Chapter 2283: Gotham Music Festival (Part 31)

The first round of the game began.

All the round tables slowly descended to the ground, and what rose back up were slender, oval-shaped tabletops. The two ends of the oval were imprinted with different patterns, representing the identities of the people who should be standing there.

Those with a bye had no tables, but no staff came to demand where they should stand. Seeing this, those with a bye found the matchups they were more interested in and stood beside them.

Some participants in the matchups were dissatisfied with this, believing it might interfere with their actions, but the organizers didn't come out to stop it, and the vast majority of people dared not speak out.

From the moment before they boarded the ship, the atmosphere had been very wrong. Although a life-or-death gambling game should be serious and tense, today's game added a few more points of eeriness beyond that.

Schiller observed the changes in the venue. After being stunned for a moment, people began to search for their corresponding patterns.

He saw the woman who had approached him earlier walking to one side of one of the tables. Schiller put away the inhaler in his hand, passed through the crowd without a sound, and walked toward her rear.

The sound of the wind brushed past his ears, the noise of the crowd became more and more distant, and blurry ripples rippled around his field of vision, with only that long dress becoming clearer and clearer.

But just as Schiller walked to the woman's diagonal rear, he saw a figure standing opposite the woman. Although wearing a mask, Schiller still recognized that it was Oliver Queen.

Schiller shifted his gaze from the woman's back to Oliver. One second before focusing, the clear part of his vision was covered by a layer of fog again.

At this time, Oliver's state was enough to attract attention.

When Schiller concentrated, the already unclear picture within his field of vision became even more blurred, and the outlines of everything rippled.

The silver-haired bank president who brushed past his left side collapsed into a vortex from the center of his mask's nose until it swallowed his entire face. His excessive focus on his lifelong achievements ignited the fuse of greed, and the desire for greater power bit and tore his spirit, finally pushing everything into the abyss, making him appear here.

A huge black hole floated in the heart of the young lady who hurried past behind him, and a man's head rotated and cried within it. After not getting the desired result, she chose to turn her love into angry killing intent, but it was far from firm—terror, regret, an irredeemable fall, she could only pin her hopes on ethereal legends.

The hunched old woman standing in the corner of the room, casting a nervous glance, was strangled by a pair of baby's hands. She had indulged in the identity of a mother for a lifetime; when she lost her child, she lost everything. Being unable to control and unable to exercise the rights of a mother brought her unparalleled madness, making her willing to pay anything to become a mother again.

In Schiller's field of vision, everyone in the room began to change. Their eyes, their brains, their hearts, and every part of their bodies were coiled with countless shadows composed of emotions. Men, women, the elderly, and children—the passersby who had long since disappeared from their lives were manipulating them, guiding them, and gradually killing them in this way.

Everything was so clear and plain, straightforward and visible.

Schiller saw countless hands tightly gripping Oliver, some pulling him down, some pushing him up. The veins on the backs of their hands bulged, their arm muscles were flushed red, and they were all doing their best, trying to bring Oliver toward the direction they were in.

But regarding Oliver himself, Schiller only saw the pain amidst the tug-of-war. His spirit emitted a stable wave of light, there was no obstruction in front of his eyes, and his heart was still beating powerfully.

Schiller took a puff of the inhaler, the phantom dissipated, and people's faces returned to normal. Oliver, however, appeared exceptionally manic and weak, like a desperate gambler who had run out of options and could only pin all his hopes on this gambling game.

Oliver's number was Marlin 1. The marlin mask was the same shape as a marlin: the streamlined body part covered the face, the powerful long tail blocked the chin and neck, and the top was the marlin's most representative long mouth, which made every participant numbered as a marlin look like they had an antenna on their head.

Perhaps due to the need for compositional balance, the vertical marlin mask didn't have two holes for the eyes, but a horizontal rectangle connecting the two eyes, thus allowing people to observe their eyes more.

Oliver's eyes were deep in their sockets, surrounded by dense, countless wrinkles. Years of wilderness life gave him a face more mature than his age group, but at this moment, it looked even older and more exhausted.

His gaze was not as bright as it used to be, but covered with a layer of indescribable haze, becoming gloomy and terrifying. And the way he lifted his wrinkled eyelids to look at people from above his eyes also made him look exceptionally manic.

At this moment, his gaze was staring fixedly at the woman in front of him, as if he wanted to tear her to pieces with his eyes, but the woman stood straight in place, even having time to straighten the lace on her cuffs.

Challengers and the challenged knew each other's identities, but others didn't know the grudges between them. Those with a bye often chose to watch more dramatic gambling games—in short, those gambling games involving public figures they thought they might have seen just now. They wanted to know what these big stars had offended and what kind of end they would have.

In contrast, Oliver and the woman were not prominent. They were neither famous, nor was the image contrast very large, so almost no one came to watch them, and Schiller didn't go either.

He came to the table where Bruce and Roman were dueling. Roman looked at him gloomily and said, "Stand further away, don't talk."

Bruce took a small step back, moving a bit further away from him.

Schiller nodded, then looked at Roman and asked, "What grudge do you have?"

"He wants to steal my life." Bruce said immediately, "He doesn't understand why he and I started at the same point, but ended up differently. He wants to be me, but he failed."

Roman let out a sharp, cold laugh, which successfully attracted the attention of others. He said, "Bruce Wayne, the world's richest man, the famous Batman—do you think this is all there is?"

"No." Roman supported his hands on the table and said in a low voice, "He is also a damn murderer, a psychopath, and a sadist. He manipulated a little girl, killed another person who should have had the same fate as him. Remember Elliot?"

Bruce's eyes suddenly changed. In Schiller's field of vision, those blue eyes flashed with little red lights, and the black tide surging at the bottom of his heart gushed out until it flowed out from his facial features, as black as night, as red as blood.

"That was his own fault."

The voice sounded as if it came from afar, trance-like. The black tide flowing out from his facial features extended tentacles to turn one head after another. It was greedily sucking everyone's attention, turning this into a performance to vent his malice.

Everyone was manipulated in an instant to look here, because of the familiar name that often rang in their ears, and also because of Roman's astonishing accusation and Bruce's response, which couldn't even be called a rebuttal.

"Elliot, like you, is a peeping tom who only knows how to hide in the dark and spy on others, a thief who wants to snatch other people's lives at every moment. The most ridiculous part is that I gave him the chance to replace me, but he couldn't even handle one ten-thousandth of my life."

Bruce's eyes and mouth opened and closed, the black tide constantly surging between his facial features, almost swallowing all his features, making him look like a withered bone in a grave.

The black tide spread further and further, more and more heads turned, tentacles reached into their eyes and mouths, sucking out the blood-red vitality, absorbing their time and energy into the heart, and pumping it out with a low and powerful rhythm until the whole person turned blood-red.

Looking at the opposite side, Schiller saw the noose around Roman Sionis's neck. He had already been hung up, pale and weak like a piece of paper. Schiller searched every wrinkle, unable to find half a point of indignation or courage; he was just a pathetic puppet.

Schiller thought, perhaps this was exactly the purpose of Bruce attracting everyone's attention at the first moment. If the mastermind was among the others, he would inevitably pay attention to the situation here.

In Bruce's view, words, actions, and expressions wrote on people's faces why they were paying attention here. As long as the other party turned their head, the answer would be revealed.

But Bruce didn't get what he wanted. The attention that entered his blood along with the black tide was not filtered by the beating heart to get the information he wanted. Either all of this was not the answer, or the mastermind was better at disguising than he had imagined.

Schiller took another puff of the inhaler, and the black, blood-red, and pale colors dissipated.

The orca mask was not a specific fish shape, but a shuttle shape that was wide in the middle and narrow at both ends. There were two white patches on both sides of the widest part like an orca's eye patches. When placed on a human face, it looked like white blush, appearing ridiculous and laughable.

The atmosphere between Bruce and Roman became more and more scorching. Just then, a staff member wearing a crab mask walked over, placed two decks of playing cards on the table, and then 10 gold coins for each person.

The center of the gold coins still had a trident pattern, exactly the same as the one in the center of the old man's forehead. When they fell on the table, they made a clinking sound, like a bell rung by the devil in the hearts of the greedy.

"The gambling poker game you are going to play is called 'Gods and Believers'." The staff member introduced, "The rules are very simple: one person holds a deck of cards, and a coin toss determines the identities of God and Believer."

"The Believer sacrifices 3 cards from their hand to God each round. God can decide to bestow 1, 2, 3, or 4 cards to the Believer. After ten rounds, the sacrifice ends. Both sides blindly select 10 cards from their own deck, turn them over one by one to compare sizes, the one with the most wins, and the one who turns over the trump card first wins directly."

The staff member placed a metal bell that would make a crisp sound when struck in the center of the table and said, "Sacrifice and card pushing to here, hands cannot cross the line. Bestowal and card pushing to here, hands cannot cross the line. Any physical contact is prohibited throughout the process, and you cannot reveal cards to the other party during the sacrifice process. After the sacrifice, both hands leave the table, and I will flip the cards."

"All bystanders are not allowed to touch the table or participate, and must remain quiet throughout. Violators will be judged as losing directly."

"Now the gambling game begins. Both sides' chips enter the game, minimum one, maximum all-in. Bets are placed, no regrets." ===== CHAPTER 2284 =====