The cruise ship was enormous. The first floor held the dance floor, banquet hall, bar, and other gathering places, while the second floor contained the game rooms, reception rooms, gym, and other hubs for daily life and entertainment.
The circular plaza where everyone had been gathered on the first floor was actually the banquet hall, while directly above it was the first-floor casino, where the gambling game had taken place earlier.
But aside from those two areas, there were many other rooms on both floors. The corridors crisscrossed, there were countless staircases, seven elevators, and, besides the stairs in the Staff Passage, more than a dozen stairways connecting the floors.
At that moment, however, the stairs leading from the first floor to the second were covered in wet footprints. The carpet had been trampled into wrinkles, and the handrails were covered in scuff marks. Clearly, the crowd had swarmed over and rushed up to the second floor in one panicked wave.
The reason was simple. The gunshots on the first floor were the most threatening evacuation order of all. After all, in this country, the man-made disaster most people were most likely to encounter—and which posed the greatest threat to their lives—was a shooting.
Fear of gunfire was carved into their bones. Not even the rocking ship or the invading seawater had frightened them this badly. The moment the shots rang out, everyone followed instincts honed over years and fled as fast as they could.
The deck was completely open, with almost no cover. It was hardly a good place to take refuge, so the crowd could only choose the second floor.
But the trap Bale-Batman and the others had encountered was also on the second floor. That meant Schiller had returned there after killing Flamingo.
Bale-Batman did not dare