The three of them crawled along the passage on the right for a while before another fork appeared ahead—one path went straight, the other turned left.
Whenever there wasn’t a ventilation opening, the duct was pitch-black. In such a narrow and dim environnt, it was easy to lose track of distance and ti. Fortunately, thanks to her past training, Everly had a strong sense of direction.
Stopping at the fork, she took out her phone and opened the ergency evacuation map she had photographed earlier. Comparing it with the route they had crawled so far, she estimated that the left passage should lead to the auditorium.
The auditorium was the core of the entire theater. It connected the front waiting hall with the stage and backstage areas at the rear. Aside from the waiting hall, it was also the area with the largest number of audience mbers. Earlier, while in the restroom, Everly and the others had vaguely heard gunshots and screams coming from the auditorium—but what exactly had happened there, the three of them still did not know.
Both Everly and Old John felt it was necessary to enter the auditorium to assess the situation and gather more information about the masked individuals. So upon reaching the fork, they temporarily changed course and crawled into the left passage first.
Perhaps because the auditorium occupied a large area, the ventilation duct widened abruptly after they entered this passage. What had previously only allowed a single person to pass now expanded enough for two people to crawl side by side.
The passage was not long, but it sloped upward. The surface was smooth and steep, making it sowhat slippery to climb. Everly had to roll up her sleeves and pant legs, pressing her bare skin directly against the stainless steel duct to gain enough friction to inch her way upward.
After crawling three or four ters like this, they finally reached the end of the duct. Ahead, warm yellow light filtered through stainless steel grates, sliced into narrow strips.
Everly slowed her movents, creeping forward soundlessly. She edged up to the grating and peeked outside.
As expected, beyond it lay the auditorium, illuminated by warm yellow lights.
The ventilation duct opened onto the upper side wall of the auditorium, about four to five ters above the ground. The wall here slanted slightly toward the stage—likely designed to help carry sound—which conveniently gave Everly a clear view. Through the gaps in the grating, she could take in the stage and a section of the front rows of the audience seats.
Below, the seating area was in complete disarray. Bodies lay sprawled everywhere. Blood spatter and nurous bullet holes marked the seats, and the red-upholstered chairs had been pierced through, white stuffing spilling out. The entire auditorium looked like a scene of devastation.
Who could have imagined that just dozens of minutes earlier, this place had been brightly lit and bustling with people? Music had flowed through the air, and the crowd had gathered in excitent and anticipation, waiting to experience a rare artistic performance…
Everly turned her eyes away, unable to bear the sight.
At the very front of the audience area, directly facing the stage, there was an open space. The surviving audience mbers were huddled there now, crouching close together with their hands over their heads. Around them stood seven or eight black-clad figures wearing masks. Each held a gun, facing the crowd in strict vigilance.
Among the captives, an elderly man shifted slightly after crouching for too long, swaying a bit more than he should have. Imdiately, the masked figure behind him—wearing a horse mask—raised his gun and shot him in the back of the head.
“Bang!”
The sharp gunshot echoed through the vast auditorium. Blood sprayed, and the body fell forward stiffly, collapsing onto a young girl in front of him. Despite the horror of what had just happened, the entire hall remained silent. No one dared make a sound. The girl pinned beneath the body did not even dare to move.
Because they all understood—if anyone cried out or made a sudden movent, the next body would be theirs.
The masked figures used killing and fear as their weapons, ruthlessly controlling the entire group.
Aside from those guarding the hostages, more than a dozen masked individuals were scattered throughout the hall. Working in pairs, they moved among the seats, hauling the bodies from between the rows and carrying them onto the stage, piling them high in front of the curtain into a growing mound.
Occasionally, if they ca across soone who was pretending to be dead—or who was not yet fully gone—they would simply raise their weapons and finish the job without hesitation. Blood dripped steadily from the bodies, trailing across the floor in thin red lines. The vast stage was already dimly lit; with the towering heap of corpses piled upon it, it now looked even more grim and hellish.
But even that was not the most horrifying sight.
In front of the mound of bodies stood four masked figures. The one in a rabbit mask and the one in a dog mask gripped a male audience mber on either side, twisting his arms and shoulders to hold him firmly in place, preventing him from struggling. A third figure, wearing a goat mask, stood to the man’s side. He pressed one knee hard into the man’s back to pin him down. With one hand, he yanked the man’s hair, forcing his head back and exposing his neck. In the other hand, he held a strange jet-black blade shaped like a willow leaf. Like soone slaughtering livestock, he drew the blade hard across the artery at the side of the man’s neck.
A heavy spray of blood burst from the wound, pouring into a tal bucket placed below.
The man did not want to die. Veins bulged on his forehead as he cried out hoarsely, struggling with all his strength to break free. But how could one person overpower three? No matter how he fought, his body remained firmly restrained. Like a fish gasping on a chopping block, he could only helplessly watch as more and more blood flowed out of him—until, at last, he closed his eyes unwillingly.
The vast auditorium echoed with his cries—loud at first, then weakening, shifting from anger to despair.
Yet the audience below behaved as though they heard nothing. They remained frozen, numb and motionless.
As long as it was not their turn, as long as the one being killed was not themselves, they could continue clinging to their fragile self-deception.
It was obvious that the man was not the only one who had been drained of blood while still alive. Behind the goat-masked figure stood several more tal buckets, already filled with dark red liquid. Once the man’s blood had been fully drained, his body was discarded like trash onto the heap behind them. The filled buckets were then carried by three masked figures to the center of the stage and handed over to a figure wearing a pig mask.
The pig-masked figure was busy at the very center of the stage.
He dipped a mop into the buckets of human blood and used it to draw a huge inverted pentagram on the stage floor. Inside the circle were nurous mysterious symbols and inscriptions she couldn’t decipher, strange totems that radiated both the uncanny and the sinister. At that mont, the pig mask was finishing the central pattern of the circle.
It was twisted, coiled, writhing like a snake.
Even unfinished, Everly recognized it imdiately—it was the totem she had encountered twice before, belonging to a certain heretical sect.
“Look at this!”
As Everly broke out in a cold sweat, shaken by the mory, a low exclamation from Misha ca from behind. Everly turned her head and saw a phone with a pink case being handed to her. On the screen was a video.
In the video, a figure wearing an eagle mask faced the cara, speaking. The ventilation duct was far from the ground, and the auditorium was filled with wails, groans, and other noises. Everly, gathering her courage, turned up the volu and leaned close to the microphone. She heard the figure speak in a strange, hoarse voice:
“I know the Micano Police have surrounded the entire theater. Just now, one of the officers fired at us, injuring a companion’s arm. What I am telling you now is: do not provoke us lightly. Any suffering inflicted upon us will be returned tenfold, a hundredfold, onto these innocent hostages.”
As the words ended, the cara pulled back to reveal a row of kneeling captives behind the eagle mask, along with several masked figures gripping weapons, tense and eager. Judging from the background, they were standing in the theater’s waiting hall at the ti.
“Begin.”
At the command of the eagle-masked figure, the masked attackers simultaneously raised their blades and struck at the captives’ arms… The next scenes were so bloody and cruel that Everly couldn’t bear to watch. She dragged the progress bar to the end, only to find the video continued to show the torture: after stripping the flesh from the hostages’ arms, the rciless executioners raised their knives and beheaded the barely-living captives one by one.
The sight made her nauseated. Suppressing her rage, Everly clicked the top-left corner to exit.
Exiting full-screen mode, she returned to the video’s posting page. Shockingly, this video had been uploaded to Micano’s largest local public forum. The post was titled “Revenge”, uploaded just ten minutes ago. The account was brand new, and its avatar was unmistakably a pig mask.
Because the content was so horrifying, the thread had already ballooned into hundreds of replies. The comnts were chaotic—people worrying about their families, criticizing the police for incompetence, begging the criminals to release loved ones, others just stirring panic… Everly had no intention of sifting through the ss and quickly exited the hottest post.
Sure enough, within the local forum, besides this threat post by the criminals, there were more than ten other threads related to the events at the Xinkalan Theater. Everly clicked on two at random and quickly reconstructed the sequence of events from the photos, videos, and written accounts posted.
It turned out that shortly after the murders at the theater entrance, the Micano police had received ergency calls from citizens. With Old John’s earlier “false report” already laying the groundwork, the police treated the situation with utmost seriousness, imdiately dispatching seven or eight patrol cars and dozens of officers to surround the theater.
By this ti, both the front and back entrances of the theater were under the control of the masked figures. Ard with firearms and holding the lives of over three hundred people inside, the police dared not engage them directly. Upon arriving at the scene, the officers tried to negotiate, asking the captors why they had taken so many hostages and probing whether there was any chance of freeing them. At the sa ti, they deployed several officers to attempt to infiltrate the theater by scaling the walls, hoping to coordinate an internal and external operation to reclaim it.
However, the masked figures were extrely vigilant. Even though the Xinkalan Theater walls were nearly three ters high and difficult to climb, they assigned guards to patrol around the periter. The mont the police infiltration team climbed over, they were spotted by the masked accomplices, sparking a small-scale firefight. During the skirmish, one officer managed to shoot a masked figure in the arm.
The police did not linger; taking the opportunity, they retreated from the theater.
Unexpectedly, as soon as the officers left, the masked figures uploaded the video to the city’s largest local forum. This act was like a slap in the face—directed at both the Micano police and every resident—making it painfully clear just how cruel and inhuman these human-shaped demons occupying the theater truly were.
The masked figures had no hesitation in killing if provoked, and it was clear they derived pleasure from torturing and slaughtering others. The more pain and fear the captives displayed, the more exhilarated the attackers beca.
No one dared to cling to any hope or take risks. Everyone at the police station was rely trying to do their job; if a forcible intervention caused greater casualties, no one there could bear responsibility for so many lives.
anwhile, the masked figures seed to abduct simply for the sake of abducting. They had yet to reveal any motive or demand anything from the authorities.
Thus, both sides—police outside, captors inside—remained at a standoff, locked in a tense stalemate.
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