Chapter 442 - 386: Split Perspective: Sinking to the Seabed

Chapter 442: Chapter 386: Split Perspective: Sinking to the Seabed

What happened after was like countless fragments of a dream, overlapping and swaying, hazy and unreal.

By then, I had already prepared myself for death. I squeezed my eyes shut and clamped my hands over my ears. That way, the last sound I would hear before I died wouldn’t be the gunman’s footsteps approaching, but my own soft humming.

The show’s finale would serve just as well as the closing number for my life.

I am the evening sky, slowly bruising to purple

I am a conversation with nothing left to say

Gazing at you in the silence

My hands pressed down harder and harder. A bubble of air felt trapped in my ears, the pressure becoming excruciatingly painful.

Even with only my own singing in my ears, I could still feel the weight of another person on the stage—footsteps fell one after another on the floorboards, their heavy impact vibrating through my body, through my voice.

A loud CRASH shattered my song. Someone had kicked the stage set open. Light flooded in, spilling over me. I turned my head; the gunman’s silhouette stood right behind me.

I lowered my hands.

"Still singing your songs at a time like this? Go to hell," he hissed like a snake, white spittle flying from his mouth. "Go sing your—for Satan."

"I’m lucky," I said, tilting my face up. I felt a tear slide down my cheek, but I still managed a small smile. "You’re backlit right now... which means I won’t have to see your face when I die."

I couldn’t see his expression, but he immediately raised his gun at me.

But just a breath later, he suddenly changed his mind.

He came over, grabbed me by the hair, and yanked me violently toward him. A jolt of pain flooded my vision. I think I fought back, I think I screamed, but then he slammed the gun hard against my temple, and the world shattered into pieces all around me.

My ears and eyes were smeared with blood. Dimly, I could only feel myself being dragged off the stage like a dead fish.

The stage was just over a meter high. For someone like me, who loved leaping from high places, a fall from a stage just over a meter high felt like crashing into a deep abyss from which I could never climb out.

’What’s he going to do with me?’

’Why is he taking me outside? Isn’t he afraid of getting caught?’

’The place must be surrounded by now, right?’

The man was dragging me out, muttering and cursing at me incoherently as he went. He said he was going to execute me publicly, that he had heard God’s guidance, that he was cleansing the nation of its toxins and casting out evil...

My last words must have been what angered him, making him change his mind on the spot. But even if a quick death had turned into a long, drawn-out torture, I didn’t regret it.

I didn’t care if he was angry. I just wanted to say what I had to say.

I didn’t care if they were angry. I just wanted to sing the songs I wanted to sing.

The road home is winding and silent

I swim in the downpour, float on the waves

I don’t know if I actually sang it out loud—probably not.

My mind was already on the verge of collapse. I couldn’t see anything clearly, and I could barely even hear the gunman’s voice anymore.

It was as if I’d been placed in a cradle. My soul swayed back and forth between two ends: one was life, the other was death.

It wasn’t until I was shoved into a car that I realized I’d been taken to the underground parking garage.

How he broke through the cordon and got into the parking garage, I had no idea. I was slumped in the back seat, where I could just see the windshield between the front seats.

That patch of light was like a path to survival I could never reach.

I watched as the car started up and sped off. It smashed through the toll gate barrier and plunged into the daylight outside. The street was full of people who scattered like a startled school of fish, screaming as they fled the invisible wave created by the car.

Only one person...

Only one person on the street didn’t move. She was like a reef that could only break the waves and force them to part. She stood steadfast amid the stampeding crowd, raising her gun at the car’s driver.

In the brief moment the car zipped past her, she fired three shots in quick succession.

But the gunman wasn’t hit. He had ducked just in time, cursing angrily amidst a silver rain of shattered glass. He stayed hunched over, gripping the steering wheel tightly. The car swerved sharply, barely avoiding a tree on the sidewalk.

In that short window of opportunity, I don’t know where the strength came from, but I suddenly flipped over and scrambled up, my body slamming against the car door. Fighting off a wave of dizziness, I desperately pounded on the window.

"Mercury!" I shrieked. "I’m here!"

Unbelievable.

Mercury had actually seen me.

Our eyes met through the car window. She seemed to be breathing heavily, her gaze fixed on me, a dark light flickering in her eyes.

In that instant, it was as if the sky and sea were about to collapse, as if I were about to fall into—

The next second, the car ripped me away from Mercury’s sight, flinging me toward the unknown.

When I am awakened, I will be submerged

Sinking to the bottom of the sea, to never again see the light of day

***

"Old gray pickup, a Ford,"

Mercury yelled into her headset as she strode toward her heavy motorcycle, which was lying on its side by the road. "License plate starts with 3AOA! It’s heading for 99th Street! She’s in the car—intercept it!"

"Understood," her subordinate replied, but then seemed to recall something. "Mercury, what if the gunman realizes he can’t get away..."

’A good point.’

The fact that the gunman hadn’t killed her, but had instead bundled her into a car, was already unexpected—the concert hall was supposedly a sea of corpses. When he realized escape was impossible, there was a high probability he would kill her first.