of the men was called away and the other turned to attend to his own business. Only then did they continue crawling forward carefully.

Just as the three crawled past the north-south corridor and turned left into the east-west passage, something flashed before Everly's eyes. She looked down and saw her phone, tucked in her chest pocket, glowing through the fabric.

Everly pulled out her phone and glanced at it—Rebecca had replied!