Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The room is dark and quiet, completely devoid of any signs of life except for the slight rise and fall of his chest as he lies on his back. The absence of windows keeps any traces of illumination from creeping in. Even the bedroom door fits seamlessly into its frame, barring any light whatsoever trying to make its way in from the outside world.

There’s no clock to be found anywhere at all in the room, not even a wristwatch. The slow, tedious ticking of an analogue would only rub at his nerves like an itch under the skin, and the searing glare of a digital would do nothing but ruin this tentative, lightless peace that he’s finally achieved. He’s already well aware that every so often the television will come on, informing him that it’s precisely eight in the morning or ten at night. Whether or not that information is actually correct doesn’t really interest him.

Time lost its meaning for him long ago in this game.

He stares aimlessly at nothing in particular. There’s no light with which to see anything, but even if there were, he’s left his usually-cluttered room barren this time around. Gone are the stacks of cardboard boxes, the piles upon piles of books and binders which were once haphazardly strewn all along the floor at random. Gone is the mountain of crumpled paper balls which once dominated his trash can, filling it to the brim with discarded theories, plans, and memos to himself. And gone too is the whiteboard which once stood front and center in the room, completely covered with pictures of his fellow classmates as he stood in front of it and tried for hours on end to pinpoint the link tying them together and the ringleader behind this game that they’re in.

Rather than just “gone,” he should say they never existed in this room in the first place. He doesn’t need them, this time around. There’s no point anymore.

Ouma stares at the ceiling, feeling the darkness pressing down on his eyelids every time he blinks, and thinks about the mechanical press which killed him—the last time.

It’s almost funny. He’d really thought that one might actually get the job done.

He sighs and shifts on the bed, hoists the covers up over his shoulders, and tries to sleep. But it’s a futile effort and he knows it. Exhaustion seeps through every bone in his body, beating like a drum (like a mechanical press crashing down) above his right eye, but he still won’t be able to sleep no matter how hard he tries.

After all, whenever he closes his eyes, he can clearly see each and every wrong step, wrong turn, wrong move, wrong guess he ever made playing out on the backs of his eyelids like a movie on a screen.

Chapter Text

“Ouma Kokichi,” he told them instantly, when the girl and boy asked for his name. That much came to him easily, but when they asked him for his talent next, he faltered. “I’m—” The answer tripped over his tongue, and he couldn’t quite figure out why.

“I’m the Super High School Level Supreme Leader,” he told them finally. It felt like the right answer, and yet it left him with a nagging, sour taste at the back of his mouth, as if he’d told them he was really blond-haired and six feet tall when they could clearly see for themselves that that wasn’t the case. He chalked it up to having woken up unconscious in a locker only half an hour earlier and pushed the sensation down before flashing them a grin.

“S-Supreme leader?” The boy in the hat went pale, and Ouma’s eyes lingered on the way his fingers instinctively twitched in surprise.

“I’m sure that’s just a joke,” the girl said, patting the other boy on the shoulder lightly. “Just a little joke to lighten the tension, right?” She arched an eyebrow back at him skeptically, clearly hoping for an affirmative.

The silence stretched on just a moment too long, and then he broke it with a laugh—

“No, it’s the truth.” There was that sour taste again. “I’m the Supreme Leader of a secret organization. But don’t worry. It’s nothing too dangerous as long as you don’t try to dig up too much information on it.”

The boy and the girl exchanged looks that clearly questioned the state of his sanity, but they didn’t pose any more objections to his introduction or his talent, and when the boy in the hat reluctantly reached out his hand for him to shake, he almost took it.

But the arrival of a strange-looking student—was that a robot?—interrupted the scene, and he took a step back and watched as the other two took the lead again.

---

“Who could have… done this?”

No one answered Gonta’s question as they all stood grouped together in the library, staring down collectively at the body which had previously been Amami-chan. The words seemed to hang in the air between them, as tangible as the layers of dust settled over the books on the shelves.

The only thing to break that silence was Monokuma, arriving to tell them all gleefully that since the culprit for the crime was refusing to step forward and name themselves, they’d be having an investigation—one resulting in an execution for either the culprit or the lot of them.

Doubt. Suspicion. He saw the seeds festering among them almost instantly, and the way in which they all took a step back, or held themselves a little more warily as soon as the news left Monokuma’s mouth. He wanted to do the same, in fact, but his eyes were fixed on the trails of blood seeping from Amami-chan’s skull, and he couldn’t move from the spot.

Who could have done this, indeed?

But that’s not really the right question, he thought to himself. Why would anyone do this?

It just didn’t add up. Why go through all the trouble to take a life, if not for the graduation opportunity which Monokuma had presented them with two days ago? Why kill for the sake of risking a trial?

As though in answer to his thoughts, Akamatsu-chan stepped forward into the center of their makeshift circle, and she raised her head high. “Everything’s going to be okay, everyone. We’re going to find out who did this, and we’re all going to get through this.”

It didn’t escape his notice that her voice was shaking and her cheeks were a little too flushed, but he could feel her intentions loud and clear all the same. Everyone else seemed to feel them, too, because Iruma-chan stopped grinding her teeth, Yumeno-chan’s eyes looked a little less unfocused than the last time he had glanced her way, and Gonta wiped his tears off on his sleeve cuff and sniffled twice before nodding.

“Akamatsu-chan’s right,” he said, speaking up so firmly that the rest of them did a double-take, as though they’d almost forgotten he was there. All but two of them towered over him physically, but he met their eyes with an old, familiar confidence. This was the kind of confidence expected of him as a Supreme Leader—the thought caused his head to pound, once, and he dismissed it quickly before consulting with Akamatsu-chan and Saihara-chan about how best to split the group up into investigation teams.

He sent them all off quickly and surely on the tasks that he thought best-suited to each of their talents, but as they all set off in twos and threes, he found his eyes pulled again to the blood-stained wood of the library floor.

---

 “I did it.”

Tears.

“I did it, and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, everyone.”

More tears.

“I’m so sorry, Amami-kun.”

The whole group was a shambles, and Akamatsu-chan was standing in the center of their circle once again, only the difference this time was that she was about two minutes away from being sent off to die, and only because she’d wanted to help.

“Please live strongly. Live together, find the truth, and get out of here.”

She told them the entire sordid tale, about how she’d only wanted to target the ringleader and put an end to this game once and for all, about how she’d tried to stop the killing game before it even began. Her bravery shook them all to the core, and there wasn’t a dry-eyed one among them, not even Shinguuji-chan, whose tears were tingeing the edge of his mask a slightly darker color. Not even himself, he realized, and his fist shook as he tried to meet Akamatsu-chan’s eye while she said goodbye to each and every last one of them.

It’s the least I can do for her, as just one leader to another.

Knowing that they were all going to lose her hit them hard as a group, but he was fairly certain they could circumvent this worst-case scenario from happening again. As long as they weren’t hit with any more two-day time limits, he was sure they could limit their losses—

The metallic shriek of the collar snapping around Akamatsu-chan’s neck interrupted his train of thought. Everyone in the room yelped and stepped back, and Ouma watched, wide-eyed, as Monokuma showed them all for the first time the true meaning of the word “execution.”

Saihara-chan’s screams echoed across the room as they lost Akamatsu-chan from their numbers for good.

---

He had known that the gloom of the first trial would hang over them like a blanket in the following days. He had also known that things would be easier if he made them laugh.

The morning after the trial, they had all met up for breakfast and tried awkwardly to piece together where they might go from here. But no one’s heart had really been in it, and so when Toujou-chan expertly slid a plate of western-style breakfast in front of him at the table, he acted on his plan.

“Ah, thanks Mom! This really hits the sp—” A single beat in which everyone went silent, staring at him as though wondering if he had noticed his mistake. Perfect. “I-I mean, well…! Sorry, sorry! This kind of breakfast just made me think of, well—”

The room erupted with nervous chuckles, and even Toujou-chan’s normally immovable expression of refinement had looked a little strained, as though she were biting back the urge to smile. Despite themselves, they had all sounded just a little less miserable than before, and Ouma chalked it up to a victory.

---

He had thought they were recuperating.

Their progress had been slow but steady, and little by little it seemed they were all finally acclimating to things. Saihara-chan in particular had taken the most drastic leaps in development—Ouma had thought the pale boy dressed all in black would almost definitely hole himself up in his room and never come out again after what had happened at the school trial. But this development had been a pleasant surprise instead.

He tried formulating their best course of action. Of course, finding the truth and getting out of this place was important, but he thought it best that they all get accustomed to the school around them first. They would never last long if they couldn’t find a way to abate the tension somehow, and the laboratories and new areas of exploration had offered them all some small measure of comfort and distraction from the tragedy they’d witnessed.

Monokuma’s motive videos had posed a slight wrench in his plans, but it wasn’t as though he hadn’t anticipated another motive after the first one. Everyone agreed easily to the plan he had put forth: that as long as they only had motive videos for each other and not their own, it would be easy to avoid any deaths this time around.

Yumeno-chan’s magic show even seemed an exciting initiative. Perhaps a show to lighten the mood and boost morale was exactly what they all needed.

That was what he’d thought, before they’d found Hoshi-chan’s body floating in the tank, suspended there for only a single instant until the piranhas lunged and ripped the meat straight off his bones.

At the sight of everyone’s shocked faces, the tinged-red water of the tank while bones and chunks of flesh settled, and the bright, beaming smile on Yumeno-chan’s clueless face as she stood posing, unaware of the catastrophe behind her, Ouma felt the sour taste in his mouth again.

---

The time for the investigation was running out.

Only Momota-chan’s aggressive willingness to pitch in and Saihara-chan’s deductive skills seemed to be keeping them from entirely falling back. Well, this was only to be expected. A murder taking place only days after Akamatsu-chan’s sacrifice had smashed all that morale he’d spent time trying to boost into tiny pieces.

And he could already see in their eyes how they were convinced that Yumeno-chan had done it. But he wasn’t so sure himself.

As they passed along the pool, he stopped suddenly. In the midst of the dirty, stagnant water filling the pool to only half its capacity, there was something dark and ragged, as though it had torn at the edges.

“Saihara-chan! Over here!”

The other boy paused, already halfway to the other building after seeing nothing of interest, and doubled back to take a look at where he was pointing. They fished it out together, and all they could tell was that it might or might not be a piece of black fabric.

“Thanks, Ouma-kun. You’ve got a keen eye for this sort of thing.”

It was the first genuine, albeit tiny, smile he’d seen on Saihara-chan’s face since the whole fiasco had happened. Ouma flashed him a grin and threw his hands up behind his head, ignoring for just a moment or two longer the hell that they were about to have to face again.

---

Murmurs and hesitant whispers of “Why?” flew up from all around the trial room.

Toujou Kirumi stood a little ways apart from the rest of them, her gloved hands crossed elegantly in front of her, looking surprisingly resilient for someone who had just been sentenced to death.

“Hey, hey, when did it start? When did you start lying to all of us?” Angie-chan’s usually whimsical voice carried a rather stinging note for once. “You kept telling us you were going to take care of us, but was that always a lie?” Her eyes seemed surprisingly sharp for a girl so often looking to the heavens as she talked about her god.

Ouma thought back to the western-style breakfasts and all the offers to do laundry, thought back to the “slip of the tongue” he’d had in calling her a mother in front of everyone. If he and Saihara-chan hadn’t found that piece of her glove, just where would they be now? Would she even have shed a tear as they all went past to their deaths? And even if she had, would those tears have meant anything at all?

Don’t be stupid, he thought. Of course not. No one would care for others more than themselves in a situation like this. And I’m a fool if I thought otherwise for one second.

How could he have fallen for such an obvious ruse? They had all fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker, but wasn’t he the one most at fault for failing to see through it? What kind of Supreme Leader did that?

Not a very good one.

“If I tell you, you’re all going to be very sorry.” Toujou-chan’s voice had cut in among the whispers and clatter, still clear and refined even in such a situation. “You’ll regret knowing. Are you sure you’d still like me to tell you?”

They all hesitated for only a few moments before nodding in unison.

---

The room was like a scene of a massacre, just like a picture taken straight from a history book he was sure he’d read at one point or another—one of the pictures that the teacher would always tell you to skip past, of course.

I never should have let her speak.

Another crash. More screams. The Exisals were on a firing rampage, and everywhere he looked there was blood, blood, blood, more blood—

I never should have let her even open her mouth.

Ouma wasn’t even sure where he was going, or if there was anywhere to go. The room was an explosion of screams and gunfire, and if he stopped too long he might notice Momota-chan’s body, groaning and wheezing on the floor, or Gonta with a chunk missing out of one of his shoulders but struggling still to stand in front of Yumeno-chan and Chabashira-chan.

His eyes darted around the room, caught sight of an elegant maid in a black dress just managing to slip to the exit—

I should’ve known that’d be her plan.

A hole opened up in his chest the moment he stopped moving, and the entire world shuddered as he fell on his side. He had to keep going, had to find a way to stop Toujou-chan from… from what? Everyone in the room was already dead or dying.

How could I have hoped to avoid this scenario, exactly?

Ah, it hurt—it hurt, it hurt, it hurt…

There was a strangely elated feeling in the pit of his stomach as he closed his eyes and let the world go dark.

---

He woke up in a cramped locker, the taste of blood in his mouth and a pounding in his head just over his right eye. The darkness pressed in like a vise, and he threw himself against the locker door, staggering out in confusion before heaving the contents of his stomach all over the floor.

Am I dead? Am I alive?

He couldn’t find a good answer to those questions, and the pressure behind his eye still kept building until his whole head felt like it was about to split. His entire mouth tasted unbelievably sour.

He’d been here once before, but he couldn’t think of any good reason for it to be happening again. The last thing he remembered was a car, dark figures—

Huge machines, with bullets firing—

Yelling for help—

Screaming in pain—

He was still on the floor retching when someone else ran in, and he felt the sensation of a cold, metallic hand along his back.

“Excuse me! Hey, are you okay? Are you okay, what’s your name?”

Ouma wondered if he should have never stepped out of that locker the second time.

Pin pon pon pon!

He opens his eyes a slit as the television suddenly comes on in the room, blindingly bright after fourteen hours of sheer darkness. It tells him that it is now 10:00pm, and he goes back to tuning the rest of the program out, letting the colorful figures bounce around and put on their useless show until the screen blinks off again.

He’s thankful for the strain being taken off of his eyes, but it’s still not as though he’ll be able to sleep.

They had all thought he was scared, probably. Or it was more like, they hadn’t known what to make of him.

He never introduced himself, when they came again. Kiibo had called out frantically for help, and the girl and the boy with the hat had come running, and Ouma had taken one look at Akamatsu Kaede’s still very-much-alive face and turned to retch again, only that time there hadn’t been anything to come up except bile.

It took him half an hour to stop shaking, and the whole time they kept looking over at him awkwardly, clearly unsure of what to say. Occasionally someone else would walk past the classroom to peek in and see what the commotion was about or introduce themselves, but he just stared speechlessly at them.

“Yo. The name’s Amami Rantarou. Everything okay in here, or…?”

He didn’t say anything in reply, only stared speechlessly at the same familiar hair and face and body of a boy he was fairly certain he’d seen dead on a library floor. Akamatsu-chan looked at him pityingly for a split second before standing up and taking the conversation out to the hallway. Perhaps they thought that would be kinder on him, but he still heard the words “in shock” nonetheless.

Saihara-chan continued to send him tense glances every so often from the safety his cap provided, as though afraid he might pass out or start screaming at any moment, but Ouma just ignored him.

He closed his eyes and tried to sort out his memories, to figure out what he remembered just before waking up. But as he thought back on a black car pulling up, dark hands grabbing him in the middle of broad daylight on a busy street, he kept remembering Akamatsu-chan’s limp corpse dangling over the keys of a piano, Amami-chan’s body curled in on itself while the blood oozed out of his skull, and he couldn’t tell if there was any difference between one set of memories or the other.

---

“Hey, Amami-chan.”

Ouma raised a hand in greeting and the other boy waved back, although hesitantly.

He had never greeted any of the group with his usual gusto this time around—even after the whole locker incident had passed, he’d barely had it in him to tell them his name before stumbling back to his room. They probably thought of him as a nervous wreck.

There was no way for him to tell them what he’d seen. In the end, he just let them think he was claustrophobic from being shoved into the locker, and in shock from being kidnapped.

He wasn’t even sure of what he had seen. There was always the possibility that it had been some kind of—hallucination. Maybe he was still hallucinating, in fact.

He also wasn’t sure of whether that possibility was comforting or not.

But the more he thought on Amami-chan, Akamatsu-chan, and Hoshi-chan’s lifeless bodies, the more he felt he ought to do something. Hallucination or not, it had all felt very real at the time. And if things were still proceeding the same way, and they were all heading down the same path in this same killing game, then he felt he at least should try avoiding the same outcome. What kind of person could see all of that and not even try to intervene, after all?

Not a very good one.

He wasn’t sure where to begin, though. Telling any of them that he’d seen them dead would only convince them that he was out of his mind, or easily the most suspicious member of the group. They’d probably just take it as a threat.

And so hesitantly, as though testing out the waters, he had asked: “You’re not… trying to do anything by yourself, are you? I mean about the time limit?”

Amami-chan looked at him long and hard, the usual half-smile gone from his face as his expression hardened. Ouma blinked, trying to keep his face impassive.

“Of course not,” Amami-chan said, after the silence went on far too long. “I wouldn’t do something like that. Probably wouldn’t end well, you know?”

“Right, yeah.” Ouma saw a muscle twitch in the other boy’s jaw and knew that he was lying without even knowing how to put it in words himself. “Well, I was just asking. Everyone’s been worrying about the time limit lately, and it wouldn’t be good if anyone went off doing things on their own… I’m just trying to help.” He smiled and put his hands behind his head, trying to remember just how he’d managed to look friendly the first time around. “I’m the Super High School Level Supreme Leader, you know.”

Amami-chan looked a little less suspicious after that, his eyebrows arching up behind his bangs. Then his slight half-smile returned. “No offense, Ouma-kun, but I wouldn’t really have pegged that for your talent.”

Then he turned and left Ouma alone in the middle of the hallway.

---

“Ouma-kun, why would you think that?”

He’d known Amami-chan wasn’t going to listen to him, so he’d thought perhaps Akamatsu-chan might. But the situation wasn’t going any better, and he didn’t know how to defuse it.

“I—I just heard you and Saihara-chan talking about meeting up in the library the other day,” he lied. Well, technically it wasn’t a lie. It probably still counted as only a few days ago when he’d heard them both admitting their plans to meet up in the library together, after they’d found Amami-chan’s body.

She studied him shrewdly, clearly trying to see if he was implying anything or not. But he hadn’t told her anything more specific than that she shouldn’t go snooping around the library because it would end badly, and she clearly didn’t know how to make heads or tails of it.

After a while, she sighed and scratched her head. “Look, I don’t know what you heard or thought you heard—”

He stared at her unblinkingly, almost daring to hope for half a second that she might change her mind about the whole thing, even if Amami-chan didn’t.

“—but it’s not nice to make up lies.”

---

Again. He saw it all again.

Everything went exactly the same, right down to the spatters of blood on the library floor and the way Akamatsu-chan’s fist trembled when she stood there and saw the body, only now he knew exactly why she was trembling in the first place.

At the trial, they all hit the exact same roadblocks, and he could see the hesitation on Saihara-chan’s face, and the fear of exposing a lie for a more painful truth. But Ouma no longer wanted to wait around for the trial to play out painfully, gradually, slowly, the way that it had the other time.

Like ripping a band-aid off a wound in one go, he spoke up, causing a sudden hush to fall over the rest of the group. “Hey, Akamatsu-chan… weren’t you and Saihara-chan both hanging around the library before all this happened?”

He could see the hurt in her eyes, see her wonder why he’d speak with such noticeable accusation in his voice when she was already steeling her resolve and biting her lip as she tried to ready herself for what she had to do.

But he pressed his point. After all, she was the one who had said she didn’t like lies.

---

He passed by Toujou-chan on the way to do his laundry, just a few days after the trial.

“Ouma-kun? Is there anything that I can lend a hand with? This is my lab after all, feel free to ask. I can do anything that needs being done.”

He hefted the laundry basket up before it slipped, as it was full to the brim with the same copies of his uniform. It was something he’d been delaying, having spent most of his time recently by dragging a whiteboard into his room from one of the unused classrooms, along with a whole mess of binders, notebooks, and any spare writing materials he could find. He’d been devoting his time lately to thinking about the second trial that he knew was coming, but that meant he hadn’t exactly been paying much attention to daily necessities like clean clothes.

The pile made it difficult for him to see where he was going, but he could still make out Toujou-chan’s elegant, tall figure peering down at him as she stood where her laboratory and the school washing machines intersected. He might almost have thought her offer kind, even if it was just her way of trying to fulfill her talent to the fullest. But now it was hard for him not to snort.

He set the basket down on the floor and opened one of the machine doors, then flashed her a smile as though in thanks. “No thanks, Toujou-chan. I can take care of it myself. Even though I look like this, I’m actually pretty good at handling my own chores.”

She looked him over dubiously, but there were definite signs of a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth as she nodded. “If that’s what you’d like, then.”

“Yeah, of course.” Ouma turned back to the washing machine and began throwing clothes in. “Wouldn’t want to make any trouble for Mom, after all.”

---

He paused just before rapping on Hoshi-chan’s door.

It was best to get it over with and try, he knew—but what exactly was he supposed to say?

Hey, look, I know you want to die and all, but trust me, I’ve been there and it didn’t work out so good. Hey, I even woke up again like it never happened… Yeah, that wasn’t the best course of action.

He sighed and tapped his knuckles against the door after all.

After a few moments, the door opened a crack, and then Hoshi Ryouma stood there in the doorway looking up at him suspiciously.

“…You?” The tennis player looked past him on either side, clearly wondering why he was here outside his door like this when they very nearly hadn’t said a word to each other ever since the day the game had begun. “S’ there a problem or something?”

He didn’t sound hostile, merely unable to comprehend what he could possibly want from him. Ouma sympathized a little at the notion that this was a person who didn’t think of himself as someone who had anything to offer to others—and that he hadn’t noticed that about him at all, last time. It didn’t sound like something a Supreme Leader should overlook in a group he was trying to take care of.

“No, there’s no problem. I just wanted to talk to you…” He let his sentence trail off, still contemplating the best possible way to broach the subject. Clearly, he’d botched his chances with Amami-chan and Akamatsu-chan. He wasn’t even sure there was a right way to phrase this kind of thing at all. “…I wanted to ask what you thought about the whole plan with the motive videos.”

Hoshi-chan’s face darkened, more out of surprise than anything else. “What I thought? What, you mean, like if I wanted to see mine or something?”

Ouma nodded. “Something like that. I mean, I know we discussed it already at the meeting earlier, but you get what I mean when I say it’d be really dangerous to go looking for our own videos, right?”

Hoshi-chan didn’t respond, so he continued talking on ahead, trying to fill in the silence. “I don’t think you would, I’m just—worried something bad might happen if any of us saw our own videos. It doesn’t sound like something we should let Monokuma bait us into.”

The awkward silence stretched out again, and just when he thought Hoshi-chan would never answer—

“Yeah, well, that ain’t gonna happen. No need to worry about me.”

The door slammed in his face.

---

At the second trial, Ouma felt as though a lump were stuck in his throat. Part of it was undeniably due to the fact that Hoshi-chan had wound up in the piranha tank the exact same way as last time, but the sensation was mostly due to the fact that he knew the hard part was from here on out.

Toujou-chan stood with her hands clasped, and this time he knew better than to think that she had begun resigning herself to her fate.

“Are you sure you’d still like me to tell you?” There came the same familiar words as last time, and he watched with narrowed eyes as the whole group leaned in close and listened to her speech about how the whole of Japan was falling into chaos in her absence, how it’d be better if the whole lot of them were to die for her sake.

She spoke eloquently, confidently, and as sincerely as a mother to her children. He could tell, as his eyes bored holes into the side of her face, that she believed every single word she was saying. But there was still something about her words that stank, horribly.

He didn’t let a single moment pass this time. The group was just beginning to get well and truly riled up when he spotted her, trying to slip her way unnoticed to the back of the room as everyone debated whether or not they could take on the Exisals with the forces they had now—

“Hey, Toujou-chan!” Their eyes locked. “Like it or not, we voted for you. Don’t you think it’s kind of unfair for you to miss your own execution?”

The room went dead silent for one beat, two beats, and then Toujou-chan sprinted off at a run as all the Exisals in the room pointed her way. Monokuma erupted into a fit of cackles, and Ouma stood and watched and reminded himself that at least he and the others were still left standing in the room this time around.

---

As Toujou-chan’s body slammed to the floor with a dull finality, Ouma found he couldn’t tear his eyes away.

I should hate her. I should.

He remembered the bullets that tore open his chest the last time, the screams and blood and chaos in the air as everyone had tried to avoid the Exisals, the dead bodies littering the ground. They’d avoided that outcome, and that was all that mattered.

But all he could think as he looked at Toujou-chan’s prone corpse was the way in which she’d fought to the end, struggling to reach the exit even as the saws began to grind against her bones—and the look on her face once she had realized that there’d never been an exit all along, and she came crashing back down to the full weight of gravity, and of death.

It left him with a curiously light sensation in the pit of his stomach, and that same sour taste in his mouth.

---

He threw himself full force into his investigation after that. It was all new territory to him, from this point on. He hadn’t even lived this long last time, and he wasn’t nearly naïve enough to think that Monokuma wouldn’t hit them with another motive soon enough.

Unsure of what he needed from the library or from other rooms, he took everything that he could carry, piling it all into cardboard boxes until they were half his weight and struggling to push them surreptitiously down hallways when nobody else was around.

One night, he read up on lockpicking in one of the books he had stashed away, and thought it a potentially useful talent for future investigations. He readied himself in front of his bedroom door to practice—only to find that he was surprisingly good at it. As he stared from his right hand to his left, he tried long and hard to think of where he might have picked up a talent like lockpicking. It didn’t seem like something particularly essential to a Super High School Level Supreme Leader…

He remained lost in thought until his head throbbed, once, and decided to drop the issue and leave it for later.

As he hung pictures up on his whiteboard, he put culprits to the left, victims to the right, and the ones remaining even farther right. If there was one thing he was sure of, it was that the ringleader behind this whole game had to be somewhere within that group still.

He stared at his handiwork as he spun the marker around between his index finger and thumb, not even sure where to start. Maybe, if he was lucky, he could at least avoid moving any more pictures to the left-most part of the board from now on.

The television hasn’t come on again when he opens his eyes next, so he can only surmise that it’s not morning yet.

For the first time in hours, he sits up in his bed, letting the sheets fall off of him as he stretches his aching joints. Lack of use is only making them sorer, but he doesn’t particularly care. They’re always sore, whenever he starts over. They never stop being sore.

Ouma just stares blankly towards the center of his room, almost certain for a moment that he can still see the outline of a whiteboard and cluttered heaps of cardboard boxes, all the fruits of an investigation that in the end amounted to absolutely nothing.

That’s impossible, of course. The room is still pitch black, and it’s only been an hour or two since he last tried (and failed) to sleep. He turns back on his side and closes his eyes again, and for a moment he almost would swear he can faintly hear the steady thrum of a mechanical press, but it’s just the sound of the blood rushing in his ears.

He never raised a complaint against Angie-chan and her Religious Student Council, but maybe he should’ve.

Looking back on it, the group only added layers of unnecessary conflict to their already suffocating situation. Stupidly, he had thought that maybe religion was something some of his classmates needed—that it would comfort them somehow, to feel like something was protecting them, even though he had already died once and he could’ve told them that even if god existed, they certainly weren’t looking out for him or them or anyone else.

That much was plain to see when he picked the lock on the art room door, and he and Saihara-chan stumbled in on Angie-chan’s corpse lying on her side, the floor beneath her stained slick with blood from a gash near the base of her neck.

It wasn’t until later, while they were carrying out their investigation, that he realized perhaps he should have pretended to be a bit more surprised about the wax dolls. But he already knew what it was like to walk into a room and see the dead brought back to life, so he supposed it couldn’t be helped that a mere imitation just didn’t quite cut it for him.

In fact, he was finding it very hard not to count Angie-chan’s body as just another wax doll in the room. Maybe if he died again he’d stumble out of a locker and there she’d be, walking and talking and praying to her deaf, uncaring god.

---

With one dead body already accounted for, he didn’t foresee there being another one.

As he stared down at the open wound in Chabashira-chan’s neck, he apologized silently. He hadn’t meant to get complacent. He hadn’t meant to assume that this kind of tragedy wouldn’t happen again just because it had already hit them once. After all, wasn’t he the best one to know that there wasn’t necessarily a limit on anything at all in this horrible game?

But didn’t I do the exact same thing with Akamatsu-chan? Didn’t I also let my guard down with Amami-chan and Hoshi-chan, even with Toujou-chan, when I already knew it was coming?

Yumeno-chan’s gaze was blank and unseeing, left mostly in shadow by the large brim of her hat hanging over her face. But even if she were to look at him, he wasn’t sure he could meet her eyes.

“Monokuma… just to check, but what happens if there are two culprits of two different crimes? What are the rules in the school trial?”

Ouma’s head snapped up at the sound of Shinguuji-chan’s soft, thoughtful voice, and in that moment he knew, although he couldn’t even explain to himself how. But there were those in this game who would kill only because of the game, and those who thought of killing itself as the game, and Shinguuji-chan was undeniably one of the latter.

He threw himself into the investigation with such a fervor afterwards that even Saihara-chan seemed a little lost, uncertain as to why he was traipsing through blood trails in the hallway or making a dash for Shinguuji-chan’s lab, where he searched for a familiar, gold sheath which he knew had housed a katana only yesterday.

He collected as much evidence as possible, making lines and connecting points on the canvas in his head since he lacked his whiteboard here, trying desperately to ignore the nagging voice in his head that kept wondering if he’d still wake up in a locker again if he failed to prove the culprit this time around.

---

Everyone had their reasons for killing, he supposed.

Akamatsu-chan had had hers. The whole group had understood her, had loved her, had known exactly how much it had cost her to take that risk for their sake. Even Toujou-chan had had hers, claiming the weight of the entire country on her shoulders, willing to do absolutely anything it took if it meant returning to the people who needed her the most.

They weren’t reasons he could necessarily forgive, or condone. Complete forgiveness was a line he found dangerous: if you forgave one murder, could you forgive another? At what point did it become okay to take another life? And even if you thought it was okay, would you be able to look the person you were about to kill in the eye, explain your reasoning, and still believe it was really, truly right?

He didn’t believe there was ever a point at which it was okay to draw that line and call it forgivable. But he could understand why most people would say that they had their reasons.

But Shinguuji-chan, shaking, sweating now, his mask pulled up to reveal surprisingly feminine features and a mouth that could only stammer out one word, over and over again, had no reasons at all. No reasons they could ever understand, anyway.

“Apologize, apologize, apologize, apologize—”

Ouma stared at the young man, dumbstruck, too shocked to tear his eyes away but certain nonetheless that the others must have had their mouths open just like him. He’d killed two people. He’d taken two lives, he’d looked them all in the eye and tried to pin it on Yumeno-chan, and now that he had no other recourse, he shook at the thought of death creeping down his back all the same.

“Apologize, apologize, apologize, apologize—”

None of them could find words. No matter how much he screamed and shrieked, there was no longer any denying the fact that he had killed two more of their classmates. There was nothing that could save him from his fate. For someone who so often had praised the “beauty of humans,” it seemed a very pathetic sight.

“Apologize, apologize, apologize, apologize—”

Ah, why did he have to keep shouting just the one word…

More than that, why was it such a familiar word?

Why would he, a Supreme Leader, be made to apologize for anything…?

“Ahhh… looks like you guys completely broke him. Too bad.”

Monokuma’s deadpan voice startled him out of his reverie, causing his head to snap from Shinguuji-chan to where the bear sat, still looking slumped and relatively uninterested in the trial at large.

“Not that that doesn’t have its own charms, but it’s just kind of sounding like a broken record by this point, don’tcha think?” Monokuma heaved a surprisingly convincing sigh for an animatronic robot. “Well, whatever. Guess it’s voting time.”

Long after Shinguuji-chan’s screams had faded away and the smell of smoke and salt was strong in the air, Ouma stared at the wall and heard a chorus of apologize, apologize, apologize, apologize beating in his brain, teasing at memories he couldn’t quite place.

---

He tried as best he could not to dwell too much on the things they’d all heard and seen at Shinguuji-chan’s trial. But the confidence they’d had, that no one would risk a murder even in this kind of game if it weren’t for reasons that most people could understand, was shattered.

The investigation was back at the forefront of his mind, preoccupying all his time. He’d snatched even more binders and books from the library, reluctantly moved three more pictures over to the left side of his whiteboard, and even more reluctantly come to the conclusion that his investigation was at a standstill unless he could investigate his remaining classmates even more directly.

This was how he found himself standing outside Harukawa Maki’s laboratory door late at night, well after the 10:00pm announcement had come on. Angie-chan’s Religious Student Council might have tried to keep them all well under-thumb and stuck in the dormitories, but Angie-chan wasn’t here anymore, and her short-lived reign was at its end.

He stared at the imposing red door, wondering if it was really alright to barge right in. She’d made it painfully clear both times that he’d met her that she wouldn’t tolerate anyone trying to take a look inside. She’d very specifically mentioned the word “screaming.”

But that just piqued his curiosity all the more. Why would a Super High School Level Childcare Worker feel the need to say that?

No matter how he looked at it, nothing about her added up.

If worse came to worse, he could probably fudge his reasons for being there, come up with some quick excuse about wanting to talk with her or check something with her…

Swallowing hard, he turned the knob, pulled the door open, and—

—was met with the sight of Harukawa-chan standing with her back turned to him in the center of the room, throwing knives into target dummies hanging on the wall with a degree of inhuman accuracy.

His mind went blank. He should have turned on his heel and run before she even knew he was there, but dumbly, his mouth opened and he could only say a blank, “…Harukawa-chan?”

In the time it took him to draw his next breath, the knife she had reached for clattered to the floor, and she was across the room before he could blink, lifting him up with one hand around his throat.

“You.”

She didn’t even seem to register what she was doing as anything out of the ordinary. It didn’t even seem to be taking her any effort whatsoever as she lifted his frame and squeezed around his windpipe more and more tightly.

“H-Harukawa—ch—” His words came out like a wheeze, choked and mangled. His hands scrambled to find purchase on the hand around his throat, trying desperately to peel even a finger or two back so he might be able to get in just one more breath, but her grip was like a vise, and her one hand was more than enough to hold him in place, even as he struggled with all his might.

“I told you not to come in here,” she said. Plainly. Coldly. As if it were a matter of fact. As if her choking him like this was all his fault, a simple necessity like stomping on a bug that you’d found crawling on your living room floor.

“Pl—e—ase—” He couldn’t see even the walls of the room around him now. The longer she choked him, the more his head swam; he was finding it harder and harder to keep moving his hands.

Please don’t, he wanted to say. This is pointless, this is reckless, this is meaningless. You’re only going to get killed too, or everyone else is, and what’s the point even—

He had known what it was to fear death, but Harukawa Maki taught him what it was to fear pain.

With his lungs aflame and the world a mess of pitch-black spots, at some point he lost consciousness.

---

The next time he opened his eyes and found himself standing in a locker, he didn’t come out for a long time.

Instead he slumped to the floor of the locker, staring vaguely up at what little light the slits at the top allowed in. His chest rose and fell rapidly, but instead of gasping for air that he no longer found himself lacking, he just rubbed at his throat beneath the scarf that covered it. He could swear he felt the phantom traces of Harukawa-chan’s unyielding fingers there still, even when he knew it was impossible.

Was she the ringleader? Was she not? Had she just killed him for reasons completely unrelated to any rhyme, reason, or motive within the killing game? He didn’t know.

Unbidden, more memories of the same dark car and reaching hands came to him.

He could remember plenty of things. His name was Ouma Kokichi, that was one. He had been kidnapped, that was another. He had watched his classmates die and kill and be put to death more times than he would like, there, that was another.

So why was it that his memories of his talent felt so… congealed, like a layer of film was covering them, never quite letting them come into focus?

He was the Super High School Level Supreme Leader. That much felt obvious to say. And yet… distinctly not right.

With his mouth still tasting sour, he touched at his throat lightly one last time before stepping out of the locker. And this time, when Kiibo came into the room and asked if he was okay, he looked him in the eye, smiled easily, and said, “Sure.”

---

“…You don’t have to sigh like that, Akamatsu-chan. I might be malicious to you, but… that’s your fault, you know?”

Even he wasn’t sure why he’d teased her so hard, when she’d come by to ask if he wanted to spend time together. In the past two loops, he’d accepted her offer gladly, and they’d talked at length about group leadership strategies, classical music pieces, and favorite types of tea.

But this time around, he’d strung her along, made her feel as if he wanted to spend time with her one moment, then shot her down the next. She was clearly losing her patience, running her fingers through her hair messily as she heaved out a sigh. This time around, it was plain to see she was regretting not spending her time with anybody else right now.

“My fault?” Her irritation faltered as her eyes widened.

That’s a lie, he wanted to say. Except it wasn’t. He kept remembering how she’d looked through him the last time, how easily she’d started to doubt him the moment he’d spoken up about the library. The Akamatsu Kaede in front of him now wasn’t the same as the Akamatsu Kaede who had rejected his attempt at helping her so coldly before. It really wasn’t fair to take things out on her like this. And yet…

He gnawed at his lip. If he’d failed to get through last time, then he’d just have to try harder this time. The fact that he was being given another chance at all like this was beyond his ability to understand, but he knew he should at least make the most of it.

“I mean… you’re… forgetting about me…” The words came unbidden from his mouth, slowly, hesitantly, not entirely true or false. No one would believe the whole story, if he told them he kept waking up again every time he died—he’d already seen the pity in their eyes last time, when they had thought he was breaking down and losing his senses.

She wasn’t technically forgetting him. After all, there was nothing to forget, this time around. They’d never met before this game. But maybe she’d understand better if he put it in these terms. Maybe if she could understand what he meant, then he actually stood a chance of explaining the situation to her more fully…

“Eh? I forgot?!”

Ouma searched her pale, shocked face for any traces of understanding, and could find none.

“Akamatsu-chan, you’re cruel! Even though I never forgot about you this whole time! Even though I cared about you…!”

She only went paler at this, and a part of his conscience twinged as he wondered if maybe he should stop. It really wasn’t a lie—but it also wasn’t what she wanted to hear. Even if he tried to explain how he’d “never forgotten,” she had absolutely no way of understanding what he meant.

“A-Are you sure you aren’t just mistaking me for someone else?” Akamatsu-chan stammered the words out nervously, clearly put off by the straightforward concern with which he spoke.

She raised a good point. Technically, she was someone else. But she also wasn’t. “How could I ever mistake you for anyone else? I mean, do you know any other Super High School Level Pianists, Akamatsu-chan?”

It was the best hint he could think to offer, but it went unnoticed, like bait left untouched on a fishing hook. He stared at her with wide, round eyes as she fumbled for words, and as the moments ticked by without her catching on, he came to the dry, unsatisfying conclusion that she simply wasn’t going to.

In the end, he threw his hands behind his head and laughed at her. “Wow, you really fell for a huge lie like that! You must be really soft!”

Akamatsu-chan furrowed her brow and looked at him with undisguised disliking, clearly averse to the idea that she’d spent so much time worrying, only to be made fun of in the end. That was fair. But he had one last hint for her, before he let their time together end, and this one he hoped would leave more of an impression, rather than going right over her head.

“Hey, but if you keep being that soft—don’t you think you’ll wind up being the first one to die?”

---

As he stood in front of his whiteboard that night, he bit at his thumbnail absently, wondering if it might be feasible to go snoop around the library himself for a change.

He knew the general layout of how the trap Akamatsu-chan would set would work—no, not “would,” that wasn’t decided yet. She might not set it still. He knew how the trap she had set in the past worked, and he knew the location of the door to the ringleader’s lair in the library, even if he still had absolutely no idea what could be beyond it.

If he were to stay there, safeguard that door, and make sure Amami-chan couldn’t come anywhere near the place where the ball was bound to fall…

They’ll think I’m the ringleader.

Ouma stopped biting, distracted momentarily by the realization that he’d gone too far down past the quick, and now blood was welling up. He searched briefly for a tissue, couldn’t find one, and wiped it off instead on the corner of a spare scrap of paper before turning to the board again.

No matter how he ran it through in his head, that was the only conclusion he could foresee. If he stuck around the library, in that particular place, at that particular time, either Amami-chan or Akamatsu-chan would be bound to think he was the ringleader, there to creep back into his secret lair. And if both of them wanted nothing more than to kill the ringleader in order to prolong the time limit, well—he already could guess how that would turn out.

He thought long and hard about the ball that had cracked Amami-chan’s skull wide open, remembered without wanting to the feeling of a bullet ripping through his chest, and of hard, unyielding fingers wrapped around his throat.

It hadn’t been that long since he had last woken up in the locker. He decided that night that he wasn’t going to waste his time if he would just wind up at square one all over again by the first two days.

---

“Let me see the motive video you got, Hoshi-chan.”

The tennis player looked the most surprised he’d ever seen him, his usually creased eyebrows arched high in complete astonishment. Ouma just stared at him calmly, his face carefully neutral.

“What the—Weren’t you the one who said we weren’t gonna watch the videos? You said it was a bad idea or somethin’?”

“Oh, that was a lie.” It was getting easier and easier to say that. “I wanted to calm everyone down, but I can’t really guess what Monokuma might be planning unless I watch the videos for myself.”

There was a long pause. Hoshi-chan clearly seemed to be trying to sort out how much of what he was saying right now was true or not, and Ouma was glad to see from his face that he couldn’t reach a conclusion one way or the other.

The other boy crossed his arms and stared up at him dubiously. “Still, why d’you wanna see whose I got? It ain’t got nothin’ to do with you, anyway,” he said gruffly. “Look, I dunno what you’re planning, but you gotta know it sounds fishy. Leave me out of it.”

He made to slam the door again, but Ouma was expecting it this time, and stuck out a hand, pushing it back just before it could close in his face.

He smiled with a little too much ease. “Look, Hoshi-chan, it’s not very nice of you to talk about my plans when you’re still trying to hide your plans. I already know you want to see your own motive video, and I know who you think has it,” he said, thinking back to how twice now he’d seen Harukawa Maki standing coldly at the class trial, arms crossed and refusing to give the rest of the group her alibi. “Let me take one look at the motive video you got, and I’ll stay out of your way.”

There was a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach as he said it, a sense of dread and resignation all at once. Sorry, Hoshi-chan, he thought. It’s not decided that you’re going to die this time around. But this is just in case.

Hoshi-chan stared at him from the crack in the door long and hard, clearly trying to make up his mind. Just when it seemed like he’d never answer—

“You ain’t trying to hurt no one, are you?” The words came slowly and skeptically, but they carried a ring of defeat to them.

“No,” Ouma said, glad that there was at least one question in this conversation he could answer quickly, and honestly.

Hoshi Ryouma disappeared from the doorway and returned again, holding out a thin tablet for him to take. When he made to shut the door again, Ouma called out, remembering the reason he’d come here in person, instead of just picking the locks when Hoshi-chan was out of his room.

“Thanks, Hoshi-chan. You’re really helping me out here. I’d be in a pinch if you weren’t around, you know?”

He could hear Hoshi-chan snort from the other side of the doorway. “Yeah, like I believe that.”

The door slammed shut again.

---

Safely back in his room, he watched the video to his heart’s content.

Most of it only confirmed the suspicions he’d been festering since he had woken up in the locker last (since he’d last had the life choked out of him bit by bit), but he wasn’t a single step closer to knowing if she was the ringleader or not.

On the whole, he rather doubted it. Someone like her, she wasn’t a thinker. She did as she was told and she didn’t think for one second to question otherwise. That she’d be imaginative enough to fool them all and run this entire killing game seemed unlikely. But he still didn’t move to grab one of his whiteboard markers, or to push her picture out of the list of suspects.

It was unlikely that she was the ringleader. …But just in case, he’d rather not discount his options just yet.

Still, it was with a grim sort of satisfaction that he replayed the video again. Even if he had yet to stop the usual victims from dying, he had changed things last time, when he’d pointed the finger at Toujou-chan. Getting them to trust him was starting to seem an impossible task, but it’d been easy enough to change things when he’d started doubting them.

“Harukawa Maki—Super High School Level Assassin!” Monokuma’s voice blared through the thin speakers a second time. “A tragic orphan girl, but she found solace and family in the sweet, sweet children who flocked to her…”

Ouma stared at the screen, remembered the sensation of his windpipe being crushed, and began formulating a plan with something like relish.

---

“Hoshi-chan sure must have been delicious, though! I mean, did you see the way those piranhas just jumped on him—”

“Ugh!” Yumeno-chan covered her mouth with her hands, looking distinctly queasy. “Stop it—stop it, I’m going to be sick—”

“I mean, really, they just gobbled him up! Didn’t leave a scrap behind! Kind of makes you wonder what he tasted like, right?”

Chabashira-chan looked at Yumeno-chan worriedly, then back over to him, clearly unable to grasp where this had come from when they were supposed to be debating alibis. “Stop! Just stop, can’t you see you’re making her sick?”

“I mean, I wonder what he must’ve tasted like, at least. Not that they left any for the rest of us to try, but I guess that’s what makes me even more curious. I mean, they could’ve left just one bite, right? Just one?”

“I said stop!”

Chabashira-chan’s raised voice cut across the trial room, but Ouma’s eyes never stopped flicking between Toujou-chan and Harukawa-chan, a smirk playing on the corners of his mouth. Every single person in the room looked a mixture of queasy and startled, even angry, and yet those two seemed curiously calm in the midst of it all. His smirk widened a little.

“Nishishi… Sorry, sorry. I was just curious is all.”

---

Harukawa Maki’s hands wrapped around his throat for the second time, but this time he had witnesses.

“Oh…?” He stared her down as she lifted his feet off the ground, forcing himself to smile even as he felt the sweat forming on his brow. “A-Are you really going to kill me… in front of everyone else…?”

Harukawa-chan stared right back, her eyes cold, but unlike last time there was real anger in her gaze, and he was glad to see it.

There were so many questions he wanted to snipe back at her, but he scarcely had the breath for all of them, so he settled for just one. “That seems… strange… c-considering your talent, right? Unless there’s something you… want to tell the rest of us? Harukawa Maki-chan? Super High School Level Assassin?”

Just as her lip curled into a sneer and Ouma wondered if even having witnesses around wasn’t enough to stop her instinct to kill, someone in the group—probably Momota-chan, he thought lightheadedly—yelled for her to put him down, and he suddenly hit the ground with a thud as the pressure around his lungs released.

It had been a close call, but the sweet rush of oxygen to the brain was enough for him to call it worthwhile. He stayed on his knees and coughed until his chest hurt, but there was a deep sense of satisfaction in the pit of his stomach. He kept remembering the way her eyes had flashed when he’d called her a murderer, just before she’d lunged for his throat, and the coughing gave way to bile which gave way to the urge to laugh.

You are a murderer, Harukawa-chan, he thought. Toujou-chan might have killed Hoshi-chan, but you’re a murderer all the same, and at least this time everybody knows it.

The television comes on again to inform him that it’s precisely 8:00am, and he opens his eyes and stares at it vacantly, wanting more than anything for it to turn back off and leave him in the darkness again. The mascots on screen read lines from their little script, they stumble around incompetently, and all he can think is that the only thing this parody of a show is missing is a laugh track to truly highlight its stupidity.

The show ends and the screen mercifully fades to black, and he flings an arm up over his strained, aching eyes. His heartbeat speeds up a little at the thought that he’s wasted an entire day in his room doing nothing, waiting for the time limit to pass. But only a little.

It’s not as though any of his plans got him anywhere, all those other times. At least he’s being more up front about wasting his time now.

His head is starting to throb, his ears still ringing from the shrill voices on the morning announcement. Maybe now, if he turns and burrows himself into the sheets again, he might actually be able to sleep for an hour or two.

As he shifts to face the wall, he can hear the faintest sound of a knock against his bedroom door. But Ouma stays in his bed and doesn’t get up to answer.

Chapter Text

Everyone avoided him thoroughly after his stand-off with Harukawa-chan. He couldn’t say he hadn’t seen it coming, after the kinds of stunts he had pulled in the trial with Hoshi-chan’s death. Really, this was better, since now he had almost no one to worry about detracting from the time he could be spending on his investigation.

And to be fair, they were all mostly avoiding her, too, and that was really all he had wanted to accomplish. If they were all forced into this unfair game, then he’d rather no one be left with a trump card unturned. The ringleader probably already had plenty of those, anyway, and he was trying to even the odds here.

He became used to this newfound period of isolation. Really, it was a small price to pay if it meant that now everyone knew that Harukawa-chan had been lying to them this whole time. And if he really needed anything from them, he could always find where they were gathered and ask them himself. It was more convenient this way: now he no longer had to dedicate himself to anything besides the third upcoming trial. The third trial that might happen. Maybe. Probably.

Ouma had grown so used to being largely ignored by the group that when he looked up from his lunch in the cafeteria one day only to see Saihara-chan staring at him apprehensively, asking him in the most tentative tone he’d ever heard if he’d like to spend time together, he found himself at a complete loss for words.

This hadn’t happened before. Not the last time around, or the time before that. And he hadn’t even lived this far the first time, so he mentally scratched that one out too. There wasn’t a single time he could remember Saihara-chan ever trying to talk to him about anything that didn’t pertain to an investigation. Even having set aside his cap as a sign of his resolve to stop avoiding the truth, people, and eye contact as a whole, he hadn’t exactly seemed very… well, daring. Akamatsu-chan had always been the brave one, approaching him consistently, every single time.

He searched Saihara-chan’s face thoroughly, ignoring the fact that this only seemed to make the other boy squirm as if he regretted his offer already. Was this just some of Akamatsu-chan’s influence rubbing off on him at last? Was it some new way of trying to prove his “resolve,” as a detective?

Whatever the case, it was interesting. He thought about his whiteboard, and the fact that he had never quite known whether to move Saihara-chan’s picture to the left or the right of his suspect list. Maybe this would provide him some valuable insight.

Ouma’s face split into a grin, and he pulled a chair out next to him, gesturing to the other boy to sit down. Saihara-chan took a seat gingerly, as though afraid he might have put a thumbtack there.

“Coming to talk to me, of all people… You’re more daring than I thought, Saihara-chan!” He tilted his head to one side, holding the other boy’s slightly wavering stare with great interest. Maybe he could make a game of how long it would take before Saihara-chan looked away. “I’m the Super High School Level Supreme Leader, you know? Nishishi… I wonder if you can guess what that means…?” He waved a hand casually and laughed. “I mean, everyone else seems to have guessed.”

Saihara-chan swallowed once, hard, but did not look away. Hmm. He mentally made a note that this was two surprises in one day.

“About that, Ouma-kun… you’ve mentioned it before, but I don’t know what kind of organization you mean.”

“What?” Three surprises. “I told you before, right? I’m the Supreme Leader to a secret, evil organization.” He was getting used to the way that talking about this subject made his head throb, just above his right temple, so he no longer even felt the need to wince. He continued over Saihara-chan’s interruption, saying, “I’m really influential, you know? My organization has 10,000 members!”

Saihara-chan seemed almost as lost now as Akamatsu-chan had when he’d tried so hard to give her all those hints. But there was something oddly promising in the other boy’s eyes that he hadn’t been able to find in Akamatsu-chan’s at all, no matter how much he’d looked. After a few more minutes of talking, Ouma finally placed it as “curiosity.”

Saihara-chan was curious. Of course he was. He was a detective. Ouma felt his grin widen as the pieces he was playing with mentally began to click, click, click into place. Maybe putting bait on the fishing line would be worth it again, if the fish was actually trying to bite this time.

Eventually, he took pity on poor Saihara-chan, who looked as though he wanted nothing more than to slump out of his chair and crawl away from the cafeteria. This had been an interesting discussion, to say the least, so he decided to give him an especially good hint.

“The organization I’m in charge of makes things happen. Ah, from the shadows, of course. Get what I mean?” He noticed the way Saihara-chan’s eyes narrowed with renewed curiosity and smiled blithely in return.

“All those mafias, all over the world, they do exactly as I say. And if I’m not managing them, they all immediately fall apart, turn on each other, and start fighting and causing all kinds of trouble.” More trouble than Saihara-chan could ever realize, he tacked on silently, stirring his spoon around the bottom of his mug before draining the rest of his tea. “It’s so unnecessary. I mean, really, even though peace is our number one priority!”

Saihara-chan didn’t respond out loud, but the look on his face said more than enough: that he couldn’t think of this as a line any evil Supreme Leader would say.

Ouma left the cafeteria later in unusually high spirits for the first time since starting this game.

---

Later that night, when he went to move Saihara-chan’s picture from one side of the whiteboard to the other, he was bemused to find himself pushing it farther out to the right, away from the rest of the pictures of their surviving classmates.

They had spent at least an hour together in the cafeteria today, and he still didn’t have the slightest clue whether he could call the detective any less suspicious or any more trustworthy. That itself was unheard of.

He stared unblinkingly at the picture of the boy in the hat, then finally snagged one of his markers and wrote one phrase in tiny, cramped handwriting: Can’t figure him out?

If he couldn’t glean anything about him from their conversation today, then that just left the necessity of seeing what he would do from here on out. Ouma snapped the marker cap back on and stared at the board in satisfaction, letting his mind wander for a bit.

If Saihara-chan approached him of his own volition again, he’d press back. He wanted to see exactly how much the other boy could keep surprising him—just to make sure today hadn’t been some kind of one-time fluke.

Still thinking of games he might propose if Saihara-chan came to see him again, he shook his head lightly, grabbed a binder from one of his cardboard boxes, and plopped down on his bed. Now it was time to pore over the notes he’d left for himself about the third trial.

---

“Angie can tell, you have a kind and gentle god looking out for you!”

This had been a mistake on his part.

After having let Angie-chan and her Religious Student Council slide under his radar the last time around, he had come seeking her out now that she was starting up the whole thing all over again. Trying to outright protest the council probably wouldn’t end well—Momota-chan didn’t seem to be having any luck with it, in any case, and the group was already divided as a whole on whether religious influence seemed to be a good or a bad thing for their numbers. He had thought he might have a little more luck if he waited to talk to Angie-chan one-on-one, to see what he could glean about the state of her little group that he might have missed last time.

But as it turned out, trying to talk sense into a genuine fanatic was about to drive him up the wall.

“I already told you before, Angie-chan, I don’t have any god looking out for me at all,” he said. How was it that he could keep a smile on his face when talking about gruesome murder details during the school trials, but trying to talk to a devout religious believer for all of two minutes was enough to make him feel like he was fighting a losing battle?

“God looks out for everyone!” she replied sanctimoniously, tapping the edge of her paintbrush against her chin in thought.

He fought to keep his face smooth. “Well, I don’t get any image of any god like the one you’re talking about. If I can’t picture it, doesn’t it kind of sound like you’re lying, Angie-chan?”

“God has a different image for every person!”

She just had a reply for everything. He blinked once, then twice. On the whole, he thought he preferred being ignored by the group at large. Now that he’d come in here to talk to her about her student council movement, she seemed absolutely determined not to let him go until she’d convinced him to join.

“Hey, hey, if you can’t picture the god that Angie is talking about, maybe they just look different to you!” She clasped her hands, apparently pleased at the thought. “But Angie is sure that the god looking out for you is very kind, and very gentle.”

Ouma let his face go blank, tired of forcing a smile for such a pointless conversation. “How would you know that?” he asked.

“Well, god tells Angie these things,” she said, as though it were the most obvious reply in the entire world.

He resisted the urge to let her know that there were a few things he could tell her about, too. Namely, the fact that her god wouldn’t be anywhere to save her when Shinguuji-chan took the edge of a plank of wood to the back of her head in a few days’ time.

Enough. There’s absolutely no point to this. If I can’t convince her to listen to reason, then I should move on to the next point in the investigation.

The corners of his lips turned up again as though he’d never stopped smiling, and he made his way casually to the classroom door. “I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree, huh? After all, they don’t tell me anything.”

“Maybe you’re just not listening hard enough?” Maybe he was imagining it, but he thought he almost saw the corners of her lips turn up as well. “Anyway, Angie can agree to disagree! Bye-onara!”

He turned the knob and left.

---

Where is god now, huh Angie-chan?

He wanted to ask that as he picked the locks with ease and entered the art room to see Angie-chan’s corpse lying in a pool of half-dried, sticky blood, surrounded by wax dolls which looked down on her peacefully without seeing anything at all. But that would be in poor taste (poorer taste even than the comments he’d let slip about Hoshi-chan at the last trial), so he didn’t say anything.

His eyes slid with cold precision from the katana stuck in the lifeless, wax figure of Akamatsu-chan, to the rope suspending the doll off the floor, then finally back over to Angie-chan’s corpse and the open gash at the back of her neck. All the details looked roughly the same as last time, so he decided to move along to Shinguuji-chan’s laboratory again.

Some part of him couldn’t help but wonder, though, if perhaps the reason why Shinguuji-chan’s motives were so inscrutable was because the motive Monokuma provided them had already been carried out. Resurrection of the dead… Yeah, right. The novelty was starting to wear off after seeing it three times already.

If he ever got into a religious debate with Angie-chan again, he made a note to concede that maybe god could exist. In fact, if this were some kind of angry, divine punishment, that might actually explain quite a few holes in his theories.

But a “kind and caring” god? Now that was a joke in poor taste.

---

“Sorry, I wasn’t paying attention for the past ten minutes. Why do we need to do this ritual again?”

“Ouma-kun…?”

Saihara-chan and the rest stared at him in surprise as he examined his nails, feigning boredom. If he let them do the kagonoko ritual which they were oh-so-optimistic about, he’d be sending Chabashira-chan to her death. So he proposed trying to call the whole thing off.

“I mean, who cares if Angie-chan is dead, right? A dead person can’t tell us anything.” He laughed, and the genuine amusement in his voice made all of them recoil. “Don’t tell me you all really believe that this kind of stuff exists outside of anime and light novels? Wooow, incredible! You’re all really children at heart!”

Despite the mask covering his face, he could still tell when Shinguuji-chan’s mouth twisted in displeasure. “The kagonoko ritual is hardly something to call ‘childish,’ Ouma-kun…”

“Eh, really?” He scratched at his chin thoughtfully. “Isn’t trying to talk to the dead a waste of time, though?”

Shinguuji-chan’s eyes narrowed to the point of slits, and Ouma threw his hands up behind his head, pleased. Clearly, he’d struck a nerve with that one.

But he was taken aback when Chabashira-chan suddenly stepped forward, putting her hand on Yumeno-chan’s shoulder. “No, we’re doing it. We should definitely try this.” She had the grace to at least blush a little. “I don’t know if it’ll really work or not, but… as long as there’s even a chance, I want Yumeno-san to be able to say goodbye to Angie-san.”

Yumeno-chan stared up at her blearily, as though she couldn’t quite get her eyes to focus. “Ch-Chabashira…”

“It’s alright!” Chabashira-chan flexed her arms and smiled. “I’m doing this because I want to protect you, Yumeno-san!”

He lowered his arms and crossed them, letting his bottom lip stick out in a pout. He felt it might be better than showing a sneer. “Hmmm? Can neo-aikido really do anything against ghosts, though?” He already knew it wouldn’t be able to do anything against the blade that was about two minutes away from entering her neck.

Although her smile had usually faltered every single time she’d been forced to talk to him in this game, this time she seemed unfazed. “Of course!” she said. “Someone like you wouldn’t be able to understand, but wanting to protect another person gives you strength! So even if Angie-san’s spirit does come… I’ll be okay.”

“It’s true,” Shinguuji-chan said, nodding thoughtfully. “Spirits are quite susceptible to the power of belief, as long as the proper precautions are taken…”

There wasn’t much to be done, after he was outvoted. So Ouma stood in his place on the magic circle, and when he heard the unmistakable thud in the dark that was the sound of Chabashira-chan’s body crashing into the blade and back down to the floor again, he just opened his mouth and sang a little louder, ignoring the sour taste at the back of his mouth.

---

He sat up abruptly in his bed the night that they finished the third trial, scattering papers which he’d failed to move back over to the cardboard boxes or his desk to the floor instead. He hardly cared about the mess. All he could focus on was the sudden realization that had hit him just as he was about to turn the light off and sleep: there were only two Exisals left.

Monokuma aside, if it was just a problem of two of those idiot bears then something could be done. His brain raced furiously as he tried to calculate the math. Nine survivors, two Exisals, one ringleader—so only eight survivors, really, but those still weren’t bad odds. Monokuma had spares, but all the spares in the world didn’t amount to much as long as the Exisals were taken out of commission first.

Better yet, if they could get rid of those last two bear cubs before they could even reach the Exisals, then maybe the machines could actually be turned to their advantage. He touched a hand lightly to his chest, remembering the way the bullets fired by that death trap had shredded through him like paper. If they had huge weapons like that on their side instead—well, hadn’t he just watched those stupid cubs make a show of intimidating Monokuma for days on end?

He had been so preoccupied with the thought of investigating things the usual way the last time around that this possibility hadn’t even occurred to him. Throwing the sheets back, he stood up and started pacing, trying to put his thoughts in order.

The odds weren’t bad. They still weren’t perfect, but they weren’t bad. He’d seen them go against all five Exisals the first time around, and they’d all been gunned down with ease, but that had been during a school trial, and the Exisals had already been prepared and at the ready. This time, with the right amount of planning and all the Super High School Level talents they had at their disposal…

Ouma made his way to the whiteboard, nearly tripping over a stray box in the process. But he righted himself, uncapped a marker, and dragged the tip quickly down the middle of the board. About thirty seconds later, he stood back and examined his handiwork intently. A smaller version of himself stared back, tongue out and a goofy smile on his face, fingers held up in a v-shape.

V for victory, he thought.

If he played all his cards right, there might not be any need to wake up in a dark, cramped locker ever again. He’d been thinking so hard in terms of how to survive, that he’d almost forgotten trying to get out was even an option.

But there was no need to die, and no need to kill. Maybe he could win this game without even needing to play it.

---

With his chin resting on his hand, he tilted his head to the side slightly. “Done investigating so soon, Saihara-chan?”

The other boy looked relatively sheepish to be found out so soon. He stood hesitantly in the doorway of the empty classroom for a moment or two longer, then closed the door behind him.

Ouma studied him thoroughly, trying to figure out his reason for being here. He was surprisingly hard to read, so he tried taking a guess. “Did you come to get the key card from me? Hey, sorry, but I won’t give it up that easily.”

They had all gone off to explore the fifth floor earlier this morning. Monokuma had presented them with another motive, of course: a simple key card that hardly looked intimidating enough to ever be a reason to kill someone. But people had already killed for less in this game, and so Ouma had snatched it, proposing they not even use it.

Not a single one of them had been happy with that suggestion, obviously, but he’d pressed his point. After all, ignoring the plan about the motive videos before was exactly what had gotten Hoshi-chan killed, as they were all so quick to forget. They’d accepted his resolution with some bitterness—obviously, they couldn’t be sure he wasn’t going to go find a use for that card himself.

But it was fine if they thought what they wanted. After all, he still intended to keep it tucked away in his pocket from here on out, the same way that his own motive video was tucked in an empty drawer at the bottom of his desk, collecting a layer of dust. Some things were better off left unchecked, if they wanted to see this game to its end.

Now that he had finished his investigation (his daytime investigation, anyway; tonight he still planned on making a full run of the place while no one else was around), he found himself here, staring down Saihara-chan. Anyone entering the room might think he was interrogating him, all alone in this empty classroom like this. Wryly, he couldn’t help but feel like maybe their roles should be reversed—Saihara-chan was the detective, after all.

“You can keep the key card. …For now, anyway,” Saihara-chan said with some reluctance. “I think you’re right in that we shouldn’t rush into using it right now.” There was something in his eyes though that suggested he would want to find a use for it someday. A detective was supposed to want to investigate everything, so he could hardly begrudge him that.

Ouma shifted his hand a little, but didn’t lift his chin. If that wasn’t the answer, then he already had another guess in mind. “Hmm? So what, did you come to beg for your life?”

“Eh?” A look of surprise flashed transparently across Saihara-chan’s face. “W-Well… yeah. I just wanted to know if… you were serious, last time? When you said you were going to kill me?”

“Of course! That’s what a Supreme Leader does, you know?” Ouma smiled at him cheerfully, thinking meanwhile of all the ways someone could easily have bashed Saihara-chan’s head in from behind, if he was so fond of coming to hang out with people in empty classrooms like this. Maybe Harukawa-chan would do something like that, seeing as she was so good at it. “I swear on my title—” Throb, just behind his right eye. “—that I have to protect my organization. So that’s why I’ll need you to die, see.”

He knew he shouldn’t keep pushing the matter, but it was just too much fun. Every time he came up with some new and inventive way of asking Saihara-chan to put either his life or his pride on the line, the other boy reacted so hilariously according to his predictions, he just couldn’t help himself.

“If I commit seppuku, I’ll die!”

“Tch. You didn’t fall for it, huh? That’s boring.” Where had that hard-to-read nature from before gone? “Okay, then hear me out here! If you want to live, you’ll have to beat me in a game. I mean, I did just tell you about everything without even asking you first, so I guess I owe you at least one chance to stay alive.”

He grinned lazily with his chin still on his hand, waiting patiently for even more stammering, hesitant pleas—

“Then I accept your challenge.”

Ouma lifted his head up and looked the other boy over intently, silently adding another tally mark on the whiteboard in his head. Apparently he was not, in fact, out of surprises.

“Huuuuuh, now that was quick. Completely different from what I thought you’d say, huuuh?”

Would the Saihara Shuuichi from those other times have responded that quickly?

He stood up and leaned in, grin stretching from ear to ear as Saihara-chan glanced down at him uncomfortably, although without backing away. “Hmm, you’re very interesting, Saihara-chan! Keep entertaining me like this, won’t you?”

He reached into his other pocket, glad for a chance to take out the deck of cards that he’d brought along since that last time, just in case.

---

“What… the hell… was that?”

No one responded to Momota-chan’s question as they stood shakily around the table. Each pair of eyes stared sightlessly ahead, but it was doubtful that any of them were really seeing the cafeteria walls before them. Instead, Ouma thought it much more likely that they were all envisioning the same thing: meteor showers, people rioting in the streets, a failed project by the name of the wood with which Noah built the ark.

Momota-chan had rounded them all up after finding another flashback light, and foolishly they’d thought it worth watching. These were the only clues to their real memories, their pasts, their families, after all.

Or were they, really? He remembered lots of things that hadn’t technically happened anymore. If it came down to a question of which of the memories in his head were more believable, the ones he’d seen with his own two eyes or the ones a flashlight had told him about—he didn’t know which he’d pick.

He almost felt like laughing. Except he really, really didn’t.

“Th-This place has gotta be hell! We’re in hell!”

Iruma-chan’s shrill voice startled all of them out of their depressed contemplation. He could see the way everyone else exchanged gazes, brief flickers of understanding that she was clearly losing her marbles.

Too bad for them. That’s the most rational thing I’ve ever heard Iruma-chan say.

Clasping her hands to her chest, Iruma-chan stumbled back a few steps. If she noticed the way everyone was looking at her, she didn’t seem to care much. “The plan failed! It failed, and all those th-things came down from the sky, and now we’re fuckin’ dead!” There was a pale sheen of sweat on her face, and he knew it wasn’t the thought of dying that scared her. There were worse things than dying. “If we died, then the only reason we’d be somewhere like this is if it was hell.”

Yes, that’s true, he wanted to say. You’re all certainly dead.

Iruma-chan had never struck him as a person with much to contribute when it came to group discussions, but he almost wanted to applaud her on her theory now. After all, he’d already seen them die plenty of times. Hell didn’t seem like a far cry away from what he’d been reliving lately.

As everyone else tried to calm her down, watching her trembling with nervous looks in their eyes, he thought long and hard about the key card in his pocket.

---

Something wet was trickling into his eyes.

He tried opening his eyes, but it was strangely painful. Something very hot, very sticky, felt as if it were gluing them shut…

After a few more moments, he managed to pry one eye open, and hazily took in the sight of a world flipped at ninety degrees. For some reason, his head was pounding.

Why am I on the floor…?

Realization crept in slowly and reluctantly. He blinked his one open eye several times, trying to make sense of an unfamiliar room filled with cold, hard machinery, and an electric panel that looked as though it might have a card reader. His brain stuttered once, twice, taking in the sight of a red stain on metal pipes not far from where he was lying on his side.

More warm, painful stuff kept trickling into his eyes, making the one that was open sting.

Am I bleeding…?

“Oi! What a waste of a good motive!”

The words sounded muffled, as though they were coming from very far away. But as he forced his eye to look a little further to the right, he could faintly make out a black-and-white shape standing just to the side of him, looking down. Monokuma, he realized belatedly.

“You didn’t like what you saw, huh? Yeah, I bet you didn’t!” The bear seemed almost to leer at him, despite the fact that its face was split into the same eerie grin as always. “But couldn’t you have had the decency to at least take someone else out with you? I mean, don’t you think it’s a little cruel to your classmates, you just leaving them all alone in a big, empty world like this?”

Ouma struggled to make sense of what it was saying, but the pain in his head had gone from dim to unbearable in moments flat. He was finding it a struggle to keep even the one eye open now, as if more than just blood was keeping it from functioning properly.

Monokuma peered down at him with something resembling—resignation? Disappointment? He couldn’t tell.

“Well, whatever,” the bear said, voice still curiously distant despite the fact that it was standing so close to him. “It’s not like you’re gonna be around much longer anyway. And it’s not a rule violation if I make the crime scene more interesting, once you’re gone.”

Crime… scene…?

Ouma struggled to fix his eye on the stain on the metal machinery, grasped finally that his heartbeat was doing the familiar slow cadence just before the end of everything.

Monokuma continued, sounding almost (Ouma couldn’t really tell, and didn’t really care) chipper now at the thought of something much more interesting. “I mean, it wouldn’t be the first time in one of these games that a suicide had to be made more interesting. You kids get way too boring when you get all depressed.”

Suicide, Ouma repeated dimly inside his head. Su-i-cide. Ah, that was right. That was right, he’d seen—he’d known—

“I mean, after all—the show must go on, right?”

The last thing he saw was Monokuma’s stretched-out grin and red eye flashing, and then he let the pain overwhelm him as his weary eye closed.

---

Apparently killing himself willingly didn’t mean he stopped waking up in the locker. Big surprise there.

But he could realize, looking back, why he must have thought it would work at the time. Why he’d wanted it to work.

Without the pain in his swollen, bashed-in head, without the blood running into his eyes and smearing them, he could remember very well the sight that had met him beyond the door—the door he’d sought out after painstakingly inching and crawling his way through the labyrinth Monokuma had told them about in their first days at this school.

He had just wanted to check it. Just to make sure. If there were an actual exit, then he could tell them. And if something horrible were on the other side and the rest of them saw, they’d be playing right into letting it become a motive-as-usual. So it had been better to go alone—

Or so he’d thought.

Ouma clasped a hand to his mouth, expecting the urge to vomit—and was surprised when he was met with the urge to laugh instead. He held his hand in place carefully, thinking back on the noxious fumes, the streets in rubble, the sky on fire, and had to bite his cheek so that he didn’t laugh. And laugh. And laugh.

It was just too funny. Yes, he’d definitely been right to snatch the key card from all of them. They would’ve torn each other apart in five minutes if they’d been met with that sight and seen for themselves the objective proof that Iruma-chan was right: this was hell. And like hell, there were only more and more circles to go, it seemed.

Laughter bubbled up in the back of his throat, sour as ever, but what else could he do? Murders in this god-awful game had meant very little before, but they meant less than ever now.

Some small part of him watched on coldly as the rest of him stood there and laughed in the locker, reminding him of the other things Monokuma had said just before he died—games, multiple games. A show. A show must go on. And a game always followed its rules.

He knew it was something to pick apart later and think about shrewdly, carefully, methodically. But for now, he just stood there and tried not to let his laughter escape too loudly, and it was a long, long time before he stepped out into the classroom again.

He doesn’t think it’s been more than an hour when his eyes open suddenly. The fact that he was actually asleep this time dawns slowly on him, but he can tell by the clamminess of his face and chest that he must have dreamt, too. And if he dreamt, it was probably the same as when he lies awake, thinking on all the scenes he’s watched and lived and died through.

He hasn’t known a restful sleep in ages now. The brief moments (eternities?) between dying one time and waking up in the locker the next, maybe. But after that, he always wakes up to a new world of pain, with his joints aching and his head on fire, so he’s not really sure if they count.

While thinking about this, he gradually comprehends that he didn’t wake up of his own accord. He can, he realizes, hear a sound in the room. A knock on the door, louder than the one he heard before drifting off to sleep this morning.

He stays where he is, lying there lifelessly under the sheets with a gnawing feeling in the pit of his stomach. Just as he’s thinking that whoever it is, they’ll definitely go away, he realizes with some annoyance that there’s more than one of them.

“Heeey! Hey, whoever you are, you in there?” Even with the door in the way, Momota-chan’s voice is loud, brash, and obnoxious enough that it rings through clearly. Even after he tones the volume down a few notches, Ouma’s ears are sharp enough to make out what he’s saying. “See, I told you, he ain’t answering. I’ve been at it for like an hour now. Hey, Shuuichi, you try it.”

Silence. The pause stretches on, and then—

Another knock on the door. “Hello? Is someone in there? We’d like to talk with you, if that’s okay.”

He recognizes that voice too, and the gnawing feeling in his stomach only gets stronger.

“Maybe he’s just not in?” A girl’s voice, harder to make out. But he’s pretty sure it must be Akamatsu-chan. “Well, still worth giving it a try. We’ve only got this to go on, after all.”

They keep knocking. It’s not as though being unable to sleep anymore is a huge loss—sleeping or being awake, it’s all the same at this point. But he can’t stand the noise, not when his room was so quiet before.

On another occasion, he might have just gotten up and opened the door.

And on another, he might have said, wait just a second, this is your ringleader, I’m just burying the body, hold on and I’ll be right out.

This time, he stares up at the ceiling, and even though his throat is parched and his voice is weak from lack of use, he manages to say “Go away,” loud enough to be heard on the other side of the door.

Ouma listened with the smallest of smiles as Monokuma explained the two-day time limit this time.

While the rest of his classmates shrieked or went silent from shock, he just stood there watching carefully, the gears in his head turning slowly. He tuned out their noise, narrowing everything down to the same speech he’d heard so many times before, removing anything from the situation at hand that would interfere with efficiency, precision, or logic.

Things made so much more sense, now. Funny, how finding out that the world was over could be so useful at a time like this.

Two days had always struck him as a strange, almost inadequate amount of time. And it wasn’t like the bear had ever given them another time limit for any of the other trials, no matter how many times he’d relived this scenario. No, it was always just this one. Just the first one, before anything had even taken place.

If the objective had been to throw them into an even bigger panic, then only twenty-four hours would’ve sufficed. His classmates would’ve been up in arms, scrambling around, probably aiming for the nearest weapon at hand before they even realized what they were doing. But it was, of course, probably too short a time for anything to get accomplished. Murder for the sake of a school trial, a real risk, required planning and foresight.

By contrast, they could’ve just been given a week. Still a time limit, but with more than enough time to plan ahead, and still short enough that the dread would creep back in on them before they had time enough to get complacent. But clearly that was too much time, because two days was much, much shorter than seven.

But if the show had to go on, as Monokuma had so succinctly put it, then—yes, that made sense. No audience in their right mind would want such an exciting development to happen too fast for them to catch it, nor would they want to wait an entire week before anything interesting happened. Two days sounded just right.

“Please, Gonta doesn’t understand very well! Why would you ever do something like this?!”

“T-Two days?! That’s all?! We only get two damn days?!”

“Everyone, please calm down, let’s just try and think about this—”

Ouma’s gaze flickered over to them for only the briefest of moments, with the barest amount of interest possible. Then he tuned them out again, already planning out his next few moves. He no longer needed to picture a whiteboard in his mind when he already had one in his room. This time, a chessboard would suffice.

The world might be over, but his time spent in this living hell was very clearly not. If this was a game, then he’d have to play to win.

By his own rules, of course.

---

“…What are you even talking about?”

“Hmm?”

He opened his eyes and grinned at Akamatsu Kaede, feigning confusion. But he was already very well aware of what she meant, what she thought, and most likely what she was going to say from here on out. After all, ever since he’d started lying to her and the others relentlessly, her disapproval of him never wavered.

Her smile was on the verge of turning into a smirk, as if she had just caught him at something. “Ouma-kun, you keep saying you’re the Supreme Leader of an evil organization, but… that’s just a lie, right? That organization of yours doesn’t even exist, does it?”

He laughed faintly, the throbbing in his temple almost a pleasant sensation this time. One of the few perks from bashing his own head in last time, he supposed, was that lighter headaches hardly fazed him now. “That’s right, I’m definitely a liar.” It wasn’t like any of them could handle the truths he could have told them anyway. “But hey, why do you think it’s a lie exactly? Why won’t you believe me on this one, even though you fell for all those other lies before?”

The fact that he was avoiding the subject seemed to fly right over her head. He kept his smile in place, but felt distinctly bored as she said something verging on ridiculous.

“You’re asking me why…? Have some common sense.” Akamatsu-chan heaved a sigh, as though dealing with someone much younger, or much denser. “There’s no way anything like a secret, evil organization could exist in our current society. So saying that you’re the leader of one is just ridiculous, Ouma-kun.”

Ouma let the act drop for a fraction of a second, staring at her blankly with an intensity that seemed to take her aback. He studied her and mentally adjusted his chessboard pieces. If she wouldn’t listen to him this time, he’d just have to take her off the board for good. And that was a shame, considering she and Amami-chan were perhaps his best, his only shot at stopping this stupid game before it even started.

“Hmmm, common sense.” She was the one who was being ridiculous. “Common sense, com-mon se-nse, co-mo-n s-e-nse, huh…?” As if common sense mattered at all in this situation. “Hey, who gets to decide that stuff?” As if she had any right at all to open her mouth and talk about common sense, when he already knew she was planning on launching a steel ball in less than a day that would crack Amami-chan’s skull wide open. “Tell me Akamatsu-chan, when exactly do you think you started having your common sense, or listening to it?” As if common sense would say that committing to a plan to kill someone was okay, as long as you were doing it for the so-called “right reasons.”

“Eh…” Her eyes went wide.

It was clear the conversation had shifted to a place beyond her understanding, but he hardly cared. He continued over her, saying, “I was officially, specifically chosen for the Gifted Program as the Super High School Level Supreme Leader, alright? Look at that from the perspective of your ‘common sense,’ and that clearly means I’m the real deal, right, Akamatsu-chan?”

“Well… that’s true, but…” She looked more than a little unnerved. He was glad to know that even if she could never grasp the hints he threw her way, she seemed perfectly capable of recognizing his hostility.

“And yet, Akamatsu-chan, you just told me that you don’t think I’m a Supreme Leader? Have some ‘common sense,’” he said, traces of a smirk now playing on his lips as he raised a finger up to his mouth, as though to scold her.

He had already known she would react with anger and hostility of her own when pressed this hard. Akamatsu-chan wasn’t the type to let herself be shoved around like this, after all. He threw his hands up behind his head as a gesture of truce, grinning at her incomprehensibly even as she fumed.

Unsurprisingly, she wasn’t listening to a word he said seriously. But that was fine. That was what had happened all the other times, after all. If she wouldn’t listen to his next offer—if her chess piece was no longer available to him—then he was going to move down the list.

“But really, just know that I’m thinking of your best interests here, okay Akamatsu-chan? If you keep turning down my offer like this, don’t come crying to me when things go wrong.” He beamed at her, and found himself completely unsurprised when he heard her final say on the matter—

“I don’t need your concern! After all, my answer to your secret agent offer is still no, thank you very much!”

Ouma lowered his hands, looked away from her, and carefully, slowly removed Akamatsu-chan’s piece from the chessboard in his head.

---

The sound of approaching footsteps caused him to look up from where he sat in the cafeteria.

Iruma-chan entered the room with her arms crossed, looking distinctly put off. And yet, there was undeniable curiosity in her gaze as she glanced around, double-checking that they were the only ones in the room.

“Whoa, Iruma-chan actually showed up! And here I thought you might not make it! I wondered if you might need a map, see. You seem like the type to forget basic information even after you’ve heard it a hundred times.”

“Hey, shut the fuck up.” Her lips curled into a sneer as she forgot for a moment to be suspicious of him. “Who would even forget how to get here? It’s the fuckin’ cafeteria, you little brat!”

“You forgot what the word ‘alibi’ meant,” he told her happily, tipping his chair onto its back two legs. “Nishishi… Anyway, I’m glad you could come.”

The suspicion seemed to set in again as her eyes darted around the room. Everyone else had already come and gone for breakfast; the chances of them coming by here now were slim. They had the cafeteria to themselves, and everyone else was likely off either in their own rooms or off exploring their research labs.

This was exactly why he’d asked her to meet him here, of course. He knew that by asking to go see her room, the request would sound way too suspicious, even if he phrased it in terms more to her liking. And there was no way he’d ever let her into his room.

“Why the hell’d you want me to come here alone, anyway? If you’re planning something, I swear to God…”

“Oh, I’m planning something.” Ouma spoke up instantly, and the words seemed to make her freeze in place, so he continued, grin still in place. “Not anything that would get you hurt, Iruma-chan. Relax.”

She exhaled visibly, but the tension didn’t leave her shoulders. “Who’d ever believe that… like hell…” She muttered under her breath for a while. Every now and then he could catch some colorful word or other. Then an idea seemed to dawn on her and she straightened up, peering over at him somewhat hopefully.  “Unless… I mean, if you’re interested in that… I wouldn’t mind, so—”

Seeing the way her eyes were now flicking to the tabletops, and the way she seemed to be interpreting his request to come alone, Ouma spoke over her quickly, his grin falling as he fixed her with a blank stare. “You can invent things, can’t you Iruma-chan?”

“Huh?” She stopped twiddling her fingers suggestively, staring at him without understanding.

“Are you a Super High School Level Inventor or aren’t you?” he asked, pressing her on impatiently.

“Y-Yeah…! I mean, yeah, but...” She seemed to have trouble getting the words out, the forcefulness of his tone having caught her off guard. Then she cleared her throat. “I-I’m the best inventor there’s ever been, obviously. Did you forget who the hell you’re talkin’ to?!”

She rested a hand on her hip and sneered down at him again, apparently trying to come across as intimidating. But that was just fine. As long as she could live up to her boasts about inventing, he didn’t really care what else she bluffed about.

He let the front two legs of his chair slam down as he stood up and approached her three steps. Any further than that and he was sure she’d either bolt from the room or hit him.

“Make me this, then. Ah, don’t read it ‘till you get back to your room, though. Wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise, would we?” He reached into his pocket, feeling around until he extracted a carefully folded piece of paper.

There were cameras all around, he had no doubt. He remembered all too clearly the way he’d heard Gonta remark thoughtfully how he was sure he’d seen a bug’s wings flickering in the sun, almost so small that he’d missed it—remembered how the word bug had clicked into place as the pieces readjusted on the chessboard in his head.

If he were right about this, then it would explain plenty, including how Monokuma knew the results of the trials without question, and why it was so hard to snoop around anywhere off-limits without the damn bear noticing and interfering.

If Iruma-chan could make what was shown on the diagram he’d drawn her, then he’d let her twiddle her fingers and picture whatever lewd scenarios she could possibly want in that brain of hers.

She took the paper from him hesitantly, her fingers trembling a bit. His smile returned and he waved to her casually, turning on his heels to leave the cafeteria. But before he could go, she called out to him uncertainly.

“Wh-Why should I?”

He turned back to look at her, his smile still fixed but his gaze cold. She flinched a bit, but continued. “Even if I wanted to, I can’t even promise I’ll be able to make much… my lab might've been open from the start, sure, but I dunno if I’ve got all the materials and stuff…”

The way she clicked her tongue in disapproval, clearly itching to make something while cooped up in this game, was all he needed to hear to know she’d still go along with his plan anyway.

Ouma threw his hands behind his head like always, his smile widening. “Well, you don’t have to take my word for it, because I’m a liar… but if you do it, just know that it’ll be fun.”

“F-Fun?”

“Everything’s a game, Iruma-chan.”

He doesn’t know why, but they’re only knocking more, not less.

It’s been precisely half an hour since he told them to go away, and his words seem to have only achieved the opposite effect. Momota-chan had distinctly said something about “holding down the fort” to the other two and run off, coming back within minutes with even more of them.

He would frown, but he doesn’t have the energy. Twisting his mouth only slightly as he stares at the wall, Ouma thinks that if he ever repeats this scenario again, he’ll just keep his mouth shut.

“So, there’s someone inside, right? Gonta doesn’t really get it, but that’s good! That means there are sixteen of us after all, right?”

“It certainly follows.” A reasonable, level-headed voice—he can place it as Amami-chan’s. “If there’s sixteen of us, then it’s just like I told you all earlier. So we have to make sure he comes out here, and then we can talk to him about the plan.”

“Still, it’s kind of worrying if he’s just in there and not responding…” Shirogane-chan’s voice comes through so softly he can barely hear her. “Do you think he’s okay?”

Knock knock knock. “Hey, you’re in there, right? Come out and talk to us, we don’t bite!” Chabashira-chan’s energetic voice sounds sincere. “Yumeno-san, do you want to try too?”

He can’t hear the full response, but he suspects he can distinctly make out the words “too much of a pain.”

Chabashira-chan tries again, not to be discouraged. “Come on, just open the door and let us talk! We have something important to tell you about!” She knocks a bit more, then stops with a sigh. “Guess he really is stubborn, huh? Well, he’s a guy after all, so…”

“Hey, come on guys, we can’t give up that easily! Gotta keep trying or this plan’s never gonna work!” Momota-chan takes charge in the pause that follows. Knowing him, Ouma suspects he’s going around patting them all on the shoulders, or hitting their backs. “Hey, you’ve been quiet for a while, Shuuichi. Wanna give it another try?”

Another pause. Shorter than last time, but still too long for his liking. Then the voice he least wants to hear calls out, soft and clear as a bell—

“If you’re in there, could you please open up? It’s really important that we talk to you.”

“Go away.”

He didn’t bother asking Hoshi-chan for permission, this time. After all, he hardly needed permission when he had lockpicks.

Ouma sat on his bed cross-legged, ignoring the Monopad beside him, instead thinking back to how perfectly his plan went off without a hitch. For the first time since he woke up in the locker this time around, he felt like he might almost smile without forcing it.

He remembered clearly how he leaned in close to Saihara-chan’s face, chattering merrily about hell and how they were both stuck in it, remembered how the other boy had scrambled to sit up so quickly he’d nearly toppled back over in the process. And he remembered the shrieks and yelps of his classmates as he had unleashed the torrent of bugs upon them—shrieks and screams which for once, had had nothing to do with an execution or a body discovery of some sort.

All in all, he rather felt like calling it a successful night.

But Hoshi-chan is still going to die come tomorrow morning. And those shrieks and screams won’t sound so pleasant then, will they?

He stopped fiddling with the pen in his hand at that thought. Hoshi-chan’s piece was certainly very close to being taken off the board again, whichever way he looked at it. Now wasn’t the time to be thinking about pranks.

And besides, there was one more thing he’d wanted to check with his own two eyes. One more thing, now that he’d already seen for himself the state of the world outside that awaited them at the end of this game…

All these times, he’d avoided watching this exact thing for fear that it would be the tipping point. Had he given in and watched it before—what he’d seen, last time—even he wasn’t sure if he’d have managed to keep from crossing that invisible line. But as he was now, he hoped he could manage.

Ouma glanced up briefly at his whiteboard, setting the pen down as he bit at his thumb nail absentmindedly. The doodle he’d re-drawn this time around met his eye happily, fingers still posed, tongue still stuck out. It was nothing but empty encouragement, but it was encouragement nonetheless.

There’s nothing to worry about. This video’s just one more lie to add to my collection, probably.

He thought back to the sight of his brains smeared against the wall, of Harukawa-chan’s hands squeezing at his throat, of the ways in which he had and had not yet seen his classmates die around him. And he thought back to the single, unchanging truth that he’d witnessed, still foul and horrible no matter how much he or anyone else might wish it were otherwise.

As he picked the Monopad up and pressed play, he couldn’t help but wonder if the ones this show was being put on for were getting their kicks in somehow.

---

Some time after Toujou-chan’s trial, Saihara-chan approached him and challenged him to another game. What’s more, he didn’t even follow the same script as last time. Ouma had posed the same questions, the same riddles—and yet, the reactions were all subtly different.

The more he came to question the state of this game they were all in, and the rules they were all expected to perform according to, the more he found himself quite intrigued by the idea of going off-script.

“Rock-paper-scissors!”

He threw his hand out again, followed the arc of Saihara-chan’s throw, switched his fingers at the exact last second. The result: a perfect tie. Their seventy-eighth tie so far, in fact.

The other boy stared dubiously at their matching hands, then made eye contact with him. Ouma liked to think he’d been doing rather a lot of that lately. He still inevitably looked away, mumbling some theory or other to himself under his breath as he tried to figure out just how he was managing it, or if this was really pure luck.

But the Saihara-chan from last time definitely hadn’t looked him in the eye quite so often. Definitely.

“Come on Saihara-chan, let’s go another round! You better play like your life is on the line! Well, your life is on the line, after all.”

Another round. And another one. He could see with some amusement (real amusement?) that the wheels in the detective’s head were spinning, trying to grasp the truth of this inexplicable mystery. It was the same look he’d seen on Saihara-chan’s face many a time, whenever a body had wound up in front of them and they’d all found themselves wrapped up in yet another school trial.

As he continued to throw his hand out almost lazily with every “scissors,” always switching to exactly which motion was required of him, Ouma shifted through his chess pieces mentally. If the Saihara-chan before him now was undeniably a different piece than the Saihara-chan he’d played against before, then how much longer would he have to keep going until his next promotion? If the rest of these hapless idiots were little more than pawns in the grand scheme of things, what would Saihara-chan become, exactly, if he made it all the way to the other side of the board?

He thought back to the words on his whiteboard which he’d written once again, and realized with a rush that a piece which was already going off-script might be able to play by different rules entirely.

Ah. I really can’t figure him out after all. Now that’s interesting.

“Another tie…”

Saihara-chan’s voice snapped him out of his reverie, and he glanced back up to see their hands still matching, still set in the exact same pose as if they’d planned it beforehand.

Ouma withdrew his hand and yawned, shifting back in his chair lazily. “Ahhh, as expected, I got bored of this after all! Was this our hundredth tie, then? Come on Saihara-chan, give me a break and just finish the match already.”

The detective blinked back at him, for once looking only mildly confused, rather than bewildered and uncomfortable. “Even if you say that…”

“Well, that’s all for today.” Ouma hopped to his feet lightly, grinning down at his opponent. “Are you okay with leaving it like this, Saihara-chan? Have you really done everything you wanted to do while you’re still alive? Oh, and on that note…  Did you know? There’s actually a surefire way to tie a game of rock-paper-scissors without fail, every single time.”

“Eh?”

As Saihara-chan glanced up at him with renewed confusion, Ouma felt his face split into a smirk.

Always question the rules of the game you’re playing, Saihara-chan, he thought happily.

---

“Ouma-kun, could I talk to you for a second?”

The sound of Kiibo’s voice brought him reluctantly to a halt as he walked down the hallway, causing his lip to curl just the slightest bit. But he faced the robot with a smile, hands in his pockets, the perfect response in mind. “I dunno, Kiiboy, can you? You were the one built with a voice feature, you tell me.”

“This is exactly what I wanted to talk to you about.” Kiibo sighed and pinched his fingers to the bridge of a nose he didn’t even need to use in what could only be described as an all-around human gesture. Well, he’d thought of it as such the last few times before this, anyway. “You seem very set on mocking me. Is there some reason for it?”

Vaguely, Ouma wondered how deep that line of questioning went. If this were a person asking him, he wouldn’t think much of it. But Kiibo wasn’t a person, as he kept reminding himself often. No matter how much he might look and talk and act like one, he clearly wasn’t one—his presence in the group felt off, somehow. Why include someone whose talent was the simple fact that they’d been built by someone else?

“Can’t it just be because you’re a robot, Kiiboy?” he said, tilting his head to the side.

“It’s Kiibo.” Another sigh. “Yes, I thought as much. But I had rather hoped it was just my imagination…”

Ouma grinned. “Oh, so robots have an understanding of imagination now, do they?”

“Please stop. I’m really serious here. And why do you keep responding to all of my questions with more questions, anyway?”

He bit back the temptation to respond to that with yet another question. Maybe if he kept throwing them at him, one after another, his circuitry would fry itself. The mental image amused him at first, then brought that sour taste into his mouth again. “That’s your problem, Kiiboy. You’re always serious, but you’re never quite real. You’re a robot, so I guess that’s to be expected!”

Kiibo’s third sigh sounded rather defeated as Ouma leaned in and gave him a sarcastic pat on his cold, metallic shoulder. “I suppose it was a waste of time trying to talk with you reasonably.”

“Nishishi. Yeah, you really did waste my time.” He stepped back again, grin still in place even as his eyes flicked coldly from the robot’s face, to his hands, to his eyes. If this were a show, he reminded himself, then a robot was likely little more than a prop. And he hardly had the time to be talking to props. “I’ll see you around, Kiiboy,” he said.

He turned on his heel and left.

---

Two steps, three steps. Pause. Turn.

He stopped and faced the door before him, imposing and tall in the gloom of the tunnel around him. It was the first time he’d managed to come across this door—not only this time, but out of all the other times, as well.

It made sense, in hindsight. He’d always assumed it would be further up, just out of reach, on the fifth floor the way Shirogane-chan’s was, or perhaps even on a mysterious sixth floor. That he hadn’t run into it even once in all this time hadn’t struck him as particularly worth worrying about the first few times. He hadn’t even had time to worry about it the first few times, after all.

But he’d found it now. He knew exactly where it must lead, but the room on the other side would stay a mystery to him until he decided to open the door for himself.

Ouma paused and waited. Since he’d finally found it, he half-expected to see Monokuma turn up at any moment, dropping some snide remark or thinly veiled encouragement to keep riling the others up. He stayed like that, immobile for at least two minutes, and only then did he release a sigh.

If the bear wasn’t showing up, then that was probably thanks to the vacuum-jar in his hands (Iruma-chan had given it a much raunchier name of her own, given all the opportunity for innuendo where a vacuum was involved). He let his eyes pass over the jar in the dim light, but the “bugs” that it held were still much, much too small for him to see. He’d just have to trust that they were in there, instead of out here, doing their jobs.

He pushed the door open, half-expecting to feel the resistance of a lock. Even if there had been, he could have just picked it open. But it opened effortlessly, as though having been waiting for him all along.

Inside was—a lair.

He took it all in, his face expressionless, walking from one end of the cavern to the next. Under other circumstances, he would have been thrilled. If he had ever managed to stumble upon this place by sheer dumb luck the first time after he’d woken up in the locker, he was pretty sure he’d have liked it. Pretty sure, but not entirely. It was starting to feel like a very long time ago.

The cavern overhead was immense, a blend of smooth rock walls and cold, metallic fixtures. Opposite him stood what could only be called a throne, and the word DICE was set, emblazoned on the wall ahead. More than anything, his eyes were drawn to that.

But first he covered the whole length of the room, from start to finish. For every item he found that looked right at home in the research laboratory of a Super High School Level Supreme Leader, he found a dozen others that didn’t. Walkie talkies. A remote-controlled helicopter. A car so ridiculous and outrageous he was sure he must’ve seen it on some anime or other. Wigs, prank moustache-glasses, clown masks…

Ouma circled around to the other side of the room at last, and took his seat on the make-believe throne that was offered.

He leaned back and stared, feeling just faintly, wryly amused at this room full of nothing but play-pretend jokes. And he thought back, long and hard, to the motive video he’d watched in his room, his thoughts lingering on words like “friends bordering on family,” and “more important than anyone.” Just play-pretend, he reminded himself.

If nothing else, he was starting to understand his role in this game quite well. It had just taken a little time to get adjusted to the rules. But he could certainly play.

Now if only he could bring in a chessboard to this room someday. Then he’d be right at home.

Chapter Text

For an entire sixty minutes, his room is absent of the incessant sounds of knocking, yelling, and chattering on the opposite side of his bedroom door.

Of course, his newfound peace is short-lived. They all come back once the hour is up—he guesses that it must be about noon, because they all just returned from a self-proclaimed lunch break. After so many hours of knocking nonstop, apparently the cavalry got hungry.

He hisses a sigh through his teeth when the knocking starts up again, more energized than ever now that they’ve all had their lunch.

“Hey, hey, someone’s in there riiight?” Angie-chan’s singsong voice comes through the door, causing his already pounding head to throb even harder. “Why won’t you come out? You could have lunch too if you came out of there!”

“Ah, Angie-san, we’re not really trying to get him to come out just to have lunch though…” Akamatsu-chan sounds as though she might be touching a hand to her forehead in exasperation.

Then comes the voice that he least wants to hear, once again. “If he’s been in there since the game started… I wonder…” In the silence that follows, Ouma wonders despite himself if he’s tipping down that ridiculous hat of his over his eyes, lost in thought. “It’s probably true he could do with a good meal.”

He tries to tune out the rest of their chattering as best he can, although it’s getting increasingly harder to do so when every noise in the room feels like it’s piercing right through his brain. Restlessly, he holds a hand up above him while he lies on his back.

It’s too dark in his room to actually see anything clearly, but he feels like if he turned on the light, he could perhaps clearly make out the faint, shiny-smooth mark of scars that should no longer exist, all along the fingers of his left hand. Not red, raw, or angry like newly formed scars, but white and half-worn away, the way old scars sometimes get after a long time has passed.

They’re probably there. They were there too, some of those other times: a collection of faint, half-invisible scars that shouldn’t exist yet, right there on his fingers.

But he can’t see anything at all, so he lowers his hand and keeps trying to tune out the constant noise of the people on the other side.

“Do I look like a goddamn conveyor belt?”

“You look like several things, absolutely none of them pleasant.” He sent Iruma-chan a cheeky grin as he propped an elbow atop the cafeteria table and waited for her to continue.

“God, I fuckin’ hate you… Anyway,” she said, trying to steer them back to the main topic. “You’re asking me for way too much way too fast. I can’t make all that shit in bulk. Hell, tryin’ to make sense of those half-assed doodles you gave me is hard enough.”

“Oh-ho, that sounds pretty disappointing coming from a Super High School Level Inventor, Iruma-chan. You sure your talent’s the real deal?” He smiled unpleasantly, resisting the urge to tack on a, mine’s not, in case you’re curious.

“I’m the goddamn Super High School Level Inventor, not the Super High School Level Mass Producer!”

He gave her a round of sarcastic applause. “Wow, incredible! To think you’d know what mass production is!”

She gritted her teeth, clearly struggling not to smack him over the head with nearest object. “Look, I did make somethin’ else, alright? All I’m sayin’ is, it’s gonna take a while before I can get you the other stuff.” As though suddenly regaining a little bit of her usual brashness, she shook out her hair and put her hands back on her hips. It was meant to make her look tough, perhaps, but it seemed to him rather like a small, scared animal trying to make itself look bigger. “You should be glad I’m making you anything at all, anyway! I’m a great fuckin’ inventor, you know?! So count yourself lucky.”

While resting his chin on one hand, Ouma drummed the fingers of his free hand against the table, mentally readjusting his chess pieces. He didn’t care about her bluff at all, but perhaps it was true that he’d asked too much from her too quickly. It wasn’t worth rushing the process if the materials she was making him came out half-baked instead. Mentally he checked himself, moved Iruma-chan’s piece back a few squares, and resigned himself to the fact that he’d just have to wait a bit longer.

He only looked back up at her when he noticed her sneer faltering a bit, a noticeable flush creeping up her face in its place. As he quirked an eyebrow questioningly, she began to poke her fingers together suggestively. “A-Anyway, come by my lab, later, yeah? You can pick up the first hammer there, but I still gotta keep working on the rest.”

“Will do! I can’t wait to see how fun the thing Iruma-chan whipped up is.” He was absolutely dreading it.

A strange sort of laugh escaped the back of her throat. “It’ll be real fuckin’ fun. Oh, and I changed that stupid name you gave it from before. Wanna hear what I call it now?”

He hoped that something about the smile on his face and the iciness of his gaze might stop her from opening her mouth and giving him the details, but apparently she was much too in love with her own joke to bother with shutting up. It was very lucky for her that she was such a useful piece.

---

Out of a possible one-hundred forty-four combinations, he had tried about fifty. Fifty-six, to be precise.

He stood in a room devoid of common sense, facing the two huge dials before him. As always, he kept his ears tuned to the sound of anything or anyone else entering the room—but there was nothing. Just the faint hum of the vacuum-jar where he left it atop the table, still switched on and dutifully sucking up things in the room too small for the eye to see. Wryly, he thought to himself that a better name for it might be “the bug-catcher.”

If anyone else were to enter right now, it’d be game over. He wasn’t supposed to be here. He never got to enter this room last time, even when the whole fifth floor was actually available to him. And as it was definitely not available to them right now, with only two murders down and four floors open…

He was pretty sure this would count as a rule violation, if he were caught. Of course, with the right amount of leeway, maybe he could wing it. Still, he would rather not take that chance if he could help it.

Using the hammer Iruma-chan made for him and the bug-catcher, he had made his way up to the fifth floor this time around. Even though Shinguuji-chan, Angie-chan, and Chabashira-chan were all still alive and well, he made it all the way up here. Every step he took, creeping close to the shadows and the blind spots in every hallway, had left him with his heart pounding in his throat—still, he felt satisfied to know that perhaps the ringleader’s technology wasn’t as infallible as they might think.

He was getting somewhere. It was slow progress, but he could play this game, too.

The sight of the door to Amami-chan’s laboratory, a jumbled, chaotic splatter of red and black, had left him so tense he could feel the adrenaline thrumming all the way in the tips of his fingers. Last time he hadn’t been allowed in, even with the floor opened up; the moment he’d gone to pick the locks, Monokuma had chased him away, yelling more than a few warnings about “minding his own beeswax,” even threatening to add “entering locked research labs” to the list of rule violations.

It hadn’t done so, but just knowing that whatever was in there was serious enough to warrant a threat like that had only made Ouma more determined to get in.

The fact that Monokuma wasn’t here now clearly meant he was doing this right. He had to be. Throwing yet another paranoid glance at the bug-catcher on the table behind him, he sighed briefly before glancing up at the dials again.

Fifty-six combinations down, eighty-eight to go. With no clues to go on, he was down to sheer process of elimination in order to rule them out. The process was long, and time-consuming.

But hey, that’s fine. I’ve got all the time in the world. And even if I get caught again, well—I guess that locker is good for something, isn’t it?

Gnawing at the inside of his cheek and ignoring the faint taste of iron, he spun the right-hand dial one more notch: this time, to the shape of a horse.

---

“…Yo, hello there. I don’t really need to introduce myself after all this time, do I?”

It wasn’t his first time seeing Amami Rantarou looking and speaking right at him after watching him die, but it was his first time seeing it quite like this. This USB drive, and this video message which had been left on it, were undeniably something he had never seen before, not any of the other times.

“…I’m actually allowed to prepare a few special privileges for myself. One of those special privileges is this video message…”

Ouma watched the video unfold before him with an icy stillness that did not quite match with the torrent of emotions he felt welling up within him. Vague confusion. Intrigue. A sort of proud satisfaction at having solved this puzzle, this game, meant for Amami-chan’s eyes only. And a familiar, weary bitterness.

No matter how many times he woke up inside the locker, Amami-chan’s piece seemed insistent on dying first. Every single time. No matter what he did or didn’t do, this hadn’t changed. And yet, knowing the possibilities that might open up if only the other boy had stuck around for longer…

“…Come on, you know what I’m getting at, right? I’m talking about something you’ve been carrying around since the moment the game started, you know? I thought that as long as you used that well, you could put an end to the killing game with it…”

His fingers pressed the pause button before he could register what he was doing, eyes focusing on the screen even more closely, studying every shape and angle of Amami-chan’s face with a renewed intensity.

No matter how much he thought back to the scene in the library, he couldn’t remember anything in particular that stood out. Just Amami-chan’s Monopad, lying beside him on the library floor in a pool of his own blood. They’d all investigated it as a group every time, but nothing had turned up about it that seemed any different from the Monopads they all carried.

His mind kept repeating the line “put an end to the killing game,” and silently he swore under his breath. A whole lot of good that did him. For now, at least, Amami-chan was already dead and gone. And assuming he did try again when he woke up in the locker next, even if he wanted to strike up an alliance, even a temporary alliance like the one he had with Iruma-chan, what good would it do him the next time around if the other boy was still going to die in a matter of just two days?

He forced his train of thought to an abrupt halt and sat very still, listening sharply for the sounds of anyone approaching. But the room stayed quiet, the door firmly shut. He hit play again.

“…This brutal killing game is going to continue ‘until there are only two people left.’ What that rule actually means… Well actually, it’s the most crucial part of this whole thing, but…”

The Amami-chan on the screen paused, his eyes widening in surprise at the abrupt noise of a buzzer sounding from behind him.

“—Haha, looks like that word was off-limits after all. Guess you’ll just have to solve that last riddle on your own. But hey, this is you we’re talking about, so I think you’re smart enough that you’ll do just fine.”

Ouma had to pause the video again, trying not to laugh this time at the absolute irony of this entire situation. Those words, so clearly intended for Amami-chan himself, nonetheless managed to bring a sarcastic sort of smile to his face. This was, after all, perhaps the most encouragement he’d received lately from anything that was not his own whiteboard.

Thanks, Amami-chan, he thought. I guess we both know that I’m smart enough, huh?

He’d definitely be fine—on his own.

---

Pale moonlight behind him illuminated a silhouette standing there in the middle of the dorm entryway. Ouma stopped at the door and stood very still, his breath catching in his throat. He had never been killed here before any of the other times—but it was possible he’d misjudged something tonight. One little setback and he’d have to knock all his pieces clean off the chessboard, put them all back again, and start over from the beginning.

He and the figure opposite him waited in silence for about two heartbeats. Then he let out an exaggerated sigh of relief.

“What, it’s only Momota-chan? Hmm, that’s kind of a letdown. And here I thought something interesting was about to happen. A dark figure, alone in the dorms at night waiting to pounce on me—my heart almost skipped a beat, you know?”

Momota-chan let out an equally exaggerated sigh. Ouma noticed that the other boy was shaking slightly as he lowered his upraised fist and wondered dryly if he had actually been about to hit him before realizing who it was.

“Jesus, you scared the shit outta me. I didn’t know who the hell was comin’ in this late at night… Thought you mighta been trying to…” There was a very awkward pause. “W-Well, whatever. And don’t say shit like that. I’m the one who’s freaked out here.”

“But we’re all alone, just the two of us, aren’t we? If you’re really not trying to kill me, this could’ve been your big chance to confess.” He snickered softly as he closed the door behind him, stepping further into the entryway. “Too bad. Anyway, what were you doing out so late, Momota-chan?”

The would-be astronaut looked slightly taken aback at being asked so directly. “N-Nothin’. Just went for a walk.”

Ouma let his gaze linger from Momota-chan’s still-shaking fist, now trembling by his side, to the slight sheen of sweat all over his face. Despite the dim light, he could still make out a slight smear near the corner of his mouth—as though he hadn’t quite managed to wipe something unpleasant away. “Hmmm… Is that so?”

“Q-Quit staring at me like that, I ain’t lying,” Momota-chan said. “It just seemed like a nice night is all. Nights like this, I get antsy being all cooped up in my room.”

“Even though you skipped out on your training with Saihara-chan and Harukawa-chan?” He raised a finger to his mouth skeptically, smirking widely as the other boy grimaced.

He had seen the three of them out there at night carrying out their ridiculous training sessions more times than he could count. It wasn’t hard to guess that he had started to skip out around this time—that’s what he’d done all the other times whenever Angie-chan and her Religious Student Council had started enforcing their idea of a “peaceful school life.”

In the dim entryway, he could still hear the sound of the other boy gritting his teeth for a while. Then he shrugged, as though giving up. “Fine, ya caught me. I did skip out on Shuuichi and Harumaki, but I had a good reason for it, okay? So to hell with you, I’m going to bed.”

Ouma waited until he turned around before calling out softly. “Hey Momota-chan, why are you still training with someone like Harukawa-chan?” He stared ahead in the dark, keeping his face carefully neutral. “Even though you know she’s a killer, you still go out and train with her every night.” She could’ve gutted them both like fish, thrown their bodies aside like rag dolls. And still they kept training with her willingly for a solid half hour, night after night. “Why is that? I don’t want to think idiocy is the only reason, but…”

He had expected the other boy to get angry—maybe even to behave so rashly that he’d start yelling and wake all their other classmates up. But he was mildly surprised to hear Momota-chan snort as though he was actually amused.

“Oh? Did you remember a funny joke, Momota-chan?”

He just snorted again, shaking his head in what looked like weary resignation. “Man, you just don’t get it. You keep spouting all that shit about Harumaki bein’ a killer and all—”

“—And it’s true.” Ouma stared at him blankly, remembering her fingers around his windpipe, choking the life right out of him. Funny, how they all seemed to want to believe the cold, hard facts even less than they wanted to believe his lies.

Does it still count as a cold, hard fact if it never happened this time around? Well, not that it matters, he thought. Harukawa-chan’s still killed plenty of other people besides me.

“—Yeah, maybe it is true. But people can change, man.”

He blinked once before recovering himself, throwing the other boy a carefree grin. “Nishishi… You’re so trusting, Momota-chan. If only you’d fall for me like you fell for a huge lie like that.”

“I told you, quit saying shit like that.” He was satisfied to hear the exasperation creeping back into his voice. “Think whatever you want, people change. If we couldn’t change, we’d all just keep giving the fuck up whenever life threw anything at us, right?”

Ouma thought vaguely on the number of times he had seen them all die and kill, and die and kill, and die and kill. If only people could change so easily.

“Sure. If that’ll protect Momota-chan’s gentle heart, I’ll pretend I believe it!” he said, waving a hand dismissively before starting off in the direction of his own room.

His foot had only barely touched the stairs when this time he heard Momota-chan call out to him, apparently having just realized something. “Oh yeah—the hell were you doing out tonight? I’m sure it ain’t anything good though, since it’s you we’re talking about…”

Ouma considered, then turned around and smirked. “Funnily enough, I went for a walk too! Ah—did I make you mad? Nishishi. Good night, Momota-chan.”

---

“Ouma-kun… Wh-What are you doing?”

The alarmed concern in Saihara-chan’s voice brought a grin to his face, even as he climbed unsteadily to his shaking legs. For half a second, he let himself pretend that concern had anything to do with the fact that it had been him lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood, rather than any of their other classmates. It was a lie probably, but at least it was a comforting sort of lie.

“Y-Yo, Saihara-chan, Harukawa-chan. Hey, I scared you right? I really got you good, didn’t I?” He grinned broadly at them despite wobbling where he stood. The ache where his forehead was split open throbbed so strongly he was fairly sure he’d be unconscious by now, if he hadn’t already gotten used to having his head hurt all the time.

The two of them just stared back at him in dumb disbelief. Harukawa-chan crossed her arms and quirked an eyebrow at him after a few more seconds, as though sure he was trying to pull something.

Ouma meant to continue but he needed to pause, letting the ache in his skull reach its peak before ebbing slightly, a little like a wave breaking on the coast. It was still painful, but at least it wasn’t so bad once he got the timing right. But his silence seemed to only disorient them further, because when he met their eyes again (a difficult task, since his eyes were finding it hard to focus) they looked even more uncertain. Their eyes kept flicking to the warm trails of blood dripping down his forehead.

“Ahh… Sorry, sorry, I spaced out for a bit there. This blood’s the real deal, you know?” He widened his eyes for emphasis, attempting to look right at them and still somehow managing to stare at a point just slightly to the left.

After another moment or two, Saihara-chan reluctantly broke the tension between them. “A-Are you okay…? Isn’t this going a little far just for one of your pranks…?”

He bit back the temptation to ask if the other boy’s “detective’s intuition” had led him to that conclusion. Instead, still swaying slightly, he gestured vaguely at the floorboard which had cracked his forehead open and sent him tumbling to the floor.

Any moment now, Monokuma was going to come on the screen and tell them that the trial was going to commence. Carefully, albeit impatiently, he tried to push their pieces across the board in the direction that they needed to go.

Harukawa-chan just scoffed, looking more disbelieving still, but Saihara-chan at least seemed to have realized the implications of the clue he’d just spoonfed him. Ouma watched him absentmindedly bring a hand to his mouth as his thoughts wandered—it was a familiar, fitting gesture for a detective.

As Monokuma’s announcement came on, the three of them looked up abruptly, waiting until the screen turned off again before glancing around at each other.

It was better if he left them to sort out their clues without feeling like he was eavesdropping. “I’ll go on ahead! I should really get this stuff cleaned up, you know?”

As he turned and put a hand on the wall to prop himself up a little (walking in a straight line was even more difficult than making eye contact), he paused only when he heard Saihara-chan call out from behind him.

“Are you really okay, Ouma-kun? You don’t need help or anything?”

Silence. Again, Ouma heard the concern in his voice, understood it would apply to any other person in their situation, tried to pretend otherwise for only a moment or two. Then he just laughed, waving his free hand over his shoulder dismissively as he started walking again.

Saihara-chan didn’t call out to him again, but he still felt strangely lightheaded, almost pleased as he made his way down the hall. He put it down to blood loss and a mild concussion.

---

“Wooow… You’re such a horrible liar, Yumeno-chan!”

There was a brief, shocked silence as they all stood there in the trial room, at a loss for words. Then they reacted as though he had slapped her, but he still didn’t look away. She squirmed and pulled the brim of her hat down further, acting as though she’d suddenly spotted something very interesting on the floor.

“Well, it’s not as though I don’t approve of lies… They are my specialty, after all.” He smiled sardonically. “Still, I don’t think it’s good to lie to yourself, don’t you agree?”

That’s a lie though, he wanted to add. Well, just because he was getting fairly good at lying to himself didn’t mean she should do the same.

As Yumeno-chan just stood there without saying anything, the rest of them sputtered trying to come to her defense.

“H-Hey, what are you saying? You should think a little more about Yumeno-san’s feelings before you just start saying things like—”

He cut Shirogane-chan off smoothly. “Oh, I’ve thought about her feelings. That’s why I’m saying this.” The image of Chabashira-chan’s corpse, lying curled on a dirty wooden floor came to mind. So did the image of Yumeno-chan in a day or two’s time, sitting at a cafeteria table without eating anything. Without talking to anyone. That was how it had been last time, and the time before.

How many times had he heard her speak up in the trial, saying so confidently that she wouldn’t let Chabashira-chan or Angie-chan’s deaths be in vain? How many times had she said she wouldn’t call anything “too much of a pain” anymore, only for him to hear those words slip out of her mouth within another few hours?

He still remembered what Momota-chan had said, about people being able to change. Perhaps it was true—for Saihara-chan, at least. So why weren’t the rest of their pieces following that same path, even when it was clearly in their best interests?

If he died, he would just keep waking up in a small dark locker, over and over again. And there would be another Yumeno-chan who would someday lose another Chabashira-chan. But for this Yumeno-chan—this was it. If her piece was ever going to make it to the end of this ruthless game alive, she would have to try harder, whether she liked it or not.

“Hey Yumeno-chan, what are you putting up with it for? Why are you just putting up with it?” He stared at her blankly, the corners of his mouth just barely turned down as he waited to see whether she would keep lying to herself or not.

It was like watching a dam break. Suddenly, abruptly, tears welled up in her eyes. As the whole group stood around her, speechless, Yumeno-chan fell to her knees and cried—until sobs started wracking her body, she kept crying. They were honest tears, at least. Chabashira-chan might even have been proud.

At some point she finally stopped, her grief replaced by a peaceful sort of exhaustion. One by one, his other classmates came forward and hugged her, patting her on the head, telling her it was okay. Ouma stood back and watched, his face neutral.

But he could feel someone’s eyes on him. When he glanced over, he could just see Saihara-chan looking away, apparently embarrassed at having been caught staring.

Yes, he wanted to tell him. I’m going to make you all learn to play this game with me. Yes, I’m doing this for all your sakes.

Instead he put his hands behind his head, looked away, and forced himself to tune them all out. If this was a show, then he most certainly still had an audience to play to. And breaking character would be breaking the rules of the game.

---

Culprits to the left, victims to the right, remaining suspects even farther to the right. At the right-most edge of his whiteboard, Saihara-chan’s picture once again was set aside.

One of these people has to be the ringleader, he thought. That’s the only logical conclusion.

So why was it that he still didn’t know who?

He stood in front of his whiteboard and tried to empty his brain of all the noise cluttering it. For more than two hours he’d been pacing, examining the evidence in his room almost feverishly. He knew every culprit, every victim, every step of the route they had been following up until now, but he still didn’t know what came next. His left thumb was raw and angry where he’d bitten the nail down past the quick again, still slightly smeared with blood he was too busy to wipe off.

His face felt hot. He took a deep breath, trying to regain that sense of cold, calculating precision he felt whenever he lined the pieces back up on the chessboard in his head. Again. Again.

Just line them up, rearrange them, it doesn’t matter. I need to find out what I’m missing.

The feverish feeling subsided a little. He uncapped the marker in his right hand and let it hover over the board—and yet he still didn’t know what line to draw next. Eight suspects to go, one ringleader in the bunch. This was about the point he’d been at last time, before he’d seen what the outside world had in store for them, forfeit the game, and been sent back to square one.

Eight suspects, only one ringleader. But that still didn’t mean he could trust the other seven. If absolutely any of them decided they had to get out—that they needed to get out… Just how was he supposed to find a way to stop them all from bashing their brains out against the wall when they knew?

Bitterly he snatched a picture off the board and readjusted it further down, writing a single word beside it. Strange. Yes, Kiibo was very strange. There was just one purpose he could think of for a robot in a “show” like this. A very clear, very unpleasant purpose. Ouma hated him for it. And yet he was so clearly a pawn in the grand scheme of things. Pawns could be promoted to all kinds of pieces in chess—but they could never be promoted to a king. So he wasn’t the ringleader. Probably. Maybe.

Two hours in and all he’d determined for sure was that the robot was someone’s puppet. He snorted, then returned his attention to the other six pictures he’d yet to push one way or the other.

The dead were, of course, excluded from the list of suspects. He’d investigated them all for himself—many, many times at that. They were dead. So they couldn’t be the ringleader. …Probably. Maybe. The fact that their pictures were on the board at all was half parts a refusal to completely eliminate them from suspicion, half parts a refusal to forget they were dead at all. Dead, dead, and probably going to come back only to die again.

Ouma stood in front of his whiteboard and breathed deeply, letting his eyes roam the thing in its entirety.

In his mind the pieces were always lined up nice and neatly, but the pictures on the board made it all look so much messier. Here, they didn’t look like pieces with their own set of moves and weaknesses. They just looked like a messy collection of photographs, a testament to his dead classmates and the fact that they kept killing each other, proof of the fact that he’d lived through all this again and again and hadn’t figured out much of anything at all.

His mind was heating up again. A million questions he didn’t want to consider tried to push their way to the forefront of his mind. Most he succeeded in quelling, but the worst was the small, insidious little thought that managed to resurface again and again no matter how much he tried to ignore it—

What if I find out who the ringleader is, win this game, and still wake up in a small, dark locker again?

He emptied his brain of all the noise, gnawing on his thumbnail all the while.

---

“I think it’s just about time.”

“…Huh?”

Ouma tipped his chair back, holding the bright pink sphere in his hand up to examine it under the fluorescent lights of the cafeteria. He wouldn’t know until he actually used it, of course, but it looked perfect. Exactly what he’d asked for.

Two other spheres rested on the table next to him, identical in every way. Beside them, the bug-catcher hummed away happily, making sure that no one intruded on his usual meeting with Iruma-chan.

“I said it’s just about time. This should do the trick. With this, we can end the killing game.”

She gnawed at her bottom lip as she stared down at him, one hand resting on her hip. “It ain’t gonna work.”

“You told me these would work,” he said, a note of irritation creeping into his voice. “I very specifically asked you if they would, and you said yes. You didn’t lie to me, did you Iruma-chan?”

She flinched, shrinking back a little. He hadn’t even raised his voice, but she lost all her brashness immediately, clearly aware that she’d said the wrong thing. “I don’t mean that shit—like yeah, sure, those’ll work. The hammers too, and the remote. But the plan…”

Bored, he straightened his chair and hopped up, moving to sit atop the table instead. His grin slipped away as though it had never existed as he looked her in the eye. “There are only two Exisals left. We take care of those annoying cubs first, then Monokuma. The ringleader wouldn’t even have enough time to make a spare.” He left out, of course, that the ringleader was probably someone within their group. “If everyone pitches in, we’ll pull it off. No more killing game. The end.”

How flat those words fell. If everyone pitched in… Now he was just sounding like Akamatsu-chan. Or Momota-chan, maybe. But Akamatsu-chan and Momota-chan never planned this far ahead, never were this well-prepared.

Again and again, his plans in his room kept taking him back to the realization he’d had the last time around: this game could be won by other means, without even needing to play it at all. Despite her big mouth, Iruma-chan had more than proven that her inventions could do the trick. They could use these plans, these inventions, and take the game by storm. And it would work.

…Likely not without a few sacrifices, though. A move this risky in chess almost never succeeded without a few pieces being taken off the board along the way.

Don’t think about which pieces might get lost. Focus on what’s ahead.

He expected her to back down the way she always did—but to his surprise, Iruma-chan began shaking her head back and forth slowly. The drool at the corner of her mouth and the bead of sweat on her forehead made her look remarkably pathetic. But she still didn’t stop shaking her head.

“I-It ain’t gonna work. Somethin’ is gonna go wrong—someone is gonna chicken out, or they’re gonna fuckin’ blow the whole thing!” Her voice raised a little. “I ain’t gonna put my life on the line just for someone else to get me killed, okay?!”

For a moment she paused, apparently expecting him to cut in. But Ouma just continued staring at her blankly. It was hard to think of a response when her words rang so true, echoing some of the same thoughts he’d had while he simulated this plan in his head as he stood in front of his whiteboard.

She pressed forward to fill that awkward silence herself, her words gushing forward even more frantically than before. “I got things I need to be doing—I need to be out there, the world’s a fuckin’ shithole! I could be doing so much!” She ran a hand through her hair anxiously and he could see fear, real fear, in her eyes. “I could be changing the whole fuckin’ world, putting it back to how it used to be! And instead I’m… stuck… here!”

Her words carried a note of finality with them that he only recognized in the split second after they left her mouth. As she clenched her fists and trembled, he accepted the end of his plan before it even started, rearranging the pieces on the board in his head with an expert hand.

There was nothing to be done. Like an opponent cornering the king and calling checkmate, he had no choice but to accept that his plan wasn’t going to work.

Iruma-chan seemed to regain herself after some time, mumbling one of her usual “offers” sheepishly under her breath, but he just stared at her, his face impassive. He spoke with her curtly, took the things she had made back with him to his room—but there really were no moves left for her piece at this point, no matter how many times he looked at the board.

---

With the board in stalemate, waiting to reach the end of the game, he let things play out as they would. He already knew the move Iruma-chan’s piece was going to make (the only move she was willing to make anymore). It was just a question of when she was going to try it.

Then came the day when Gonta had been nearly beside himself, desperate to take on the Exisals if it meant even the slightest chance of getting everyone else out alive. No one knew how to convince him that this was a terrible idea. Or rather, Ouma’s thoughts kept straying to the time he’d seen the guns on those Exisals tear through Gonta’s broad shoulders like tissue paper, but there wasn’t any point in bringing that up. As far as they knew, that hadn’t happened. So it was as if it “never happened.”

Then Iruma-chan had come into the room, bearing good news. I’m going to save the group, she had said. He’d had to actually struggle not to burst out laughing at that one. She might be dense and crass, but at least she told a good joke every once in a while.

And now he stood at the top of a virtual roof in a virtual world, looking up at snow that fell from the sky only to pass through the ground without ever piling up. The snow on the ground was pre-programmed, he supposed. So it would never reach past a certain point. The sound of the door finally opening caught his attention, and he turned around, waiting to let Iruma-chan take his king off the board.

“—Or could it be that you called me up here to kill me?” he asked. His voice sounded very quiet, even to his own ears.

Her avatar frowned. Apparently she had enough conscience left to feel guilty. “…So you did notice.”

She actually apologized. That was almost nice of her.

Ouma just let her speak, thinking aimlessly about this world she had programmed. Objects wouldn’t break, snow wouldn’t stop falling. A mansion and a church which looked miles apart were actually very close together, and the edge of the world fell off into pitch black space. Her talent really was something—she never stopped surpassing the limits of what was supposed to be possible.

He wondered what other possibilities her plan might surpass. No matter how he looked at the arrangement of pieces, there were only two possibilities. Perhaps this virtual world full of virtual programming might actually count as something outside of the game they were already playing. In which case, if he died here, then maybe—maybe he wouldn’t wake up inside the locker again. If not…

…There was only one possible move to avoid this stalemate. Just the one. He’d thought it over as much as possible, and always he came to the same conclusion. In this game, with these rules, and these pieces, there was only one move left to him. And if he woke up in the locker again, he’d have no choice but to use that move.

Ouma waited to see the result. He couldn’t move even if he wanted, once Iruma-chan’s avatar grasped his arm, but he still felt the usual icy composure settling in on his brain as he observed and weighed his options. If nothing else, he’d know what to do the next time around by studying exactly how and why he’d lost this match—if there was a next time…

He braced himself. She swung the hammer down.

“No matter how you look at it, hasn’t it been far too long? I can’t imagine he’s going to respond now of all times.” He can hear Shinguuji-chan’s voice past his bedroom door, as calm and cunning as ever.

Those words cause a jumble of muffled response for a few seconds. He can’t make out the specifics, but it’s easy for him to fill in the blanks: Shinguuji-chan just voiced what they’d all already been trying not to think to themselves, and now they’re all starting to panic.

Maybe he’s finally starting to wear them down.

“Come on, no way we’d just give up that easily!” Momota-chan’s booming voice settles them all down. Just like always. “If we just backed down and left, then what were we even knockin’ this long for? We’re gonna stay until he comes outta there, got it?!”

Another few moments of scattered, mumbled responses, compliant but still hesitant to Ouma’s ears. But just as he expected, they’re all too tired after knocking for so long. The protests continue.

“…I believe we’ve done as much as we can. If he will not come out and talk to us, I believe we should strive to put our efforts elsewhere before the time limit is up.”

“Wha—? Toujou?!”

More of them chime in.

“I’m still really worried, but… I think she’s right. I don’t know why he’s so desperate to stay in there when we all just want to talk to him…” Shirogane-chan’s voice trails off. “Maybe we really should call it quits?”

Momota-chan still sounds outraged on the other side of the door, but he can hear Amami-chan cut in, as level-headed as always. “…I think it’s true that if he were going to say something, he’d have said it by now. We should probably make sure we have another back-up plan for when the time limit hits. Just in case, you know?”

There’s a general murmur of agreement to which he can hear Momota-chan sputtering even more furiously. “What’s with all of you? Hey, Akamatsu—what about you? You ain’t gonna back down on this, right? Show ‘em how it’s done!”

“Eh?” Akamatsu-chan sounds taken aback for a split second. She must be undecided herself on whether to keep trying or stop, he guesses. Then she bounces back. “Mmm… I agree that it’s too early to give up. Let’s try just a little bit longer!”

The discussion continues for what feels like an eternity. Ouma guesses it’s been about five minutes before he comes back to himself, realizing he can hear the sound of footsteps walking away from his door. About half the group decided to give up, from what he can tell.

Finally, he thinks. He rests an arm against his forehead lightly as he stares up at the ceiling. Just a little bit longer and the rest of them will give up, too.

“—What about you, Saihara-kun?” Akamatsu-chan continues some conversation or other opposite his bedroom door, trying to figure out what they should do now with only half the numbers they used to have.

Silence. Then, thoughtfully: “…There’s still a few things I want to ask him no matter what. I think we should keep trying.”

Ouma bites at his lip, wishing bitterly that they’d just go away.

There was no game over screen, and he still woke up in the locker feeling like his head was about to split open. Brain death was, unsurprisingly, still brain death, regardless of whether it took place in a virtual world or not.

It wasn’t like he’d expected it to work. Not really. But he’d thought, maybe there had been just a slight chance…

A slight chance that what? That I wouldn’t wake up in the locker again?

If only he could be so lucky.

As Ouma sat in the dark and tried to ignore these few, brief moments of respite before knowing he’d have to go out and line the board back up all over again, he was hit with a sudden, awful curiosity. It was a question he hadn’t even considered, as fixated as he’d been last time on the matter of what to do with Iruma-chan’s piece, but—

What about the trial?

The trial. His blood went cold. The trial, where everyone’s lives were on the line. The trial, with a case he knew fully well Iruma-chan had had as much time to set up and dispose of evidence on as she pleased.

Just how had that trial gone? Had they managed to guess the right culprit? Or maybe…

Ouma sat and stared at the vague outline of the locker door without really seeing it. Instead, he saw the usual: dark hands in broad daylight, reaching out to him, dead bodies curled up or hanging or slamming to the floor, Monokuma’s leering grin, the sight of the sky outside on fire.

He had let himself be cornered into checkmate last time because he’d wanted to see the result of his loss. And now he knew. Now he knew exactly what kind of move he would have to play when he reached that point again in this game.

---

There was no point in going easy anymore. He fully intended to press every advantage he had in order to win, this time around.

He set the whiteboard in his room up exactly as he’d had it the last time. Deftly, right from the very first day, he put culprits to the left, victims to the right, the undecided suspects even farther right. Saihara-chan alone stood out from the group, still a presence he couldn’t quite figure out after all this time.

None of these things had happened yet. But they would.

There was only one difference between his board this time and last time: when he grasped Iruma-chan’s portrait, he placed her to the left-hand side of the board. There was just enough space to fit another portrait in front of hers. All he needed to decide was whose.

Anyone looking at me right now would think I was planning a murder. Well, he thought, that’s exactly what I’m doing.

The familiar sour taste in his mouth wouldn’t seem to go away.

But he didn’t have time to think of the repercussions of what that would entail. For now, he focused on what was already decided. There were three trials spanning now and then. Only three trials. Coldly, he realized for the first time how little time that was if he really wanted to put a stop to this killing game.

He wasted none of that time. Ouma planned and schemed and left his trail of clues—a trail he fully intended on having the rest of them follow as he played to win in this game, even if it meant dragging them by the nose.

When the second floor opened up this time around, he asked Iruma-chan for the bug-catcher immediately. When there was no one else around, he scratched out letters on the slab in the back garden, painstakingly etching what would eventually become a declaration of war. When the rest of them questioned who he was and what the hell he was doing, he made sure to give them his most ominous smile.

Piece by piece, the game narrowed down. The waiting was almost more boring than it was worth—but that was okay. The challenge would arrive soon enough, and then he’d be able to progress past the stalemate he’d reached last time.

Two pieces had to go. Two was a fairer trade than everyone dying, he tried to tell himself. But the sour taste never quite left his mouth, whenever he sat in his room and thought about it.

---

Two days before Iruma-chan finished making her virtual world, Ouma sat in the cafeteria and tried to find some way to stave off the boredom and the endless waiting.

Again, he took out a knife. Again, Saihara-chan leapt up from his chair when the knife “accidentally” nicked the sides of his fingers as he sliced it carefully and precisely for the sake of their game. Again, the other boy ran off to get a first-aid kit for him.

But those were the only similarities in common with last time. Every time they reached this point, Saihara-chan continued to go farther and farther off-script. Even when Ouma made sure to follow the exact same lines, the exact same delivery, the other boy picked a different response every time.

If boredom was the poison wearing down his will to go on in this endless, repetitive game, then this was the perfect medicine to that. Ouma laughed to himself happily as he let Saihara-chan bandage his fingers up tightly, ignoring the confused-but-exasperated glance the other boy sent him.

“…There we go, something like this should do the trick. How is it, Ouma-kun?”

“Yeah, it’s not like I cut myself too seriously or anything. Thanks for patching me up, Saihara-chan. But more importantly…” He took a brief, calculated pause. He was certainly coming to embrace the role of an actor, in addition to all the other roles he had taken on, but it was hard for even himself to tell whether he was doing this more for the sake of the group or the sake of the show. “Oh nooo… I lost! Guess that means you win, Saihara-chan! Congratulations!”

Uncomprehending confusion. Skepticism. These things Ouma had already expected—it wasn’t like Saihara-chan or any of them ever really understood. But still, there was that glint of curiosity deep down, the sign of a detective’s undeniable urge to know more about the world around him.

Ouma wondered briefly if falling in love with someone always meant noticing these little details about them.

As he talked cryptically about games which could be won without being played, he teased him happily, the fondness in his voice apparent. The other boy clearly didn’t believe him, but that was fine by him. After all, Saihara-chan was trying. Improving, overcoming, questioning. However he was managing to do it, he was still constantly going off-script in this show where his role had already been decided for him.

Even if he didn’t understand yet, Ouma was slowly becoming convinced that he could. Soon.

“Nishishi… Right now, Saihara-chan, you won’t forget me for the rest of your life, will you? I already stole your heart, so I’m satisfied! That’s why I don’t need your life anymore!”

“Wh-What are you even saying…! Wh-Why would you…?”

Ouma smiled and reminded him of the very simple fact that he was a liar.

With his bandaged hand still stinging, he left the cafeteria cheerfully, his mood surprisingly light despite what was coming in just another two days’ time. As usual, he had put up a wall of distance between the two of them. There’d be no time to waste hanging out like this once they moved on past the next trial. And after all—he still couldn’t quite figure the other boy out.

But that’s why he was certain. If he kept going like this, Saihara-chan would follow. Even if he couldn’t find a way out of this maze on his own, Saihara-chan would. Not because it was his role in some show, but because he was a detective, through and through.

Ouma made his way back to his room, rubbing a thumb over his fresh bandages fondly all the while.

---

Two days later, Ouma found the piece he needed to use in order to break the stalemate of Iruma-chan’s virtual world. He stood back and watched as Gonta picked up the flashback light, turned on the switch, and started screaming. It was a good thing there was no one else outside for the moment to hear them.

This is what’s necessary, he told himself. This is what needs to be done. I had to ask Monokuma to put that light there, or else things would’ve just turned out exactly like last time.

For a moment he remembered telling Yumeno-chan that he didn’t tell lies to himself. His stomach churned at the thought.

Gonta cried. He cried for the sake of a world turned to rubble and ash, for the sake of their dead loved ones and families. He cried for the sake of all their classmates who had died for absolutely no reason at all.

Poor Gonta. It would only make things worse if he tried to tell him that those loved ones he remembered might not even have existed in the first place. That things were even more meaningless than he’d realized. So he didn’t tell him.

As the tears streamed down the other boy’s face, Ouma thought about how once upon a time, he might have tried to comfort him. That was what a good leader would do in this situation: comfort, console, encourage.

But that wouldn’t help him win this game.

So he put a hand on Gonta’s arm, looked up at him, and smiled broadly. Just as he’d planned for weeks, the words came out naturally, insidiously: “Hey, Gonta? If the inside of this school is hell, and the outside world is also hell… Why don’t we end it all? All that suffering.”

He’d practiced those words so much that he thought, when the time came, he would feel nothing at all. It didn’t have to be Gonta—anyone at all would’ve sufficed, but Gonta just happened to be the one who had come with him when he had gone to search for that “motive” he knew was lying in these virtual woods.

He had readied himself for the moment he’d be knocking this sacrificial pawn off the board. The leering smile on his face and the singsong edge to his voice attested to the hours he’d spent in front of his whiteboard, planning for this move.

But as he watched Gonta nod slowly, miserably to his plan, his mind kept thinking back to the motive video at the bottom of his bedroom drawer. Don’t kill people, it had said.

These are pieces, not people, he lied.

Don’t kill people.

I’m not. This is just what needs to be done, or the game won’t end.

Don’t kill people.

Hating this game from the very bottom of his heart, he spun around in the virtual snow, looking back over his shoulder towards Gonta with the same smile still plastered on his face. “I even thought up a name for this little alliance of ours. It’ll be something special, just the two of us! We can call ourselves—the Killing Game Busters! …What do you think?”

Gonta didn’t respond.

---

“By the way, the culprit is Gonta.”

He was tired.

The trial room went silent enough to hear a pin drop for the span of about three seconds, and then it erupted into chaos. Confusion, outrage, disbelief, shock—these emotions and many more flitted across every single one of their faces and exploded into a jumbled torrent of voices yelling all at once.

Ouma just sneered back at all of them. Too easy. This was too easy. They were all predictable, not even trying to think for themselves. And of course, when confronted directly with the truth they’d all wanted so much, they reacted like this.

For a split second, his eyes flitted to Saihara-chan’s face, waiting to see if the detective had caught on yet. He had helped him in the investigation, called him his partner—done everything short of hand him the answer directly on a silver platter. But that usual glint of curiosity wasn’t there when he looked. Instead, he felt he caught a glimpse of something he didn’t like. So he looked away and carried on his act.

“—but no matter how much you try to deny it, the truth won’t change! After all, there can only be one truth! The culprit who killed Iruma-chan is Gokuhara Gonta! This is the undeniable truth you all craved so much!”

Spreading his arms wide, he hit them with the very thing they claimed they had wanted from him. He grinned with a coldness that seeped into every bone in his body, laughed at them, and gouged the truth in like a knife.

Every now and then during the trial, his thoughts would tend to Iruma-chan and Gonta. Iruma-chan on the roof, this time around. Gonta, strangling her around the neck. The sight almost cute despite the grotesqueness of it, two little avatars in a pre-programmed world, neither of them looking particularly harmful.

Then, of course, there had been the sight of Iruma-chan’s body in the chair afterwards, her face purple like a bruise as her dead hands clung to her throat postmortem. Gonta, here and now, stammering and crying, too unfortunate to know what it was he had forgotten.

Ouma smiled wide like a performer on the stage, feeling a loathing somewhere deep inside him which he was not quite sure was meant for either the ringleader or the audience watching this so-called show—or himself.

“Why don’t I show you, then?” The rest of them averted their eyes from him, clearly able to sense the hostility underlying the sweetness of his tone. “Why don’t I show you all the absolute, undeniable proof that it was impossible for me to kill Iruma-chan?”

And then, he thought, we’ll see how much you all love the truth.

---

He had thought they would stop pressing him for truths they weren’t prepared to handle, after the way the trial had gone. But he’d been wrong.

“I said no, you useless idiots!”

The grin on his face felt stretched almost to breaking, like a mask so tight it was about to shatter. He danced around the issue of the outside world as they all crowded around him, begging to know more about what had driven Gonta to do such a thing. All too clearly, he remembered what happened to people in this game like Amami-chan who knew more than they should, once the ringleader found out exactly how much they knew.

Instead, he threw malice at them like poison. Once he started, he found it was hard to stop. Too much bottled-up resentment, too many things he’d left undone or unsaid all the other times he’d failed, came out casually, easily, a steady stream of pure hostility.

It’s all your fault for being so stupid, he wanted to say. This game won’t end no matter what I do. So if it doesn’t matter what I do, isn’t it fine if I act like this, too?

It wasn’t like they’d remember anything he said anyway, if he ever woke up in the locker again.

“Behold, I’m the ‘evil Supreme Leader’ with a twisted personality. The more you all suffer, it’s just so funny to me I can’t help myself.”

Gonta and Iruma-chan were dead. The rest of them were alive. He and all the rest of them had just “done what needed to be done” and yet—

And yet. And yet, and yet. For just a moment at the end, when he’d begged Gonta to let him be executed with him, waking up in the locker one more time had seemed a small price to pay to avoid this outcome. A small price to pay if it meant atoning for this sin that could never be undone, no matter how many times he relived this scenario in the future.

But this outcome couldn’t be avoided. He’d already proven that the last time around, when he’d let Iruma-chan swing that hammer down. When he’d let all the rest of them head to their deaths in a trial they stood no chance of solving by themselves.

Yes, this whole situation was definitely funny. Funny. Pathetic. Disgusting.

“When people experience pure suffering, it makes me happy! There are people like that in this world, too! There are people just like me, who spread malice for no reason!”

As the words left his mouth, he thought of the ringleader, still a wolf in sheep’s clothing he hadn’t yet discovered among the flock. He thought of the eyes he suspected were glued to their screens right this second, watching him perform. Perhaps they were calling for a standing ovation.

He wished he could say he didn’t understand how anyone could possibly look at this game and call it entertaining. But he did.

Ouma felt a deep, sadistic pleasure as he stuck to the script he had written himself. Every insult, every glare, every sign of hatred thrown back at him only fueled his urge to keep going. Yes, this was what was needed to win in a game like this. This was what he’d held back on doing, all those other times. But if there was no need to hold back—then why stop at all?

This was, after all, the kind of role he’d been meant to play in this game.

He dodged Momota-chan’s punch, so easy to predict, so much weaker and less steady than before that he felt like taking the rest of them and shaking them by the shoulders, asking how it was possible for them to not notice that their beloved hero was slowly dying. But he only kept the same grin in place as he turned to face them all again, wondering aloud how they felt about Momota-chan keeping secrets.

When Harukawa-chan threatened to kill him, he actually laughed aloud. It was hardly the first time she’d made that threat, but he’d love to tell her it wouldn’t be the first time she’d succeeded, either.

He kept going. It felt as though something hot and resentful was spilling from the bottom of his stomach, slipping from his mouth instead in some horrible, seething mixture of lies and truths. None of it mattered, anyway. Absolutely none of it mattered, and either he’d see this game to the end or they’d never remember what he said even if he woke up in the locker again—

“You’re the pathetic one… Ouma-kun.”

Saihara-chan’s words cut him off abruptly. Ouma stared at him blankly, for the first time feeling self-aware of how stupid he must look with the same leering grin stuck to his face like a mask that wouldn’t come off.

“There are always people willing to gather around Momota-kun… but there’s no one willing to do that for you, is there Ouma-kun?” The words rang clear and soft in the now-silent trial room, fighting poison with more poison. Except Saihara-chan’s poison was completely justified, unlike his own. “You’re just meant to be… the kind of person who would end up pathetic and alone like that.”

Saihara-chan spoke as softly as ever, but his words cut worse than the still-healing knife wounds at his fingers. Ouma sneered, tried to respond, and found he couldn’t think of anything to say. The inside of his head felt blank, a collection of TV static after the explosion of malice from earlier.

Curiosity and understanding were reserved for mysteries—not murderers who tried to manipulate human beings like chess pieces across the board. So it made sense that Saihara-chan no longer held any curiosity for him at all in his unwavering, half-pitying stare.

Quietly, some small part of him wondered why he’d ever bothered thinking he could afford to wish for an ally in a game as twisted as this.

“…Ahhh, this is getting boring. Everything got way less exciting all of a sudden.”

He left them all with one last threat and walked out of the trial room at a deliberate, steady pace. And as he came outside to the usual slab, he carved the rest of his intended message, just as slowly, just as deliberately, without even bothering to go back to his room to get the bug-catcher.

Ouma stood back and admired his handiwork indifferently: The world belongs to Ouma Kokichi.

No more faltering. No more hesitation. No more betting on probabilities he already knew were doomed to failure before he even took the risk in the first place. Risk was unnecessary in a game about victory.

And this game was just about at its end.

---

He sat on the cold, hard floor of the machinery bay as he waited to die, writing page after page with a practiced, frantic hand, wondering how things had gotten to this point.

That was a lie, though. He knew exactly how they’d reached this point. He just didn’t want to admit it to himself.

Ouma breathed deeply, ignoring the fiery pain running its way through his veins. Even now, when just breathing made every muscle in his body feel as though they were all shrieking in protest, some part of his brain still desperately clung to that cold, logical precision. Not that he was sure what good logic or precision could do him now…

He’d played the rest of the game like any good actor would. Or maybe like a chessmaster.

Or maybe, like a pathetic, lonely liar.

Truth, lies. Black, white. Any square on the board would do, as long as it served a purpose, and they had already been reduced to only seven pieces on the board in total. He had taken that truth about the outside world they so badly wanted, wrapped it in a shroud of lies, and crushed them with it.

His initial plan, with the hammers and bombs, had been discarded. Coldly, he’d come to the conclusion that Iruma-chan had been right about that much at least—the plan wouldn’t work as long as there was a traitor in their midst. Being unable to trust everyone was the same as being unable to trust anyone.

So instead, he had put his hands on the board and snatched it away. There was no deeper satisfaction than the feeling of knowing that he was this kind of character and taking this game, this show, away from the people who wanted to watch it the most. He could almost imagine the despair it must have caused them all. No one knew better than he did how quickly boredom could lead to despair.

Six pieces cornered, one of them a king. He’d put them all into check and declared mate—or so he thought.

Then Harukawa-chan had come crashing through the machinery bay door and killed him once again. She was good at that, of course, but even he hadn’t believed she’d do it again in this particular scenario, after all the precautions he’d taken.

But it didn’t matter what he believed. His plans were down the drain now, and he had very little time left.

Ouma stopped writing for a second, hissing through his teeth as his veins throbbed with an agony unlike anything he’d felt any of the previous times. He flexed his arm impatiently, then picked up his pen and started writing again.

Over his shoulder, he heard a low whistle. “Shit, man, you write fast.” Momota-chan sounded almost impressed, as though against his will.

“Hmm.” Ouma didn’t bother responding, and just kept his hand moving as quickly as possible. Half his brain was spinning, trying to think of every possible scenario that could occur from this point on, thinking up at least ten possible scenarios with a hundred different branches each. The other half felt simply blank, overcome with pain and the numbing realization that everything hinged on this one plan if he had any shot at all of not waking up in that locker again.

For a few moments there was silence between them, the only sound the noise of the pages in his binder as he flipped through them and the scratching of his pen against paper. Then Momota-chan clicked his tongue, sighing in frustration. Ouma didn’t need to look up to know the other boy was probably scratching at the back of his head in dissatisfaction.

“What the fuck even goes on in that brain of yours? Why are you even doing all this?”

That was a very good question. Ouma kept his hand flowing across the pages even as his whole body throbbed in a fiery, aching tempo with every second that his heart kept pumping the poison through his veins.

He thought about Gonta and Iruma-chan. About the blood on his hands—his hands which were, ironically enough, free from any actual blood. Unlike the rest of him. But there was still blood there which was never going to come off, no matter how fast he wrote or how well he played this game.

He thought about the fifty other scenarios with a thousand branches each which he’d dismissed from his plan entirely. How easy it would have been, to have drunk that antidote himself. To let Momota-chan die, since he was already dying anyway. To let Harukawa-chan be executed, since that was only fair when she had poisoned two people.

He thought about the ringleader, and how he’d been blindsided. Whatever plan they had used to encourage this particular outcome, it must have been brilliant. Bitterly, he almost wished he could have seen it. A match in which you couldn’t read or learn from your opponent’s moves was the most boring sort of game.

He thought about the suicide note he’d prepared this time, stashed away in his room. Tried not to think about if Saihara-chan would find it or not after this—and failed. The bandages on the fingers of his left hand were plain to see in the dim light of the machinery bay even as he wrote with his right.

“…Who knows,” he said finally, long after Momota-chan had probably been expecting any answer. “Can’t it just be that I really want to win this game?” The game wasn’t even winnable. He was sure of that now. But he didn’t say that much out loud.

The other boy seemed to mull it over for a time. “…Could be,” he agreed. “But I ain’t buyin’ it. You could be using that big-ass brain of yours to get out of this situation if you wanted to, but you aren’t. So what gives?”

Ouma thought last of all about the locker. It was the last place in the world he wanted to be again. The last thing he wanted to think about.

He said nothing, and his hand kept going across the paper without stopping.

---

Is the cat in the box dead or alive?

Ouma looked up at the press above him, waiting for it to kill him. He kept his face expressionless, simply staring upward at the massive hulking metal, trying not to wonder things like how quickly and how much pain.

There was no shortage of pain in his body. He ached so much he couldn’t have stood back up even if he wanted to. Just getting him here had been a challenge: he’d had to let a half-dead man drag him by the shoulders and lay him down like a doll.

Until the moment the box is opened, it’s both. And it’s neither. But the moment the lid is opened… It has to be one or the other.

He could have done it. Could’ve made a real catbox. No clues, no evidence, nothing to give even the slightest hint as to the status of the cat inside. And maybe if he had done that instead, he would go—somewhere else. Somewhere that wasn’t a small, dark locker waiting to thrust him into this game one more time.

Maybe if no one could ever observe the box again, he wouldn’t keep reliving these things. He was tired.

But it was impossible. For him, anyway. His bluff had been called, and he couldn’t follow the rules of a game like this after all. So they all (not just Saihara-chan he told himself firmly, but that was a lie and he knew it) had their fair share of clues to help them reach the truth. Maybe they would actually get to the end of this game he’d prevented them from finishing the last time.

Wryly, he tried to justify to himself that it wasn’t his fault for opening up the box. Not entirely. Even if he’d tried to leave no clues at all, he already knew Momota-chan wasn’t the type of person who would keep the box closed forever if it meant risking everyone else’s safety.

And neither was he.

He stared upwards and waited to be killed again. After all the writing from earlier, his mind was unusually blank now. There were no more “what-if”s. No more scenarios spinning in his brain, no more hypothetical moves for hypothetical matches.

There weren’t any moves left for him to make on this gameboard. So he wasn’t going to bother setting the pieces back up on the board, next time.

If he could get even one other piece to the end of the gameboard alive this time around because of this plan, then that was enough. That would be more than he’d ever managed to accomplish any of the other times.

From the metal landing up above him, Momota-chan called him out of his reverie. “Don’t think for one second that I believe you told me everything. You didn’t even tell me half of whatever it is you’re hiding, did you?”

Ouma would’ve at least managed a chuckle, under other circumstances. But not this time. “Don’t pry, Momota-chan,” he said. “Believe what you want, I don’t care. But a liar like me has secrets I want to keep to the end, understand?”

If the cat in the box is already dead, then just leave it be, he thought wearily. There was no sense in trying to drag out a dead cat.

Silence. Then suddenly: “…Sorry, man.” The words sounded almost gentle.

He would've scoffed, if he'd still had the energy for that sort of thing. “Don’t be.”

A long, long pause hung between them. He knew already that Momota-chan’s hands must be at the ready on the buttons, both for the press and the camcorder. After one last deep breath, he readied himself. “Turn it on.”

Thankfully, Momota-chan didn’t hesitate. The press thrummed to life in the next instant, a dull clamor of noise and vibrations that drowned out everything else. As the slab of metal made its way towards him inexorably, unhesitant and merciless, he had several vague, fleeting thoughts all at once.

He thought about cats and boxes, about what it would mean to stop being both alive and dead at the same time. He thought about chess, about games, about the slightly dirtied bandages on his hand. He thought about the fact that even now, if there were no locker and no catbox, he still would really rather not die—

The press came crashing down, and everything ended.

---

He woke up in a locker, took in the state of himself, and resigned himself to the fact that this was the end after all.

The cat in the box was dead. Now it’s alive again.

That would keep repeating, as per the rules of this game. Whatever those rules really were, and whoever decided them, he didn’t know. He still didn’t know. He didn’t want to know.

Ouma made his way out of the locker. Every joint, every muscle in his body screamed in protest, aching dully. There was no more poison and no more press, but he was too tired to keep doing things this way.

A chess match could only start if both sides agreed to line the pieces up and play a match. He’d tried to steal the board away, only to have it stolen out from under him instead. Now he didn’t feel like stealing it back.

He made his way down the hall quickly, despite the pain in each step. One or two people he passed along the way, always without looking back at them.

For the moment, he wanted peace and quiet. He wanted a dark, empty room in which he wouldn’t have to think anymore about sacrifices he’d made and sins he’d committed just to lose in a game he couldn’t win from the start.

A few days. If he closed himself up in his room starting now, he’d have at least a few days of peace and quiet and nothingness before the time limit was up. Then he’d wake up in the locker again, only to face a few more days. If that kept repeating… It wasn’t ideal, but he felt it was at least a better trade than trying to play the game any further.

There was nothing more boring than an unwinnable game. There was nothing more disgusting than breaking all the rules and sacrificing for a game that had never meant anything at all.

Ouma picked the locks to his own room, closed the door behind him, and locked it shut, fully intending to never open it again.

Without a clock in his room or the television coming on, it’s impossible for him to know how many hours are left until the time limit. But he knows it must be close. It’s all anyone on the other side of the door has been talking about since some time ago.

There are very few of them left by now. At an estimate, he’d guess there must be about four hours to go.

It’s so blissfully quiet again in his room. Occasionally he can still hear murmurs and footsteps outside the room. And every once in a while, as though on the hour, a knock. But it’s nowhere near as bad as the clamor from before, and while his head is still pounding faintly, it’s barely worth noting compared to the way it was throbbing before.

Time ticks by slowly. More of them leave. Eventually, even Momota-chan says something furiously under his breath and storms off. Whether he’s going to ream the others out or not, Ouma doesn’t know or care. He just knows he probably won’t come back before time is up. Akamatsu-chan says something he can’t make out a little while later, sounding both apologetic and encouraging.

She leaves, and Ouma has to wonder if he finally got them all to give up.

In the pitch black darkness of his room, it doesn’t matter whether his eyes are open or closed. It didn’t matter much either, when the press came down—the last time. He wonders if he might fall back asleep for just a few more hours, if he tries closing his eyes again now.

He tries. It lasts for a few peaceful seconds, and then—

Another knock at the door.

“Go away,” he says instantly. Empty as he feels, there’s still just a tinge of annoyance to his voice. He had thought he was alone, but that knock clearly says otherwise.

“It’s just me now,” says the voice from the other side of the door. “There’s something I need to ask you about no matter what.”

Despite himself, Ouma’s lip curls. He already knew it would be that voice, yes, but he can’t say he’s pleased at being proven right.

Because he doesn’t say anything, the voice speaks up again. “…Is it okay if I go ahead and ask?”

No, it’s not okay, he thinks. “Go away,” he repeats. That hardly sounds any less childish, but at least he can delude himself that it’s a flat refusal for a conversation, something that will deter the other party from saying anything else.

It doesn’t work, of course.

“You’ve been saying that for a while now lately… Well, pretty much for the whole day.” The voice sounds thoughtful. “You said it first when we came knocking this morning, when we were just trying to figure out if you were even in there or not.”

Ouma doesn’t say anything at all this time.

“Even though we weren’t sure if you were inside or not, you still answered us. And you’ve kept answering since, every now and then. It could’ve just been that you answered by mistake the first time but... something tells me that’s not it.”

Silence. Ouma stares at the ceiling and half-wishes there were another press here to kill him now.

“If you really wanted us to go away, wouldn’t you have just stayed quiet? Wouldn’t you have not said anything at all?”

A detective through and through… Ouma remembers when he thought those words to himself and bites at the inside of his cheek, tasting iron in his mouth.

“I think… I think you answered because you wanted to let us know you were in there.” There’s a note of confidence to his voice, the sound of a detective announcing a theory which he’s sure will hold up.

There are a million ways Ouma can think of to poke holes in that theory of his, but all of them are lies. He’s too tired to lie right now.

“What do you want from me?” he finally asks.

There’s a brief, surprised pause. Then the voice carries on, so quiet that he almost can’t make it out. “I think you do want to talk. Or else you wouldn’t have said anything this morning, and you wouldn’t have responded to me just now. Isn’t that right?”

Ouma shifts his head slightly to stare vaguely in the direction where his bedroom door should be. It’s a sign of affirmation that can’t even be seen by that person on the other side, and yet—still…

“There are things I want to ask you still, but could you open the door? I won’t come knocking again if you don’t like what I have to say.”

You shouldn’t have come knocking the first time, he thinks, but it’s a tired, childish thought. The promise of getting him to go away sounds almost worth it. Still, he hesitates.

“…There’s not much time left. Please.”

The silence spans at least thirty seconds. Two minutes. Five. Ouma slowly, carefully gets up from the bed. His legs are shaky and his body feels weak all over, but he can walk if he takes it slowly.

There’s no expression on his face at all as he turns the lock in the dark, unlocks the door, and opens it.

Chapter Text

When the door swings open, at first he almost thinks there’s nobody on the other side.

Stupid, he thinks. That’s stupid. Of course I wasn’t talking to a ghost.

His thoughts flip hastily through the past forty-four hours he’s experienced. All too clearly, he remembers Momota-kun rambling the day before about the ghost all in white he saw shuffling through the hallway. Not, the other boy had clarified, that he actually believed in ghosts or anything. It had just taken him off guard. Caught him by surprise. Of course.

Well, obviously. There was no time for the occult in any of this mess. Just grasping the reality of their situation had been hard enough.

But Saihara still blinks apprehensively as the door opens wide all the same. He’s been standing in the well-lit hallway this entire time, but he still feels as though his eyes are the ones trying to adjust as he takes in the state of the room. It’s all pitch-black, and what little light shines in through the doorway from behind him seems to cut off rather abruptly as soon as it touches the dark shadows just past the threshold. All in all, the room feels no more welcoming now than it did when the door was shut tight before him, impenetrable and unfriendly.

It takes him some time to realize that the boy on the other side isn’t actually standing in the doorway per se but behind the door—a careful tactic to avoid being hit full in the face with the harsh glare of the hallway lights, he notes.

Saihara just stands there blankly, wondering what to do with himself. This is what he wanted, of course. What he’s been trying to accomplish since the day began, actually. He just didn’t think it would actually happen. His words have been surprisingly (and alarmingly) self-assured for the past few days, but that doesn’t change the fact that he is a pessimist by nature.

He had hoped for this outcome, tried to achieve it—and now that it happened, he isn’t quite sure how he should proceed. Somehow, it feels like this uncertainty is always a constant in his life. He swallows hard and tries to remind himself that the hardest part is yet to come. Hopefully that same self-assurance from earlier hasn’t completely gone away yet.

There’s a sigh from the boy behind the door. “Weren’t you the one who said we were in a hurry?”

“Eh? Ah… yeah.”

“Come in, then.”

For a moment, he remembers all too well the whispered conversations between his classmates earlier today. Is entering a dark room alone (this dark room, with its mysterious inhabitant and previously-impenetrable door) really the best idea in a game where they’ve all been told to kill each other?

He reminds himself firmly that there are less than four hours to go until the time limit. He doesn’t have time to hesitate like this.

Taking a deep breath, he steps forward into the room, and the boy behind the door pushes it shut as soon as he’s clear of the threshold. The sudden absence of light unnerves him, even though he knew it was coming. His fingers almost twitch towards his forehead, fumbling for a cap that isn’t there before he remembers that he stuffed it into his back pocket earlier.

For some reason, he had expected some laughing, half-teasing remarks, now that they were alone together like this.

What, too dark to see? Well, don’t let that stop you from having a conversation.

The soft tone of voice from the room’s mysterious occupant had just given him that impression, though he isn’t sure why. He hasn’t heard him say a single word that wasn’t delivered in complete monotone, let alone laugh.

The teasing doesn’t come. There’s a soft, muffled sound of bare feet moving in the dark, a noise like bedsprings creaking gently under someone’s weight. Then a click, and the room lights up unexpectedly—not with harsh, white, fluorescent light, but with the warmer glow of a bedside lamp.

Still, it’s so sudden that Saihara finds his eyes readjusting all over again. As disoriented as he is after only a brief stint in pitch darkness, he wonders how the boy on the bed must be feeling. Did he turn on this lamp or the overhead lights even once in the past few days? Somehow, he rather doubts it.

Gradually, the sight of the boy before him slowly sinks in, pushing his other thoughts aside. The lighting might be dim, but it’s still more than enough for his eyes (keen from years spent nosing around crime scenes he hadn’t even wanted to visit in the first place) to take in every detail.

Hollows under his eyes that sit like bruises. Unkempt hair curling into his face, clearly obscuring his vision but too much of a hassle for him to brush it out of his eyes. Wrinkled, messy sleeping clothes, creased with telltale signs of having been worn for days on end. A frame that looks somehow smaller, lighter than he had expected.

What had he expected, exactly? He doesn’t even know this boy. But he worries all the same. It’s only been a few days, so it can’t possibly be too serious, but his mind searches frantically through the symptoms of malnutrition for a good twenty seconds nonetheless.

As it turns out, the unopenable room’s mysterious inhabitant isn’t a ghost after all. But he sure looks like one.

He clears his throat awkwardly and looks away. The boy hasn’t said a word yet to offer him a place to sit down, but he still makes his way over to the desk anyway, pulling out the chair and sitting on it gingerly. There’s an armchair a little closer to the bed which looks like it might be more comfortable, but it’s facing the other way, and he doesn’t really feel like craning his neck right now.

Now, he thinks, for the hard part. “So…” he says. He trails off uncertainly, unsure of where to begin. He had meant to start his speech more convincingly, but he’s not exactly the best at performing under pressure.

This is a situation that requires him to pick his words carefully. It might very well be the most urgent conversation of his life. He can’t afford to mess up.

“…So,” he says again.

“Wow, eloquent.”

Saihara nearly sputters. The words are still as monotone and unfriendly as ever, but he can’t help but be caught off guard by the snippiness with which they were delivered. For half a second, he makes eye contact with the boy again—but he looks away almost immediately. There’s just something too unnerving about that hollow, blank-faced stare of his.

He’s hit with the urge to pull the cap back out of his pocket. His fingers are jittery, itching for something to fumble with in order to calm his nerves. But he pushes the urge back down. “Can I ask you your name?” he says finally, after another moment or two has passed. A name is a good place to start. This conversation is going to be hard enough as it is without having anything else to call the boy in front of him.

“Ouma Kokichi.” The reply comes instantly, much quicker than he would’ve expected. It’s no more and no less than what he asked for directly. But there’s still just the slightest feeling of… dissonance. These replies feel all wrong, as if they were somehow straying from lines written for them on a script.

“Ouma-kun,” Saihara says tentatively, trying to lead into his next question. For just a moment, he would swear he sees the boy’s face darken. But the shadow is gone just as quickly as it came, enough for him to wonder if it was just a trick of the dim bedside lighting. “Why did you lock yourself in here like this?”

There’s a pause so long it feels like it might never end. The lack of time they have, less than four hours until the time limit, weighs on him constantly, eating away at the pit of his stomach like a solid clump of nerves. There really isn’t a lot of time to spare for these long, unending pauses. But he’s afraid that if he breaks the silence between them again, he might get kicked out of this room—and next time, maybe the door won’t open back up.

Ouma-kun looks at him with no emotion, no expectations, and very little interest. “I don’t know, Saihara-chan. You’re the detective, why don’t you tell me?” The words come out cold, pointed, and in a lower tone than he would’ve expected, coming from such a small frame.

Only a second or two passes before Saihara realizes exactly what was wrong with that last question.

“Eh…? Ah—” He swallows, his hands clenching and unclenching atop his knees. “I… I didn’t tell you my…”

“Didn’t tell me your name or talent? Yeah, isn’t that strange?” The indifference in the boy’s voice rings as hollow as the circles under his eyes; he would almost swear the room feels a few degrees colder. “So hey, what’s the secret? Would you believe me if I told you I heard the rest of them say your name while they were standing outside my room all day? ‘Saihara Shuuichi-kun,’ yeah, I’m pretty sure at least one of them said it word for word. Would you just take my word for it if I said I was really good at matching voices with names and faces?”

Saihara doesn’t say anything in return. He swallows again and sits very still.

“Hmm, but that still doesn’t account for how I know your talent, does it?”

Maybe Ouma-kun’s words would sound less out of place if they were being said with any feeling to them at all. Sarcasm, disdain, condescension—even these would be fine. Even a smirk would do. But it’s the complete and utter lack of emotion that really unnerves him.

“Come on, Saihara-chan, give me an answer. You wanted to talk, right? Let’s talk.” There is a very brief pause, and if he didn’t look so tired, Saihara could swear the boy would be sneering at him right now. “Is there anything I could tell you that you’d just believe?”

He doesn’t say the next part out loud, but his intent seems to hang in the air between them nonetheless: If you say that you’d believe me that easily, then you’re a fool.

Saihara finds, though, that his nerves are less shaken now than they were when this whole speech started. Uneasy as he feels, he’s sure now more than ever that there has to be an explanation for all of… this. For the things he’s thought and said over the past few days, the things he’s heard the others say. An explanation and a reason as to why he’s in here, talking in a dimly lit room with a boy who looks like he barely even has it in him to exist.

He looks up and meets Ouma-kun’s eyes steadily. His curiosity is a curse sometimes, but right now it feels more like an anchor, holding him steady despite his nerves. “You could start by telling me something,” he says quietly. “Do that, and I’ll decide for myself whether I believe you or not.”

It feels just the slightest bit like a victory when he sees the boy’s eyes widen imperceptibly. Surprise. Disbelief. Very clear signs of emotion.

Good, he thinks tiredly. Good. That’s a start.

Finally, Ouma-kun scoffs. It’s the least amused-sounding laughter he’s ever heard in his life. “Alright, sure. Fine.” He stops for a second, looking sickly pale even in the dim, warm lamplight. If he weren’t already sitting on the bed, Saihara would recommend that he lie down. He could swear he looks as if he’s about to pass out.

“Fine,” Ouma-kun says again. “I’ll talk first, you listen. No interruptions, that’s just rude.”

Saihara arches his eyebrows at that surprisingly cheeky addendum, but he doesn’t say anything. Just to prove that he’s capable of not interrupting, of course.

“I guess we’ve got some time to kill anyway.” The other boy gives him a smile for the very first time, looking bitter, defeated… and just the tiniest bit amused. “Or, hey, time until we all get killed.”

Ouma talks. There’s a raw, rough ache in his throat and his tongue feels like sandpaper, but he talks. And talks. And talks.

For the first time since this game began, the first time since he woke up in that small, dark locker, he tells the whole sordid tale from start to finish.

It sounds like a tall enough tale to put even his best lies to shame. Perhaps that’s because it’s a story comprised entirely of truths and lies, lies and truths. Even he’s not sure where to draw the line between the two anymore. They’re all things that he’s done—and technically things he’s never done, never will do again.

Is there even a word for something that isn’t a lie but isn’t the truth either? he wonders vaguely. A half-lie? A half-truth? How strange, that there’s no word to sum up the gray area. Even as his thoughts go elsewhere, his mouth keeps reciting the story, just as mechanically as his hand raced across the paper the last time, writing three-hundred-or-so pages of a script that no longer exists.

Any good story, whether it’s true or not, deserves a good delivery. The best ones deserve to be told with a flourish, with embellishment in all the right places. He’s really not doing this one justice at all. Every bone in his body aches with complete and utter exhaustion, but a small part of him still protests at his own blank-faced monotony anyway.

But one thing is for sure: he leaves nothing out. He’s still too tired to lie. That includes lies by omission, too.

Saihara-chan makes for a better listener than he would’ve thought. He knows how nosy he can be, for a fact—well, what did he expect from a detective?

Despite his warning, he still half-expected some surprised remarks, some disbelieving noises. But none of that happens. The other boy just sits there and listens. At some point Ouma notices him unclench one of his hands on his knee and prop it up under his chin in that familiar, thoughtful gesture.

Although he doesn’t interrupt, he still reacts in all the right places. Sometimes he looks surprised, other times doubtful. More than once, when he touches on the worst and most unforgivable of his own crimes, he sees Saihara-chan’s fingers twitch nervously. But perhaps it’s a testament to either his determination or his curiosity (he’s not sure which) that he doesn’t just get up and leave.

He expected him to have left by now. Saihara Shuuichi from the first time around, the second, from any of those other times, would have left by now. At least, he’s pretty sure.

How nice to know that Saihara-chan is just as hard to read as ever.

“…Then I woke up in the locker again. I decided to skip all the usual boring parts and head straight to my room. …Ah, but things got pretty boring again when Saihara-chan and the others came knocking, I guess.”

His throat aches by the time he finishes speaking, inflamed and sore from lack of use. Well, after more than two days without even a glass of water, that’s probably only natural. He rests his head atop his propped-up knees, glad for an excuse to finally stop talking. The ball is back in Saihara-chan’s court, so to speak.

He expects shock. He expects suspicion. He expects outright accusations of him lying and deceiving, even at this late stage in the game.

What he doesn’t expect is for the other boy to absentmindedly tap his finger against his chin, gnaw on his bottom lip for a while, and then say, “That… makes sense, actually.”

Ouma’s brain stutters. Of all the possibilities he accounted for, all the possible responses he ever expected to hear, that wasn’t one.

“What?” he says. He was quite the smart-ass earlier when he mocked Saihara-chan’s inability to start talking. The irony isn’t lost on him now that he’s back to one-word responses himself, the disgust in his voice almost palpable.

“That actually makes sense.” Saihara-chan repeats himself with the casual firmness of someone announcing a correct math problem to the rest of the class. “That answers a lot of the questions that I had before. Thank you.”

He stares at the other boy, dumbfounded. “I might’ve been lying, you know. I might’ve been lying about everything I told you.”

“Yeah, maybe you were,” says the other boy amenably. “But I don’t think so.”

Ouma stares. A cough rises up in his throat once or twice, too sudden for him to choke back down, but otherwise he feels completely, utterly immobilized. He’s not even sure if he was this incapable of movement when Iruma-chan programmed him to stand stock-still in the virtual world, those last few times.

“I just told you I’ve been time-travelling.”

“Yeah, you did.”

“Everything I told you is absolutely impossible.”

“It really does sound impossible, yeah.”

“Hey, listen, Saihara-chan,” he says. For the first time since he opened the door to his room, he feels something like real anger flaring up in his chest, cold and sharp. He’s still exhausted, but incredulity is starting to win out.

What’s with this treatment? Again and again, he’s repeated this pointless game. He’s called himself a liar, a villain, a ringleader—the worst of the worst. There wasn’t a person in this game who would’ve believed his words at face value even if he paid them to. So why is it that the other boy keeps tapping his chin and nodding, as though it really does make sense?

There isn’t a shred of proof to back him up. Everything that happened—didn’t happen. That’s the catch. If Saihara-chan is naïve enough to take him at his word here, then he’s every bit the idiot he was when Ouma last saw him, white-faced and tear-streaked and horrified at the sight of an outside world he should’ve already guessed was ruined a long time ago.

He bites down the part of himself that’s still stupid enough to feel just the tiniest bit happy, that Saihara-chan would believe him in spite of all that.

He’s about to continue his rant when suddenly, he freezes. He blinks once, twice, almost sure that he’s just seeing things wrong in the dim lighting. “…Where the hell is your hat?” He blurts the question out all at once, propping himself just a little more upright as he stares.

How did he miss something so simple all this time? Even if he’s tired (and he is tired, bone tired), this is an oversight on his part the size of a… well, a horse.

Haha. Sure, now’s a pretty great time for jokes.

Saihara-chan flushes and lifts his hand up to pull down the edge of a cap that’s not there right now before realizing his mistake and lowering it again sheepishly. It’s a predictable motion, a familiar motion. Ouma has seen this plenty of times—always after the first trial. Never now. Never within the first few days of the game.

“It… um. It felt like it was sort of getting in the way.”

The detective clears his throat, crossing his arms uncomfortably as though looking for something to do with his hands. This too is something he’s seen him do a hundred, a thousand times before, but never this early. He’s heard of going off-script, but isn’t this just a little ridiculous?

“And besides… that’s what I’m talking about,” Saihara-chan continues, cutting into his thoughts. “Ouma-kun, I’ll be honest. Everything you said is impossible. But then, we’ve all been going through a lot of impossible things lately. I’ve… we’ve… had a certain feeling about this game we’re in.”

‘I’ll be honest…’ Yeah, sure. He could laugh, but he thinks he might be sick if he opens his mouth. He settles for eyeing Saihara-chan with a skepticism bordering on disgust.

“Maybe… Maybe it’s not the first time we’ve been through this game.”

For just a moment, he envisions a game in which all the pieces are set up on the opposite side of the board, right from the start. Automatic promotion, no wait necessary. The most perfect and opportune positioning of pieces he could ever hope for in an unwinnable game.

Then he remembers that thinking of everything, everyone, as a bunch of pieces was exactly what got him into this mess in the first place. The sick feeling in his stomach gets worse, and if he weren’t already sitting down, he’d probably have stumbled to the floor by now.

He throws his hands up behind his head, not in his usual cocky gesture, but just to steady himself. He breathes heavily, in, then out. In again. Out again. He’s aware that if he looks up, he’ll see Saihara-chan staring at him, alarmed and concerned. So of course, he doesn’t look up.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop the alarm and concern from showing through anyway. “…Are you okay?” There’s a softness to the other boy’s voice that he doesn’t remember hearing before, and he hates him for it.

“Do I look okay to you?” He rests his head against his knees weakly, waiting for the nausea to pass. “For a Super High School Level Detective you seem to be doing a pretty bad job at this whole, you know, detecting thing.”

He says that, but his mind is racing through the conversations he’s heard taking place outside his door all day. He was the bad detective, not Saihara-chan. The missing hat is just the tip of the iceberg.

The name “Shuuichi,” far too overly-familiar after only a few days’ time, even from someone like Momota-chan. Amami-chan and Akamatsu-chan, together in the same place just a few hours before the time limit. This whole ridiculous plan, whatever it was that they all had in mind. None of these things had ever happened before, or if they had, not until much, much later.

Why now…? Why? Why now of all times?

His brain can’t come up with an answer to that, no matter how long he waits. It keeps stuttering, repeating the question like an engine that refuses to start.

“…I thought maybe we were just… remembering things we were made to forget. Like some kind of induced amnesia. That would account for the sense of déjà vu,” Saihara-chan says. “The only thing I could think was that maybe we’d experienced something similar in the past, and that was why things seemed to be… coming easier to us.”

Ouma stays very, very quiet.

“You know, in the déjà vu sensation, your brain convinces itself that it’s lived through an exact experience before. It makes the leap very quickly from ‘yeah, maybe that happened before’ to ‘yeah, that definitely happened before.’ So I thought it made more sense at first if we were just… leaping to conclusions, making connections where there weren’t any.”

If he weren’t feeling so nauseous, Ouma would throw something at him. Sounding pretentious is a job requirement for a detective, sure, but he’s just really not in the mood to hear it right now.

“But I think I’ve finally realized, thanks to what you told me. Ouma-kun, if you really have been repeating this game, um… reliving everything with your memories intact, then couldn’t that just as easily happen to the rest of us?”

“That’s impossible.” He responds before he can even really think the question over. It’s a question he doesn’t want to think over. His mind keeps balking at the alternatives.

“Why is it impossible? You told me a lot, but I still don’t quite understand why you would be the only one remembering anything. It doesn’t really add up.”

It’s impossible because the rest of you are too stupid, he wants to say. There’s no way you’d ever remember anything, not when you all disappointed me so spectacularly, so many times. Instead, he says, “Why did no one else remember any of those other times, then? Why just now?”

That earns a few seconds of silence. He still won’t lift his head off his knees, but he can just picture the other boy, tapping his finger against the corner of his mouth in thought. How annoyingly like a detective.

“Did no one else really remember anything?” Saihara-chan finally asks. “It sounds to me like there were signs. Maybe instead of being the only one remembering… you were just the best one at it?”

Ouma thinks back on every single time they played a game together. Every unexpected move, unexpected line, every instance in which Saihara-chan went off-script. All the times in which he or, less often, one of the others said or did something that genuinely caught him off guard. Were those signs? He doesn’t know.

“What’s your talent, if you don’t mind me asking? You didn’t mention one earlier, when you were talking.”

He finally lifts his head up off his knees. There are spots across his vision, though he’s not sure whether they’re from how bad he feels, the lack of sleep, or just because his eyes are readjusting to the bedside light again. “No clue,” he says bluntly.

“N-No clue?” Saihara-chan actually sounds taken aback, his voice cracking in a way that’s familiar and just the slightest bit entertaining, even after all this time. “You mean… like Amami-kun…?”

“Oh, no, I remember having a talent. They made me remember having one, I should say.” He smiles wryly. “It’s just that it’s fake.”

He’s not the Supreme Leader of anything—that’s a fact he knows better than anyone right now. Even if they… those people… actually exist, or used to exist (and that’s a thought he doesn’t want to dwell on), it was all just play-pretend. Just a lie. Like everything else about me, he thinks.

It takes him a moment or two to realize that Saihara-chan is staring at him, not in disbelief but with something more like… curiosity. “What?” He’s too tired to try guessing what that look on his face might mean.

“Ah, well… I just thought, that kind of supports my theory, doesn’t it? Maybe your talent is related to why you remember everything more easily than everyone else.”

Ouma wonders if there’s any good way for him to refute that theory of his. As much as he hates to admit it, the evidence seems to be in Saihara-chan’s favor, not his own. He remembers his old whiteboard, his eye for detail, his three-hundred-page script. Repetition can account for some of those things, of course—after all, he’s known what’s coming and what to expect for a good while in this game. But it can’t account for all of it.

“Tell me about your plan,” he says suddenly.

“Eh?”

“I said, tell me about your plan. That’s what you wanted to ask me about, right? You’ve all been pounding on my door for the better part of the day because you want everyone to participate, I’m guessing?”

The other boy looks both impressed and a little bit uneasy at his guesswork. “Well… yeah.”

Ouma resists the urge to roll his eyes. It’s not exactly like they were subtle, talking about things so loudly, right outside his door.

Saihara-chan takes a deep breath. Now that the conversation is switching away from theories and back to the main reason he came here, it looks like his nerves are catching up with him a bit. “We’re going to wait it out,” he says after a pause.

A noise somewhere between a cough and a laugh rises up in his throat. “Wait out what, exactly? The time limit? Or the game?”

“…Both.”

“Either way, that’s nothing new Saihara-chan. That’s what all of you planned to do all those other times, before Akamatsu-chan took that ball and caved in Amami-chan’s skull with it.” He waves a shaky hand. “Ah, but if you feel like being the one who gets his head caved in instead, you can go ahead and try to stop either of them. Just tell them what I told you. I’m sure they’ll be so quick to believe it.”

“Maybe we tried to wait it out before, but did we ever try waiting it out in the same place? All sixteen of us?”

Ouma gives him a tired look. “Are you telling me your plan, after everything I told you, is still to hold hands and sing songs? You really think trusting everyone is the way to beat this game?” He’s mildly surprised to learn that there is apparently some small part of him still capable of feeling disappointed, after all this time.

Well, that’s okay, he thinks. That small part won’t be there, the next time around. I’ll know not to feel disappointed, if this conversation happens again. Assuming he even bothers opening the door next time.

But the other boy surprises him even more when he opens his mouth and says, “Not at all.”

Ouma eyes him skeptically. “Oh, really? Sounds like blind trust to me.”

“We’re not doing this because we trust everyone. We’re doing it because we don’t trust each other. We decided the safest way to see the time limit out to the end is to hole up together, so we can all keep an eye on each other.”

“So now you’ve all gone from wanting to be best friends to trusting absolutely no one?” That sure would’ve made things a whole lot easier for him, if it had ever actually happened. No trust was better than blind trust. But they never did learn. “Sorry, but I’m the one who’s finding that a little hard to believe here.”

Saihara-chan pauses, un-crosses and re-crosses his arms, and looks away nervously. “It’s not… that we don’t trust anyone.” As a detective, someone who suspects and points the finger at people for a living, he must not like the idea because it hits too close to home. “It’s just… We barely know each other yet, so of course we can’t trust each other.”

Of course we can’t trust each other. He nearly bent over backwards last time, trying to make Saihara-chan say those words back then. Here they are this time around, being offered to him so easily. And yet… he feels the meaning behind them is slightly different from what he himself has always had in mind.

“But doubting people is part of the process of getting to know them, right? Whether we like it or not, it’s necessary. So we’ll keep doubting each other, until we all know each other better.”

What’s with that logic? Ouma thinks. Doubt until you all know each other? Doubt until you understand each other? As if something like that would work.

“It’s not just for the time limit. We’re planning on turning the library into a living space. That’s what everyone else was doing today, when they weren’t here knocking.”

The library? His mind balks at the word: if there’s one place they shouldn’t be this close to the time limit, it’s there. He feels sweat on his brow, the nausea creeping back into his stomach, twisting it into knots. And yet, when he thinks about it rationally—if everyone’s there, not just Akamatsu-chan or Amami-chan…

He can almost see the sense in it. There aren’t any school regulations against sleeping outside their rooms. The only places off-limits at night are the cafeteria and the gym. So if that’s the case, then… then even this stupid plan might just…

What he hates the most is that he’s not sure if it’ll work or not. He’s not sure if anything will work, including this far-fetched, half-baked plan.

I already gave up, anyway. Why am I even considering this?

“That’s why… we’d like you to join us, too, Ouma-kun. This plan won’t work if even one person is missing. Too many people would wonder where that person was, what they were doing, and then…”

“…And then the whole thing would fall apart, yes.” Ouma finishes his sentence for him, his words clipped and short. He’s still trying to think, but his brain is just so tired. “What time is it?” he asks, still considering his options.

“E-Eh?”

“The time. How much time until the time limit hits?”

“Ah…” Saihara-chan clears his throat, then checks his watch. “An hour and a half.”

So, not much time at all. He needs to make up his mind fast.

Well, what’s the worst that can happen? Whether we all die because time runs out, or because Monokuma decides it doesn’t want us camping out in the library, I’ll still just wake up in the locker again. And next time, I’ll know not to come out of my room again.

He ignores the fact that that’s exactly the same thing he told himself last time, too.

Ouma takes a deep breath, looks him right in the eye, and says, “Fine. Okay. You win.”

For just a moment, he thinks back to when he used to lose their little games on purpose all those times, remembers the dramatic performances he used to give. For just a moment, he remembers what it was like to have fun.

The detective looks at him curiously. “I-I win? So you mean…?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I just can’t seem to shake you no matter what I do, Saihara-chan. So I guess I have no choice but to go along with this little plan of yours. How boring.” And yet, as he says it, he feels distinctly not bored, for what might be the first time in… hours? Days? Years? He’s not sure.

All the tension leaves Saihara-chan’s face at once; he looks so shaken with relief that Ouma has half a mind to ask if he wants to sit on the bed instead. “That’s great,” the other boy says weakly. “That’s really great… I wasn’t sure if you were going to agree, so… I mean…”

“Hold on.” He holds up a finger, interrupting before the other boy can get too ahead of himself. “I’ll go with you. Just don’t expect anything from me, okay?” His voice comes out softer than he intended.

This is the most he can give, as far as he’s concerned: compliance without resistance. But he has nothing else left to offer. No charades, no façades. No lies.

It’s not as though there’s anything else left to him, stripped of those things. So he’ll go, and he’ll observe, and he won’t get in their way. And when this house of cards inevitably comes crashing down and he’s thrown into this game once again, at least he’ll know he gave it one more failed attempt.

He expects the other boy to nod anxiously to that last remark, but instead he just looks at him thoughtfully. “I think it’s true that you shouldn’t push yourself too hard. Not after what you’ve been through.”

Cheap sympathy that he doesn’t deserve—just great. He shrugs and changes the subject. “Should we get going, then?”

“Eh? Didn’t you want to get changed first…?” Saihara-chan looks genuinely taken aback.

“Ah, there’s one little detail I forgot to mention. I don’t think I can stand or walk on my own.” He gives him a sardonic smile. Or a weak attempt at one, anyway. “So, you see, unless you’d rather be the one to dress me, I think I should just go the way I am now.”

The detective nods, looking a little shaken. They can always come back for his clothes later, maybe when he actually has the energy to do basic tasks, like dressing himself.

Saihara-chan stands up from the chair by the desk, leans down, and offers him a hand—presumably to help him to his feet.

Ouma takes it, too tired to refuse.

Saihara had expected half-carrying a boy his own age to be a much more difficult task than this.

After all, he’s not particularly strong. He hasn’t done any physical exercise beyond the mandatory forty-five minutes of gym per day at his last high school, and that was quite some time ago. His arms are weak and out of shape—and well, if he’s being entirely honest, he wouldn’t mind keeping them that way.

But it turns out to be easy. Surprisingly easy. Scarily easy.

Ouma-kun has one arm thrown over his shoulders, almost the entirety of his weight leaning against him as they slump across the school grounds at a slow, steady pace. He’s standing upright, but only in the barest sense of the word; if he were to step away from him, the other boy would crumple to the ground in a heap.

“You haven’t eaten much lately, have you Ouma-kun?” That’s an understatement. He feels like a wraith, barely more than skin and bones. He’s not sure how much he weighs exactly… but at an estimate, he’d say “not enough.”

It must be hard for the other boy to walk and talk at the same time, because he takes a while to respond. “Who knows…” he says after a pause. “Not eating for a few days won’t kill me.” There’s a pause, then a laugh that hardly sounds like a laugh. “Well actually, nothing will kill me. Not permanently.”

Saihara isn’t quite sure how to respond. The state he’s in goes beyond just a few days without food, and they both know it. He hoists the boy a little more securely against his shoulder and keeps going, trying to process all the things that he’s heard today.

Time travel. Amnesia. Horrible crimes, committed by these classmates he’s only just met. Even worse crimes, committed by this boy he’s propping up on his shoulder. To be entirely honest, he’s afraid of this boy. There’s not much he isn’t afraid of—he can’t help it.

The story he told him about sounds too ridiculous to be true. It’s too bizarre, too outlandish, and none of it makes any sense at all—if he were reading a mystery novel with these kinds of twists at the end, he’s pretty sure he’d close the book, put it down, and never pick it back up again.

And yet… more bizarre and outlandish than any of those things is the feeling in his gut, telling him that this is the right thing to do. There’s no explanation for it, any more than there was an explanation for it back when he stood knocking at that impenetrable bedroom door, knowing (without knowing how he knew) that if he gave up and left then something awful would happen.

There’s a certain quote from a certain fictional detective that he can’t help but feel is applicable to their current situation. Something about the impossible and the improbable… But even thinking it to himself feels like far too much of a cliché. So he doesn’t.

For what feels like the hundredth time since they started walking, he casts a glance sideways to see how Ouma-kun is holding up—there’s a sheen of sweat on the other boy’s face, his eyes fixed straight ahead as they make their progress, step by step. Under the last rays of sunset, the hollows under his eyes stand out against his pale skin more than ever, haggard and dark.

“Do you want to take a break?” Saihara asks hesitantly.

Ouma-kun doesn’t even look at him. “We don’t have time for breaks. Besides, games should be played in hard mode, don’t you think? It’d be a shame to stop now when I’m having so much fun.”

Saihara can’t help but suspect that’s just an excuse. He’s pretty sure that the other boy is worried that if he sits down again, he won’t get back up. Every step he takes looks painful, like he’s having to remind himself how to walk.

If he voices this aloud though, he might just make him angry. He swallows and keeps walking, trying to ignore the sinking suspicion that it’s already written all over his face. But fortunately, Ouma-kun doesn’t look over.

As they enter the school building and make their steady, careful way towards the library, he looks down at his feet. Even though he’s put his cap aside for now, having these kinds of discussions—having any discussion—is still difficult. “I need to tell you something, before we get there. …They, um… kind of think you… might be the ringleader.”

There’s no response. He supposes this might be something of a sensitive subject, considering everything he heard earlier.

“I mean, they won’t once we’re there! Once we go there and they see that you’re with me, they’ll stop thinking that… p-probably.” He remembers all the whispers, all the fearful discussions around the bedroom door earlier today. “It’s just, you were the only classmate we hadn’t seen yet, so some of them thought that… if anyone might be pulling the strings…”

His words trail off uncomfortably, but Ouma-kun doesn’t seem to care much. “I could be the ringleader, for all you know. Pretty sure I mentioned it before, but I could’ve been lying to you about everything,” he says. He sounds casual, as if the subject has nothing to do with him. “So why don’t you think I’m the ringleader anyway, Saihara-chan?”

It’s a fair question. He brushed it aside so easily earlier, but honestly, he still has doubts. Still… “Even if you were—would you really be able to do anything the way you are right now?” He keeps his eyes fixed on his feet.

There’s another pause. “I’m a pretty good actor.”

“…So you told me.”

Ouma-kun has certainly driven that point home several times over the last few hours. But it’s still kind of hard for him to imagine. By now, he’s seen a few rare signs of emotion from the other boy. Bitterness, sometimes. Anger others. Very occasionally, a slight look of amusement, like he was trying not to smirk.

But for the most part, he’s still been blank, almost impossible to read.

I don’t think anyone could act to this degree. There’s no way for him to fake the state that he’s in right now… Probably.

Of course, he did take a look around the bedroom while he was there, just to be sure. But the place was sparse, empty—just like his own. If there had been any signs of plotting or scheming, any set of panels to monitor and control the game, he’s pretty sure he would’ve been able to find them. …Or maybe that’s just the detective in him getting a little too ahead of himself.

Talking must be taking a toll on the other boy, because they walk the rest of the way in silence. Before he knows it, they’re both standing outside the library door. Or rather, he’s standing and Ouma-kun is leaning on him harder than ever, covered in sweat and shaking from head to toe, apparently exhausted from their combined effort of making their way down the basement stairs.

The sight is… pitiful in a way he can’t quite describe.

Saihara reaches out to the door handle—and freezes briefly as all his anxieties come rushing back to him. What do I tell everyone else? Is this really going to work? I’ve been giving my input so far, but what if everything I’m doing just gets us killed instead?

Despite the cold clump of nerves twisting in his stomach, he also remembers Ouma-kun’s words, right before they left the room: Just don’t expect anything from me, okay?

Weren’t those the same words he himself was living by almost exclusively until he came here? Never trying because there wasn’t anything he could do, never getting involved because he had no confidence in himself. He didn’t want anyone to expect anything from him, because that was easier. Less messy. Less terrifying.

But like it or not, he has a lot of expectations riding on his shoulders right now.

He swallows once, inhales, pushes down on the handle of the library door—

—and all hell breaks loose.

“What on earth?!”

“Saihara-kun!?”

“Shit, man! Shuuichi, is he dead? Shit!”

They’re bombarded with noise on all sides as they enter the room: raised voices, gasps, even a few screams. Immediately, several of the others come swarming them, trying to take a closer look. Saihara tenses for about ten seconds before realizing how this must look to them. He is carrying a half-unconscious body on his shoulders, after all. He can hardly blame them for thinking Ouma-kun is a corpse—he certainly looks like one.

“No, he’s not dead,” he says. Thankfully. That was definitely another worst-case scenario they’d all discussed, before Ouma-kun had answered and let them know he was in there this morning. “He’s just… really tired. I think he might be sick.” It’s the closest to the truth he can give them. It’s true that the other boy is sick and tired—the circumstances are just a little difficult to explain.

Amami-kun crosses his arms. “So that’s why he responded like that earlier, huh? Poor thing.”

“He must be quite sick if he can’t even stand on his own. It seems to me he needs immediate medical attention,” Kiibo-kun says thoughtfully.

“Yeah, but we didn’t find an infirmary or anything yet, did we?” Shirogane-san looks worried as she wrings her hands. “Just a few first-aid kits in the warehouse. And it’s not like any of us are doctors or anything…”

“Um, Gonta doesn’t know much about medicine, but if it comes to taking care of someone… I’d like to help however I can!”

Ouma-kun is pointedly avoiding looking at any of them, but Saihara can’t help but feel like he saw him flinch just the slightest bit, after that last comment.

Toujou-san interrupts smoothly before the conversation can get too panicky. “Excuse me, Gokuhara-kun, but perhaps I should be the one to take care of him. I’m not a doctor, of course, but I do have some medical knowledge.” She bows her head slightly. “A maid’s duty is to take care of others, after all.”

“It ain’t like we got any alternatives right now… Alright, sounds good to me.” Momota-kun’s take-charge approach to the matter is something Saihara has become quite familiar with over the last few days. Given how little time they have to be debating these things right now though, he’s pretty glad for it. “Hey, uh… but you’re sure he’s not a ghost, right Shuuichi? He hasn’t said a word yet…”

Oh right. That had certainly happened, earlier. Momota-kun was one of the few who had actually gotten a look at Ouma-kun the day before yesterday—presumably when the other boy had been on his way from the locker to his room. But he’d been all the way at the other end of the hallway, and it turned out he had quite the overactive superstitious streak… So he’d been concerned that the figure he had seen might actually be a ghost. Again, not that he actually believed in ghosts or anything, Momota-kun had reassured him.

Saihara can’t help but feel just the tiniest bit amused, remembering that whole discussion. In the end, Momota-kun’s account was what had helped assure them that there really was a sixteenth student around here. So it had been a lucky break, all in all.

“He’s not a ghost,” he says, trying to keep the corners of his mouth from turning up too much. “A ghost wouldn’t be leaning on my shoulders like this, right?”

“Oh, yeah…” A look of sudden realization dawns on Momota-kun’s face. “Yeah, that’s a good point.”

Akamatsu-san doesn’t even try to hide her smile. Maybe it’s a good thing they’re smiling so much now. It’s been a long day, after all—and staying in good spirits is better than panicking. “Does our mysterious not-ghost have a name?”

“Ouma Kokichi.”

All of them jump a little, startled. Saihara guesses they weren’t expecting to hear the answer from Ouma-kun himself. But one thing he’s noticed is that whenever anyone asks the other boy his name, he always answers directly. Like it’s the one thing about himself that he’s sure of.

But again, maybe his detective instincts are getting a little too ahead of themselves.

Everyone decides to skip the self-introductions, considering how short on time they are. Toujou-san steps forward and puts Ouma-kun’s other arm around her shoulder, supporting his weight with her frame. For the first time since they left the bedroom, Saihara stands upright once she pulls away. The other boy wasn’t heavy at all, but the stooping was starting to make him just a little sore.

Just as she’s about to walk him over to a futon they set up in the corner of the room, they all freeze as the television (one of the many equipped throughout the school grounds) comes on. An announcement chime rings, and then—the most ungodly noise he’s ever heard starts blaring from the speakers. Some kind of video, complete with pictures of pieces and murder methods they’ve already seen on their Monopads.

“What the hell’s all this?” Hoshi-kun asks. He looks disgruntled, despite his best efforts to stay calm.

Saihara checks his watch, trying to ignore the cold sweat beading up on the back of his neck. “O-One hour left until the time limit.” He exhales a shaky breath. “This is probably the ringleader’s way of trying to make us panic. I don’t think it’ll stop until the time limit runs out.”

“Well,” says Amami-kun. “Must mean we’re getting somewhere, right? Only one hour left to go. Then I guess we’ll see what happens.”

One hour left. Saihara casts a sideways glance at Ouma-kun, watching carefully as the other boy stares blankly ahead. From the lack of reaction, he can guess this isn’t the first time this video has come up.

But he hopes it might be the last time.

Ouma sits on the futon and stares straight ahead. A few of the others come up to try and talk to him, hesitantly testing the waters, but Toujou-chan shoos them all off, insisting that they’d be of more use elsewhere. Then she fusses around him for a bit, checks his temperature, and mutters something about a fever that he can’t quite catch over the noise blaring from the television.

But it’s not like there’s anything they can do about that. They don’t have any medicine, and while water and a decent meal might do him some good, they’ve all agreed not to leave the room if possible until after the time limit is over, not even to go to the cafeteria. Saihara-chan staying behind to talk in his room was an extenuating circumstance, apparently.

Time ticks by slowly. The past few days sped by in a blur of sleepless exhaustion and migraine-induced agony, but this feels like it might be the longest hour of his life.

He has nothing better to do, so he observes. In fact, that’s all he plans to do, this time around. Last time he was a participant in this game. This time he’ll just stick to watching the game from afar. Let someone else take a seat at the chessboard, if they want to try and play. Maybe they’ll manage to do a better job than he did—although he doubts it.

The library looks almost unrecognizable. The whole room is spotless, clean from dust, cobwebs, and any stray plant-life that might have been creeping up towards the shelves. The cleaning is Toujou-chan’s work, probably, but it looks like the rest of them have been hard at work pushing the unattached bookshelves aside.

His corner-futon isn’t the only one in the room, either. There’s a stack of them in the other corner, ready to be dragged out whenever they decide to sleep. Assuming they get the chance to go to bed alive, of course. Still, it’s a little impressive. In less than a day, they turned the room from a winding, cluttered mess of shelves and book stacks to a clean, well-lit area with a clear view from end to end.

At first, he wondered why they would pick the library of all places. His instincts are still screaming that this is the worst possible place to be with only one hour left until the time limit. Every so often, his eyes flick to the spot on the floor where he’s seen Amami-chan’s corpse lying, curled on its side. There’s no pool of blood there—yet.

By now, though, he has his suspicions. Not only is the library big enough to hold all sixteen of them, but there’s also the matter of that place. The ringleader’s lair. A hidden area even he doesn’t know much about.

He waits to ask Saihara-chan about it until he comes by to see how he’s doing, looking tired but concerned. All the while, the Monokuma video still blares in the background. It’s nothing more than another annoyance to Ouma by this point, like the buzz of a fly he can’t see. But then again, he’s had a lot more time to get used to it than everyone else.

“The library? Ah… Amami-kun suggested it. He said he felt like he should tell us… about the map that he had on his second Monopad.”

“Second Monopad?” Ouma sits a little more upright. The video Amami-chan left for himself replays itself in his head, every word committed perfectly to memory. ‘I’m talking about something you’ve been carrying around since the moment the game started’…

Saihara-chan nods seriously. “I’ll have to fill you in on the details later. When things aren’t, um… quite so hectic.” He leans over and says something to Toujou-chan, to which she nods, and then he walks off again. The room is abuzz with the sounds of barely contained fear, low and steady under the shrill noise of the Monokuma video. He wouldn’t have thought it possible of him, but the detective seems to be doing his best to keep that fear from reaching the breaking point.

According to the clock on the wall, there’s only half an hour to go. Thirty minutes until the final verdict. Or, not-so-final if it turns out he’s just going to wake up in the locker again after this.

Even now, he feels like there has to be some kind of catch. His eyes dart over to Akamatsu-chan occasionally, as though expecting to see her pulling a steel ball out of her backpack, resorting to last-minute action now that tensions are running higher than ever. But she’s just standing with Momota-chan and Amami-chan, and if her eyes look like they’re darting to the bookshelf in front of the hidden door a little more often than not, well, that probably can’t be helped.

The room gives a clear view of everyone and everything. No one could possibly commit murder in here anymore without someone else seeing it. And he can clearly see fifteen other faces here, not counting his own.

Doubting people is part of the process of getting to know them… huh. Maybe this means there was some sense in that messed-up speech of Saihara-chan’s after all. Or maybe he only insists on thinking of it as messed-up because he’s frustrated that he never thought of this plan himself.

Either way, the idea that there could be anything left at this stage in the game that he hasn’t seen before is disorienting. If he had the energy for it, he’d probably be just as terrified as everyone else is right now.

Thankfully, he doesn’t.

Time keeps inching by at a snail’s pace. At some point the song on the speakers sounds like it’s coming from very far away, or maybe underwater, drowned out by the sound of his own heartbeat. He tries to keep his breathing steady, aware of the fact that it’s just because of his own exhaustion.

Ten minutes left.

He’s pretty sure he knows the reason why Saihara-chan is sure this plan will work, why the likelihood of them surviving past the time limit is higher than the chance that they’ll all just get executed for breaking the rules. There has always been something that’s smelled like a loophole to him in Monokuma’s first motive.

But seizing that loophole requires being willing to take risks. He’s not one for playing the odds. He’s never had much luck, so to speak, if this game is any proof of that.

Since when did Saihara-chan decide to take up gambling, anyway? He remembers his own words, You better play like your life is on the line, what feels like a million years ago. This is much bigger than picking up a knife in some game he had planned to lose from the start anyway.

Five minutes left.

All his thoughts are bleeding together. He manages to keep his breathing steady somehow or other, but he feels like if he stops consciously trying then he’ll start gasping for air around him. At some point, he dimly registers Toujou-chan’s ungloved hand against his forehead again, cool to the touch. By now, he can barely tell the difference between the pounding, pulsing ache in his head, and the reverberation of that horrible, awful song.

He shudders when she pulls her hand away, and tries to distract himself with thoughts of cameras, audiences, and shows that must go on.

One minute left.

Wouldn’t it be funny, he thinks deliriously, if I just died anyway? What happens if someone keels over and dies from natural causes, anyway? We never found out with Momota-chan all those other times.

His body has gone on far too long, with far too little rest. Maybe even if he does nothing at all, he’ll still die every few days. Maybe even if Monokuma doesn’t kill them all, his own body will still give up on him. The irony isn’t lost on him.

The minute hand slides one more tick to the right: time’s up.

The television shuts off all at once, leaving a silence more deafening than the video itself. In the seconds that follow, everyone looks at each other nervously. Ouma keeps his eyes blearily on the bookshelf in front of the ringleader’s lair.

His fever’s still running high and his head feels like it’s splitting open, but it’s officially past the time limit and he’s not dead yet. In fact, no one is.

No one’s dead. No one’s dead. The thought keeps beating in his head like a drum. He’s lived through these last few days so many times, and for the first time ever, Amami Rantarou is sitting not too far away from him, his skull intact, his eyes open and alert. Akamatsu Kaede sits a little to his left, looking apprehensive but free from guilt.

Vaguely, Ouma wonders if he’s just hallucinating.

“What the hell are you jerks doing!?”

Monokuma’s voice echoes through the library a split second before the bear shows up, claws raised. Its face is still stuck in the same animatronic leer as always, but the fury is evident in its gaze regardless. The phrase, “if looks could kill” comes to mind.

“Come on, I very specifically gave all of you a time limit! Why isn’t anyone dead yet?!” The bear asks this as though genuinely curious, despite the anger in its voice. “I expected we’d come down to the nitty-gritty deadline, but this is just ridiculous!”

No one says anything. They all just hold still, looking between one another as though afraid they’ll be swiped at if any of them open their mouths. But Ouma already knows good and well that’s not going to happen. After all—the headmaster can’t interfere in any of the murders. It says as much in the school regulations on their Monopads.

“Aren’t you all bored?! Don’t you want something to happen?!” Monokuma bounces from one leg to the other impatiently. “Hey, you all remember that I waived the rule about being caught, right? So what are you waiting for? Go wild! Kill whoever you want, right here, right now, and it doesn’t matter even if everyone else sees you! I’ll still let you graduate!”

Clearly, the bear anticipates getting a reaction with that offer. Ouma half-expects the same thing. After all, he’s seen these people kill each other for far less, plenty of other times. But no one moves.

Monokuma stops bouncing from side to side and stands stock still, a low growl sounding in its throat. It really does look as if it’s completely, utterly at a loss for what to do.

“So… Saihara-kun was right, huh?” Akamatsu-chan speaks up suddenly.

“Huh? What’s that? What did you say?” Monokuma replies, all too innocently.

She stands up, leans back, and crosses her arms. It’s a good attempt at looking casual, really, but Ouma can still see her knees knocking together. If the shelf weren’t there behind her, he’s pretty sure she’d fall down. Still, maybe she should get points for trying.

“Saihara-kun was right,” she says again. “You’re not going to kill us, because you can’t. That’s why you phrased the motive like that.”

“’If no one dies within forty-eight hours, then all people forced into the killing game will be executed’… Was that it?” Amami-chan asks, his tone friendly and good-natured as ever—but there’s a definite edge to his voice. “It’s been forty-eight hours and I don’t see any Exisals here.”

Momota-chan slams one fist into the palm of his hand, grinning at Monokuma with a familiar, insubordinate grin that Ouma’s seen many times before. “How about it, Monokuma? If you’re gonna kill us, don’tcha think you should hurry up and get started? Otherwise we’re all gonna start gettin’ the wrong idea here.”

Monokuma makes a half-strangled noise in the back of its throat and glares at them all. Its claws extend, and retract, extend again, retract again, clearly itching for a target. But it doesn’t make a move.

“Guess you can’t do it after all, huh?” Akamatsu-chan picks up where Momota-chan left off. “If we’re breaking the rules, then go ahead and punish us for it. Because otherwise, you can’t lay a finger on us. That’s what your little rules say, right?”

“The beautiful thing about rules,” Monokuma says, “is that I can always add more.” There’s a very dangerous glint in the bear’s eyes.

But unexpectedly, Saihara-chan speaks up. “You can. But I don’t think you’re going to.”

“Oh-hoh…? Pray tell why not, Saihara-kun.”

“Because arbitrarily adding rules after you lost wouldn’t make for a very fair game. And I bet the people watching this right now wouldn’t like that very much, would they?”

There’s a silence in the room loud enough to hear a pin drop. The bear stays perfectly still, one paw upraised.

Ouma watches the scene unfold, although the slow, irregular thump of his heartbeat in his ears is somewhat distracting. Still, he tries to make his eyes focus. He doesn’t want to miss a word of what Saihara-chan is saying.

“We followed the rules of your game, fair and square. If you could’ve executed us, then you would’ve by now. So that means two things. One—we weren’t forced into this killing game.” The detective swallows, hard. “And two—you have to follow your own rules as much as we do.”

“Nobody likes a sore loser, ya damn bear!” Momota-chan cuts in again, taking the bear’s lack of response as a clear resignation. “We didn’t go along with your stupid game, so hurry up and let us out of here, or—”

“Or what?” Monokuma says sweetly. Too sweetly. It’s as though the bear isn’t angry at all anymore, though they all know better than to believe that. “I’m sorry Momota-kun, did you think that the game would just end if you made it forty-eight hours without killing anyone? But there’s nothing about that in your school rules either, is there?”

A murmur of unease spreads throughout the group. He can hear a few of them murmuring, whispering to each other. Were they actually optimistic enough to think that outlasting a single time limit would end the whole game, just like that? Ouma could’ve told them that wouldn’t work.

Not, he thinks, that they’d listen to me anyway.

But he supposes it’s true that even he had no idea of knowing what, specifically, would happen if they managed to get this far. Up until now, this forty-eight hour time limit was every bit as much of a catbox as the press he died under last time.

“So, you all managed to go two days without killing someone. Big deal,” the bear says, waving a paw dismissively. “Take a closer look at your rules, okay? There’s no end date to your communal life here at Saishuu Academy. Not unless you kill, that is. How long do you think it’ll take before one of you cracks?”

“No one’s going to kill anyone,” Saihara-chan says, and he sounds so assured, as if all the evidence really is pointing that way. Ouma almost wants to believe him, too. Almost.

But Monokuma just leers at them all with that same lifeless grin. “We’ll see about that. There’s plenty of ways to make a good motive.” It strolls across the library floor casually on its stiff little legs. “So go ahead, get some rest. Do whatever you want, kiddos. ‘Cause by the time I’m done with you, you’re gonna wish someone was dead already.”

It leaves through the exit at the other end of the room, letting the door slam shut.

Saihara really only has one question to ask himself later that night, as he lies down on his futon. Perhaps it’s not what he should be asking, considering the long road they still have ahead of them from here on out, but still, he can’t help but wonder—

Why me?

He feels about a thousand times shakier than he looks. Even he’s not sure how he managed to speak up earlier today, when Monokuma came. The words he spoke back then hardly sounded like his own, carrying a weight of credibility and authority to them.

He’s really not sure how to tell everyone that he’s a spineless coward, not a real detective.

Still, there’s something to be said for the fact that they’re all alive. Forty-eight hours came and went, and while there’s still no end in sight, at least no one took a life. Yet. It’s still much too early for them to let their guards down, of course.

Saihara props himself up on one elbow as he looks around the room. He really should sleep—earlier, they all decided to start a night watch, with shifts. Their method was pretty efficient: four groups of four, two shifts a night. Tonight, two of those groups would handle the night watch shifts, while the other two groups slept soundly. Then the next night, it would switch, and the groups that had been on duty tonight would get to sleep through the whole night tomorrow.

The ones up for the first shift tonight are… Chabashira-san, Yumeno-san, Angie-san, and Iruma-san. Earlier today, someone had had the foresight to take a few battery-operated lanterns out of the storage warehouse. He can see the four girls illuminated dimly in the lighting from those. From the looks of it, they’re all too tense to speak—well, that’s only natural after the day they all had.

He forces himself to lean back on his futon, staring up at the ceiling. Again, the question repeats itself: Why me?

The thought of showing up to breakfast tomorrow, of having to act like he knows what he’s doing for one more minute in this horrible game, is enough to make him want to close his eyes and never wake up. He should be sleeping (god knows, he needs the rest), but his heart won’t stop pounding.

There’s a rustle of sheets from the futon beside him. “Saihara-chan?”

“Ouma-kun?” He’s a little bit startled, but thankfully he manages to keep his voice to a whisper.

He hadn’t known the other boy was awake. After Monokuma left, they’d gone to get him some food from the cafeteria right away, since the building would be off-limits come nighttime. But he’d barely touched what they’d given him—which was just rice, broth, and water, since Toujou-san had said anything more solid than that would probably upset his stomach.

Saihara had seen him maybe eat about four bites and swig down some water before curling up in his futon and sleeping like… well, like the dead. Despite the constant commotion in the library, the loud conversations, the heavy footsteps back and forth as everyone tried to get settled in, Ouma-kun hadn’t woken up a single time. Until now, apparently.

As luck would have it, his own futon wound up getting set up next to the other boy’s when they were setting them up for the night. Or rather, it wasn’t about luck at all.

When he’d asked why, Akamatsu-san had looked at him sheepishly, half-smiled, and said, “Well I mean, you’re the only one who he’ll talk to, right?”

Saihara tries very hard not to think, Why me, for the third time that night. And fails.

Just as he starts to wonder if Ouma-kun might have fallen back asleep, the other boy speaks up again, his voice hoarse. “Everyone must be terrified, huh?”

“…Yeah,” he says after several long moments of silence. It’s a fact that he’s been trying to avoid thinking about, all this time that he’s been pitying himself. But it’s true that Monokuma’s words hadn’t left them with a particularly good feeling about what was to come. “Yeah, everyone’s terrified.” And he has no idea how to lessen that terror for any of them. He doesn’t even know how to make himself stop feeling so terrified.

“Good.”

“Eh?” He sits a little more upright in his futon, turning over to try and get a glimpse at Ouma-kun’s face. But the lantern-light is too far away, and he can’t make out anything in the shadows covering the other boy’s face.

For a moment, he feels like they’re back in the dimly lit bedroom. Like they never left at all.

“I said good. I’d be more worried if you were all acting like you weren’t scared at all.”

It slowly dawns on him that this must be what happened in… some of those other times, that Ouma-kun had described.

“I still don’t think this is going to work,” the other boy continues. Even at a whisper, his voice sounds just as emotionless and blank as it did earlier today.

Saihara resists the urge to say, me neither. Instead, he says, “But it’s good to try, isn’t it?”

There’s another pause the length of a few heartbeats. “…Yeah,” the boy in white finally says. “I guess it’s good to try.”

Chapter Text

After his conversation with Saihara-chan, he keeps waking up in the middle of the night. Repeatedly.

He’s not sure how many times he wakes, or what time it is exactly. All he knows is that it must be well after nighttime, and not yet time for the morning announcement. At some point he’s pretty sure the group on watch changed from Iruma-chan and the others to the second shift—Momota-chan, Shinguuji-chan, Amami-chan, and Gonta.

Every time he wakes, it takes him a few seconds to remember that he’s not still back in his dorm room. The lantern light always disorients him, throwing shadows on the wall that he thinks shouldn’t be there until he remembers where he is (and who he is too, sometimes).

At some point, he feels his face. His cheeks are warm and his bangs are soaking wet. The fever seems to be trying to sweat itself out, but it’s still not quite there yet.

He breathes through his nose and lies on his back, exhausted after turning from one side to the other so many times. This is more sleep than he’s had in—days? Weeks? ...At least since the game began, he’s pretty sure. But he’s not used to it at all, and no matter how much he closes his eyes, his body protests that it’s still not enough.

Too bad for me, he thinks. I can’t sleep when I’m dead, because I can’t die. So I’ll just have to make do.

He shifts on his futon again and closes his eyes, praying for a dreamless sleep that he already knows he won’t get. He couldn’t be so lucky. After all, those dreams still play out on the backs of his eyelids every single time he tries to rest.

---

“Ouma-kun… was it? Is there anything about your breakfast you find unsatisfactory?”

That gentle voice pushes him out of his thoughts, causing him to look up from his barely-touched rice and miso soup.

“You’ve hardly eaten a bite,” says the same voice again. “I was just wondering if it wasn’t to your liking. There’s plenty of other food in the kitchen if you’d prefer something else, you know.”

He meets Kiibo’s inquisitive gaze for a few moments and stares back blankly, wondering how to respond.

In the past, this would be where he’d have chimed in with some snarky comment or other about robots. Then Kiibo would get mad at him, retort with some line about him being incomprehensible, and fume about “robot discrimination” for a bit before moving on. Predictable. Routine. Pre-scripted. The kind of humor you could find on any manzai comedy show.

For a moment, he almost wishes Momota-chan was in their group instead. At least if he was here, threatening to eat his share of food if he didn’t hurry up and finish it, he’d know how to respond—which is to say, he’d just slide his bowl right over and let him have it.

That’s probably not a good idea, though. Momota-chan would never stop talking and he knows it, just like he knows that his questions wouldn’t be limited to why he wasn’t eating his breakfast, either.

He waits too long to respond. He can tell, by the way the conversation between Saihara-chan and Hoshi-chan (and it was sparing conversation to begin with) drops off. So he just looks away, shrugs, and takes another bite. The rice goes down his throat, feeling tasteless and dry like sand. It’s not that he made a mistake when cooking it; he suspects he just isn’t tasting his food properly in the first place.

He hopes this might dissuade Kiibo from pressing the issue any further—but no such luck. Of course.

“It just seems a shame that two of us aren’t eating in our group,” the robot says. He smiles again, just as gently as before. The gesture looks just a tad self-deprecating. “I can only look at the food myself, but I suppose you’d get far more benefit out of actually eating it, yes?”

It’s a lot harder not to respond this time. Ouma bites his tongue, thinking of at least a dozen possible comments he could make about robotic literal-mindedness, and says nothing.

“…Th-That was a joke,” Kiibo says uncertainly. Awkwardness hangs in the air between them, but it’s still not enough to deter him from pressing forward. If Ouma didn’t know any better, he’d think it was almost as though he wanted there to be some kind of banter between them. “I just thought that if you still weren’t feeling well, it might be best if you at least… try and eat…”

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Saihara-chan throw him a glance, looking hesitant but concerned. Ouma keeps his expression carefully neutral, but he still remembers perfectly well some of his earliest times repeating this game, when he’d been too shaken up to cover his weaknesses properly. Back then, they’d all treated him like some small, scared animal, too shocked and withdrawn to be taken seriously.

Their pity right now reeks of the same misguided compassion. It’s that compassion of theirs that makes them such easy targets, he’d like to tell them. So easy to trick. So easy to kill.

Not, he reminds himself, that I’ve ever actually seen Kiiboy over there get killed. Whether that means anything or not, he’s not sure. The same applies to Saihara-chan, of course, but then Saihara-chan isn’t a robot—just a weirdo for believing what must have sounded like an extremely half-baked story about time travel.

There are a handful of others he hasn’t seen get killed, either. It’s as though something’s been pulling him back, every time he’s tried to make progress in this game. As though the ringleader is always just out of his reach.

His instinct says that mysterious ringleader is still probably one of their group, rather than some unknown third party, but that might not mean anything either. After all, his instincts have led him astray plenty of times so far.

There’s a sharp throb behind his right eye. Immediately, he stops his train of thought. His fever was finally broken by the time he woke up this morning, but he still feels like it might be there, just under the surface, waiting to come back at full force.

There’s no point in spending my time and energy on thoughts like this when I’m already holding back my expectations anyway, he thinks. It’ll just tire me out faster.

Looking somewhat concerned by his silence, Kiibo opens his mouth, no doubt to question him again—when Hoshi-chan cuts in unexpectedly.

“If he doesn’t feel like eating, don’t press it. There’s no point in forcing anyone to do somethin’ they don’t wanna.”

Rather than pity or compassion, Ouma supposes he’s just speaking from experience. Despite his exhaustion, he still manages to feel a slight surge of gratitude. Then he wonders if Hoshi-chan still would’ve spoken up if he knew even a fraction of the things he’d said about his corpse in all those trials, and what little rice is already in his stomach threatens to come back up for a moment.

“Ah… my apologies.” Kiibo looks down at the table with something that might pass for reflexive embarrassment, if he were actually human. “I suppose this was another one of those times where I wasn’t reading the mood quite right.”

There aren’t any other attempts at conversation after that. It’s too early for much small talk, and they all have a long day ahead of them. Hoshi-chan and Saihara-chan eat their breakfasts slowly, Kiibo looks down as though still lost in thought, and Ouma sets his chopsticks down and ignores all three of them, resting his chin on his hand as he stares at nothing in particular.

The rest of his bowl of rice goes entirely untouched.

---

They stop by his room on the way back from the cafeteria. All four of them going seems a little excessive—but he suspects this is just something they’ll all have to get used to in the following days.

The groups they’d been divided into weren’t just for the night watch shifts, as it turned out. If the point of this entire plan was to keep an eye on each other at all times, then that would have to include all the other hours of the day, too. Letting someone roam the hallway, go back to their room, or even go to the cafeteria whenever they pleased might just invite trouble further down the road.

“What, so ya mean, we’ll even have to go with each other when someone needs to go to the bathroom?” Momota-chan had said earlier this morning, frowning as he thought it over. “I dunno if I like the sound of that.”

“…I think it sounds like a far wiser alternative than someone saying they were going to go to the bathroom and then sneaking off elsewhere,” Shinguuji-chan had pointed out dryly.

Harukawa-chan had crossed her arms, looking less than enthused by the whole idea of keeping watch and being watched in turn. “So we’re just here to… what? Hold each other’s hands, basically?”

Her lack of cooperation for a plan everyone else seemed largely on board with had hardly surprised him. But what had caught him (and everyone else, for that matter) off guard was Akamatsu-chan’s sudden, no-nonsense response—

“Oh, so do you want to die, Harukawa-san?”

That one line had pretty much settled the discussion.

Now, he hesitates outside his bedroom door. After days on end of being holed up in there, standing on the other side of the room looking in feels just a little uncanny.

“Do you need help, Ouma-kun?”

Saihara-chan’s voice from behind him brings him back to his senses. He hadn’t meant to space out in the first place—his exhaustion and the fever from earlier have both done a number on his ability to stay focused, more than he would’ve liked.

Under other circumstances, he’s pretty sure this would be where he’d chime in with some inappropriate comment or other. What, Saihara-chan, do you really want to see me without my shirt on that badly? Wow, how bold, I’m really impressed!

He makes no such comments, and instead grips the handle and turns it. “No thanks,” he says. “I don’t need any help at all.”

Ouma lets the door swing shut abruptly behind him and stands alone in the lightless bedroom.

For a moment or two, he considers staying right here. It would be easy enough. He could just lock the door behind him, go lie down on his bed again. He still hasn’t eaten or drunk much, but it’s more than he’s had in days.

It would probably earn him at least another two days of respite—even if they all came knocking on his door again to ask what the hell he was doing. Even if they were all still convinced that he was the ringleader.

It’s tempting, but he doesn’t do it. Compliance without resistance, he reminds himself tiredly, and he flips on the lights in the room for the first time in what feels like an eternity as he sets about getting his clothes. It’s surprisingly easy, since this time there are no books, binders, or pieces of evidence lying haphazardly around the room for him to trip on.

He changes quickly, carefully avoiding the full-length mirror next to his closet. Part of it has to do with the gauntness of his ribs, and the fact that he’s pretty sure several of his dead classmates have had a livelier looking tint to their skin than he does right now. Even if he did catch a glimpse, it would barely even look like himself, and he hardly needs any more reminders that he’s been playing this game long enough to become someone entirely different since it started.

Mostly though, he just doesn’t want to look at his own face. He knows it’s not the case, but part of him still feels like if he looks in the mirror, he’ll see that same, leering grin from last time plastered all over it.

He finishes tying his scarf, his movements automatic and mechanical after so much repetition despite the clumsy stiffness of his fingers. Still avoiding the mirror, he checks by touch to make sure it covers his neck completely, then looks around the room as though taking it in for the very first time.

In the full glare of the fluorescent lights, it looks even more desolate than it did in the dark. He can remember where each and every object used to sit, all those other times. Clues, he used to call them.

How pointless, he thinks. What good are clues if they never actually tell you anything?

Feeling a sense of boredom he hardly knows how to put into words, even to himself, he flicks the lights back off and exits the room.

The mood outside doesn’t feel like he’s just interrupted their conversation. There are no awkward pauses, no abrupt silences as though they suddenly cut themselves off. In the first place, it’s not as though he got assigned to the most talkative group in general. But there’s still an undeniable feeling of tension as he rejoins them, as though they have no idea what to say to him at all.

Ouma just shrugs and stays quiet, letting them take the lead as they start walking again. The last group should be finishing up their breakfast in the next half hour or so—all of them cooking for themselves, of course, as there was no point in giving Toujou-chan free reign over the kitchen when the whole point of this plan was to all keep an eye on each other.

After that, they’re supposed to have another group meeting, apparently. Not that it’s any concern of his. He’ll just keep his mouth shut and his interest elsewhere.

For some reason though, he still catches Saihara-chan looking at his throat as they start walking again, his eyebrows furrowed as though thinking about something. Ouma pulls his scarf a little higher and just keeps walking.

“Tiresome… This is so incredibly tiresome…”

Chabashira-san nods encouragingly as Yumeno-san sits and mutters to herself on the library floor while they wait for the others to gather, but otherwise no one reacts.

By the time they reached the library, Yumeno-san and the others were the only ones waiting there. Everyone else was apparently otherwise preoccupied—Momota-kun’s group with breakfast, and Akamatsu-san’s group with grabbing an early morning shower in the gym locker room. They can’t start their meeting until everyone arrives, so there really isn’t much to be done until they finish up and rejoin them.

The magician pulls the brim of her hat low over her face, casts a moody look around, and keeps mumbling half-heartedly. “My mana supplies haven’t been this low in at least six hundred years… The most well-known mages were always allowed to rest and recover before being asked to perform great feats… Truly, that was torture.”

Between her bloodshot eyes and the low, ominous tone of her voice, Saihara’s pretty sure she means it. He scoots back a little, straightening up against one of the nearby bookshelves. Yumeno-san is hardly intimidating by any normal standards, and he’s well aware that all her talk about “great mages” is code for “famous stage magicians,” but he really doesn’t want to get caught in the by-blow nonetheless.

Getting stuck with one of the two night shifts meant getting less sleep for the night than everyone else. Since it was only a matter of a few hours, rather than the whole night, both groups seemed to be holding up pretty well, all in all—but he supposes some people just needed more sleep than others.

“What’s the point in waiting like this…?” Yumeno-san gnaws at her lip and looks, if possible, even grumpier. “I could be recharging my mana here and now, rather than waiting for people who aren’t here yet.” It’s true that her bleary eyes look as though they might shut tight any moment now.

Saihara realizes that if he doesn’t speak up now, she might really fall asleep on the spot. He hesitates, then opens his mouth—but Iruma-san cuts in and speaks over him.

“Who even cares if you’re tired? The rest of us stayed up last night too, ya shitty hag!”

“…It’s not just about being tired,” Yumeno-san says warily. “My mana—”

“The hell with your mana! It ain’t like you would’ve been doing anything else anyway, so it’s fine if you useless small fries stay on watch. Meanwhile, I coulda been usin’ that time to invent somethin’ new, but no.” She crosses her arms and scowls, tapping her foot in irritation. “Every second of my time is valuable, ya know? A beautiful, genius inventor like me shouldn’t have to get stuck on the first fuckin’ night watch.”

“Every second of Yumeno-san’s time is valuable, too!” Chabashira-san protests, apparently unable to stay on the sidelines any longer. “You mentioned inventing things, Iruma-san, but Yumeno-san could’ve been practicing her magecraft—”

“As if that shit even exists!” Iruma-san snorts.

But those words cause a sudden silence to fall over the whole room as Yumeno-san suddenly stiffens, her wariness replaced with hostility in an instant. Insults against herself were one thing, but insults against her craft were apparently another matter entirely.

Saihara feels a sudden lump in his throat as his anxiety spikes. It’s only been one night since they survived Monokuma’s time limit and tensions are already running higher than they should. Maybe he should say something to try and calm everyone down—but who would listen to someone like him, anyway?

“…Magecraft exists,” says Yumeno-san darkly, her mouth twisting unpleasantly.

Iruma-san almost seems to hesitate for a moment—he’s pretty sure that if Yumeno-san weren’t quite so small and harmless-looking, she might actually back down here. But after gauging that the situation was still in her favor, she clicks her tongue dismissively and stares her right back down.

Holding his breath, he hopes vaguely that if he waits just a few more seconds, Akamatsu-san or Momota-kun might barge through the library door and take charge of the situation in an instant. Either one of them would know what to do; they always had an order or an opinion to give, and whenever they’d spoken up so far, people listened to what they had to say.

Amami-kun too, he’d probably know how to defuse this situation somehow. This entire time, he’d seemed somehow reliable and easygoing all at once, and his laid-back demeanor would be the perfect thing to make people lighten up, no doubt. He didn’t exactly seem like the take-charge type—but people listened to him nonetheless.

He waits, just a little bit longer. But the doors don’t open, and no one comes barging in to take control of the situation for him. Saihara exhales a shaky breath and acknowledges what he’s been trying to avoid thinking about this whole time: that even if they won’t listen to him, he probably still should say something.

Hoshi-kun looks as though the infighting might be giving him a headache, and Kiibo-kun looks lost and uncomfortable, as though he’s trying to think up a suitable response to the two girls and failing. Chabashira-san seems indignant on Yumeno-san’s behalf, and Angie-san has her hands clasped as she stares sanctimoniously upwards, content to ignore the situation completely as long as she isn’t dragged into it.

And Ouma-kun… When he glances Ouma-kun’s way, the boy is simply staring at the whole lot of them with a complete lack of expression that makes him impossible to read. Whether he’s actually paying attention, or just tuning them all out, he can’t tell.

Any of these people could speak up instead of me, he thinks. It’s not like I have to take the lead here. No matter how much he tries not to (and no matter how unbelievably whiny it sounds, even to himself), he still can’t help but repeat the same thought from last night: Why me?

But that’s a question that he already knows the answer to. At least, somewhat.

He was the one who spoke up earlier, after the time limit passed. He was the one who challenged Monokuma directly, and he was the one who proposed his theory about this killing game, and the reason why they were here in the first place.

No, maybe his obligations had started even earlier than that. Maybe it was when he volunteered to stay by himself outside that locked and unassailable bedroom door.

Saihara thinks about the cap in his pocket. As much as he’d love to pull it out and hide behind it, he hasn’t actually done so yet. Maybe that’s a good sign.

…Or maybe he’s just delaying the inevitable. Either way, he sighs and musters his courage. What little of it there is, anyway.

“I think… if there are any problems with the watch shifts or the sleeping arrangements, it might be a good idea to wait to bring them up during the meeting,” he says. “Fighting among ourselves right now isn’t going to do anyone any good.”

Both of them turn to stare at him. He can feel everyone else’s eyes on him too, burning a hole in him as he stands his ground and tries not to dwell too much on the fact that being the sudden object of everyone’s attention has always made him feel like crawling into a hole and dying.

For a moment, he half-expects one or the other to throw an irritated, mind your own business his way before resuming the argument as though nothing happened. He can hear the sound of Iruma-san gritting her teeth as she sneers at him, and of Yumeno-san breathing sharply through her nostrils. He braces himself, wondering if it was a bad idea to open his mouth after all—

And they back down.

“Tch,” Iruma-san says. But she snorts and looks away, arms crossed, and doesn’t attempt to argue with him.

Yumeno-san mutters one last, foreboding, “Magecraft exists,” under her breath, looks decidedly away from Iruma-san, and rests her head atop her knees. She had seemed a bit put off by Chabashira-san’s attempts to talk to her before, but at least now the other girl’s energetic questions about magecraft and sorcery look like they’re appeasing her somewhat.

After a few more seconds, it’s as though the whole room collectively lets out a sigh as the tension slowly defuses. Everyone in the room more or less goes back to what they were doing before, as they wait for the others to rejoin them. Everyone in the room, that is, except Ouma-kun.

Saihara glances his way momentarily, surreptitiously studying his non-reaction, though he half-suspects his sudden interest is just a way to try and take his mind off the nerves that are still churning his stomach. He replays their conversation from the day before, remembers word for word the deadpan tone with which the other boy had told him that rising tensions and seemingly petty motives had gotten people killed on more than one occasion (occasions which he suspects might not have been so different from Yumeno-san and Iruma-san’s argument just now).

Logically, he knows that what he told him must be true. The only way his story adds up at all is if there was some measure of truth to it, anyway—but the boy’s repeated, monotone claim, I could’ve been lying to you the whole time, keeps ringing through his head like a warning bell every time he dwells on it for too long.

He remembers his own words, too. Doubt others in order to get to know them. Belief is a process built on doubt.

…Somehow, he has a feeling that process is going to be longer and harder with Ouma-kun than with anyone else here.

---

They start the meeting right away once the other two groups rejoin them. Thankfully, they all seem to be in higher spirits than his own group or Yumeno-san’s. He half expects the infighting to start up again as soon as more spectators enter the room, but luckily they seem to have reached an unspoken decision to put it on hold for now.

“Alright, listen up!” Momota-kun says, standing over all of them. The easiest way to do a group meeting, they’d decided, was to let whoever had the floor stand and talk, while the rest of them sat with their backs to the shelves.

This format would lead to fewer interruptions overall, and the general idea was to sit down and let the next person stand up and speak whenever asking for input or an opinion. All in all, it sounded like a good plan—but Saihara still can’t help but feel grateful for the chance to keep his legs crossed and his back firmly pressed up against the shelf right now.

“We’ve talked about shifts and shit. We’ve talked about what we’re gonna do in the short-run.” Momota-kun crosses his arms and frowns, looking uncharacteristically serious. “Now it’s time to discuss what we’re gonna do about that damn bear.”

“It seemed… really angry, didn’t it?” Shirogane-san asks timidly. “That probably isn’t a good thing, is it?”

“Sometimes,” says Angie-san, “it’s better to just let sleeping gods lie, you know?”

“Um… isn’t it sleeping dogs?” Gonta-kun asks, looking a little bewildered by the sudden shift in the conversation.

But Angie-san just clasps her hands and smiles. “If you don’t make god angry, you won’t get punished. Divine punishment always befalls those who go up against god!” She sounds almost chipper, but her words carry a certain edge to them.

“It seems a little late to point this out,” Kiibo-kun says, “but considering our situation, it already feels as though we’re being punished. It’s not as though Monokuma would’ve left us alone, even if we’d done things differently.”

“We’re not in a position to argue back, but we’re putting up a fight anyway. That bear was bound to get angry no matter what we did, as long as we didn’t go along with its plan.” Harukawa-san runs her fingers through the end of one twintail, looking somewhat absentminded. “That’s just what happens when you don’t do what people tell you to do.”

“The fact is, Monokuma’s already pissed off,” Momota-kun says loudly, calling all eyes back as he stands front and center in the middle of the library. “Ain’t nothing we can do to change that, so we might as well accept it. We’re gonna keep bein’ told to kill each other for as long as we’re here, so we need to start plannin’ ahead.”

Shinguuji-kun tilts his head just slightly to the side as his eyes narrow curiously. “I have a question, about the matter of punishment…”

“Oh, big surprise there,” Iruma-san snaps. “Never woulda guessed, from the way you dress.”

He ignores her. “It’s true that this killing game seems like a punishment of sorts. We all assumed we were being held here against our will.” He taps a finger idly against one shoulder, slowly gathering his thoughts. “But in that case, what about Monokuma’s time limit? ‘All people forced into the killing game’ were supposed to be executed once time ran out. And yet, we’re still here.”

Momota-kun pauses, apparently at a loss for how to respond. “That’s… well, uh, ya see, that is…”

“Saihara-kun said something about people watching us, did he not?” Shinguuji-kun continues. “It sounds to me as though he might know more than he’s letting on.” There’s an undisguised note of accusation in those words.

Momota-kun looks his way, and Saihara freezes, his stomach twisting violently as he’s suddenly put on the spot once again, despite his best efforts to stay unnoticed this time.

For a moment, he almost dares to hope that maybe he won’t have to come up and speak. But those hopes come crumbling down in an instant as the would-be astronaut sputters for a bit, rubs the back of his head sheepishly, and says, “Maybe… Maybe I oughta give the floor to Shuuichi for a bit. Come on up, man.”

Saihara gets slowly and shakily to his legs, wondering why in the world it’s come down to him again. He’s not nearly as important as everyone’s making him out to be. Really, he isn’t. So why does this keep happening?

He stares pointedly at a spot on one of the other bookshelves across the room just above everyone’s heads, rather than looking at them directly—a neat trick he’d learned when he was still young in order to make it look like he was making eye contact without actually doing so. Everyone’s eyes are on him again, he can feel them. Even Ouma-kun is looking his way blankly now, most likely because of the shift the conversation’s taken.

It’s true that he knows more than he’s letting on. It’s true, but it’s only because of the story he heard from Ouma-kun. And even then, he thinks, I have no way of knowing how much of what he told me was a lie or not.

How exactly is he supposed to explain what he knows (or at least, what he’s guessed) to the rest of them? It’s not as though Ouma-kun is going to come up and speak with him. The other boy doesn’t even look the least bit interested, as though it’s none of his concern. There isn’t even a trace of worry or apprehension on his face at the idea that Saihara might spill the beans and tell everyone else what he told him.

He wipes his palms against his pockets as he stands and faces the room, trying desperately to ignore how lightheaded he feels. Instinct says he should just bolt from the room when faced with this many people staring at him, looking so expectant to hear what he has to say. That instinct is wrong, of course, but it’s still tempting to listen to it all the same.

“Um,” he says, then winces. This again. Whenever he needs to make every word count, his words come out in a jumbled, stammering mess. “Um, it’s not that I know more than the rest of you. I don’t, really.”

Raised eyebrows. Creased foreheads. Clearly, nearly everyone is skeptical of him, and he can’t really blame them.

“I wasn’t sure about what I said yesterday… It was a theory, not a statement.”

It was true that he’d had to deliver it like a statement of fact, though, or else he was pretty sure Monokuma would’ve kept trying to pinpoint the weak links in their group. It might even have gone through with its threat to add a new rule against sleeping in the library, which would’ve been the worst case scenario for them. So he’d spoken up back then with a lot more confidence than he’d actually felt.

He swallows, hard, and keeps talking. “Something about the way Monokuma kept phrasing that rule with the time limit kept bothering me… I even brought up the fact that it sounded strange with Akamatsu-san a few times, when we were trying to decide what to do.”

Out of the corner of his eye (his gaze is still firmly fixed on the books opposite him, rather than on everyone’s faces) he sees her nod firmly in agreement, and his knees feel suddenly weak with relief. He’s telling everyone the truth, mostly, but he has a feeling that they’re going to believe it a lot more coming from Akamatsu-san than they are coming from him.

“So I tried to confirm it. If the rules are that important to Monokuma, then there has to be a reason for it. A game where the opponent can break the rules however they please isn’t a fair game, right?”

Nearly everyone nods at that. In any game, rules were there to make the game fair for both sides. No one followed rules because they wanted to, but because they had to—usually.

As Ouma-kun looks right through him without nodding or showing any other signs of interest, Saihara remembers something else he told him in that dark, empty bedroom: the assumption of a fair game only works when you and your opponent are on the same page.

“If the rules of the game keep changing, or if you read the rules wrong from the start, or,” Ouma-kun had said, looking bored, “even if your opponent is just fickle, then the game might not even be fair at all.” He’d seemed distant, as though he were a million miles away, on another planet entirely rather than just a few feet away sitting cross-legged on the bed.

But if Saihara shares that little piece of wisdom with any of the rest of them, they’ll probably start arguing nonstop. If possible, he’d like to avoid a repeat of the same argument from earlier on a larger scale.

So he clenches and unclenches his hands, stares straight ahead at the same point on the bookshelves, and tries once again to feign a lot more confidence than he actually feels. “We’re all still alive, so I think that settles it. Monokuma can’t just kill us on its own, because it’d mean breaking its own rules. If it can’t break its own rules, then that means it’s a fair game, right? Games like that… usually there’d be an audience, wouldn’t there?”

There’s a general murmur of discussion as everyone thinks it over. His reasoning seems to be swaying them, slowly but surely. One of the few benefits to being a detective, he thinks tiredly. You state theories so logically and matter-of-factly that people usually wind up thinking you sound convincing.

“I guess… that does make sense,” Chabashira-san says slowly.

“Yeah… I don’t really get what we’re talking about, but that does make sense!”

There’s a brief pause, then Saihara yelps and stumbles back about three steps. He’s not the only one to yell either; half the group jumped in surprise at the sudden, unexpected voice in their midst.

A sudden thump draws his attention, followed by the sound of Momota-kun swearing furiously as he rubs at the back of his head. He lets a few more profanities slip out, then finally manages to ask the question that’s on all their minds: “Where the hell’d you all come from!?”

Five animatronic bears stare back at them all, as though they’d been there from the start.

“Come from?” the red one repeats innocently, one paw raised under its chin. “Eh… where did we come from exactly? I don’t remember.”

“Well that’s a very broad question,” says the pink one. “I guess it all depends on what you mean... Are you asking which room we came from or how we were born?”

“Shaddup, ya morons!” The yellow one cuts over them both, pushing its glasses up on the bridge of a nonexistent nose. “This ain’t what we’re here to discuss.”

“Hell yeah! Dad had business with all of ya, but he’s too mad to show up! So he wanted us to drop by instead!”

The only words in their entire, scripted banter that really caught his attention were “too mad to show up.” Saihara glances around the room again briefly; judging by the apprehensive looks on his classmates’ faces, he guesses they must have noticed that same phrase, too.

He’s still not sure how much these bears are capable of reasoning or responding to their questions, but he decides to take the bait and ask anyway. It isn’t like they really have much of a choice. “He’s mad…?” he repeats, frowning. There can only be one reason for that.

“Oh, he’s furious.” The pink one nods solemnly in agreement. “I’ve never seen him so angry! Our whole den really is a mess right now…”

“I miss Dad!” says the red one with a sniffle, head hung low. “He never used to get like this. The real Dad would never be so scary…”

The green one waits about two beats, then speaks up tentatively. “That Is… Our Real Dad, Monotarou. He’s Always Been Like This.”

“Eh? Is that so? …I don’t remember him acting like this, though.”

“Whatever! Stop blabberin’! We’re here to intimidate this bunch, remember!” The yellow one pushes its glasses up again. “Dad’s so angry, he’s like a… like a tiger, prowlin’ around in its cage! Or like a lion! Or—”

“Like A Bear?” asks the green one, with something like exasperation despite its robotic voice.

The four other bears turn and give it a look of the utmost disdain. Saihara wonders what the point is of these bizarre animatronics. They walk and talk and “react” to things, sure—but even these little moments of interaction between them feel so deliberately theatrical. It’s impossible to think of them as anything more than a bunch of unresponsive robots, no matter how much they pretend to carry on a conversation.

“A-Anyway,” says the pink one, drawing the group’s attention back once again. “You really don’t want to see Dad when he’s angry like this, trust me.”

“If ya don’t take him up on that ‘graduate instantly’ offer soon, Dad’s gonna blow a gasket! Take it from us!”

“Yeah!” The red one pipes up in agreement. “He might even do something real nasty to your friends and loved ones, and that’d be horrible! I’d cry, you know!”

A hush falls over the entire group. Even the other four bears stop talking, staring pointedly at the red one instead.

“Monotarou,” says the blue one. “Ya fucked it up.”

“We weren’t supposed to tell them about that just yet!” the pink one says, in a whisper that hardly sounds like a whisper—its voice still carries over to the rest of them just the same.

Those words are so obviously a lie. This entire arrangement feels too scripted, the slip-up too perfect. Instantly, his palms feel slick with sweat once again, his heart racing in his chest as the full impact of those words really sets in.

“Our friends and loved ones…?” Akamatsu-san looks vaguely nauseated. “You don’t have them. They’re not here, you couldn’t… do something like that…”

No one buys it, of course. Just because they searched this entire place from top to bottom, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other places with other people trapped inside. The ringleader running this entire game has resources beyond our imagination, he thinks dizzily, that much is obvious.

It would probably be very, very easy for them to get to any of their friends or loved ones.

“Has Monokuma already done something?” Amami-kun asks in a voice so hoarse it takes Saihara a moment to even realize just who was talking. “Hey, did you already do something? We don’t have any proof that you didn’t, right?”

The murmurs among the group start low, then begin to rise. There’s a tangible feeling of panic sweeping them all, the feeling of pressure building behind a dam that’s about to burst. Yesterday, they managed to keep that panic at bay: they had a time limit set for them, and a goal in sight. Today, he’s not so sure they can manage.

The more he thinks it over, the sicker he feels. He can remember his uncle just fine… There was nothing unusual or off about him the last time he saw him. He didn’t seem to be in any danger—but then again, he can’t even remember how he got here himself.

He’d like to think that his parents wouldn’t be targeted; they’re always off travelling, and they have plenty of security wherever they go, considering their notoriety. But if the ringleader’s resources really do extend this far, then…

Anxiety is no stranger to him. He’s lived with the feeling all his life, untouchable but ever-present, like the shadow at his feet. It’s there now, and although it has no feeling or shape to it at all, he can still feel it pressing down on his chest, crushing him, sucking all the air from the room.

His ears don’t seem to be working properly. Everyone’s mouths are moving, so he’s pretty sure they’re all still talking, still questioning, still panicking, but the sound isn’t registering at all. The only reason he’s still standing in the middle of the library floor is because his legs are keeping him up out of habit. If he tried to take a step forward, he’s pretty sure he’d come crashing down in an instant.

It takes what feels like an eternity (is it ten seconds or ten minutes, or longer?) before he realizes Ouma-kun is staring at him intently.

Staring. He’s staring at him. Saihara stares back, too numb even for his usual self-consciousness to set in. It feels considerably easier to wonder about why the other boy might be staring at him than it does to wonder if his uncle or his parents or his friends are injured or tortured or dead in an alley somewhere, so he does.

It’s unusual, he thinks. It’s really strange. He spent this whole time avoiding looking at any of the rest of us. He always just stared through us instead. I wasn’t even sure he was keeping up with the conversation.

But there’s no mistake. Ouma-kun’s eyes are locked on him, his brows furrowed. The bears, the others panicking, none of it seems to faze him in the slightest. If Saihara had to put a name to that expression… he might almost call it “expectant.”

It’s such a drastic change from his usual lack of expression. There must be a reason for it, he realizes dimly, but he can’t quite figure out what that reason is.

So many people are expecting so many things from him—how is he supposed to answer to any of them? His uncle, all the people he cares about, they might be dead, or maybe they’ll die very soon, or maybe some other unspeakably horrible thing will happen to them tomorrow or the day after or two weeks from now.

My loved ones are all probably expecting things from me too. Like not letting them die. The thought makes the pressure on his chest increase tenfold.

Still, he tries to remind himself to think. To think, think, think. He’s a detective, he should at least be able to do that much. The other boy’s gaze is fixed and unyielding. Every so often, Saihara can see him shudder a little, like he still hasn’t quite recovered from being sick. By contrast, though, he hardly even blinks.

Did he mention anything about this to me before? he wonders, thinking back on their conversation from the day before. It’s a struggle to remember any of it in this situation, but it’s a little easier once he thinks of it as a distraction. Family… loved ones… he mentioned something about there being videos, I think… motive videos…

A motive this strong is almost guaranteed to get someone killed. There’s no point in even debating that much; it’s obvious from the fear on his classmates’ faces, the tingling in his fingertips, the pounding of his heart against his ribcage as he continues to stand there without moving. Who wouldn’t want to try and see if their most important loved ones were okay, after hearing that they might be hurt, that they might get killed?

Ah. Realization taps against his brain, though it’s hard to make room for it considering all the other thoughts that are currently preoccupying him. Ouma-kun did mention something about those motive videos, now that he thinks about it. It had seemed like he hadn’t wanted to talk about them much, when he’d told his story, but he’d still discussed them a little when he’d explained the case with Toujou-san. He’d said something… something about them being similar to those “flashback lights” that he’d mentioned.

Saihara feels the gears in his brain begin spinning again, slowly, reluctantly. Feeling begins to return to his fingertips, just a little, and he blinks, surprised to realize just how dry his eyes feel. It turns out he was blinking even less than Ouma-kun.

He gives the boy the slightest nod, a sign of understanding he isn’t even sure he means. There’s always a possibility he didn’t understand anything. That his reasoning is completely mistaken. He speaks up anyway.

“How do we know…?” His voice trails off midway, raspy and hoarse like there’s something stuck in his throat. He clears his throat and tries again, still hardly able to believe what he’s about to ask. “How do we know that we’re even remembering those people the way we should?”

“What exactly do you mean, Saihara-kun?” It seems like Toujou-san was able to make his words out clearly over the panicky clamor in the room. Even her usually-calm demeanor is beginning to show a few cracks now, and her eyes are as narrowed and shrewd as a hawk’s.

“Yeah, what does that even mean?” The red bear tilts its head to the side curiously. “How would you remember someone the wrong way? I don’t get it.”

Saihara inhales deeply and says, “I mean, what if our memories are all wrong? What if those people don’t exist?”

The clamor dies down for an instant, then returns full force at double the volume. Everyone sounds, if possible, even more confused than they did just moments before.

“They don’t exist…? How could they not exist!?”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about, Saihara-kun!”

“Shuuichi, have ya lost your damn mind!?”

His eyes dart briefly to Ouma-kun as he struggles to gather his thoughts. By now, the other boy is the only one in the room not falling to pieces entirely. While everyone else talks over each other or half-rises to their feet, the other boy continues to sit there. It’d be easy to think him entirely unaffected by the situation—except, he’s still staring.

He can’t ask him aloud if this was the right answer, if he managed to notice whatever it was that he was missing before. But he’s sure (surprisingly sure, in fact) that it is. If he were wrong, Ouma-kun would be looking through him again, not at him.

Instinctively, he looks away and half-lifts his right hand, moving to tug at the cap that he’s no longer wearing. He only remembers that it isn’t there at the last second—but for some reason, as he leaves his hand frozen in midair, everyone quiets down just a bit.

Did they think he was just lifting a hand to get their attention? To ask them to listen closely? The thought that he managed to do something a real leader might do by complete accident is just too ironic.

“There’s a lot we don’t remember... right? We don’t remember how we got here. We don’t remember who put us here.” He swallows. “But most importantly, we don’t remember volunteering for this.”

The noise in the room quiets down, just as suddenly as it flared up. Everyone looks right at him, but as he averts his eyes back to the bookshelf past them, Saihara can’t help but notice that the bears are all standing completely, perfectly still.

“We don’t remember ever volunteering to participate in this killing game… but we know it has to be true. Because if it weren’t, we’d have been executed. That’s what we discussed earlier, isn’t it?”

More silence.

“I don’t know why we would’ve agreed to participate in something like this,” he admits. “There might be a reason for it, but I don’t know what it is. But the fact is, we weren’t forced into this killing game, no matter how much we might feel like we were. So that means… that means that our memories are a lot less reliable than we thought.”

“But still…” Amami-kun looks pained. “Saying that the friends and family we remember don’t exist? No matter how you look at it, isn’t that… going too far…?”

Saihara wipes a hand against his pocket again and hopes absentmindedly that the sweat on his hands isn’t too noticeable. Maybe something like that isn’t even important right now, but it still feels embarrassing beyond words. Besides, he’s already about to drop under the scrutiny he’s getting.

Finally he stops looking for something to do with his hands, and says, “It-It’s not for sure that they don’t exist. It’s just… a maybe. Just a possibility. And… we know that whatever they tell us here, it’s because they want to make us kill someone else.”

“Well, ain’t that obvious?” The blue bear speaks up, loud and impatient. “We’re stuck in a rut as long as you bastards keep refusin’ to kill each other, so we gotta make some sparks ourselves!”

As Saihara feels his breath catch in his throat, the other four bears freeze on the spot. Despite the stiffness of their animatronic faces, they somehow manage to look almost mortified.

“Oh, no!”

“Monokid, ya damn moron!”

“...I don’t get it. Was that something he shouldn’t have said?”

“Everyone,” the green one says, speaking up clearly and (for the most part) calmly over the chaos. “Stop Talking. Talking Will Just Make It Worse.”

Shirogane-san brings her hands up over her mouth, her expression somewhat distant, as though she were very far away. Saihara has a feeling he’s not the only one struggling to keep his balance right now. “So… So, he’s right?” she asks. “You did something to our memories?”

“The people we think we remember might not even exist…” Harukawa-san says slowly. She’s managed to appear generally unruffled (or mildly annoyed) in all the time that he’s known her, but even she looks more than a little shaken up right now.

“In that case… there’s even less incentive to kill than we supposed.” Shinguuji-kun’s mouth barely moves under his mask. The little of his face that’s visible looks ashen.

“L-Less incentive?” the pink one squeaks, paws raised apprehensively. If it could sweat, Saihara is pretty sure it’d be doing it right about now. “That’s not exactly true though, right? Y-You don’t… know for sure that your loved ones don’t exist!”

“No,” Saihara agrees. “We don’t know for sure. But no one is going to kill someone over a ‘maybe.’”

If their own memories aren’t trustworthy, there’s no point in going along with this killing game. No one is going to want to put their life (everyone’s lives, really) on the line for a motive that has no guarantee. …At least, he sure hopes so.

“…Dad Won’t Be Happy To Hear About This.” It’s hard to tell, given how robotic and stiff its voice is, but he’s pretty sure there’s a certain dryness to its tone. “Let’s Go.”

The other bears nod to its suggestion.

“As For The Motive… Well, It’s A Shame. I Suppose… We’ll Have To Rely On ‘That,’ Later.”

The bears leave the room, leaving everyone shaken by both threats and implications alike.

Conversation resumes, although it can hardly be called normal. Everyone looks at each other, and the anxiety in the room is as palpable as static in the air before a storm. He can’t hear what anyone is saying, though. His sense of hearing seems to have stopped working again.

His eyes find their way back to Ouma-kun’s face, only this time the other boy looks away first. His expression is as bored and as blank as before, and yet… Somehow, he doesn’t seem quite as impossible to read as yesterday. There’s a certain feeling about him, as Saihara watches him stare pointedly towards the other bookshelves.

Is he relieved? That would make sense. But it’s impossible to muster an emotion like relief unless you’re actually invested in something.

Once again, his thoughts stray back to yesterday. Just don’t expect anything from me, okay?

But Ouma-kun was the one who’d expected something from him just now.

“Shuuichi? Shuuichi, man, you okay?”

Saihara startles at the sudden sight of Momota-kun right beside him, a nervous frown on his face and a hand on his shoulder. He comes back to his senses a little, remembers that they should be doing damage control as a group. He can’t afford to just space out.

“Yeah,” he says. This time, his palm isn’t quite so sweaty when he moves to wipe it. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

Ouma sits at the edge of the ring of lantern-light in the dark, quiet library, staring at the walls absently. There are still dark, unfamiliar shadows there, misshapen and grotesque, but at least tonight he’s wide awake and past the point of wondering where or when or who he is.

He and his group have taken the first shift of the night, the past hour and a half of which has passed in a completely uneventful fashion. It’s been quiet, interrupted only by the faint, carried whispers of his classmates in their futons, or the occasional snore. More often now, there’s simply the sound of soft and steady breathing. Saihara-chan, Hoshi-chan, and Kiibo all sit a little to the left of him, though they can hardly be called a group of three when none of them attempts to strike up any conversations with each other.

The lantern is drawn closer to them than it is to him, but if he were feeling up to it, he might try to read anyway. They are in a library, after all; there’s no shortage of books around him. The light is faint, too indistinct to properly light up anything more than the most basic, shadowy outline of the room, but he doesn’t particularly care. The lighting in the machinery bay wasn’t good for reading either, and that didn’t stop him.

But the fact of the matter is, he’s not in a reading mood. He’s not in a talking mood, either. He sits on the library floor, and every so often he drums the fingers of his left hand against his knee while he props his chin up with his right hand.

It’s not as though sitting and doing nothing is particularly a challenge—that’s all he was doing for the last few days, after all. It’s simply… boring. But he’s long since grown accustomed to this boredom.

Boredom is a poison. He remembers thinking that at one point or another, and it’s as true now as it was back then. Just like the poison that Harukawa-chan shot straight into his veins last time, it spreads slower when he doesn’t agitate the wound. So he sits there and does nothing.

But his brain keeps spinning furiously, despite his best efforts not to think about anything in particular. It’s a curse, he’s decided. He can’t keep it from actively working, filtering, sorting through any and all of the information before him. It’s like one of those televisions from some horror movie, the kind that keeps flickering on again even when it’s turned off. Or unplugged.

Maybe if I had another mechanical press around here I could get a few moments of peace. Ha.

After the run-in with the bears, everything had passed by relatively uneventfully. They’d wrapped up their meeting fairly quickly, deciding to continue things along the same course of action, and no one had put up any objections or complaints. Even at the end of the meeting, Iruma-chan and Yumeno-chan hadn’t once brought up the subject of getting put into different groups.

But the panic was still there. Just below the surface, barely contained. They had managed to rein it in for now, but that was only a temporary measure, a measly bucket of water thrown on a house that’s caught fire.

Fire always spreads. He wonders who will be the one to spread it first this time, since it wasn’t Akamatsu-chan.

However, it’s as he very pointedly avoids wondering how in the world they managed to prevent the fire from spreading out of control when their earlier discussion was such a perfect opportunity that he feels a tap on his shoulder.

He resists the urge to flinch; he doesn’t like being snuck up on even at the best of times, and his senses are still far too dulled from his exhaustion. It’s not good, that his mind is wandering so often.

Instead, he looks over. Saihara-chan looks back at him, arm outstretched in the faint lantern light.

“Sorry if I startled you.” The words are almost mouthed, the other boy says them so quietly.

A half-dozen lies come to mind, about how he’s never startled, never caught unawares. The Supreme Leader of a secret, evil organization can’t be surprised, because it’s his job to know about anything and everything that goes on in the shadows.

Ouma discards them all and simply shrugs, staring back. “What do you want?”

He doesn’t really need to ask, though. He’s already well aware of what it is he wants.

The detective looks back at him, and to his credit he only looks mildly nervous at the bluntness of those words. Really, this is almost surprisingly unflinching for someone like Saihara-chan.

A pause lingers in the air between them. Across the room, he hears someone (probably Momota-chan, he thinks) let out a tremendous snore, sigh, and turn over.

“I wanted to thank you,” Saihara-chan says. The words are quiet, hesitant—and completely well-intentioned.

Ouma stares back blankly. He could say, I didn’t do anything. He could also say, I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. But both of those would be lies, and they’d both know it.

Finally, he settles on saying, “I don’t want your thanks.” That much is true, at least.

The other boy mulls it over for a bit, then shrugs. For some reason, the gesture annoys him more than it should. Rather than looking uneasy or confused, he simply looks as though he’s understood something. Or trying to understand, playing with pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that’s slowly but surely coming together.

“Maybe you don’t want it,” Saihara-chan says. “But I still wanted to say it anyway.”

Ouma looks him right in the eye. “Do whatever you want. I don’t care.” It’s exhausting by this point, having to drill in such a simple fact.

Saihara-chan opens his mouth to respond—

And both of them nearly jump out of their skin as the television suddenly comes on.

At first, he thinks it’s a direct announcement from Monokuma. The bear had come on at ten o’clock as scheduled to tell them it was nighttime, but it hadn’t had any messages for them other than a cursory, good night. By now it must be around midnight, so perhaps this was its next course of action, telling them to meet up in the courtyard or some other place around the school so it could give them all yet another new and exciting incentive to kill each other.

But that’s not it. Monokuma isn’t on the screen—instead, it’s the same animated video from before. The one from the time limit. The same song as last time comes blaring through the speakers at full volume, sending every single one of his classmates shooting up in their futons as they struggle to make sense of what’s going on.

“What the fuck! What the actual fuck!” Momota-chan comes stumbling up to them, nearly tripping over his pyjama pants in the process. “What the hell is goin’ on!?”

“W-We don’t know either,” Saihara-chan attempts to explain. “Everything was fine until j-just—”

“What time is it!?” Chabashira-chan yells from across the room. “Tenko really, really doubts that it’s morning just yet!”

“What’s happening!? Why is that song playing again!?”

“Is it another time limit!?”

“You fuckers better not have tried to pull anything!” Iruma-chan snaps, still tangled up in her futon as she shoots them all a glare.

Kiibo raises his hands placatingly as he gets to his feet. “Everyone, please calm down! None of us know why that song is playing again, but no one here caused it to happen! We should calm down, then discuss this as rationally as possible—”

Ouma tunes them all out in the old, familiar way. The song registers, in one ear and out the other, the video a disorienting, flickering jumble of shapes and colors that all end in murder. Possibilities flick through his mind, one after the other, none of them good.

He’s fairly sure he knows what Monokuma is up to. Or rather, what it'll be up to every few hours from now on.

This, he thinks wryly, is why I didn’t want Saihara-chan’s thanks. When I end up in that locker again, sooner or later, it’s not going to make a damn bit of difference if he said thank you right before we all got killed.

---

During the time limit, the video had droned on and on for a solid hour, too loud to be drowned out by conversation or any other noises they could make. Whoever had designed the song certainly knew what they were doing, too: it was as wailing and grating as the shriek of a car alarm, and perfectly attuned to send their anxiety as a group skyrocketing.

That had been bad enough. Those sixty minutes had set them all on edge, teeth gritted and hearts pounding as they slowly waited for time to run out. Ouma’s fairly sure that if he hadn’t been so far gone from his fever, even he would’ve felt a little bit of that same old fear come back to him.

This time, the video had played for five hours straight.

They had all sat huddled in the dark as they waited for the first hour to pass, both hoping for and dreading the idea that the screen would turn off. His classmates all naively assumed it must be some new time limit, though for what purpose (beyond the obvious one of killing each other) they weren’t sure. But there hadn’t been any penalties for their inaction last time, so they’d all agreed to do the same thing once more.

They were wrong, though. He could’ve told them before the hour was even up that the video wasn’t going to stop, but he didn’t. It would’ve taken too much explanation, and besides, they wouldn’t have looked very kindly on him being right. They never did.

The first hour came and went, and still the video had pressed on without stopping. There wasn’t any escaping it, either: Akamatsu-chan’s group had checked the hallways briefly, and unsurprisingly discovered that every single television was lit up with the same video, the same incessant, mind-numbing song. Just like last time.

“Why isn’t it stopping?” Harukawa-chan had asked. Everyone else’s eyes were noticeably bloodshot, bleary-eyed from having been woken up in the middle of the night, but she alone hadn’t looked particularly tired. Well, considering the hellish lifestyle she’d been forced into, that made sense. She was probably used to functioning on very little sleep.

“You don’t think…?” Shirogane-chan had bitten her lip, quivering where she sat against the shelf. Her voice had almost been too hard to make out under the piercing, pounding beat of the Monokuma video. “You don’t think, it’s going to keep playing until… one of us actually…?”

She had left the end of her question unspoken, but everyone had understood, and not a single one of them had responded.

There’s a possibility she’s right, he had thought at the time, but I doubt it. After all, that’s just too boring. No one would want to watch a show like that.

Around five in the morning, the video shuts off all at once, without warning. Just as he expected.

Everyone shoots up from their sunken, sleep-deprived stupor, looking around the room apprehensively. The absence of light and sound is almost more disorienting than the video itself; Ouma can feel his eyes struggling to make sense of the surroundings in the now-insufficient lantern light, his ears ringing in the silence.

“It stopped…?” Hoshi-chan asks, lifting the edge of his hat slightly as he stares towards the now-dark television screen, baffled.

“It stopped,” Akamatsu-chan repeats blankly. Her eyes scan the room from corner to corner as though expecting to see a corpse lying in one of the nooks or crevices, but there’s nothing there. “Why did it stop?”

“Who cares why it stopped? We can sleep now, can’t we?” Yumeno-chan’s hat sits low, half-obscuring her face, but he can still see how red and puffy her eyes are even in the lantern-lit gloom. Some of it he suspects is just further exhaustion on top of having taken the first watch last night, but he’s fairly sure she might be frustrated to the point of tears by now, too.

Kiibo nods slowly, confusion etched all over his robotic face. “I… I suppose so?” It’s a question, rather than a statement.

No matter how long they wait, Monokuma doesn’t appear. Neither do the other bears. Some of them stare pointedly at the bookshelf in front of the hidden door as though expecting to see it swing open at any moment, but it stays firmly shut.

“I believe everyone else should rest, now that it’s possible,” says Toujou-chan. “There’s still some time left until the morning announcement… Our group was scheduled for the second shift anyway, so I believe if we keep watch until then, you can all get a few more hours of sleep.”

Good old Toujou-chan, he muses, always thinking of others first. He can’t even muster any malice behind the thought. It’s a genuinely good suggestion.

There are a few more murmurs of consensus, and the rest of them decide to curl up in their futons and sleep while Akamatsu-chan’s group keeps watch. There’s still a feeling of dread lying over them, the tension thick and palpable enough to cut with a knife—but most of them are far too tired to dwell on that right now.

Not Saihara-chan though, apparently. As they both lie down, he can barely catch sight of the other boy’s questioning glance, clearly seeking his opinion on the matter without any words at all.

The idea of his opinion being sought after is laughable. He remembers the offer he posed to him in Iruma-chan’s virtual world last time, so quaintly, so casually. He also remembers the irritation on Saihara-chan’s avatar as he’d reached for the parlor phone, and the soft-spoken, biting words he’d left him with in the trial room as he’d put on the role of a villain like a mask.

Why is it that his opinion is only worth listening to after he’s stopped wanting to give it?

More importantly, why ask for his opinion at all when everything he’s tried in this game so far has completely failed?

He lies there quietly in the dark, debating on whether to say anything or not. He’s well aware of the reason why his and Saihara-chan’s futons are side by side, just like he knows that the other boy is aware of it too. No one else had succeeded in getting him to talk, so the responsibility fell to Saihara-chan all the time now.

Ouma’s mouth twists. What they probably thought of as some well-meant measure to help him “open up” was little more than a thinly veiled excuse for their fear and mistrust of him. How nice. I’m like a dog they want to stick with the one person they’re sure I won’t bite.

Well, at least they were right not to trust him.

On that line of thought, he decides to open his mouth and whisper, “What do you know about psychological torture, Saihara-chan?” It’s a serious question, not a threat.

The other boy stares back, eyes wide and face pale. But it seems his detective’s intuition is in full force today (perhaps fueled by five anxiety-ridden hours of nonstop adrenaline), because he looks pensive almost immediately afterward.

Ouma turns over in his futon and pretends to fall asleep as soon he closes his eyes, only to drift into the real thing after a few minutes.

He wakes with a start at seven-thirty on the dot, his stomach clenched with uneasiness—at first, he thought he was back in his bedroom, waking once again to the sound of a knock on the door. As he regains his senses, he realizes the Monokuma video is wailing again.

The uneasiness settles gradually, and in exchange he feels the bitter, weary satisfaction of being proven right.

---

Eight in the morning comes and goes, and the morning announcement doesn’t come on. The video just keeps playing, the same old images of murder after murder never faltering, the music deafening.

His classmates look about ready to drop. He’s feeling pretty exhausted himself, but he doubts it has much to do with the video, or the night watch. His fatigue runs a lot deeper than those things, though he supposes it doesn’t matter much, if the end result is still the same.

They turn on the lights this time, rather than sitting in the dark with only a lantern to see by. There aren’t any windows in the library; without any natural light (as “natural,” of course, as anything could get in this dome), their internal clocks are already struggling. It feels as though it’s still hours earlier, the middle of the night rather than a bright and early morning.

“Hey, hey! God thinks Angie and the others should do something to pass the time!” Angie-chan speaks up over the booming noise. There’s just a tinge of desperation to her usually-chipper voice by now. He can hardly blame her for wanting a distraction. “Like cards or something! Let’s play cards!”

No one takes her up on the offer. Cards might certainly help them relieve tension—but they’re all just too tired.

After another half hour or so, they decide to go eat breakfast collectively this time, rather than in shifts. Their rotation schedule is already a mess as it is, so there’s no need for any of them to wait or preoccupy themselves with other tasks.

Personally, he thinks it might be the better choice anyway. Four groups of four are safer than anyone going out by themselves, or even in groups of two, but it’s not a foolproof plan. If anyone really wants to commit a murder… Well, hasn’t he already seen that his classmates are more than capable of finding a way to kill when they really want to?

They eat without conversation, though not in silence by any means. The video loops on and on without pause, drowning out the sounds of bowls and chopsticks clinking.

Ouma makes another bowl of rice for himself. It tastes as coarse and dry as the one from yesterday, and he stops again after just a few bites.

At ten o’clock, long after they’ve left the cafeteria, the video shuts off yet again.

“The fuck is that bear playing at!?” Momota-chan shouts. He seems to have entirely forgotten about the rule forbidding violence against the headmaster. If Monokuma were to show up right now, he’d probably just start swinging with all his usual, reckless bravado.

Shinguuji-chan shoots him a reproachful look, rubbing at his temples lightly. He’s not the only one with a headache either, between the off-and-on noise, the sleep deprivation, and the stress. “It would seem there’s no rhyme or reason to this mess…” he says. “If there’s no way to predict when the video is going to come on or turn off, then…”

“…Then there’s no way for us to get any sleep, even when it’s turned off.” Amami-chan fills in that worrying thought, fiddling absently with the bracelet on his right hand. “We can’t carry on a schedule like this.”

Shinguuji-chan nods. “And I don’t suppose anyone among us is still optimistic enough to think that Monokuma would just go easy on us by tomorrow.”

Just staying awake until the next day won’t help them, that much is true. This barrage is as much an attack against their minds as it is their bodies, an endurance contest of sorts—and as someone whose body has already been pushed well past its limits, Ouma doesn’t particularly feel like enduring any longer.

He had thought it would be a tactic like this. Simply keeping the video turned on all the time would be too one-sided, too uneventful. Obviously someone would be bound to snap and kill if that song never stopped for even a moment—but where would be the fun in that? This sporadic assault, this slow, gradual whittling away at their nerves, it’s probably much more fun to watch.

People say that variety is the spice of life, but that’s not technically true. It’s unpredictability. The unexpected. That’s what really ropes people in, keeps them at the edge of their seat and coming back for more. And who would know that better than him?

There’s no better term for what this is than psychological torture. Of all the ways they’ve suffered horribly in this killing game, he suspects that’s what people have always really wanted to watch the most. And of course, it’s only fun if there’s some element of risk to it, on the surface at least. If there’s a chance they might actually overcome it, or stand up in the face of it.

If he’s right, there probably won’t be more than an hour or two between this brief interim of silence and the next onslaught of Monokuma’s video. In which case, he’d better get to work. He’d like nothing better than to be an observer in all of this, but that’s not going to happen if he gets roped into yet another trial. Circumventing the issue altogether sounds preferable to having to sit through yet another boring, uneventful execution.

No rest for the wicked, right? I guess it makes sense that I’m always working, then.

“Saihara-chan, can you draw?” While the others continue the discussion, he mumbles that question to the boy sitting next to him, too quiet to be overheard by anyone else.

The detective flinches in surprise at such a sudden, inexplicable question. Thankfully, everyone else is too exhausted and too focused on the conversation at hand to pay them any mind. “N-No,” he says cautiously. “Not at all. Why?”

That’s a shame. At the very least, it’s going to make things a lot harder on him. Thankfully, he already knows Saihara-chan is a fast learner.

He doesn’t answer his question. Instead, he says, “Grab a notebook and a pencil somewhere here in the library. Then we’ll sit together when the video comes on again. I think it’s about time you had some drawing lessons.”

“Wow… I never woulda thought a sad virgin like you could come up with somethin’ like this!”

Iruma-san stands peering down over the diagrams and plans that he’d given her. From behind her, Akamatsu-san lets out a cough that sounds suspiciously like an attempt not to laugh, after which she tries to look a little more disapproving.

“W-Well,” Saihara says evasively. “You know… something had to be done… so I thought, if it helps, then…”

It’s not a lie… technically. Something did have to be done, and he did think that this would help. It’s just that he isn’t the one who came up with any of this.

He glances just briefly at Ouma-kun, standing a little ways away from him in the middle of Iruma-san’s lab, but the other boy’s expression is as impassive as always. The whole place feels more like a mad scientist’s lair than a research laboratory for a high schooler, packed to the brim with gizmos and contraptions whose purpose even he isn’t sure of—and yet, the other boy looks simply uninterested.

Bored. Aloof. Like he’s only there for the sake of necessity, rather than because he wants to be. No one would ever think him capable of drawing those plans or diagrams, much less willing to do so in the first place.

Saihara turns back and takes another look at the diagrams himself, still hardly able to believe that he’s really looking at a set of plans to build a remote control that can hijack the school’s television system.

“Is this… really okay?” Akamatsu-san asks, gazing down curiously as she leans in for a closer look. “Will we really be able to just turn them all off or on whenever we want?”

Iruma-san’s head snaps up. Despite her obvious interest in the diagrams, her eyes are still noticeably swollen, the bags under her eyes too prominent for make-up to completely hide them. “What, do ya see any better options coming our way? ‘Cause last I checked, that goddamn bear just came and told us breakin’ school property was against the rules!”

Akamatsu-san winces. So does Saihara, for that matter. In fact, Ouma-kun is the only one who shows no noticeable reaction, instead looking aimlessly at the huge buzz-saw hanging from the ceiling.

Monokuma’s reappearance had been completely unexpected earlier, and hadn’t lasted longer than a few minutes. Just as Momota-kun, Gonta-kun, and Chabashira-san had been discussing the possibility of breaking the televisions one by one, in order to disable the speakers, the bear had popped up as though out of thin air, causing everyone in the room to jump. Some of their startled yelps had still been audible even over the sound of the video, still playing as inexorably as ever.

“Tsk, tsk! I can’t believe you’d all resort to vandalism just because of a little background music!”

No one had moved, though Momota-kun’s fist had trembled noticeably. If he’d risked it—if he’d taken a running start at Monokuma, Saihara is fairly sure something horrible would’ve happened, without a doubt. Thankfully, he hadn’t.

Monokuma had waved a paw disapprovingly, looking downright gleeful in the face of everyone’s misery and exhaustion. “Guess it’s true what they say—your generation really is shaping up to be a bunch of delinquents, huh? Well, I won’t stand for delinquency in my school, no sir! Sleep where you will, but destruction of school property is expressly forbidden in the meantime!”

As suddenly as it had come, it left, and only the slight vibration of their Monopads notifying them of an update in the school regulations was proof that it had been there in the first place.

Akamatsu-san rubs at the back of her head, trying to muster what little of her patience is left. It must be hard; the only reason she’s here is to keep an eye on Iruma-san as she works, the same way that Ouma-kun and he had come as a group to drop off these plans so that nothing went astray. It’s important, now more than ever, that none of them go anywhere unattended, since there’s no telling who might snap under pressure first.

“I know… that it’s not like we have any other options,” the pianist says slowly. She’s trying to stay calm, clearly, but Saihara can still see the slight clenching of her jaw. “I was just wondering if it was actually going to work or not.”

“What do I look like, a fuckin’ expert!” In the silence that follows, the realization that she is, in fact, the expert on the subject slowly sinks in, and Iruma-san flushes a little. “What I mean is, I’ve never made shit like this before. So let me try it out first before ya go askin’ me stupid questions!”

That’s not entirely true, though. If Ouma-kun’s story is to be believed, she’d made a remote control quite similar to this, powerful enough to hijack not only televisions but even the Exisals, too. Not that she’d remember it, though.

Saihara’s mind still boggles at the thought a little. The more he sees for himself, the more it really does sound… impossible. He can’t help but feel like he’s being made to eat his words, somewhat, for deciding to try and sort out the improbable from the impossible.

When the Monokuma video had come on once again, screeching through the speakers with an intensity that felt like it was trying to drill its way into his skull, Ouma-kun had sat down next to him in their corner of the library. And as the panic and tension had continued to grow, while everyone was distracted with the droning of the video and song, he’d looked pointedly at the pencil and paper in his hands, nodded his head, and… instructed him on what to do.

It had been hard to make out his voice over all the noise—even harder to actually draw something for functional purposes when he knew absolutely nothing about drawing. The most he’d ever done were a few scribbles for reference in the tiny notebook he kept in his breast pocket, which he sometimes (not often) used for his detective work.

But this had been another matter entirely, and every single mistake he’d made, he’d tried to painstakingly erase, only for the worn-out eraser to leave smudges all over the paper. Ouma-kun had looked at him with something surprisingly like impatience every single time this had happened, which had only made him feel more rushed, which in turn had only led to more mistakes.

The whole trial-and-error process had been a mess, thanks to his sweaty, nervous hands, and even now he’s not sure if it was the video itself or Ouma-kun’s scrutinizing stare that had caused him to feel more anxious.

And yet… if this plan actually worked, then it would certainly be worth it.

“Gimme another hour or two, and I can probably get somethin’ to work.” Iruma-san grumbles that begrudgingly after poring over the diagrams a little longer. “I can’t guarantee I can get all the kinks out in that little time, but I’ll get somethin’. And it’ll work.” She shakes her frizzing hair out, putting a hand on her hip. “It’ll work, ‘cause I’m the beautiful genius inventor, Iruma Miu, and I don’t tell any of the rest of you how to do your jobs, alright!? So just let me invent!”

Akamatsu-san blinks, completely at a loss for words. Finally, she just nods, either too tired to argue back or even, perhaps, just a little impressed at this surprising display of work ethic from… well, from someone like Iruma-san.

Saihara turns to leave and Ouma-kun follows—but just as his hand grips the handle, Iruma-san calls out to him.

“Hey, Suckhara! It’s pretty incredible you drew this shit! I didn’t know a detective could be any good at inventin’. And here I thought you were the type to just go sniffin’ around other people’s dirty bits!”

He resists the urge to flinch (only partially thanks to her last comment). Taking credit for something he didn’t do still feels wrong, somehow. It’s probably necessary, given the circumstances… but still. “It’s not… i-inventing, really. I just drew the plans,” he says. Partly, he’s just trying to justify it to himself.

He just drew the plans. Right. Plans which might very well save one life, or two, or all their lives right now. And the person who told him how to draw those plans is still right behind him, as unspeaking as his own shadow—or maybe a ghost would be a fairer comparison, since he takes up almost as little space as one.

It’s been more than a day since they left the bedroom together, and still he feels like some half-invisible, nearly-faded presence, only flickering into sight again whenever absolutely necessary.

Saihara leaves the room, still lost in thought.

---

They walk back through the school a little ways apart, the hallways of the building eerily silent now that the televisions have stopped their barrage of noise once again. It won’t last, of course, but that’s fine, as long as Iruma-san can finish the remote in the next few hours like she said.

The fading rays of sunset (assuming it really is time for the sun to set, and assuming that really is the sun) slant through the windows, reminding him of the day before yesterday. Ouma-kun isn’t leaning on his shoulders this time, but the walk still feels very much the same.

Even without the time limit pressing in on them, there are still the inescapable circumstances they’re caught up in, breathing down their necks. Still the same time of day, the same scenery. Still the same sense of distance between them.

At some point, Ouma-kun took the lead while they were walking, so now he trails a few paces ahead of him, his footsteps quiet despite the speed of his pace. Saihara can’t blame him for going on ahead; he’s probably walking much too slowly right now, trailing further and further behind as he keeps winding down the same trails of thought.

How much does he really know about this boy in front of him, by now? How much of what he told him can he really say he trusts?

He said not to expect anything from him. He said that he didn’t think any of this was going to work.

And yet, he’d also agreed that it was still good to try.

Before he even realizes it, Saihara’s feet slowly come to a stop. Ouma-kun trails a few more paces ahead of him, then turns and looks back at him when he no longer hears the sound of him following. He doesn’t look impatient this time, or inquisitive. Just tired.

“Ouma-kun, can we talk for a bit out here? Before we go back to the library, I mean.”

The hallways are ablaze with fading oranges and reds, the last washes of the setting sun casting long shadows against the cracks and creeping plant life sticking up through the floors and walls. The scene couldn’t be more different from that dark, empty bedroom. But this distance between them, the way the words linger in the air and fade—all of it still feels the same.

The other boy waits the length of a few heartbeats, unreadable, then turns back around. “Sorry, Saihara-chan, we already finished the question-and-answer session.” His tone is light, but there’s a finality to his words nonetheless. “We already talked. I don’t feel like talking anymore.”

There isn’t a door between the two of them any longer, but there might as well be. It’s there, invisible but impassable all the same, a firm but imaginary do-not-cross line in the air between them. No more discussion. No more questions. Period.

Saihara ignores it. His curiosity is getting far too out of hand, after this much time lost in his own thoughts—or maybe he’s just too tired to feel as anxious as he should right now.

After another moment of hesitation, he finally asks the question that’s been on his mind for some time now: “Isn’t that a lie though?”

The silence hangs between them, stretching as long as the shadows on the floor.

“Isn’t that a lie, though?”

Ouma stares. For a moment, he’s almost sure his ears are playing tricks on him. That’s not a phrase he expected to hear. It’s not a phrase he should be hearing, now of all times. Last time, the time before that, any of those others times, sure, but he’s gone out of his way to avoid telling any lies so far, ever since he woke up in that locker again.

He keeps his face completely immobile, but his words are like ice as he says, “What do you mean?” Perhaps this is Saihara-chan’s way of showing that he doesn’t trust him after all. That would certainly be the wiser choice.

“I mean, haven’t you been lying for a while now?”

His mouth sours instantly. This was the predictable response, to be sure, but perhaps he’d let the unexpected events of the last day and a half skew his expectations slightly. Even he didn’t think the detective would go back to being so predictable at a time like this.

“So you don’t believe me, then. You don’t believe the things I told you.” He states it matter-of-factly, but internally he wonders if he should’ve just stayed in his room yesterday when he had the chance after all.

But Saihara-chan just shakes his head. “That’s not it. I believe what you told me—well, I think it has to be true after… everything we’ve seen.” His right hand fidgets near his pocket, still slightly dirty with traces of graphite, smudged from all the marks he tried to erase and wipe away. “But weren’t you lying when you told me not to expect anything from you? Aren’t you actually expecting a lot of things yourself, Ouma-kun?”

Again, he stares. How is he supposed to respond, exactly?

“Weren’t you lying when you said you didn’t care?”

Ouma stands and faces him in the hallway, his heart thudding in his chest with an intensity he didn’t think it was still capable of. Is this anger? Is it frustration that he’s feeling? Another thud. Another.

Am I just afraid that maybe he’s right?

Why is he asking all these things, anyway? Why does he care?

“Saihara-chan,” he says. It’s a struggle to get any words out; his heart is thudding so painfully by now that it feels almost as though it’s lodged in his throat. “When I told you I didn’t care, that wasn’t some riddle for you to solve. There wasn’t any deeper meaning to it. I said I don’t care, because I can’t care.”

That’s the truth of it. The horrible, painful, inescapable truth. Lies were a mask, a façade, a shield of false compassion. Lies were a mercy. But the truth that he’s been thinking for some time now is that Ouma Kokichi died a long time ago in this game, and it’s only his body that keeps getting brought back.

Who could possibly have it in them to still care after seeing the things that he’d seen? After doing the things that he’d done?

It’s as ugly, blunt, and true of a confession as he can give to the other boy’s expectant look. Perhaps this is the only way he can get the detective to really understand, and to get off his case—

—but he just shakes his head and says the unbelievable. “No offense, Ouma-kun, but I don’t think you’re that good of an actor.”

“What?” He’s pretty sure that was an insult just now, but he can’t muster any venom in response. Only shock. It’s so unexpected that he only feels really and truly dumbfounded.

“I don’t think you’re as good of an actor as you think you are.”

Saihara-chan looks at him, and by now he’s lost track of how many times, ever since this game started, he’s come to the realization that he really, truly just can’t figure him out.

“You don’t think I’m a good actor.” Ouma repeats the words blankly, numb with astonishment.

The other boy nods. “You keep saying that you are. Maybe you were, even. But this… lack of caring, it feels more like an act to me. And not a very good one.”

Not a very good one? That’s almost laughable, he thinks. That’s definitely not what you thought about me last time.

“What’s the point in an act where you’re only lying to yourself?”

I still don’t think it’s good to lie to yourself, don’t you agree? The words come rushing back to him all at once, churning his stomach, souring his mouth even further.

Belatedly, he recognizes this speech for exactly what it is: provocation. Perhaps Saihara-chan isn’t very confrontational by nature, and perhaps this provocation isn’t even meant with bad intentions. But Ouma knows a test when he sees one.

This is a bluff, he realizes suddenly, his brain cooling down as logic takes over. Saihara-chan’s just bluffing. He’s lying.

In which case… he didn’t know anything about his behavior for sure. This was yet another theory from the great detective, a piece of reasoning he was putting forth only because he wanted it to be true. He was tentatively testing the waters, searching for proof to back him up.

Ouma reaches his decision instantly. A lie for a lie, then.

“Hey Saihara-chan,” he says, “have you noticed there’s no one else around right now?” The words come out smooth as silk, and it’s such a complete turnaround from his earlier behavior that he’s pleased to see the other boy startle.

“What about it?” Saihara-chan’s eyes narrow, as though trying to figure out what he’s up to.

“What, you can’t tell?” Ouma clasps his hands behind his back, leans forward onto the balls of his feet and then back again. “There’s no one around us at all, and we’re still a long ways away from the library.”

Silence.

His face splits into the usual, uncanny grin, as easily as putting on a coat that’s been worn a hundred times before. “I guess it’s pretty hard to fool a detective after all, huh? There’s no point, if you already know that I’m lying. But hey, you seem to have gotten the wrong idea as to what I was lying about.”

“The wrong idea…” Saihara-chan says slowly. The other boy swallows, hard, and there’s a part of Ouma that sings to see the sweat beading on his brow. “Okay, so what’s the truth then? What were you lying about?”

“I told you, didn’t I? That I could’ve been lying about all of it.”

More silence.

“Hey,” he says, “what do you think will happen if I just kill you here and now?”

There’s already more sweat than there was just a few moments ago. “E-Everyone...” His voice fails for a second, and he swallows again. “Everyone would know right away. We left together, they know you were with me. It wouldn’t be hard to guess.”

“Boo, only half-right.” Ouma gives him a mocking frown. “Sure, everyone would know, but that doesn’t really matter, since I’m the ringleader!”

Saihara-chan takes half a step back. Maybe the gesture was entirely unconscious, but he seizes onto that weakness without mercy. Corner, corner, check and mate.

“Here, I’ll just tell you, since Saihara-chan wasn’t enough of a detective to figure it out himself: I’d kill you. Then I’d never come back to the library. I’m the ringleader, so I’ve got plenty of places to hide. What, did you really think that hidden room in the library was the only one?”

He wonders what kinds of shadows the setting sun is casting on his face as he takes a step forward. Saihara-chan doesn’t take another step back this time—but he doesn’t come any closer, either.

“Ah, it’s kind of a shame to be found out so soon, but maybe this is actually for the best. Everyone’s pretty much already guessed that I’m the ringleader anyway. Maybe I overdid it with that whole ‘sickly, traumatized, emotionally numb’ routine? Either way, I thought I was going to die from boredom if I had to keep it up for one more minute.”

Liar, villain, ringleader—he steps into each role again as though he never left, welcoming back each one like an old friend. There’s a ringing in his ears and his heart won’t stop pounding in his chest, but he doesn’t care.

“I wonder how quickly everyone else is going to fall apart without Saihara-chan there to prop them up? I bet they’ll be in a pretty shabby state without their Super High School Level Detective. Oh, maybe it’d be even better if I made up some lie about there being a traitor in the group who was helping me out the whole time, too! People love obvious clichés like that, don’t they?”

Saihara-chan’s right hand, the one near his pocket, is trembling, as though he’s not quite sure what to do with it. Ouma presses forward, wondering absently just how much more bile he has to throw before the other boy will turn tail and run.

“Hmm,” he says, looking Saihara-chan over. His grin widens, stretching into a leer he hasn’t worn for some time now. “I guess just killing you now would be way too boring, though. How about this? I’ll give you a head start. You run, try and get back to the others to tell them about me, and then I still catch you and kill you at the last second. Doesn’t that sound way more exciting? Hey, Saihara Shuuichi? Tell me what you think, come on.”

Is this just his way of lashing out, because Saihara-chan was right? Is he only acting like this because he’s at a loss for any other way to respond? He’s not sure. He’s not sure at all, but he wants to keep doing it. What he’ll do after this, where he’ll go, it doesn’t matter—for once, he’s not interested in trying to think that far ahead.

He remembers the words Saihara-chan left him with so long ago, just after Gonta’s death. Poison is still poison, no matter how soft and how slow, and it seems like it’s only just catching up with him now. But he’s ready to admit that he certainly is the kind of person meant to end up pathetic and alone—

He stops smiling. He stops laughing.

At some point, Saihara-chan had lifted his trembling right hand, slowly, very slowly. That same hand is being held out to him now, reaching through thin air towards him.

“What are you doing?” The smoothness leaves his tone in an instant, and numb, hollow shock comes rushing back again.

The other boy takes a moment to respond. His hand is still trembling, faltering a little, but he doesn’t stop holding it out to him. “I… take it back,” he says finally. “You’re a really good actor, Ouma-kun.” He laughs weakly. It sounds more like a choked-back sob. “A really good one.”

Ouma stares from his face to his hand, then back again. Lies and taunts and threats come to mind one by one so effortlessly, but he can’t seem to put them into words.

“But you don’t have to act anymore. Not the way you were doing just now and… not about the stuff that I mentioned before, either.”

His hand starts shaking even more noticeably. By now, it looks like it must be paining him just to keep it outstretched. But he still doesn’t lower his arm, or take any other steps back.

Ouma stares and stares and stares, and wonders what on earth would ever make the other boy think that it was okay for him to take that hand. That he even had the right, to take that hand.

“You’ve been thinking about how to keep us all alive in this game more than anyone, but maybe it’s still wrong, to expect you to handle everything by yourself. You told me that… you already tried that, plenty of times.”

Why? Ouma thinks. His brain is stuck, refusing to come up with any other words beyond that one. Why, why, why?

“But you can’t… expect the rest of us to handle it all, either. Or even just me. There’s only so much I can do, b-but—all the ideas that’ve been saving us so far have come from you.”

Why? Why is this happening when it isn’t supposed to? Why is his hand still outstretched?

“I really do think this is going to work… but not if you keep acting like you’re not involved. So... please.”

Please. Please what? Saihara-chan doesn’t say anything more, but that hand speaks volumes for him. Please trust me, it says. Even if you can’t trust anyone else, at least trust me. Maybe then, I can trust you too.

Feeling numb all the way to his core, Ouma just shakes his head. Left, right. His neck doesn’t seem to want to move much.

He understands. He does, really. But there’s no way he can take that hand. He still doesn’t have the right to.

But instead of lowering it, Saihara-chan just keeps holding it out to him, ignoring the way that it’s shaking like a leaf.

Bewildered and speechless, Ouma finds himself stepping forward. One step. Then another. He wasn’t worried about consequences a few moments ago, when he was trying to drive Saihara-chan away. So perhaps it’s fine if he doesn’t worry about the consequences right now, either.

He takes the hand that’s reaching out to him, the same hand he has no right to grab, and holds onto it like a lifeline.

There was a time, once, when he mistook the sour taste in his mouth and the tightness in his throat for something else. That time, it turned out to be hollow, bitter laughter.

This time, in a surprisingly normal and predictable turn of events, he’s amazed to realize that those sensations are simply the usual symptoms before tears.

Chapter Text

Saihara stands on shaky legs, breathing slowly. Light gleams brilliantly through the barred windows, casting shades of fire on the overgrown, plant-covered floor and walls, although it grows dimmer with each passing minute as the sun continues to set.

Absentmindedly, he thinks to himself that his hand hurts.

It doesn’t matter, though. It’s such an unimportant, trivial thought—like carrying someone from a burning building and being preoccupied with the pain from stubbing your toe against the doorframe on the way out.

So he pays it no attention and simply stands there, trying to stay calm and still as Ouma Kokichi grabs his hand with a strength he didn’t know him capable of and cries until his eyes are dry.

He’s been crying for longer than Saihara’s been able to keep track of, though it’s not as though the length of time matters much either. For now, he just tries to move as little as possible. He’s afraid that if he takes one step, says one wrong thing, this moment between them might come to an end. This tentative… trust. Understanding. Whatever it might be called.

Somehow or other, Ouma-kun manages to cry without making much noise—which is perhaps fortunate for both of them, since he’s pretty sure the others would’ve long since come running upstairs from the library by now if they’d heard. There definitely wouldn’t be any easy way to explain this scene to the rest of them.

But instead, the other boy just keeps quiet and hangs his head, shaking from head to toe as dry sobs wrack his entire body. And every time a new one hits, he squeezes his hand even harder, as though it’s an anchor that’s holding him steady. Each time, there’s always a slight pang where he grabs it.

Instinctively, he searches for words and finds none. But he supposes that’s only natural—if there were anything to say, he’d have said it by now. He’s pretty sure he used up everything he had to say back when he first held out his hand to Ouma-kun. By this point, there aren’t really any words left. So he lets him cry, and the sun slowly but surely sinks further past the horizon of the dome, leaving evening hues behind that are tinged with more purple than red or orange.

After a while, the sobbing stops. The other boy breathes hard and heavy in front of him, still shaking on every inhale, but he doesn’t seem to have any tears left in him to cry. It’s a feeling Saihara can understand all too well, though he can’t remember the last time he got to that point.

Is that a good thing? he wonders. Maybe I just don’t remember because my memories are all messed up. Or maybe it really has been a long, long time since I cried like that.

Ouma-kun lets go of his hand, and they stand there in silence. The silence seems to be becoming something of a constant with them. Other than those intermittent, shaky breaths, there’s no noise at all for some time. Then, as though out of any better ideas, Ouma-kun leans against the wall and slides down to take a seat right there in the middle of the hall.

“Sorry,” he says. He doesn’t look up at him, or at anything else in particular.

Saihara swallows. “It’s… okay. I mean, y-you probably need to sit down after… after all of that. You should rest.”

“No. Not that.” The other boy shakes his head slowly, still not looking at him. “I’m sorry.” Pause. “I’m… sorry for before.”

In the quiet, empty hallway, he can almost hear those horrible words from earlier echoing through his head. He knows now that they were all lies, but that didn’t make them any less chilling and sinister. For a moment (really, not any longer than that) he’d actually wondered if he was about to be killed.

Vaguely, he wonders about the word “before.” Was he only talking about what had taken place between them just now? Or was he apologizing for… all of those other things he had mentioned, too? It seems strange, somehow, receiving an apology for things he himself has no memory of. Or more like things he has only faint, hazy memories of—things that still feel like by-gone dreams or scenarios he might have imagined when his mind was elsewhere.

What is he supposed to say, exactly?

He can’t think of anything, so Saihara follows the other boy’s lead and takes a seat on the floor himself, leaning up against the wall opposite Ouma-kun. It’s just as well; his legs could use a rest, as many times as they’ve almost given out on him in the last few days.

“That’s… okay, too,” he says at last. The words come from him slowly, and he’s not sure if it’s Ouma-kun who isn’t meeting his eye anymore or if it’s the other way around. “You weren’t… You didn’t mean it. So it’s okay—”

“If I’m a bad actor, then you’re a pretty bad liar yourself, Saihara-chan.” Ouma-kun cuts him off, his voice raspy after crying so hard and for so long. “It’s not okay. Nothing about what I did is okay.”

There’s a ring of truth to his words after so many lies. He knows for sure now that this isn’t simply about their time here in the hallway. “There were… a lot of factors,” Saihara reminds him quietly. “It’s not like anyone else has been through the same things you have…”

“What, you mean no one else is reliving things, travelling through time, and waking up in a locker like some third-rate psychological thriller?” The other boy snorts disbelievingly. “Yeah, I guess not. Maybe I should write a how-to guide on what-not-to-do for anyone else unlucky enough to get stuck in the same situation.”

Saihara attempts a smile, though he doesn’t doubt it must look more than a little strained. “Didn’t you tell me you did something like that for Momota-kun? You said you wrote him a script or something…” Try as he might, the image of Momota-kun sitting in an Exisal, reading cramped, tiny handwriting from a script the size of a telephone book and trying to pretend to be Ouma-kun sounds so ridiculous it’s almost funny. Even in this situation.

“Well that was more like a how-to guide on how to not blow the trial, but sure, I guess it counts…” The boy in white takes another deep, shaky breath, trailing one finger absently along a crack in the wall beside him. “Why do you even believe me, anyway?”

The words after everything I’ve done go unspoken, but Saihara understands them nonetheless. For the first time, the boy in front of him looks… almost lost, as though that question truly has him more shaken up than he’d like to let on.

It’s a fair question, too. Even he isn’t quite sure why, or if there’s even an answer at all.

He thinks about the slight ache in his hand from where Ouma-kun grabbed it too hard. That pain is still there—and with it, proof that there were, in fact, some things the other boy just couldn’t lie about. There hadn’t been any lies in that hand, or in those tears he’d cried. He’s sure of that much, at least. Perhaps that was something of an answer in itself.

“I feel like I’m getting to know you… just a little better,” he finally says. “That’s all.”

Maybe it’s only a step in the right direction, but it’s a step nonetheless. If he wasn’t making any progress at all… If he wasn’t at least partially right, then he wouldn’t have taken his hand, would he?

Ouma-kun is silent for a long time, looking down at his hands as though lost in thought, only shaking occasionally as he catches his breath. “Is that your ‘detective’s intuition’ or something?” he asks. He had asked it once before, back in that lightless bedroom. But he’s pretty sure that’s not why the question feels so familiar.

“Ah... I-I don’t know if I’d say that, exactly... I just felt like… well, that’s what friends do, right? Get to know each other.”

There’s an even longer pause. Saihara scratches at the back of his head uncertainly as the other boy seems to mull over the word “friends” like he’s never heard it before in his life.

After a while, Ouma-kun gives him a nod so slight that he’s almost sure he would’ve missed it if he’d blinked. Then he climbs unsteadily to his feet, and meets his eye for the first time since they stood facing each other in the hall earlier. For the first time since he took his hand.

“Can we go to the restroom before we head back?” He grimaces and gestures down at himself. “I’m not sure if you noticed, but I’m covered in snot and I look like a wreck, so I wanted to try and clean myself up a little.”

“Sure… Of course.” Saihara climbs to his feet too, taking note at last of how dark it’s become in the time that they’ve been talking. The sun is almost completely sunk, far below the horizon. “The televisions are probably going to turn on again soon, huh? We should get back before everyone starts worrying.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. Even if they ask where we were, we can just say Iruma-chan was regaling us with her wit and charm. And toilet humor.”

A joke. It’s a joke. Just a small one, but it still helps to clear the air between them somewhat. Saihara even manages something that might pass for a laugh, and for the first time in the three days or so that he’s known Ouma-kun, he sees a smile on the other boy’s face. It’s faint and wry, but it’s definitely there.

That’s another step, he thinks. Another step in the right direction.

---

As soon as they reach the library, they’re bombarded with questions—which is about what he expected, considering how long they took.

“Where the hell’d you guys go!? Were you just talkin’ with Iruma and Akamatsu the whole time? Shit man, come back sooner next time! We were startin’ to get worried!”

“Hey, what did Iruma-san say? Did she say she could do it? How much longer is this going to take?”

“Saihara-kun, is there anything Gonta can do to help? These ‘remote control’ things sound kind of confusing… but still, Gonta wants to be useful to everyone!”

“We can sleep tonight, right? We’re not gonna have to spend another night awake the whole time?”

Saihara answers them one by one, his responses coming on autopilot rather than because he’s actually putting any deliberate thought or effort into them. Given that they’re all pretty much in the same boat, no one seems to mind. In fact, when he tells them that Iruma-san will probably have the remote (or something that passes for it) ready in a couple of hours, they all dare to look somewhat hopeful for the first time all day.

Thankfully, none of them seem to notice that Ouma-kun was crying. Or at least, no one asks any questions about it. If there’s a silver lining to be found in their current predicament, it’s probably the fact that no one has the time to spare such a small detail, and everyone else’s eyes are red and puffy from lack of sleep too—so the dark, swollen circles under the other boy’s eyes don’t draw any unwanted attention.

Not even five minutes after they’ve been back, the Monokuma video flares back up, reviving the headache that was resting somewhere in the back of his skull until it beats like a drum, matching with the rhythm of the song. This turn of events is admittedly predictable, but he still can’t hold back a sigh as he rubs at his temples wearily.

He considers taking an aspirin for the pain but decides against it; there are a number of medical supply kits in the warehouse, but it’s probably better to conserve them for more serious situations. If they run out of medicine any time soon, he doubts Monokuma is going to restock it for them—moreso in this situation where their misery is only to the bear’s advantage. As he tries to ignore the song and headache alike, he can’t help but notice that Ouma-kun doesn’t take an aspirin either.

“You could take one, if you want. You’re still recovering from that fever, it wouldn’t be a big deal if you had a little more medicine.” Saihara points this out, leaning against one of the corner bookshelves as the others come and go. Some of them are trying to keep themselves awake and energized by pacing around the room or attempting to hold a conversation, despite the distractions. Others, like Yumeno-san, are simply slumped over in their futons, sheets pulled over their heads in a desperate attempt to drown out the noise.

Ouma-kun watches the television screen evenly as the Monokuma video cycles through, then turns and quirks an eyebrow. “What, and miss all this fun? Seems a little unfair if I’m the only one not invited to the migraine party.”

“Th-That’s not what I—”

“I know, I know.” The other boy waves a hand placatingly. “Just my attempt at humor. It looks like I’m a little rusty though.” He shrugs and looks away again. While he certainly does look better than he did a few days ago, the general air about him still feels… sickly. He’s too skinny, too pale, and their current dilemma means that the bags under his eyes haven’t diminished in the slightest. To be quite honest, he looks like a stray breeze could knock him over.

“If you’re sure…” Saihara says.

Ouma-kun sighs. “Look, it’s fine. I’ve kind of gotten used to having my head hurt anyway—”

“Well, well, look who’s talking.”

Both of them startle a little, and he looks up to see Amami-kun standing over them. They both tense up, and the taller boy seems to notice because he quickly offers a conciliatory smile. It’s a little more stressed than his usual easygoing grin, but at least it’s an attempt, and Saihara allows himself to relax a little.

Amami-kun rubs the back of his neck with one hand. Tucked under his other arm is a familiar-looking Monopad—and Saihara is fairly sure he knows which Monopad, specifically.

“Wow, talk about bad timing on my part, huh? I was just a little surprised, so I wanted to crack a joke. Y’know, because you haven’t talked a lot.”

His words are aimed towards Ouma-kun, who’s now sitting stock still with a guarded lack of expression. No one is really at their most observant after going so long on so little sleep, but the smaller boy still seems wary.

Saihara can’t really blame him, either. Somehow, he has a feeling that behind that seemingly laid-back, flippant persona, Amami-kun might be a lot more perceptive than he lets on.

Amami-kun glances between the two of them, then looks Saihara’s way instead. “I had something I kinda wanted to run by you. Well, I want to talk to the rest of the group too at some point, when this whole thing’s wound down, but I figured for now I should talk to you first—both of you, I guess, since you’re together over here…”

Neither of them responds. They just wait, straining to hear more over the constant, rhythmic wailing of the Monokuma video.

The other boy trails off, clearing his throat. It’s hard to make out almost anything he’s saying over the noise of the video, but his low volume still seems deliberate, as though he’s trying to make sure no one else overhears them. “I thought it might be okay to talk, since we’ve got some time. But if you want, I can leave. Would that be better, or…?”

Saihara isn’t sure of what to say, so he looks over at Ouma-kun again. The smaller boy looks up at Amami-kun, his face unreadable, clearly thinking long and hard about something. After a few moments, he gives a slight shake of the head, showing he has no problems with it. Cautious though he looks, he must be just as curious to hear whatever it is the other boy has to say to them.

“Thanks.” Amami-kun takes a seat on the floor beside them, resting his Monopad atop his legs gently. The strained smile from earlier vanishes completely as he fixes both of them with an unusually serious look. “Saihara-kun, be honest with me. I know the other guys asked you just now, but… is Iruma-san really gonna be able to make that remote you mentioned?”

He’s a little taken aback. For all the build-up, that’s… a less surprising topic of conversation than he was expecting. “Y-Yeah,” he says cautiously, not quite understanding why he’s being asked to repeat something he thought he had already cleared up. “Yeah, she is.”

“She’s sure? Like, really sure?”

“I think so… Um, Amami-kun, is this something you’d rather talk about with Iruma-san, or…?”

“Nah.” He shakes his head. “Nah, that’s not it. She’s busy right now, and anyway, like I said, it’s somethin’ I wanna discuss with everyone at some point…” He curls his left index finger under his chin as the fingers of his right hand rub distractedly at the rings he’s wearing. “I just wanted to make sure she could actually build something… well, something like that.”

“Something ‘like that’…?” The other boy’s language seems intentionally vague.

Amami-kun shrugs. “Something complicated. Like, really complicated. I mean, sure, we’re all Super High School Levels here—” The corners of his mouth turn down, just for a moment. “—but whoever’s running this game has a lot of resources, right? Enough to have stuff like Exisals keeping watch on us and robot bears with their own AI programs. And technology that can mess with our memories,” he says, tapping his temple lightly.

Saihara straightens up a little against the bookshelf. “So you… believe me? About our memories?”

“Kinda hard not to, at this point. It’s not like I want to, but… it’s a lot easier to believe our memories were messed with on purpose rather than that I just got a really convenient case of amnesia, y’know?”

“Yeah...”

The taller boy shifts a little. “I figure, if you’re right about the whole memory thing, then... the other Monopad I told you guys about, this one here? It makes a lot more sense.” He lifts it up for emphasis. “I still don’t know why I have it or what it all means, exactly, but I can start to make a few guesses now.”

“What’s this about another Monopad?”

Ouma-kun’s sudden question is hoarse and nearly impossible to hear over the blaring noise, but Saihara still turns and stares in surprise nonetheless. It takes him a moment to remember that he only touched on the Monopad once, without ever actually explaining it to him. And even though the other boy had mentioned something about finding Amami-kun’s research lab in his story, he still probably didn’t know all the details. Not if Amami-kun was always already dead by the time he discovered it.

He pauses briefly at the thought that one of these boys in front of him is technically supposed to already be dead by now. Was supposed to be dead. Amami-kun seems so perfectly, genuinely fine as he sits and talks with them now—tired, perhaps, but fine.

Technically, if Ouma-kun’s story is to be believed… most of his classmates are supposed to be dead. If not now, then soon, in another matter of days, maybe weeks at most. It’s a disconcerting, almost sickening realization.

Talking to people who are supposed to be dead sounds strange and incomprehensible, a feeling not entirely captured by words. But as impossible (and improbable) as it sounds, he really does feel a jolt of painstakingly realistic nausea at the thought.

He shouldn’t be able to picture what Ouma-kun had described to him so easily, but… maybe he can. A little. And maybe it doesn’t feel quite so faint or hazy this time.

Saihara shudders a little, but the other two don’t seem to notice it. Amami-kun is still staring at Ouma-kun, looking equally surprised before he also comes to the realization that the other boy must not know almost anything about the other Monopad.

Maybe he had just assumed someone else would fill him in on the details, or maybe it slipped his mind completely to bring it up before this, considering everything else that was going on. Saihara had meant to tell him about it himself, before Monokuma’s latest motive had taken top priority and distracted him from everything else.

“Can I see it?” Ouma-kun’s usually-unreadable face now shows just a trace of… irritation. He must be miffed. Given the circumstances, Saihara is pretty sure he isn’t accustomed to being the last to know about these things.

Well, it wouldn’t hurt him to get a little more used to it… Probably.

The taller boy seems a bit lost, either because of Ouma-kun’s somewhat unexpected expression, or his question, or both. He curls his index finger thoughtfully under his chin once again as he considers—and finally nods, looking just a little apprehensive. “Well, this is what I wanted to bring up with you two anyway. Sure, go ahead. Take a look.”

Despite how small and shaky his hands look, Ouma-kun takes the Monopad with no hesitation, as firmly and steadily as if it belonged to him. Without waiting for any more encouragement, he flicks the tablet on, letting it cycle through its start-up function.

Saihara expects it to go straight to the map that Amami-kun showed them the other day—but stops suddenly at the sight of words loading on the screen.

He scoots closer, reading as best he can from the side as the other boy scrolls quickly through what seems to be an entire memo, never once slowing his pace. The contents of that memo are surprising enough; words like “ringleader” and “Super High School Level Hunt” jump out at him instantly. But most surprising of all is the sender, listed at the very bottom: from Amami Rantarou, to himself.

His head spins a little. He had thought the other boy had showed them everything there was to see on this Monopad, but this small little note blindsided him completely. “Wh-Why didn’t you mention this earlier?” he asks, swallowing hard. “Back when you were telling us about the map…”

Amami-kun has the grace to look just a little ashamed of himself. He twists his mouth for a moment before sighing. “I wasn’t sure how to explain it, so I just told you guys that I found the Monopad in another classroom when we were looking around the school, and that there was a map on it. I thought it’d make me look even more suspicious if I told everyone that I have a note from myself I don’t remember writing.”

“It would’ve.” Ouma-kun agrees, still not taking his eyes off the Monopad. “Everyone probably would’ve thought you were conspiring together with the ringleader.” He flicks to the side of the screen, poring over the map displayed there in great detail. “Except now, you have Saihara-chan’s theory about our memories to explain all of this. So it’s a lot safer to bring it up.”

That does make sense. Saihara nods slowly, trying to review their earlier actions as a group again with this newfound understanding. “So you not only knew about that hidden door to the ringleader’s lair because it was on the map, but because the note told you about it… The note guaranteed that the ringleader was in the school, and that they’d try to come here…”

Ouma-kun continues looking over the Monopad for a little while longer—probably comparing it with the layout of the school as he remembers it, Saihara thinks. Once or twice, his eyes pause on some spot or other, as though something’s caught his interest. But he says nothing, and once he’s satisfied he simply flicks the tablet off again and hands it back to its owner.

“…To be honest,” Amami-kun says, “I actually thought about coming here by myself, at first. I wasn’t sure if what was in this note was complete bullshit or not… Kinda hoped it was, y’know? Would’ve made me feel less nervous about myself.”

There’s a pause, uninterrupted by anything else save for the same old noise of the Monokuma song. Then he continues.

“…But I thought if push came to shove, I’d have no choice but to check and see for myself. It wasn’t until we all started discussing what to do about the time limit as a group, trying to come up with something… that I felt like maybe I should take a chance and try bringing up the map.”

“Was it just a hunch?” Saihara asks, thinking absently about memories that don’t feel like memories.

“Yeah. Just a hunch I had.”

An awful lot of us seem to have been getting these “hunches” lately, he thinks. Maybe what I told Ouma-kun was on the right track after all.

“So why tell us now?” Ouma-kun asks, interrupting his train of thought. “If you’re going to tell the whole group the truth about the note you wrote to yourself sooner or later, why not just wait until then? What’s so important that you had to talk to us about it before anyone else?”

Those words seem to mask another, more barbed question, but he doesn’t voice it just yet as he waits for Amami-kun’s answer. The irritation from earlier is gone, replaced by a more familiar mask of caution and suspicion. But unlike earlier (even just earlier this morning) Saihara feels like there’s a definite sense of interest in his tone and expression alike.

The taller boy looks around briefly, as though to once again make sure that no one is listening in on their conversation. But that’s all but impossible with the video playing, so he turns back around and tells them: “I wanted to know if Iruma-san could make something that would get us into other parts of the school.”

“…Huh?” Saihara’s voice comes out more startled than he intended.

“Well if she can make something that can hijack the televisions, she can probably hijack other stuff too, right? Either way, she’s hijacking the ringleader’s technology. And if she could find a way to get past the stuff that’s blocking us off from other parts of the school, then…”

“…Then we could go just about anywhere that was off-limits.” He understands. “The other floors, the blocked-off buildings…”

“…Or even a certain off-limits spot that’s in this very room with us,” Ouma-kun says. His eyes dart towards the bookshelf across the room, behind which there’s a hidden door they’re all too aware of.

Amami-kun nods. “Exactly. I think we’d definitely find some clues that way, don’t you?”

Saihara brings a hand to his chin and nods slowly. That much is undeniably true. He can guess a little more now about the other boy’s behavior, the pieces all slowly fitting together in a way that makes them become comprehensible. “You didn’t want everyone to know at once because the ringleader is supposed to be hiding among us…” Something occurs to him, then. “But why did you rule me out?”

The taller boy blinks as though surprised, then grins a little sheepishly. “Well, I guess I can’t, completely. But I thought since you were the one pissing Monokuma off the most, it stood to reason that it probably wasn’t you.”

“And me?” Ouma-kun asks. Saihara isn’t sure if it’s intentional or not, but there’s a certain dryness to his tone.

“Haven’t ruled you out completely yet either,” Amami-kun admits. “But if the ringleader really is one of us… I dunno, I don’t feel like they’d be the most obviously suspicious person. It’d make sense for them to hide themselves a lot better, wouldn’t it?”

There are holes in that logic, but then again, there would be holes in just about any other theory he could make. None of them have any clear idea of who the ringleader actually is, so there’s nothing to say to that really.

“Plus, hey,” the other boy continues, “I don’t wanna go around labeling anyone else as a suspicious guy right off the bat. I know how it feels, after all.” He knocks lightly against his forehead, a brief joke before he returns to the serious mood at hand. “Anyway, as long as Iruma-san really can make it, then it shouldn’t matter even if the ringleader knows, since we’ll all still be keeping an eye on each other. I just wanted to make sure it was… y’know, possible.”

Saihara nods again, more strongly this time. “I think it’ll work. I think she can definitely make something, once she’s done with the remote. Even if it might take a while…”

“You’re sure, yeah?”

He remembers all the items Ouma-kun told him about: hammers and bombs, bug-catchers and drones… “She can do it,” he repeats firmly. “Call it a hunch.”

Not long after their conversation comes to a close, Amami-chan excuses himself and stands up to pace around the room. He stops near a bookshelf that’s too close for comfort to the one where his corpse was found every time, pulling a few books off the shelf and examining them with a great deal of (feigned) interest.

Most likely, he’s just trying to keep himself awake and preoccupied while they wait for more news—but the place where he’s standing still rubs him the wrong way. Ouma watches him closely, but no matter how long he waits, a steel ball doesn’t come rolling down from the shelf above him, and the other boy’s skull stays decidedly intact. Eventually, he looks away.

As he mulls on what Amami-chan told them, he gnaws at his thumbnail, the gears of his brain slowly spinning back up to something like their old, familiar tempo. It’s a gesture he once reserved for the times when he stood in front of his old whiteboard. But he doesn’t have a whiteboard now, much less a room of his own or any privacy, so he sits where he is and tries to sort through the information they’ve been given.

A second Monopad—the long-awaited second survival privilege he heard about in Amami-chan’s video message. The ringleader’s lair. Iruma-chan’s inventions. The possibility of perhaps finally starting to rule a few people out from the notion of suspicion…

He thinks long and hard about the hidden room. It’s true that Iruma-chan’s inventions could easily breach any off-limits areas. In the past, however, he never tried gaining access there, even though he might have been able to with the hammers. But the possibility that the ringleader might’ve seen him coming and set some trap for him there had always been far too high for him to risk it.

A king was never left unprotected in chess. A stronghold was never left unfortified. As long as he couldn’t rule out the possibility that the ringleader or some snare of theirs was waiting on the inside, he hadn’t been able to make any progress in that direction. But this time, the ringleader should be on the outside, with all the rest of them.

There was also the matter of Amami-chan’s… hunch. Little by little, these hunches seemed to be piling up to create a new script entirely. He thinks vaguely about memory, dreams, the subconscious. Where did memories go when they were overwritten? Theoretically, nowhere. But he himself still has plenty of memories that “shouldn’t exist” anymore, considering all the contradictions they posed.

Maybe Saihara-chan’s little theory was right. He’s not sure why that possibility irritates him as much as it intrigues him.

As his mind continues spinning through information and branching possibilities, he decidedly avoids thinking about what happened back in the hallway. But suddenly, there’s an interruption to his thoughts.

“Aren’t you… chewing a little too much?”

Ouma pauses mid-chew at his thumbnail, putting his thoughts on hold as he looks over at Saihara-chan. Then he looks pointedly at the detective’s shaking leg, which keeps jostling up and down nervously, almost in-tempo with the beat of the Monokuma video.

“A tad hypocritical of you to be policing other people’s nervous habits, don’t you think?” he asks. He tries keeping his tone light, but the video is far too loud and his throat is still far too raspy for him to manage. He probably sounds more severe than he intended.

The other boy looks down sheepishly, though his leg still doesn’t stop moving. “I, um… It’s just, I used to chew my nails, too. It got really bad at some point, so I had to start reminding myself not to do it anymore. So I guess I kind of… got carried away.”

Ouma examines the other boy’s nails. The neat, rounded edges look fairly well-taken care of, unlike the short, jagged corners of his own. It doesn’t seem as though he’s gone back to that vice in a while—but he can imagine it nonetheless. Saihara-chan certainly seems like he’d be a nail-biter.

“Are you trying to tell me that me biting my nails makes you anxious?” He arches his eyebrows a little, feigning bemusement.

“Um… Th-That’s not… I, uh…”

“It’s just another joke, Saihara-chan,” he says, more gently this time. “Besides, plenty of things I do make you anxious. This wouldn’t be the first time.”

Saihara-chan lets out a weak sigh, apparently unable to deny that much. But even though his leg keeps bouncing up and down all the while, he looks just a little less on-edge than before.

Ouma is still biting at his nails when the television suddenly shuts off completely, without warning.

Everyone in the room freezes, uncertainty lingering in the air. No doubt, they all want it to be Iruma-chan’s doing—the looks on their faces say as much. But there’s no way to tell for sure, and the sudden, ringing silence could just as easily be another part of Monokuma’s ploy, just like it’s been all day.

They wait in silence for a few moments, uncomfortable and exhausted. It’s pretty clear none of them want to think about the possibility that those televisions might come back on again soon after this.

But before too long, they suddenly hear a far-off sound. It wouldn’t be audible if the video were still playing, but in the hushed tension of the library, they can hear it clearly: the sound of footsteps at a run, heading down the stairs, coming closer. That, and… a rather familiar cackle.

The door to the library flies open all at once and Iruma-chan barges in, whooping. “Hya-ha! What d’ya think of that, you sons of bitches!?” Clenched tightly in her hand is a small, black device. A remote, from the looks of it.

“Iruma-san…?” Shirogane-chan stares at her wide-eyed, wringing her hands together. She seems to be at a loss for how to react; this certainly wasn’t what anyone expected, when they pictured their dilemma being solved. They’re still unsure if it even is solved. “Does this mean…?”

“No shit, glasses-girl! Do ya think I’d be back in here yelling about it if it didn’t fuckin’ work!? Look at that TV! Silent as the fuckin’ grave, not a peep out of it! That thing won’t turn itself back on until I let it—just like a guy in the sack!”

Everyone in the room continues to stare at her, far too busy hoping that she’s telling the truth to even react to her usual comments.

Iruma-chan puts her hands on her hips, tips her head back, and laughs. And laughs. And laughs. The noise is high-pitched and infuriating—or it would be infuriating, if she hadn’t just proven once again how incredibly useful her talent could be. “How about it!?” she yells, stomping one boot on the rough wooden floor. “Do you understand now, just how amazingly beautiful, smart, and talented I am!? I’ve got the whole damn package! Come on, ya cockroaches, bow down!”

Akamatsu-chan comes into the room right after that as though on cue, panting heavily. They hadn’t heard her footsteps, this time; Iruma-chan’s cackling had drowned her out.

“I told you not to run on ahead, Iruma-san! Sheesh…” She puts her hands on her knees as she catches her breath before straightening back up. “Sorry about her—she started shouting this kind of thing back in the lab as soon as she got the televisions to turn off, and then she bolted before I could stop her.”

“Big deal, so I ran on a little ahead of you! All of ya should be down on your hands and knees grateful that I’m doin’ anything here—”

She doesn’t get anything else out before everyone starts chattering at once, the tension in the room replaced by a different, more enthusiastic energy. Before Iruma-chan can register what’s happening, nearly everyone starts talking at once.

“Iruma-san, thank you! Thank you so much!”

“I can’t believe you pulled it off, Iruma! Damn, that’s amazing!”

“Akamatsu-san, you too, thank you so much for going with her. The two of you did so much—”

“Yeah, and Saihara-kun’s plans made it all possible, too—”

Honestly, he wouldn’t mind staying seated. But that in itself would probably draw more unwanted attention than it was worth. And in any case, he supposes it really is a cause for celebration. So Ouma stands a little ways back from the rest of them and watches—as do a few of the other, less sociable members of the group, like Hoshi-chan and Harukawa-chan.

Most of the others are front and center though, trying to convey their thanks; despite being considerably shorter than Iruma-chan, Angie-chan nonetheless throws her arms around her and squeezes so tight that she even manages to lift her a few centimeters off the ground before putting her back down. Iruma-chan flushes a shade that’s nearly as pink as her outfit and stumbles back a few steps, suddenly looking much sweatier than before.

“Y-Yeah… Yeah, that’s more like it.” Her voice comes out a squeak, contradictory to her words. “B-Be grateful, all of you…”

Akamatsu-chan puts a hand on her shoulder, to which the other girl also jumps in response. “I think we’re all thankful here, Iruma-san. Like, really thankful. You did great.” Her smile is weary but sincere.

Iruma-chan flushes an even deeper shade of pink and seems incapable of saying anything at all after that.

Considering how many times she’d done it before, Ouma hadn’t doubted in the slightest that she could make the designs he crafted into a reality. Still, some part of him is still relieved to see that it worked after all.

At this point, even he’s willing to admit that just about everything in their current situation is an undefined variable. Even he doesn’t necessarily know how things might turn out from this point on.

If she’d gone along with my plan for the hammers and bombs, would that have worked out, too? Would we have ended the game at that point, if she hadn’t decided she needed to get out of here so badly?

He can’t really hold her lack of cooperation against her, though. Not when he was hardly the picture of the word cooperative himself. And even if he still remembered clearly the numbness he had felt just before she had brought the hammer down, the fear of starting over again one more time—well, he’d gone and killed her too. So that made them even.

…Or not. He’d planned her and Gonta’s deaths with an icy, meticulous level of practicality that still left him chilled to the bone if he thought about it too long.

He watches the rest of them crowd around and thank her, still causing her to stammer and tremble at every nice comment that comes her way. She’s weak in the knees, half-drunk on the praise she’s getting now, but he doesn’t doubt she’ll be right back to her usual, haughty self as soon as she’s had a good night’s sleep. Or maybe she’ll bounce back even sooner.

The longer he watches, the more he thinks that perhaps it’s just as well that he’ll never know how his plan with the hammers might’ve turned out. Half of those people crowding around her right now wouldn’t have even been alive at the time he’d come up with it. Half of them wouldn’t have even been able to participate.

They’re alive now, though. Some (like Amami-chan, like Akamatsu-chan) were already supposed to be dead, and yet—here they are, alive.

Perhaps it’s time to try and draw up new plans for this new script. Perhaps, since there’s no whiteboard here for him to bounce ideas off of, he could try running his ideas past Saihara-chan instead.

He looks at his hand, with its too-short, uneven nails. Despite his best efforts not to, he still finds himself thinking about what happened in the hallway. After all: it’s the same hand.

“Well,” he mutters inaudibly, under his breath, “what are friends for?”

---

In the chaotic sleeplessness of the last few days, their original night shift schedule had gotten rather muddled. Eventually they settle down enough to discuss how to start it back up again, to which Iruma-chan has exactly one thing to say—

“Do whatever the hell you suckers want, as long as I get to sleep through the whole damn night tonight.”

“Seconded.” Yumeno-chan speaks up so fast in agreement that her usual sleepy mumbling seems like a lie. Now that the excitement is wearing off, she looks wobbly on her feet, as though she might actually pass out if she doesn’t get to sleep soon.

Ironically, the entire dilemma seemed to have made the two of them forget about their fight from the other day entirely. There’s a certain level of irony to the whole thing, considering that little squabble of theirs had only started in the first place because they’d gotten stuck with the first night watch.

Who knew that all it took to make them stop fighting over a lack of sleep was an even bigger lack of sleep, Ouma thinks. Now there’s a solution that won’t work twice.

But at the very least, no one had died. Yet. Still. …He’s not sure which of those two words is more appropriate. Either way, it was rare enough in this game that crises like this were ever averted without someone paying with their life.

“I see no problems with letting Iruma-san’s group rest for the night,” Shinguuji-chan says. Despite the fact that he usually seemed to prefer standing (or at the very least, sitting in a chair), even he’s sitting on the floor by now. No one has the energy to keep standing up or pacing anymore, now that that song isn’t fueling them with constant fear and adrenaline.

Hoshi-chan thumbs at his candy cigarette. “Sounds fair to me. As hard as she worked, I think they’re all more than entitled to a good night’s rest.”

No one has any objections. As expected, no one wants to wear out their newfound trump card on the off-chance they need to use her talent again. And he doesn’t doubt they will, soon enough.

“Iruma-san’s group aside, which two groups should take on the night shifts for tonight?” Ever the voice of reason (true to his robotic pragmatism, Ouma thinks), Kiibo moves on to the main issue at hand.

Toujou-chan clears her throat lightly to grab everyone’s attention. She’s still trying to look the picture of a perfect maid, sitting primly, her legs folded under her, her hands clasped atop her skirt. He knows, though, that she must be just as tired as the rest of them—not that she’d ever admit it.

“If need be, our group could probably step in,” she says. “I don’t mind, if it gives everyone else the chance to recuperate.”

There’s a very hesitant pause. Everyone looks incredibly tempted to take her up on that offer.

But her group took a shift just yesterday, at the expense of even less sleep than they might otherwise have gotten. While he doesn’t doubt she and Harukawa-chan might be able to go another night on even less sleep than everyone else, he’s not so sure about Shirogane-chan or Akamatsu-chan.

Ouma throws a glance in Saihara-chan’s direction, trying to get his attention subtly. It takes the detective a few moments to notice, either because he’s so focused on the conversation at hand, or maybe just because he’s so tired. But he finally looks over and gives him a quizzical stare when he notices his eyes on him. By now, at least, he seems to have realized that he doesn’t do this sort of thing without a particular message in mind.

He looks back over at Toujou-chan’s group, then back at the detective again, giving his head a miniscule shake. Our group, he mouths soundlessly.

It means yet another night of less sleep than usual for them, but it doesn’t matter much. Not to him, anyway. Currently he’s used to no sleep whatsoever, so any sleep at all is a step up from that.

The rest of his group might not hold up nearly as well, Saihara-chan included, but hopefully they’ll get more than enough sleep tomorrow night instead to make up for it. That is, assuming Monokuma doesn’t have an even more horrible motive in store for them by then.

Saihara-chan catches on pretty quickly. He doesn’t seem opposed to the idea itself—merely hesitant to speak up, for some reason or other. Ouma watches him open his mouth, as though to say something to him instead. But then the other boy just closes it and shakes his head slightly before addressing the rest of the group.

“U-Um,” he says, and everyone turns to face him at once. He looks more than a little put off by the attention, but presses on regardless. “That’s okay, Toujou-san. Your group should get some rest tonight, too. You’re all probably really tired, it wouldn’t be fair for you to do another shift two days in a row… Our group can take the first shift.”

Neither Kiibo nor Hoshi-chan disagree with that proposal, though they look just as tired as the others. Well, to be honest, he expected as much. No one seems to have any problems with that suggestion either, when it’s put forward as “Saihara-chan’s plan.” Perception is everything, as it turns out.

“Okay, so then Gonta’s group will take the second shift, right?” Gonta asks curiously. The one sitting closest to him is Momota-chan, so that’s who he decides to look at for affirmation.

Ouma had assumed the astronaut-in-training would’ve been throwing loud, jarring interruptions into the conversation long before this—but it seemed like he had dozed off.

Momota-chan’s head jerks up suddenly, as though he was nodding off with it at an uncomfortable angle on his shoulder. “Y-Yeah,” he says. He looks around with wide eyes, not-so-subtly trying to catch his bearings. “That sounds about right. Yeah.”

Shinguuji-chan narrows his eyes slightly. “Were you listening, Momota-kun?”

“O-Of course… Sure, I was listening!” He slaps his cheeks a little, looking somewhat more awake. “I was just, uh. You know. Gettin’ a micronap in. You’ve gotta know how to make all the sleep you can get count when you’re training to become an astronaut.” He coughs loudly when it’s clear no one’s buying it, and changes the subject. “So, we’re uh… taking the second shift, right? I got no problems with that. Wouldn’t be manly to say no, would it?”

“Actually, being irresponsible and slacking off is exactly what I’d expect from a menace like yourself…” Chabashira-chan looks thoroughly unimpressed.

“I told you already, I was just micronapping! That ain’t irresponsible!”

It’s a little different from their original arrangement, but they successfully manage to sort out the night shifts again. Everyone breathes a weary sigh of relief. Even if tomorrow holds something even worse in store for them, they still overcame a nearly impossible situation. For right now at least, getting even a few more hours of sleep is the most important thing on everyone’s minds.

They go in groups to the bathrooms, taking turns to change their clothes and brush their teeth. Once everyone is ready, the overhead lights go off, and most of his classmates are asleep before their heads even hit the pillow of their futons.

---

Ouma listens to the sounds of steady, gentle breathing (and occasional snores) for a while. He considers actually reading a book by lantern light this time, just to keep himself a little more awake, but in the end he decides it’s unnecessary.

Self-control has never been a problem for him, even at his weakest. So if he tells himself not to fall asleep, he won’t. It’s as simple as that. …Or it used to be, anyway.

He’s not surprised at all this time around when, after a few long minutes, he feels a gentle tap on his shoulder. When he turns around, Saihara-chan is there, sitting much closer to him now. They’re far enough away from Kiibo and Hoshi-chan that they won’t be overheard, as long as they keep their voices to a whisper.

“How are you doing?” the detective asks softly. Ouma doubts he’s just referring to his fatigue.

“I’m okay,” he says. His answer comes too quickly, before he can really stop to debate whether he’s telling the truth or not. After lying for so long, it’s hard even for him to tell when he’s being truthful. Or what the “truth” would even be, in a situation like this.

Saihara-chan can’t possibly understand (there’s no way he ever could, even if he took everything about his story at face value), but he still knits his eyebrows a little. “Are you sure…?”

I guess I can’t blame him for wanting to check, Ouma thinks. I threatened to kill him earlier today. Then I went and had a complete breakdown all over him. It’s a miracle he doesn’t think I lost my mind.

He keeps quiet this time, then shrugs a little in response.

On the one hand, they’re all somehow, for some reason, still alive. So in that sense, he’s okay. Probably.

On the other hand, he’s still not sure what’s in store for them. He’s not even entirely sure why he came out of his room in the first place. Or why he took Saihara-chan’s hand. In that sense, he’s decidedly not okay.

There’s another long silence between them, neither comfortable nor uncomfortable. It’s simply… quiet. Then, as though unsure how to change the subject, Saihara-chan speaks up again. “There are, um… there are marks. On your hands…” His voice is so quiet he has to strain to hear it, even in the near-total silence of the library.

Instinctively, Ouma clenches his left hand as though it’s been stung, then flexes it back open. For a moment, he considers crossing his arms, hiding his hands completely from view. But that would be completely pointless, if the other boy already caught on.

Well, of course he caught on. He was a detective, after all.

In the dim lantern light, they’re hard to make out. Most people wouldn’t notice them, much, unless they were looking very closely. It’s hardly any easier to see them now than it was in the total darkness of his bedroom, but they’re there nonetheless: faint, white, half-worn marks on the fingers of his left hand. They look almost as though they might’ve been left by a small blade of some kind.

Those aren’t the only ones, though. On his right hand, there are marks too. Rather than scars, they look like bruises. Tiny, purplish, clustered particularly around the parts of his fingers where he might hold something to write with. Like, say, if he’d been holding something way too hard and writing for hours on end with it. A pen, maybe. Or a whiteboard marker.

He had almost forgotten. Or maybe he simply hadn’t wanted to think about them. They’re hardly visible in the first place, smooth and worn away as they are. In this lighting, he doubts anyone would actually notice them by accident.

Something occurs to him. “You noticed in the hallway,” he says. It’s not a question.

Saihara-chan pauses. Then nods. “I thought… um, I thought I saw something similar. On your neck. The other day, after you went to go change clothes…”

Ouma remembers the curious glance the other boy had thrown his way back then, right before he’d pulled up his scarf and continued walking.

“I thought maybe it was just my imagination, but earlier… I noticed your hands looked… kind of the same.”

Of course. He’d been holding onto his hand so tightly, it was only natural that Saihara-chan would’ve looked at his hands sooner or later. And the lighting in the late afternoon sunset of the hallway would’ve made it easier to see them, probably.

“If it’s okay for me to ask… what are those marks, exactly?”

Ouma looks at him long and hard, debating on what to tell him. He considers just staying silent, the way he’s been doing for the last few days whenever there’s something he doesn’t feel like responding to. Silence is always an appealing option: it’s so simple to just keep his mouth shut. No lies or truth involved.

He clenches his left hand open and closed again, remembering the slightly rough texture of bandages that aren’t even there anymore. Technically he hasn’t worn them at all, this time. He probably won’t get a chance to wear them, either—he has no more intentions of throwing any games for the sake of leaving hints that won’t even be noticed. It’s not like he could get his hands on a knife anyway in this situation, even if he wanted to. Which he doesn’t.

Finally, he sighs and looks away. “Your guess is as good as mine,” he admits. It’s not a happy admission. “I don’t know either. They’re just sort of… there, sometimes. After I start over again.”

Reminders…? Leftovers…? He’s not sure if there’s a good word for them. They’re impossible, sure, but then just about everything he’s been experiencing is downright impossible. It still doesn’t change the fact that he’s been waking up in a small, dark locker every time he dies. Or the fact that he has bruises and markings all along his body, barely visible but still there, the only testimony left to the fact that he’s repeated this game again and again besides the memories in his head.

He remembers the feeling he had when his fever was at its worst, almost as though his body itself was at its limit. As though his mind itself was breaking down. Maybe that was closer to the truth than he knew. These marks might very well be proof of that.

I guess it’s a good thing my uniform and scarf covers everything up, huh? Well, almost everything.

Saihara-chan doesn’t call him crazy, or a liar. Maybe he should, but he doesn’t. He just nods. “Are they from… uh… are they… from when…?”

It doesn’t seem like he’s sure of how to phrase his question. He tries looking for the most tactful option, can’t find one, and trails off, looking somewhat embarrassed by his own curiosity.

Still, Ouma understands what it is he wants to say. His mouth twists sardonically. “Some of them, yeah. Now that I think about it, your good old friend Harukawa-chan left more than her fair share, probably.” The ones on his neck come to mind, but he thinks there might be a new one on his back, faint and round like an arrow tip. He doesn’t know for sure, though, given that it’s not an easy place to check.

Saihara-chan looks like he doesn’t know how to respond to that. He averts his eyes uncomfortably, his fingers momentarily clenching atop his knees.

Ouma’s brief moment of sadistic pleasure is replaced by a pang of guilt as soon as he sees that. He wonders why he even felt the need to make that comment in the first place. Did I just not get enough of being horrible once today? he wonders. Maybe I’m just too used to it.

The detective still won’t meet his eye, so he speaks up instead. “Sorry,” he says. Up until earlier today, it had been such a long time since he last said that word and meant it. Now he seems to be saying it quite a lot. There are so many things he’s done lately that apologizing would never compensate for; this is just one of those rare occasions where it happens to be different. “I guess that wasn’t fair. It’s not even like you two know each other that well, this time around.”

It wasn’t like Saihara-chan had made her go stick a poisoned arrow in his back, either. Probably. Unless he was the ringleader…

He buries that thought deep down, refusing to follow it any further. It’s too late to indulge that possibility. It’s been too late ever since he made up his mind earlier this afternoon, there in the hallway.

The other boy relaxes just a little, though his eyes stay fixed on a point on the floor. “I’m… sorry too. That she killed you, I mean.” He pauses. “I mean, it’s true that I don’t really know Harukawa-san very well yet, but… I’m sorry it happened, anyway…”

Ouma would snort through his nose, if he didn’t already know that it would draw Kiibo and Hoshi-chan’s attention. Instead, he clicks his tongue softly. This bad habit of Saihara-chan’s he’s familiar with, at least. “Please. What do you have to be sorry for?” he asks. “Besides, it’s not like I didn’t have it coming.”

“…Eh?” This time Saihara-chan does meet his eye. And he stares at him like he’s grown three heads.

“I told you already, remember? You all thought I was the ringleader. It’s not so surprising, when you take that into account.”

“Maybe it’s n-not surprising, no…” The other boy speaks slowly. “But that still doesn’t mean you… ‘had it coming.’ Not entirely.”

Ouma arches one eyebrow skeptically.

“You… um, uh. Even if you did things—horrible things—” He doesn’t even seem sure of what it is he wants to say himself. “I mean… you died,” he finally blurts out, looking bewildered.

“Yeah. And if you’re asking me if I wanted to, the answer is no.”

The words come easily, but even he’s not sure if they’re a lie or not. In the last few seconds under the press, he definitely had the clear, resonant thought that he didn’t want to die. Perhaps it was stupid or selfish of him to fear it, but even a temporary death always brought a new world of pain with it. If he had his way—then no, he’d rather not die.

But he also remembers how easy it would’ve been to drink that antidote himself. To let Harukawa-chan and Momota-chan die in his place, to keep going with his plans for a stolen gameboard... And yet, he didn’t pick that option.

He decides he doesn’t like that train of thought either, so he continues talking. “Anyway, all I’m saying is that I brought it on myself. Harukawa-chan just happens to be especially good at killing people, that’s all.” And an incredibly stupid, gullible pawn, he almost adds. But those words probably wouldn’t add to the sincerity of his apology, so he keeps his mouth shut.

Saihara-chan is still just staring at him, dumbstruck. He looks as though something just occurred to him. “You really don’t think people can change, do you?”

He’s fairly sure he’s heard those words before. No, he definitely did. Once, in the dark, moonlit entryway to the dorms. Ouma would ask if he’d had any interesting chats with Momota-chan lately, except he knows he probably hasn’t. Not this time anyway.

“Even after all of… this,” the other boy says, gesturing vaguely at the library, their sleeping classmates in general. “No one dying yet. Amami-kun’s second Monopad. After—” He cuts himself off, looking suddenly, extremely tired. “…After what happened earlier. And you still think other people can’t change.”

‘Can’t’ or ‘won’t’, Ouma’s not really sure. He shrugs, not denying it. It’s true that he doesn’t want all his plans to hinge on the idea that people might change, maybe. Trust is always a bet, regardless of how well you think you know someone, and he’s the type to leave as little room in his plans for chance or risk as possible.

Saihara-chan’s next question is even quieter than before. “What about those marks, then?”

“What about them?” He’s not sure why the other boy would suddenly bring up a topic he thought was behind them by now. Even if it might be worth discussing in more detail later on, he certainly doesn’t see how it’s relevant right now.

“What if other people have them, too?”

Impossible, he wants to say. He bites his tongue instead and says, “They don’t.”

“Did you ever check? Did you ever look at anyone else to see if there was some kind of mark on them? Some kind of… I don’t know. Something left behind, I guess. In theory, every experience leaves its own impression on people, right?”

“No one has anything like that,” he repeats. That same, lingering feeling of irritation is starting to come back to him now. He’s pretty sure it’s far too late for them to be having an entire whispered argument like this, after days of almost no sleep whatsoever.

“That’s what you said about other people remembering things, too.”

Ouma goes silent at that.

“Isn’t it…?” Saihara-chan opens his mouth, then closes it, thinking better of whatever it is he was about to ask. He sighs and looks away, his fingers still clenched atop his knees. “Never mind.”

The sudden diplomacy only irritates him more. “No, by all means, why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind, Saihara-chan? I think we’ve reached that point in our friendship, no need to let those pesky manners get in the way now.”

He had no problems saying whatever he wanted when I told him I was going to kill him, and now he’s back to being all shy. Incredible. He’s messed up. Saihara-chan is definitely messed up, beyond his ability to predict. But even Ouma himself isn’t so sure that’s entirely a bad thing.

The detective pauses, as though chewing on his words. Reluctantly, he says, “Isn’t it… kind of arrogant to think that you’re the only one who can do anything?” Pause. Then, more reluctantly still, “It’s like you think the whole world revolves around you sometimes, Ouma-kun.”

Whatever response he had planned slips his mind entirely at that. He stares at Saihara-chan, completely expressionless.

Irritating. It’s extremely, ridiculously irritating. The other boy is right—there’s really no way to argue that fact, but that’s the most irritating thing of all.

Without wanting to, he thinks about the old concrete slab, out in the courtyard. The world belongs to Ouma Kokichi…

Objectively, he knows there’s no reason why this should all be happening to him specifically, or why it couldn’t just as easily have happened to someone else. Maybe it’s just like Saihara-chan theorized. Maybe he simply has a knack for remembering things better than others. Maybe he’s just more perceptive than others, or more susceptible to this kind of thing.

So of course, there’s no way that he stands at the center of the entire universe. He knows that. And yet…

He snorts through his nose after all. Kiibo and Hoshi-chan turn their heads to stare, just like he knew they would; even Saihara-chan looks slightly alarmed.

Ouma ignores them all and just shakes his head, snickering under his breath. The irritation is still there, but lingering underneath it is real, honest amusement.

“I-Is everything okay?” Kiibo asks, looking startled. In the lantern light, he must not be very sure of what it is he’s seeing.

“W-We’re fine. Everything’s fine. We were just, um… talking…” Saihara-chan answers quickly, though he sounds more than a little baffled himself. After saying something so blunt, he must have assumed he’d be angry.

Well, I am pissed off, he thinks. It just doesn’t change the fact that he’s right. Or that it’s pretty damn funny.

Ouma Kokichi, the center of the universe, the ruler of the world—what a childish, petty thought. It sounds so right at home with his play-pretend talent and his play-pretend lab. No wonder the other boy was getting worn out from his antics. He’d been using him like some kind of royal emissary, passing messages back and forth between himself and the rest of the group this entire time.

Do I not even think it’s worth talking to the rest of them? Do I not think they can come up with anything worthwhile on their own? He remembers Amami-chan’s surprise, to see him talking at all. Of course they were suspicious of him. He hadn’t told them anything about himself yet.

Saihara-chan’s words from earlier play back clearly in his mind. Maybe it’s still wrong, to expect you to handle everything by yourself…

At the very least… he could try to work on it.

He waits until Kiibo and Hoshi-chan turn away again, apparently assured that nothing bad was happening. Then he turns and looks at the boy sitting next to him again.

“Thanks, Saihara-chan.”

“Th-Thanks…?”

“It’s kind of refreshing, you know. Being honest with each other.”

Saihara-chan still looks uneasy, albeit relieved that he isn’t mad. He nods, and Ouma notes again how pronounced the bags under his eyes are. Thankfully, they’ll be able to rest soon enough. According to the clock (hard as it is to make out in the shadowy lighting), there’s only a little while left until their shift ends, and the second shift begins.

For the next ten minutes until they shake Momota-chan’s group awake, he thinks long and hard about the marks on his hands, clenching his fist open and closed again every so often. His head is still pounding, throbbing just behind his right eye in a way that he’s perfectly accustomed to. But he thinks that perhaps, he’ll sleep well tonight.

He dreams—though he’s not exactly sure of what.

Even asleep, he’s still faintly, distantly conscious of the fact that he’s dreaming. He’s not sure why—but he is. Most of his dreams tend to end very quickly as soon as he becomes aware that he’s dreaming, but not this one.

This one continues, passing by with no perception of time or awareness of his surroundings. People’s faces—no, the people themselves—are simply blurs, vague shapes and outlines of color. He knows all of them; at least, they aren’t strangers to him. But when he actively tries to sort out who’s who, or where he is, he can’t put a name to any of it, like a word at the tip of his tongue that refuses to let itself be voiced.

All he knows for sure is that his name is Saihara Shuuichi. That he is dreaming. And that the dream is beginning to make him somewhat uneasy.

He isn’t even sure why that is. He sees and hears things within his dream, but the part of him that’s aware that he’s still sleeping can’t fully understand any of it. Even if the scenes unfolding around him include grotesque displays, or horrible, heart-wrenching words, they still remain… fuzzy. Indistinct. Like a movie playing out on a projector that refuses to come into focus, the sound and audio quality garbled beyond recognition.

Still, it’s a dream bordering on a nightmare. He can’t make sense of what he’s seeing or hearing, but he can still recognize how he feels: anxious, tired, lonely. Sometimes, flat-out terrified. And almost always painfully, unbearably sad.

Despite how blurry everything is, sometimes he recognizes a snatch of color long enough for it to remind him of something else. He looks up into a patch of blue, wide and empty, like the sky at the end of the world—

Something ice cold touches his shoulder, jolting him awake.

Saihara jerks away and sits bolt upright, looking around frantically. He’s too tired to make sense of where he is or what he’s seeing, but his heart keeps thumping in his chest at an alarming rate. After several long seconds he finally registers that Kiibo-kun is kneeling down beside him, one hand still half-raised as he stares at him with concern.

“Saihara-kun? Are you alright…?”

The library. He’s in the library, sitting on a futon, with several of his classmates nearby. That’s right, this is—normal. Or as close to normal as they can expect, in their situation. He tries to calm his breathing, little by little letting his pounding heart slow its tempo. Then he nods. “Yeah… Sorry. I’m fine. Guess I was just… a little startled.”

“M-My apologies… I only meant to wake you because, well… It’s time for breakfast.” The robot gestures at the clock above them.

“Wait, did the morning announcement not go off today either?”

Kiibo-kun nods. “It would seem that way. Either Monokuma attempted it and couldn’t get the televisions to turn on again due to Iruma-san’s remote, or it decided not to bother in the first place. As expected, it’s very difficult to figure out what it might have in store for us.”

As he looks around the room again, Saihara realizes fewer of his classmates are here than he expected. Iruma-san’s group is scattered around the room, occupying themselves one way or another—Chabashira-san and Yumeno-san with conversation (something about the possibility of superheroes using magecraft, this time), Iruma-san with making a few last-minute tweaks to her remote, and Angie-san with what looks like a morning prayer routine. As for the other two groups…

His robotic classmate seems to notice his confusion. “Akamatsu-san and the others are just finishing up their breakfast, I believe. We’re supposed to go switch with them. Momota-kun and his group finished showering not long ago. Now they’re going through the warehouse for more supplies, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Seems like no one else had a problem with waking up, even without the announcement…” The past two days aside, the announcement itself had been like an alarm to him, signaling him when it was time to get up in the morning.

Kiibo-kun looks somewhat surprised. “Well… I’m fairly sure that’s because most of us tend to get up much earlier than the announcement. Today was an exception, considering the circumstances, but… Saihara-kun, could it be that you’re not much of a morning person?”

Saihara feels his ears burn and looks away sheepishly. It’s true that he’s always been somewhat hard to wake up, but he’s not entirely sure it’s fair for a robot to point that out. Robots didn’t even need sleep, did they? Recharging, maybe, but not sleep.

Thankfully, Kiibo-kun doesn’t seem to notice either his embarrassment or his “robo-discriminatory” train of thought. He glances up at the clock again and stands up, brushing dust off his metallic knees. “Shall we get going, then? I imagine it’s inconvenient, waiting to shower until after you’ve eaten, but we have to make do in these circumstances.”

As Saihara nods and climbs rather unsteadily to his feet (he’s still somewhat groggy), he takes another look around the room. Sure enough, Hoshi-kun and Ouma-kun are over by the entryway, looking considerably more awake and well-prepared than himself. Both of them hold a change of clothes in their arms and a toothbrush in one hand; the gym showers might have to wait until after breakfast, but they can still stop and freshen up in the bathroom beforehand.

Hoshi-kun must be unfazed by waking up so early due to his days as a tennis star. Saihara had never been part of any clubs before, but he had seen the sports teams at his old school out on the track and field plenty of times in the morning, always well into their training routines even as late-comers like himself were only just arriving. Whether that memory is real or not, it sounds—accurate. Any sense of normalcy in these distinctly abnormal circumstances comes as a small comfort to him.

He wonders about Ouma-kun, though. Even before Monokuma’s latest motive, the other boy obviously hadn’t been sleeping very well. But despite their shift last night, he looks—relatively fine. The circles under his eyes are still noticeable, but it doesn’t seem like his fever is coming back, at the very least.

The other boy turns his head, as though feeling his eyes on him, so Saihara looks away quickly, scrambling to grab his own change of clothes. Breakfast, he reminds himself. Breakfast first. Any plans about what they were doing or what to discuss as a group would have to wait until after that.

---

It still feels strange, eating in the mornings.

Breakfast is a meal he usually skips. The fact that he was so hard to wake up meant that he usually slept in as late as he could get away with, back at his previous school. He was never one to arrive past the bell, of course—but he always got such a late start that he had no time to spare to make himself food and still catch the train on time.

His uncle never had time to make anything for him in the mornings either, as busy with detective work as he was. And his parents, of course, just didn’t bother, back when he still lived with them.

Once or twice, when he had a few more minutes than usual to spare on his morning commute, he bought bread from the nearest convenience store and ate it on the way. But that was about it.

It’s a morning routine he still remembers in extremely clear detail. Perhaps bits and pieces of it are true. Perhaps nothing about it is actually true, from the convenience store he visited to the lukewarm, half-full pot of coffee his uncle sometimes left for him long after he’d gone to work.

Nonetheless—he’s still not used to eating in the mornings.

As a result, his breakfast is fairly small. Nowhere near as small as the single bowl of white rice Ouma-kun had been having for the last couple of days, but still, he keeps it light: natto, white rice, a bowl of miso soup. Anything more than that and his stomach would rebel, he’s pretty sure. It’s just as well; he’s self-sufficient enough to know how to cook the basics, but more complicated dishes would just be beyond him.

Just like he’s done for the past few days, he prepares his modest breakfast and carries it to the table on a tray. The fact that the kitchen has no doors means it’s easy to keep an eye on it even when they’re in the dining hall. So they can all cook at their own pace, rather than waiting for every single person to finish before sitting down and eating.

He’s only just picked up his chopsticks, about to start in on his natto, when Ouma-kun slides into the seat across from him—bringing with him a tray with a… rather surprising line-up.

From the seat beside him, Kiibo-kun stares in mild disbelief. As usual, he isn’t eating anything today either, so it must be rather hard for him to take his eyes off the sight in front of him. Saihara can’t blame him for staring, though; no matter how hard he tries to focus on his own breakfast, he still finds his eyes drawn to the other boy’s tray every so often.

Hoshi-kun arrives last to the table. Everything on his tray looks filling, but healthy—no doubt due to his time as an athlete. He too notices the selection on Ouma-kun’s tray and arches a questioning eyebrow, but says nothing.

For a while, they eat in silence. Or rather, Hoshi-kun eats quietly, Kiibo-kun stares, and Saihara alternates between doing both, sometimes leaving his chopsticks hanging halfway to his mouth. Ouma-kun ignores the three of them altogether and enjoys his breakfast at a leisurely pace.

Finally, Kiibo-kun can’t seem to take it any longer. “That’s… that’s quite a breakfast you have there, Ouma-kun.”

The other boy picks up a piece of French toast so drizzled in syrup it’s barely recognizable, not even bothering to use a fork or knife. He takes a bite, chewing slowly. After what seems like an eternity, he swallows. “Well,” he says, his tone genial, “you were right.”

It’s not as though Ouma-kun is doing something entirely out of the ordinary—he’s simply sitting there, eating his breakfast. Still, compared to the past couple of days, his behavior is so drastically different it leaves Kiibo-kun at a complete loss for how to respond.

The fact that he’s talking to the rest of them and not just Saihara must come as enough of a shock—but it’s the breakfast itself that seems to well and truly confuse him.

“I… I’m not sure I follow…” the robot admits hesitantly, clearly afraid he might accidentally discourage this rare and unprecedented conversation somehow.

“You were right,” Ouma-kun repeats. “I didn’t like my breakfast, the last few days. So I decided to try something else.”

‘Something else’ is a bit of an understatement. In Saihara’s opinion, it looks more like he decided to try almost everything else. Ouma-kun’s tray isn’t quite as full as Hoshi-kun’s, but there’s still quite an assortment lined across it. In addition to the (syrup-drenched) French toast, there are also pancakes, muffins, and a pile of fruit stacked high with whipped cream.

The other boy actually smiles when he notices them all staring, a blithe gesture that catches their other two classmates completely off guard.

Saihara is familiar enough with trying to read him by now that he’s fairly sure he catches a hint of sarcasm behind it. But it doesn’t seem like there’s any malice involved, so he can’t do much more than eye the tray in amazement himself.

“I—I see… So you decided to go for a more, um… western breakfast, today?” To Kiibo-kun’s credit, he really is trying to keep the conversation going. What he tactfully avoids pointing out is that everything on his tray looks more likely to give him heartburn, or at the very least, a stomachache.

Ouma-kun just nods and takes another bite of his French toast, completely unbothered.

The stop-and-go conversation between the two of them is almost amusing in its own way, but Saihara still frowns, suddenly wondering something. “Are you actually going to be able to finish all of that?” Maybe it’s an unnecessary concern, but he can’t help it. After days of barely eating anything at all, he’s not so sure the other boy’s stomach can handle this much.

“Nope.”

“…Eh?” The reply was so automatic, he’s a little caught off guard.

Ouma-kun puts the unfinished piece of toast down and skips right over to the fruit instead, eating at a slow, deliberate pace. “No matter how you look at it, there’s no way I could finish all of this, right? But it’s not that big a deal. I’m just tired of having rice for breakfast.”

There’s a hint of another smile playing at the corner of his lips, a coy expression that makes Saihara think that this is how it must have been—before.

Hoshi-kun puts down his mostly-finished natto and fried egg and arches another eyebrow. “It ain’t like it’s my place to tell you what to eat, or how much… but why bother wasting it? What if Monokuma decides not to restock the food anymore?”

“What, a starvation motive? Well, that’d be boring.” Ouma-kun shrugs. “I doubt it’ll happen.”

It’s certainly hard to deny that if this was some kind of game meant for people to watch, starvation probably wouldn’t be the most... exciting motive. He hadn’t thought of that, but it’s true. Considering the motive they had just overcome, it might even feel too repetitive for whoever was out there, watching all of this.

More importantly, if this was supposed to be a “fair game” of any sort, then there would have to be a loophole of some kind. The same way that the televisions only played the Monokuma video sporadically, rather than constantly—he just couldn’t foresee an audience of any kind finding it interesting if they were all guaranteed to starve to death no matter what. It wouldn’t just be boring; it’d be a cheap cop-out.

Ouma-kun puts his spoon down and takes a sip from a mug on his tray. The scent of black tea wafts over, pleasant and slightly citrusy. “It sounds like no matter how much we take, whoever’s putting us through all of this has to keep restocking.” Pause. Another sip. “So, I thought… might as well enjoy it, right? Breakfast, I mean.”

The way he says ‘breakfast’ sounds a little strange. There’s a little too much weight on the word, as though he deliberately reminded himself of it. Saihara wonders if he might’ve said something like ‘the killing game’ instead, in other circumstances.

Thankfully, his words don’t come across as a threat. If anything, it sounds like another coy joke—and somehow childish, like a kid in a candy store with no qualms about filling their pockets, as long as someone else is footing the bill.

Kiibo-kun still doesn’t seem very sure of what to expect, or where this change in attitude came from. But in contrast with his robotic appearance, his expression softens into a gentle half-smile. “Well... I’m not quite sure I understand. But I’m glad if you’re feeling better, Ouma-kun.”

Hoshi-kun nods his agreement as he sips at his green tea. Although he’s fairly taciturn, that’s still not enough to mask the fact that he’s a good person. His concern shows through just as clearly as Kiibo-kun’s, even though he doesn’t voice it.

Ouma-kun doesn’t respond for a few seconds. He picks up his spoon again, ignoring his fruit this time in favor of moving a few spoonfuls of cream to his mug. Then he stops, looking thoughtful. “I was going to say thanks, but I actually forgot your name. What was it again… Kiiboy?”

“It—It’s Kiibo!” The robot’s smile falters completely, replaced by a bewildered (and somewhat indignant) look. He looks doubtful that anyone could possibly forget such a simple name.

“Right, right. Kiibo it is. ...It’s a little hard to pronounce, though. Are you sure I can’t call you Kiiboy instead?”

“Just Kiibo will do!”

Saihara watches the back-and-forth dialogue, feeling that same flicker of familiarity. The ice between their group is definitely broken now—or at the very least, it’s beginning to thaw.

As he watches, though, he still senses there’s more to the story. Behind Ouma-kun’s casual words, that same sense of deliberate intention is there, as though he’s carefully planning and preparing every single response before he gives it. He truly does seem like an actor on a stage, trying to step back into a familiar role.

But even if part of the other boy’s act is a lie, it’s a pretty good one. Saihara still doesn’t know him well enough to say for sure, but… he guesses that this is Ouma-kun’s way of trying.

Maybe with a little practice, it’s a lie that might shape up into something more genuine.

He smiles a little at the thought and picks up his chopsticks again, wondering vaguely if he ever had a breakfast this lively before. He certainly doesn’t remember one, of course. In his memories, he never had time for breakfast. But perhaps there’s something to be said for making new memories, too.

After breakfast, they head over to the gym to shower off.

If he had his way, he’d prefer a bath. Baths are spacious, leisurely—the perfect opportunity for him to lie back and turn his thoughts off for a while. But it’s not like he can afford to be picky in this situation, so he makes do with what they have.

The soap stings his eyes and the water seems to only have one temperature: scalding. Still, it’s the best thing he’s felt in ages. He scrubs with the soap all over until he feels almost raw, and the too-hot water strips the aches and pains right from his muscles.

It’s actually amazing how good it feels, being clean again. Once he’s done, he even feels like a human being again. Almost.

Kiibo sits and waits for the rest of them on a bench in the steam-filled locker room right next to the showers, looking slightly uncomfortable. They take as little time as possible, but Ouma can imagine it still must be boring, sitting in an empty room with nothing to do. Waterproof or not, it’s not like he could shower with them, though the mental image amuses him for about ten seconds.

He towels off and dresses again quickly as soon as they’re finished. It’s not like anyone could probably see much of anything through the blanket of steam covering the room, especially if they weren’t looking closely to begin with. But he’d still rather not take any chances. The marks across his body are something he’d prefer to keep… personal. Saihara-chan bringing them up was already more than he’d bargained for.

The four of them have only just emerged from the locker room, ready to start making their way back to the library—when something entirely unforeseen interrupts them.

“Saihara-kun! Kiibo-kun! And—oh, thank goodness you’re all here!”

Shirogane-chan waves to them as she sprints through the gym. The moment she reaches them, she puts a hand to her chest, catching her breath as she wheezes. For some reason Harukawa-chan is with her, trailing behind her silently. She moves just as quickly, though she isn’t winded in the slightest.

Ouma stiffens, trying to keep his mouth from twisting. He has no idea why they’re here, but it doesn’t take a genius to realize that something must have happened. He can only hope that “something” didn’t involve Harukawa-chan or one of the others throwing a knife in someone’s back. Or an arrow.

No, that can’t be it. They wouldn’t care if she’d done something like that, after all. Trained killers get special privileges the rest of us don’t, he reminds himself wryly. He hates that his hands are twitching, itching to cover the scarf at his throat.

It’s not Harukawa-chan he should be focusing on right now, though. Shirogane-chan clearly has something to say to them, still gasping for breath as they crowd around and wait to hear the (presumably bad) news.

“P-Please… you have to come, quickly!”

“Come where? Shirogane-san, what happened!?”

Saihara-chan voices the question that’s already at the forefront of his own mind. “No one is…” There’s a brief pause. “No one’s… hurt, right?”

Ouma knows exactly which word he didn’t want to say aloud, and why. Saying it aloud made it feel so much more likely, a real possibility looming over their heads rather than a distant ‘what-if.’

Her eyes go wide as if she hadn’t even considered that possibility, and she shakes her head. “N-No! No, not at all, everyone’s fine! It’s just… oh, how do I even explain—”

“We found Monokuma.” Harukawa-chan cuts over her, apparently losing her patience. “Our group went out to the courtyard to take another look around, and we found it there, not moving or talking. And there’s something weird next to it.”

“Something weird…?” Hoshi-chan repeats, frowning.

Shirogane-chan nods. It seems like she’s finally caught her breath, although she still looks paler than ever. “We think… we think it might be another motive.”

The news comes as more of a disappointment than a surprise. Considering no one had heard from Monokuma ever since yesterday afternoon, before Iruma-chan finished working on her remote, it made sense that the bear would turn up again now with something else in store.

“Akamatsu-san and Toujou-san are staying where we found it, to make sure nothing weird happens… We came to tell everyone else, so we can figure out what to do about it. But we didn’t see you guys near the library, so we were starting to get a little worried,” Shirogane-chan explains.

I’d be a lot more worried about roaming the school with only Harukawa-chan for company. Ouma’s fingers twitch again as he thinks fixedly about wolves and sheep puzzles. Even he’s not entirely sure where she falls in those categories. It was probably safe to say that she wasn’t the ringleader—there was no way to fake being such an easily manipulated pawn.

Still, she was unparalleled when it came to killing people. So did that leave her a wolf or a sheep? If she was a wolf, she was a very stupid and ineffective one. So a sheep, then. A sheep with fangs.

Some of his thoughts must have shown on his face after all, because she notices him staring. But he doubts that she can read the expression he’s wearing. Even he’s not exactly sure how he feels about her.

“W-We should all head over to the courtyard.” Shirogane-chan wrings her hands together nervously. “I think everyone else is probably there by now, waiting for us… but…”

Kiibo nods. “Let’s go. The sooner we see what this is about, the better.”

The six of them walk in silence. But as they reach the grounds and descend the stairs that lead to the bottom half of the courtyard, they begin to hear a bustle of nervous commotion from the rest of their classmates. Just a little ways away from them stands Monokuma, completely immobile and unresponsive—along with… something else.

The “weird” thing the two girls mentioned turns out to be a phone booth. A phone booth that definitely wasn’t there before, bright red and completely un-missable.

“I don’t know what the hell that is,” Iruma-chan says, “but I don’t like it. I ain’t gonna go near it.”

“It’s true that it’s most likely dangerous…” Toujou-chan agrees. “That’s why Akamatsu-san and I stayed here, keeping watch. We can’t be too careful, especially in this situation.”

Angie-chan’s interest looks piqued as she clasps her hands together. “But, but—isn’t it kind of mysterious? How do we know if it’s really dangerous or not if no one checks?”

“Fuck off, no-tits! You wanna know so bad, then you go check it out!”

“Call me crazy, but I don’t think anyone should check it out. At least not just yet.” Amami-chan holds a finger thoughtfully to his chin. “S’ probably a motive, right? So it’s in everyone’s best interests if no one touches it.”

“Ahhh, I see, I see! I guess it’ll have to stay a mystery then! A mysterious riddle only god knows the answer to!”

“No, I’m pretty sure Monokuma knows exactly what this is all about, since it’s standing right there…” Chabashira-chan throws a hesitant glance in the bear’s direction.

The six of them rejoin the rest of their classmates. Shirogane-chan moves instantly to stand with her group, still looking pale and shaky, but Harukawa-chan stands a little apart from the rest, arms crossed. Ouma watches her carefully for a few seconds before surveying the phone booth for himself.

It’s not like he can tell much about it from the outside, though. It’s certainly eye-catching enough, like a prop from an outdated drama. But other than that, it simply looks… like an ordinary phone booth. It’s impossible to figure out its purpose just by standing outside it—and going inside to try and find out sounds like the worst sort of solution.

It hadn’t worked so well with the motive videos, or with the key card. He doesn’t doubt it wouldn’t go smoothly this time, either.

“Gonta doesn’t really know much about this ‘phone booth’ thing, but, um… If Monokuma knows what’s going on… why isn’t it moving?” Gonta brings up a very good question.

Chabashira-chan touches the tips of her index fingers together, frowning. “I don’t suppose… we just caught a lucky break? It didn’t just stop working… did it?”

“While doubtful… I suppose that’s not entirely outside the realm of possibility.” Shinguuji-chan speaks slowly. “We’ve been staying in the library all this time. So even if Monokuma needs to be replaced, I assume there’s no way for the ringleader to enter their lair to make a new one…”

“But how did it break…? It seems like it’s fine, right? At least, I don’t see anything wrong with it…”

No one has an answer to Shirogane-chan’s question.

Momota-chan finally breaks the silence a few moments later, slamming his shaking fists together. “To hell with it! Who cares if the damn bear broke!? Either way, that phone booth is bad news! From now on, none of us should even go near that thing—”

“What, you’re just going to ignore it after all the trouble I went through to put it here for you? Now that’s just rude!”

Several of his classmates scream as Monokuma suddenly starts talking, as casually as if it were continuing some conversation they were just having. There’s no warning—it just starts moving around on its little robotic legs again, walking and talking like normal.

Momota-chan stumbles back a few steps, nearly tripping over his own feet. “Shit! What, so you’re fine? So why play dead!?”

“I knew it’d catch your attention,” Monokuma says dismissively. “Hey, that’s another thing I wanted to talk to you about. It’s also pretty rude to go ahead and decide someone else is broken just because they don’t respond to you, don’t you think?”

Ouma narrows his eyes. He doubts the rest of the group even notices the thorns lurking behind that question. But they’re there. Sharp, invisible, like tiny pricks of doubt. He pushes it out of his mind for now, though. There are more pressing matters at hand.

“Y’know, Momota-kun, I’m really interested in what you were about to say. It wasn’t something about… destroying the phone booth, was it?” The bear raises one paw, suddenly dropping the cheery act entirely. “Because I’m pretty sure you know what’d happen to you if you destroyed school property now.”

The would-be astronaut grits his teeth. Whether he’s shaking from nerves or from anger, Ouma can’t tell. Probably both.

“Whatever.” Momota-chan’s teeth are still clenched. “We don’t need to destroy it. It ain’t like anyone’s gonna use your stupid motive, anyway.”

“Motive?” Monokuma repeats the word as though curious. “Who said anything about it being a motive? This phone booth is a gift! A freebie, if you will.”

“A gift? We don’t want any gifts from you,” Akamatsu-chan says, looking incredulous. “No matter how you look at it, it’s clearly another motive.”

The bear hangs its head, kicking a forlorn paw at the ground. “Well, think of it what you will… But I wouldn’t be so quick to look a gift horse in the mouth, you know? And you all were the ones complaining about ‘not being able to trust your memories’ or whatever.”

Silence. Dead silence. If he listens closely, he thinks he might almost hear the wheels in everyone’s heads slowly but surely grinding to a halt.

“You’re all an entertaining bunch, I’ll give you that. So when my little cubs told me about how you ‘couldn’t trust your memories,’ I thought—why not! Just this once, I’ll give you something good!”

Ouma understands perfectly, with clear, cold, precision. So far, they’ve only been shown the stick. Now comes the carrot.

“This isn’t a motive so much as it’s one of those… hmm, ‘phone-a-friend’ options? Like I said, it’s a freebie. You get in the booth, you dial up whoever you want—friends, family, whatever. Ah, but don’t forget to hit star-fifty-three first, though. You know, for external calls. Then, you can talk to them all you want.”

“Do you honestly expect we’d believe something like that?” Toujou-chan’s face looks as severe and immovable as stone. He could point out that she’s the first one who fell for a ploy very similar to this—but now is really, honestly not the time.

“Hey, Angie has a question! If you were able to mess with everyone’s memories in the first place, who’s to say you wouldn’t just fake the phone calls, too? …You could do something like that, couldn’t you Monokuma?” Her smile is serene, but her eyes look sharp.

The bear doesn’t seem discouraged, though. It just waves another paw, still keeping its eyes on the ground. “Use it or don’t use it, that’s up to you. That’s why it’s a freebie—it’s no fur off my tail if you all don’t want to hear from your loved ones again.”

There’s a murmur of unease. Everyone knows it must be lying. It must be. Even the stupidest among them can put that much together. But even a single lie can shed light on a dozen more truths. He knows that better than anyone. And he knows that they all must be tempted to bite at the carrot dangling on the string.

“Oh, but I should mention—it’s first come, first serve, you know? A special gift like this gets a one-time use only. You can call for as long as you want, and talk about whatever you’d like, but only one of you can make a phone call. One call, one time. That’s it.”

Carrot, stick. North wind, sun. No matter the name for it, the principle was always the same. Whatever Monokuma wanted to call it, it was still very clearly a motive. Pressure. Incentive.

There’s something to be said for simplicity. Sometimes sticking with the basics was the most effective method. And nothing was more basic than fear, concern—and curiosity.

“No one is going to use it,” Saihara-chan says firmly, marking the end of the discussion. “No one.”

Monokuma’s grin looks more leering than ever. “I guess there’s no helping it, if that’s how it is. You’re all keeping watch at night anyway, so there’s no reason for you to be worried. No one’s going to use it, right?” It pauses, tilting its head to the side. “And yet… you all look worried. Really worried. I wonder why that is?”

No one says anything at all.

“Well, do or don’t, it’s all the same to me. Just so long as you keep it interesting!” The bear laughs. “I guess this is where I’m supposed to say, ‘knock ‘em dead, kids!’ Or something like that.”

---

They all go back to the library, once Monokuma leaves. A few of them turn and check behind them as they walk, as though expecting to see someone, anyone, running up to the booth the moment their backs are turned—a standard prisoner’s dilemma.

Unsurprisingly, the general consensus is to keep doing what they’ve been doing.

“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t fuckin’ matter. We’ll keep doing night watch like we’ve been doing, and no one goes anywhere near that damn phone, okay?”

As usual, Momota-chan’s boundless confidence is completely unfounded. In fact, even he doesn’t look like he necessarily believes what he’s saying, though Ouma doubts he’d ever admit it. But that still doesn’t change the fact that his face looks pale, his hands a little shaky.

“Iruma-san’s and Akamatsu-san’s groups are on watch tonight, yes? Will you all be able to handle the shifts with your current numbers, or would more assistance be better?” Kiibo crosses his arms, contemplating their options. If he were capable of it, he’d probably be furrowing his eyebrows, as deep in thought as he looks.

Iruma-chan opens her mouth (no doubt to say that anyone who wants her shift can damn well have it), but Akamatsu-chan speaks over her quickly.

“We’ll be fine. It’s not much different than usual. We’ll all be here, in the library, and if anything happens we can wake the rest of you up.” She sounds slightly more certain than Momota-chan—but not much.

If she decides she’s too uncertain, what then? Will she hide another steel ball away in her backpack, a just-in-case measure for if things get too bad?

Not that the others would have any better solutions. Iruma-chan would throw each and every of them under the bus at the first opportunity if it meant saving her own skin. And if anyone tried sneaking out to the phone booth while she was on watch, he doesn’t doubt Harukawa-chan’s solution would be to crush the life right out of them before they could take more than a step. The marks on his neck can attest to as much.

Well. At least in that case, the truth about her special little talent would come out again. And it’d be someone else’s neck on the line, for once.

You still think other people can’t change. Ouma remembers Saihara-chan’s words from last night, the weary look of disappointment on his face. Could he honestly blame him?

He tries to slow his thoughts down, opening and closing his hand as he searches frantically for a solution. If he loses his composure like the rest of them, then there’s no point. He needs to stay calm. If he tries to quit again, like he did in the hallway…

I thought I knew them, he reminds himself. I thought I knew each and every little horrible thing about them. I didn’t think we’d make it past the time limit, and we did.

What’s more, they’d all managed to make it past that time limit largely without he himself doing anything at all. The world, as it turned out, didn’t revolve around him.

Ouma flexes his hand a few more times as the meeting wraps up, remembering the sensation of staying anchored.

Akamatsu-san, Harukawa-san, Toujou-san, and Shirogane-san take the first watch.

There’s an added layer of restlessness among the group before everyone goes to sleep tonight. Saihara doesn’t know much about his classmates yet, other than what he’s gleaned in the last few days, or the bits and pieces he’s learned from Ouma-kun’s story. But he senses that they’re all more nervous than usual.

He doesn’t blame them. In many ways, the uncertainty is worse than anything else. The hardest thing about the last motive had been the fact that they couldn’t predict when the song would turn on or off, after all. Now they’ve been given a motive-that-isn’t-a-motive, handed a chance on a silver platter to try and see if their memories are real or not.

As he lies on his back on his futon, he considers the motive videos Ouma-kun told him about. It made sense that a video couldn’t always be trusted. What person in their generation didn’t know about editing tools, or special effects? A video was pre-recorded, pre-planned. It couldn’t respond to you; the figures on the screen were simply ones and zeroes, pixels that might as well have been on the other side of the globe for all that they were inches away.

Of course, a phone call could be edited, too. Money-grabbing scams and voice-changers were as common in Japan as they were anywhere else. Common sense said Monokuma was just lying to them, grasping at any straws that might get them to kill one another. Common sense said it, but…

…But he can’t deny there’s a part of him that wants to go and check for himself. If he called his uncle, would he really pick up? Would that prove that he existed, just how he remembered him?

It’s a fallacy. He knows that, but it doesn’t make the temptation any less. If the technology is convincing enough, if the lie is well-prepared enough, then there’s no way he’d be able to tell if the person on the other end was his uncle or not. Even if they sounded like him, knew the things he did, said the things he would say… that wouldn’t necessarily prove anything.

Perhaps it’s just what Ouma-kun likes to call his ‘detective’s intuition’ that makes him crave that undeniable proof. Although he’s pretty sure that at this point, they’re all thinking the same thing.

Saihara drifts into an uneasy sleep, thinking of that bright red telephone booth. At some point, he dreams again, and the color red seeps into that same vast, empty blue, like the sky—

He’s less aware of what he dreams, this time. He already forgot the other dream, or even that he dreamed at all; once he woke up it slipped away from him, like sand into the tide.

There are blurs, and shapes, and colors, and he feels as anxious and miserable as before. Sometimes there are fewer shapes than before. At least he thinks so, but he’s not sure.

Voices and faces pass, always just beyond the point of recognition, leaving no trace behind except perhaps a word, a feeling, a distant impression. Or a hunch, perhaps. If dreams are made up of memories, then perhaps that would explain—explain something. In his dream, he’s not even sure what needs to be explained in the first place.

He wakes with a start, drenched in a cold sweat. This time, there’s no cold hand on his skin, no one kneeling beside him to tell him that it’s morning. He breathes heavily, unsure why he even woke up in the first place. The overhead lights are still off. As far as he can tell, it’s the middle of the night, though he isn’t sure of the hour.

His vision is filled with spots, but he still casts a glance at the futon beside him. Just to check. Just to be sure.

Contrary to his expectations, Ouma-kun is lying there, fast asleep, his breathing slow and even. Saihara stares for a second or two, unsure why he even needed to check.

I should be resting, too, he thinks. I should go back to sleep.

He sighs deeply, finally managing to catch his breath again. On a whim, he looks towards the lantern light, just to try and gauge the time, to see who’s on shift—

He stops. He stares. There’s only one figure, sitting in the dim lamplight, fiddling with something that might be a remote. One figure. Only the one—Iruma-san, he’s pretty sure.

But no matter where he turns his head, no matter how many times he looks, Yumeno-san, Chabashira-san, and Angie-san aren’t anywhere to be found.

Chapter Text

At first, he thinks he must be seeing things wrong. He keeps waiting, blinking hard, as if the three missing figures are just some trick of the light, or maybe leftover effects from the recent lack of sleep.

Maybe if he waits long enough, stares hard enough, they’ll fade back into his field of vision. Or maybe he’s actually still fast asleep, and if he blinks his eyes enough times, he’ll wake up.

But at last it sinks in: three of the girls who should be on watch aren’t there, and he has no idea where they are. Or how long they’ve been gone.

He can feel the moment the reality of the situation finally sets in; fear washes over him, freezing the blood in his veins like ice water, clutching at his heart like an iron vise. In that instant, he very nearly forgets how to breathe.

After at least ten seconds, the paralysis wears off, and Saihara leaps from his futon, rushing over to Iruma-san and kneeling next to her in the ring of lantern light.

She must not have noticed that he had woken up, because she jumps at his sudden appearance, nearly dropping the remote clasped in her hands in the process. At the very last second she manages to fumble for it, catching it just before it hits the floor.

“The hell do you want, Saihara!?” she hisses, scrambling backwards a few inches. But there’s no real anger to her tone. On the contrary, she looks rattled by his sudden appearance, her eyes darting around the library as though expecting to see the rest of their classmates suddenly jumping up from their futons as well.

His panicked brain barely even registers her unease; he has no time to spare for his usual hesitation or timidity in a situation like this. “Where is everyone else?” He looks around the room quickly, one more time, but still the figures of the missing girls don’t just magically reappear. “Where are Angie-san, Yumeno-san, and Chabashira-san!?”

Iruma-san doesn’t answer. She swallows hard, once, gripping the remote in her hands much harder than necessary.

“Where are they, Iruma-san?” This time when he presses her, he barely even manages to keep his voice to a whisper.

As she scoots back another few inches, she immediately lifts a finger to her mouth, shushing him. She double-checks the rest of the library quickly, her gaze even warier than before. “K-Keep it down, keep it down! What, do you wanna go waking everyone else up?”

For a moment, he’s incredibly tempted to do just that: with everyone else awake, the time it would take to resolve this situation would be cut considerably. They could scour the place from top to bottom, leaving no stone unturned, and they would probably find everyone—but…

…But if everyone wakes up and realizes that our entire plan to keep watch went to pieces, what then?

He doesn’t want to think about it, but he’s pretty sure he knows the answer. If anyone uncertain about this plan woke up and found out it had failed—no, not even that it had failed, but that it could fail…

It would only take one wrong step for them to fall apart as a group. One wrong move, one tiny crack in their resolution, and the little pricks of doubt that Monokuma had scattered among them would spread like wildfire.

He remembers everything Ouma-kun told him. And he remembers how he responded in turn—that they were carrying out this plan not because they all trusted one another, but because they didn’t.

That plan worked well in theory, as long as their caution could keep each other in line, keep anyone from getting hurt. But what if this mistake only furthered the idea that they shouldn’t trust each other, shouldn’t even try to get to know one another?

Trust was something gradually built, and hard to repair once broken. And if everyone decided that their current arrangement wasn’t working out, that the status quo came with too many liabilities—well, he had heard that several of his classmates wouldn’t be opposed to taking things into their own hands…

He swallows, still unsure of what to do. But every second he spends debating with himself is another second lost. Despite the noisy drumming of his own heartbeat in his ears, this time his voice is very quiet as he asks Iruma-san one more time: “Did they go to the phone booth?”

Her voice comes out in the barest whine. The inventor winces, then relents. “I dunno… Maybe? …Probably.”

Saihara feels his blood run a little colder. Her answer isn’t a surprise, but those are definitely the words he least wanted to hear. “How long? How long have they been gone?”

“J-Just... just a little while…” She clasps the remote to her chest as though afraid he’s going to snatch it away from her. Deprived of her usual ability to yell or make a scene, she was apparently desperate enough to latch on to anything she could for comfort. “Look, it ain’t my fault they left!”

“Just…” He pauses, trying to swallow. Somehow, his mouth feels hopelessly cotton-dry. “Tell me what happened.”

Iruma-san nods, wiping nervously at the sweat on her brow. “O-Okay. Okay, well, that Yumeno chick started mumbling under her breath, the way she always does—she said somethin’ about wanting to hear from someone who had been… in hiding for a long time, or something like that.”

In hiding for a long time…? That sounds more like a missing persons case than a hostage situation. But all of the missing persons cases he can remember off the top of his head have no connection to Yumeno-san, at least on the surface. He frowns, but lets the other girl continue talking.

“I t-told her to shut the hell up, ‘cause… y’know, we were on watch and stuff…” Her free hand tugs nervously at the end of a lock of hair, twirling it between her fingers aimlessly until it becomes even frizzier.

He suspects that her telling Yumeno-san to be quiet probably had very little to do with their night watch, and more to do with the fact that Iruma-san found it annoying when almost anyone else was talking besides herself.

“B-But she just kept going like she couldn’t hear me. She kept sayin’ somethin’ was… ‘impossible,’ but I didn’t catch what.”

She trails off, apparently reluctant to keep explaining, so he prompts her. “What happened next?”

“Chabashira interrupted her. Duh.” She snorts disdainfully—a little louder than she intended, because she flinches immediately afterward, cautiously surveying the room to make sure no one else woke up. “…She shoulda told her to shut up, but she didn’t. Just asked her to calm down, said all that usual garbage about ‘always being on her side’—”

Both of them freeze at the sound of a futon shifting. Saihara can’t see anything distinct beyond the lantern light, but he worries about what to do if anyone else were to wake up right now. As it is, he’s only just now getting the full story from Iruma-san himself. He’s really not sure how he would explain this situation to anyone else. Or what they would decide to do about it.

Nothing happens, though. Whoever it was must have simply been tossing and turning in their sleep, because the noise subsists, and once again, only the sound of everyone else’s peaceful breathing remains.

Iruma-san exhales slowly, then scowls. “Things were quiet for a while. Then Yumeno said she had to go to the bathroom. That brat has always got to piss, so I thought she meant it at first. And Chabashira said she’d go with her to keep watch, so I thought, y’know, maybe they were sneakin’ off to go do some other dirty business in the bathroom instead—”

“Please, Iruma-san, just tell me what happened!”  By now, his patience has already worn several layers too thin, and his nerves are stretched almost to their breaking point. He really, really doesn’t have time to spare for her usual antics.

“—but then Angie over there got real suspicious. She asked why they were goin’ now of all times, said Yumeno oughta be able to hold it. Donkey-lips didn’t have a comeback for that, she just kept sayin’ she needed to piss… Chabashira said they’d be right back, and then they both left…”

Saihara feels as though the pieces of the puzzle are starting to align. He can see where this explanation is heading—though the fact that they’re not back yet doesn’t bode well at all. “And… Angie-san?” he asks, tentatively.

Iruma-san grimaces. “…She went after ‘em. Seemed like she was real determined to preach at Yumeno or somethin’.”

“Why didn’t you try to stop her?” he hisses. “Or any of them!? Why didn’t you wake someone up first before it got to this point!?” Right now is a time for action, not for pointing fingers—he knows that, but the frustration escapes him nonetheless as he groans quietly and holds his head in his hands.

Once again, she clutches the remote to her chest defensively. “H-Hey, it all happened so fast! There are three of them out there, I’m not just runnin’ after them by myself! A-And…” She shudders for a moment, reverting to timidity once again. “Angie t-told me to stay here and keep watchin’ everyone else… Said if I tried to pull anything, ‘god would know about it’ and ‘punish me.’ And I don’t give a shit about her imaginary god, but I’m still not stickin’ my nose where it doesn’t belong, okay!?”

Saihara hasn’t known Angie-san long, but still he can imagine that she must have been quite convincing. Beneath her cheerful exterior, it sometimes felt as though she had a certain shrewdness that could make her seem… well, rather intimidating to someone like Iruma-san who faltered so easily the moment anyone put their foot down around her.

In the end, he suspects that was all it had boiled down to: Iruma-san felt outnumbered and threatened—not just by Angie-san, but by all three of them. Even if there was a real chance that one of them could be… injured outside (not killed, he thinks emphatically, but the possibility tugs insistently at the back of his mind nonetheless), she still wouldn’t risk her own well-being to intervene.

Her life was on one side of the scale, and everyone else’s lives were on the other. As long as she could secure her own safety, and had a decent idea of all parties involved, then things like group unity or potential trust and cooperation meant… very little to her.

As he struggles to come to a decision, another memory suddenly comes back to him even in this desperate situation—as always, from that fateful conversation in that dark and desolate bedroom.

“But I mean, can you really blame Iruma-chan?” Ouma-kun had asked him. His voice had been raspy and low from lack of use, and (if it was even possible) even more devoid of emotion than before. It had been difficult to tell if he had even been asking a question.

Saihara hadn’t been allowed to interrupt at the time, but he supposes the look on his face had asked the question for him: Even though she tried to kill you…? Tried to kill everyone?

“That’s just self-preservation for you.” With a face blanker than any sheet of parchment, in that same emotionless tone, the other boy had said, “Almost anyone would do the same, if their own life was on the line.” A pause. And then, almost bitterly: “I mean, I did the same thing, too. When things get tough, we all put ourselves first.”

No, he thinks, that’s a lie. Perhaps that was one more thing that Ouma-kun hadn’t even intended to lie about. Maybe the other boy really did believe it to be true, even now. But as for Saihara, he firmly believes—he has to believe that it isn’t. It isn’t the whole story, in any case. Not for Ouma-kun, and not for Iruma-san, either.

Ouma-kun was right about at least one thing: he can’t really blame Iruma-san for trying to stay safe in such a risky situation. And at least she still hadn’t tried to hurt anyone herself, this time. She’s even still cooperating with their plan, to some degree. It’s a small step of progress in the right direction, but a step nonetheless.

And if she’s making progress… then hopefully that means everyone else is, too. He can’t assume the worst of her—of anyone else—just yet.

As he shakily gets to his feet, he makes up his mind. “Please stay here,” he tells Iruma-san. “Just like you’ve been doing, stay here and keep watch. …Don’t wake anyone else up, for now.”

“Wh-What are you gonna do?” she asks. Her voice is little more than a whimper, either fearful at the possibility of getting in trouble or else sick and tired of the whole situation.

“I’m going to go… find out what happened. I’ll check on them. If I’m not back in an hour….” He hesitates. “…Wake up Momota-kun or Akamatsu-san, and tell them what you told me.” They would know what to do, if the worst-case scenario were to happen. …Hopefully.

The inventor nods nervously, clutching her remote tightly to her chest. At least she wasn’t behaving like her usual haughty self. The threat of real danger had turned her complacent, at least for the time being. Small favors, he thinks, but he’s far too apprehensive to find any real relief in the thought.

He silently makes his way across the library, taking extra care not to brush against anyone’s futon. One wrong step right now could make everything implode on itself, escalate the entire situation immeasurably, if he accidentally woke anyone else up.

Just before he exits the room, he turns and looks back. Iruma-san’s face is wide-eyed and fearful in the glow of the lantern; outside the ring of light, however, the rest of his classmates are covered in shadow. All he can make out is the dim form of their sleeping figures, breathing peacefully.

Hopefully, they’ll all still be that way by the time he comes back. …If he actually manages to come back.

Inhaling sharply, he exits the room, headed straight for the phone booth.

---

The school at night is more unsettling than he could have imagined.

Saihara walks through the dark hallways, his pace careful but steady. As tempting as it is to break out into a run, he doesn’t—not only because of the noise it would make, but also because some small part of him still has enough sense to warn him that running full speed when he can barely see his surroundings would be a bad idea.

Already desolate enough in the daytime, the school at night seems a world apart, full of unspoken, lurking threats that set his teeth on edge and make the hairs at the back of his neck stand on end.

Although the moon (or a brilliant imitation of it) is out, it’s somehow still so hard to see where he’s going. The scattered patches of moonlight, slipping between the barred windows or ancient-looking cracks in the wall, add layers of indistinctness to the world around him, making the shadows and creeping vegetation in between those patches look even eerier than before.

If there were a reason for that ominous feeling, then perhaps it might be… the fear of the unknown. Only seeing half of what’s there, bits and pieces of a still-unfamiliar landscape, causes his mind to fill in the blanks by itself. And there was no telling what might be considered impossible or not—everything here was already so far beyond the usual realm of possibility, so no stretch of the imagination sounded too far-fetched.

Try as he might, one thought keeps occurring to him with each step he takes: he could very well die as a result of his choices tonight. Doubtful though it might seem, and as much as he’d like to believe none of those girls (none of his classmates, period) would do such a thing, it’s still a very real possibility.

He doesn’t want to dwell on the idea too much, but it lingers like a bad taste in his mouth. If he thinks about it for too long, he’s pretty sure he’ll run the risk of letting his fear immobilize him. But dismissing the possibility entirely sounds foolhardy and stupid, as though believing himself somehow untouchable.

Was it like this for Ouma-kun, too? he wonders as he hurries along. Did he think about how he might die every time he went to talk to someone? Every time he left his room? ...He’s fairly sure he knows the answer already. There must have been only one choice for him, after being met with death and failure each and every time.

Unlike Ouma-kun, Saihara has no proof that he’ll wake up in a locker should he fail tonight, no promise of any do-overs. He’s tried to sound so confident for the last few days, explaining his theories that all of them might remember these different timelines (worlds? loops?), even if it’s only subconsciously—but what if he’s wrong?

And even if his theory is actually right, that wouldn’t change anything for the “him” who’s present right now, would it? Even if other versions of Saihara Shuuichi might exist, might remember something—if he didn’t remember these thoughts and feelings as his own, then wouldn’t that be the same as dying after all?

“This” version of me might die, only to be replaced by some other, very similar-yet-different version… The thought sends shudders up his spine.

By the time he exits the school building, he’s already drenched in sweat—a fact that has very little to do with how fast he was walking, and much more to do with his nerves, and his heart stuttering anxiously in his chest, deafening in his own ears.

He leans over to catch his breath for just a moment, resting his hands on his shaky knees. If only he could stay like this for a few minutes, or maybe an hour or two… But that’s not an option. So much could have happened, could be happening right this moment. He can’t afford to waste time just because he feels like a coward.

Taking one last sharp, deep breath, he reluctantly steels himself for whatever he might see (or whatever might… happen to him, while he’s out here) and follows the moonlit path away from the school building, down towards the courtyard.

Even before he’s halfway there, he can see the phone booth. There’s a light on inside, a picture perfect scene right out of every old-timey drama he’s ever watched on his uncle’s old television. Bright, artificial light spills out from the booth, pooling onto the ground around it—and his heart thuds heavily in his chest as soon as he sees three figures, there in that ring of light.

Three figures. Three girls. One of them (Yumeno-san, he thinks, judging by her height) stands a little ways away from the other two, so frozen in place that he might have mistaken her for a sculpture if he didn’t know any better. It’s harder to make out what the other two are doing—they’re standing close together, but their movements seem awkward and stilted. Their voices are raised too, despite the late hour, but he can’t make out what they’re saying from this distance.

The knot in his stomach loosens just the tiniest bit when he confirms all three of them are still alive. But only a little: after all, the closer he gets, the more apparent it becomes that they’re all… right in the middle of a huge fight.

“Chabashira-san! Angie-san!” He throws caution to the wind and decides to risk grabbing their attention. Perhaps it’s a stupid, reckless decision, but he can only rely on his own intuition in a situation like this.

All three girls startle at the sound of his voice. Yumeno-san finally moves, shuffling back a couple of steps as though unsure whether to run in the opposite direction or not. Chabashira-san swerves to the side nervously, and as she stumbles more clearly into the pool of light it becomes obvious why her movements were so stilted.

Angie-san struggles in the other girl’s grasp, trying her hardest to get away, but to no avail. No matter how she kicks and flails, Chabashira-san keeps her arms expertly pinned behind her back. One of the shorter girl’s twintails looks as though it came loose in the fight, leaving her hair mussed and tangled on one side, and there’s an uncharacteristically accusatory, furious expression on her normally-smiling face.

She realizes he’s there just moments after the other two do, clearly taken aback. Then she resumes struggling, twice as hard as before. “Shuuichi! Get her off me, Shuuichi! Tenko and Himiko are dirty, rotten traitors—“

“Th-That’s not true! That’s not true at all!” Chabashira-san panics, redoubling her grip on the other girl in an effort to keep her from thrashing so wildly.

“Ow! Let go, let go of me!”

“Chabashira-san, what in the world is going on? Why don’t you just let go of her!?” Saihara feels as though his heart is trying to beat its way out of his chest, pounding somewhere uncomfortably near the base of his throat instead.

The taller girl bites her lip, still unrelenting in her grip and stance even as Angie-san continues to thrash against her. “Because… Because she’d go and wake up everyone else! Tenko can’t let that happen!”

He can already sort of understand the dilemma she must be in. After all, he hadn't woken anyone else up, either. Still, he can’t help but check. “Why shouldn’t she? Why are you and Yumeno-san even out here at this hour, when you’re supposed to be keeping watch?”

“Because she and Himiko are greedy, selfish, no-good traitors!” Angie-san reemphasizes, still trying (and failing) to free her wrists from the other girl’s grasp. “They both don’t care about anyone else’s well-being—”

“I’m telling you, that’s not true!” The frustration in Chabashira-san’s voice is almost palpable. But rather than angry, she only seems worried. A little sad, even. “This… This isn’t what it looks like, Saihara-san.”

Saihara inhales sharply, trying to calm himself down enough to get a grasp of the situation. Maybe if he agrees to talk rationally with all of them, he can keep them calm, too. He wills his still-pounding heart to un-lodge itself from his throat, and slowly nods. “Okay, well… What is all of this, then? I can’t understand if none of you explain. So… please, tell me.”

She bites at the inside of her cheek. “Your group… doesn’t have night watch duty tonight, right? Did anyone else wake up? Does anyone else know we aren’t at our shift?”

“You mean besides Iruma-san? …No, no one else knows. Not yet. I just sort of… woke up, and I realized you three were missing. Iruma-san told me where to find you.”

For a moment, there’s a half-hopeful spark in Chabashira-san’s eyes, like someone drowning at sea being thrown a sudden lifeline. “If I tell you what’s going on… would you promise not to tell the others about what happened tonight?”

He’s all too conscious of Angie-san’s reproachful stare, locked onto him as he considers the other girl’s question. Finally, he shakes his head. “I can’t make any promises. Not until I know if you were going to hurt someone else.”

“B-But…!” Chabashira-san stops herself from protesting further, gnawing on her lip all the while.

Given the predicament that she’s in, it’s not as though she really has any choice but to tell him her side of the story, if she doesn’t want things to go from bad to worse. But still she looks hesitant, averting her eyes as she looks out at the open courtyard. Her body language doesn’t seem aggressive or threatening, but merely… cornered.

After a few more seconds, she seems to come to something of a deliberation. “Fine then. Saihara-san, this was all my—”

“Stop it, Chabashira. It was my fault.”

Saihara, Chabashira-san, and even Angie-san all jump a little at the sudden interjection from a quiet, despondent voice. Despite being central to the conflict at hand, he had somehow almost forgotten Yumeno-san was even there. She had been so silent and unmoving in all the chaos, watching the arguments unfolding around her almost as though they were happening to someone else.

Her words don’t really surprise him; he had almost guessed as much, after all. Judging by what Iruma-san told him back in the library, it did sound like Yumeno-san was the one who had wanted to come out to the phone booth the most. But it is surprising, hearing her admit to it now.

“Your fault…” he repeats, putting a hand to his chin in thought. “Okay, so you wanted to use the phone… to contact someone, right? I-I don’t blame you.”

It would be hard to blame anyone entirely, in these circumstances. Even if it was reckless. Even if it was—as Angie-san had said—more than a little selfish, perhaps. Still, he can’t say it’s justifiable. “But why would you try to go through with it? I mean… Angie-san must’ve guessed what you were up to. You know she has a right to tell the others. That’s what our whole night watch system is for. And Chabashira-san, why would you ever agree to help—?”

“Because Yumeno-san would never have used it to hurt anyone!” Chabashira-san cuts him off, looking far more indignant on her friend’s behalf than she was on her own just a few minutes ago. There’s a certainty in her eyes that leaves no room for argument, catching him completely off guard.

“Y-You can’t know that for a fact,” he says, sputtering a little. “And even if that’s true, it was still incredibly dangerous, coming out here like this…”

“Maybe it was dangerous,” she agrees, “but Tenko’s still sure of it. Yumeno-san isn’t the kind of person who would ever hurt someone. And that’s why I’ll always be on her side when she’s scared. I might not be the smartest, but I’m still a pretty good judge of character!”

It’s a baseless argument. Or at least, it should be, but Saihara finds it difficult to dispute entirely. Is it really so different from my decision to trust Ouma-kun? he wonders to himself. I believed him even when his story was impossible. Even when I had no reason to trust him at all.

“…Alright.” He gives Chabashira-san a small nod. “Let’s say you’re right—even if Yumeno-san didn’t plan on hurting anyone, this still could’ve ended… really badly. If anyone else found out about what you two did, the whole group could split apart… someone might even get angry enough to hurt you. Or her.”

She has the decency to look somewhat sheepish, even as she continues to hold Angie-san in place. “I-I know that! That’s exactly why I don’t want you or Angie-san to tell anyone!”

“If anything were to happen, I’d take responsibility for it.” When Yumeno-san speaks up again, her voice is almost too quiet for them to catch. They all look her way, but she isn’t making eye contact with any of them; instead she stares at the bright pool of light spilling out from the phone booth, looking utterly downcast. “All of this was my fault… if anyone were to get angry, I couldn’t blame them for that.”

Saihara can’t help but be a little taken aback by how downright apathetic she sounds: as though the possibility of being hurt has already crossed her mind and she simply doesn’t care by now. It’s a brand of apathy he’s fairly familiar with by now, although he doubts her reasons for feeling this way are the same as Ouma-kun’s.

Chabashira-san looks just as startled as he feels. “Yumeno-san! You don’t actually think I’d let anyone hurt you, do you?”

Yumeno-san just shrugs. Most likely, she knows that the other girl wouldn’t do such a thing—but she still looks completely uninterested in whatever might happen to her after this.

Angie-san gives a disdainful snort in the silence that follows. Apparently she had finally given up on attempting to break free from Chabashira-san’s deceptively slackened grip, but the glare she throws at all three of them in turn is still as full of daggers as ever. “No one else would need to do anything to you,” she says, her mouth twisting into a sneer. “No one else even needs to lift a finger for you to get what’s coming to you.”

Chabashira-san’s mouth twitches imperceptibly. Her eyes harden as she asks, “What do you mean by that, Angie-san?”

The other girl just scoffs; her position is far too uncomfortable for her to actually manage a shrug, but she gives her best attempt at one anyway. “God will take care of the both of you. And Shuuichi too, if he decides to help you lie about this.”

“For the last time, it’s not god that we need to be afraid of, here! If anyone else found out about this, if they thought Yumeno-san was a threat, who knows what they’d try to—”

“No one else broke their promise!” Angie-san snaps, cutting the other girl off angrily. “No one else gave in to their greed, or put everyone else’s safety at risk! If anything happens to either of you, then you brought it all on yourself!”

Chabashira-san’s mouth nearly drops open. She looks completely, utterly speechless, baffled at how to reason or argue when face to face with a devout believer. But Saihara wonders, suddenly, if this might be Angie-san’s own fear talking.

Just like coming to the phone booth in the first place might have been Yumeno-san’s way of showing her distress at this whole situation, perhaps clinging to her beliefs was how Angie-san coped with the strange, incomprehensible things that they had come to guess about where they were, and why they were here.

He remembers, too, the things Ouma-kun told him about her “Religious Student Council.” It had certainly shed a new (and somewhat disturbing) light on all her previously innocuous talk about god and worship—but he thinks it might also explain why she always seemed to feel safest in a group. She had, after all, been trying to stop the killing game in her own way. The seemingly unreasonable rules that she had enforced, and the power she had clung to, had probably been her own way of trying to keep another murder from happening.

All of them were struggling to cling to their identities in the midst of this confusion, but he can imagine it might be even harder for Angie-san in particular. How could someone who supposedly grew up a certain way, lived in a certain place, believed in certain things—how could someone possibly handle having those things ripped away? Being told their memories, their home, their beliefs, might not even exist?

He can’t help but sympathize deeply, even if he still finds the stories he heard about her methods unsettling. She wasn’t, after all, a truly bad person.

It’s a lie, after all, that most people would only choose to put themselves first. That’s what he’s already decided. Even if everyone might be scared, or selfish, or angry deep down, he’d like to believe that they’re all shuffling along in their small, stumbling steps towards progress.

As she stands there, her arms still pinned behind her back, Angie-san hardly even looks like the same, (eerily) cheerful, happy-go-lucky girl that he’s gotten to know in these few long-but-short days. Her hair is all disheveled, her eyes narrowed, scowling in contempt and mistrust. She just looks… as scared as any of them, really. Surely she must want to resolve this without things getting any worse, too.

“Angie-san,” he says slowly. If possible, he’d like to try and avoid making her even angrier. “I’m not here just to lie and cover this up. I just… want to find out what happened. I’d like to know why Yumeno-san came out here, even when she knew it was a bad idea.”

Angie-san and Yumeno-san are both silent at that: the former still fuming, the latter stiff as a pole and unresponsive, too.

“Yumeno-san? Could you… tell me, please? Why did you come out here tonight?”

More silence. He’s pretty sure there’s a flicker of uncertainty in her eyes this time though, as if she’s deliberating with herself about whether to come clean or not.

“I can understand missing your loved ones… I mean, I don’t think anyone here isn’t at least a little tempted to try and call their family, too. But you must know it has to be a trap Monokuma set for us. So why on earth would you—?”

“I didn’t… I didn’t want to call my family.” She sniffles once, and then it’s as though a dam of some sort broke inside her, because her previous indifference washes away, replaced by frustration and worry and misery all at once. It’s the most emotional he’s ever seen her, even more than the time she had her spat with Iruma-san in the library.

Chabashira-san takes a half-step towards her as the other girl starts crying, but Yumeno-san staggers back a step, shaking her head as she rubs desperately at her eyes with her sleeve.

“I do-don’t care about g-going home again, or seeing my old friends from school! I don’t even want to see my p-parents, not if it’s all fake! Not if they’re just one big lie!”

Her words start coming more and more quickly. Saihara isn’t too familiar with western religion (or any religion, really) but he imagines this must be something like an admission given within a confessional: seeking forgiveness, and growing ever-more emotional.

Yumeno-san’s shoulders shake. “I just… I j-just wanted… to know where my master was!”

“Your master?” He feels a prickle of familiarity at the word, though he’s not too sure why. Maybe she had mentioned this “master” of hers at some point in a conversation recently, but… though he’s somewhat ashamed to admit it, he hadn’t really been paying much attention to her in these last few days. They had all been so busy with so many other problems in their way—he hadn’t really paid her much mind even when he did happen to overhear some of her talk about magecraft and magic.

Then again, maybe she had mentioned it at some other point in time. Perhaps he’d been just a little closer to her than he was now, in some other world that wasn’t this one.

It’s becoming so increasingly frustrating, not recalling the memories he doesn’t have anymore (memories he isn’t entirely sure he ever actually had), and not being able to trust what memories he does have.

Yumeno-san seems to realize that they’re not quite following her anymore, because she sniffles again and tries to take a deep, shuddering breath. “M-My master,” she says, “was the person I looked up to the most. He was the entire reason I became a mage, h-he taught me everything I knew about m-magecraft, and then…”

They all wait, afraid to break the silence.

The rest of her sentence stammers in the other girl's throat for a moment as though stuck, and then comes rushing out. “…He disappeared. People called him a fraud, they sabotaged his shows, and he just… vanished. I never saw him again. I couldn’t even find him with my magecraft, so he probably didn’t want to be found. But I just w-wanted… I wanted to see if I could find his number here, somehow… Monokuma said w-we could call anyone, so…” She trails off slowly—and then, as though her legs are too tired to hold her upright anymore, she falls to her knees in the grass, looking thoroughly hopeless.

Saihara doesn’t know what to say to her. Neither does Chabashira-san, or even Angie-san, for that matter; they all look at her uncertainly, still reeling from the uncomfortable feeling her words had left them with.

She truly hadn’t been a threat, even from the start. Regardless of whether Chabashira-san’s trust in her was the right decision or not, Yumeno-san didn’t even know the number of the person she wanted to hear from the most. And all she had wanted was proof of his existence.

Again, he realizes that this isn’t just about homesickness, or flat-out denial. This went much deeper than that—to the core of what made up their identities, who they were as people. He remembers those hate-filled eyes boring holes into him, clear as day. Making him want to disappear. Making him afraid of being hated, afraid of his own talent, afraid of everything and everyone.

Those eyes—that man—had helped to shape him into who he was now, for better or worse. They were part of why he had shied away from thinking of himself as a true detective for so long, and why he had finally come to embrace it, now that he could use it to help people in a crisis. What if that, too, was just another lie? A fabrication meant to stir him on in some way, and nothing more or less?

He would never want to contact that man again, personally—but perhaps, if things were different… he would. Maybe if the impact that case had left on his life had been something more positive, instead of a scar that he wanted to forget, he would also want proof that it happened. That the man still existed, somewhere out there. That he had, at the very least, really shaped his life in one way or another, even if everything else was fake.

“Yumeno-san…” Saihara stops himself before he can say more. What is it that he even wants to say to her, really? Everything that comes to mind sounds shallow and hypocritical. There are too many people who need his help, and he doesn’t know if he can find the words for all of them. Not that he’s ever had a way with words, anyway.

He’s still debating with himself when Chabashira-san clears her throat. It’s a small, quiet sound, more like she was trying to ready herself to speak rather than get their attention, but Yumeno-san looks up at her from her spot on the grass nonetheless.

“Tenko… had a master, too,” she says gently. “He… I don’t think he was as amazing as Yumeno-san’s master must have been, but he did teach me a lot. He helped me come up with my own form of neo-aikido, trained with me… I actually grew up with him, at the temple.”

Yumeno-san shifts herself on the grass a little, until she’s clutching her knees. She keeps her head down, but she sniffles once as she asks, “You lived with him? Not… with your parents?”

Chabashira-san nods. “That’s right. I love my parents too, but… the priests at the temple were much more like Tenko’s real family. They practically raised me, you know?”

The shorter girl doesn’t respond, but she does raise her head at that. Just a little.

Still, Chabashira-san takes it as a sign of encouragement, so she continues. “I cared so much about all of them. All of them mattered to Tenko, but…” She bites at her lip. “I know that I probably can’t understand exactly how you feel right now, Yumeno-san. But my master was also… a huge part of my life.”

More silence. Even Angie-san is listening quietly, no longer scowling but staring down at the grass intently as though thinking long and hard.

“It wasn’t just neo-aikido, either. Tenko learned so many things… like how to stand up for myself, how to channel my energy into something useful. How to help others. What I believed to be right and wrong…” Her words trail off and she inhales sharply. Even her eyes are looking a little red right now, though she seems determined not to cry for the moment, as long as Yumeno-san is still in need of cheering up.

Yumeno-san is looking right at her by now, her expression a mixture of wistfulness and dejection. Saihara knows that look pretty well by now, too—the look of someone who desperately wants to reach out to someone else, but is too afraid to do so.

Despite everything, Chabashira-san somehow manages a thin smile. “I don’t know how much of that was real. I don’t know if it ever happened or not, but… it doesn’t matter. Not to me.”

“Why not?” Yumeno-san’s voice cracks as she asks that single question.

“Because… Tenko is still Tenko. I don’t want to assume the worst, so I won’t. And I’m firm in my beliefs, even now. Neo-aikido is something my master and I made, not only as a sport, but for the sake of helping others… and helping someone in need is what I’m best at.” She stops and looks down at her feet, as though suddenly self-conscious. “I’m not so good at thinking about difficult things, though. So I’ve decided… I’m not gonna worry about it just yet.”

For a moment, the girl sitting on the grass looks as though she’s going to burst into tears again. Another sniffle hits her, but she just rubs under her nose with the sleeve of her shirt this time. After a few seconds, she shakes her head uncertainly.

“But… why would you help me?” That must be the question that was weighing on her the most. “If you don’t want to find out if it was all a lie or not, and you don’t want to use the phone for yourself, then why w-would you—”

Her question cuts off abruptly, and Yumeno-san takes a deep, shaky breath, weighing her next words slowly and deliberately. Finally, she says, “I don’t want to make you angry, but I wasn’t thinking… about you, Chabashira. I wasn’t thinking of anyone else, as long as I could try to f-find my master. You offered to help, and I d-didn’t… I didn’t care, as long as it let me get what I wanted. I’m sorry, but that’s—that’s the truth about me.”

“Tenko.”

Yumeno-san blinks. “What?”

“You can call me Tenko, Yumeno-san. I mean, only if you want to, of course.” Chabashira-san’s smile is gentler than Saihara has ever seen it, despite hearing something which he was sure would hurt her feelings. “I could tell you were hurting, Yumeno-san. You don’t express yourself as much as you should… Not very often at all, actually… but I could still tell that you were in a lot of pain.”

“I don’t… understand.”

“Well… you heard what I said to Saihara-san earlier, right? I told him that I knew you wouldn’t hurt anyone else, even when you’re sad, or scared, or in pain. But I thought if I went with you, then I could… make sure, I guess? That I could… um… well…” Her smile falters just a little as she slowly trails off.

Chabashira-san looks as though she’s lost for words, trying to figure out how to express all of the different emotions inside her at once. For someone so talkative and energetic, she seems hesitant—perhaps uncertain about how Yumeno-san might take her words, or else maybe about just what it is that she’s feeling right now.

Saihara understands that uncertainty, more or less. Or at least, he’s been in enough uncertain situations over the last few days to sympathize. And so, he tries to give her a small push in the right direction.

“I think…” he says, and all three pairs of eyes turn to him, clearly surprised to hear him speak up again. As always, the feeling of being stared at so directly makes him want to squirm. But he presses on with his theory regardless. “I think what Chabashira-san means is that… she does trust you, Yumeno-san. But that’s why she had to come with you. So that you had someone to look out for you, and make sure that you didn’t… do anything that could hurt yourself, even by accident. She probably wanted to help you so you would know you weren’t going through this alone.”

Chabashira-san had flashed him quite a look when he first started speaking, but the pressure from her gaze lightens considerably by the time he finishes. By then, she nods several times, looking relieved. “He’s right.” The admission clearly costs her something, but she puts it aside for now. “That’s… exactly it. I didn’t want anyone else to hurt you either, Yumeno-san, but I also… needed to make sure you weren’t going to hurt yourself over this. And if you had kept worrying about all of this—that phone, and your master, and everything else… Tenko could tell that it was going to hurt you.”

Like a wound left to fester, Saihara thinks. He’s finally starting to see the whole picture, now.

Yumeno-san would have tried to sneak out sooner or later, whether it was during her night shift or while she was on some other duty. Chabashira-san had decided to stand by that decision, helping her to rip the band-aid off of that wound all in one go, trying to mitigate whatever consequences might come from it. And Angie-san’s own wounds and mistrust had only been aggravated by the fallout, as she clung to the idea of safety in numbers while distrusting every member of her group more and more all the while.

“I would rather be here if something went wrong than leave you all alone to deal with it by yourself,” Chabashira-san says, and her words are so sincere, so well-intended, that Yumeno-san instantly hides her head against her knees again, sniffling with renewed intensity.

For the first time all night, Saihara allows himself to breathe a sigh of relief. But only a small, short one. After all, the night is hardly over. Things seem to be winding down now, but he still has to come to a decision about what to do tonight, and so does Angie-san. And even if, by some miracle, they all manage to agree to keep this secret for now—there’s no guarantee that this whole fiasco won’t come back to bite them further down the line.

He decides it’s best if he tries to seek some sort of compromise. “Chabashira-san?” he asks. “Could you let go of Angie-san now, please? I… think her arms must be sore.”

“Eh?” She looks startled. “But if I let go of her… she might try and run back to the school, and…”

Saihara shakes his head. “I don’t think she would.” Not by now, anyway. But just to be safe, it’s probably best to ask. “Angie-san, would you finish talking with us, first? I don’t think anyone is going to use the phone, or… or hurt anyone else. So if you could just stay here with us until we figure out what we’re going to do… um, well…”

Angie-san looks at him long and hard before scoffing—but it’s a small, rather defeated sound. “You’re phrasing it like a question, but you’re not really giving Angie much of a choice, are you Shuuichi? I mean, even if I tried to run back, I bet Tenko would just catch me again and pin me down.”

He honestly can’t think of anything to say in response to that. Neither can Chabashira-san, apparently, because she tries to meet Angie-san’s gaze briefly and fails, looking back down at her feet again instead.

Angie-san lets them both stew in silence for a few more minutes, then breaks the tension with a sigh of her own. “Fine. If you let go, Angie won’t go running off or anything.” She pauses, and then a shadow of her former self flickers across her face as her bottom lip juts out in something resembling a pout. “My shoulders hurt. You didn’t need to yank my arms all the way back like that.”

“I-I wasn’t trying to hurt you…” Chabashira-san protests weakly, but she still obliges and lets go of the other girl at long last, taking a step or two back for good measure. “I know that… probably isn’t the best excuse, but still. Tenko would never, ever hurt someone seriously.”

That doesn’t sound too terribly convincing from a girl who threatens to throw people to the ground on an almost-constant basis, but Saihara does think she means it. At the very least, Ouma-kun had never mentioned anything about her hurting someone else—Chabashira-san had always been a victim, as far as he knew. Hopefully this time, he could help keep her from becoming one.

Angie-san stretches her arms from side to side, rubs at her sore shoulders as if to get the aches and pains out, and fixes both Chabashira-san and Yumeno-san with a hard, appraising look very unlike her usual smiles and lackadaisical prayers. Whatever they were going to do from this point on, it seemed that she, at least, was taking it quite seriously.

“You can’t ever lie to Angie about something like this again,” she finally says. “If you do, Angie will know it. God will know it, and they’ll tell me. And then I’ll make sure to tell everyone else about what happened tonight.”

Yumeno-san, still hugging her knees as she sits on the ground, looks at the other girl with open surprise. “You make it sound like you still wanna stay in our group.”

Admittedly, Saihara is surprised by that too. He hadn’t thought she would want anything to do with the other two girls, after everything that had transpired tonight.

Her answer comes convincingly enough, though. “To keep an eye on you,” she says coolly, “not for any other reason. I’d rather be the first one to know if you two ever get up to something again, instead of the last.”

If nothing else, she seemed to have decided that they were both (relatively) harmless. Even if she didn’t trust them, per se, this seemed the first step towards toleration. Skepticism was better than outright hostility.

And, at the very least… they had managed to avoid the worst-case scenario tonight. Perhaps Angie-san wasn’t so sure any of her other classmates were likely to be less of a threat, if she found herself in a similar situation.

Yumeno-san and Chabashira-san both look at each other wordlessly—and for once, the former takes the lead, rather than letting the other girl speak for her (or over her). She sniffles one last time, wipes her nose with her sleeve, and then pushes herself wearily back on her feet with her hands before nodding her agreement.

Seeing that, Chabashira-san has no objections. She nods too, looking almost weak with relief. “This means so much, Angie-san. Thank you, thank you so, so—”

Before she can say anything else, Angie-san cuts her off, holding up one finger as a warning. For the first time all night, she manages a smile something rather like her old self. “Ah-ah, don’t thank me just yet, Tenko. I’m not doing this as a favor.” Her eyes are keen: not dangerous, but certainly suspicious. She must be thinking of safety in numbers once again. “Don’t you even think of trying to sneak away from Angie again, or I’ll know exactly what you’re up to. And if anything happens to me—Shuuichi, you’d be able to put two and two together, right?”

He swallows nervously. “O-Of course.” Not, he thinks, that it’ll ever come to that. I hope.

Angie-san spreads her hands, as though that decides it. “So, you see? Even if you try and get rid of me so you can do this again, you won’t be able to get rid of Shuuichi, too. Not without it looking really suspicious for you both.”

“…We wouldn’t do that,” Yumeno-san says quietly. There’s no hint of anger or indignation to her tone, but for once… she doesn’t sound completely emotionless either. “I don’t want to try this again, either. It wasn’t a good idea. And I’m… sorry, about everything.”

The other girl seems not entirely convinced, but certainly not as livid as she was before, either. Even though she doesn’t say anything else, Saihara decides it’s the best they can hope for under the circumstances.

He still has things he’d like to discuss about what happened tonight, especially since he’s not so convinced that leaving their group arrangement unchanged is the best plan. Most importantly though, it was clear that something had to be done about the phone booth. They needed to find a way to take care of it without violating any school rules—otherwise it was just a matter of time before someone else rose to the bait.

Something clearly needed to change in their strategy, but he’s not so sure now is the best time or place to discuss it. Or if he even has the energy, for that matter. Somehow, tonight’s fiasco had left him even more drained than the nonstop wailing of Monokuma’s time limit video a few days prior; as long as everyone is safe and sound for the time being, he’s happy to wait until later to voice his concerns. When he suggests they all head back to the school building, no one objects.

As they start walking back, Chabashira-san offers a hand to Yumeno-san, who still looks somewhat shaky on her feet. And for the first time since he’s known her, the smaller girl accepts and murmurs a quiet, “Thank you Tenko.” She lets Chabashira-san rest one hand against her shoulder, steadying her as they trudge across the courtyard. Angie-san walks a little ways behind them, not wanting to get too close, but evidently not wanting to stray too far, either.

Like that, they make their way back to the moonlit entrance. Saihara doesn’t have his watch on him (at this point, maybe he should just start sleeping with it on), but he’s pretty sure it hasn’t even been a full hour since he left the library yet.

“What should we tell Iruma-san, when we go back in there?” Chabashira-san asks. Her expression darkens with renewed apprehension, and her mouth twists in a way that makes him sure she’s gnawing at the inside of her cheek again.

He can understand her concerns—Iruma-san is hardly known for her discretion, after all. But he shakes his head and says, “I’m pretty sure you won’t need to say much. She’ll probably just be relieved that nothing bad happened to any of you.” It wasn’t like she’d want to jeopardize her own position either, by telling anyone else what had happened during their night watch.

“Relieved?” Yumeno-san muses about that for a moment or two. “…I dunno. Iruma doesn’t really strike me as the worrying type…”

“She was worried, though,” he tells her. “About all of you. I think she was just… too scared to know what she should do.”

Yumeno-san looks down at the floor, looking half-parts guilty and uncertain. “If you say so,” she says, not arguing the point any further.

The four of them walk a little ways further, but once they reach the staircase leading down to the basement, Saihara pauses, leaning his head back against the wall behind him as he takes a slow, deep breath.

“Are you okay, Shuuichi?” Angie-san asks, somewhat guardedly.

“Did something happen? Do you need help?” Chabashira-san’s voice isn’t unkind.

He gives them all a weary smile. “No, I’m fine, just… tired.” Really, incredibly tired. “It’s, uh, been a long night. I feel like I might need to clear my head a little before I go back down there.” He couldn’t face that lantern-lit room just yet, or the anxiety he was bound to feel over his classmates’ shadowed, sleeping figures.

The three girls are silent. They share a glance between one another, then look back at him. Asking to be left alone even briefly was no doubt suspicious, under these circumstances—but then, they had just returned from their very own suspicious nighttime venture, and weren’t in the best position to point fingers.

All he wants is a few minutes, really. Not for the phone booth. Not for Monokuma’s motive. Just time in the dark to catch his breath, clear his head, and muster his courage a little before going back in there. He feels as if he’s been constantly on-edge ever since this killing game started.

“Don’t take too long, okay?” Chabashira-san says at last. “And don’t wander off too far.”

Saihara breathes a sigh of relief. “Thank you. I won’t. And I promise I won’t... well, you know.” Not only did he have no interest in going anywhere near that phone booth again after tonight, but it wasn’t as if he’d be able to do so even if he did want to. He felt thoroughly drained of all his energy, like a battery sapped dry.

But she shakes her head. “Tenko already knows you wouldn’t do that, Saihara-san. You might be a menace—” Her mouth twists in displeasure for a moment. “—but I can tell you aren’t the kind of person who would do something like that, either.”

He blinks, taken aback by her generous assessment. It was one thing to hear her vouch with baseless confidence for Yumeno-san, who she clearly liked, and another thing entirely to hear her vouch for himself. “You… can?” He’s too tired to even ask how, or why.

She shrugs. “Well, sort of. If we actually had a full sparring session, I’d be able to tell a lot more… but I’m pretty sure, anyway. Not,” she adds quickly, “that you’re anywhere near as good of a person as Yumeno-san.”

Yumeno-san makes a noise that’s something like a very tired, somewhat stifled laugh. Saihara gives an uncertain smile, too. Part of her certainty is no doubt because that was just the way she was, but he vaguely wonders if Chabashira-san might also remember… certain things, deep down. She had said herself that she wasn’t a deep thinker; perhaps what she took for intuition was something closer to recollection.

As the girls all head downstairs, their footsteps softly padded by the nighttime darkness and barred slivers of moonlight, he tilts his head back and sighs again. Despite the fact that it was all over—that things had even ended well, despite all expectations—there’s still a tightness in his chest, a looming feeling of dread he can’t shake.

What is it that has him so frightened, here in this empty, silent hallway? A feeling of movement, out of the corner of his eye? A shadow that doesn’t look as though it’s falling quite the way it should? Or is he just afraid of the dark?

He closes his eyes for a moment, grits his teeth. And then, when he opens his eyes again, he walks slowly, slowly, past the entryway. He’s not heading outside to the courtyard, no; he still has no interest in the phone booth. Instead he walks towards the far hallway on the opposite end of the ground floor: the hallway nearer the dining hall where they ate their meals every day.

There, he waits. It feels like an eternity, but realistically it’s probably only about a minute or so. And then, he finds himself completely unsurprised when he hears footsteps, coming out of the dark towards him.

Saihara opens his eyes. And feels immediately as though a weight has been lifted off of him.

“Ouma-kun,” he says. His words come out more like a rasp, and suddenly he’s all-too-aware of the cold sweat slicking his palms. “It’s just you.”

I should’ve known, he thinks. I should’ve known. Ouma-kun was perceptive, after all. It made sense, that he would’ve woken up earlier, that he might’ve overheard his discussion with Iruma-san. Maybe he had even followed him to the courtyard and watched from a distance, unnoticed.

Only two days ago, the realization that Ouma-kun had been following him around in silence would never have made his knees feel so weak with relief. It might’ve had the very opposite effect, in fact. The thought is almost funny; he could laugh, if it weren’t so late.

But the other boy just stares back at him impassively, his mouth a hard line. It’s difficult to read his expressions even at the best of times, but Saihara feels his fear come back to him suddenly as he realizes there’s no sign of amusement on his face.

“What?” he asks. “What’s wrong?” A million of the worst-possible scenarios flood through his mind, and he’s suddenly, terribly sure that something awful has happened to one of their classmates somehow.

Ouma-kun examines the ragged nails on one of his hands (still too short, bitten down past the quick again and again). Then he sighs. “’It’s just me’… that’s what you said, right Saihara-chan?” His voice is cold. “That’s the problem. It’s not just me.”

Saihara opens his mouth to ask what he means, but he doesn’t get a chance—the sound of a second pair of footsteps cuts him off. There’s a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, like nausea, or sudden vertigo from free-fall, as Harukawa-san approaches from behind the other boy, her face a cold mask of anger. And then he doesn’t need to ask at all.

Ouma Kokichi had spent the last thirty minutes trying to resign himself to the fact that he was probably going to wind up inside the locker yet again. It wouldn’t be the first time that Harukawa-chan had sent him back there; why should the previous time have been the last?

He had still suspected, somewhere deep inside him, that it would come to this sooner or later. That he would have to face the facts and admit that this time, too, had run its course. Just because they had been having an unusually good streak of luck this time around didn’t mean anything: you could roll a six on a die multiple times in a row, and still just as easily roll a one the next time.

The first one on the die had come when he woke up. Well no, to be more accurate it had come whenever those three idiots went sneaking off to the phone booth in the middle of the night. But someone had been bound to try breaking the rules eventually, and he supposes it doesn’t really make much of a difference which of his classmates were stupid enough to try it.

So he would probably have been better off had he stayed asleep. But as luck would have it (a factor which had, of course, not been on his side now or any time prior that he could think of), he was a very light sleeper—the payoff for having always slept with one eye open in this killing game. So the sound of Iruma-chan’s shrill whispers and frightened, squeak-like noises had woken him as suddenly and surely as a bell ringing in his ears.

That his classmates had gone to the phone booth, that Iruma-chan hadn’t told anyone… none of these things had surprised him. They were expected outcomes, on some level, though not ideal.

But he has to admit: even he wasn’t expecting to look quietly over to the space opposite his futon and find that Saihara-chan was missing, too.

He had shifted in his sheets then, the better to overhear the two of them. With his eyes closed, his chest rising and falling slowly and softly, no different than if he had been truly asleep, he had thought wryly to himself that lying wasn’t a talent that relied only on words. And he had made out the gist of the situation like that, more or less.

Part of him had expected Saihara-chan to come and shake him awake… but he didn’t. The other boy stepped over him, tiptoeing around the rest of their sleeping classmates until he was across the room and out the door, hurrying along to try and right a situation which Ouma very much doubted he was equipped to handle on his own.

He had lain there fuming a few moments, debating briefly with himself about what to do, all the while knowing his mind was already made up. Common sense said the safest place to be was still here, in the library; it said that most likely one of the three girls was already dead, that the culprit was bound to be one of the remaining three, and that until the lights were on and the sun high in the sky atop the dome, he was better off saving his energy for the class trial that was no doubt ahead of them.

But stronger even than the biting, cynical I-told-you-so’s of common sense was the feeling of anger, hot and bubbling beneath the surface. It pushed away the empty resignation waiting to wash over him, and even won out over a worried lump of real, genuine concern for his classmates which he was somehow able to muster even after all these times, painfully gnawing away somewhere near the pit of his stomach.

There was no sense waiting here in the dark, feeling petty and unreasonable like someone whose gym partner had ditched them for someone else. Lives were at stake. He knew that.

And he also knew that he was a liar, a thief, and a sneak at his core—in which case, why not sneak around? The only one in this game who was any better at sneaking around than him was the ringleader, and he was determined to catch them sooner or later. He might as well put his many talents to use, if he was truly going to stop acting like a bystander in this game.

And so, he’d gotten up from his futon, silent as a shadow. Iruma-chan hadn’t proven very difficult to deal with; he knew her, and more importantly, how to deal with her. The more people who went missing from the library, the higher the chance that she would keep her mouth shut to protect herself. There really wasn’t any danger of her telling anyone else that he was sneaking out, too.

…Or so he’d thought.

He had only made it as far as the entryway of the school, just one step short of pushing the door open, when a hand had suddenly gripped his shoulder, roughly and unceremoniously spinning him around to face whoever had caught him in the act.

His mouth had instantly twisted with disdainful recognition at the sight of the person he least wanted to run into—meanwhile, his anger quickly soured into something more like fear. But if it was fear then it was one he wouldn’t admit to.

Another time, perhaps, he would’ve plastered a smile on his face and asked her cheerily to get her hand the hell off of him, but he hadn’t been in the mood for it then, and he wasn’t sure if he blamed her, or Saihara-chan, or the three missing girls, or any and all of the rest of his classmates. So he’d kept his mouth shut instead.

“What are you doing?” Harukawa-chan had asked. Her face gave nothing away: her eyes were fixed on him, her grip painfully taught on his shoulder.

Despite the fact that silence was the less incriminating option, he had found it in him to be just a little bit nasty, at that. “If you’re going to kill me, could you hurry up and get it over with?” This was getting a little old by now, at least for him.

He’d waited for the moment when her grip would inevitably move from his shoulder to his throat, her fingers tightening around his windpipe, crushing the life out of him—but it didn’t happen. She hadn’t killed him, for whatever reason. Yet. The key word was “yet.”

She’d just narrowed her eyes. “I’m not killing anyone, until I know what’s going on. Where did the others go, and what are you and Saihara up to?”

It would have been more reassuring if she had simply said that she wasn’t going to kill anyone, period. Not that he would’ve taken her at her word for it. Ouma had shrugged, trying to ignore how her fingers bit into his shoulder with a painful, unflinching grip that was no doubt impossible for him to shake off. “Why don’t you go ask Iruma-chan?” he’d suggested. “You know, since she woke you up and all.”

“Iruma didn’t wake me up. I woke up when I heard her and Saihara talking...” She had paused, her face still too blank for his liking. He was more familiar with her scowls and glares, after all. “I’m pretty sure I woke up once, a little before that. But I didn’t realize anyone was actually trying to leave the library, so I went back to sleep. By the time I woke up again, those other three were gone, and then I saw you leave, right after Saihara.”

“So you’re a light sleeper.” His mouth had curled into something that was half a smirk, half a grimace. “How nice.” Must be from all that assassin training, he had thought, but he didn’t dare voice the thought aloud, or her hand would definitely go for his windpipe instead. It’s a small miracle she doesn’t sleep with a knife under her pillow, too.

Harukawa-chan hadn’t looked the least bit amused. “You woke up too, I’m guessing. What’s your excuse?”

He hadn’t had any particular reply for that, unfortunately.

She had taken his silence for either resignation, or fear (he still didn’t want her to know he was afraid), and pushed back to her original point. “They went to the phone booth,” she said, her words slow and deliberate as the gears in her head were no doubt turning. “Do you think one of them already killed someone?”

“How should I know?” He’d tried not to let the bitterness leak through his tone too much. Better that he sound bitter than let his voice shake, though. “I was going to go check, before you stopped me.”

“Going to check, or going to kill one of them yourself?”

He had given her a flat stare, noting the way the filtered moonlight glinted off her eyes like the edge of a knife. “Do I look armed to you?” His voice was dry, and he had made very sure it didn’t shake at all.

She’d searched him brusquely after that, patting down his sleeping clothes like a prison guard might search a prisoner for hidden weapons of any kind. When she found nothing, the knife-edge to her gaze had softened only marginally, but at least she had taken her hand off his shoulder, and that hand hadn’t gone for his throat instead.

Finding him unarmed didn’t rule out trickery, though. It still would be plenty possible to kill someone with traps, or some weapon stolen from the warehouse and hidden elsewhere ahead of time. A deep thinker she might not be, but Harukawa Maki was very well versed in the art of killing people, and so he was absolutely sure she was just as aware of that fact as he was.

Harukawa-chan had folded her arms, clearly deliberating between what few options were left to them. She could wake up everyone else if she so chose, but given the truth about her “talent,” it might not be easy for her to explain herself. She clearly preferred to work alone whenever the opportunity presented itself—a fact which he was loathe to admit they had in common.

But not waking up the others meant that she would have to keep an eye on him herself. She could make sure he didn’t move an inch… but only if she didn’t, either. And only until the others came back, or the sun came up. And all of this was assuming that she didn’t change her mind and decide to kill him for good measure, of course.

So Ouma couldn’t say he was terribly surprised when she had come to the one remaining, inevitable conclusion, uncrossed her arms, and said, “You’re coming with me. Let’s go see what’s happened.”

It hadn’t escaped his notice that she didn’t phrase it as a question, or give him a choice in the matter. Well, he had thought, I suppose the real choice is ‘do or die.’

“There are three of them,” he’d pointed out, trying not to seem sullen, “and if it comes to blows, I can’t do anything. Do you really think marching up to them is the best option?” It had taken every ounce of willpower he had to not pointedly remind her that she was, for the moment, still supposed to be a Super High School Level Child Caretaker. She could at least act the part.

Even she apparently hadn’t liked the odds, though, because she shook her head. “We’re only getting close enough to assess the situation. If one of them uses the phone booth…” Her words had trailed off, leaving an unpleasant silence in their wake. More unpleasant still, though, was her next reminder, clipped and short: “And there aren’t three of them. There are four. Or did you forget that Saihara went, too?”

He hadn’t forgotten, but he hated her for reminding him just the same. He had wanted to tell her that Saihara-chan of all people wouldn’t use that phone booth—but on what basis? With what proof? And what was the point of arguing with her right now anyway, unless he wanted to inspire a change of heart in her and get himself killed after all?

He hadn’t thought Saihara-chan would go off to confront this situation without even letting him know (without even telling him if he had a plan), either. Yet here they were. He’s not sure if he’s angrier at Saihara-chan in this situation, or at his own unfailing certainty in his chest that the other boy was still going to do the right thing.

It would be so much easier if Ouma could just doubt him the way he had doubted all the rest of them for so long, but he supposed that route was long lost to him by now.

And so, both he and Harukawa-chan had gone outside. She’d insisted that he walk a few steps ahead of her, and he hadn’t seen any reason to argue; it wasn’t as if he could outrun her, and it made no difference whether he saw her coming or not if (or when) she decided to kill him. Dying outside would be a change of pace at least, he’d thought to himself as he looked up at the caged expanse of dark blue above them. Even if it’s not really the open sky.

His pulse had thrummed in the tips of his fingers as they neared the courtyard, just close enough to get a glimpse of the phone booth below from where they stood on the gentle grass slope. For just a moment, his cynical attempt at self-distraction had stopped—instead, he had scanned the area below (knowing that the girl behind him was no doubt doing the same thing), searching for any sign that everything had come crumbling down once again. Just like it always did.

But there were no bloodstains smearing the grass, no bodies lying prone like fallen statues. He could, just barely, make out Saihara-chan’s form, and the three girls’ as well. Even if he couldn’t hear their words from this distance, no one was dead. And no one seemed to be inside the phone booth, either.

His knees had felt weak with a rush of relief he hadn’t even thought himself capable of still feeling. Relief was probably a rash emotion in these circumstances, and foolish, all too likely to be sucker-punched by something else going wrong in the next moment (or minute, or hour). But still: no one was dead. For now. If anyone had died, he only knew of one way to bring them all back to life again, and that was to go back to the locker himself—not that he was keen on trying that particular party trick again if he could help it.

Ouma had decided that he was grateful for the distance between himself and Harukawa-chan after all, as it meant that she couldn’t see his face, or vice-versa. They stayed like that for minutes on end, until his knees ached with the chill of the midnight air. Still, they silently stared as the scene unfolded, unable to make out much of what was being said but always watching nonetheless. Waiting for the first sign of things going wrong.

Once or twice, he thought back to what she had said about “assessing the situation,” and wondered if she’d be more comfortable passing the time with a trigger at her finger.

But nothing happened—nothing violent, anyway. They had discussed plenty of things amidst themselves, and it would be a lie to say he wasn’t brimming with curiosity to know the specifics of their conversation. At one point Yumeno-chan seemed to be crying (at least no one could accuse him of being the one behind that, this time), and when Chabashira-chan let go of Angie-chan some time later, the other girl hadn’t screamed or kicked or acted too terribly injured.

That had actually surprised him somewhat. For all her talk of god’s infinite mercy, Angie-chan had hardly struck him as the forgiving type. If anything, she had been particularly quick to hold a grudge or blame others when she was running her student council. But she clearly wasn’t running back to the school, nor did she look too injured to do so. She must have decided to hold off on getting even, at least for now.

Despite all the odds against them, it seemed that they had somehow managed to avoid the worst. Perhaps that wasn’t so surprising; those three had never proven themselves to be murderers, after all. But maybe it meant that their plan (working together, keeping an eye on one another) wasn’t so hopelessly out of reach after all.

By the time Harukawa-chan grabbed him by the shoulder to get his attention, his whole body had ached in protest, sore and stiff from standing motionless in the chilly night air. It was a pointless wish, but part of him wanted his scarf, nonetheless. He had always been bad with the cold—or maybe he only felt so cold thanks to all of his nerves standing on end.

“Let’s get going, back to the school,” she had said, in a tone that brooked no argument.

The discussion in the courtyard had already appeared to be wrapping up by then. Going back was definitely the smarter course of action, if they wanted to avoid detection. For what purpose, though? he'd wondered. Assassins usually stick to the shadows, but maybe it’s best that they see her coming.

Four people (five, actually, counting himself) was quite a lot of people to have to silence, though. With only one person, perhaps two, she might have been able to justify killing a potential threat, removing the weak link in their group. But this was too many weak links at once, even for her. And it wasn’t as though she could hope to do it cleanly, either. Iruma-chan could still point a finger back to her, if something happened tonight.

There were plenty of shadows to hide in, and when the group from the courtyard came trudging back, the two of them went completely unnoticed. Ouma didn’t need to ask what her plan was: Saihara-chan was bound to notice he was missing when he went back to the library, since their futons were right across from each other. He would definitely ask Iruma-chan, or come looking for him himself. And so, whether or not they were discovered, Harukawa-chan would get her chance at an interrogation sooner or later.

At least she couldn’t prepare a crossbow for this particular interrogation. His back had spasmed for a moment at the memory of that god-awful poison, but he still refused to breach the silence with his would-be killer. Captor. Interrogator. Whatever she was at the moment.

As it turned out, they hadn’t even needed to wait very long. Saihara-chan had asked to be given a moment alone, claiming he wanted to clear his head, and in that moment Ouma knew he must have noticed, or at least suspected that someone was watching him. At least his skills as a detective weren’t going to waste.

And that was how they had found themselves like this: standing furtively in the unlit hallway beside the dining hall, waiting to be cross-examined by a girl who was more than capable of killing them both.

As Saihara-chan stares past him in abject horror, realization dawning on his face, Ouma spreads his hands in resignation. “In my defense,” he says, “she would’ve caught you even if I hadn’t come along. You were a lot noisier than you thought, back when you were talking to Iruma-chan.”

“I’m not armed,” Harukawa-chan says bluntly, echoing his words to her from earlier that night.

He just can’t help it; he turns back around and gives her a cold, mistrustful smile. “Oh, I’m sure you can still manage with your bare hands. The bruises you left on my shoulder can attest to that.”

She doesn’t deign that with a response, but the look she fixes him with is answer enough, hard and reproachful.

Saihara-chan shakes his head weakly, still trying to grasp the full situation. “Wh-What’s…? I don’t…” He swallows, and even in the darkness Ouma can still make out a thin sheen of sweat forming on his face. “Harukawa-chan, this isn’t what it looks like. I didn’t use the phone booth… no one did.”

“I know. I followed you, to see what was going on.” Her voice is as terse as a slap in the face.

“Y-You did? But why is Ouma-kun… with you?”

Why do you think? he wants to say, but doesn’t. “I got lonely,” he says instead. “I woke up and you weren’t there to chase out the monster hiding in the closet, so I went looking for you. But Harukawa-chan seems convinced I was going to go bash all your brains in with that big, rusty hammer I don’t actually have.”

It seems she can’t bring herself to ignore him any longer; she turns around to face him, a frown forming at the corners of her mouth. “Were you always this talkative?”

“Only when I’m in the company of someone I hate.” He puts a hand over his heart, still smiling. To be fair, it wasn’t a complete lie: he had scarcely said this many words altogether since he came out of his bedroom.

“Could you stop it?” Saihara-chan’s voice almost cracks under the strain; he’d almost snapped the words. “Ouma-kun, please be quiet. You’re making things worse.”

Ouma sneers, but the only retorts he can think of would just add fuel to the fire. And lingering on the fact that Saihara-chan had not, in fact, let him in on his plan or come to him for help would do nothing but make him sound like a petulant child.

It occurs to him that this is probably precisely why the other boy hadn’t tried to wake him up, but the thought only irritates him more. Sure, maybe he wasn’t actually the center of the universe, but it wasn’t like he was entirely to blame for this situation, either. If Harukawa-chan did kill them both, then at least 80% of the blame should go to Saihara-chan.

“I hardly think I’m making it any worse than the three out of four people who left their shift in the middle of the night,” he says after a pause, finding his words again. “Or the person who found out about it first and didn’t tell anyone else.” It feels like something of a victory when he sees the other boy flinch.

Harukawa-chan crosses her arms, no longer interested in what he has to say. Instead, she turns to Saihara-chan again. “Did you have any kind of plan, when you went to talk to them?” she asks.

It’s almost as though he doesn’t understand the question. The detective winces again, stammering for excuses or explanations which fail to come to mind. “I-I just… I didn’t. I didn’t know how much time was left, and I just wanted to make sure that everyone was still ali—” He swallows, cutting himself off. “Still okay. I didn’t want to wake everyone else up in case…”

“In case everyone started panicking and didn’t want to go along with the plan anymore?” Ouma supplies helpfully. Despite his accusations a moment ago about not waking the others, he can’t truly blame Saihara-chan for that much, at least. His own experiences said that was probably (definitely) what would have happened. And he doubted Yumeno-chan would have gotten off lightly, either, if everyone else started thinking of her as a traitor and a threat.

Saihara-chan just nods, still looking pale and stricken in their dark, dim surroundings.

There’s a brief silence between the three of them. And then—

“…That’s exactly why I didn’t want to go along with this stupid plan in the first place,” Harukawa-chan says, as though that’s any sort of revelation to them.

Ouma can think of about a million different quips he’d just love to respond with, but he doesn’t say any of them this time. Instead he just watches her shrewdly as she taps a finger lightly against the crook of her arm, unable to make out her expression in the dark from where he’s standing.

“You, and Akamatsu, and Momota, you’re all really good at coming up with these plans where everyone ‘works together’ and ‘keeps an eye on one another.’ But none of you ever thinks about what to do after that.” Her tone is matter-of-fact. “Things go wrong. People step out of line. That much is guaranteed, no matter what you do,” she says, “and you have to decide what you’re going to do about it when it happens.”

Is she speaking from experience? he wonders dryly. All the training she must have undergone couldn’t have been easy. Perhaps where she came from, the punishment for one person ‘stepping out of line,’ as she called it, was collective—not entirely unlike the killing game itself. Although that was part of the problem in and of itself…

“I-I know that,” Saihara-chan tells her. “I know it’s not like we can expect everyone to follow the rules all the time. But…” He closes his eyes for a moment, swallows again. “It’s not like we can just tell everyone the whole story about what happened tonight, either. They would all turn on each other.”

“Then you need to take responsibility and do something.”

The other boy makes a startled noise in his throat that, under any other occasion, would actually be somewhat amusing.

She continues without giving him a chance to interrupt. “You pushed for this plan harder than almost anyone, and for whatever reason, people seem like they actually listen to you.” There’s a slight pause. “And I guess I was wrong, because you have kept things working pretty well. Until now,” she concedes. She doesn’t specify whether she believes she was wrong about the plan or the detective, but Ouma is pretty sure she means both.

Saihara-chan doesn’t seem to know how to respond, or whether her words were even intended as a compliment or not. But it doesn’t matter, because she presses on, cutting over his stammering with no hesitation.

“What I mean is,” she says, “something needs to change. If something like this happens again, you need to have a plan next time. You need to have a deterrent.”

“A deterrent?” Ouma finally throws self-restraint to the wind, his voice low and incredulous. It’s not as though the other boy was responding anyway, and this is a laughable suggestion if he’s ever heard one, coming from her. “Killing people isn’t a ‘deterrent,’ Harukawa-chan, it’s just good old-fashioned murder. Sure, the people you kill might not do anything bad again after they’re dead, but that’s sort of the whole point of this killing game, in case you missed it. It’s what Monokuma wants you to do.”

Harukawa-chan whirls around, and for an instant he’s sure he’s gone too far: she’s going to kill him, going to choke the life right out of him once again, or maybe snap his neck before he can even register the pain.

She doesn’t, though. Instead she looms over him, cold anger clear in every line of her face, every muscle tensed along her arms. With an expression that says she’d like nothing more than to throw him against the wall, or maybe pummel him, she asks, “Do you have a problem with me?”

 A problem? He almost laughs, but stops himself at the last second, and it’s just as well—it probably would have come out slightly unhinged. Best not to sound the way he had after Gonta’s trial if he can help it. “I have several problems,” he admits. “Some of them with you, yes.”

“Name it.” Her voice is lower than his own, and twice as chilling.

“Not sure I follow your drift.”

“I said name it. I’ve seen you staring at me before this, always looking like there’s something you want to say. And now that you’re finally talking, you just won’t shut up. So tell me what your problem is, whatever it is I did.” He watches as her hands curl into fists at her side, but she still doesn’t touch him. “Or else get off my back.”

He almost considers saying it. …Almost. Never mind the fact that she wouldn’t understand at all, never mind the fact that she might kill him again just for accusing her. The words are on the tip of his tongue, but they die before they can leave his mouth, and he swallows them bitterly along with his pride.

What would be the point in telling her? He’s here, alive before her very eyes. She would only think he was messing around, refusing to answer the question. Or perhaps that he was just crazy. He could go a more familiar route—could tell her that he knew all about her real talent, and what she was capable of. But that had never worked out for him before, and it would only put Saihara-chan in greater danger. She didn’t know that the other boy already knew, after all.

“What, now you’ve suddenly got nothing to say?” The question comes when he fails to respond, breaking the tense silence between them. Her eyes are fixed on him, narrowed in appraisal. If he didn’t know any better, he might almost think she really did want to know the answer.

Too bad for her. Ouma looks away first, staring long and hard at the wall opposite them instead, unable to make out any details beyond the vague, inkish-black outline of the warehouse door in the dark hallway.

Saihara-chan finally manages to find his courage—no doubt he must have been just as sure as Ouma himself that a murder was about to take place. When he speaks up again, his voice is shaking slightly. “Harukawa-san… p-please don’t do anything that you’d regret. Don’t hurt him. Please.”

Her fists finally unclench and she takes a step back from him, sighing. “I’m not here to kill him. Or you, for that matter.” She throws a derisive glance Saihara-chan’s way as he swallows nervously. “And I wasn’t talking about killing people earlier, either. When I said you need a deterrent, what I mean is, you need to have a way to prevent people from acting out.”

The other boy still looks lost, too nervous to understand what it is she’s implying, but the meaning of her words dawns on Ouma quickly. “You mean we need an enforcer,” he says, and this time he keeps his voice flat and unemotional.

She looks his way again, but when she’s unable to detect any spite in his words, she gives him a terse nod. “Maybe. You need someone who can prevent stuff before it happens, instead of cleaning it up after it’s already done.”

Even in the darkness, Saihara-chan’s face looks crestfallen as realization hits him a moment later. Her words must have struck an uneasy chord for him—a reminder, perhaps, of everything he had claimed to hate about being a detective so much.

“You got lucky tonight,” Harukawa-chan says, her voice just a touch gentler. “But you couldn’t have known that nothing would happen. That kind of lucky break won’t come around a second time.”

“…You’re right.” The other boy knows it, as Ouma knows it, but that probably doesn’t make the admission any easier for him. “You’re right, but…”

“But what are you suggesting, exactly?” Ouma steps in again, although for Saihara-chan’s sake, he tries to keep his words as non-confrontational as possible this time. “Locking people up before they’ve actually done anything?” Maybe poisoning and torturing them too? he wants to add, but he thinks better of it. She’d probably like nothing more than to lock him up, come to think of it. What a shame that when he already tried doing that to himself, they just wouldn’t leave him alone.

He sees a flicker of doubt in her eyes, and there was the crux of the problem: in order for anyone to enforce order in this makeshift group of theirs, it had to be someone people could trust. It couldn’t be someone power-hungry or eager to incite others—and in their case, it couldn’t be the unknown ringleader in their midst, either.

Everything he knew about her by now said that Harukawa-chan wasn’t the ringleader. But that hardly made her trustworthy. He still wouldn’t say her secret aloud, not with Saihara-chan’s life at stake too, but it spanned the silence between them like a chasm that couldn’t be crossed. There was too much blood on her hands for him to ever trust her… as there was too much blood on his own.

“…Maybe not locking them up, no.” Thankfully, she concedes the point without him needing to say anything else. “Or maybe I’m not the right person for the job. But you need to switch the groups around, if nothing else.”

Saihara-chan frowns. “If we did something like that out of nowhere, everyone would wonder why. There’s no way people wouldn’t get suspicious.”

“It doesn’t have to be all the groups,” she says. “Just let me handle Yumeno and the rest. I can switch with one of them, can’t I?”

“I… I guess.” The detective first looks taken aback, then thoughtful. After tonight, it’s true that making some changes to that particular group would be for the best—the tension had been brewing among them ever since the other day, and had only gotten worse from there. “I’ll see what I can do, tomorrow… but, um…” He trails off awkwardly. “Harukawa-san? Can I ask why?”

There’s a long pause. “That whole group is a mess—most of them might as well be really big kids.” She hesitates, and then, with just a touch of self-deprecation, she adds, “And kids have always been easy for me to handle, whether I liked it or not. I’ll keep an eye on them.”

A truth within a lie. Not bad. Ouma has to give her credit where credit is due, although he doesn’t feel like giving her much else.

It’s late by the time the three of them decide to return to the library. Before they descend the stairs, he catches one last glimpse of the moon slanting through the barred windows of the hallway, higher than it had been before. They’re basked in one last sliver of cold, unfeeling, artificial moonlight before they’re all plunged into the almost-total darkness of the basement.

Yumeno-chan and the others on watch glance at the three of them when they enter the room, then look away quickly without saying a word. Iruma-chan must have filled them in on their absence, no doubt. But since everyone is back, safe and sound, they don’t press for answers. They’ll keep our secret if we keep theirs, he thinks. Now there’s a clichéd game if I’ve ever heard of one.

Harukawa-chan returns to her futon as he and Saihara-chan settle into theirs. He can feel the other boy’s eyes on him, feel the unvoiced questions and a million other things he must want to say—but Ouma ignores him, turns away, and doesn’t sleep another wink until morning comes.

---

To say that breakfast is tense the next day would be an understatement.

Once it was time for Yumeno-chan’s group to wake the others, everything was seemingly back in place, a façade of normalcy settling over them after the near-failure of the previous night’s events. So no one knew about what had happened last night.

No one knew—but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that something was amiss. Especially when Ouma was hardly trying to hide it.

Of course, that’s not to say that he throws a fit or anything. Although he might be feeling petty and unreasonable, he’s well aware that anything too drastic would result in not only the rest of his group asking what the problem was, but everyone else as well. So he doesn’t raise his voice, and he doesn’t revert to the numb and unresponsive behavior of a few days ago either.

But as they eat their breakfast, it’s noticeable to everyone with more than half a brain that he spends the whole meal without saying so much as a word to Saihara-chan.

As it turns out, Kiibo and Hoshi-chan both have more than half a brain; they share a glance first with each other, then with the detective, even as Ouma whittles down his stack of pancakes and maintains an amiable enough conversation with the two of them.

Even without looking his way, he knows Saihara-chan’s eyes are on him, too: exhausted, red-lined eyes with dark circles under them. He knows the other boy didn’t get much sleep even after they finally got back last night—he could hear the sounds of him tossing and turning in his futon throughout the night, as though having a fitful dream. Under other circumstances, he might have noted it as something to ask him about later. Not today, though.

Although Hoshi-chan adopts his usual policy of strict refusal to pry (a much-appreciated policy, at that), Kiibo just can’t seem to keep his curiosity at bay. “Is… Is everything alright, Ouma-kun? Saihara-kun?” he asks tentatively. “You two seem rather… er, unwell.” He had probably considered saying “strained,” or “unpleasant,” but was too tactful to do so.

Ouma can feel the detective’s gaze leave him at that, even as he maintains his own posture perfectly, sipping from a mug of rich black tea that’s almost hot enough to scald his throat. It’s a lighter blend today. Something floral, he thinks, still keeping his attention decidedly off the other boy. Darjeeling, maybe. At least he couldn’t fault this god-awful school for its abundant selection of tea blends.

“Yeah, I… I guess I just didn’t sleep very well last night,” Saihara-chan says, and Ouma has to stop his eyes from flicking towards his direction when he hears him admit it after all. “I just had a lot on my mind, and it was hard for me to fall asleep.”

This doesn’t account for the less-than-warm atmosphere between the two of them at the breakfast table, but Kiibo nods nonetheless. “That’s no good,” he says with a sympathetic frown. “After Monokuma’s previous motive, we should be trying to get all the rest we can. It’s not a very efficient use of energy, spending the night tossing and turning.”

Ouma considers pointing out that not all of them can press a button and enter sleep mode like a laptop, but decides against it. He’s feeling rather magnanimous to all but one of them this morning, after all. He maintains his silence instead and douses his stack of misshapen pancakes in enough maple syrup that it nearly runs off the edges of the plate.

Saihara-chan just sighs. “I know… Hopefully I’ll be able to sleep a little more easily tonight.”

Despite his complete and undivided attention being focused on his breakfast, Ouma still finds the conversation shifting back towards himself again after that. “What about you, Ouma-kun? We do have another shift tonight…” Kiibo raises a hand to his metallic chin, looking pensive. “Will you be able to handle the night watch later on, or was your sleep unrestful as well?”

“Nope, not me! I’m just fine—I slept like a log last night.” In the past, he might have said this with an edge to his voice that was sweeter and more artificial than the maple syrup pooling on his plate, but now he simply says it in what passes for a normal tone. It’s still a lie, of course, but he’d like to think that it’s progress. Perhaps it’s even halfway believable to anyone who wasn’t there to see last night’s events unfold.

He can feel Saihara-chan’s eyes back on him every now and then after that: trying not to look at him, failing, and always glancing away once again.

It’s not until after breakfast that they actually get a chance to speak one-on-one—well, “one-on-one” might not be entirely accurate, since they’re still technically in their group of four. But the cavernous space and lengthy rows of the warehouse offer them as close to privacy as they can get in these circumstances.

They were assigned to warehouse duty after breakfast, a task which was about as dull as it sounded. All they needed to do was go through the room and take stock of what was there, with two of them replacing any inventory they might need for the library, and two of them keeping an eye out for anything new that might look useful.

The room was so huge that it was impossible for them to keep an accurate account of everything that was there. However, the sheer size of the place wasn’t without its benefits; they were still discovering new items even now, thrown haphazardly under some piles in the corner, or placed high up on hard-to-reach shelves.

Some of the objects he saw looked as if they might actually help make their night watch shifts a little easier, like a sealed plastic bag of pocket-sized flashlights wedged to the right of a pile of exercise mats. Or something that might have been a stack of binoculars, which towered on a shelf much too high for Ouma to reach without a ladder of some kind. Other items were simply recreational, like games, exercise equipment, or individually-packaged snacks that didn’t need to be stored in the kitchen.

Of course, they couldn’t just go running around the place willy-nilly. Someone might go getting less-than-honest ideas into their head, and who knew what anyone with sticky fingers might try to sneak out of the warehouse if left to their own devices? He had seen a fair amount of irony in Akamatsu-chan being the one to bring up those potential dangers back when they had first suggested warehouse duty as a group, but he hadn’t said anything, of course.

And so, their four person group is now something closer to two groups of two, as long as they stay here in the warehouse. It comes as no surprise to him when Kiibo suggests that he and Hoshi-chan examine one side of the warehouse inventory, leaving Ouma and Saihara-chan to investigate the rows on the other side. Neither of them objects to the proposal—although neither of them says a word to one another, either. Once the other two boys are out of sight, the silence settles back in on them, leaving only the muffled echoes of their footsteps on the hard concrete, and the occasional sounds of Kiibo’s distant attempts to strike up a conversation.

No matter, though. The silence doesn’t bother him. Ouma can wait. He’s far better at staying silent than anyone who knew him might give him credit for (as days on end holed up in his room could attest). And far better at holding a grudge, too. He keeps his mouth shut even as his brain buzzes with questions, demands, and the usual branching possibilities of “what-ifs” and “should haves.”

Eventually, he stops at a nearby stack of tatami mats piled one on top of the other, running a hand along them; the rough, dry texture is oddly calming, and the buzzing subsides just a little. He can hear the sound of the detective’s footsteps as he catches up to him, then stops behind him. Then the other boy sighs heavily, the sound of someone about to speak, and Ouma knows he’s won this little game that they’re playing.

“Ouma-kun… if you have something to say, then just just say it.”

Ouma tilts his head to one side and doesn’t turn around, but continues examining the tatami with a great deal of interest. “Now why would I do that when you clearly don’t value what I have to say anyways?”

He can hear the sound of the other boy hissing in a breath. Even now, even after everything, some part of him can’t help but feel a faint, insistent sense of satisfaction: it’s the sound of utter frustration that he caused, and therefore, a job well done.

“Is this because I asked you to stop, last night? Really? For crying out loud, Ouma-kun, you were antagonizing her, and she was already—”

Ouma whirls around at last, cutting the other boy’s words short. “I might be immature, Saihara-chan, but even I can tell when my big fat mouth is making things worse. That’s not what this is about.” That was part of it, in truth, but he’d rather go get under the press again than admit that much.

“Then what?” Saihara-chan asks. He can’t raise his voice in the warehouse, or else the echo might reach Kiibo and Hoshi-chan, but he looks well and truly fed up by now. “Why are you acting like this, giving me the silent treatment when we need to figure out a plan for later? Harukawa-chan wants to switch groups, and we still haven’t done anything about the phone booth.” He rubs at his temples with one hand, exasperated. “Now more than ever, we need to work together. You said you’d cooperate.”

“I said.” Ouma repeats the words as though they’re the most amusing thing in the world, although there’s nothing amusing about the smile he offers Saihara-chan. “Why don’t we talk about what you said, hmm? You seem awfully content to gloss right over that.”

The detective blinks, at a loss for words. “What I said? What are you even—?”

“‘Please trust me, Ouma-kun.’” His pitch rises slightly, just high enough to be mocking. “‘You can’t do everything on your own, Ouma-kun.’ ‘This plan won’t work if even one person is missing, Ouma-kun.’” He snorts, and the leering smile on his face is replaced with blank-faced assessment. “It must be nice to get to pick and choose what ‘cooperation’ means to you, huh?”

Saihara-chan stares back at him, equally blank at first. Then confusion gives way to dawning comprehension, which in turn gradually gives way to something like shame. “I-I wasn’t… picking and choosing. I meant all of those things. I still do.”

“But not enough to ‘cooperate’ with me when something actually went wrong,” Ouma notes wryly.

“It wasn’t like that!” The other boy’s denial is half-hearted at best; his eyes slide to the floor, unable to hold Ouma’s blank, unwavering stare. If he still had his hat, he’d probably be tugging it down over his face. “I mean, maybe it’s true that I could’ve handled things better, but… I-I just had a lot of things on my mind. Everything was happening at once.”

“Do you still doubt me? Is that it?”

Saihara-chan looks back up at him; his eyes widen slightly. “What? I… what?”

“I asked—” He enunciates each and every word crisply, softly. “—if you still doubt me. If you don’t trust me. If you thought I would, y’know, make things worse if I went with you.”

The detective looks at him in mute amazement for a solid ten seconds. Finally, looking almost baffled, he says: “…I didn’t ask you to come with me because I didn’t want you to get hurt.”

It’s Ouma’s turn to find himself lost for words. He stares back, waiting for a catch, a punchline of some kind. Saihara-chan’s not the kind of person to joke about something like that, though. He already knows that much, but still he waits, silent and staring.

“I-I thought… that no one else should have to risk their safety. I’m a detective, so I thought… I should be able to handle the investigation on my own. If something had already happened, I didn’t want anyone else getting hurt. Especially…” He trails off. His words hang there for only a moment, and then, hesitantly: “Especially you, since… it seemed like you had already been through enough, Ouma-kun.”

Compassion. Consideration. He should have known something like that would be the reason—something like that was always the reason, where Saihara-chan was concerned. Had he just not wanted to consider that possibility because he liked having an excuse to be petty and insufferable?

Maybe it was just because he still didn’t think he deserved that sort of thing, even now.

Ouma twists his mouth, bites the inside of his cheek. “...Yeah, well, don’t act like that excuses it.” He tries to sound harsh, but the venom’s gone out of his voice.

“I won’t.”

“You’re still a huge hypocrite,” Ouma points out. The detective isn’t even arguing with him, but he still feels the need to place emphasis on the last word. “Don’t think I can’t tell. ‘Takes one to know one,’ and all that.”

Saihara-chan actually manages a laugh at that. “You’re not wrong,” he admits. “I’ve been lecturing you a lot lately, but I guess I haven’t been taking my own advice to heart.”

“Boo. It’s no fun if you don’t deny it.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, I guess.”

They both stand there in silence. Eventually, Ouma throws his arms behind his head as he leans back against the stack of tatami mats. It’s a gesture he hasn’t made in some time, but the familiarity of it takes him back to games that were played and lost on purpose, a long time ago. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate the consideration,” he says, after a few moments have passed, “but y’know, if something does happen, I’m the one who gets a guaranteed do-over. Not you. You might as well take me along for insurance.”

Saihara-chan smiles at him—not a happy smile. Not a bitter one, either. It just looks a little sad. “It’s not guaranteed.” The other boy corrects him. “You won’t know if you’ll repeat another loop until after it’s already happened.”

Ouma remembers the press, the catbox, his muscles spasming as he lay dying. He can’t find it in him to return the smile. “I guess that’s true.”

“I’d rather it didn’t come to that.”

He tears his eyes away from the other boy and looks up at the warehouse ceiling instead. “That’s what you still don’t get, Saihara-chan. If you die—” If anyone, even a single one of their classmates, died… “—then it still comes to that. Eventually. There’s no beating this killing game after it’s already begun.”

Ouma doesn’t look away from the ceiling, but the sudden, surprised silence that follows tells him that Saihara-chan must be taken aback. “…I’m sorry,” the other boy says at last. “I’ll… I’ll try to ask you for help. If something… you know. If something happens again.”

“You better,” Ouma says, and he’s only half-joking as he finally meets the detective’s eye. “I don’t give out my trust lightly—just so you know.”

“Huh? You’re fuckin’ kidding me, right? Of course I want to get out of this shitty group, especially after all that bullshit last night!”

Saihara pinches his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose, torn between feeling somewhat exasperated with Iruma-san’s usual behavior, and simply thankful that she’d agreed to the idea at all. He supposes the latter is more appropriate, but he still takes a step or two back, trying to put distance between them as she leans forward with her hands on her hips, too close to his personal space for his liking.

“P-Please, Iruma-san… keep your voice down.” He winces just a little, looking over his shoulders to see if anyone else had heard her. She didn’t have the best grasp on what qualified as an “inside voice,” and the library wasn’t terribly private to begin with. No place in this school was, really.

She snorts, but does lower her volume just a little as she straightens up. “Whatever, you virgin. So… you’re serious, right? You can get me outta this shitfest of a group?”

He nods. “As long as Chabashira-san and the others are okay with it, I think so…”

“So, who’s offerin’ to trade places?”

“Eh?” He pauses, not sure how wise it is to go giving all the details right away. “Umm… Harukawa-san.”

The corners of her mouth curl upward as Iruma-san smirks. “Ohhh, I get it. She got tired of her own group and wants to swing, right?”

Swing? Saihara thinks, incredulous. Suddenly, he feels immensely relieved that he offered to go make the rounds himself—they had crossed paths with Harukawa-san’s group briefly after his group left the warehouse, and she had asked whether or not she should be the one to bring up the idea, but he had volunteered instead. Just imagining what the other girl’s reaction might have been if she were present to hear this now leaves him with a dull sense of horror.

Oblivious to his thoughts, Iruma-san keeps going as usual. “Makes sense! Shirogane’d bore anyone to death, and that hag Toujou is too fuckin’ strict to allow any fun. Her whole ‘no-fun-allowed’ schtick’s been rubbin’ off on Akamatsu lately too, because sometimes I’d swear that girl has some piano keys shoved up her—”

“Iruma-san!” Saihara cuts over her. He’s never been so desperate to end a conversation in his entire life. “Let’s just… leave it at that, okay? I-I still need to go talk to Chabashira-san and the others, to see if it’s okay… but if so, then there’ll probably be another group meeting soon.”

She blinks, disoriented by the interruption, but it doesn’t take long for her to regain her composure. “Alright, sure. But you better not be pulling my goddamn leg, or else I’m gonna be majorly pissed.”

Her words are forceful enough, but he’s quite sure it’s an empty threat as she walks off, hands on her hips, her mood considerably improved from earlier. No sooner had she left his corner of the library than Ouma-kun comes back, sidling up beside him with footsteps that are far too quiet.

“So, how did it go?” the other boy asks him, shifting his weight to lean back against the closest bookshelf.

Saihara knows perfectly well that he probably was close enough to overhear every word. “You could’ve just stayed with me while I asked her, you know. It wouldn’t have made that much of a difference.”

“Oh, trust me. Iruma-san’s probably happier not having me around.” Ouma-kun waves a dismissive hand.

I’m not so sure it’s not the other way around, Saihara thinks, but at this point he’s wise enough not to voice the thought aloud. The last thing he needed was to get into another argument with Ouma-kun right after they’d made up. …Still, some part of him wonders what the smaller boy and Iruma-san might have talked about last night in his absence; Ouma-kun had made a point to avoid talking to her directly up until then, always using Saihara to talk in his stead.

The other boy pauses as though sensing his thoughts, his face going blank in a way that Saihara’s come to know means he’s thinking long and hard. “Besides, we’ll have to see how this whole thing goes. I’m still not so convinced it’s a good idea.”

Saihara manages a tired smile. At least not convinced was a step above it definitely won’t work. “Because of Harukawa-san, or because of everyone else involved?”

“If I said ‘all of the above,’ would you be surprised?”

“Not really.”

Ouma-kun rolls his eyes; his hands fiddle absentmindedly at his scarf. Very close to the dark, purple-blue bruises at the hollow of his throat. “Let’s just hope Harukawa-chan is as good as her word. You seem to think it’s worth a try, in any case.”

“I do.” Saihara pauses for just a moment. “…She didn’t kill you last night. Or me. And she could’ve.”

“She probably just realized it was in her best interest not to,” the shorter boy says, but even he doesn’t sound entirely convinced by what he’s saying. His hands linger at his throat, where there are bruises… but no fresh ones.

Little by little, step by step. Saihara closes his eyes, glad to know that change isn’t impossible—for Ouma-kun, for Harukawa-san. For himself.

When he opens his eyes again, he looks back at Ouma-kun. “Come on. I need to go talk to Chabashira-san next. You should come along this time—if you want.”

Ouma-kun doesn’t refuse.

---

The group meeting takes place not long after. Much to Saihara’s relief, Iruma-san and Harukawa-san are the ones who bring up the switch in front of everyone else. He’s gotten accustomed to a lot of pressure in a short amount of time, but public speaking is still something he’d prefer to avoid if he can help it.

There are a few murmurs from the group at large when the topic comes up; most of his classmates simply sound surprised, or curious. Less common but still present, however, are voices tinged with suspicion. Some of them think it’s odd to make a request like this.

And it is, he thinks, but there’s no way we can tell them about what happened last night.

“Well… it’s not like I mind, personally, but…” Akamatsu-san frowns, tapping her fingers against her arm in something resembling a fidgety rhythm. “Is there any particular reason for it?” One-two-three, one-two-three-four, her fingers tap out a beat, and Saihara wonders if she’s thinking of some musical piece he’s not familiar with.

By contrast, Iruma-san taps the toe of her boot against the wooden floor of the library in a way that has no rhythm to it at all. “No real reason,” she says, “I just can’t fuckin’ stand being around those brats anymore. They yap all the goddamn time.”

“Y-Yumeno-san isn’t a brat!” Chabashira-san apparently can’t keep herself from interjecting. She notices her mistake a moment later and looks down, her ears slightly red. “Although… I suppose it’s true that Tenko sometimes talks a little too much…”

“Way too fuckin’ much,” Iruma-san agrees, her mouth twisting.

Momota-kun seems less skeptical than Akamatsu-san, but equally confused. “Uh… aren’t you all a pretty talkative group?” he asks.

In a rare moment of total harmony, both Iruma-san and Chabashira-san whirl around, each of them fixing him with an icy stare. “Who asked you!?”

The astronaut throws his hands up defensively. “I-I’m not sayin’ it’s a bad thing! I just, er, y’know!” He scratches at the back of his head. “I guess I don’t really get why you’d wanna switch now, if you were all kinda gettin’ used to each other before this.”

“I have to admit, I’m curious as well.” Shinguuji-kun takes the opportunity to voice his thoughts, narrowing his eyes in a way that looks far too shrewd for Saihara’s liking. “If the group truly wasn’t to your liking, you could have voiced your complaints within the first couple of days. Perhaps… after the incident with Monokuma’s time limit song. Why not say something when your group was most likely to be rife with problems?”

Iruma-san flinches a little, and Saihara has to keep himself from doing the same. It was for the best if she tried to act normal in front of everyone else—but she had never been the best at holding up under pressure.

“I-I just didn’t want to cause any problems!” she says, and Saihara prays, begs internally, that she can come up with a better excuse than that. Even at a distance, he can see the sweatdrops starting to bead on her forehead. “We… We had a lotta shit on our plates back then! I was tryin’ to be the bigger person!”

“Hmm,” Shinguuji-kun says.

Toujou-san seems just as skeptical, her face unreadable as she says, “Personally, I would like to hear from Harukawa-san.”

The whole group turns to look at the girl in question, almost as though they’d forgotten she was even there. She had been especially quiet the entire time, other than at the beginning. Now she stands near the bookshelves opposite them, her back straight and arms crossed, looking taciturn like always.

Akamatsu-san blinks. “Now that you mention it… I mean, we’ve been in the same group all this time. Is there any particular reason you want to switch?”

“Did we… um, did we make you mad, Harukawa-san?” Shirogane-san asks with a timid frown, wringing her hands as though unsure what to do with them. “You can tell us if you’re not happy with how our group has been working out.”

“It a-ain’t like that…” Iruma-san’s protest is shaky at best. “I’m tellin’ you guys…”

“And I asked to hear from Harukawa-san directly.” Toujou-san’s words give no leeway, cutting off any room for argument. “I’d prefer to hear her reasoning, her side of the story, before we come to any conclusions.”

It’s a completely reasonable request. There are more murmurs as members of the group look back and forth, clearly waiting to see what happens next. As always, the maid had an overwhelming aura of pressure about her that made it hard to refute her words. If it was already difficult enough for Harukawa-san or Iruma-san to come up with an excuse, then he couldn’t possibly hope to speak on their behalf. Saihara swallows, hard, trying to ignore the sweat that’s suddenly slicking his palms.

Unlike Iruma-san, Harukawa-san doesn’t look agitated or flustered. She simply looks… resolute. With her arms still crossed, she looks down at the library floor for only a moment or two before she raises her head, her gaze unwavering. All of them wait with baited breath to hear what she has to say.

“…It’s me.” Her tone is even, and her voice doesn’t shake. “I’m the reason. I was actually the one who asked Iruma to switch groups, not the other way around—because my talent is a lie. It’s because I’m the Super High School Level Assassin.”

Silence. No one says anything. No one moves. In the shocked, speechless stillness that falls over the library, they all stare wide-eyed and open-mouthed at this girl who so calmly admitted to being an assassin in front of them.

Saihara is no exception, even though he already knew as much well ahead of time—he simply can’t understand why she would admit to it now, of all times, or why she would lie about her reasons for wanting to switch groups. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Ouma-kun staring, gaping: rather than blank-faced, he looks outright stunned. Even he hadn’t predicted she would do this, it seemed.

Chaos ensues after that—half of his classmates scramble backwards, bumping up against the shelves against them despite the fact that there’s really nowhere else for them to go. Still, they try and put even a little extra distance between themselves and the girl who confessed to being a murderer.

Even Iruma-san staggers backwards, the heels of her boots scraping against the wooden floor in her hurry. “What the hell!?” She clasps her hands to her chest, as though afraid her arms will be cut off if she stands too close. “What the actual fuck is your fuckin’ problem!? D-Don’t come anywhere near me!”

Harukawa-san raises an eyebrow, looking rather unimpressed. To her credit though, she doesn’t move from where she’s standing.

Only Gonta seems lost, rather than angry or afraid. “Umm… Harukawa-san… this isn’t a joke, right? You’re not just telling some joke that Gonta isn’t smart enough to understand?”

“No,” she says coolly. “It’s not a joke. I really am an assassin—and I’ve been trained to kill people all my life.”

In the middle of the even bigger commotion that those words cause, Saihara manages to share a glance with Akamatsu-san. She nods, apprehensive, but puts her forefinger and thumb to her mouth, blowing a shrill whistle that manages to silence everyone in the room once more, if only for a moment.

“Before we all freak out… I think we should try and hear what Harukawa-san has to say.” The pianist looks a little pale, but she speaks so forcefully that it’s difficult for anyone to argue with her. She inhales. “You were in our group this entire time and you didn’t hurt or kill anyone, s-so I mean, there has to be a reason why you’re bringing this up now… right?” That last word comes across with just a tad more desperation than she probably intended, because she swallows nervously immediately afterward.

Hoshi-kun seems less nervous than most of the others, too—from what Saihara remembers, he had also mentioned that he had experience with murder. Perhaps he was less quick to judge others for being in similar circumstances. “You said you were ‘the reason’ you wanted to switch groups… That doesn’t mean you wanna to start killin’ people, does it?” The tennis player chews the candy in his mouth thoughtfully. “It’s the opposite, isn’t it?”

“The opposite?” Kiibo-kun asks. “What do you mean by that?”

Harukawa-san silently appraises them all; her arms are still crossed, her posture deceptively casual. Saihara wonders if she’s posed to leap away, should anyone make any sudden movements towards her.

Finally, she sighs. “You’re not wrong. I’ve been keeping it a secret this entire time, because people tend to…” She hesitates. “…overreact, whenever I do tell them. People think they need to kill me, before I kill them—and then I have to do just that, in self-defense.” There’s a cold glint in her eyes, as though daring anyone to fault her for it. “But if you’re all serious about this whole ‘no killing, keep an eye on each other’ plan… then I want in.”

For the first time ever, Ouma-kun speaks up within their group meeting. “You want us… to keep an eye on you.” His voice is so low and so unexpected that several nearby classmates jump a little, surprised to hear him participate.

“Yeah.” Harukawa-san meets his eye without looking away. “That’s what this whole plan is all about, right? I’d rather admit to it now so that everyone knows than have you all find out some other way later and turn against me. At least like this, I can do it on my own terms.”

Saihara finds himself struck by her words: what she just described fit the events that Ouma-kun had told him about perfectly, like a glove.

Suddenly, the pieces of the puzzle slide into place with an almost audible click, forming a picture he can actually begin to understand. She must remember—if not consciously, then intuitively. Just like he suggested to Ouma-kun, those memories really must still be there for the rest of them too, lingering in their subconscious. Even if they were just out of reach most of the time, it didn’t mean they were gone. And it didn’t mean they couldn’t learn from them.

“Okay, okay, buuut!” Angie-san calls out, a razor-sharp edge buried somewhere within her lilting voice. “Why our group specifically, Maki? You said you were the one who asked Miu to trade places, right? Did she know about this, too?”

Iruma-san makes a furious noise somewhere in the back of her throat. “Do I look like I fuckin’ knew about this!? I wouldn’t even be in the same room with this freak if I had a choice!”

“She didn’t know,” Harukawa-san interrupts, though not without shooting a cold look Iruma-san’s way first. “I didn’t tell anyone until just now, that way you’d all hear it at the same time. And…” She pauses for only a second. “I thought your group would be better because Chabashira is there.”

Chabashira-san looks completely taken aback as all eyes in the room immediately shift to her. “E-Eh? Wh-Why Tenko!?” She holds her hands up, gesturing them wildly as she shakes her head. “I-I’m sorry Harukawa-san, I don’t really understand…”

The assassin simply shrugs. “It’s not that difficult. There aren’t a lot of people in our group who know how to fight or defend themselves. I thought you looked like the best pick, that’s all.”

“H-Huh? I-I mean, certainly, yes, Tenko knows how to fight, but…”

“You’re trained in martial arts,” Harukawa-san says, “and in a barehanded fight, we’d probably be pretty evenly matched… No, you might actually best me. If anyone in this group has to keep an eye on me, then I’d rather it be you. Maybe then everyone else won’t be so convinced that I’ll come slit their throats at night.”

Saihara winces at the graphic mental image, but part of him still feels as though a weight has dropped off his shoulders. This must’ve been her plan all along, ever since last night: to keep an eye on Chabashira-san’s group while they kept an eye on her in return. Mutual suspicion, mutual caution—a mutual stalemate without any need for killing or torture.

It even worked as a well-timed diversion. Confessing about her talent was a risky move, for sure, but it had taken most of the attention off of Iruma-san and the others. No one was likely to press for further details when they were all too preoccupied with a sudden assassin in their midst.

He sends a careful glance in Ouma-kun’s direction and notices that the other boy must have reached the same conclusion—his earlier shock is gone by now, replaced by the usual unwavering, blank stare, his mouth a hard line. Saihara sees his hands move distractedly toward his scarf, tugging at the frayed ends of it.

No one else’s hands were at his throat, though. No murder attempts, this time. Saihara wonders if he can get the other boy to admit later that trusting Harukawa-san had been the right decision after all.

Incredibly, though, not everyone is entirely convinced by her claims. Momota-kun raises a dubious eyebrow as he speaks up. “Sorry, Harukawa, but I ain’t so sure. Come on… an assassin, really?” He shakes his head. “You just don’t look like the kind of girl who could kill people for a living.”

The girl looks his way, and for a moment Saihara would swear she almost smiles. The corners of her mouth tug upwards, almost giving way… but at the last moment she fixes him with a flat stare instead. “Funny,” she tells him, “that’s what a lot of my victims said, too. Right before I killed them.”

Time has had less and less meaning for him, the longer this game has gone on—but he’s almost starting to feel like it matters again.

Four hours, for example. Not so long ago he would have felt like four hours weren’t worth very much at all. In the past, four hours would simply have been a few steps closer to the next inevitable murder, and a few steps farther from the last.

But now, four hours means no more and no less than a decent amount of sleep for someone like him. By the end of the first watch shift, once it’s time for Momota-chan’s group to come and shake them all awake, Ouma almost feels some semblance of well-rested. Time might have meaning again, but the meaning doesn’t necessarily have to be very important—four hours of restful sleep is better than none at all.

His body certainly needed the rest, after not sleeping last night: it’s been an eventful day, full of twists and turns that even he hadn’t seen coming.

He realizes, once he’s woken up, that his brain has stopped buzzing. In place of the usual constant clamor of thoughts, plans, and what-ifs, there’s simply the calm of realization, and the perfect snap of gears slowly locking into place.

For better or worse, he’s missed this feeling of cold, calculated planning.

That’s why he waits about a half hour before he mentions that he needs to use the restroom. It seems like an ordinary request, to most of them—after all, Kiibo and Hoshi-chan weren’t there last night. And unlike Yumeno-chan, at least he hasn’t been rocking back and forth or muttering to himself under his breath.

Saihara-chan frowns, but goes with him. That doesn’t seem suspicious to the other two, either; they’ve been going places as a pair ever since the time limit hit, and their little disagreement at breakfast was short enough to pass it off as a fluke.

And even if they suspect something later, well. Ouma’s accounted for that, too.

Once they’ve climbed the stairs, he spins around to face the other boy. No threats, this time. No grinning, leering, or scowling. There’s just the slightest hint of a smile on his face as he asks, “Do you trust me, Saihara-chan?”

The detective assesses him quietly. Then he nods. “…I do.”

“We don’t have a lot of time, then. Follow me.”

There’s no sense in wasting precious seconds if they want to make it seem like a short trip to the restroom, so Ouma turns on his heel and heads for the front door. Outside, the nighttime breeze is just as crisp as it was last night. He wonders vaguely whether the people responsible for this game will ever get tired of providing them with the same weather, day in and day out.

Probably not. As long as we keep entertaining them.

Today had certainly been entertaining, in its own way. That was the first clear thought he’d had, when he woke up from those four hours of sleep. Over the past few days, Monokuma had alternated between showing up unasked for, scarcely leaving them a moment to themselves, or else leaving them all entirely alone for hours, sometimes an entire day at a time.

Today had been one of the latter days. Ever since the near-disaster at the phone booth last night, the switch between group members, and Harukawa-chan’s unexpected confession about her talent, they hadn’t seen hide or hair of that damn bear.

Most of his classmates didn’t seem particularly interested in why that might be, other than to occasionally wonder aloud whether Monokuma was planning some other way to torture them. But Ouma is pretty sure he’s figured it out, by now.

Whoever was watching them, they must be pretty torn over all these new developments. Though it might be derailed from its original purpose, a killing game like this must be hard for some viewers to look away from—even the sheer refusal to play the game by the rules might have been a big enough plot twist to keep some of them glued to the edge of their seats.

“Well, do or don’t, it’s all the same to me. Just so long as you keep it interesting!”

He remembers Monokuma’s parting phrase, those words it left them with when it first explained the phone booth to them. Judging by the bear’s absence… today’s events had probably been very interesting indeed.

Snatching the game out from under the ringleader last time hadn’t been the right course of action, that much went without saying. But his fatal flaw had been in coming to view everyone else as pieces on the board: lifeless, thoughtless objects to be moved or discarded according to the whims of the players.

But this was never meant to be some two-person game between himself and an unknown ringleader, with everyone else a mere piece on the gameboard. Even if it was, then in all honesty he was probably never more than one of the pieces atop the board himself. Instead of trying to snatch the game away, he should’ve tried to switch it out for a different game altogether—for a game like this, where everyone was a player.

He wonders if another late night stroll to the phone booth tonight will be enough to keep all those faceless, unknown viewers on their toes. If boredom would only drag them all to their deaths that much faster, then he won’t let anyone get bored.

The two of them walk in silence until they reach the phone booth. Saihara-chan doesn’t seem the least bit surprised by their destination. Just tired, and worried. …And more than a little bit interested, too, despite how hard he tries to hide it.

Ouma shudders a little in the chill night air. It’s probably no colder than sundown in early spring or fall, but the breeze still feels like it’s slicing through his body like a knife. What a shame he couldn’t take his scarf along without rousing any extra suspicion.

“Are you cold?” Saihara-chan doesn’t look much warmer than him, standing there in his pyjamas, but the detective frowns at him all the same as he asks.

He shrugs. “Yeah, whatever. It’ll probably be a lot warmer inside that phone booth anyway—and that thing only holds one person, so I’m afraid you’re out of luck while you wait.”

“Ouma-kun…”

Ouma waits in silence.

Saihara-chan pauses. Shakes his head. “Just… just don’t take too long.”

No questions, no accusations. Just an attempt to understand his intentions, his plans. To understand him. The realization makes the same smile from earlier tug at the corners of his mouth, just a little. But all he says is, “I’ll try.”

He heads into the phone booth—and comes out again after only about a minute or so.

“That was… fast.” Saihara-chan blinks.

Ouma shrugs. “Well, yeah. I told you I’d try.” He waves his hand, beckoning the other boy to follow him. “Come on, we should start heading back now. Don’t want them to think we’re taking too long.”

“W-Wait! Are you not even going to tell me what you did in there?”

He sighs and stops walking a few steps ahead at the detective’s insistence. “What if I told you I tried to order a pizza?”

“You what?”

“Sheesh, it was a joke. Although wasting the phone call on some nonsense number does have its appeal.” He lifts a finger to his mouth, and for the first time his smile really does betray signs of a smirk beneath. “For now, I put a preventative measure in place, in case anyone else gets any bright ideas about trying to use it like Yumeno-chan did.”

The other boy quirks a dubious eyebrow. “A preventative measure?” he repeats.

“Mm-hmm! A ‘deterrent,’ you might say. Go check and see what I mean, if you don’t believe me. But be quick about it.”

Saihara-chan looks doubtful, but he takes him up on that offer nonetheless as he steps into the phone booth, looking for anything out of the ordinary. Ouma can tell that he must’ve found it when he hears the other boy let out a wordless noise of disgust a moment later. He steps out again right after that, his nose still wrinkled.

“Ouma-kun…”

“Yes, Saihara-chan?”

The other boy doesn’t say anything for a few seconds as they start walking again, falling into step beside each other. Finally, he asks, “Why… chewing gum, of all things?”

“Well,” Ouma says brightly, “most normal people wouldn’t want to use a phone anymore if they saw the receiver was covered with used chewing gum, would they?” He tilts his head, considering. “Or I guess if they didn’t notice it ahead of time, they sure would be in for a nasty surprise once they put it up to their ear.”

“When did you even get—” Saihara-chan cuts off his own question before he can finish as realization slowly sinks in. “…You snatched it from the warehouse, earlier. You were looking for something like this all along, weren’t you?”

Ouma nods, rubbing his hands together for warmth as they walk.

The detective looks almost astounded. It was a simple plan, admittedly—almost too simple. Simple, mundane, and more than a tad childish. But that was the beauty of it, in Ouma’s opinion: it was completely, bewilderingly unexpected for the viewers, the ringleader, and his classmates alike.

“Even if someone wasn’t grossed out by it… for whatever reason...” Saihara-chan can’t help but wrinkle his nose again at the thought. “…They’d probably still think the phone had already been used. Or that it was a trap. But I wonder what Monokuma will make of all this…” He puts a hand under his chin, somehow looking the perfect picture of a detective in thought despite wearing only his sleeping clothes.

“It’s not destruction of school property,” Ouma reminds him. “The phone still works just fine. I just… doubt anyone is gonna want to use it, after this.” It wasn’t against any of the rules—it was just a stupid, harmless prank. But effective.

The other boy nods slowly, looking more and more convinced as they draw closer to the school building. “This really is like… winning a game by not playing it.”

Those words make Ouma stop in his tracks. When the other boy notices he’s no longer walking, he stops too, just outside the entryway to the school building. The shadows on the ground from the moon behind them are softer, less pronounced than the sharp, orange shadows from that other afternoon, still fresh in his memory.

“Hey Saihara-chan? Can you read minds, perhaps?” he asks quietly.

The detective doesn’t seem to have a clue what he’s talking about. He flushes at the unexpected question, though it’s hard to tell with only the moon to see by. “What do you mean?”

“…Nothing.” Ouma shakes his head, thinking about the scars still covering the fingers of his left hand. Almost under his breath, he adds, “You really do get me, huh?”

As they make their way back down to the library, there’s a curious lightness in his chest. Some part of him knows it can’t last—that even this brief venture may very well cost them dearly. It’s only a matter of time before one of their classmates finds out that they snuck out, or before Monokuma shows up again with some other incentive to try and get them to kill one another.

Strangely, he doesn’t care. What he could only see as hindrances before, he sees now with full clarity for what they are: opportunities. Opportunities to take this game in an entirely different direction that even he’s never seen before. The thought leaves him oddly motivated, the gears in his brain itching for a chance to swerve this entire game beyond anyone’s expectations.

He realizes, a little belatedly, that for the first time in ages that he can remember, he isn’t bored at all.

Thanks to Saihara-chan, he thinks. But not quite. Lately, all of his classmates—all of them, even Harukawa-chan and her ridiculous stunt from earlier, have somehow reminded him of why he used to try so hard. Saihara-chan was just the person who had made him see it first.

Once, a long time ago, he had wondered to himself if noticing all the little details about someone was a symptom of falling in love. Tonight, he now knows another truth: that noticing someone else was the first step to falling in love, yes, but that being understood was the first step to truly caring.

It’s such an incredibly, wonderfully not-boring sensation.

Chapter Text

It’s all Saihara can do to stave off his exhaustion when they return to the library.

He doesn’t fall asleep, of course—he couldn’t even if he wanted to, luckily for him. But it’s a struggle just to keep his eyes open, moreso in the soft lamplight of the library where no hints of sunrise can be seen.

In his defense, he’s gotten far less sleep than most of his classmates lately. Everything’s been too hectic, too tense. Despite his best efforts, it’s all been starting to fall apart too quickly, like sand castles crumbling down at high tide. He can only hope that their plans aren’t quite so short-lived, and do his best to keep everything from collapsing in on itself—but that hasn’t left him a lot of time to rest and recharge.

…Not to mention, the little sleep that he had managed to glean hadn’t been particularly restful. Lately, he’d been waking up almost more tired than before he slept at all, with his nerves on edge and his stomach somewhere near the base of his throat. Perhaps he’d been sleeping poorly, having restless dreams, but if that was the case, he didn’t remember them at all. Maybe the stress was just getting to him.

He would love a break, but he already knows there’s no chance of that happening. Not with this killing game looming over their heads indefinitely, waiting for any possible crack in their defenses to come crashing down.

The thought should motivate him to work harder—but somehow, it just drains him further.

“—chan? Saihara-chan, hey, wake up! You’re drooling.”

Ouma-kun’s hushed voice startles him out of his thoughts. On instinct he moves to wipe the corner of his mouth with his pyjama sleeve, only to discover that there’s nothing there. He frowns, feeling more than a little embarrassed. Although… considering he’s the one who fell for it, he supposes he has only himself to blame.

“What was that for?” he mumbles, hoping the flush on his cheeks isn’t too visible. It should be fine, given how dark the library is with only a lantern to see by, but he can’t help but feel self-conscious.

The other boy stretches an arm lazily above his head before shrugging. “You weren’t asleep, but you looked tired. Like you were about to doze off. I figured I’d get your attention.”

Ah. That wouldn’t have been good. After so many late nights and early mornings, it’s only natural that he isn’t at his best or most vigilant. But he can’t imagine Hoshi-kun or Kiibo-kun would look the other way if he (quite literally) fell asleep on the job. Not after all the other things they’d managed to overlook out of kindness, or trust, or maybe just the desire to keep their noses clean.

How Ouma-kun seemed to be functioning so well on so little sleep was beyond him. As far as he knew, the other boy had been waking up earlier and sleeping even less… and yet, he somehow looked miles better than he had when they’d first met.

He scratches the back of his head and takes a deep breath, hoping more oxygen to the brain might help him feel a little more awake. “Th-Thanks.” He manages a strained smile. “I guess it’s a good thing you were keeping an eye on me, huh?”

The other boy goes quiet at those words, for whatever reason. Saihara wonders if he misspoke, or maybe his words were just too quiet to be heard—but before he can apologize or say anything else, Ouma-kun’s blank stare is replaced by a wide grin that’s slowly but surely becoming the more familiar of the two expressions.

“If you want, I can show you an easier way to stay awake. Call it a distraction, of sorts.” The grin becomes something more like a smirk, a knowing, self-satisfied expression as if the other boy were somehow in on a joke that Saihara hadn’t heard before. “I can’t make any promises, but maybe it’ll even stir up some fond memories for you.”

It’s Saihara’s turn to stare blankly in response, blinking slowly. He must just be too tired to understand what the other boy is getting at.

As though he expected this, Ouma-kun raises a hand dramatically—before quickly cycling through all the motions of rock-paper-scissors.

“…That’s it?” Maybe he should’ve expected something like this after seeing Ouma-kun’s little stunt with the phone booth firsthand, but it still feels a tad anticlimactic after all the build-up.

The other boy’s hand lands on paper with a totally unnecessary flourish, and then he leans back against the shelves again, resting his arms behind his head. “That’s it,” he agrees. “Pretty cool, huh? I bet you’re dying to play a match with me now. Just so you know, I won’t go easy on you this time.”

“You know, I’ve been wondering this for a while now, but... you’re actually pretty childish, aren’t you, Ouma-kun?”

Ouma-kun’s eyebrows arch up high behind a few wispy strands of hair that hang in front of his face. “Wow, rude. I was even gonna offer you a leftover piece of gum, but now I think I won’t!” Contrary to his words, the grin on his face stretches a little wider—he’s enjoying himself and it shows.

Saihara just shakes his head, exhausted but amused nonetheless. “I, uh, think I’ll pass on the gum. But playing a game might actually be a good way to pass the time, so… sure. Why not?” He shifts and stretches, trying to make himself at least a little more comfortable; the rough wooden floor of the library was really starting to take a toll on his back.

“Now that’s the spirit.” Ouma-kun sits upright and leans forward, intertwining his fingers as he stretches his arms in front of him, almost as though warming up for exercise. “I did mention I’m not just going to let you win this time, right? Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Aren’t you taking this a little too seriously? I thought this was just to help me stay awake.” Even this competitive streak was only making the other boy seem more immature. Although… that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Saihara is only a little surprised to realize it, but he definitely prefers this side of Ouma-kun to the unresponsive, cynical boy of the last few days.

“Maybe you’re not taking it seriously enough. If you ask me, you should play every game like your life is on the line.”

Saihara pauses, his fingers faltering through the motions before landing on a half-hearted scissors—he’d been unsure of whether to pick that or paper. As though sensing that uncertainty before the result was even shown, Ouma-kun’s hand comes down at almost the exact same instant in a tight fist.

The other boy grins. “See? You let your guard down a little too quick. It’s not a good habit.”

Saihara frowns. It could’ve just been a one-time fluke after all, but Ouma-kun looks confident, as if he already knew that he’d falter in the end. “Okay, so let’s go again. …You’d better follow the rules, though.”

“Hand on my heart, I won’t cheat,” Ouma-kun says, and he really does put his hand atop his heart for extra emphasis, looking the very picture of sincerity. “I would never stoop to cheating just to win a game. Honestly.”

“…I don’t believe you.”

Ouma-kun’s grin turns smug again after hearing that, dropping all traces of the sincere act in an instant. “That’s a smart decision. You always were a fast learner, Saihara-chan.”

“Okay, okay, you’ve made your point. You’ve only won one match so far anyway.” Saihara feels more than a little childish himself now, getting so competitive over rock-paper-scissors of all things, but there’s probably no harm in it. “Let’s keep playing and then we’ll see who wins the most matches in the end.”

His impatience only seems to get a bigger kick out of the other boy, and the two of them spend the rest of their night watch shift playing the most intense game of rock-paper-scissors that Saihara’s ever witnessed.

True to his word (for once), Ouma-kun really hadn’t been planning on going easy on him—Saihara barely managed to scrape one win out of every three matches, though the other boy seemed as delighted with this as if the detective had wiped the floor with him.

It’s only when they’re finally reaching the end of their shift and preparing to wake the others that Saihara even remembers the worries that were weighing on him so heavily before. Somehow, in all those matches, he never once thought back to the tough decisions still waiting for him in this killing game, or the restless dreams and constant exhaustion that wouldn’t seem to go away.

For just a moment, he really had been so focused on such a silly, childish game that he’d forgotten everything else ahead of them, and he can’t help but wonder if that was Ouma-kun’s real plan all along.

---

The one benefit to their group taking the later night watch shift was that they were allowed to enjoy breakfast first.

Sleep deprivation had left him with a smaller appetite than usual, but Saihara appreciates the change of scenery nonetheless. Today the rice and natto in his bowl interest him a lot less than the steaming hot mug of coffee that accompanies them—it’s a mismatched meal, perhaps, but he’ll take all the caffeine he can get in these circumstances.

“—I mean, in the first place, why don’t you just ask Iruma-chan to install some taste buds for you? Then you wouldn’t have to sit here moping every time the rest of us eat something.”

Saihara pauses mid-sip at his mug, coming back to the conversation slowly. It was a little harder than usual to keep up with what was being said, but that too was probably just a result of so many late nights. At least he doesn’t seem to have missed much—Ouma-kun was giving their poor robotic classmate a hard time again, but that was already becoming the norm at their breakfast table each morning.

Kiibo-kun waves a metallic hand dismissively. “I-I couldn’t possibly bother Iruma-san with such an inane request when I’m sure she’s already very busy.” As an afterthought, he clears his throat (nothing could possibly be blocking his throat in the first place, Saihara thinks, but he’s wise enough to not say as much out loud). “And besides, that would be a terribly inefficient use of food.”

“People don’t always eat for efficiency’s sake, Kiiboy.” Ouma-kun gestures blithely at the syrup-soaked pile of waffles and strawberries atop his plate. “If I wanted to be efficient, I’d have stuck to eating white rice and nothing else. Weren’t you the one who told me to try something new for a change?”

The robot frowns; the use of that nickname from the other day hadn’t escaped his notice, apparently. Saihara can see a handful of conflicting emotions cross over his face as he debates whether it’s even worth the effort of correcting Ouma-kun or not. Though ultimately, he must’ve deemed it a losing battle, because he just sighs and continues. “Be that as it may… wouldn’t it seem a little unnecessary to install a robot with an eating function?”

Ouma-kun stabs lazily at another bite of his waffle, dragging it through the pools of syrup on his plate with a thoughtful expression. “Hmm… honestly? If you ask me, it seems pretty unnecessary for a robot to even go to school in the first place.” He shrugs and skewers another strawberry with his fork before popping the whole bite into his mouth carelessly.

“H-How rude! There was no need to say something so uncalled for—”

“Hey, come on, hear me out.” Ouma-kun wipes his mouth with a napkin before settling back in his chair, leaning far enough until the front two legs lifted up off the floor. “You’re the one who doesn’t want people to judge you just for being a robot, right? So what’s wrong with adding a few more functions?” His chair wobbles even more precariously as he throws his hands up behind his head. “Humans do unnecessary things all the time. Who really cares if a robot does the same?”

Kiibo-kun pauses, his finger raised in mid-air as though trying and failing to think of a decent comeback. He squints, clearly wondering if he’s somehow being made fun of, but apparently unable to determine any real hostility from the other boy. “I… I see. Thank you, Ouma-kun.”  His voice softens. “That’s a surprisingly decent point, actually.”

“I know, right?” Ouma-kun says, still expertly balancing on the two back legs of his chair as though engrossed with that single, childish activity. “I’m full of good ideas, just so you know. That’s why you should ask Iruma-chan to install you with a robo-punch feature, too.”

“I’ll be doing no such thing!”

Saihara stifles a laugh into his mug before taking another sip of coffee, trying to look un-amused if only for Kiibo-kun’s sake. The two of them only continue to bicker after that, carrying the entire conversation all by themselves. He doesn’t mind, though; the lively banter just gives him and Hoshi-kun all the more time to eat at their own pace, without needing to worry about those unbearably awkward pauses from the first few days of their stay.

It’s only once they’ve made their way back to the library, returning briefly to gather their belongings before they head to the gym for a morning shower, that he finds himself pulled out of his thoughts again by a small but insistent tug at his sleeve.

Saihara turns around, half-expecting to see Ouma-kun with yet another question or comment or scheme—and is more than a little taken aback to see Hoshi-kun instead.

“Saihara. Before we head to the gym… d’you mind if we talk for a bit?” Hoshi-kun thumbs at his candy cigarette and silently nods towards one of the more remote bookshelves in the corner of the room.

Without even knowing why, Saihara feels his heart sink somewhere near the pit of his stomach. He looks around quickly for Ouma-kun, hoping against hope that he can help him out of this situation somehow—and he finally finds him near the library entrance, but for once the other boy doesn’t seem to notice. His back is turned to them both, and Saihara can hear his distinctive laughter as he teases Kiibo-kun about something else this time, though he can’t make out the words.

Hoshi-kun must have known they’d have a perfect opportunity to talk one-on-one, then. For someone as aloof as Hoshi-kun to want to talk to him privately… it doesn’t bode well. But Saihara nods all the same as they walk together towards the corner bookshelf.

They stand there for a moment in complete silence. Conversations with Hoshi-kun were never particularly lengthy even at the best of times, but Saihara feels the weight of that silence all the more acutely now. Asking what the other boy might want to talk about felt even more daunting though, the equivalent of trying to glean information from something as impassable and cold as a glacier. As a result, he just keeps his mouth shut and waits, his eyes lingering on the worn edges of the nearby books.

Sure enough, Hoshi-kun decides to break the silence. He fiddles with his beanie for a moment or two before sighing deeply, sounding more than a little exhausted himself. Then finally, he asks: “So, about last night…”

There’s no bite of accusation hidden in those words, but Saihara immediately stiffens all the same. It’s uncharacteristic enough for Hoshi-kun to pry into someone else’s problems, but the fact that it’s about the topic he least wanted to discuss with the rest of his classmates just feels like confirmation of all his worst fears. The detective isn’t able to say a word in response; his mouth feels suddenly dry as he tries to swallow down the nervous lump that’s suddenly there in his throat.

Even that small reaction must have given something away though, because Hoshi-kun just nods. “You went there, yeah? To the phone booth. Along with that Ouma kid.”

Saihara feels his knees go weak, as if someone just knocked the air out of him. For a moment all the sound in the library seems to fade out at once; distantly, he can hear Ouma-kun’s teasing comments and Iruma-san’s loud, high-pitched laughter, but they sound as though they’re coming from a million miles away. Iruma-san must already be causing trouble for Akamatsu-san and the others, he thinks to himself, feeling lightheaded, they’d normally already be at the dining hall by now.

He can’t say anything without taking the risk that he might give everything away. He can’t give a reply. But that itself seems to be enough of a response, because Hoshi-kun nods as he meets his eye with a level gaze.

“Easy. Relax.” The tennis player crosses his arms. “I’m just askin’. I ain’t accusing you of anything.”

“I…” If Ouma-kun were present, he’d probably be able to come up with some brilliant excuse on the spot. It didn’t have to be perfect; anything would work, as long as it temporarily smoothed things over. But Saihara isn’t that creative; every lie he can think of sounds half-baked at best. What choice does he have but to just come clean? “…H-How did you know?”

“…Hmph.” Hoshi-kun chews slowly on his candy cigarette, apparently mulling the question over. “Saihara, I dunno if you’re aware but Kiibo and I aren’t stupid. Just ‘cause we’ve been staying out of your business doesn’t mean we don’t know when something’s off.”

Saihara can’t help but wince—he didn’t think either of them were too dumb to catch on, honestly, but saying so now would probably be too little too late. “So… Kiibo-kun knows too?” His question sounds small and halfhearted, even to himself.

“Pretty sure he does,” Hoshi-kun says, “or at least, he probably suspects it. He didn’t say anything to me last night, but things were real quiet when the two of you stepped out for a while.” The other boy’s face is far too stoic for Saihara to read, his mouth a hard line. “It ain’t like there’s a lot of places to go in this school. And you two always seem to play your cards close to the chest.”

“Hoshi-kun…” Saihara cuts himself off. How can he possibly argue with that? He and Ouma-kun had been keeping more than their fair share of secrets over the last few days; he’d be a hypocrite to try and insist otherwise. At last, all he can manage to say is the truth, or part of it: “We went to the phone booth, but I swear, we didn’t use it.” He swallows again, tasting something sour and foul at the back of his throat. “We wouldn’t.”

The tennis player looks back at him so impassively that for a moment Saihara almost wonders if this conversation is over, if the other boy might turn around and leave and tell everyone else about everything they’d done last night. Then Hoshi-kun looks away and takes another piece of candy from his pocket, to replace the cigarette that he’s just finishing up. “Don’t have to tell me that. I already figured as much.”

“You mean…?” Feeling comes back to his fingertips as the detective takes a sharp breath.

“Yeah. Whatever it is you did last night, no one’s dead this morning.” For just an instant, Hoshi-kun’s eyes narrow very slightly. “Otherwise you and I’d probably be havin’ a very different conversation right now.”

That did make sense. They might not have known each other long (or else, they might not remember how long they’d known each other), but Hoshi-kun had always had a strict hands-off policy when it came to other people’s affairs. As long as he could be sure that they weren’t going to hurt anyone else, he wasn’t the type to pry. That must’ve been the reason he had asked him to talk one-on-one, rather than springing the question on him during a group meeting instead.

Maybe Ouma-kun wasn’t the only one who tended to underestimate the rest of their classmates. It was just yesterday that the other boy had called him a hypocrite, after all. He could almost laugh, if this situation hadn’t left him feeling so drained.

“But y’know, Saihara…”

Saihara blinks, putting that train of thought on hold. Hoshi-kun pauses. Sighs. Re-crosses his arms, like he’s mulling over what to say next.

“…You gotta watch your step. You’re gettin’ way too careless.”

He couldn’t agree more. He had been careless, last night, and the night before that too. No matter how much he tried to cover his tracks, he couldn’t possibly account for every little thing that went wrong in this killing game. And things had been going wrong an awful lot lately.

Saihara doesn’t say any of that, though. Instead, he just nods.

“Honestly? You don’t really strike me as the kinda guy who’d kill someone. I’ve spent my fair share of time behind bars, I can tell when someone just doesn’t have it in ‘em.” Hoshi-kun scoffs, sounding ever-so-slightly bitter. “But that might not be enough for some people. Some people might be upset just ‘cause it’s you we’re talking about.”

“Because it’s me…?” Saihara repeats those words, feeling far too tired and too stressed out to understand where the other boy is going with this.

“’Cause you’re supposed to be the leader,” Hoshi-kun says, “whether you like it or not.”

Saihara’s heart sinks again. Right… that. It was far too late to ask himself why me at a time like this.

“All I’m sayin’ is, you can’t keep expectin’ to get lucky every time something like this happens. Sooner or later, shit catches up to you.” Hoshi-kun finishes his second candy cigarette, then nods his head back in the direction of the entrance. “Anyway, I’ve said my piece. Take it or leave it, it’s up to you. I guess we better get goin’.”

Saihara follows the other boy wordlessly as they walk back over to their belongings near the pile of futons, grabbing what they need for their morning shower. Unable to think of anything better to say, all he can manage is a small, “Thank you, Hoshi-kun.”

The tennis player looks up at him as he slings a towel over his shoulder. “I don’t need your thanks. Just hope you know what you’re doin’, that’s all.”

You and me both, Saihara thinks. But that would hardly be the most reassuring reply, so he keeps his mouth shut.

Hoshi-kun’s warning keeps repeating in his head the entire walk over to the gym, as though stuck on a loop. Harukawa-san had also said something remarkably similar only the other day, leaving Saihara with an anxious knot in the pit of his stomach.

They were right, after all. Sooner or later, things were bound to catch up with him. Sooner or later, what little luck he had would run dry.

He wonders if maybe he should bring up what just happened with Ouma-kun, ask him for his input. But telling him now wouldn’t change the fact that Hoshi-kun already knew… and besides, there wasn’t exactly a good opportunity to pull the other boy aside and talk to him one-on-one right now anyway.

Knowing just how many times Kiibo-kun and Hoshi-kun had both turned a blind eye for their sakes only makes him feel more ashamed. Even though they’d only ever had the best intentions, it was still true that they’d broken the rules. The same rules everyone else was supposed to follow.

Maybe… later. He’d tell him everything later, whenever there was a good opportunity to do so. He remembers his promise from yesterday, how he’d told Ouma-kun he would ask for his help if anything else happened, and the knot in his stomach grows a little heavier. He’d meant what he said at the time… but now just wasn’t a good time for it. Right now, just taking things one day—no, one hour at a time, is already hard enough.

Saihara finishes his shower and changes his clothes in record time, half in a daze as he does so. He’d never really taken particularly long showers, even less so while they were stuck in this strange school, but today he felt as though he could hardly even focus. His mind was perpetually elsewhere, still too busy repeating Hoshi-kun and Harukawa-san’s warnings like a mantra, filling him with a sense of dread that he can’t quite explain.

When they return to the library, though, it all makes sense. The other shoe looming over his head finally drops, and he knows his luck has finally run its course.

The rest of his classmates, twelve in total, stand huddled together in the center of the library. They must have been talking just before he and his group walked in, because the conversation drops off sharply as soon as they enter the room.

No one looks injured. No one seems to be missing from their group, either. That should reassure him, but it doesn’t. Every member from the other three groups is here in this one room… all of them, even the ones that should be at breakfast or patrolling the grounds right now.

Twelve pairs of eyes stare back at him, and then a small sound breaks the awkward silence as Toujou-san clears her throat and steps forward.

“Saihara-kun, may I have a moment of your time? I’d like for all of you to join us, if you don’t mind.” Her words are posed as a question, but they carry an overwhelming sense of pressure. “If I might have your attention, please. I’ve called a group meeting, you see—about what transpired last night.”

Maybe this was why Harukawa-san and Hoshi-kun’s words had weighed on him so heavily—subconsciously, he might’ve already had an inkling of what was about to happen. Or maybe this was inevitable from the moment he unwittingly took the lead in this group.

He can hear himself agreeing to talk, as though from a distance. After all, saying no hardly seemed to be an option.

---

Saihara leans against the shelf behind him until his back aches from the spines of books digging uncomfortably into his shoulder blades. They were all sitting now—all except Toujou-san, in what had become the usual fashion for their group meetings.

She’s the one doing most of the talking, but everyone else’s eyes are still on him. He can feel them all staring, feel their unasked questions and their doubt like pinpricks on his skin, but he doesn’t make eye contact with any of them. Instead, he keeps staring firmly ahead at a point on the bookshelf behind Toujou-san’s left shoulder, and he only speaks when he’s sure his voice won’t quaver.

He remembers thinking it was odd, that he had still heard the sounds of Iruma-san’s laughter while talking with Hoshi-kun earlier. That her group was already supposed to be at breakfast by then, and it was rare to see them dallying behind their usual schedule.

It was his own fault, for not thinking a little harder at the time. For not checking behind the nearby shelves to see if anyone’s belongings were nearby, for not suspecting that Toujou-san or anyone else might’ve been closer than he thought.

Overhearing someone else’s hushed conversation in a room as spacious as the library was all too easy for prying eyes and ears—a fact that he seemed to have forgotten, thanks to Monokuma’s time limit song.

If he had thought about it a little more or been a little more perceptive, maybe this could’ve all been avoided. But there was no sense in regretting it now. All he can do now is answer Toujou-san’s questions and hope for the best.

“I simply want to know what could possibly have possessed you to go to that phone booth last night. What reasoning could you possibly have, given the circumstances?”

He breathes in. Breathes out. Tries to steady himself for a moment before giving her as much of the truth as he can manage. “I just wanted—”

“He was just trying to stop me from going.” For the first time since they joined the group meeting, Ouma-kun speaks up.

If he’s the slightest bit nervous, he doesn’t show it; his voice is calm and clear, the loudest that he’s spoken up in any of their group meetings so far. Saihara even breaks his concentration for a moment, looking away from the shelf behind Toujou-san to try and get a glimpse of the other boy’s expression—but Ouma-kun has his gaze fixed directly on the maid, and he doesn’t look his way even once.

“I told him I just needed to use the restroom, but I bolted outside as soon as we were up the stairs.” It’s a complete and utter lie, but Ouma-kun says the words so seamlessly, without a trace of last night’s playfulness. “Of course, he caught up to me before I could actually make a call or anything. We argued for a bit, and then he talked me down—”

“Wait.” Saihara’s mouth twists; he didn’t mean to cut in, but he can’t help it. That might be a clever enough excuse to avoid bringing up what had happened with Yumeno-san and the others a few nights ago, but he can’t say he likes the idea of Ouma-kun shifting the blame onto himself any better. “That’s not what—”

“—and that wasn’t the end of it, obviously.” Ouma-kun interrupts him smoothly, as though he hadn’t heard him at all. “I mean, what if someone else tried to do the same thing later on? That was a pretty big concern, but after discussing it a little more, we decided to booby-trap the phone with some gum I had on hand. It’s not broken or anything, but I doubt anyone would want to use it right about now.”

Ouma-kun’s words stir up a few murmurs from the rest of the group. Given that they’d all been trying to give the phone booth as much of a wide berth as possible, no one seemed to have checked it in person since this morning.

Saihara swallows once, twice, then finally looks away from the other boy when it’s clear that he still isn’t looking his way. None of this is ideal, but he’s not sure what he could possibly say that wouldn’t just make both of them look all the more suspicious.

“O-Okay, but…” After a few more seconds, Shirogane-san’s mousy voice hesitantly speaks up over that hum of discussion. Her knees are clasped to her chest; she looks nothing short of a nervous wreck as she wrings her hands together. “Is there a way to tell… that you didn’t use the phone before doing that? I mean… is there any way to guarantee it hasn’t been used yet?”

Ouma-kun just shrugs. “Probably not? Though I doubt anyone who’d actually used it would want to draw attention to it by sticking gum all over it.” He pauses and then, his mouth a hard line, he adds: “Believe me or don’t, it’s all pretty much the same. But it is a fact that none of us are dead this morning.”

It’s a good point—the same point Hoshi-kun had brought up earlier this morning. If nothing else, Saihara hopes it might reassure the rest of their classmates that this entire plan can still work.

However, Toujou-san instantly snuffs out that brief hope almost as quick as it comes. She only has to clear her throat again before all eyes in the room are back on her, even his own—for a maid so committed to serving others, her presence is just too commanding to ignore.

“Be that as it may,” she says, “both you and Saihara-kun still went to the phone booth. I overheard him say as much to Hoshi-kun. And I’m afraid he didn’t mention anything at all about trying to stop you, or any such thing. In fact, he didn’t mention anything whatsoever about this to anyone until he was asked directly.”

Ouma-kun doesn’t seem to have a response for that. Again, Saihara can’t help but remember the promise he made yesterday, and he has to stop himself from trying to catch another glimpse of the other boy’s expression.

“Saihara-kun.” Toujou-san’s voice rings clear as a bell. “Did you, or did you not, go to the phone booth last night?”

Saihara clenches his fist until he can feel the sharp sting of his nails against his palm. “…I did.”

“And did you, or did you not, try to hide this fact from everyone here, until you were caught directly by one of your own group members?”

“…I did.”

“Despite the fact that this plan was your idea in the first place?” She arches an eyebrow as though genuinely curious, even though she must already know the answer.

“It’s not just my plan. We all came up with it together.” It’s becoming more and more of a struggle to keep his voice even each time he replies. But he knows that if he doesn’t reply at all, it’ll just look all the more damning.

“We certainly discussed this plan together. And we all agreed to follow it.” She concedes the point. “But you were the one who proposed the finer points of it. You’ve taken on something of a leadership role in our group since the killing game started, have you not? …Though I don’t remember anyone actually appointing you to such a position.” There’s a critical look in the maid’s eyes, sharp and appraising.

Saihara inhales sharply just to catch his breath, to steady himself. He’s about to reply again—but an unexpected voice cuts him off.

“I-It does sound like Saihara-san might have messed up with this whole phone booth thing… but even leaders make mistakes every now and then, right?” Chabashira-san taps her fingertips together timidly as she interjects. “Tenko isn’t too surprised to hear that a menace would go sneaking off and breaking the rules… b-but that’s what this plan is for, isn’t it? To keep an eye on everyone so nothing bad happens?”

Her shaky voice and the damp sweat on her brow hardly make her look convincing, but Saihara has never been more grateful to hear her speak up than he is now. She meets his eye nervously for half a second before averting her gaze elsewhere, and he knows she must be thinking about what happened between her, Yumeno-san, and Angie-san the other night. He hopes she could read the thank you on his face before she looked away.

Toujou-san gives a slight nod. “Mistakes are only natural—no, inevitable, for the average person. I won’t deny that…” She pauses for only a moment, but when she continues her voice is heavy with an authoritative pressure that’s completely unlike her kindly, almost motherly tone from the last few days. “But not all mistakes are easy to forgive. What concerns me is the idea that Saihara-kun might think himself above following the rules, as the self-appointed leader of our group.”

Saihara stares. This was everything Hoshi-kun and Harukawa-san had warned him about, but the maid’s words still manage to blindside him completely somehow.

Self-appointed? If he could give this job to any of the rest of them, he’d have done so ages ago. Just moments ago, she’d said it herself: that she couldn’t recall a single person appointing him to be the leader. But they had. Maybe not with their words, maybe not outright, but they had basically left it all to him, and he just hadn’t had it in him to argue back while their group was so close to falling apart at the seams.

Ever since he’d volunteered to stay behind, to be the last one standing outside Ouma-kun’s bedroom door, he feels like maybe he drew the short straw somehow.

He’s still too stunned to say anything, but Toujou-san seems to take his silence as some sort of affirmation. “I might be reassured if I could guarantee that what you did last night was in the best interests of the group,” she says coolly. “But I have to wonder… even if Ouma-kun’s story were true, why hide it from everyone else? It sounds to me like keeping such a huge secret was only in your own self-interest.”

“I didn’t… I-I wasn’t sure anyone would believe that nothing happened—” He stops, digging the nails into his palm a little deeper. He hadn’t wanted to stutter at a time like this, not in front of everyone, but it had slipped out all the same. “…I didn’t want to risk upsetting everyone. I didn’t know what would happen to the group.”

“Even though Harukawa-san confessed such a huge secret of her own only yesterday?”

Toujou-san gestures towards where Harukawa-san is sitting, and the other girl looks just as surprised as Saihara feels to hear her own name coming up at a time like this.

“She admitted to being an assassin in front of all of us, despite having nothing to gain from it… yet despite being one of the foremost people in charge, you couldn’t tell us that someone in your group tried to use that motive?” She re-clasps her hands gently atop her pristine dress. “I find that very hard to believe, Saihara-kun.”

What can he possibly say to that? What excuse could he offer without throwing at least one of his classmates under the bus? Harukawa-san, Iruma-san, Chabashira-san—even Ouma-kun, they would all be just the next target of Toujou-san’s suspicion if he says anything even remotely close to the truth.

His dead silence only causes the murmurs to start back up—hushed, at first, then quickly growing to a sizable din as most of his classmates start debating the issue back and forth.

“But… but Saihara-kun is a nice person, right?” Gonta-kun asks. “He’s been helping us whenever we’re in trouble… He’s much smarter than Gonta too! He even figured out how to get Ouma-kun to come out of his room and start eating.”

“He’s certainly clever.” Shinguuji-kun’s voice is dry. “Perhaps… a little too much so. I still find his explanation for how he knew we were being watched particularly puzzling. And his theories about our memories…” The anthropologist narrows his eyes. “...Are disconcerting at best. It would seem that he’s aware of an awful lot that the rest of us just aren’t privy to.”

Iruma-san gives a disdainful snort. “For fuck’s sake, come on. You’re really throwing shade at that Saihara? Mr. No Spine-hara over there?” She crosses her arms in front of her chest, sneering. “Obviously he just got stuck bein’ the leader ‘cause he’s a huge masochist who can’t say no to people.”

Maybe that’s her way of trying to be considerate for the other night, the same way Chabashira-san had been, or maybe she really does think that little of him. Saihara doesn’t care. Anything to have one more voice in the room who doesn’t think he’s capable of stooping so low.

“Shuuichi’s the leader ‘cause he’s got more balls than any of the rest of you!” Momota-kun’s voice booms encouragingly over everyone else’s—and as thankful as he is, Saihara finds himself struggling to remember why his friend couldn’t have just taken this role on himself. “’Sides, we don’t have just the one leader. We’re all runnin’ our own groups here, yeah?”

“Even if that’s the case, that’s all the less reason for Saihara-kun to go running around however he pleases.” Toujou-san sounds completely unperturbed. “Leading a smaller group is no excuse for keeping such important information a secret, and he should be held to the same standards as the rest of us. Or are you suggesting anyone who calls themselves a ‘group leader’ is beyond such accountability?”

“Th-That’s...” Momota-kun balks, his face a little pale. “That’s kinda beside the point…”

Akamatsu-san waits a few moments before finally chiming in, her voice smaller than Saihara’s ever heard it before. “I just… I guess I just want to know…” She rubs against her left arm absentmindedly, her eyes trailing from shelf to shelf across the library before reluctantly meeting his own. “Why didn’t you just tell us, Saihara-kun? I kind of thought…” Pause. “I thought the whole point of this plan was to stop us from going off on our own like this.”

Saihara remembers, suddenly. Remembers her plan to try and find the ringleader in their midst, the one Ouma-kun had told him about. All those other times, over and over again, she had apparently taken matters into her own hands, kept secrets from him and everyone else, only for it to be twisted horribly against her.

It wasn’t something she had ever told him about directly—but she must’ve been considering it this time, too, before thinking better of it. For the first time ever, she’d put aside her own plans and trusted in everyone else more fully. Maybe this whole plan, this alternative, had even come as a relief to her, knowing she wouldn’t have to do things on her own.

…And then he’d gone behind everyone’s backs, never once considering her feelings. That small realization at a time like this almost makes him nauseous, and Saihara looks away first. He can’t even manage an answer to her question.

“So just what are you suggesting we do about this, Toujou-san?” Amami-kun speaks up, his voice as relaxed and reasonable as ever. If he feels particularly strongly about their discussion, he’s careful not to show it on his face.

Toujou-san closes her eyes briefly, and Saihara has to wonder if she’s really contemplating their options or if she already planned her response from the start. There’s a stern look in her eyes when she opens them again, but all she says is, “...We should proceed with caution.”

Saihara’s palms are unpleasantly clammy by now, covered in a thin layer of sweat and stinging more sharply than ever as he keeps his nails clenched tight against the skin. It’s a more lenient answer than he was expecting, but he doesn’t feel any mercy in her words at all—perhaps because it feels as though her eyes are piercing him through as she looks his way directly.

“I doubt that replacing one irreproachable leader with another would fix the larger breach of trust at hand. I do understand that some measure of group cooperation is necessary, after all. However…” There’s a loaded pause, and when the maid speaks again, she sounds almost remorseful. “It’d be wise to remember that those trying to earn your trust the most may have other, more self-motivated intentions. Perhaps we should keep a closer eye on Saihara-kun from now on.”

Her words have such a ring of decisiveness to them that no one can think of a single objection—not even Saihara. The group meeting ends in complete silence.

---

“Good going back there, Mr. Detective. You did a bang-up job, really, Saihara-chan.”

Saihara looks up in surprise from the book he’s been reading—well, not reading exactly. More like staring at aimlessly. He’d been trying to read the same page for about half an hour, with no success. “Ouma-kun…”

Until just now, Saihara has had this entire corner of the library all to himself, but he’d hardly say he was “alone.” The rest of his classmates are off in their groups, discussing post-lunch plans and chores, keeping their distance from him. But not too much distance. He can’t help but notice that most of them are still looking his way occasionally, whispering words too quiet for him to hear.

“...Everyone’s looking this way,” Saihara reminds the other boy, for lack of any better response. It’s not like he can deny how badly he’d messed things up, after all.

“So? Let them stare. Not talking to each other isn’t gonna make us look any less suspicious anyway.” Ouma-kun takes a seat next to him on the library floor.

“I guess… I didn’t think you’d be in the mood to talk.”

The other boy taps his chin in thought. “You mean, you thought I’d be pissed at you?”

“...Yeah, pretty much.”

“Oh, don’t worry. I am,” says Ouma-kun, “at least a little. But frankly? We’ve got more important shit to deal with right now. Speaking of which, why didn’t you just tell me what happened with Hoshi-chan, anyway?”

Saihara grimaces. He’d known that question was going to come up sooner or later, but that doesn’t make it any easier to answer. “I mean… I was going to.” He sighs and rests his head back on the shelf behind him. “Maybe you won’t believe me, but I was. I just didn’t get a chance to, before…”

Before everything went to shit, he almost says, but he leaves it at that.

Then Ouma-kun turns to look at him, his face so close that Saihara almost flinches. He looks him over appraisingly in complete silence; whatever he might be thinking, his blank expression doesn’t betray it at all.

Finally, he sits back again. “Okay… let’s say I do believe you. And you were going to tell me later.” Despite his light words, Ouma-kun’s face is still completely serious. “But now Toujou-chan stuck her nose where it doesn’t belong, and we’ve got a huge mess on our hands. So let’s deal with that first.”

“You don’t… sound very surprised by all this,” Saihara says. Suddenly, a sinking suspicion occurs to him. What if the other boy had only been pretending not to pay attention when they’d come back to the library? “Did you already know about everything…?” Maybe Toujou-san hadn’t been the only one eavesdropping in on them...

But Ouma-kun dismisses that thought almost as soon as he’s voiced it. “Oh, please. I wish I’d known. As much as it pains me to admit this, even I don’t know everything—or else I wouldn’t still be stuck in this killing game after all this time.” He snorts, somehow without sounding amused in the least. “All I know is, I took my eyes off of you for like five seconds, and then suddenly Toujou-chan’s got you standing on trial.”

“So why did you try to take the blame?” Saihara can’t help but bring it up; it’s been bugging at him this entire time. And while it was hardly worth having another fight over, he still wonders why the other boy made such risky claims despite not having seen any of this coming.

Ouma-kun goes quiet, looking thoughtful as he considers the question. He clasps a knee to his chest and rests his head atop it. “Hmm… force of habit? I’m really good at getting them to pin the blame on me by now.”

“Not funny.” Saihara honestly isn’t in the mood for jokes right now.

“Okay, okay, my bad.” The other boy waves a placating hand before trailing his fingers absentmindedly down the spines of the books next to him. “But I was only half-kidding. It would’ve been easier if they blamed me instead of you, so I tried to give you an out. Guess it didn’t go so well, though.”

Hearing those words, Saihara can’t help but wonder if he’s being unfair. All he can think to say is a simple, “Sorry.”

In the silence that follows, the detective closes his eyes. Opens them. He stares up at the ceiling for a moment, then back at the book he’d grabbed at random off one of the shelves. Finally, his brain actually registers what it’s supposed to be about: a biographical book on several famous composers. His stomach clenches at the memory of that look on Akamatsu-san’s face, how disappointed she’d seemed. He shoves the book back on the shelf behind him before he can even process what he’s doing.

“Interesting choice, reading at a time like this.” Ouma-kun quirks an eyebrow at him. “Was it really that boring?”

“I wasn’t really reading, I just…” He stops and pinches at the bridge of his nose. Already, he can feel a headache slowly building behind his temples—maybe from the lack of sleep, or just the sheer amount of stress that he’d been under lately. “I didn’t want to look at everyone else when I knew they’d be… staring at me.”

“Oh.” The other boy just nods, sounding just slightly… disappointed? Concerned? It’s difficult to tell. “You always did have that bad habit—”

Whatever Ouma-kun was going to say is suddenly cut off by the sound of the library door opening. It takes everyone a moment to register that all sixteen of them were already there and accounted for, and then the alarm sets in as they look up to see Monokuma standing in the doorway.

“Hey, bastards! Bet you’re all happy to see me again—how many years has it been?”

Everyone shares the usual reactions: surprise, caution, dismay—even a few groans of displeasure. Amidst the sudden wave of noise, Saihara can barely make out the other boy’s words, muttered low under his breath: It’s about time.

“What do you want?” Akamatsu-san’s voice sounds strained as she squeezes her arms. None of them are too shocked by the bear’s reappearance after all this time; it had been a few days since it had introduced the phone booth to them, after all. But that doesn’t mean they’re not dreading the idea of hearing what it has to say.

Yumeno-san’s eyes peer resentfully out from under the brim of her hat. “If you have another motive for us, why not just get it over with and tell us what it is? No one here wants to see your ugly face,” she mutters.

“Motive?” Monokuma repeats the word curiously, tapping a mechanical paw to its chin. “You kids sure seem to like that word a lot. What, do you actually want me to give you a motive?”

“Pretty sure you can dismiss that possibility,” Amami-kun says, and despite his cordial tone, his eyes aren’t laughing at all.

“Well then, stop bringing it up! It’d sure make my job a whole lot easier if you actually took the bait whenever I gave you a perfectly good motive, but you’re the ones who keep insisting on being stubborn about it.” The bear totters forward on its tiny robotic legs as they all clear a path. “Anyway, this time I have a reward for you all.”

“Um… Gonta is confused. Didn’t you say the same thing about the phone booth?” Gonta-kun’s voice is tentative as though sure he’s asking a stupid question, but his point is a good one; Saihara was even wondering the same thing. “But everyone kept saying that was still a motive anyway…”

“Do you have chewing gum between your ears, or do you kids just like sticking that stuff all over school property?” Monokuma comes to a halt in the middle of the library and tilts its head to the side, as though genuinely curious. “Last time, I said the phone booth was a little freebie. This time, it’s a reward. The kind you get for good behavior—though I guess you little delinquents wouldn’t know much about that, so I can kind of get why it’d come as a surprise…”

“S-Sorry, Gonta just didn’t understand…”

Kiibo-kun cuts in gently. “You don’t need to apologize, Gonta-kun. After all, it all boils down to the same thing. Monokuma might call it many different things, but whatever it tells us is clearly meant to be a motive.”

“Why call it something else if it knows none of us are going to believe it anyway?” Despite the nerves eating away at his stomach, Saihara can’t help but voice that question aloud. “And why call it a ‘reward’ when all we’ve done so far is ruin its plans? It just doesn’t add up.”

“I just told you, rewards are for good behavior!” Monokuma’s voice is almost sickly sweet, completely unlike the angry outbursts it had been showing ever since they’d all waited out the time limit. “I told you kids to make it interesting last time, and you didn’t disappoint! And I’ve been awfully hard on you guys for the last few days, so… don’t you think you deserve a little treat for all your hard work?”

Ouma-kun doesn’t seem at all surprised by the bear’s reasoning. He just taps a finger to his chin and asks, “What kind of reward are we talking about here?”

“Well, you know, since you’ve all been having such a fun sleepover for the last few days… how about a movie night at the gym?”

The room goes quiet at that little suggestion. None of them quite know how to react; it’s more than obvious that whatever Monokuma has in store for them, it won’t be nearly as cute or innocuous as it sounds. But the bear’s insistence on treating it like a reward only heightens the sense of anxiety in the room, as thick and palpable as the rows of books on the library shelves.

Shirogane-san reluctantly breaks that heavy silence, wringing her nervous hands together. “You’re not… you’re not really giving us a choice, are you?”

“Was it that obvious?” Monokuma sounds downright giddy. “I said you could do whatever you wanted with the phone booth because that was just a freebie, but rewards are a totally separate thing! You can’t just not collect your reward; how ungrateful would that be?”

“And if we still would rather not see whatever it is you want to show us?” Toujou-san asks. Her face is impassable, a hard and scrutinizing mask.

Monokuma considers the question with another tilt of the head. “Hmm… why not make it a new rule? It’s forbidden to turn down a reward offered directly by the headmaster.”

Every Monopad in the room sounds a collective ding almost as soon as the words have left the bear’s mouth.

“Oh, and no worries—you can still come back and do your little camp-out in the library or whatever. I’m not here to ruin your fun or anything, so relax!”

Not a single one of them feels like relaxing, and their so-called headmaster knows it.

“So, with that being said… get your butts over to the gym! Unless you want to share your little sleepover with the Exisals!” The bear laughs, a shrill and all-too-familiar sound. “You’d hate to miss the movie I picked out. It’s a hell of a film—it might even offer you kids a new perspective on things!”

Monokuma exits the room almost as quickly as it came, leaving nothing but a lingering sense of dread in its wake.

Ordinarily, they would probably try to sort out their options and sit down for another discussion. But without even knowing how much time is left before the Exisals are sent their way, they aren’t really left with much of a choice: they look around the room, silent and tense, and then they begin to file out of the library to see whatever is in store for them.

Saihara’s feet feel heavy as he trudges up the stairs, trailing a little behind most of his other classmates. His thoughts are muddled with an ever-looming anxiety, as if the shadow under his feet is slowly but surely growing longer until it threatens to swallow him whole.

He’s so consumed by his worries (about Monokuma, about what everyone else must think of him, about this entire killing game) that he almost doesn’t notice when Ouma-kun begins matching his pace on the steps and taps him on the shoulder.

“So, what do you think?” The other boy is all-too-aware that they don’t have much time before they reach the gym, so he gets straight to the point. “What’s this ‘movie night’ going to be?”

This is the only real chance they have to discuss what’s coming, to even attempt something like a contingency plan, but Saihara can barely keep up with everything that’s happened today as it is. He shakes his head wearily. “I honestly don’t know what to think. I wish we had some way to know what was coming, but…” He leaves the thought unfinished as his words trail off awkwardly. Whatever was about to happen, it couldn’t possibly be good.

Much to his surprise, Ouma-kun seems relatively unfazed. Despite his serious expression, his voice is relatively calm as he leans in and says, “I think I can probably take a guess.”

Something nags at the back of Saihara’s mind. “You mean…?”

“You remember what I told you, right? About those motive videos.”

Saihara does remember, though admittedly he’d completely forgotten among all the commotion—those videos, and the flashback lights that he’d heard so much about, were the keys that had led him to guessing the crucial missing piece about the way this killing game worked.

He brings a hand to his chin in thought, feverishly trying to remember everything the other boy had mentioned when they’d had their talk in that dark bedroom, what felt like so many days ago. “You really think that’s it? Was this how it happened those other times, too?”

“Not exactly. Those stupid cubs were usually the ones to hand them out.” The other boy shrugs. “But it’d fit right in with our last motive, right? The phone booth didn’t work, so now we’re getting a more direct motive about our friends and loved ones, and no one’s allowed to just not watch their video this time.”

That… made sense. It would tie in with the phone booth motive almost perfectly—in fact, considering the phone booth was still operational, maybe forcing them to watch their motive videos would give someone even more incentive to use it than before. Especially if whatever Monokuma showed them was related to their false memories.

It sounded like a plausible theory… but Saihara still has no idea what they’re supposed to do to work around it, or even if that was what was actually waiting for them at the gym.

“Besides,” Ouma-kun says, and he puts a finger to his lips as his voice drops a little lower, “Toujou-chan’s already feeling pretty suspicious of you, right? All she’d need is one little push for the ‘greater good’ or whatever from her motive video and I bet she’d probably be willing to take some pretty drastic measures.”

On instinct, Saihara digs his nails back into his palms, which are still a little tender from where they almost broke the skin a few hours ago. “If that happens… if she watches her motive video, what do we do? How do we stop her from killing someone?”

For that matter, how would they stop anyone from doing something drastic once they saw those motive videos? From the way Ouma-kun had put it, only a handful of people had actually seen their own videos in those other timelines, and even that had been more than enough to kickstart the killing game back into action.

“I guess we’ll have to cross that bridge when we get to it. Y’know, since we don’t have much time left.” Ouma-kun’s mouth twists. “For now, we’ll just have to keep an eye on Toujou-chan. Maybe Hoshi-chan, too. Harukawa-chan…” He pauses. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but she’s probably not a threat this time, since she already told everyone about her talent. Anyway, that’s all we can do for now.”

Was that really all they could do? No matter how hard he tries, Saihara can’t think of any better options. Keeping an eye on each other was the whole reason they’d created this plan in the first place, after all.

Part of him wonders, though… would Monokuma really repeat a motive like that when most of them were already starting to question their memories? Would it take the huge risk that maybe one of them would believe whatever lies were on the screen, that they’d be desperate enough to make contact with people who might not even exist, to the point that it would even go through the trouble to add another school rule?

He’s not sure—but before he can voice any of those thoughts aloud, they’ve already reached the gym.

Saihara pauses outside the double-doors, but Ouma-kun follows after the others without a moment’s hesitation. After one last deep breath he joins them, trying to ignore how much his hands are shaking as he pulls the doors wide open, trying not to wonder what’s waiting for him inside the room.

But the interior of the gym is more normal than he expected. There’s no pile of motive videos waiting ominously for them, no strange-looking flashback lights—in fact, even the Exisals and the other bears are nowhere to be seen.

The only thing that somewhat stands out is the large projector screen hanging on the wall, though that’s been there since they first woke up in this school. Other than the school logo, nothing is displayed on it, and nothing looks particularly out of the ordinary about it either.

Then Monokuma appears on the stage, popping up from the podium just beneath the screen. “Glad to see you all made it!” The bear taps the microphone in front of it twice, testing the sound quality. “Can you all hear me? You can, right? Okay, kiddos, hold on to the edge of your seats because I’m starting the movie, and you’re never gonna believe the twists in this one!”

The logo fades out and the screen flickers on; at the same time, the whole room goes quiet enough to hear a pin drop. Saihara braces himself for whatever is about to appear on screen—and then finds himself completely at a loss for words.

On the screen directly in front of him, there’s no sign of Toujou-san, or Hoshi-kun, or Harukawa-san. No sign of their loved ones either, not their friends or family or acquaintances they might have known. There’s no cheesy introduction, no narration from Monokuma, no indication that this is any sort of motive video at all.

No, the only thing that he sees on the screen is a face. His face. Wearing a distinctly familiar, tattered old hat.

---

“Number 154… My name is…”

Huh?

“I’ve been a fan of Danganronpa for a long time now… and I’ve always wanted to participate in a killing game like this…”

What is this? Who is that?

“I-If I’m allowed to participate, I would love to become the Super High School Level Detective…”

Whose words are those? What the hell… am I even looking at?

“Oh, but it’s fine if I’m not a detective. As long as I get to be in Danganronpa, anything is fine. I just… I just want to be a part of the world of Danganronpa, no matter what.”

Saihara stares in blank, abject horror at the video playing out on the screen in front of him. His own face stares back at him, as twitchy and awkward as he’s ever seen it in the mirror. The word Danganronpa rebounds around the inside of his skull, incomprehensible, meaningless. He has no clue what it means, and to be honest, he doesn’t care—he’s far more shocked by every other word leaving this stranger’s mouth. His mouth.

“That’s why I’ll do my very best, as long as I can participate in this killing game!”

The stranger on the screen, identical to him in every way, smiles widely at the camera for the first time.

Saihara has never worn a smile so disgustingly off-putting before. He’s never said those words before, either. Never, never, never. He’d remember if he did, wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t I?

But then, he was the one who’d gone and warned everyone just how unreliable their own memories were.

That’s his face on the screen, whether he wants to admit it or not. His face, his voice—his hat.

“I’ll commit a murder no one’s ever seen or thought of before! It’ll blow everyone away! We’ve never had a Super High School Level Detective as the culprit before, right? So if I were the detective, I’d be able to use some trick that no one else could!”

Those horrible words keep coming, one after the other. Hesitant at first, but now tinged with an almost feverish desperation.

“I’ve thought all about my execution, too, for when everyone finds out that I’m the culprit! It’ll be amazing! Something perfectly fitting for the Super High School Level Detective!”

The word execution lingers in the air long after the figure stops talking, and the audible excitement in that voice (his voice) threatens to make his skin crawl. Saihara can’t bear to look at this stranger wearing his face for even a second longer; he tears his eyes away, looking anywhere, everywhere, as long as it’s not back at the screen.

At last, his eyes land on Ouma-kun. But Ouma-kun isn’t looking back at him—like everyone else, his gaze is locked on the other him. The one wearing a broad smile at the mere mention of murders and executions.

If anyone could possibly look at this and still tell him it was all a lie, he had hoped it would be Ouma-kun. That’s what he wants to hear: that it’s all fake. That it’s just a sick joke. But if it’s some kind of joke, the other boy doesn’t seem to find it very funny. Instead, he looks nothing short of stunned. Alarmed, even.

Seeing that shocked expression on the other boy’s face is too much—he’d seen Ouma-kun wear all kinds of faces, but nothing that ever came close to this. He’d been hoping to see almost anything else: a sly grin, as if the other boy had known this would happen all along, a dismissive roll of the eyes as though this entire motive was a cheap waste of time.

Even that blank, unreadable stare he sometimes still fell back on would’ve been better than seeing the other boy’s emotions so clearly displayed across his face, in that split second. Another wave of panic surges through him, and all of a sudden Saihara can’t bring himself to look at Ouma-kun anymore either.

He was right. The thought occurs to him suddenly, almost deliriously. Back then, Ouma-kun was right. He shouldn’t have opened the door for me.

The video fades out, and in its absence he can finally feel the weight of everyone else’s gazes on him as they slowly, begrudgingly look his way again. The undisguised accusations in their eyes pin him in place like an insect to a board, rooting him to the spot.

No matter which way he turns, his classmates are on all sides of him, and he can’t look a single one of them in the eye. The other him had been wearing his old hat, but right now Saihara Shuuichi has nothing to hide behind.

Monokuma must have left while the video was airing, because no one comes over to break the silence, not even to gloat. The entire gymnasium is silent as the grave; the only noise he can hear is the nervous stutter of his own pulse, ringing in his ears.

“Saihara-kun…” Akamatsu-san’s hoarse voice shatters that silence like glass. “What… was that?”

He doesn’t say anything. Can’t say anything. He doesn’t know the answer to that any better than she does, but truth be told, he just doesn’t want to hear the sound of his own voice right now. Not if it sounds anything like the other person on that screen.

More of his classmates begin asking the same questions, but their voices sound far-off and indistinct, as though from a distance, or through a film of water. Someone else (or maybe it’s still Akamatsu-san) begs him to speak up, to say anything, but he still can’t manage a reply. Amidst all the sudden noise, the only thing he can make out for sure is the sound of his own quick breathing, struggling to carry oxygen to his brain, to form any coherent thoughts at all.

His panic is slowly but surely beginning to spiral into something worse: something closer to despair.

“It’s gotta be a goddamn trick! There’s no way any of that was real!” For all his bravado, Momota-kun’s voice is still shaking. And Saihara can’t blame him for it—he had wanted someone else to tell him the exact same thing, only a few minutes ago.

Even Toujou-san looks uncharacteristically rattled; her gloved hands shake ever so slightly as she clasps them atop her dress again. “Trick or no,” she says, “it certainly did look and sound like him. Try as I might, I couldn’t spot any differences, other than the uniform he wore.”

“E-Even the hat was the same…” Shirogane-san says feebly.

“That… that doesn’t necessarily prove anything, right? The video could’ve been faked…”

“Maybe it was edited somehow. Or someone used a voice-changer…”

“Even if it was real, what if Saihara-kun doesn’t remember any of it? There’s definitely a chance our memories are fake, right? So, maybe…”

“I believe it was Saihara-kun himself who said that it was quite risky to take a gamble on a ‘maybe,’ no? Even if he claims to have amnesia, he could always be lying.” Shinguuji-kun’s mouth is as imperceptible as ever behind his mask, but his eyes are cold and narrow. “Any of us could, for that matter.”

As Saihara stands there in silence, as the rest of his classmates argue with each other, Gonta-kun raises a huge, trembling arm. “Is… Is Saihara-kun the ringleader? Gonta doesn’t understand…”

“Dunno about that.” Amami-kun slowly crosses his arms. “I kinda doubt the ringleader would just hand us their identity on a silver platter saying, ‘yep, here you go.’”

“Unfortunately… the ringleader isn’t the only threat to us in this game.”

Toujou-san cuts right to the heart of the matter, voicing the one concern that must have been on all of their minds, even his own.

“Anyone can pose a risk to us in this game…” Despite the cracks in her composure, the maid’s words are very calm. “Anyone can kill. It’s simply a matter of whether they will or not.”

Akamatsu-san inhales sharply, looking every bit as sick and shaky as he feels. Saihara wonders if she’s thinking about the plan she almost carried out, the murder she almost committed. She must know just how true those words were, better than most people in this room.

Kiibo-kun puts a hand to his chin, deep in thought. “We’re put in a very difficult position. Even if this was all the real ringleader’s design, and they only showed us that video to make us suspect Saihara-kun…”

“…Not suspecting him would be worse.”

Saihara isn’t sure whose words those are—maybe Toujou-san’s, or Shinguuji-kun’s, maybe someone else’s entirely, but he can’t deny them. They’re right. Who would trust someone that they’d just seen talking so enthusiastically about murder, about willingly signing up for something as brutal as a killing game? He wouldn’t.

And if he wouldn’t even trust himself… why should any of the rest of them believe him, either?

He’d been the one to suggest the idea that maybe their participation in this killing game wasn’t as forced as they’d believed—that they had joined willingly, somehow or other. But even then, he’d never really believed that the real answer would be something like this. Part of him had always been sure that there must’ve been extenuating circumstances, a loophole of some kind; maybe the definition of “willing consent” was broad for the people running this game.

But with the truth staring back at him in the face (with his face), it was impossible for him to argue back.

“Wait, wait a second. This whole goddamn plan was Saihara’s idea, wasn’t it!?” Iruma-san snaps. “So what the fuck does that mean?”

“It means we have no way to tell whether he’s lying or not. About this plan, or anything else.”

“If he really did join this game intending to kill someone, he may even have planned ahead for this. Perhaps following this plan any further would just be playing into his hands…”

“Saihara wouldn’t lie about somethin’ like that! We’re talking about people’s lives, here!”

“I d-don’t really want to believe that Saihara-kun would lie either,” Shirogane-san says, her teeth nearly chattering from nerves as she hesitantly interrupts. “But then… why did he lie to everyone about the phone booth earlier?”

No one has a response to that. Least of all, himself.

Saihara just closes his eyes. The sound of his pulse in his ears is almost deafening by this point, or maybe it’s just the sound of everything crashing down on him at once, the way that he’d always feared it would. Maybe they’d only ever been prolonging the inevitable from the moment the time limit had run out.

Like a natural disaster, all he can do is close his eyes and wait it out. Nothing he can say or do will change the fact that he’s broken their trust beyond all repair. Nothing can change the fact that this plan, his plan, seems like nothing but a trap by now.

Had that been the plan all along? Kill someone with some clever trick while everyone was supposed to be keeping an eye on each other, then forge a perfect alibi? He’d like to believe that wasn’t at all what he’d had in mind when he’d first suggested this plan, but how could he ever know for sure? He didn’t even know why he’d joined this killing game in the first place, let alone what he was capable of.

Clearly he didn’t know himself any better than the rest of them did.

By the time Saihara opens his eyes again, his hands are numb, his heart pounding in his chest so violently that it almost hurts. He finally manages to find his voice, rough and strange in his own ears, as he says just one thing:

“This isn’t going to work.”

The gym was totally empty now. Totally empty—except for him.

Like a lone survivor in the aftermath of a disaster, or maybe like an actor without an audience, Ouma Kokichi sits by himself on the gymnasium stage, his back to the wall, his head tilted up to the ceiling, lost in thought.

Everyone had left a little while ago—slowly at first, and then all at once. There just wasn’t much point in sticking around, when the walls of their entire plan had come crumbling down all around them. Many of them had left the room in groups of twos or threes, still clinging to some vague notion of safety in numbers, but everyone still pretty much agreed: the plan was dead now.

Saihara-chan had, of course, left the room first.

After he’d so bluntly announced that there was no more point in following their original plan, he’d offered to see himself out before anyone else could so much as tell him to go. He’d made no excuses, explanations, or even apologies: he’d simply left, without looking back even once. And without ever once meeting his eye, no matter how many times Ouma had tried to read him after watching that video.

He’d been completely blindsided—he could admit that much. He’d been so sure that Monokuma was going to show them Toujou-chan’s motive video again, maybe all of their motive videos, that he hadn’t stopped even once to consider the possibility of some other video for “movie night.” And the thing that had played out on the screen had been completely beyond even his ability to predict. After all, he’d never seen anything like that, those other times.

He leans a little further back, staring up at the ceiling of the gym as though trying to burn a hole through it. And he continues to try and make any sense of whatever the hell it was that he’d seen.

Saihara Shuuichi, the Super High School Level Detective, talking about murders and executions. Practically drooling at the notion of death—any death, his own or other people’s. Babbling on and on about killing games and murder tricks, clinging to the notion of his five minutes of fame the way a starving man would lunge for food that was dropped to the ground.

Whatever the hell that video was supposed to be, it didn’t look good. And whether Saihara-chan was the only one with skeletons in his closet, or whether there were possibly other, similar videos for the rest of them, it certainly didn’t bode well.

If nothing else, Ouma is pretty sure he can safely say this much: Saihara-chan wasn’t the ringleader. Like Amami-chan had pointed out, why would the ringleader bother to confess their identity so easily? Looking at it logically, that video was nothing but an advantage for whoever the real ringleader was; it had served its purpose, and torn down everything that Saihara-chan had been working for over the last few days.

But… just because he wasn’t the ringleader didn’t rule the detective out from suspicion either. Toujou-chan had hardly known just how right she was when she’d said as much, but anyone could kill in this game. Anyone. Perhaps, even Saihara Shuuichi. It would be reckless to dismiss the entire video as fake, when the proof was staring him back in the face.

Reckless, and foolish, and naïve. All words that he’d come to associate with the notion of trust for a long time now.

Ouma’s mouth twists as he continues to stare up at the ceiling, looking pointedly at a spot just a little to the left of one of the fluorescent lights. And he thinks back on the Saihara-chan that he’s come to know after repeating this killing game again and again, thinks about the detective who had looked him in the eye only just last night and said that he trusted him.

The other boy had asked for his trust in return, too—maybe not in so many words, but with his hand. The hand he’d reached out to him, despite every attempt Ouma had made to push him away, despite every horrible word that had come out of his mouth.

He looks away from the ceiling, and stares down at his hands instead, looking at the bruises and faint, shiny scars along his fingers.

Perhaps Saihara-chan had only ever reached out his hand because there was something else in it for him. Maybe he’d been playing the long game of betrayal. Maybe he’d only wanted him to trust him back then so he could double-cross him later. Maybe the whole thing had been little more than an elaborate act.

Ouma doesn’t think so, though. He slowly flexes the fingers of his right hand, remembering the sensation of Saihara-chan’s hand in his. No matter what the Saihara Shuuichi on that screen had said, he’s pretty sure the other boy couldn’t lie about the warmth of his hand.

If trusting someone else after all this damning evidence would be foolish, well… he supposes he can live with that.

“I guess I’m just not as smart as I thought I was,” he says aloud. It’s true that there’s no one else in the room with him, but he knows the people watching this killing game must be hanging on to his every word, wondering what would come of this entire, terrible situation. It’d be a shame not to give them what they wanted; he was onstage, after all. “I must be pretty stupid, anyway, to keep losing this game for so long. Guess I’ll keep being stupid for a little longer.”

He hops off the stage, brushes off his clothes, and thinks for a moment. Sure, he’d like to find wherever Saihara-chan went off to, but there are a few other things he needs to do first. He’s not the only player in this game. Neither is the ringleader, for that matter, and neither is Saihara-chan.

This whole situation was terrible. Terrible, awful, and desperate—a little too much so. The ringleader had overplayed their hand, and now it was his turn to make a move. Except, he didn’t particularly feel like playing chess anymore.

Ouma thinks it over a little more, nods once, and then walks quickly towards the exit on the other side of the gym. On his way out the door, all he says is, “I think today’s the day I’ll end this stupid game.”

He smiles to himself, hoping that his audience heard him loud and clear.

---

“The hell? What did you just fuckin’ say?”

“You heard me fine the first time, right? I need you to make me something, so we can start tearing down the rest of the school.”

For once in his life, Ouma decides to be on his very best behavior. He bites back every snarky reply that comes to mind and repeats himself calmly. And when Iruma-chan, Akamatsu-chan, and Amami-chan all stare back at him, bewildered, he doesn’t so much as smirk.

It’d be a little too easy to be antagonistic right now. If he wanted to—if he really tried, he could probably turn this situation around the good old-fashioned way. A cryptic remark here, an ominous smile there, and he’s pretty sure he could take the blame off of Saihara-chan, could make everyone remember how much they hated him instead.

But he’d gone that route so many times; switching out one fake ringleader for another wasn’t likely to solve anything. Even if he got them all to be less suspicious of Saihara-chan, this killing game was quickly on its way to ending in another tragedy. All it took was one person with murder on their mind—one person to light the spark, one person to take matters into their own hand, and things would quickly begin to play out exactly the way they had before.

Maybe that was why part of him had known Amami-chan and Akamatsu-chan would be back at the library, even before he’d opened the door to check. It made perfect sense, really. The two of them had lit the spark more times than Ouma could count, and this room was where it had all began. If anyone was likely to hang around this empty, purposeless room even after everything that had happened, it was those two.

What he hadn’t accounted for though, was the one, small piece of good luck that was Iruma-chan being with them.

He had known she was much too paranoid to stay isolated in these circumstances, but he hadn’t been sure where she might’ve chosen to hole up. Maybe she’d decided that these two posed a relatively low threat, or maybe she’d just grown accustomed to hiding behind Akamatsu-chan after all the time they’d spent together in the last few days. Maybe she’d just thought that the two of them might have some kind of plan to fix this mess and put everything back together.

Whatever the case—it was lucky he’d found her here. There weren’t a whole lot of places she could’ve been, with so much of the school still closed off at this point in the game, but the clock was ticking, and every minute he might have spent looking for her was a minute wasted.

There was one constant he was sure of, after repeating this game so many times: Iruma-chan’s talent was the key to stopping this entire killing game. And that was why he wanted her to help him start tearing this school down, piece by piece.

Iruma-chan stares down at him with a hand on her hip, trying to make heads or tails of his request. “…Are you fucking high, you little troll?” She finally manages to ask that question, her expression an equal measure of irritation and confusion. “Look, shit is majorly fucked right now, but if you found anything in that warehouse to get you stoned off your ass, at least gimme some.” The inventor pauses and then, poking her fingers together, she tacks on a hesitant, “P-Please… you’ll give me some, right? I’ll do anything you want…”

Ouma resists the urge to roll his eyes, but despite everything, he can’t truly bring himself to feel annoyed. Given that he’d scarcely said more than two words to her this time around, other than when he’d gone out to follow Saihara-chan to the phone booth the other night, her unpleasant attitude was almost a little nostalgic. ...Almost.

In the past, he might’ve tried to intimidate her into cooperating with him, or at least thrown a few insults back at her, just to even the playing field. But for now, he just looks to the side and says, “You know what I’m talking about, right Amami-chan? You were the one asking whether Iruma-chan could make anything complicated. You said something about wanting to see if there were any other clues, hidden throughout the school…”

“…I did.” Amami-chan gives a cautious nod. “I wasn’t sure if you two were telling the truth at the time, but then she finished that remote. I guess I see what you meant now.” There’s an appraising, curious look in his eye, and Ouma is almost certain that the other boy must know what he’s getting at. Or he must suspect it, at the very least.

“Sorry, Ouma-kun, but… why are you bringing this up right now?” Since she wasn’t part of their earlier conversation, it’s only natural that Akamatsu-chan must feel left out of the loop. Her eyes are puffy and tinged with red in a way that makes Ouma wonder if she’s been crying. Maybe the library was the only room where she’d felt safe enough to let her true feelings show, if only for a few minutes. “I don’t really know what it is you want Iruma-san to do…”

It was only natural that they’d want a little more explanation, so Ouma just nods. He raises a finger—a moment of their time is all he needs. Then he turns and searches the closest library desk for the first sheet of paper he can find. It’s not totally blank; the front is covered with some dry, meaningless print (probably a page that fell out of one of the countless books in here), but the back will do.

He flips it over and takes a pen out of the desk drawer, tracing the lines of a design he knows by heart at this point. What had once taken him hours to come up with while alone in his room now takes him no more than five minutes, surrounded by three curious people on all sides of him: it’s a rough sketch at best, but unmistakably the shape of a small, slender hammer.

He spends another thirty seconds outlining the basic functions of the design, then slides it across the desk, nearer to Iruma-chan. “You can make this, can’t you?” He phrases it as a question, but the truth is that he already knows the answer. The real question was whether she would make it after everything that had happened.

“What the fuck is this even supposed to…?” Iruma-chan starts to snap, but she stops her question mid-sentence the moment she takes a closer look. She studies his messy, frantic penmanship for a few more seconds as comprehension slowly dawns on her face. “It was you, wasn’t it? You’re the one who came up with the design for that remote, the other day.”

Ouma just shrugs. There’s not really any point in denying it anymore, and besides, he’d even been in the room with Saihara-chan when she’d first taken a look at the concept sketch.

“I knew that remote was way too complex for a sneaky little perv like Saihara to come up with…” The inventor mutters darkly under her breath, but her eyes don’t leave the electro-hammer’s design for even a second.

Akamatsu-chan peers curiously over the other girl’s shoulder, but it’s clear that she doesn’t have a clue what she’s supposed to be looking at. “I’m sorry, is that… supposed to be a hammer?” She squints, like she’s not quite sure. Well, he had drawn it in a rush, after all. “Even if Iruma-san could make this thing, we’re not supposed to break school property, remember? Monokuma even added it to the rulebook.” She pauses. “And besides… I’m not sure if it would do any good after…”

Her words trail off as she lowers her eyes to the floor, rubbing at her left arm awkwardly. She doesn’t voice the rest of her train of thought, but Ouma can grasp the gist of it: the worst had happened, and everything had gone to shit. What was the point in trying to explore the school now, when everyone had split up and gone their separate ways?

“I think… I get it.” Amami-chan toys with the bracelets on his left wrist absentmindedly while he looks over the sketch for the electro-hammer. “I mean, I think I get why you’re bringing it up. Better late than never, right?”

“No time like the present,” Ouma agrees.

“And I don’t really get the specifics, but basically… if Iruma-san makes this hammer into another one of her crazy inventions, we could smash down all of the barriers around the school and find out more about what’s going on.” For a moment, Amami-chan looks almost cautiously optimistic. “We could even get into that room right here in the library. Find out what the ringleader’s been hiding. It’s not like things could get that much worse, right?”

Ouma smiles. Things could get worse—but not by much. “With the right kind of hammer, we might not even need to break any school rules. All we need is something that can short-circuit electric devices, but we don’t necessarily need to smash anything.” He gestures down at the paper on the desk. “So, what do you say, Iruma-chan? You could make something like that, couldn’t you?”

The girl glares at him for a moment or two, though her eyes keep darting back to the sketch on the table every so often. “…I can make anything in the fuckin’ world, because I’m the best inventor who’s ever lived,” she says through her teeth, “but do you have any idea how much time this shit would take?”

Ouma does, as a matter of fact, have an idea. In the past, it took her days, sometimes weeks of nonstop work to finish all of the electro-hammers and bombs. But they don’t have even a fraction of that kind of time right now.

“Do you think you could manage in say, a few hours?” Come on, Iruma-chan, he thinks. You’ve already made these more times than I can count. You should be able to make just one more.

Iruma-chan stares back at him, completely stunned by such a blunt question. For a moment, he’s almost sure she’s going to throttle him for asking something so ridiculously unfair—but she hesitates. Maybe the design feels just a little more familiar than she expected it to… or maybe she just likes the idea of a challenge.

She gives one last disdainful snort and then snatches the paper off the desk, crumpling it slightly in her fist. “Whatever. Fine, I’ll make it. S’not like I have anything better to do right now anyway.” Despite the frustration in her voice, he’s pretty sure she is more excited than she’s letting on. She was the one who’d been complaining nonstop over the last few days about not having enough time to invent anything, after all.

“Might as well take Amami-chan and Akamatsu-chan with you, before you go to your lab.” Ouma calls out to her as she turns her back on him, already heading for the library door. “Wouldn’t want anyone trying to… hurt you, if you were by yourself.” He avoids saying the word kill at the last possible second, hoping the three of them can tell that he’s going for concern and not a threat.

Iruma-chan, Akamatsu-chan, and Amami-chan all pause, and the room goes very quiet. None of them seem quite sure just how to take those words, but at the very least… they don’t react badly.

In the awkward silence that follows, Akamatsu-chan seems to debate with herself for a moment or two before she finally asks what’s on her mind. “Are you… doing all of this because of what happened with Saihara-kun?” she asks. “Do you know for sure he’s not working with the ringleader? He wasn’t trying to set us all up?” Her voice wavers a little, like she’s scared to be hopeful.

He doesn’t have a shred of solid evidence to back him up, but Ouma nods all the same. “I’m sure,” he says.

“It did seem like an awfully convenient set-up.” Amami-chan agrees, crossing his arms. “Pretty sure I mentioned this to Saihara-kun before, but he must have really been pissing the real ringleader off. They went through a lot of trouble just to drag him through the mud.”

Akamatsu-chan closes her eyes, struggling to come to some sort of a decision. With a shaky sigh, she finally opens them again and nods. “If it means we can get to the bottom of everything that’s happening to us… if we can find out the truth, then I’ll help.” She pauses, and then more gently, she says, “I don’t know you very well, Ouma-kun, but… you seem like you trust Saihara-kun a lot. And it kind of makes me want to trust him, too.”

It’s Ouma’s turn to be taken aback. He stares at the pianist blankly, thinking back on all her speeches about teamwork, on her unrelenting optimism, even on those times (very long ago, by now) that they’d shared tea and talked about their favorite musical pieces. Most of all, he thinks back on just how desperately she had always wanted to end this killing game.

It’d be nice, he thinks, if we could finally manage it together this time.

He doesn’t have much more to say after that, but just before the three of them leave the library, he pulls Iruma-chan aside and asks if he can speak to her a little ways apart from the other two. Something had come to mind since he’d seen her standing here in the library, and to be honest, he’s not quite sure when he’ll get another opportunity to talk to her one-on-one. And despite the obvious curiosity on their faces, Akamatsu-chan and Amami-chan agree to let them talk, as long as they stay more or less in their line of sight.

“Whaddaya want?” Iruma-chan asks, once they’re out of earshot. Her boot taps impatiently at the rough wooden floor. “Make it quick. I’ve got a job to do, thanks to you.”

He decides not to beat around the bush. “I owe you an apology.”

“Wh—huh?” Iruma-chan’s eyes widen a little.

“Hypothetically, okay? Hypothetically speaking, if I… hurt you, in the past, or did something I couldn’t take back. …I’d owe you an apology for that, right?” For the second time, he avoids the word kill, switching to something just a little less harsh.

She looks him up and down in nothing short of disbelief. “What, is this about the other night? Just ‘cause you mouthed off to me and acted all scary—”

“No, Iruma-chan. That’s not what this is about.”

“…Then I don’t get it. What the hell are you talkin’ about?”

He pauses, wondering if he could ever possibly explain it all to her. Could he tell her how intricately he’d planned every detail of her death? How he’d been standing there at the moment the life was snuffed out of her? How he’d looked down so coldly at her lifeless, purple face once they’d left that virtual world that she’d programmed?

For a moment, his eyes flicker to the choker around her neck. It’s impossible for him to tell for sure, but he wonders if she might have a few bruises there, too, not entirely dissimilar from his own.

Finally, Ouma just shakes his head. “Never mind. I’m sorry, Iruma-chan. That’s all you really need to know. …And I’m never going to say that to you again, so you better burn it into your brain real good.” Just for good measure, he tacks on that last part. Maybe phrasing it in a way that was more familiar to her would make it a little easier for her to understand.

“Oh, fuck you.” Iruma-chan snorts, and before he can even move out of the way, she whaps his head lightly with the palm of her hand. “I still don’t know what the fuck you’ve been smoking, but there’s no way a little brat like you could do shit to a gorgeous, super-talented genius like me. So get your head out of your ass and let me work.”

Ouma winces, but it doesn’t really hurt. Well, not much, anyway. After all this time, she was probably bound to hit him sooner or later.

If she can make just one more electro-hammer, he decides he’ll let her hit him all she wants later on.

---

Once he leaves the library, he debates with himself where to go next. Finding Iruma-chan first had been the biggest challenge to his plan, and there was still no guarantee she would actually finish the electro-hammer in time. For now, all he can do is hope that her ridiculously helpful talent will pull through once again.

The irony of having no choice but to put his faith in Iruma-chan of all people isn’t lost on him. No matter how many times they’d fought, argued, even killed each other, somehow they always seemed to wind up working together again.

Well, at least he’d been able to apologize to her. Even if it wasn’t much of an apology, and even if she hadn’t understood a word of it… at least it had felt a little easier to look her in the eye again, after that.

Ouma decides that it’s best to be thorough; just to be on the safe side, he’ll check the rest of the basement, then work his way up to the first and second floors. If possible, he’d like to talk to the rest of his classmates first before he tries to find Saihara-chan.

When he checks the arcade room, it’s as disappointingly empty as ever. During some of his less eventful loops, he’d tried everything he could think of to make the games turn on here, but nothing had ever worked. Some of them were clearly beyond fixing too with foliage seeping through the cracked screens, a beautiful forgery of some ancient, rotting dystopia.

Whoever put this school together for us really did their homework, Ouma thinks idly to himself. They really wanted us to think we were the last people on earth. It was a good set-up, honestly—but not perfect. The tiny cracks and imperfections were starting to show, and he couldn’t wait to bring the rest of this stupid school crumbling down for good.

He keeps walking through to the next room over, and thankfully the AV room yields better results to his search.

Angie-chan, Yumeno-chan, and Chabashira-chan are huddled up in the room: the former sits on the left-most couch by herself, while the other two seem to have taken the couch on the right. Despite the circumstances, or maybe just because it was the safest course of action, they seem to have more or less stuck to their original group… minus Harukawa-chan.

But he’s pretty sure he knows where he can find Harukawa-chan, later. For the time being, her absence isn’t a problem. He’ll seek her out, too, once he’s ready.

The three girls look back at him in alarm when they hear the door open, though they seem to relax once they realize he’s by himself. Even if he’d actually come in here with the intention to murder some poor, isolated straggler, it wasn’t like he’d be able to try anything with all three of them in the room. Maybe there really was something to be said for sticking to the buddy system.

“Mind if I come in?” he asks. But Ouma doesn’t actually wait for a reply before he walks a little further into the room. The projectors on either side of the room do give him a moment’s pause, but since the screen hanging on the wall stays decidedly blank, he decides not to pay them any mind. It’d be a joke in poor taste if the ringleader decided to replay that video now, after everything that had happened.

Yumeno-chan eyes him cautiously from under the brim of her hat, her knees clasped tight against her chest from her lazy perch on the couch. He can’t help but notice that the usual hint of disgust is missing from her gaze this time. That made sense, since he hadn’t spent nearly as much of his time trying to tease her or pull on her pigtails, just to provoke a reaction out of her. In fact, he was pretty sure they hadn’t actually had so much as a single conversation between the two of them, this time around.

He’d just have to hope she didn’t suddenly have a “hunch” about just how strongly she’d hated him in the past.

“What do you want, Kokichi?” Angie-chan’s voice drawls from the couch over to the left. For once, she’s not poised for some sanctimonious prayer; if anything, she looks almost as lethargic as Yumeno-chan, sprawled across the couch with her head at one end, her feet at the other. Maybe her usual prayers hadn’t been quite cutting it for her, since she’d found out just how unreliable their memories might be. “It’s rare to see you without Shuuichi around.”

Ouma could almost feel bad for her, if he wasn’t so short on time. Well, she’d come to terms with things sooner or later. …Probably. It wasn’t like he couldn’t sympathize with the feeling that the truth was rather overrated.

“Saihara-chan’s a little under the weather at the moment,” he replies, “and anyway, I think we can all agree that you three owe him one. Considering what happened the other night.”

He keeps his tone light and casual, but all three girls stiffen the moment the words leave his mouth. It wasn’t like they hadn’t been able to put two-and-two together, when he and Harukawa-chan had shown up alongside Saihara-chan once they all came back to the library the other night.

They must have known, or at least guessed that more than one person had found out about their little foray to the phone booth. But they definitely didn’t seem to have expected that he’d bring it up so openly right now.

“You’re not going to try and throw Yumeno-san under the bus, are you?” Chabashira-chan asks. Her right hand tightens into a fist, and even though Ouma is pretty sure she wouldn’t do anything drastic, he still takes a careful step back. He’d rather not be thrown across the room like a rag doll if he can help it.

Yumeno-chan’s eyes widen in surprise for just a moment before her expression darkens. Then she sighs and slumps back against the couch, as though trying to sink even further into it. “Nyeh… I don’t care, even if he does. It’s not like things could get any worse.” She hesitates, and then tacks on, “I probably have it coming, anyway.”

Ouma just shakes his head, waving a dismissive hand. “If you’d wait to hear me out to the end, I don’t plan on throwing any of you under the bus, actually. I could’ve done that back in the gym if I’d really wanted to, couldn’t I?”

“Okay, so then why did you come here?” Angie-chan lifts her head off the arm of the couch, and there’s a shrewd, familiar edge to her voice as she eyes him with suspicion. “You weren’t hoping to catch Angie or the others alone, were you? Were you planning something naughty, Kokichi?” Her words sound playful enough, but she’s clearly much more suspicious than she wants to let on.

“Oh, please.” He can’t help but roll his eyes. “None of you are my type.”

“Thank god for that,” Chabashira-chan mutters darkly under her breath.

“Anyway. I came to let you all know that Iruma-chan is building something again. And when she’s done, we’re going to put an end to this stupid killing game.”

All three girls go wide-eyed at that; Angie-chan finally sits up, and Yumeno-chan leans forward until her tiny legs finally reach the floor again, staring at him as though he just grew three heads, or started barking at her.

“…I don’t get you,” Yumeno-chan finally says, still looking at him in sheer amazement.

Ouma pauses. He’d more or less expected that they wouldn’t be the quickest on the uptake, but he still wonders what might be the best way to get his point across.

He taps his chin in thought for another moment or two before coming to a decision. Sighing, he says, “Look, we can all agree Saihara-chan was set up just now, right? Whoever the ringleader really is, they wanted that plan to fail, and that video was the ace up their sleeve. And I guess it worked like a charm.”

All three of them go silent once he brings up the video again.

“But it’s kind of weird, right? I mean, I’m not the only one who could’ve thrown you three under the bus. If Saihara-chan was really such a threat… if he was really planning to double-cross everyone, don’t you think that would’ve been the perfect time to expose your little secret in front of everyone else?”

Looking guilty, Chabashira-chan bites her lip before dropping her gaze to the floor. “Tenko… thought about speaking up, actually,” she admits. “Even now, I still don’t think Saihara-san is a bad person. Tenko might not be the smartest, but… but I could tell, the other night. He kept our secret, even though he didn’t have to. And he knew why I wanted to protect Yumeno-san.”

“Even if you’d tried to say something… Saihara just walked out of the room before most of us even knew what was happening,” Yumeno-chan tacks on remorsefully. “It was like he wasn’t even listening anymore…”

Ouma nods. “I don’t think you three could’ve changed much, even if you’d tried to speak up for him.”

Even he had been too shocked to think of anything to say, when he’d first seen that familiar face staring back at him, up on that screen. And Saihara-chan hadn’t looked at him even once after the video had finished playing, no matter how much he’d tried to catch his eye.

“What’s done is done, and the real ringleader got their way.” For a little while, he adds silently. “But that’s exactly why… if the ringleader could use a dirty trick like that, I think it’s fine if we start playing dirty, too. That’s why Iruma-chan is going to make something that can open up every part of the school.”

“The whole school?” Chabashira-chan repeats the words with a look of pure disbelief. “Do you really think we’ll find whoever set up Saihara-san like that?”

“If everyone agrees to help me search… then, yeah.” Ouma thinks back to his dark and empty bedroom, remembers Saihara-chan’s earnest face while he’d explained how the plan he had in mind wouldn’t work if even one person was missing. “I need to know if everyone will get back onboard the original plan, otherwise there’s no point. After all, the ringleader has plenty of opportunity to slip out of reach again if we all stay split up like this.”

Much to his surprise, Yumeno-chan agrees almost immediately. There’s a frustrated noise in the back of her throat before she finally hops to her feet and balls her little hands into fists. “You really came all the way here to ask something that simple?” She sounds almost indignant. “Fine, count me in! Saihara heard me out, even when he didn’t have to. So of course I wanna find whoever set him up like that!”

It’s Ouma’s turn to be stunned. He stares from Yumeno-chan, to Chabashira-chan and Angie-chan’s equally surprised faces, then back to Yumeno-chan again. He’s pretty sure that was the most he’s ever heard her speak in one sitting, even counting all the times that he’d repeated in this game.

At the very least, it seemed like she’d decided to stop lying to herself after all. That was a pleasant surprise.

Chabashira-chan nods her agreement, looking equal parts relieved and enthused. “Count Tenko in, too. He might be a menace, but he’s not the type of person who would try to hurt someone else,” she says. “I might not have known him for long, but I’m sure of that much!”

Maybe he’d severely overestimated how hard it would be to convince these girls, or maybe it’s just easier to convince them of Saihara-chan’s innocence when he actually believes it himself. Either way, all Ouma can do is nod.

Angie-chan is the last of the three to agree, but at least she doesn’t seem particularly unwilling. “Shuuichi hasn’t been the best at this whole ‘group leader,’ thing,” she says simply, crossing her legs underneath her as she readjusts her position on the couch. “But he wouldn’t try to kill someone. At least, that’s what Angie thinks, since he stopped Tenko from killing me the other night.”

“For the last time,” Chabashira-chan says through gritted teeth, “I wasn’t going to hurt you!”

Angie-chan arches one eyebrow dubiously, but doesn’t say anything else. She didn’t seem to trust anyone completely, not even the other two girls she was here to keep an eye on—but at least she didn’t seem completely set against them, either. And she must have wanted to find out who the ringleader was just as much as the rest of them, if it gave them a chance at ending this killing game.

“You three can stay here and keep an eye on each other until Iruma-chan finishes up, right?” Ouma asks. “I mean, that’s what you were doing before I came here, anyway.”

The other two agree easily enough, but Yumeno-chan looks more fired up than ever. “You better not keep us waiting for long, then! I’m getting tired of sitting on that couch, and it’s starting to hurt my back.”

An idea occurs to him suddenly. “Well, if you’re tired of sitting around here, doing nothing… mind doing me a favor?”

“What kind of favor?” Yumeno-chan squints at him, looking suspicious.

“Hang out in the library instead until Iruma-chan’s ready. And make sure no one comes sniffing around any of the bookshelves.”

---

Once Ouma leaves the AV room behind, tracking down the rest of his classmates proves to be a little more challenging than he expected. He climbs the stairs up from the basement, debating whether to check the dining hall or the classrooms first. It’s entirely possible that some of the others might have already gone back to the dorms, but he hopes that’s not the case. Going back and forth between the two buildings would be an enormous waste of time right about now.

Ultimately, he decides to start checking the classrooms sequentially—but he doesn’t so much as make it past the entrance hall before an unexpected voice calls out to him.

“Ouma-kun? Ouma-kun, thank goodness! Come over here, please, something’s happened!”

Every muscle in his body clenches, instantly on high alert as he whips around to see Kiibo waving him over from the front door of the school. The robot had sounded panicky and distressed in a way Ouma hadn’t heard for some time now, nothing at all like his usual soft-spoken tone.

He’s heard that lurch of panic in several of his classmates’ voices before, and he’s never had any reason to associate it with anything good.

So he walks towards the door stiffly, feeling numb all over, preparing himself for the worst. But all he asks is, “What happened?”

“H-How to explain it… I’m not quite sure how to put it myself, but…”

Ouma grits his teeth. “Is someone dead? Yes or no, Kiiboy?”

“I—no. No! N-No one’s dead, but…”

Relief washes over him like a cold wave, leaving nothing but a churning in his stomach and a weakness in his knees. Seeing the robot look so alarmed and upset had been a nasty surprise, and he did not like surprises. But as long as no one was dead, it was fine. Everything was fine. This game wasn’t past the point of winning just yet.

“What the hell happened?” he asks again. If Kiibo drags this out for one minute longer without telling me, I’ll turn him into scrap metal myself, he thinks. It’s a bitter thought, but he allows himself to be petty, on account of how fast his heart is still pounding in his chest.

“It… It’s Momota-kun. Maybe it’d be quicker if I just showed you… Hoshi-kun is still with him, right outside. Come with me.”

Suddenly, Ouma can more or less put the pieces together. He follows Kiibo out the front door in silence, already with an inkling of what he’ll see there.

Sure enough, Momota-chan sits with his back propped up against the school walls, completely covered from his chin to his waist in dark, sticky blood. Every breath he takes sounds sharp and wheezy, like someone’s stuck a knife in his throat, and his eyes are closed in deep, painful concentration.

Hoshi-chan stands just a little to the side of him, arms crossed and brows furrowed. Clearly, he was concerned but didn’t have the slightest idea what to do; he looks up wordlessly the moment they approach.

“I found help, Hoshi-kun.” Kiibo’s voice is still tinged with panic, despite his best attempts to stay calm. Turning back to Ouma, he finally attempts to explain the situation a little more thoroughly. “He was like this when we found him… or rather, he was bent over in the entry hall, clutching at his throat. B-But I swear, we didn’t do anything to hurt him.”

“We brought him outside to see if some fresh air would help,” Hoshi-chan adds; for once, he’s not gnawing at his usual candy cigarette. Maybe he’d just forgotten about them in all the confusion. “Then he hunched over. At first we thought he needed to puke, but then, well…” The tennis player gestures towards the blood coating Momota-chan’s entire shirt.

Ouma looks down at the other boy’s dark, bloodstained figure for a good, long minute. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, at the worst possible moment. He remembers that old saying distantly—some addendum to Murphy’s Law, he’s pretty sure. It made sense, then, that everything was going to hell all at once.

“Fresh air won’t help what he has,” he says finally. “Will it, Momota-chan?”

Momota-chan reluctantly opens his eyes and looks back at him. They keep staring at each other like that without saying a word, and Ouma can see a hint of confusion on the other boy’s face, wondering if he knew, and how. He thinks back on how disoriented the would-be astronaut had seemed lately—almost dozing off at times, uncharacteristically more subdued than usual, even when everything had been falling apart around him.

Ouma does know, of course, but if the other two are going to hear about it, then it’s not going to be from him. It’s not his secret, after all.

“…I think I’m kinda dying.” Momota-chan clears his throat, and horribly, it sounds closer to some kind of gurgle. “Maybe. Sort of.”

Comprehension dawns quickly on Kiibo, and the concern on his face looks all too human as he asks, “You mean you’re sick? This wasn’t from an injury?”

“If it was… then I sure as shit don’t remember gettin’ injured.”

“Th-That’s!” Kiibo stutters. “Then we need to get you out of here, quickly! If we could only find a way to get you medical attention—”

Momota-chan waves a flippant hand, though Ouma can tell that it’s trembling more than the other boy would like it to. “Relax… s’not a big deal. Not yet, anyway—”

He cuts himself short mid-sentence, stifling another cough in his throat, blocking his mouth with an already-bloodstained elbow. Even stifled, it looks violent, wracking his whole body in a way that’s painful just to watch. When the cough finally subsides, he exhales shakily.

“I just… well, shit.” Momota-chan knocks his head back against the wall, looking thoroughly drained. “I got no clue what’s wrong with me, and I’ll probably die from it sooner or later, as long as we’re stuck here. But for now, I’m fine. This is nothin’, compared to what Shuuichi’s goin’ through right now.”

Hoshi-chan looks down at the other boy dubiously. “That sure as hell didn’t look ‘fine’ to me.”

“If you’re trying to play the big damn hero, you can cut it out now,” Ouma says flatly.

In hindsight, something like this had probably been unavoidable from the moment they’d started following Saihara-chan’s plan—with everyone sticking together at all times, it was only a matter of time before Momota-chan’s little secret got found out.

All of the constant stress they’d been under probably hadn’t done him any favors, either. Between the long nights, the lack of sleep, and what they’d now seen in the gymnasium, the cat was bound to come out of the bag sooner or later.

Or out of the box, I guess. Ouma thinks back to the dim lighting of the machinery bay, and how the other boy had constantly loomed over his shoulder while he’d written page after page of a script for him to follow.

Slowly, Momota-chan shakes his head. “This ain’t about… playing the hero, or whatever. I’ve had a few of these episodes before—usually I just tried to stay quiet in the bathroom, whenever it happened.” Despite the exhaustion in his voice, he still sounds just a little guilty. “It’ll pass, just like it always does.”

Ouma doesn’t say anything. Neither do Kiibo or Hoshi-chan, for that matter.

The other boy frowns, apparently sensing their skepticism. “I mean it, I’m fine—maybe not in the general sense, but for just right now. I don’t wanna be here makin’ people worry about me when Shuuichi’s being set up like that!”

For all Momota-chan’s flaws, Ouma supposes he can’t fault him for this one thing: he was certainly the type of person to put someone else’s well-being before his own.

There’s a pause, and then quietly, Kiibo says, “…So you think so, too?”

Ouma finally tears his eyes off Momota-chan’s grisly figure, looking back at the robot instead. “You all think Saihara-chan was being set up?” he asks. And I didn’t even have to bring it up first, this time, he thinks. Leave it to Momota-chan to get right to the point. But it’s something of a surprise to hear that the other two had come to that conclusion on their own, too.

“We were in the same group!” Kiibo says, a hint of indignation in his voice. “I admit that when I saw that video, I wasn’t quite sure what to think. And I won’t deny that perhaps Saihara-kun could’ve been fooling us this entire time. But personally, I don’t believe it makes any sense.”

“When I asked what you two’d been up to, he didn’t try to dodge the issue,” Hoshi-chan adds. “Coulda tried to lie to me. I half expected him to, but he just gave it to me straight. ‘Sides, I know a killer when I see one, and I still don’t think Saihara’s got it in him. I don’t think he’s a good enough liar to play innocent, either.”

That wasn’t entirely correct, but Ouma doesn’t say anything. Saihara-chan could lie well enough under pressure—he had seen him do it countless times. To the group, to himself. Even during school trials, sometimes. He wasn’t half-bad at lying, when he needed to.

But ‘not half-bad’ still isn’t enough for something like that video, he thinks to himself. If Hoshi-chan could spot a killer from experience, then Ouma could spot a liar. No one’s a better liar than me, and I don’t even know if I could’ve pulled off a video like that and then acted like I knew nothing about it. There was no way Saihara-chan could’ve done it—even if he still has no solid proof, he knows that much.

Kiibo heaves a sigh of relief, despite not needing to breathe. “I agree wholeheartedly. If Saihara-kun were trying to trick us with his plan in some way, I don’t believe he would’ve come clean when asked about the phone booth.” The robot holds a hand to his chin, looking thoughtful. “And if he truly wanted to deceive us no matter what, I don’t believe he would’ve left the gym willingly. It would make more sense for him to protest his innocence, or try to shift the blame to someone else.”

For perhaps the first time, Ouma finds himself thankful beyond words for Kiibo’s stupid, robotic practicalities. He could almost kiss him for laying out the facts so calmly and logically—though on second thought, he’d probably taste like battery acid. Out of nothing more than sheer gratitude, he decides to keep that thought to himself.

His cough really must have begun to subside, because Momota-chan finally manages to speak up again. When he makes that horrible noise in his throat again, they all turn to look at him.

“I… liked Shuuichi’s plan from the start. Get everyone together in one room, force ‘em to look at each other and communicate, what’s not to like, right?” He wipes his mouth off with the back of one hand before dropping it back to his side, leaving a slight trail of blood on the bricks of the wall behind him. “But Shuuichi said it wasn’t right to just trust everyone right off the bat. Said we should doubt each other too, that way we’d get to know each other better.”

Ouma looks down at the other boy silently, waiting for him to continue. At the very least, it was nice to know that he hadn’t been the only one Saihara-chan had needed to convince with that little speech of his.

“So, I decided to give it a try. Doubting, I mean.” Momota-chan frowns again. “S’not really my thing, to be honest. But after thinkin’ about it for a little while, I realized we really would all be in deep shit if someone tried leadin’ the group without the best intentions. And when that video came on... well, I don’t wanna admit it, but it shook me up.”

Kiibo and Hoshi-chan are silent too, but it’s more than clear from the looks on their faces that they know how the other boy feels. Ouma doubts there was a single person in that room who hadn’t been at least a little rattled by seeing what was on that video. Except the ringleader, of course.

“At first, I didn’t know how to react. I just wanted to say the whole thing was faked, somehow… that it wasn’t Shuuichi.” The would-be astronaut clenches his teeth, though Ouma’s not sure if it’s to fight back another cough or just because he’s remembering the scene in the gym. “But after we all split up, I kinda realized what Shuuichi meant. In order to really say I trusted him, I had to try doubting him first.”

Ouma stays quiet. He’s in no position to ridicule him—after all, Momota-chan was hardly the first old dog to struggle with learning a new trick. If Saihara-chan could get him to give trust a chance, then it made sense that he could also get Momota Kaito, of all people, to learn how to doubt.

Momota-chan pauses, then shifts himself so he’s sitting a little more upright against the wall. “So I kept thinking it over, tryin’ to see if he was suspicious or not. And that’s when I realized…” He pauses, just for a moment. “Even if that person in the video was Shuuichi… it doesn’t matter to me, ‘cause it sure as hell ain’t him now. I don’t care who that was, people can change.”

The words are almost nostalgic. Ouma remembers the moonlit entry of the dorm from a long time ago—Momota-chan had been bleeding from the mouth back then, too, if memory served him well.

He’d never have thought it possible at the time, but maybe they had both been right. Or both been wrong; he isn’t really sure which. People could lie to your face, take advantage of your good-will. People could hurt you and double-cross you. …But they could change, too. He’s more or less ready to accept that now.

But admitting out loud that Momota-chan had been right about anything at all would go entirely against his principles, so instead Ouma just says, “Y’know, you talk a lot for a guy who’s coughing up blood.”

Momota-chan nearly sputters. “I-I’m not coughing anymore! I told you it’d pass, you—!” He must’ve been hit with the urge to cough again, because he covers his mouth hurriedly just to be safe. When it passes without incident, he shoots Ouma a glare. “I liked you better when you didn’t talk at all.”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure I’m going to be getting that a lot,” Ouma says. “Ask Kiiboy about it, I’ve been making his life hell at breakfast.”

“You’re kind of a bastard, aren’t you?”

Ouma allows himself a small smile, not denying the accusation. At least this was a decided improvement. No matter the timeline, things didn’t feel quite right unless he and Momota-chan were butting heads. And getting angry at him seemed to have helped Momota-chan forget about the pain from his coughing fit, if nothing else.

Kiibo watches their back-and-forth banter with an expression somewhere between exasperation and relief, but it’s ultimately Hoshi-chan who decides to interrupt them.

“I think we can all agree that someone wanted to make sure Saihara took the fall. So, the question now is, what’re we gonna do about it?”

Ouma reminds himself of what he set out to do in the first place. All he needs to do is give them more or less the same explanation he gave Yumeno-chan and the others, and then he can go looking for everyone else.

“Well, about that,” he says. “…Do you think you can make sure Momota-chan doesn’t die for at least a few more hours?”

---

By the time he goes back inside the school building, the sun is already starting to set. The whole endeavor had taken more time than he would’ve liked—luckily, explaining Iruma-chan’s invention and the rest of the plan had been quick enough. So once he was at least halfway-reassured that Momota-chan wasn’t just going to keel over and die on him before they could get out of this school, he leaves them behind.

It had already been a long, long day, but it was still far from over for him. He needed to find the rest of his classmates, and fast.

Ouma decides to pick up where he left off and starts by checking the first-floor classroom after all, but no one’s inside when he opens the door. He only needs a moment or two to check that no one’s skulking around the shadows before he keeps moving, heading left.

Only when he reaches the left-most hallway does he finally stop, between the dining hall and the warehouse. It wasn’t impossible that someone might be hanging around the warehouse, but the whole room was huge. …Not to mention, filled with potential murder weapons from top to bottom. Better to check the dining hall instead, then.

It turns out to be the right choice. When he opens the door, he’s met by Shinguuji-chan, Toujou-chan, and Gonta on the other side, seated around one of the tables and in the middle of what seemed to be an argument. Or as close to an argument as a conversation with Gonta could get, anyway.

Always the gentleman, Ouma thinks as he walks a few steps forward, closing the door behind him. Unless it’s about bugs, he never could get angry about anything.

“Please, Toujou-san… Gonta wants to understand. What was that video?” The entomologist’s voice sounds almost tearful. “That didn’t seem like Saihara-kun at all. Saihara-kun wouldn’t hurt anyone, would he? Why did he say the plan was over?”

For all her rigid training and self-possession, Toujou-chan looks as though she might finally be reaching the end of her patience. Her elbows are on the table and her gloved fingers massage lightly at her temples as she tries to stave off what must be a hell of an overbearing Gonta-induced headache. Her mouth is a hard line, but Ouma thinks he can see a muscle in her cheek twitch for a moment or two.

There’s a tray of tea-time snacks on the table as well, all of them refined and professional-looking. If Ouma had to wager a guess, he’d say Toujou-chan had made them for the other two; maybe providing for others even at a time like this was her messed-up idea of stress relief. But it must not have worked, because the whole tray seemed to be completely untouched, and the tea was probably stone cold by now.

“I’m not sure what you expect me to say, Gonta-kun.” Toujou-chan lowers one of her hands, though the other stays firmly fixed to her left temple. “I’m not responsible for that video. Frankly, I found it to be something of a shock, too. I cannot give you an explanation for something that I don’t entirely understand myself.”

Gonta winces, still looking as though he might burst into tears at any moment. “B-But…! Do you really think that was Saihara-kun? Gonta is too dumb to understand what’s going on, but you two are really smart! Can you explain it so that even someone as dumb as me can understand?”

“Perhaps Ouma-kun would be happy to explain it to you,” Shinguuji-chan says. He makes a blithe gesture with one of his long arms to where Ouma stands by the door. “Given that he’s just joined us, I can only assume he wouldn’t mind participating in the conversation.” There’s a pause as his eyes narrow, just a little. “And he seemed to know Saihara-kun quite well. Perhaps better than the rest of us.”

Gonta looks up in surprise, apparently not having heard the door open, but Toujou-chan just closes her eyes, still trying to regain her composure. Ouma ignores the barbed hostility in Shinguuji-chan’s words and simply walks up to take a seat.

To be honest, he hadn’t really expected to find Gonta with these two, of all people. In some ways, he felt like Toujou-chan and Shinguuji-chan might even be easier to deal with—they were more suspicious of both him and Saihara-chan to be sure, but they weren’t nearly as stubbornly set in their ways as Gonta, either. Sometimes naïveté was a lot more dangerous than a good, healthy dose of skepticism.

Plus, there were… other reasons that he’d been avoiding Gonta whenever he could help it. But if it was unavoidable right now, then fine. He’d talk to him.

“If you’re expecting me to come in here and schmooze you and tell you how Saihara-chan is innocent actually, sorry, I’ll have to pass.” Ouma shrugs. “Sorry to you, too, Gonta. No one knows whether that video was real or not, so I can’t give you the answer, either.”

Gonta looks openly distraught to hear those words, but Toujou-chan and Shinguuji-chan share a guarded glance before looking back at him. Ouma ignores their stares and eyes the scones on the table instead—he was hardly hungry, but it’d be a shame to waste Toujou-chan’s cooking now that everything had already gone to shit. So he picks one up and pops it in his mouth.

“Forgive me, but I also had assumed that the two of you must be close, given how much time you’d been spending together…” Toujou-chan eyes him with a mixture of curiosity and appraisal. “If you aren’t here to convince us of Saihara-kun’s innocence, then… why did you come here?”

The honest answer was that he knew emotional appeals about trust and friendship wouldn’t work, but Ouma isn’t stupid enough to say that aloud. Gonta might believe whatever anyone told him, but the other two were sharp as a tack, and unlikely to buy into feel-good stories about holding everyone’s hands and trusting someone just because they “seemed nice enough.”

He knew that all too well, because he was cut from the same cloth. So, he decides to go with a different approach instead.

“Do you honestly think I could sit here and tell you that you have to trust Saihara-chan just because I said so?” Ouma arches an eyebrow. “I can’t, so I won’t. He and I both lied to you, so go ahead and suspect us all you want. The only thing I came here to ask… was whether any of you thought that video seemed just a little too convenient.”

Toujou-chan pauses before her head finally moves only slightly: up, and then down. It’s the stiffest nod Ouma’s ever seen, but it was definitely an affirmative.

“Before that video… when we had our group meeting in the library, I admit that I was incredibly suspicious of Saihara-kun.” The maid sighs. “And I still am. The fact that he flagrantly disregarded so many of the rules meant to preserve our group’s safety is something I couldn’t turn a blind eye to.”

You’re a fine one to talk about disregarding the rules, Ouma thinks, but he keeps it firmly to himself. The things she had done were in the past and, he supposes, from her perspective, she had still done everything out of some twisted love for the “greater good.” It just hadn’t been for their good, but someone else’s. At the very least, she wasn’t completely beyond reasoning with.

Shinguuji-chan nods his agreement. “Saihara-kun did seem very reliable… a little too reliable, in all honesty. I’m still not sure how he knew so much information that he should’ve had no way of knowing. So I must agree that he’s suspicious.”

If Toujou-chan’s words had been ironic, the anthropologist’s were on another level of hypocrisy altogether. If it weren’t for Saihara-chan bringing up the possibility that their memories might not be real, Ouma wonders just how many of their female classmates he might have tried to murder at the first opportunity.

At least thanks to Saihara-chan, he actually had a reason to hold back before indulging in another killing spree. …Hopefully.

“Isn’t it just because Saihara-kun is a detective?” Gonta frowns, looking around the table at each of them in turn. “Detectives are supposed to be smart… he must’ve found some clues that none of us could see.”

“Sure,” Ouma says, “let’s go with that. Saihara-chan’s a smart cookie. Maybe smart enough that he pissed the real ringleader off.”

“…As you say.” Toujou-chan nods again, a little less stiffly. “I was suspicious of Saihara-kun—but I can’t say that I believe he’s the ringleader after seeing that video. Not in good faith.”

“He could always still be working with the ringleader, of course.” Shinguuji-chan’s voice drawls from under his mask. “That video may have been an elaborate way of shifting all of our attention to Saihara-kun, so the ringleader in our midst could go unnoticed.” He stops, tapping a finger against the table slowly. “However… this would still mean that someone else was involved.”

“I’m sure you’d like for it to be me,” Ouma says, grabbing another scone. “But that would be a little too obvious, don’t you think?”

Shinguuji-chan’s eyes narrow further, but Toujou-chan just sighs again. “What is it that you’d like to say, Ouma-kun?” she asks. “You can be frank with us.”

Ouma dusts the crumbs off his hands before leaning a little further in. “If you want to suspect me, go right ahead. Cooperate with everyone else as a group one last time, and you can suspect me all you want. It’ll be the perfect opportunity for you to see whether I’m the ringleader or not.”

“Wait, Ouma-kun is the ringleader?” Gonta repeats the words fearfully.

“Most likely not.” Shinguuji-chan’s dry voice sounds as annoyed as Ouma’s ever heard it. “But it seems he’s insistent on being as unpleasant as possible until we’ve heard him out to the end.”

If they think that this is him at his most unpleasant, he’ll take that as a pretty good sign of progress. Ouma wastes no time in explaining the situation with Iruma-chan, as well as the plan to investigate the school in its entirety.

Once he’s done talking, Toujou-chan and Shinguuji-chan look about as skeptical as he expected. But Gonta nearly upends the table as he struggles to get to his feet, as overly enthusiastic as always.

“Gonta will help everyone!” The other boy’s voice wavers, just a little. “If there’s any way Gonta can help… I’ll do it! Please, let me know when Iruma-san finishes, so Gonta can be there right away!”

Toujou-chan steadies the tray atop the table before it can clatter to the floor from the other boy’s overeager outburst. Once it’s stopped shaking, she looks back Ouma’s way with a stern expression.

“You must think me unreasonable, but I assure you, I’m not. If there truly is a way to investigate the rest of the school, then I don’t mind cooperating with the rest of the group.” The maid almost sounds a little remorseful. “I only wish to know who’s been sabotaging our group efforts. That’s all.”

Ouma considers her words slowly. “I don’t think you’re unreasonable, Toujou-chan.” That much is true, at least. “I just think that’s you being you.”

“If nothing else, it seems we have a common interest for this much.” Shinguuji-chan says. “I suppose you can count us in. And then we’ll see who was responsible for that little charade in the gymnasium.”

One way or another, they certainly would. That much was true.

When he stands up to leave, Gonta immediately offers to escort him to the hallway in true, gentlemanly fashion. At first, Ouma is a little taken aback, but he quickly recognizes it as an opportunity, much like finding Iruma-chan in the library was an opportunity.

“I guess an escort couldn’t hurt,” he admits. “You can’t be too careful these days, after all. Hmm, but… could we talk for a bit? There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you, Gonta.”

Toujou-chan and Shinguuji-chan both fix him with a sharp look at that, but Ouma was already expecting as much. He tacks on that he doesn’t mind leaving the door open, if it makes them feel better—an offer that they’re quick to accept. No doubt, they were suspicious of what Ouma might get up to if he was completely alone with someone as big and strong as Gonta.

And in the past, they would’ve been right to be so suspicious.

Gonta looks more confused than anyone else, though. Once they reach the hallway (and prop open the door behind them, just like Ouma said they would), the entomologist can’t help but ask, “Why do you want to talk to me, though? Gonta thought for sure that you didn’t like me…”

“And what would make you think that?” Ouma asks, already knowing the answer perfectly well.

“W-Well…” Pause. “Even after you came out of your room, you wouldn’t even look at Gonta. I thought maybe you were scared, because I’m so big.”

As always, the other boy was so much more perceptive than anyone gave him credit for. Even himself. “I’m not afraid of you, Gonta,” he says gently.

“You’re not?” The taller boy’s face lights up; his moods are as quick to change and as easy to read as clouds on a brisk autumn day. “Thank goodness! But then…” He stops, and frowns again. “Why did you keep looking away, every time Gonta was in the room?”

Ouma inhales. And he thinks back, a long time ago, to a snow-covered rooftop in a virtual world. A flashback light, expertly placed ahead of time on the snow. Gonta’s tearstained face in the trial, still not understanding why things had turned out so horribly, but ready to accept the blame nonetheless.

After another moment or two, he exhales and says, “I’m sorry, Gonta.”

Gonta wrinkles his brow in confusion, clearly not understanding where that had come from. He probably thought he was simply too stupid to follow the conversation, but Ouma knows better: no one would really be able to understand, when the things he was sorry for had never happened. Not this time, anyway.

The other boy opens his mouth to speak, but Ouma holds up a hand to stop him. “Wait. Hold on, okay? Before you ask me what I’m sorry for, or try to tell me that it’s all okay, or that you forgive me or whatever, I just need you to hear me out first.”

Gonta reluctantly closes his mouth and nods, clearly curious to hear whatever it is that he has to say.

“You’re not going to understand what I’m talking about, and I don’t really expect you to, but… let’s just say I did something to you. Something bad.” Ouma flexes his right hand a little. This conversation had been a long time in coming, but it’s still difficult to keep himself motivated enough to say everything that he needs to. “Maybe you don’t remember it, but it really did happen.”

The entomologist looks him right in the eye, biting his lip as though trying to remember if such an event ever really took place. Ouma doesn’t really expect him to have any success with that, but who knew? Maybe somewhere deep down, he might have some faint, hazy recollection of the things that had happened back then. Even Gonta might remember it, somewhere deep, deep down.

“It’s okay, even if you don’t remember. All you need to know is that I did something pretty terrible… not the kind of thing that you can ever take back.” His throat feels uncomfortably dry, and he wonders if maybe he still should have tried to drink some of Toujou-chan’s tea, even if it had gone cold. “You’re the type of person who wouldn’t hold a grudge, even if you knew exactly what I was talking about. But maybe you should.”

Gonta blinks, his eyes wide and concerned behind his glasses. “You think… Gonta shouldn’t forgive you? For whatever it is you did?”

Ouma just nods. “You’d forgive me, if I let you. But I don’t think you should. Sometimes, when someone does something bad… maybe you should try staying mad at them for a little while.”

He had expected more confusion, but Gonta surprises him immensely by slowly nodding. “Gonta thinks… maybe I kind of understand what you mean, Ouma-kun. It’s like when someone steps on one of Gonta’s bugs, right?”

“…Uh, yeah. It’s… sort of like that.” Ouma hesitates to reply for a moment before slowly nodding. He has absolutely no idea where the other boy is going with this, but it’s the first time he’s ever heard Gonta say he understands something, and he doesn’t want to risk ruining it.

“Sometimes, when people step on Gonta’s bugs… well, I do get angry.” Gonta crosses his arms. “They usually don’t mean to, but even if it was an accident… it won’t bring the bug back to life.”

Did he actually remember? Ouma can’t tell at all. He just waits, still staring in mild disbelief.

“Sometimes people hurt Gonta’s bugs on purpose, because they think they’re icky, or scary. And then Gonta gets really mad. Sometimes I won’t even speak to them again for at least a few days.”

Only Gonta would think that giving someone the cold shoulder for “a few days” constituted a serious grudge. Ouma keeps silent, but he can’t shake that thought from his head.

“Gonta still doesn’t really know what you did, Ouma-kun… but if you say you did something bad, I’ll believe you.”

“…Thanks,” Ouma says. Some small part of his chest unclenches as he sighs with relief. Gonta didn’t have to understand perfectly, as long as he more or less grasped his intentions. He was thankful for that much, at least.

“Ah, but…” The entomologist hesitates, rubbing awkwardly at one shoulder. “Once Gonta is done being mad at you… do you think we could be friends?”

Ouma goes still again, completely taken by surprise.

“I promise, I’m not scary! And, well… you were in your room for such a long time, Ouma-kun! Gonta kind of wondered… if you weren’t very good at making friends…”

He stares. That was, perhaps, the understatement of the century. He could point out that he was extremely good at making enemies, but he doubted that would clear up Gonta’s misconceptions of him any better. As a result, still feeling completely stunned, Ouma can only nod.

“Tell you what,” he says, “if we get out of this school, we can be friends. And I’ll never step on any of your bugs. I promise.”

---

He has to insist that he’ll be okay on his own at least three times before Gonta agrees to head back inside the dining hall. Ouma can see Toujou-chan and Shinguuji-chan still watching them carefully from the table, wondering what they might’ve talked about. Just to be cheeky, he gives them a wave while he closes the door before turning on his heel, heading back the way he came.

At least convincing them went more smoothly than he’d expected. Were these really the same classmates he’d watched kill each other so many times? They were a lot more reasonable than he remembered. Though, to be fair, he wasn’t actually sure when the last time that he’d actually sat down and had a conversation with most of them was.

He’d been so busy with all his plans and schemes last time, so reluctant to trust anyone, that he’d completely forgotten what it was like to even talk to some of these people without lying, or trying to provoke them. Maybe that was just what happened when he had stopped seeing them all as people at some point, and more like chess pieces.

But they weren’t pieces. None of them were, not even the classmates that he still didn’t particularly like or trust. Which is exactly why he’d like to see Harukawa-chan next, if he could find her.

Wherever she is, he has a feeling he’ll find Saihara-chan, too. The conversation that the three of them had shared the other night keeps coming back to him, Harukawa-chan’s words about deterrents and enforcers repeating in his brain on loop.

Ironically, if there was anyone who probably felt that they needed to be watched and kept from hurting someone right now, it was probably Saihara-chan. And Ouma would be willing to bet everything he owned that the only person he’d been willing to ask for help in circumstances like these was a certain Super High School Level Assassin.

His thoughts are so preoccupied with those two that he doesn’t even realize the one crucial mistake that he’s been overlooking until he rounds the corner and comes face-to-face with it in the hallway.

Shirogane Tsumugi makes a startled noise and stops in her tracks, holding her arms up to her chest as she stumbles in place and tries not to run into him.

“O-Ouma-kun!” There’s a note of surprise, or maybe relief, in her voice. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t expect to see you here. Are you okay?”

Under any other circumstances in the world, Ouma would’ve shrugged off her apology and shooed her away as soon as the words had even left her mouth. In any other situation, he wouldn’t have paid her even the slightest bit of attention—maybe it was rude of him, or maybe he really did still think he was the center of the universe on some level, but in all honesty, she bored him.

Plain, mousy, boring Shirogane-chan. He’d never paid her so much as a second glance before, other than a handful of times where she’d spoken up and annoyed him by reminding him of her presence. Even after repeating this game so many times, there was literally nothing of interest about her, at least not that he could remember.

…So why was it that he couldn’t take his eyes off of her, as if he’d just been struck to the spot by lightning?

More importantly, why was she alone right now?

He’d gone all over the school building for the last few hours, working his way through every single room he came across. Looking for his classmates, trying to fix this mess they were all in. And even though Saihara-chan’s plan was more or less in shambles now, their original groups mostly scattered or broken, one thing had been consistent so far: everyone had stayed where they could see someone else.

Perhaps they had all just gotten used to the original plan, and maybe they no longer felt quite so safe when they were alone. Maybe some of them just couldn’t think of anything better to do, despite the anxiety and uncertainty they must be feeling right now.

If there were any exceptions to that rule, it’d have to be him. Maybe Harukawa-chan and Saihara-chan, too, though if his suspicions were right then they would still be together when he found them. And Momota-chan might have been alone for a brief period of time, but that was before he’d started hacking up a lung to the point where he couldn’t even stand.

And apparently… there was Shirogane-chan, too.

Now why would that be? he wonders, feeling almost lightheaded from the sudden realizations that are weighing on his brain. Why in the world would someone as boring and timid as Shirogane-chan be waltzing around the school by herself after everything that just happened?

In that moment, Ouma knows. He knows the answer, the same way that he knows Saihara-chan is still worth trusting: a sharp, twisting feeling in his gut without any proof to back it up whatsoever, but he knows all the same.

In the same moment that he realizes the truth about Shirogane-chan, he also remembers that they’re the only two people standing in the hallway right now.

The dining hall is around the corner, far behind him. Even if he wanted to say something, he’d gone and closed the door behind him after Gonta went back inside. Kiibo and Hoshi-chan were still outside, checking up on Momota-chan’s health, and the girls from Yumeno-chan’s group were still keeping an eye on the library for him. And Iruma-chan was even further away, up in her lab under close supervision by Amami-chan and Akamatsu-chan.

I’m an idiot. The same thought he’d had in the gymnasium comes back to him now, though he’s not sure whether it’s because he had let his guard down now of all times, or because he had somehow overlooked something so simple all this time. Or rather… someone.

Ouma looks back at Shirogane-chan, blinking slowly. It’s difficult to make out her expression: orange rays slant through the bars of the window beside them and reflect off the lenses of her glasses, hiding her eyes from view. Her hands are still clasped at her chest, mouth turned down in what would otherwise seem like a normal, concerned, very boring frown.

In a situation like this, he decides to stick with a very straightforward, simple solution: lie.

“I’m fine, Shirogane-chan,” he says, regaining his composure as smoothly as though it had never left. Hopefully all the realizations that had just dawned on him hadn’t shown on his face, or else this conversation would probably be cut very short. “Running in the hallways doesn’t seem very like you though, does it?”

“Sorry… I-I was a little afraid to be by myself, honestly.” The girl in front of him bites her lip, looking around the empty, overgrown hallway.

Ouma wonders if she’s checking to make sure that they really are alone right now, and if she wants to kill him.

He’s not scared of her, exactly. Maybe he should be, but he isn’t. If he dies, he’ll just be sent back to the beginning again. But it’s the thought of having his corpse strung up like a puppet on strings, used to spark life back into this killing game that was on its last two legs, that sends a hot, bitter surge of disgust running through him—disgust for her, for this entire show, and for everyone who wanted to watch it.

He was not going to die in this hallway, as a piece in someone else’s game. He wasn’t going to die, period. It had been ages since the thought came to him so clearly, but it beats in his head now like a drum, over and over again: he doesn’t want to die. Not yet, not any time soon, not if they somehow finally ended this game.

And not without paying Shirogane-chan back for all the hell she had put him and everyone else through a million times in full. He’d smash her plans to pieces and ruin everything she loved first, and if he had to do it while bleeding from the head or with a knife in his back, then so be it.

Shirogane-chan opens her mouth, trying to give him some hurried excuse about having gone to the bathroom—but Ouma cuts her off before she can say anything. Right now, the best thing he can do is to treat her the same way that he has all along: with complete and utter disinterest.

“Not to be rude, but I’m kind of in a hurry. D’you mind if I take a raincheck on this conversation?” Ouma examines the nails on one hand, feigning boredom even as his thoughts continue to race. Had he managed the same, bored drawl that he always reserved for her? Had he given anything away that he shouldn’t? He couldn’t afford to mess up a performance now, of all times. “You should check out the dining hall, if you’re looking for some of the others. I think Gonta might still be there.”

He walks right past her without even giving her the chance to respond, but the moment his back is to her he can feel himself tense up, preparing to run if he needs to. Even if she comes at him with some kind of weapon, he might still be able to make it to the entryway if he tries.

He keeps walking. One step. Then another. She doesn’t attack him, or even try to stop him. Ouma keeps his eyes firmly ahead, taking in the sight of the sunlit hallway ahead of him even while his thoughts are still with the mousy girl behind him.

How many days ago had it been, since he’d seen this same hallway lit up so beautifully while the sun began to slip beneath the horizon? Bathed in orange (blood-orange, he thinks), tinted with red and purple that sink beneath the cracks and foliage peeking from the walls. It couldn’t have been that long ago, but it feels like another lifetime entirely. Then again, most of his memories in this killing game do.

“Ouma-kun?” She speaks up after all, just before he can round the next corner. It’s close enough to touch, but it might as well be on the far side of the moon.

He stops in his tracks without turning around. Without looking, he can only leave whatever expression she must be wearing up to his imagination—but then, she’s stuck in the same position, too. “What is it, Shirogane-chan?”

There’s a long pause. More than enough time for her to try and kill him, if she wanted to. Did she not have a weapon on-hand after all? She had said she was coming back from the “restroom.” Maybe whatever plans she’d set up to try and set this killing game back in motion, she hadn’t expected to have such an easy opportunity to actually murder anyone just yet.

He could almost laugh. How hilarious, that in a game where he'd kept losing over and over again, he’d finally found this one little sliver of good luck right at the end.

“You should be more careful… don’t you think?” Her words are soft-spoken, kind even. Generic and boring enough that he wouldn’t have given them a second thought, before he knew better. “It’s kind of dangerous, being away from everyone else… aren’t you worried, after what happened earlier?”

Ouma can’t help it; he turns around and smiles. “Sure, it’s dangerous. But don’t you think this killing game’s finally gotten interesting again?”

The sun is just a little lower now. Behind her glasses, her expression doesn’t change at all: plain, blank, and unreadable. This Shirogane-chan doesn’t cower away from him, or stutter any other miserable excuses. She simply watches him, waiting, and he wonders if this is the closest she’s ever come to being honest with any of them.

He brings a finger to his lips as though sharing a secret with her, feeling almost overwhelmed with the unintentional comedy of this entire situation. “You don’t need to worry about me, by the way. I’m actually pretty hard to kill,” he says, and his smile widens ever so slightly. “Not sure if I can say the same for the rest of these idiots, though.”

“I… see.” Her voice is still soft, a little anxious, even, but her eyes are still blank and inscrutable, fixed on him like she was expecting something.

Maybe the only reason he wasn’t dead yet was because she was just curious to see what he’d do. He had promised to give everyone a show, after all.

Ouma turns back around and takes another step forward. And another. Soon enough, he’s walking at a normal, steady pace. The hairs on the back of his neck stand on end when he finally reaches the other corner of the hallway, but the rays of the artificial sun on his face are warm.

“By the way, Shirogane-chan,” he says as he rounds the corner, “I know it’s getting dark soon, but you might want to stick around a little longer. Everyone’s meeting up in a couple of hours, and we’re about to tear this killing game to the ground soon.”

Shirogane-chan says nothing at all to that, and Ouma keeps on walking, not looking back even once until he’s reached the stairs to the second floor.

---

He’s felt a lot of emotions whenever he’s seen Harukawa-chan’s face in the past, covering a wide range from pity to paranoia, but relief was never one of them. Not until today, anyway.

The moment he sees her at the other end of the second floor, standing just outside of a familiar classroom, he feels all the tension leave his body. Unbelievable though it sounds, he’s actually glad to see her for once.

Shirogane-chan was a still-unknown threat; beyond the obvious answer of “murder,” he hardly even knew what she was capable of, or what her motivations were. Harukawa-chan and her short temper seemed remarkably straightforward, by contrast. …And she wasn’t exactly a threat anymore, either. Probably.

When he walks a little closer, he can see that she’s standing just outside the classroom door, her arms crossed and posture deceptively casual. No doubt she was keeping a careful watch to make sure no one came in or out of the room, just like she’d done with her research lab so long ago. Although considering he now knew pretty much everyone else’s location in the school, he hardly needs to ask if she’s had any visitors.

“I thought you’d show up sooner than this.”  She doesn’t uncross her arms, just stares down at him indifferently.

Ouma considers whether to bring up what had happened between him and Shirogane-chan in the hallway, but thinks better of it. He doesn’t have any proof—not yet, anyway. And he’s not so sure he wants Harukawa-chan to be the first person he tells.

“I had other things to do first,” he says, which isn’t technically a lie. “But I’m here now. Let me guess… Saihara-chan asked you to kill him?”

For the first time, her expression changes; she frowns, just a little. “He did. Repeatedly, as a matter of fact.”

“But you didn’t do it.”

“Obviously. And you came here looking for him because you came up with some new plan, didn’t you?”

The corners of Ouma’s mouth twist, just a little bit. “Obviously.”

In the past, he might not have believed that someone like her could rely on anything other than bloodshed to solve her problems, but somehow he’s not surprised to hear it now. He’d already seen more than enough proof of how much she could change, after all. And perhaps he’d been doing his fair share of changing, too.

 “You’re not going to stop me if I go in there to talk to him.” Ouma doesn’t bother to phrase it as a question; he can’t sense any hostility coming from the girl in front of him. And in any case, if she were going to snap his neck for getting too close, she could’ve done it twice over by now.

Harukawa-chan shrugs. “Better you than me. He’s not going to listen to anything I have to say, anyway.”

“You sound like you already tried.”

She scoffs. “I told him he couldn’t kill someone, even if he wanted to. It’s not like I would let him, and besides, we needed that plan of his to work. …But he wouldn’t listen to me.”

“Yeah, I bet.” Saihara-chan always could be stubborn at the most inopportune times. “He doesn’t even trust himself anymore, of course he wouldn’t think that his plan would work.”

“I didn’t think he was the type to snivel so much.” Harukawa-chan finally sighs and uncrosses her arms, tugging absentmindedly at a strand of loose hair from one of her twintails. “I guess I was wrong. Maybe about a lot of things.”

Ouma considers those words, then shakes his head. “You don’t really believe that though, or else you wouldn’t be here, keeping an eye on Saihara-chan.”

For a moment, she almost seems surprised. Then she frowns. “I just figured that he’d kill himself if I didn’t say yes. I guess I’m the only one who’ll be getting the blame if he dies now, though.”

Despite her best efforts to sound cold, Ouma is pretty sure he can hear a hint of what might be concern, somewhere deep down. As much as he was loathe to admit it, that was something they probably had in common: neither of them were very good at letting on when they cared about something.

She moves aside to lean against the wall instead, a clear indicator for him to go on ahead. But just before Ouma’s hand can touch the handle, she speaks up again—a little more hesitantly than before.

“Wait,” she says. “Before you go in there… mind if I ask you something?”

He stops and turns to look at her, quirking an eyebrow. “Sure, I guess. But if you want to know my favorite color or something, I think you could’ve picked a better time to ask.”

Much to his disappointment, she doesn’t even dignify the joke with a roll of her eyes. Her face is dead serious as she asks: “Are you ever going to tell me what I did to you?”

Ah. So that was it.

Ouma finds himself at a loss for how to respond. All these classmates he’d looked down on before just kept seeming to find new ways to surprise him now, somehow or other. He no longer feels like joking either as he carefully studies Harukawa-chan’s face, wondering how the girl in front of him might react if he did tell her the whole story someday.

Was there any version of events he could tell her that wouldn’t sound like a complete and utter lie? Saihara-chan had believed him after hearing everything he’d had to say, but Harukawa-chan was much more like himself—a skeptic.

And even if she did believe him, what was to stop her from remembering some of the things he’d said and done, to her and all the rest of them? Maybe some things were better left unsaid, for his sake as much as hers.

He could probably evade the question, whether by changing the subject or outright lying. But it would just piss her off, and for better or worse, it was crucial that they work together if they wanted to put a stop to this stupid game. So all that was really left was the truth.

“No,” he says. “Honestly? I don’t think you’d want to hear it.”

She doesn’t look surprised by his answer, but she still bites the inside of her cheek in frustration as she struggles to find a response.

“You’re probably right about that.” The words come from her slowly and reluctantly. “I can’t really say I like it much when you open your mouth.”

Yeah, that checked out. Ouma doesn’t find himself the least bit surprised, either.

“Still… I don’t know. When I look at you, somehow I feel like I’ve got something to apologize for.” She pulls a little more insistently at the strand of hair between her fingers as she finally looks away.

Ouma stares. He’d been doing an awful lot of apologizing today, making up for lost time that no one else could remember, but he hadn’t expected to hear an apology himself. Or something close enough to one to count.

Harukawa-chan doesn’t look back at him, but she does close her eyes, hissing a sigh through her teeth in frustration. “Whatever. Forget it, it probably sounds stupid. I don’t even know what I’m trying to say.”

“…I don’t think it’s stupid,” Ouma says, after a long pause. “I think I can kind of understand. Turns out, I’m not so good at apologies either.”

“I’m shocked,” she says flatly, but there’s not really any bite to her words.

“Shocking but true.” He rolls his eyes once before looking at her again more seriously. “Look, don’t worry about it, Harukawa-chan. It’s all water under the bridge.”

“If you say so.” She doesn’t sound like she particularly believes him, but maybe that’s fair, since he’s not sure how much he believes what he’s saying either.

He pauses for a moment before continuing, a little more quietly. “I’ve still got my fair share of things to apologize for. Some of them to you, even. So… like I said. Don’t worry about it.”

If doubting someone was the first step to get to know them, he and Harukawa-chan must be old friends by now. He wonders if he can really say that he trusts her now, even a little bit, and can’t find a simple answer to that question. But at the very least… he couldn’t say he hated her anymore, either.

“Thanks for helping Saihara-chan,” is all he says.

This time, when he turns to grip the handle, she doesn’t stop him.

---

The sun must be completely sunk beneath the horizon by now, because the classroom he enters is almost completely dark. Despite that, he knows every inch of the room like the back of his hand; if he wanted, he could probably circle the entire room without bumping into any of the desks even once.

Well, it was obvious that he should know it so well: this was where he’d woken up, all those other times. The locker that he still hadn’t found a way to escape stands silently at the right-hand corner of the room, little more than a smudge against a black canvas in this near-darkness.

The idea of that locker looming quietly like an open maw, waiting to swallow him whole again, should send shivers up his spine, but Ouma only stares at it a moment before looking away.

He wasn’t here for the locker, after all. Instead, it takes him a moment or two of careful searching to find the reason he’d come all this way, waiting for his eyes to adjust. And he finally finds him—not at one of the desks like he’d expected, but sitting beneath the barred classroom windows, back against the wall and head on his knees.

That inky-dark figure slowly lifts his head once he realizes that whoever’s in the room with him has no intention of leaving.

“Ouma-kun…” His voice sounds tired.

Ouma approaches the other side of the room a little bit at a time, carefully circumventing the desks until he stands just out of the other boy’s reach. “Hey, Saihara-chan,” he says. “That was a pretty shitty movie night, huh?”

“Don’t.” Saihara-chan’s voice sounds suddenly tense. “Just don’t. Don’t joke like that.”

“Sorry, but I’m not joking. That movie sucked ass. Can’t really say it was your best performance.”

Saihara-chan sits up a little straighter, but his knees stay close to his chest. “Just go away, Ouma-kun. The plan’s over. There’s no reason for you to be here.”

Ouma considers taking a seat against the wall next to the other boy, but then thinks better of it. “Oh, haven’t you heard? There’s a new plan now. We’re ending the killing game.” He announces this as casually as if they were chatting at breakfast, leaning one shoulder against the wall while he stands. “You really ought to get with the program or you’ll get left behind.”

Saihara-chan puts a hand to his head; it’s too dark for Ouma to make out his expression, but he can’t help but wonder if the other boy might have a headache, directly behind his right eye.

“It’s a nice gesture,” the detective admits, almost begrudgingly. “But I thought you were smart enough to read between the lines. It’s not going to work. The ringleader probably has something else in store, and it’s probably only a matter of time before someone gets killed anyway. We were just… delaying the inevitable.”

“Unfortunately for you,” Ouma says, “it turns out I’m actually a huge idiot. Just like everyone else. So the plan is back on, but not without you.”

The only illumination in the room comes from the stars peeking between the barred windows; if the moon is up yet, then it must be facing a different side of the school. But Ouma can still feel Saihara-chan’s eyes on him, cold and tired and probably more than a little irritated.

The other boy finally gives up on trying to assuage his headache and rests his head back on his knees again. “That’s on you, then. But I’m not going to risk hurting someone.” Bitterly, almost under his breath he adds, “That’s all that being a detective has ever been good for, anyway.”

Ouma puts a finger to his chin as though genuinely curious. “So, instead of hurting someone yourself, you’re just going to sit around in this dark room until someone actually dies?”

That one struck a nerve, just like he knew it would. “Like you have any room to talk!” Saihara-chan snaps.

“As a matter of fact, I do have room to talk.” Ouma walks forward another step, and another, until he’s close enough to finally begin making out some of the indistinct features on the other boy’s face. “Turns out, I’m the only person who gets to sit in the dark and feel sorry for myself. So it kind of pisses me off when I see you moving in on my territory.”

Saihara-chan just stares up at him in disbelief, unsure how to react to anything that he’s saying.

“Did you think I’d come in here and pat your head and tell you how bad I feel for you? Sorry, that’s not my style.” Another step. “I’m not a nice person, unlike you or Akamatsu-chan. So I’m not here to feed into your little pity party or whatever.”

He can see the beginnings of indignation on the other boy’s face, white-hot anger peeking through the shock and despair. Good. Anger was better than whatever he’d been feeling for the last few hours, anyway.

“You’re scared of hurting other people? Let’s talk about hurting people, Saihara-chan. Better yet, let’s talk about killing them.”

The other boy doesn’t say a word, but the hurt and indignation is still as visible on his face as an open wound, even in the dimly illuminated classroom.

“You think that video makes you look bad? You think you don’t deserve anyone’s trust anymore?” He scoffs. “Come back to me when you’ve gotten two people killed. I convinced more people that I was the ringleader than you ever could, and that’s without footage of me drooling over murders. You could’ve talked for an entire hour about wanting to kill people in that stupid video and it still wouldn’t be half as bad as some of the shit that I’ve actually done.”

Saihara-chan swallows, hard. “That’s not anywhere near the same, and you know it. You haven’t even—”

“Haven’t done anything this time around?” Ouma cuts him off, finishing the sentence for him. “Yeah, well neither have you.”

Those words are met with complete silence.

“Do you want to know how many times I saw you try to hurt someone, all those other times?” he asks. “Zero. And it’s not like I wasn’t suspicious of you. A detective who keeps bailing everyone out of trouble every time there’s a school trial, I mean, how convenient is that?”

More silence.

“You had intimate knowledge of how to kill people, friends who wouldn’t have suspected a thing if you’d stuck a knife in their back. Even a whole lab full of poison. I thought for sure that if I let my guard down, you would try something—and you never did.” He meets Saihara-chan’s eye levelly, refusing to let the other boy look away. “Never.”

“Not that you ever saw, maybe.” The other boy’s words are very quiet. “But you can’t know that for sure.”

“Maybe I can’t,” Ouma agrees. “But I still know you. And I trust you.”

There’s a brief silence. Then there’s a sound almost like laughter in the detective’s throat, hollow and unpleasant. “That’s rich, coming from you. Since when were you the sort of person to talk about trusting someone else?”

He can’t say he didn’t see it coming, but something in Ouma still snaps at those words all the same. He leans down until he’s on his knees, close enough to the other boy in this dark classroom that their faces could almost touch, and grabs one of his hands, squeezing down hard.

“Since you wouldn’t shut up until I came out of my room and helped with your stupid plan. Since you believed my story when I told you I’d been reliving time, even when you had no reason to.” He keeps squeezing the other boy’s hand tight, refusing to let go even when he knows he must be cutting off the circulation. “Since you held out your hand and asked me to trust you, because you said that you trusted me too.”

Since I fell in love with you the moment you bandaged my hand, he thinks, but he doesn’t say that part out loud.

For a moment, their faces are close enough for Ouma to make out every detail of Saihara-chan’s wide-eyed expression, even in the dim, slanting starlight. Had it really only been just last night that they were playing rock-paper-scissors together, pushing back all the problems that were waiting for them? It had been dark in the library too, with only that tiny little lantern to see by.

As they sit there in silence, staring at each other in the dark, he can feel the tremors of Saihara-chan’s hand shaking in his own. “You really trust me that much?” the detective asks, and his hoarse voice is almost as shaky as his hand.

“I really do.” The hand that he’s holding is exactly like he remembered it: soft and warm and undeniably real, even if everything else in this entire school was a lie. “Like I said, I know you. And you know me… well enough to tell if I’m lying or not.” He was the only person who had ever known him so well, ever heard all his lies and still decided to reach out his hand. “So you can trust me too, right?”

The other boy manages a laugh, so hoarse that it’s almost a croak. “You were right. You’re not smart at all, and I don’t know why I ever thought you were.”

“See? I told you, I woke up and decided to be stupid today, and it’s all your fault.” Still holding Saihara-chan’s right hand in his left, he uses his free hand to brush a stray strand of hair out of the other boy’s face. “Sorry Saihara-chan, but all of this is just a consequence of your own actions. So shut up and take responsibility.”

Neither of them says a word after that for what feels like a long, long time. Then slowly, very slowly, the other boy nods. And squeezes his hand back, just a little.

“If it’s all going to be the same,” Saihara-chan says weakly, “I guess it’s fine if we’re stupid together.”

“That’s the spirit.”

Ouma stands up without letting go of that hand, not looking away from the other boy even once. Saihara-chan follows suit, getting to his feet slowly and unsteadily, clasping at his hand for balance.

“Just hear me out first, and when this is all over, you can go back to feeling sorry for yourself as much as you want. Got it?”

Saihara-chan frowns but he nods all the same, waiting to hear whatever it is that brought Ouma all this way to talk to him.

“Good.” He holds the other boy’s hand tightly in his own as he says, “So, Shirogane-chan is the ringleader.”

Chapter Text

“So, Shirogane-chan is the ringleader.”

Those five words are dropped into the conversation so casually that Saihara is sure he must be hearing things wrong. Oh, he hears them well enough of course, in the literal sense of the word: the sound travels through waves across the air, goes in through his ears, and eventually makes it all the way to his brain.

But he just can’t process them. They don’t make any sense.

He’d already told Ouma-kun to stop joking around earlier, but maybe the other boy was still intent on messing around with him anyway. Maybe this was just his way of checking to see if Saihara really was paying attention to his plan, or maybe he just wanted to provoke some sort of reaction out of him before moving on to the real topic of conversation. It would hardly be the first time the other boy had shown a rather morbid side to his sense of humor.

But… would Ouma-kun really joke about something this serious? It didn’t seem in-character, even for him. And the longer the accusation hangs in the air, the more Saihara can feel a distinctly uncomfortable knot growing in the pit of his stomach.

So he keeps waiting nervously for the inevitable punchline to the joke, or for the usual admission that it was all just some big, meaningless lie. Not that lies were ever really meaningless when they came from Ouma Kokichi, as he’d learned over the course of the last few days (or weeks, or months, or however-the-hell long it had really been). Everything always had to carry some hidden double- or quintuple-meaning with the other boy, and Saihara isn’t sure his aching head is up for deciphering any sphinx-like riddles at the moment.

The punchline never comes, of course. Saihara stands there and gapes with his mouth wide open, feeling like a fish out of water, and Ouma-kun just keeps carrying on the conversation all by himself without even waiting to see if he’s following along.

“Really,” the other boy says, “it’s not the most exciting reveal, but there you have it. Shirogane-chan’s the ringleader, and she’s been playing the rest of us for a bunch of suckers this whole time. I’ve gotta say, I’m kind of disappointed. It feels totally obvious in hindsight, right?”

Saihara knows logically that the time for jokes has passed by now; any opportunity for Ouma-kun to admit that it was all a (horribly ill-timed) prank at his expense has come and gone. But the other boy just sounds so unbelievably casual about all of this, as if he were telling him that the vending machine had run out of his favorite kind of soda instead of revealing the identity of the person who wanted them all to murder each other in cold blood.

But much to Saihara’s annoyance, Ouma-kun seems like he completely anticipated this total loss for words, because he just keeps talking as smoothly as ever.

“I wasn’t wrong earlier, y’know. I must be more stupid than I thought. Like, I’ve been repeating this stupid, shitty game for so long that I was about to lose my mind and somehow I didn’t put it together until just now?” Ouma-kun rolls his eyes. “Guess I should be glad she tried to kill me, or who knows how much longer it’d have taken for me to figure it out.”

Those words finally manage to jump-start his poor brain back into action. Saihara instinctively squeezes the other boy’s hand, somehow still clasped tightly in his own after all this time, and pulls him closer to get a good look at him—though that’s admittedly easier said than done when the room is nearly pitch-black. “W-Wait, wait a second, what? Shirogane-san tried to kill you!?”

“Well, yeah. Kind of?”

“And you just… you just neglected to mention this until right now.” Couldn’t you have brought that up first? he almost says, but he just barely manages to catch himself. Pinpointing the ringleader was the priority here, no mistake, but he still didn’t like hearing his friend talk about nearly being murdered so casually, as if it were an afterthought.

Saihara would say he was shocked by the other boy’s behavior, but was he really? As infuriating as it was, Ouma-kun had always been one to keep the important details close to the chest, only letting them drop whenever it suited his own agenda. Or his infuriating flair for the dramatic. Saihara inhales sharply and lifts a hand to his temples. “Right. Okay. So, she tried to kill you. Is that why you think she’s the ringleader?”

“I said she ‘kind of’ tried to kill me.”

“…What does that mean?”

The other boy shrugs. “It means we ran into each other in the first-floor hallway, alone, and I could practically feel her considering whether she should crack my head open like a watermelon.”

“Okay, b-but did she—did she hurt you? You can’t just say something like that so suddenly and then not even explain—“

“That’s what you pick to worry about? Don’t you think if I were bleeding out I would’ve already collapsed by now instead of coming here to haul you out of this stupid classroom?”

Saihara can’t help it; he snaps. “Can you stop messing around for once in your life and just give me a straight answer? Are you injured, yes or no?”

Ouma-kun pauses, and even in these serious circumstances Saihara almost regrets snapping at him. Almost, that is, until the other boy sniffs and says, “Well, physically I’m fine, but think about my emotional scars.”

Ouma Kokichi may actually be the most insufferable human being in the world, Saihara decides.

Ouma-kun huffs a sigh and finally gestures to his own chest with his free hand—that is to say, the one that Saihara hasn’t been squeezing in a vice-grip this entire time. “As you can see, I’m fine. Still very much alive and kicking, and that’s really all that matters, right? Guess I can count myself lucky for once.”

Yes, okay. That much was true. The room might be dark, but Saihara can see that much at least. He can’t make out any dark bloodstains on the other boy’s clothes, and Ouma-kun didn’t seem to be limping or covering up any injuries either. Confirming that much does bring him some mild relief—and now that his most pressing concern was put at ease, the discomfort that he felt at first begins to loom over him again.

“Ouma-kun…” Saihara dreads asking the question, but there’s no getting around it. And even before he asks it, he practically already knows the answer. “Do you have any proof?”

He can sense, rather than see, a muscle twitch near Ouma-kun’s jaw. He must’ve known that Saihara would have to ask—and more importantly, beneath that nonchalant act he was probably livid at his inability to show one shred of evidence to back up the claim. “She was going to kill me,” the other boy repeats, and there’s a slight edge to his voice that wasn’t there before. “I know murderous intent when I see it.”

“Trying to kill someone doesn’t necessarily mean that person is the ringleader.” Saihara closes his eyes, trying to consider the possible objections that the others in their group might raise.

“She was alone, Saihara-chan.” The edge feels a little sharper, Ouma-kun’s tone a little icier. “While you were holed up here, I came across every other person in this godforsaken school. And everyone else was still in some kind of group, except for her.”

“That’s still not necessarily enough to prove anything.”

Ouma-kun looks him right in the eye. “Okay, and? So what happens if I say I don’t have any proof at all, huh? What then?”

Saihara looks right back at him. “I’ll believe you anyway. But you already knew that much, didn’t you, Ouma-kun?”

The other boy’s hand twitches just a bit—Saihara had almost forgotten that he was still holding onto it. And for a moment, there’s… something, between them. Saihara isn’t quite sure what it is, but it’s something that hangs almost tangibly between them, like pressure in the air before a thunderstorm.

The only pressure he’s ever been familiar with is usually the bad kind: the sort of anxiety that sits on your chest and keeps you from breathing. But this feels… different, somehow, in a way that’s hard for him to put his finger on. More than suffocating, the wordless tension feels strangely reassuring.

Perhaps it was nothing more than the unspoken knowledge that there was at least one person they could show their backs to in this killing game, no matter what happened.

Saihara tries to push the fog out of his brain and move back to the conversation at hand. Shirogane-san, the video from before, the plan to end the killing game… there was still a lot they needed to discuss, clearly. “Okay, so… so you ran into Shirogane-san in the hallway, by herself. Then what happened?”

“I’ll tell you,” Ouma-kun says, “but there’s something you need to do for me first.”

Saihara isn’t sure what the other boy might want from him—hadn’t he already agreed to go along with whatever plan he had for ending the killing game? But it’s not like he can back down at this point, so he just nods. “Okay, sure. Just tell me what it is.”

Ouma-kun points to their intertwined hands. “I know I grabbed yours first and all, but you can let go of my hand now, genius. Your palm’s all sweaty.”

“Oh.”

---

Even after hearing the entire story, Saihara doesn’t know how to feel.

He’s… relieved that it’s not someone he’s closer to, of course. The idea of the ringleader being someone like Akamatsu-san or Momota-kun—someone who had been openly kind, helpful, friendly with him since the very beginning—had crossed his mind, and even the possibility of it had been painful enough. Maybe he should just be thankful that, at the end of it all, the answer hadn’t come to the worst-case scenario.

That doesn’t mean that he wants it to be Shirogane-san, though. He doubts that he’d be feeling any better even if Ouma-kun had told him it was someone, anyone else. After all, accepting that the ringleader was someone in their midst meant bracing himself for betrayal and hurt no matter what. So it followed that someone they knew must have been lying to their faces this entire time.

No, the only possible “happy outcome” here (if they could even call it that) would be if the ringleader who’d been tormenting them was some completely unseen outsider. Maybe a mysterious seventeenth student, or a puppet-master who’d been pulling all the strings of this convoluted reality-killing-game-show from the shadows, just out of sight.

…But they couldn’t possibly be so lucky. The odds of the ringleader being someone they knew were astronomically higher than it being some complete stranger. And above all else, Saihara was a detective. For once, he doesn’t feel like he can afford to doubt or second-guess himself—he’s absolutely certain that he would’ve seen the signs of someone trying to live undetected in their midst.

Still... learning that Shirogane Tsumugi was the one behind all of their suffering wasn’t exactly a cause for celebration, either. If anything, it only left him feeling strangely hollow, frustrated that every hard-earned answer they arrived at in this killing game was accompanied by even more questions.

Was she really the ringleader? If so, why was she doing this? How could they get her to stop this game? Saihara doesn’t know the answer to any of these questions, much less how he should be feeling at the news.

“I know I told you it wasn’t the most exciting reveal, but you could give me some kind of reaction to go off here.”

“Sorry, it’s just… a lot to take in. I mean, she always seemed so on-board and willing to help out with everything…”

Ouma-kun’s reply is completely matter-of-fact. “Well, someone was going to turn out to be the ringleader sooner or later. Might as well be her.”

Might as well be… He had a fair point, didn’t he? Realistically speaking, if they ruled out all outside forces then someone from their group had to be the ringleader.

There were only sixteen of them altogether—fourteen, if he discounted himself and Ouma-kun. Of those fourteen remaining students, Shirogane-san was as likely a candidate as anyone else. No, maybe even a little more likely.

How much did he actually know about her? How much did anyone else? She was the Super High School Level Cosplayer, and… and what else? Reasonably polite and helpful when things were going well. A bit anxious and timid when things weren’t. Almost always at the back of a crowd, never the center of attention.

Saihara couldn’t say he’d had much one-on-one interaction with her in the few days that they’d been putting their plans into action—but then, that went for a handful of his other classmates as well. Shirogane-san was a bit of a wallflower, but he’s pretty sure anyone else might say the same thing about him. Was there really nothing more solid to go off of…?

He decides to risk asking Ouma-kun what else he knows. “Did you ever notice anything else about Shirogane-san? Any of the other times, I mean?”

“Really? You’re seriously asking me that? Do you really think I’d have been stuck going in circles for so long if I had?”

The other boy’s voice is so flat, Saihara knows he must’ve struck a sore spot. Oops. “Well… I mean, you’re just usually so perceptive…”

“Yeah, yeah, rub it in, why don’t you? No offense, but most of the time that I was stuck in the same room with Shirogane-chan, I’d have rather watched paint peel than talk to her.” Even without any light, he can tell that Ouma-kun must be sneering, just from the tone of his voice. “I guess I won’t be making that mistake again, huh?”

Maybe they were looking at this all wrong. Saihara decides to change their approach a bit. “Okay, well… was there ever anything that happened that showed she couldn’t be the ringleader? Anything that would rule her out completely?”

“You know me, Saihara-chan, I don’t rule anyone out if I can help it…” Ouma-kun trails off, though Saihara distinctly hears him mutter something about a whiteboard under his breath. “Anyway, why don’t you tell me? You and she always lived a lot longer than I did, anyway.”

Those words make Saihara stand up a little straighter. “We… lived longer?”

“I already told you before, remember? You, Kiiboy, Shirogane-chan, Harukawa-chan, and a few others… You never seemed to die early on. I couldn’t tell you if you or anyone else ever actually made it out of the game, though.” Ouma-kun’s fingers are jittery as he crosses his arms. “But I never actually saw any of you guys die before kicking the bucket myself.”

Saihara does remember, more or less: back when he’d heard the whole unbelievable story from Ouma-kun (back in a darkly-lit bedroom not so different from this classroom) the other boy had mentioned that he’d never lasted longer than five trials in this killing game. But there were others who’d made it a lot farther than he had.

Of course. There had to be. If Ouma-kun had been murdered all those other times—or killed himself, others—then of course other people had to have outlasted him. The world went on, one way or another. And Saihara himself should’ve been there, too.

As hard as it was for even him to remember sometimes, the world did not, in fact, revolve around Ouma Kokichi.

Five entire trials… five different sets of victims and culprits in this killing game. If Ouma-kun was right about the third trial always having two victims, then wouldn’t that have brought their surviving members down to just five people? Only five out of fourteen people left alive… the number sounds so unbelievable that he can hardly imagine it.

Five people out of fourteen, and somehow or other, Shirogane Tsumugi always seems to make it that far no matter what…

Saihara cups a hand to his mouth as his thoughts start spinning. He feels as though something is just out of reach, a thought he can’t quite formulate, lodged somewhere firmly in the back of his memories. Just like a dream you can’t remember as soon as you’ve woken up, even though it was so vivid only moments before. Or like an itch you can’t quite scratch.

Had anything ever happened between Shirogane-san and himself, all those other times? If they’d both made it so far in this killing game, then he’d almost be willing to bet money that it had, even if he can’t quite remember it. And besides that…

“Is there a way to tell… that you didn’t use the phone before doing that? I mean… is there any way to guarantee it hasn’t been used yet?”

“E-Even the hat was the same…”

“I d-don’t really want to believe that Saihara-kun would lie either. But then… why did he lie to everyone about the phone booth earlier?”

…For someone usually so soft-spoken in all their other meetings, she’d sure had a lot to say about that video in the gym, hadn’t she? And about what he’d done with the phone booth, too. Actually, now that he thinks about it, hadn’t she been the one to draw their attention to the phone booth in the first place?

Ouma-kun doesn’t have any hard proof, and neither does Saihara. Not yet. But if there was one thing a Super High School Level Detective should be able to get their hands on, it was proof, wasn’t it? For once in his life, Saihara feels absolutely confident in his ability to do that much.

His hand is still around his mouth as he says, “She won’t just come out and admit to it, you know. Even if we pressure her about it.”

“Oh, I’m aware.” Ouma-kun flashes him a smile that he can sense even in the dark: a smile that is sharp, and cold, and dangerous. And despite all of that (or maybe because of it), extremely reassuring. “That’s why we’re going to corner her first. Like a rat in a trap.”

Saihara nods. “If the only trial we ever had was for the mastermind herself… I guess that’d be pretty fitting for a messed-up killing game like this, wouldn’t it?”

“It sure would. Now, let’s get the hell out of here,” Ouma-kun says. “Time’s a-wasting.”

---

They exit the room with an unspoken agreement to wait until later before they told anyone about the conclusion that they’d reached. Force Shirogane-san to slip up first, then let everyone else know that she was the ringleader: that was the plan.

There were plenty of good reasons for this—namely, the complete lack of proof to back up their theory. Saihara already knew firsthand now just how skeptical some members of their group could be; he didn’t want to look like he was just making baseless accusations to take the heat off of himself. Not until he and Ouma-kun were both absolutely sure, or else he’d risk making everything ten times worse.

That, and… it would be better to get Shirogane-san to admit to it herself, if possible. If Ouma-kun’s recount of what had happened in the hallway was true, then she might already be trying to cover her tracks, on high alert. It probably wouldn’t be easy to catch her, but that was the whole point of driving her into a corner until she had no choice but to admit it.

Saihara only hopes that path to the corner won’t leave any casualties in its wake.

Of course, their decision is all very logical and understandable up until they take two steps out of the room and come face-to-face with Harukawa-san. Saihara freezes, having almost forgotten that he’d been the one to ask her to stand watch outside the room in the first place, and for a moment he wonders if she overheard any of the more important (or embarrassing) parts of their conversation from the other side of the door.

But she just takes a long, hard look at them and asks, “What the hell took you so long? I thought maybe one of you died in there.”

Ouma-kun just waves a dismissive hand. “You’re as tactful as ever, Harukawa-chan. Did you really think I’d kill Saihara-chan after going through all the trouble to come here and drag him out?”

“I never know what to expect from you.”

Ouma-kun’s mouth curls upward as if she’d paid him a compliment. “Glad to know I’m not getting rusty, then. That’s by design, y’know.”

Harukawa-chan crosses her arms and gives the other boy a flat stare, but by this point Saihara feels more confused than alarmed. He isn’t sure if it’s just his imagination or not, but despite the snarky remarks that the two are sniping back and forth the conversation between those two somehow feels about several notches less tense than before. It’s as if all the words lack their usual bite.

Given the fact that the last time he’d seen Ouma-kun and Harukawa-san talking to each other, they’d seemed almost ready to tear each other’s throats out, Saihara isn’t exactly complaining. It’s just… a little bizarre, seeing them carry on some semblance of a normal conversation.

He might not know the finer details of what happened here, but one clear thought comes to mind: Ouma-kun must have really changed if he was ready to put even that grudge behind him.

When the other boy had told him about everything that had transpired between him and Harukawa-san in the past—it’s not like Saihara couldn’t understand why he’d become so mistrustful of her, but he’d honestly thought that Ouma-kun would never be able to move past it, or accept that Harukawa-san might be different this time around.

Apparently he’d been wrong, though. Standing here in front of him, talking to each other without any hostility for once (albeit with plenty of exasperation), both of them seemed plenty different to Saihara now.

He’s snapped out of that train of thought as Harukawa-san rolls her eyes at Ouma-kun one last time before turning her attention to him instead, though. He pauses as she looks him up and down, her face too inscrutable for him to guess what she’s thinking.

She’s the first one to look away. “Guess the plan’s back on, huh.”

“Y-Yeah… Or, uh, I guess there’s kind of a new plan, now.” Saihara swallows nervously. “Though Ouma-kun’s really the one who came up with it, not me.”

“Whatever. You two can have fun being the ‘idea guys.’ I’ve always been better at following orders than coming up with plans, anyway.”

Saihara can’t help but feel a twinge of guilt at those words. He really hadn’t… treated her the best before he holed himself up in that classroom, had he? After everything that had happened in the gym, he’d shut down so completely—which was understandable, but still. He’d had no right to say some of the things he’d said, considering everything they’d been working towards before this.

She’s still not looking at him anymore, but he averts his eyes to the floor anyway. “I’m sorry, Harukawa-san. For, um… for asking you to kill me earlier,” he says. “I didn’t… I really shouldn’t have asked something like that from you.”

“What do you want me to say, exactly? ‘Glad you didn’t die’? Pretty sure I already covered that one.”

“N-No, I just…”

Harukawa-san tugs at a loose strand of hair almost absentmindedly, though Saihara can’t help but wonder if she’s actually feeling just as awkward as he is. “Like I said… whatever. Next time, don’t ask someone else to get their hands dirty for you just because you don’t want to do it yourself.”

Ouch. The words still sting, even though he knows he deserves them. “I won’t,” he promises. “I… I don’t actually want to die. Not if there’s a way for us to all get out of here alive.”

“Well, good. I didn’t even think we’d make it this far without any murders, so it’d be a pretty big waste if you died now.”

Saihara manages a small smile. Harukawa-san, he was quickly discovering, might actually be pretty easy to read after all. …Though she was definitely still a little intimidating.

Ouma-kun interrupts them with a yawn, his hands still crossed behind his head. “Y’know, as fun as this morbid little conversation is, we are kind of in a hurry here. And to think you accused us of wasting time in there.”

Harukawa-san purses her mouth but can’t really argue the point. Instead, she nods. “Okay, so fill me in, then. What’s the new plan?”

And—they tell her. Saihara is still more-or-less catching up on things himself, so he’s thankful that Ouma-kun is going back over the finer details. He could more or less put the pieces together himself after everything the other boy had told him in the classroom, of course, but it steadies his nerves to hear everything laid out in succession.

…Moreso when he’s pretty sure Ouma-kun might be adding some new steps to this plan as he goes, especially after his run-in with Shirogane-san. Saihara only hopes that the rest of them can keep up.

Harukawa-san looks nothing short of disbelieving once she’s heard the whole thing, her shoulders squared and tense. “Are you really sure about this?” she asks, after she’s already exhausted every other possible objection. “Isn’t it kind of… taking a huge risk?”

“Hey, you already said you weren’t one of the ‘idea guys,’” Ouma-kun points out. “Besides, what’s the alternative? Go back to the old plan again, get four shitty hours of sleep a night, and wait for Monokuma to keep trying to pick us off one-by-one? No thanks.”

“I-I guess not.” It’s the first time that Saihara has ever heard her stammer. Given how unbelievable some parts of this plan are, and how much hinges on Iruma-san being able to pull off nothing short of a miracle, he can deeply sympathize. “Still…”

“When I said we’d take down the whole killing game, I meant it literally.” Ouma-kun’s mouth splits into another leering grin. “Come on, it’ll be fun.”

Saihara decides to cut in, if only because they’re both at risk of sounding completely insane thanks to the other boy. “Everyone else already agreed to come, as far as I know. But we’re really going to need your help for this too, Harukawa-san.”

Once again, they had somehow managed to come up with a plan that would never work in a million years if even one person didn’t play their part. He knows how ridiculous it all sounds, but they really didn’t have a lot of other options.

She blinks twice before nodding, and even though she still looks about as uncertain as Saihara feels, all she says is, “Fine, count me in. You said we’re all meeting up in the gym?”

Saihara nods. “Fifteen minutes from now.”

“We’re gonna need to swing by and see how Iruma-chan’s doing first,” Ouma adds. “Think you’ll be ready by then?”

“I’ll be there in ten.”

As she turns on her heel to leave without another word, Saihara can’t help but call out to her before she’s out of sight. “Harukawa-san, I… I don’t know what that video in the gym was but…” He swallows. “If it really was me, I don’t remember it at all. I promise.”

The thought of how to face the rest of his classmates after everything that had happened before has been lurking at the back of his mind since he set foot outside the classroom. Ouma-kun was one thing—by now, they had both seen each other at their worst, and besides that, the other boy had come seeking him out of his own volition. Whatever their relationship was now, Saihara wasn’t quite sure, but it definitely felt… a little different from where he stood with everyone else.

Ouma-kun had told him that everyone else had already said they were onboard with this new plan, but Saihara himself wasn’t so sure what he would do if they still looked at him the way they all had in the gym. Even if Shirogane-san really was the ringleader, hearing those words come out of his own mouth had cut deeper than he’d anticipated.

Harukawa-san stops walking a little ways away. “So why tell me this?” she asks, her back still facing him.

“I-I just… if we can’t trust each other, this plan isn’t going to get very far, right?” Saihara wasn’t entirely sure whether he even trusted himself right now. But he wanted to be there for the rest of his classmates regardless, especially if this turned out to be their last chance to break out of this killing game. “I just… I wanted you to know, I-I really don’t remember that video. That’s all.”

Another moment of silence passes between them, and then she simply starts walking again. “Believe me, Saihara,” she says with a scoff, “I already know what kind of person you are.” And with that, she’s out of sight.

Ouma-kun arches an eyebrow as he looks his way. “Don’t think I’m ever gonna understand why you two are friends,” he says, though for once there’s no real hostility to his voice. “What, is it an introvert thing?”

Despite everything that’s still ahead of them, Saihara finds himself smiling. Harukawa-san was certainly intimidating, and a little rough around the edges, but she also felt… extremely reliable right now. “I don’t think it’s something you need to understand. Not unless you’re planning on making friends with her yourself…?”

“Dream on.” Ouma-kun narrows his eyes, though there’s no real hostility to his voice for once. “Come on, let’s go find Iruma-chan.”

By the time he and Saihara-chan make their way to the gym, only a handful of members are missing from their group.

Saihara-chan hangs back a little, but Ouma just strides right through the gymnasium doors and makes his way directly for the stage—the same stage where Monokuma aired that video only a little earlier the same day. He can feel several pairs of eyes on him as he does so, Shirogane-chan’s among them, but he ignores them all as he hops atop the stage and takes a seat, letting his legs dangle off the edge.

Come to think of it, he was dangerously close to the edge in more ways than one right now.

Everyone already gathered in the gym stares back at him apprehensively, apparently expecting that he had something to say to them, but when it becomes apparent that he’s waiting just the same as the rest of them, they slowly go back to murmuring amongst themselves. A few of them begin to turn their attention Saihara-chan’s way instead, and the detective looks as though he’d rather be anywhere but here. Ouma has to commend him on not hiding behind his hat again, if nothing else.

The tension in the room is thick enough to cut with a knife, but Ouma pays it no mind and decides to take count of everyone who’s already made it here instead. And he counts… roughly three-quarters of them.

Closest to the stage, there’s Toujou-chan, Shinguuji-chan, and of course, Gonta’s huge frame standing head and shoulders above the other two. They’d probably made it here easily enough, since the cafeteria wasn’t all that far from the gym to begin with.

A little further back, he can see Yumeno-chan and her little posse. They’d come up from the basement as soon as they’d gotten wind that he was going to give everyone an update on Iruma-chan and her hammers, and he can only thank his lucky stars that he’d had the foresight to ask them to stay in the library just a bit longer before all of this.

Closest to the door, there are the vestiges of his own former night-shift group, Hoshi-chan and Kiibo, along with Momota-chan. The would-be astronaut sits propped up against the wall much like he had outside the school entrance, his shirt still a dark and bloodstained mess.

The three of them must have come in only a little while ago because everyone else in the room keeps shooting them apprehensive, uneasy looks whenever they’re sure Momota-chan isn’t looking. That blood all over his shirt looked an awful lot like a murder attempt at first glance, after all. And the shaky, rattling breaths he keeps taking every few minutes aren’t particularly reassuring either.

Ouma can imagine how everyone must have crowded around at first, clamoring to know if Momota-chan was okay (or even alive at all), and is vaguely reminded of when he was dragged to the library like a walking, sheet-white corpse. Everyone’s reactions were pretty similar back then, too. It really was nothing short of a miracle that all sixteen of them were still alive so far. He stares at the other boy’s gory figure for a moment longer before looking away, resuming his head-count.

So, who else did that leave? Well, there was Saihara-chan and himself. The two of them had just walked in together, so of course they went without saying.

And of course, last but not least… there was Shirogane-chan. Our lovely little backstabbing snake of a ringleader herself, Ouma thinks to himself. She stands a bit closer to Yumeno-chan’s group than any of the others, but not close enough to count herself among their numbers. Maybe that was always how she’d kept a low profile in their group and he’d just never noticed before: keeping close enough to contribute to the conversation, maybe even push it in whichever direction she wanted it to go, but never enough to make herself conspicuous.

He’s pretty sure she looks more tense than usual this time, though. Maybe he was just imagining those occasional, furtive looks she was shooting him over the rim of her glasses—but Ouma sincerely doubts it.

Step by nervous step, Saihara-chan finally makes his way closer to the stage, and Toujou-chan nods in his direction, her face impassive. “It’s good to see you again, Saihara-kun.”

“Y-Yeah, I…” The detective still looks as uneasy as Ouma’s ever seen him, but to his credit, he stands his ground. “I was a little shaken up by what we saw last time.”

“As were we all, I think.” Toujou-chan puts a gloved hand to her chin. “But it’s good to see you back again nonetheless. I hope we’ll be able to put aside our differences and work together for the sake of the group, if nothing else.”

Is she actually apologetic for how she drilled into him last time, or is she just trying to observe his reactions in order to get a better read on him? Knowing Toujou-chan, probably a little of both. Ouma watches them from his perch on the stage without interfering; it’s probably for the best if he doesn’t interrupt them with any of his own snarky commentary. For Saihara-chan’s sake, anyway.

“Ouma-kun told us that there was some new plan in place to end the killing game,” Shinguuji-chan says, an appraising look in his eye as he stares at Saihara-chan. “Something to do with another one of Iruma-san’s inventions. I’m assuming this is another ace you two kept hidden up your sleeves?”

Saihara-chan rubs at his palms in that way he always does whenever they’re sweaty, wiping them against his pants pockets as if he really thought no one would notice. “Uh, no. More like a last-ditch-effort. A-And Ouma-kun’s really the one who came up with it… I only just got filled in a little while ago myself.”

“Give credit where credit’s due, Shinguuji-chan,” Ouma calls sweetly from the stage.

The anthropologist fixes him with a flat, unblinking stare, to which Ouma replies with another wave. He’s only just paused to idly wonder how often Shinguuji-chan actually blinked (or if he had ever seen him blink, period), when another straggler enters the room.

Harukawa-chan walks in, makes it about five steps from the door, and then promptly stops and stares when she catches sight of Momota-chan against the wall. Even at this distance, Ouma can see her eyes widen as she stares first at the boy struggling to sit upright on the floor, then at the rest of their group with an unhidden look of accusation on her face.

“He’s not dying.” Yumeno-chan shuffles over and, in what Ouma can only assume is her misguided idea of being helpful, gives the other girl a nervous pat on the arm. “At least, that’s what he told us…”

Kiibo holds up his hands, attempting to placate the assassin before she could jump to further conclusions. “I understand it doesn’t look very good, but rest assured… no one here did this to him. According to Momota-kun, he’s, um…” The robot trails off.

“’m just sick, Harumaki,” Momota-chan mutters, sitting a little straighter under the renewed scrutiny from everyone else in the room. “It’s fine, though. Just need to get out of here and see a doctor, that’s all.”

Everyone in the room shares a nervous glance at the word sick, and Ouma doesn’t miss the uneasy shadow that crosses even Shirogane-chan’s face.

But Harukawa-chan just continues to stare down at the boy, clearly torn between concern and disbelief. “And you just... didn’t tell anyone about this before?” she asks. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“W-Well… my lungs, for one,” Momota-chan says weakly.

If that was his idea of a joke, Harukawa-chan doesn’t seem to find it very funny. She narrows her eyes, and the pissed off expression on her face is one that Ouma himself is distinctly familiar with as she bites the inside of her cheek. Unfortunately, she’s only just opened her mouth to respond when the gym door flies open and the last few remaining members of their group arrive.

Harukawa-chan cuts herself short, and the rest of them have no choice but to simply look on as the mood takes another unexpected shift for the worse.

Iruma-chan stomps into the gym with a sour look on her face, her hair frazzled and disheveled from the last few hours of sweat and toil in her lab. Amami-chan and Akamatsu-chan come in a few moments later side by side, dark shadows hanging beneath their eyes and exhaustion in their weary footsteps as they wordlessly come and stand near the stage.

It’s the polar opposite of Iruma-chan’s triumphant entrance into the library a few days ago, back when she’d disabled the televisions. Everyone stares, some at Akamatsu-chan or Amami-chan, but mostly at the inventor herself.

“What?” she snaps, when she realizes most of the eyes in the room are looking right at her. “Are you fuckers all braindead? If you can’t tell that the hammer’s not ready yet, you’re all even more stupid than I thought.”

Ouma chooses this exact moment to hop to his feet, in a single fluid motion that draws most of the attention back on himself. Just how he likes it. “What I think Iruma-chan is trying to say,” he tells them, “is that the plan’s going to take a little bit longer than expected.”

“And what is that supposed to mean, exactly?” Shinguuji-chan asks. As usual, he doesn’t bother to sugarcoat the issue. “The rest of us gathered here precisely because you said you had some grand new scheme to stop this killing game, and you promised that Iruma-san could deliver on it. I hadn’t expected you to waste our time with such a bold claim.”

Iruma-chan scowls. “Go fuck yourself, shit-for-brains. Do you wanna try making it yourself then, huh? Or are your balls not big enough to give it a go?” She shrugs Akamatsu-chan’s hand off her shoulder as she crosses her arms. “I’ve been working my ass off for the last few hours, but finishing somethin’ of that caliber in less than a day just ain’t possible!”

One, two. Ouma moves a few steps towards the podium, thinking carefully of what to say next. “I mean, you heard her. No matter how useful her talent is, even Iruma-chan can’t do the impossible.” He’d learned that the hard way, back when he’d asked her to rush her inventions for him several loops ago, and she’d given him pretty much the same response. It’s a bit surreal hearing the same words now addressed to everyone else. “But it’s not like she’s far from finishing, right?”

Amami-chan nods. “I mean, it’s not like I’m an expert or anything but she did seem pretty close to finishing, from what I could tell.”

“It was definitely coming along,” Akamatsu-chan adds. “And she told us about the specs she was adding to it! It’ll help, I know it will. It just… needs more time.” She winces a bit as she tacks on those last words.

Three, four. Ouma treads another few steps, crossing to the other side of the stage, his thoughts still spinning. Of course, he and Saihara-chan had already checked in on Iruma-chan’s progress with the hammer before coming here—and he’d known the rest of their classmates weren’t going to be happy with this little announcement. The most he can do is try and push this conversation in a somewhat fruitful direction, and stall for time.

“Guess there’s no choice but to keep waiting, then. How much longer do you think it’ll take?” he finally asks, as the rest of the group begins to murmur amongst themselves. There’s an unhappy glint in most of their eyes, but this time Ouma hones in on the way that Shirogane-chan avoids saying anything at all. And she’d been so chatty in those last few meetings, too. What a shame.

Iruma-chan runs a hand through her hair and looks away, still sneering. “Maybe ‘till morning… if I work all night.”

Morning. Somehow, the word has an ominous ring to it, as if no one here really expected that they would all be alive by that point. …Maybe they wouldn’t, honestly. But Ouma intends to give it a try anyway.

“Fine, okay. Morning,” Ouma repeats. Five, six. Another two steps, back towards the podium while he considers his next move. “That’s just a few hours away. Enough time for us to all hit the hay and come back when it’s finished. Anyone got a problem with—?”

Instead of an interjection, he’s interrupted by a hacking, guttural cough as Momota-chan spews fresh blood all down the front of his shirt. A few people in the group shout, backing away in surprise, and even Ouma stops talking as he stares at the other boy, waiting for the god-awful noises to stop.

It takes several long minutes before the coughing fit subsides, at which point the astronaut has managed to clamber to his shaky feet, leaving an uncomfortable spatter of blood on the wooden floor in front of him. He tries to say something else—presumably the usual heroic speech about how he was totally fine, no trust me nothing’s wrong whatsoever—but was unable to get the words out as the wracking cough kept him doubled over.

“Are you okay, Momota-kun?” Gonta is the first one to break the awkward silence that’s left hanging over the gym when the other boy’s cough finally subsides. “Gonta doesn’t think you should be on your feet right now…”

“He shouldn’t,” Harukawa-chan replies, but her calm tone can’t quite mask the note of worry beneath it. “Group meeting or not, he’s got no business being here if all he’s going to do is cough his lungs out until he’s passes out from blood loss.”

Angie-chan tilts her head slightly, tapping a finger under her chin in thought. “Angie’s pretty sure it’d be better if we all stayed together… That’s what we did in Kokichi’s case,” she adds. “He was burning up with a fever at first, but we let him rest in the corner of the room.”

True enough, that had been the case back then. And it had probably been the best course of action too, considering how little time they’d had left until the time limit ran out.

On the other hand, as dangerous as his condition had been at the time, Ouma’s pretty sure he hadn’t been at risk of coughing one of his internal organs up until it flopped on the floor for everyone else to see.

Momota-chan wheezes a bit and finally manages to croak out a word. “W-Water,” he says. “I think… I need some water. It feels like I’ve got somethin’ stuck in my throat.”

Everyone exchanges a solemn glance as if listening to a dying man’s last request.

“Hey, I ain’t dead yet! Don’t go actin’ like I am!” Momota-chan wipes the fresh blood near the corners of his mouth with the back of his sleeve—though he had already spit up so much blood by this point that the his jacket sleeve was already dark with the stuff. “I still wanna be here for this group meeting. I want us all to get out of this stupid killing game! I just… uh, I just need to freshen up, that’s all.”

Saihara frowns. “Momota-kun, I don’t think…”

“Just let me get some water.” He pauses and looks down, taking in the sorry state of his jacket and shirt. “And… maybe a change of clothes, too. There’s plenty, back in my room. Then I can come back and we can talk about what to do until Iruma’s finished her thing in the mornin’, or whatever.”

Ouma feels several of his thoughts click, click, click into place as he thinks about their options. Or lack thereof. Momota-chan probably did need to go clean himself up, but no one seemed very sold on his chances of making it back alive. Even if he went completely by himself, the likelihood of their Super High School Level Astronaut making it until morning seemed… slim, at best.

As usual, Akamatsu-chan’s bleeding heart gets the best of her first. “Okay, well… you probably need some help walking, right? At least let me help get you to your—”

“I’ll accompany him.”

Ouma feels a muscle twitch imperceptibly in his jaw when Toujou-chan says those three, simple words. Oh, great. Just fucking perfect.

She approaches Momota-chan without even waiting for any objections, instead offering the boy her shoulder to lean on. “Surely there’s no problem with that? Momota-kun hardly looks capable of even standing right now, let alone making it all the way to the dorms,” she says. “And this way, if his condition worsens along the way, I can tend to him.”

Yeah, Ouma thinks, I bet you’ll ‘tend’ to him real nicely with some blunt force trauma to the head.

The chances of that weren’t very high, though. Toujou-chan was too smart to take a risk that big—who’d be stupid enough to kill someone after so conspicuously offering to help them one-on-one, knowing that they would be the only possible suspect if the other person died? It was more likely she was actually, genuinely offering to help him out.

“I believe I’m still the only one here with any real semblance of medical training,” Toujou-chan reminds everyone, in response to the uneasy stares that they’re giving her.

Even if Momota-chan dropped dead from whatever the fuck was wrong with him, it still wouldn’t look good for her. She had nothing to gain from this, and a hell of a lot more to lose.

Ouma gnaws at the inside of his cheek until he tastes that familiar, coppery tang, and then he makes eye contact with Momota-chan. The other boy needed to get out of here and probably sooner rather than later, that much was for sure.

Momota-chan seems to reach the same conclusion, because he makes up his mind a moment later. “Y-Y’know what, Toujou, sure. Walkin’ is a little bit hard right now, so…” He grimaces, as though the next words physically pain him more than the cough. “I guess I could use the help.”

Saihara-chan looks just as worried about this decision as Ouma feels, but there’s no time to second-guess matters now. Especially when morning is only a few more hours away at most—time was ticking.

Momota-chan staggers out of the gym, his bloodstained jacket pressing heavily against Toujou-chan’s pristine uniform as they walk side-by-side, and low murmurs from the rest of the group linger even after they’re out the door.

Shirogane-chan finally speaks up after staying silent for so long, touching a hand to her cheek as though deeply concerned. “Poor Momota-kun,” she murmurs. “I really hope he’ll be okay.”

Ouma would love to tell her that there was only room for one comedian in this group, and he had the stage currently, thank you very much, but he bites his tongue and acts as though he didn’t hear a thing.

“If he does die, it’ll be his own fault,” Harukawa-chan says, but the nervous sweat on her face doesn’t match her words at all. “If he was that sick, he had no business keeping it a secret from everyone else.”

“I would agree, but… who here hasn’t kept a secret or two to themselves?” Despite the small splash of blood still decorating the gymnasium floor, Shinguuji-chan sounds remarkably unbothered by the whole situation. “Human beings are creatures who cling to such notions of privacy, believing that it will keep them safe. That’s likely why Momota-kun didn’t say anything to the rest of us.”

Harukawa-chan narrows her eyes, but she can’t say anything to argue back. Maybe she thought his line about everyone having secrets was a dig at her own assassin talent, though Ouma would be much more willing to bet it was intended for him and Saihara-chan.

And, well, even if he was making the conscious decision to try and trust them this time around, he knew better than anyone else that he was hardly the only liar in this group.

For the next few minutes, they almost feel like strangers again. Sixteen of them (down to fourteen already) thrown into a single gymnasium, none of them sure about each other’s intentions or motives, too hesitant to move one step closer to each other, but also not wanting to let anyone too far out of their sight either.

No matter how hard they fought against it, this was and always had been a game where they had very few options: kill or be killed. Betray, or get betrayed. Maybe expecting anything else was just delaying the inevitable, going against what Shirogane-chan and all those faceless people out there wanted to see.

What a shitty-ass game. Ouma flexes the fingers of his left hand, nearly bored to tears by even the idea of it. Shirogane-chan, and all those people watching this game—they can all go screw themselves.

A sudden round of distant explosions rocks the whole gym almost the moment that thought crosses his mind; the floorboards begin to rumble while the overhead fluorescent lights rattle together like chattering teeth.

It’s as though he witnesses every possible reaction simultaneously: confusion, fear, apprehension… and a determined sense of resolution from the people who knew it was coming. Somehow, despite all odds, it seemed that Momota-chan had managed to do his fucking job.

This game didn’t need murders or bloodshed to spice things up. No, what Ouma had planned (with some input from some of his other classmates, of course) was way more interesting than the same old thing they’d already seen about a hundred times before.

Some people are shrieking, a few put their hands over their head as though expecting the Exisals to come in and start gunning them down any minute, but best of all is the look of stunned speechlessness on Shirogane Tsumugi’s pale face. Some of his classmates look deeply concerned for their safety, and the others are ready to start running for the door any minute—and she alone had the shocked, numb-inside look of someone who had just gotten the wind knocked out of her by complete surprise.

Or maybe, like someone playing a game of chess who had just watched their opponent knock all the pieces off the board and slap down a set of playing cards instead.

“I guess I forgot to mention,” Ouma says, and he looks Shirogane-chan directly in the eye as a sharp, cold smile twists the corners of his mouth up gleefully, “that I lied.”

Opening up the whole school? Catching the ringleader red-handed, exposing her in front of everyone? Yes, Ouma wanted both of these things. But since the very first moment that he had seen someone die, what he had wanted more than anything else was to see this entire killing game burn to the ground.

And now it was finally happening. Somewhere in the distance, at least one of the Exisals had been commandeered, and Monokuma had been taken care of too, no doubt, or else the stupid bear would’ve already shown up by now to tell them that they were breaking about a million school rules at once. Saishuu Academy was burning—maybe literally.

Iruma-chan puts her hands on her hips, throws back her head, and cackles like a lunatic. Well, Ouma wouldn’t be surprised if she had actually lost her mind by now. Being at least a little bit insane was slowly becoming part of the job description for working with him, and he had asked a lot of her in a very short amount of time.

All traces of her earlier foul mood are gone as she finally manages to stop laughing her head off and yells, “Come on, dipshits! Let’s get the fuck out of here—unless the rest of you wanna be sitting ducks!”

She hardly explained anything, but then again, she didn’t really need to. Ouma had given quite a few of his classmates a heads-up on this little change in the plan, and anyone who didn’t already know about it would doubtless be quick about picking up on the details if they wanted to live. All that mattered was getting the fuck out of dodge.

“Ouma-kun! Get down from there, we need to go!”

Saihara-chan stretches a hand up to him on the stage, and Ouma takes it without a second thought as he jumps down from the stage and starts running.

Momota Kaito should be dead by now.

Should be—but he isn’t. Come to think of it, he should probably be a lot of things. Twelve thousand kilometers away, training at some astronaut program hosted by NASA. Three hundred and eighty-five thousand kilometers away, walking on the moon like all his idols who had come before him.

…Two meters down, buried underground. Six feet under, in other words.

Somehow, that was all he could think when he first slammed the hammer down on the electric pad outside the machinery bay. If Monokuma had shown up right then and there and sentenced him and Toujou to death for breaking school rules, they wouldn’t have had any real way of defending themselves.

He regrets it a little now, but he’d honestly wondered whether he was going to die before he’d even made it that far. Toujou offering (more like insisting, honestly) to come with him had not been part of the plan—not that this whole “plan” thing had been set in stone exactly, ever since that fucked up video had tried to frame Shuuichi and sent their whole group scrambling into pieces.

If anyone was going to come along and help him out, he’d banked on it being Akamatsu. He was pretty sure she’d been just about to offer, before Toujou had interrupted instead, with a soft-spoken but adamant tone that left no opportunity for him to turn her down nicely.

Given the chance, he would’ve rather just risked everything and tried pulling off his little role in this plan all by himself—but who would believe that he could “make it back to his room” on his own, and in his condition? He’d caught Ouma’s eye, and even without a word passing between them, that was when Momota had known that he’d have to take a chance: let Toujou in on the plan, or risk losing the only element of surprise they might still have at this stage in the game.

Not that the odds of this little charade working had ever been particularly high. Long after the sun had sunk past the horizon, he’d still been crouching outside the school entryway, trying to catch his breath without setting off another coughing fit, when Ouma had come back outside to pay him another visit—surprisingly enough, with Shuuichi in tow.

Momota had been thrilled beyond words (Hoshi and Kiibo had seemed pretty damn pleased too, for that matter) to see that the other boy was back onboard with things after all, but the two of them hardly gave him a chance to celebrate before reminding him of the direness of the whole situation. And, of course, of the horrible, nagging cough that just wouldn’t seem to dislodge itself from his chest.

“We’re on our way to go see Iruma-san in her lab,” Shuuichi had explained very gently, as though talking to a hospital patient in their sickbed. At the time, Momota had wanted nothing more than to insist that he was not a sick patient and didn’t need to be treated like one… but he wouldn’t exactly have been the most convincing with blood all down the front of his shirt.

Kiibo had perked up at that, asking the question that was already at the front of Momota’s mind. “Did she manage to finish it already? I wasn’t sure if she’d make it in time… though I’d expect nothing less from Iruma-san, really…”

“Dunno yet. But if she didn’t, we’re all pretty much screwed.” Ouma announced this with such a casual finality that Momota had wished he’d had the energy to stand up and slug him. At least once, right in the cheek.

Unfortunately, getting up and yelling would’ve definitely made the irritation in his throat come rushing back full force, so he hadn’t really had much of a choice but to sit there and glare daggers at the other boy instead.

The hostility hadn’t gone unnoticed either, because Ouma had arched his eyebrows high as though actually amused. “Relax, Momota-chan. No need to get yourself all worked up. She’ll have it done.”

“Oh yeah?” Hoshi had asked. “And how do you know that?”

“Because she’s done it before,” the other boy had said with a smile.

Infuriating. Cryptic. An absolute bastard. That was the new and improved impression of Ouma Kokichi that Momota had been getting ever since the other boy had actually started talking to the rest of them, and nothing he’d said yet had proven him wrong. Still, for some godforsaken reason, his plan seemed to be their best—their only—bet right now.

“So why waste time and talk to us?” Momota had finally managed to slide a knee underneath him as he struggled to his feet. “Sounds like you’re in a hurry. And we already told you we’ll meet up in the gym.”

Ouma’s smile faded instantly, replaced with a look so serious that it was almost unnerving. “I need another favor,” he’d said, “and it’s something only you can do right now. Help me out, Momota-chan.”

Something only you can do. How easily he’d been suckered in by those words. The other boy must’ve known he couldn’t turn him down after hearing something like that—that it would appeal to the part of him that had always dreamed of bigger things, like leaving his name among the stars. Or, on the off-chance that he never made it to space, at least leaving enough of an impression that other people wouldn’t forget him.

The new adjustment to the plan was simple enough to sound almost doable, assuming luck was on their side: just lie. Shamelessly, blatantly, and without remorse.

In other words, Ouma would go and ask Iruma to hide that hammer in one of the classrooms as soon as she’d finished making it. They’d all meet up in the gym as promised, tell the whole group (more specifically, tell the ringleader in their midst) that the hammer wasn’t done yet.

Then one of them would leave to go fetch the hammer, take it all the way to the closed-off machinery bay… and smash their way in, breaking open as many of the Exisals as they could reach before the cubs and Monokuma were tipped off to the rule violation. After that, they’d hole up in one and use the huge machine to fend off any of the others that the cubs might try and attack the rest of them with.

“You’re insane.” That was Momota’s reaction at the time, hearing the plan in its entirety. “Like actually, officially outta your tree.”

“Momota-kun.” Shuuichi had interrupted before Ouma could say something that sounded suspiciously like a thank you, looking more determined than Momota had seen him in the last few days. “I know it sounds… well, crazy, but it’s the best thing we can do to stall for time. If the ringleader really is one of us, it’s for the best if they know as little about the real plan as possible.”

That had sounded convincing enough, to be sure. “Okay, sure. I get that, but… why the hell does it have to be me?”

“Because—”

Ouma had interrupted Shuuichi instead, that time. “Because you’re coughing up blood, genius. You really think anyone else has a chance of leaving the room without everyone thinking they’re up to something?”

…Right. “And I’m supposed to, what? Just go out in a blaze of glory once the damn bears catch up to me? How do you even know if that hammer’s gonna open one of those things, anyway?”

“Isn’t that the kind of thing that always happens in anime? What, was sci-fi not your favorite genre as a kid?” the other boy had asked innocently, dodging the question. “Trust me, once Monokuma’s tipped off, an Exisal is the safest place you could be. Those things are basically impenetrable.”

There wasn’t a shred of proof to his words, but he’d sounded so completely, absolutely sure about it. Everything from his flippant tone to his ever-changing, unreadable expressions should’ve raised a red flag… and yet, Momota had found himself believing him. For some unfathomable fucking reason.

So he’d agreed. Of course, he’d agreed. Like the superheroes he’d always admired in his favorite manga as a kid, or like an astronaut helping to make history, or like a complete and utter fool, he’d promised to go along with everything on the off-chance that it might help. The whole thing was probably going to get him killed in the end—y’know, if the blood coming out of his lungs didn’t do the job first—but for some reason, he’d felt so strangely sure that this was the right thing to do.

Everything about this scenario felt so oddly familiar: electric hammers, giant robots, a desperate hero’s last stand. Maybe Ouma really hadn’t been lying, and he was just following the plot of some anime he’d seen before. Not that the idea of following a script from an anime was all that reassuring.

Hoshi had looked about as skeptical as he’d felt, but for some reason Kiibo had seemed strangely convinced that the hammer really would be able to do the things that Ouma promised it would.

“If it were anyone else I wouldn’t be so sure, but I really wouldn’t put it past Iruma-san.” He’d held his head up high, looking almost… proud? Momota wasn’t really sure. “She hasn’t let us down even once yet, you know. And she’s an expert when it comes to all of this technological stuff.”

Momota had absolutely no clue why the robot seemed to have such unshakable faith in Iruma’s abilities, but he wasn’t going to complain about it. Anything that would help boost his own confidence in this plan was more than welcome. And when it came to trusting people, sometimes you had to just go with your gut. That much, at least, he understood.

Before Ouma and Shuuichi had continued across the grounds to the lab, all five of them had paused, an ominous silence hanging over them. It wasn’t like they’d get another chance to talk things over or discuss the plan again, once they all met up in the gym.

…They might not get another chance to talk to each other, period.

Shuuichi had looked at him—really looked at him, right in the eye. “I know you’ll pull it off, Momota-kun. We’ll see each other again, once this is all over… and then we’ll get you to a doctor.”

“A doctor. Right.” Momota had just laughed, an oddly hollow sound in the back of his throat. Since when did Shuuichi become the optimist around here? Normally, he’d be a lot more positive himself, but it was hard when something he didn’t even understand seemed to be trying its damndest to kill him. “Sure would be nice.”

“I mean it, though. Once we’re out of here, it’s the first thing we’ll do.” The detective sounded so sure, Momota was almost tempted to believe him.

And Ouma had leaned forward at that, surprising Momota enough that he’d taken a step back. Under the full moon that hung above the grounds, the shadows on the other boy’s face had looked menacing.

“Let me put it in easier terms for you to understand, Momota-chan.” Once again, he’d dropped any pretense of a smile or smirk, looking deadly serious as he said, “If you die in that fucking Exisal, I won’t ever forgive you in a million years.”

As much as it pained him to admit it, Ouma was probably right about him being the only one who could even hope to leave the gym without arousing suspicion, too. Nearly everyone did seem to think he was on his last leg, the moment they saw the amount of blood he’d coughed up. He hadn’t exactly had time to look at himself in the mirror yet, but the pitying looks in everyone’s eyes and the way they kept clamoring to know if he was injured told him that he probably looked like the victim of some stabbing.

If only Toujou hadn’t insisted on coming along, the whole thing would’ve gone off without a hitch. But it would’ve looked a hell of a lot stranger to turn her down than to take her up on the offer, so what else could he have done, anyway?

For a few moments, they’d trudged along in silence through the darkened hallways. Momota had given it his best performance back in the gym—those coughs had been the real deal, more or less, but the urge to start hacking up a lung wouldn’t have hit him nearly as hard if he hadn’t instigated the coughing by force. Once they’d left the gym, he’d focused as much as possible on calming his breathing, letting the scratchy, itchy sensation in his lungs slowly expire without aggravating it.

That had been all nice and well, until they’d made it to the entryway, at which point there was really no hiding his destination anymore. The dorms and machinery bay were both outside the school, across the courtyard in different directions, but before he could go anywhere else, he’d need to pick up that hammer that Iruma had left in one of the classrooms.

The moment he’d started dragging his feet, Toujou had closed her eyes. “I suppose now you might finally tell me where you’re actually going.”

Heh, he’d thought to himself. Well she sure ain’t beating around the bush. “Figured that was why you offered t’ come along... Guess I make for a worse actor than I thought.”

“There was no problem with your acting skills, really. I simply figured you for the kind of stubborn fool who would rather die than not be there with the rest of the group at such a dire moment,” Toujou had said, her voice completely matter-of-fact. “So when you agreed to leave the room to go take care of yourself, I knew you must be up to something.”

Momota had decided there was no point in trying to bullshit her any longer when she was already right on the money. She’d just see through it, anyway. “Guess I am a stubborn fool… can’t really deny it. But aren’t you kinda the same, Toujou?”

She’d just blinked, looking almost surprised to have the question turned back around on her.

“I mean, you didn’t rat me out, right? And you’re always doin’ stuff for the rest of the group, claimin’ it’s your ‘duty as a maid’ or whatever… That makes you just as much of a stubborn asshole as I am, when it comes to wantin’ to help people out.”

“Perhaps… you’re not wrong,” she’d said slowly. “I suppose I see your point.”

And so, he’d brought her up to speed on why he’d left the gym and where he needed to go from here. She was frighteningly quick on the uptake, but maybe that was a good thing—he didn’t really want to consider the worst-case scenario, but if the damn cough did happen to kill him before he could finish the job, it was good to have a stand-in.

Momota Kaito never turns away another sidekick! …That was what he’d wanted to say, just to lighten the mood a little, but something about the maid’s stony demeanor made him decide not to risk it. Like Chabashira, she probably wasn’t the type of girl to react all that well to jokes.

As they’d trudged across the courtyard, electro-hammer in tow, Toujou adjusted his weight on her shoulder as though it hardly even fazed her, putting her free hand to her chin in thought. “I’m glad I asked. It’s a bold move, this plan of Ouma-kun’s, but I believe it will have a higher chance of success with my assistance.”

“How d’you know I’m not the one who came up with the plan?” Sure, it was actually Ouma’s idea, but he hadn’t mentioned that to her when he was going over all the important details.

“Because he’s the type to always withhold a few details from those he distrusts,” she’d said simply. And then, before he could chuckle in agreement, she’d added, “And I’m afraid you simply aren’t capable of coming up with something of this caliber yourself, Momota-kun.”

Ouch. That little comment had stung so much that he’d stayed quiet all the rest of the way to the machinery bay—though maybe it was a good thing that the blow to his pride could take his mind off the itching pain in his lungs for a few minutes.

And then, once they had finally made it to their destination, they’d stood there, staring intently at the electric panel outside the room. According to Ouma… well, according to Iruma, really, this hammer would do the trick on anything electronic. The metal shutter that gated them off from the hangar looked impenetrable, but supposedly it would go flying up once the security panel was fried.

Toujou had just passed him the hammer without a word. Maybe she felt a little guilty for the insult, or (more likely) maybe she had thought she was doing a favor by letting him have one last, heroic moment before everything went to hell. Like nearly everyone else, she seemed to think he didn’t have much time left after all.

But Momota Kaito wasn’t—isn’t dead just yet. Even if he should be. Even if most people would be, with a cough like his. Maybe it was just him being a stubborn fool again. Maybe, cliché as it sounded, it was because he didn’t want any of the friends he’d made to be sad if he went and died now of all times.

Or maybe it was just because a certain little bastard had sworn to never forgive him if he went and died now, at the tail end of it all. How the hell Ouma could make a sentiment as well-intentioned as stay alive sound like a threat was beyond him, but it had most certainly gotten the message across.

And besides, he didn’t want to die. Not if he was being honest with himself. He still hadn’t gone to space, hadn’t made his mark on history yet—hadn’t broken his way out of this stupid, shitty killing game.

But the satisfying, electric sizzle as he brought the hammer down on the security panel was as good a way to start making his mark as any, he figured.

The moment the shutter door flies open, alarms start blaring on all sides. Momota doesn’t waste a second longer and dashes into the machinery bay; he doesn’t need to look back to know that Toujou is following close on his heels. No time for propping him up now: those bears were always popping up when they least expected it, as though out of thin air, so there was no telling when one of them might show up now that they were finally, officially breaking the rules.

The room is such a dim, cluttered mess that there’s almost too much to look at. The wash of grays and greens and the huge, looming machinery gives Momota a nasty feeling for a second, but he quickly forgets about it as a wave of relief overcomes him instead. There, to the side, he sees all five Exisals lined up nearly in a row, as promised.

Boom. The reverberation from crashing the hammer against the first Exisal he can reach sends a shudder through his arms and torso as the lid flies open. Momota hesitates—and then comes to a decision.

“Here, Toujou—catch!”

Fotunately, she does. Her gloved hands catch the hammer by its handle as he half-tosses, half-shoves it her way. As much as he’d love to start smashing the rest of these Exisals open, maybe even frying some of their inner circuits if he had a chance, even just lifting the hammer twice now had left him almost completely drained.

“You can handle the rest, right?” he asks.

She was already standing closer to the second Exisal than he was by now, and she stood a better chance of fucking up some of the others before the cubs started to arrive, too. “But of course,” she says with a nod. With a steadiness that belied just how heavy the damn thing actually was, she lifted the hammer up in both hands and slammed it easily against the other Exisal’s side.

Momota climbs into the cockpit of the first Exisal as fast as he can (which, to be fair, is still probably slower than most people), looking around at the foreign-but-familiar controls on all sides of him. Just like a goddamn anime, indeed.

“Gotta say, I always wanted to pilot a big machine like this as a kid,” he confesses.

Toujou readies the hammer against the third Exisal and swings the hammer without hesitation. “Make it count, then. I doubt we’ll ever get another chance at this sort of thing, after all.”

She’s only just slammed the hammer down against the delicate internal machinery of the same Exisal when all five cubs turn up at the entrance, screaming frantically about rule violations and something else about Monokuma. Not that it really mattered, though—Momota waits to lower the cockpit of his own Exisal until he watches Toujou sprint back to the second one and climb aboard, taking the hammer with her.

Maybe he really had watched too much sci-fi anime as a kid, or maybe those bears were just the most annoying little fuckers on the planet, because the sensation of opening fire with the Exisal’s huge guns is immensely satisfying.

Iruma might have been the one who started rallying everyone to leave the gym, but Harukawa Maki is still the first one out the door.

It’s not really surprising: she’s in better shape than most of them, and she was prepared for the distant sounds of explosions and gunfire long before the first blast actually shook the gym. She’d been used to sounds like those nearly all her life, but this was her first time going into a fight where she’d need to watch other backs—everyone’s backs—besides her own.

But before she could do anything to help the rest of them, she was going to need some help herself.

So she’s the first one out of the gym, barreling down the hallway and up the closest flight of stairs to the second floor without so much as a hitch in her breath. The crashes and faraway pops of gunfire haven’t reached the main building—yet. But they’ll be here soon, and she needs to reach the gate blocking off the third floor before they get here.

“Hijacking an Exisal? Is that even possible?” She’d been in a state of near-disbelief when Ouma had first explained everything about the plan to her. “Even if Iruma’s hammer can disable electronics, how do you know it’s going to actually open up one of those big machines?”

He’d just smiled, in that smug, enigmatic way he had. “Well technically, I got the idea from you. So I know it’ll work for sure, actually.”

“From me?”

But he wouldn’t explain any more than that. Of course he wouldn’t. He still hadn’t told her anything that she wanted to know, not really.

Somewhere deep down, Harukawa still felt a lingering sense of resentment for the boy that she herself didn’t fully understand. Even before he’d started talking to the rest of them, she had observed him warily. Watching carefully, waiting for… something. She wasn’t sure what, exactly. Something dangerous, something cruel.

But even though nothing of the sort had ever wound up happening, everything about him had still rubbed her the wrong way, from the self-important way that he carried himself, to the barbs that had (until very recently) punctuated his every word to her.

Maybe he’d thought she was too stupid to notice the cold looks that he gave her sometimes, but she wasn’t. She did notice. And she’d known right away that everything about her must have rubbed him the wrong way, too.

Worst of all was that persistent, nagging little feeling that Ouma Kokichi might be someone difficult to hate entirely, though—despite all of her other misgivings, there was always something that felt suspiciously like a knot of guilt when she looked at him for too long.

Guilt. Regret. Not exactly the sort of feelings she was supposed to carry with her, in her line of work. Whether that work—her memories—was real or not, it was all she’d ever known. It wasn’t as though she objected to that little talk they’d had earlier about putting their differences aside, letting… whatever it was that had happened be water under the bridge. But she still wasn’t exactly happy with the lack of clear answers.

“Okay, fine.” She’d given up on getting any more details about his remark on the Exisals and decided to voice the rest of her reservations. “But why Momota? Shouldn’t someone who knows how to fight try and hijack them instead? I think Chabashira and I would do a better job.”

Saihara and Ouma had only exchanged a knowing look, as though communicating without a word between them. Whatever secrets Ouma was keeping from her, he clearly wasn’t keeping them from the detective, that was for sure.

“I’m not so sure about Chabashira-san, but um…” Saihara had hesitated. “Momota-kun is…”

Just as he’d trailed off, Ouma had cut in smoothly. “I think it’s better if you see why it has to be Momota-chan for yourself. As for you though, there’s something I think your talents would be better suited for.”

She’d crossed her arms. “And what’s that?”

“Weapons. Lots and lots of them.”

It was a possibility she hadn’t even considered. They had all already come across several research labs pertaining to some of their talents, but Harukawa had never really stopped to wonder where hers might be, or if she even had one. The idea of finding her own research lab had just never really interested her to be honest, especially with so many more pressing issues to their survival.

But it was true that if everyone else had one, then it followed that she most likely had one too—and that it would be stocked to the brim with tons of dangerous weapons, befitting the Super High School Level Assassin.

Once Momota could get his hands on one of the Exisals, they’d be able to completely break open all the areas of the school that were currently off-limits. But he probably wouldn’t be the only one with an armed Exisal prowling around, if the bears got hold of any of the others. They were going to want to stop them as quickly as possible, now that Monokuma finally had an excuse to jumpstart the bloodshed.

Momota couldn’t be in several places at once, either; even if someone went with him to try and help, there were still going to be areas of the school where some of their classmates were isolated, out of Momota's reach. So Harukawa would need to be part of their line of defense from the ground.

As long as it wasn’t a sword, she was well-trained with any number of weapons. And maybe most of them wouldn’t be able to crack open an Exisal, but it was a hell of a lot better than trying to fight them all off empty-handed. Maybe she’d even be able to entrust a few of those weapons to some of her other classmates… the ones who didn’t look like they’d immediately shoot one of their eyes out, anyway.

She had understood all of that. Weapons, movement, action—those things were all her area of expertise. And because it seemed like a higher chance than no chance at all, she’d agreed to go along with the plan. Still…

Head up the stairs, wait for the gate to the third floor to get blown wide open, make your way up there and keep heading down the hallway until you get to your lab. Bright red door, you can’t miss it.

…How the hell had he known that?

She could more or less understand how someone could make the leap about her lab having weapons—she’d announced her talent for the whole group to hear just the other day, after all. And it made sense to guess that it must be in a location they hadn’t been able to reach yet, since it wasn’t among the other ones.

But he’d told her where it was without a trace of hesitation, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. No matter how hard she tried to wrap her mind around it, Harukawa just couldn’t understand how he could’ve known that ahead of time.

Weird knowledge about things that didn’t make sense. Whatever grudge he’d had against her, the one he’d only just agreed to put aside for the time being. The strange animosity she herself had felt, whenever she looked at him. None of it made any sense, and the longer she thought about it, the more confusing it became.

Only when her head started hurting had she decided to put the issue behind her until everything else was finished. If there was one thing she knew from her prior work assignments, she would need her mind to be as clear as possible if there was even a chance in hell of pulling this off.

No guilt. No regret. No complicated thoughts. Just years of training, muscle memory, and a desperate urge to get the fuck out of this school and see what, if anything, was waiting for her outside.

Harukawa stands near the gate to the third floor stairway, periodically digging her nails into her palms as she waits. There are still plenty of distant sounds: people yelling, the sounds of explosive rubble and rumbling footsteps that can only be the Exisals’ lumbering approach. And yet somehow, loudest of all seems to be the sound of her own breathing.

One of those Exisals was bound to come up the stairs sooner or later, but what she would do next largely depended on which one it was. If it was Momota, then he’d break open the gate for her as planned. If it wasn’t…

..Well, she could still probably get one of those stupid bears to break open the gate by accident, as long as she was quick on her feet. The margin for error would be almost nonexistent, though, and she’d need to dodge almost as soon as they showed up or they’d put a bullet in her brain before she even had a chance to get her footing.

As the hulking mechanical sounds begin to draw closer, she switches her position, readying herself for a sprint: both hands on the floor, front knee bent into a crouch, back knee just barely touching the floor as well. Until she got her hands on any of those weapons, she was going to want to run, and dodge, and jump. Not fight.

Harukawa hisses a breath in through her teeth, feeling the thuds and crashes from one of the machines come up through the floor as tremors in her arms. It’s close enough that she knows at least one of them must be on the second floor with her by now. And then, the instant she sees the low, red glow of an Exisal looming from the far side of the hallway—

She leaps into a sprint without waiting to see whether it’s a friend or foe. In the moment that it takes for the huge machine to straighten itself up on the landing, Harukawa has already made a beeline directly for it.

The hallway is dark, cramped, and hard to navigate—if she tries to fight one of those monstrous machines barehanded, she’ll be at a total disadvantage. But those same things should work in her favor, as long as she relies on her speed. Even with those huge guns attached, and even if they could see in the dark, those machines were going to be slow to turn around.

One second passes, and another. The moment she’s close enough that she could push her weight off the floor and jump atop the Exisal if she really wanted to, she instead slides directly between its legs until she’s crouching behind it, safely on the other side of the hallway.

Harukawa had known she could pull it off, but that kind of risky stunt would probably only work best the first time. If she had to get past the huge, primate-like contraption a second time, though… she would need to be more creative.

She clenches her teeth, debating between whether to make her way further down the hall or stand her ground by darting into one of the nearby classrooms instead. Both options were unappealing; she’d be heading further away from her target either way, after all. But even cornered in a classroom, she could at least try to use anything she could get her hands on to slow the Exisal down: desks, chairs, maybe even one of the lockers if she could knock it away from the wall.

And then—the Exisal doesn’t turn around. It ignores her completely and heads directly for the gate blocking the stairway, picking up speed until its enormous frame crashes right through it. The same gate that she, Chabashira, and even Gonta hadn’t been able to budge an inch with all their strength combined now folds like wet cardboard with a single screech, and suddenly the way up to the third floor is open.

At least there was no doubt about which side this Exisal was on anymore.

Harukawa lets out a breath and flexes her fingers. She knows she should keep heading straight up, but still she asks, “Momota? Is that you?”

“I’m afraid not,” comes Toujou’s clipped voice, amplified by the microphone inside the machine.

Oh. She hadn’t considered the possibility at all, but it made sense that if Momota had set the plan into motion without a hitch then he must have convinced Toujou to help out too.

Perhaps Toujou mistakes her silence for disappointment, because she quickly adds, “He’s still alive, I assure you. He’s in an Exisal himself, somewhere on the first floor I believe.”

“Good to know,” Harukawa says, feeling awkward. Then she shakes her head; she didn’t have time to worry about one reckless idiot’s wellbeing when the whole school was still a free-for-all of gunfire and explosions. “I need to keep going—there should be more labs on the third floor. And if there are, then we'll have stuff we can use to defend ourselves up there.”

“Mind if I come along?”

Harukawa whips around at the sudden sound of a voice behind her, but it’s only Hoshi. Just how quiet were his footsteps, to have snuck up on her like that? Even with all the other sounds of chaos throughout the school, her senses were usually more tense than ever in a battle like this. She must have lowered her guard even more than she’d thought, once she knew the Exisal wasn’t going to attack her.

Hoshi seems to be unscathed, so the situation on the ground floor couldn’t be too bad yet. He waits patiently for her answer, so Harukawa just nods. She’d hardly spoken a word to the tennis player in all the time that they’d been trapped here, other than a few brief exchanges during group meetings, but if nothing else he wouldn’t be dead weight like some of their other classmates.

“I’ll lead the way, and you two follow.” Toujou’s Exisal begins to move carefully up the stairs without even waiting for an answer. “We won’t know if there are any other threats lurking up there until we see it for ourselves, but at least I should be able to clear out any potential threats if I go first.”

Harukawa waits with Hoshi until the back of the machine is further up, nearly out of sight, and then they begin to climb their way through the rubble and up the stairs.

The third floor looks… more or less similar to the second. Still the same bars on all the windows, the same encroaching vegetation squeezing through the cracks. All three of them wait at the top of the stairs to see if more bears or Exisals might pop out of nowhere, but nothing of the sort happens. The ringleader really hadn’t anticipated them forcing their way up here, then.

They pause just a moment longer, and then they all go their separate ways without a word: Toujou in her Exisal to tear down the next blocked-off area, Hoshi to only god knew where, and Harukawa to her research lab.

Ouma was right, she catches herself thinking as soon as she sees it. The door is so vibrantly, blatantly red that she really couldn’t have missed it, even if it hadn’t had a little plate with her talent listed on it. At one point, she might have ripped that plate off the door before anyone else could see it, but there was no need now.

She doesn’t even need to break the door down in order to enter; it’s unlocked, and the door swings open as if it were waiting for her the moment she pushes down on the handle. What awaits her inside are—weapons. Lots and lots of them, as promised. Harukawa takes a quick, silent inventory of them all and notes without amusement that there isn’t a single sword in sight.

Whoever made this room (this entire school) had to have known. About her distaste for swords, ever since an unexpected incident in her past. About the painful, sleepless nights she’d endured, ever since she was a child. Did any of it ever actually happen? What about the other kids from her orphanage, whose faces she’d burnt into her memory before drifting off to sleep every night after hours of agonizing training?

Harukawa couldn’t pretend any longer that she wasn’t burning up inside to know the answers to these questions. After all, if none of it had ever happened… then who was she, anymore? Who had Harukawa Maki ever been?

She didn’t know. Maybe someone high-and-mighty like Ouma, or composed and analytical like Toujou might already have an answer, but she sure didn’t. But—for now, it doesn’t matter. As she begins to take the weapons down off the racks in front of her, white-knuckled and stony-faced, she only knows one thing: whoever she might be once they get out of this school, it won’t be the same person she’s been until now.

Harukawa throws as many weapons as she can possibly fit into the nearest briefcases. The small ones are easy enough to fit: knives, daggers, handguns, arrows, and ammunition are all small enough to carry around. But they’re also the least likely to be of any real use against the Exisals. She might know flashy tricks, like how to deflect bullets with a single blade, but any of her other classmates would probably be shot dead before they could even move out of the way.

The larger weapons, by contrast, are harder to fit, but look as though they might come in handy. After some deliberation, she carefully fits a chainsaw into one of the larger cases, two of the hammers in another, and last but not least, she takes the largest weapon she can find (a huge, medieval-looking battleax) for herself. An unwieldy, heavy weapon like this would be a terrible choice for any normal mission, but she suspects it just might make a dent in some of the Exisals if she comes at them with enough force.

Unfortunately, that does leave her with the question of how to carry everything out of here at the same time. She pauses, debating on leaving either the hammers or chainsaw even if it meant that she’d have to risk coming back for them later—but then she hears Hoshi’s voice from behind her, and turns around to face him.

“Need some help with those?” he asks, both eyebrows raised at the sheer, ridiculous quantity of lethality in one single room. In one hand, he’s got an easy grip on what looks like a tennis racket in one hand, and a couple of cans full of tennis balls in the other—if she had to guess, he’d probably found his own lab on this floor just like she’d found hers.

His soft approach hadn’t caught her nearly as much by surprise this time, so Harukawa just nods. “Sure. If you could carry two of them, I’ll handle the ax and the other one.”

“Yeah, sure.” Despite his small stature, he takes the briefcases from her with no problem whatsoever. He bends down only for a moment, packing the tennis balls into one of the briefcases while keeping the racket tucked firmly under one arm, then straightens up again. “S’ this good enough? Should we get out of here?”

She looks him over once more and decides that he definitely fell into the category of ‘could take care of himself,’ which was more than she could say for a lot of the rest of her classmates. “Actually, feel free to take one from the case. Anything you want, as long as you can use it.” She gestures to the rest of the room. “You can pick from those too, but the guns aren’t real, so I wouldn’t recommend them.”

“Nah, I’m good. A racket’s all I need,” he says, shaking his head. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin with the rest of that stuff.”

Harukawa couldn’t say she knew too much about Hoshi, other than the fact that he’d supposedly been to prison. For what, and for how long, she hadn’t asked; he’d been pretty tight-lipped since the game had started, much like herself, and she hadn’t exactly felt the need to go prying into his personal business either. But there was something… an air about him, or maybe it was just how he carried himself… that told her the two of them weren’t entirely dissimilar.

So if he said that he only needed a tennis racket in a dangerous situation like this, she’ll take him at his word for it.

They don’t waste any time; rather than walk, they break into a run with all their weapons in tow, moving seamlessly through the dark hallways without ever once faltering or tripping. Harukawa is more than a little impressed; between the two of them, Hoshi might actually be faster, his quick, catlike steps difficult for even her eyes to keep up with.

“Hey Harukawa,” Hoshi says as they round the corner and head down the staircase, making breakneck speed for the lower floors. “Y’know what I always wanted a chance to do? Before we all wound up here, I mean.”

Harukawa has no clue. “Travel the world? …Write a book?” She throws out a few wild guesses, unsure of what most people ever wanted to do with their free time. She’d never been given enough freedom to know what most people would want to do with their lives, if they had a chance.

“Nope. A prison break.”

The words are so blunt, so terrifically absurd, that Harukawa actually barks out a laugh, even as they continue to sprint though the hallway. It was morbid, gallows humor, the only type of humor that she felt she could truly understand.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he adds, “those other things sound great. And I kinda already got a taste of travelin’, before I got sent to jail. But y’know… I should’ve tried busting out of that shitty-ass place at least once.”

“Better late than never,” Harukawa agrees, taking the next set of stairs two at a time. “I actually blew up a whole floor of a building once. Set it up with a ton of explosives, then knocked it down to a four-story.”

He whistles. “Sure wish we had some of those with us right about now. Bet they’d come in handy.”

She couldn’t agree more. Unfortunately, explosives had been as conspicuously absent from her lab as the swords. The people in charge probably hadn’t wanted her using them to force a way through the rest of the school—kind of like they were doing right this minute.

They both hit the ground floor running, with no time to breathe as a piece of the ceiling comes crashing down. She and Hoshi both jump aside, dodging the rubble and a spray of bullets from one of the Exisals—which is fortunately knocked aside by one of its own a moment later. Toujou had been telling the truth about Momota, it seemed.

Harukawa drops her briefcase to the ground and kicks it open, readying her ax at the same time that Hoshi retrieves his tennis balls from the smaller case. None of her other classmates are anywhere that she can see, but that’s fine. No blood and no bodies meant they were probably fine, then. And without them getting in the way, she’d be able to take her pick of the rest of the weapons if by some chance she got disarmed.

Another Exisal comes staggering into the fray, pushing Momota’s until he stumbles back, taking a chunk of one of the walls with him. Harukawa has just enough time to see Hoshi ready a tennis ball with sniper-like precision before he sends it flying, speeding into one of the bears’ Exisals hard enough to leave a hole in its wake. Which gives her an idea.

“Give me a few more of those holes,” Harukawa says, tightening her grip, “and I’ll get my ax into that cockpit.”

Girl genius, Iruma Miu, really doesn’t know why she’s wasting her time trying to save these cunts.

After all, she was many things: gorgeous and creative, magnanimous and above all else, sexy as hell. Plus, she had more talent in her little finger alone than half of these morons had in their entire bodies. If you asked her, her good qualities were far too numerous to list all at once.

...But ‘brave’ had never really been one of them. The word was incongruous with everything else about her, the kind of descriptor you usually only heard on Saturday morning cartoons for kids—the type she used to secretly binge all the time before getting trapped in this ass-backwards school.

Anime protagonists could be brave because they weren’t real. They didn’t exist, and neither did any of their problems, so it was easy for them to save the world with the power of friendship and some really cool magical gadgets or whatever.

But out in the real world? Real people weren’t brave, especially not high school kids. High school problems were a lot less glamorous, and a lot more down to earth: stuff like who was talking shit behind whose back, getting picked last for teams in gym, or trying not to get caught while getting high as a kite in the girls’ bathroom. Petty drama, pointless bickering, useless popularity contests.

The only people who tried to seem brave or nice were the ones who cared about keeping up appearances. But Iruma couldn’t care less about any of that shit, and so no one really gave a shit about her in turn. She had her looks, she had her genius inventing skills—people just didn’t like how she talked. Apparently, she needed a filter, whatever the hell that meant.

They were all just jealous, anyway. Jealous because she said whatever the fuck she wanted to without trying to water it down like the rest of them, and mad because they were just as spineless and sniveling as she was deep down, except they weren’t even as smart or good-looking as she was to make up for it.

At least, that’s what she’d thought… before. Before it turned out that they had very real problems like being stuck in a fucking killing game with some crazy-ass bear that wanted them to murder each other. Before she realized that she might never see the light of day again, (the real light of day, not that shitty artificial light from that good-for-nothing dome) that she might die for real in this fucked-up school. And… before she’d discovered that some of her classmates might actually be the real deal.

Brave, even in a situation as terrifying as this. Kind, even to someone who had no friends like her. And sure, some of them might be creepy little weirdos who wouldn’t hesitate at anything to save their own skin, but not all of them were like that. And in a game like this, “not all of them” was already a lot more than she’d expected.

So right now, even though Iruma would love nothing more than to sneak out the front door and go hole up in her lab, cowering under a table until all the carnage was over, instead she grits her teeth and tries to be brave. Just this once.

It’s definitely not as easy as they made it look in anime, though. For one thing, the school is goddamn near unrecognizable right now, with rubble and dust flying everywhere while Exisals prowled the halls. Lucky for them that the moon was coming in through the windows on this side of the school, or none of them would be able to tell their feet from their assholes trying to navigate their way in the dark.

Iruma has a flashlight on her person along with a handful of other things she had snagged from her lab after finishing the hammer, but she keeps them all decidedly out of sight, tucked away in a toolbelt strapped to one leg under her skirt. (Yes, under. No one would think to try stealing her shit there, now would they?)

As much as she’d love to see where she was going, or if there were any bodies she needed to keep an eye out for, she can’t afford to risk turning the flashlight on—it’d be like waving around a huge sign for the Exisals that said, Hey, look! I’m here, stupid! Night vision probably came standard for something as advanced as those machines, but still. She definitely didn’t want all that attention on her while she tried to navigate the school.

It’d been hard enough having all eyes on her before there were giant robots trying to kill them, when the success of the whole plan had hinged on her telling everyone that the hammers weren’t done yet.

“Just lie,” Ouma had said, like it was the easiest thing in the world. He and Saihara had come to check on how the hammer was coming along in her lab, as promised, and while she was glad to see the Cherry Boy Detective was back in the game, she’d still have been happy if neither of them ever showed up to ask her a favor again.

Because the kinds of favors they wanted were never fucking easy.

“Easy enough for you to say,” she’d grumbled, snatching the hammer out of his grubby little hands and propping it against the nearest sofa instead. “Maybe lyin’ comes real easy to you people, but I almost got crucified the last time I tried! No one was buying it when I said I wanted to change groups, remember?”

Saihara had sputtered a bit, probably wanting to protest that he didn’t lie all that often, but Akamatsu had just stepped in between them and clapped her hands together in that conciliatory way she always did whenever she played mediator.

“Iruma-san,” the other girl had said gently, “maybe it’d be easier if you tried to draw from what you’re feeling right now. You know how they say the best lies always have a little grain of the truth in them? It’s like that.”

Still feeling more than a little huffy, Iruma had just crossed her arms, but everyone else had stared at Akamatsu with expressions ranging from amusement to complete bewilderment.

Amami had been the one to break the silence, letting out a low whistle. “Whew. Solid advice, to be sure, but… I can’t say I expected to hear it from you.”

Ouma hadn’t even tried to hide his delight, his eyes narrowing as if he were in on some kind of joke. “Wow, took the words right out of my mouth. And you sound like some sort of expert and everything! Akamatsu-chan, I’m so proud.”

“I-I’m not an expert, it’s not like I’m saying that it’s great to lie to our friends all the time…” Ever the goody-goody, Akamatsu had quickly tried to walk back her original suggestion. “But if the ringleader’s there, we don’t really have a choice, do we?”

Ouma had looked incredibly thoughtful at that, as though once again mulling something over in that big-ass head of his, but his advice (to Iruma, at least) had pretty much stayed the same: lie your ass off and bide for time.

And okay, so. It wasn’t like it had been a complete disaster. Even now, blood pumping, heartbeat pounding violently as if it were stuck somewhere in her throat, she felt like she’d done a pretty damn good job.

No, not just a good job, she thought, trying desperately to distract herself, I gave the performance of a goddamn lifetime. It’s a real shame my one true love is inventing shit, or maybe I could’ve found my callin’ as an actress.

In the end, Akamatsu had been right—just focusing on how she really felt, rather than trying to over-explain, had helped make her sound a hell of a lot more convincing. And it hadn’t been particularly difficult to sell the idea that she was in a foul mood, considering how frustrating working on that fucking hammer had been: she’d spent the whole time with sweat dripping off the tip of her nose, her frizzy hair constantly getting in her face, all while squinting at the tiny, fragile parts and trying not to fuck it all up.

More than anything, she was pissed that she’d only had time to finish just the one. If she’d had longer… just a few more days, or even a week. She knew. She knew she could’ve made more hammers, more inventions, more safety nets to fall back on just in case something went wrong.

But she hadn’t. All she’d had was about half a day.

And as much faith as she had in her own abilities, she still wasn’t sure one hammer would be enough. Oh sure, it’d do everything it was supposed to, no doubt… but what about the other Exisals? What if those fucking bears actually managed to kill someone, and then the rest of her classmates decided to risk a few murders themselves, once it was too chaotic to tell what the fuck was going on?

Iruma stops at the top of the second-floor stairway and takes a deep breath. She’d already considered these possibilities—many, many times. Not everyone was like that. Not everyone would choose to only save their own skin.

And even if some of them did, hadn’t she already made up her mind to try and be brave?

She reassesses that everything on her toolbelt is where it’s supposed to be and keeps walking. She’s so focused on putting one foot in front of the other, breathing in and out, that she nearly screams and falls on her ass when she actually bumps into someone once she reaches the third floor hallway.

“Iruma-san? That you?”

Oh, thank fucking god. It was just Amami. She could deal with Amami. He’d already kept her company while she worked on the hammer earlier, and besides, he was one of those weirdos like Akamatsu: always pretty nice to everyone, including her.

She tries to open her mouth to respond, but her voice won’t come out as more than a squeak. Embarrassed, she clears her throat and tries again. “You scared the living shit out of me. Thought I was gonna piss myself.”

“Sorry about that.” To his credit, he doesn’t even grimace at her choice of words. “I saw other people heading up the stairs, so I came to see if the upper floors had been opened up yet. But, uh… it’s a little intimidating, I guess, trying to look at everything all by myself.”

Under normal circumstances, her first reaction would be to point and laugh: what, did you need your dick stroked and your hand held at the same time? But as it is, Iruma feels about ready to disintegrate with panic and anxiety on the spot, so she twiddles her fingers together nervously and asks, “C-Can I come with you? Please?”

He blinks in surprise, and she has to beg internally please please please don’t secretly hate me enough to want me to keep going on my own I’ll die in here, and before her thoughts have even started to calm down he gives her a very small smile.

“Two’s better than one, right? Sure, let’s see if we can keep going.”

Iruma lets out a loud, sharp exhale, as sudden as getting the wind knocked out of her. She’s trying to be brave, god knows she is, but her knees are knocking together and she feels like the world’s most pathetic, sexiest girl genius.

“Where are we tryin’ to go, exactly?” she mumbles, trying to change the subject.

Amami is nice enough to not comment on just how fucking weird she’s being. “Kinda wanted to see if I could find my lab,” he says.

“Your lab?” It’s a bizarre suggestion, but it’s not like she had any better ideas in mind. Actually, she hadn’t really given much thought to where to go looking for clues, or even what kind of clues she should be looking for in the first place. Maybe some of the others had given it a little more thought, but she had her hands full just trying to survive here. “What, ya think there’ll be some sort of hint there?”

“I think there might be.” Amami crosses his arms, his eyes darting to the long hallway still ahead of them. “In any case, I need to find it first, so I figured I’d keep going as far up as I could and check out the labs along the way.”

“Better hope it’s not somewhere on the grounds like mine, dipshit.” Iruma regrets tacking on the insult almost as soon as she’s said it; that one was sheer force of habit.

But Amami takes it all in stride, as if he simply didn’t care. Or maybe he was too busy thinking about something else. “Yeah, I guess so.”

Iruma squints, but he doesn’t seem to want to tell her anything more than that. And she didn’t really care, either, as long as he let her tag along so that she wouldn’t be completely by herself in this shitty fucking school.

Besides, it wasn’t like she was telling him everything either. As they continued down the third-floor hallway and on to the next set of stairs, checking the doors carefully as they went, she sticks close to his back and makes sure once again that everything was accounted for on the toolbelt under her skirt.

Sure enough, she thinks with a rush of relief. One mini-flashlight. One screwdriver. And one small gadget she’d managed to scrape together over the last few days, whenever she’d taken a breather from working on all those other projects: a small, bomb-like invention capable of disrupting electronic signals for at least a few minutes.

This one wasn’t anything Ouma had planned or designed for her, and because she’d only had a vague concept in mind while making it, it wasn’t nearly as impressive as the remote or the hammer.

But it still makes her feel better all the same, knowing that it’s there. Just in case of an emergency.

Yumeno Himiko has a feeling in her gut. No, not a feeling—something even more intuitive, less tangible. Something magical.

Unfortunately, magic didn’t work according to the same schedule and laws as the mortal plane. It had rules of its own, and functioned according to its own whims, making it difficult for even advanced mages such as herself to ever fully master it.

This was all well and good, usually. Magic—no, magecraft was fanciful and unpredictable. It added a little bit of spice to life, and it was why she had worked so uncharacteristically hard to become good at it. But that same unpredictability also meant that she had no clue what the hell she was supposed to be looking for right now.

Thankfully, she wasn’t alone. “Yumeno-san, do you think it’s around here?” Chabashira asks her in what was probably meant to be a hushed whisper, but comes out at around twice the decibels. So it just sounds like a regular tone of voice.

Yumeno had already long-since accustomed herself to the fact that Chabashira didn’t seem to have what most people called an “inside voice.” The martial artist never did anything in half-measures: she was athletic, energetic, and above all else… loud.

This wasn’t, perhaps, as much of a bad thing as Yumeno might have considered it before, but now wasn’t really the time or place for it.

“Tenko, shh.”

“Oh!” Still too loud. “Right, sorry.”

Yumeno gives up on convincing the other girl to lower her voice and goes back to scouring the classroom in front of her, trying to gauge whether whatever-it-was that she was looking for might be here. But without really knowing what that was exactly, it was pretty hard for her to tell. At times like this, she found herself wishing that magi—magecraft abided by more manageable, slightly less finicky rules. Just a little.

She looks at desks and chairs lying askew on the floor, then to television that must have come loose from the mount attaching it to the ceiling in all the commotion. It lay broken on the floor, bits and pieces of shattered glass surrounding it on all sides. The days when Monokuma had used those televisions to torture them with that annoying, relentless song couldn’t possibly be that long ago, and yet they felt about a lifetime away.

Broken televisions were probably also going to be the least of their worries, if the fighting kept up at the pace it was going.

Yumeno gnaws at her lip, trying to come to a decision. What most people might refer to as “following their intuition” was actually a long and intensive process of relying on one’s own mana and psychic abilities to divine the future. And it was really, really… hard, considering just how many things were happening all around the school at once.

“I don’t… think so,” she tries to say before another shudder shakes the school and a round of gunfire echoes in the distance. Her jaw snaps shut instantly, teeth chattering like icicles against each other, and the other girl puts a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

“Come on, then. Let’s keep looking.” Chabashira’s tone is far more cheerful than she probably feels, and Yumeno knows it, but she’s grateful for those words all the same. “Tenko will keep you safe.”

And this was why it was so hard to truly begrudge Chabashira for anything. Despite her overabundant energy, and her too-loud voice, and even the fact that she had dragged Yumeno along by the hand and half-carried her up the stairs like a misbehaving cat in order to get them both past the Exisals, she was a good friend.

Maybe better than I deserve, Yumeno thinks mournfully to herself, but she doesn’t voice the thought aloud as they exit the classroom and keep looking.

As usual, their group had been left out of the loop when it came to the inner workings of this whole plan. Not that Yumeno could really blame the rest of her classmates for deciding not to fill them in on the finer details and improvisations—after all, what had she, Chabashira, and Angie really done so far except cause a bunch of trouble and nearly mess things up for everyone else?

Ouma had told them all that Iruma was inventing something to open up the rest of the school, something to help end the killing game, but she hadn’t expected the plan to involve hijacking Exisals. Or so much gunfire. Maybe it was her inner magician, but she’d expected something cleaner, something quick and flashy like a tri—spell that would rip the ringleader’s mask off in one, neat motion.

Up until the moment that the first explosions had started thundering, she’d really had no idea that Iruma had actually finished the hammer. Maybe Ouma had specifically told some of them in advance and left out others in order to sell the reaction a little better when Iruma came storming in and complaining. Which, again, was probably fair. But still…

I really don’t like that guy. She can’t help but complain to herself, trying to take her mind off the distant, mechanical sounds of fighting.

“Are you sure we shouldn’t go back up to the third floor again?” Chabashira asks, pulling her out of her thoughts. “Maybe whatever you’re looking for is up there... It might be safer to get a little farther away from the Exisals on the ground floor, too.”

But Yumeno just shakes her head. They had forayed up to the third floor briefly, trying to get a glimpse of all the new classrooms and labs that were no longer off-limits to them (or, uh, very off-limits still if Monokuma or the Exisals happened to catch up to them), but the farther up they went, the more something had insistently begun tugging at the back of Yumeno’s thoughts, telling her that there was something important they should be looking for on the second floor. Something they must have overlooked for some time now.

She didn’t know how to put that “something” into words any better. It was just that: a certain “something,” fleeting and illogical, like a dream, a memory, or a feeling at the tip of her tongue. Something really and truly magical.

“It’s not up there, it’s down here,” she tells Chabashira, though she feels like she’s convincing herself more than anyone else. “It has to be.”

Honestly, if she had her way she’d prefer to stay down in the library. Even now, in the middle of all this chaos. Maybe it was because they’d spent so much time in there already, trying to wait out the time limit, but even when Ouma had asked her, Chabashira, and Angie to keep watch in there and make sure no one else came in, it had felt so relatively… safe. Safer than anywhere else in this school, anyway.

There was no chance of that right now, though. Once they’d left the gym, the whole ground floor had already been littered with Exisals. Supposedly Momota was in one of them, helping to stave off another two and keep them from attacking the rest of them, but that still left about two of them unaccounted for. And the hallways were already quickly becoming a warzone, strewn with bullets and chunks of flying rubble—getting past any of those machines and down to the basement stairs was next to impossible.

Yumeno sighs, thinking of hardwood floors and sleeping bags, and pushes open the door to an unassuming second-floor classroom with a plate that reads “Classroom A.” And then she knows this must be the one.

“This one! This is it!” She lifts herself up onto the balls of her feet and back down again, struggling to contain the sudden rush of excitement that’s overcome her. “I’ve been here before!”

Chabashira smiles in a way that suggests nothing but confusion, and Yumeno knows she didn’t phrase it quite right. Yes, she had been here before—they all had, and probably about a dozen times over considering how little of the school had been available to them before now. This was just a completely average, boring second-floor classroom. Maybe some of them had even woken up in here, at the start of it all.

But it wasn’t just here, it was here, she wanted to tell the other girl, despite how little sense that made. It wasn’t the room itself that felt familiar, it was everything else about it: the danger, the need to investigate, the shaking desks and lockers and the school disintegrating into debris all around them. Something about walking into this particular classroom had given her a rush of déjà vu in a way that she knew it wouldn’t have, if the circumstances weren’t quite like this.

But as thrilled as she is to have found the right room... there’s nothing in here. At least, not anything that she can see. Just a blackboard, a television (this one turned off but still mounted to the ceiling for now), and a whole bunch of desks and chairs.

“Well,” Chabashira says, and while it’s clear she doesn’t understand at all her tone is still relentlessly optimistic, “let’s look together, then. Why don’t you take the lockers, Yumeno-san?”

Yumeno readjusts the brim of her hat, pulling it a little tighter down over her head; all of her jumping around just now had nearly sent it flying. “Okay... Lockers, right. I-I can handle that.”

She doubted that whatever was tugging at her mind so adamantly would just be sitting inside one of those dilapidated lockers, waiting to jump out and scare her like a monster from a cheap horror movie, but it’s not like she can rule the possibility out entirely either. So she heads over to that side of the room, throws open the locker doors, and begins searching while Chabashira stands in the center of the room and looks ahead, examining the blackboard at the front of the room.

Only—it turns out that there are some disadvantages to staying on the second floor of the school.

They’ve only been searching for a few seconds when Yumeno hears a worrying sound: something sturdy, huge, mechanical, something that shakes the walls with stumbling footsteps as it grows closer, like oni coming down from the mountain to eat children. And in an instant she’s all-too-aware of the fact that there’s only a single concrete floor separating her and Chabashira from what must be an Exisal fighting on the first floor beneath them.

For a moment, there’s a low rumbling as she and Chabashira look at each other. And then—Yumeno doesn’t know what’s going on down there, only that the primate-like machine must crash against, or maybe straight through one of the lower walls because the whole classroom starts trembling as though there’s an earthquake. Only a moment later and there’s another thud as the Exisal’s rumbling footsteps sound again, and something huge knocks against the classroom floor before it’s sent flying.

She doesn’t think. She doesn’t think about anything consciously, because she feels, rather than sees, the middle of the floor start to sink from where the Exisal’s enormous fist slammed against it down below. All she knows is that Chabashira is close—much closer to the center of the room than she is, too close to where that gaping hole in the floor is starting to open up.

But if she’d had time to think anything at all, it might have been this: just once, Yumeno would like to be the one protecting someone else for a change. Maybe then she could finally feel like a better friend.

Yumeno makes impact with Chabashira’s shoulder just in time and knocks her out of the way, hard, before the rest of the floor collapses and she goes crashing to the ground as the nearby desks and chairs fall with her.

Gokuhara Gonta just wants to be useful. Useful to someone, anyone—everyone.

It used to be that he didn’t particularly care about the “why” as long as someone could give him a “how”. The word “useful” was a vaguely defined concept that he just wasn’t smart enough to explain on his own. As long as someone else could just tell him how to be useful to them, specifically, that would be enough. As long as he could help someone in this horrible, twisted game, he’d do just about anything.

But that had slowly started to change as of late. The change was so gradual and confusing, especially to Gonta himself, that he still didn’t know how to put it into words, but… being useful was no longer enough. He needed a purpose, a reason for that usefulness.

After all, most of his other classmates had found their own ways to help out, hadn’t they? They were smart, like Saihara-kun or Iruma-san. Charismatic and assertive, like Akamatsu-san or Momota-kun. Brave and selfless, like Harukawa-san or Chabashira-san. Either way, they all had something to contribute... and those sorts of contributions felt so completely out of his reach.

They helped each other, not out of some desperate desire to be helpful in any sense of the word, but because they were all working towards a common goal: escaping from this school. Gonta wanted to get out of here just as much as anyone else, probably, but they were all different: all of his classmates had things that they wanted to do once they got out of here, people they wanted to see again.

Dreams and desires, drives and ambitions. And Gonta… Gonta only wanted to be a gentleman. But a true gentleman wouldn’t have ever gotten stuck in a situation like this in the first place, would he?

Gentlemen were polite and kind, brave and sophisticated. And above all else, smart. If he were a real gentleman, he would’ve used every ability in his arsenal to get all of his friends out of this school, away from danger. The fact that they had been stuck here already for days on end, powerless to do anything but wait and see, was a testament to his failure at that one, singular goal.

He could try to become a gentleman if they ever did escape… but at that point, wouldn’t everything be too late? Everyone else had been trying so hard to escape from here this whole time. Doing their best, doing their part. Surely none of them would ever want to look at him again, knowing that he’d been the only one who hadn’t been able to contribute something.

Becoming a gentleman would have to wait. In the future, Gonta would be gentler and funnier and—smarter. For now though, the only thing he wanted was for no one else to die.

No one else. He’s not sure why that’s the thought that comes to mind as he stands his ground on the first floor of the school, squaring off against one of the Exisals. It doesn’t make any sense. Things often don’t make sense to him, and so he assumes he must just be too stupid to understand them, but the thought repeats itself anyway: no one, no one, no one else.

No one has died yet, he reminds himself. If someone had died, everyone would tell Gonta about it. Everyone else would be sad, too. It’s a shaky thought, and it does nothing to dispel the tears that try to prick at the corners of his eyes.

All the others had warned him since day one: even he couldn’t fight against the Exisals alone. But strength was really and truly the only thing that he had. Becoming a gentleman was too distant a dream for him, too far out of reach right now, so he would settle for protecting everyone. The Exisals were tough—but Gonta was tough, too.

And luckily, he doesn’t need to fight them all at once. He doesn’t even need to fight them all by himself, because as he’d discovered (much to his surprise, at first) Momota-kun was inside one of them, too. And it turned out that fighting those big metal monsters was much easier with one of their own turned against him.

Momota-kun wasn’t the only one, either. Harukawa-san and Hoshi-kun were farther back, blocking off the stairs, preventing any of the Exisals from getting through.

Every now and then Hoshi-kun would shout a heads-up and Gonta would move out of the way fast, as fast as possible, just in time to let a tennis ball go streaking past like a bullet. And Harukawa-san would move in closer in his place, swinging an ax that was taller than she was until the blade caught against the side of the machine’s cockpit and tore the hole open a little wider each time with a metallic screech. The moment the Exisal tried to shake her off, she’d yank the blade out and jump back, and Gonta would step back in again to shield them all until the next ball came flying.

This was how things had been going, until the second Exisal shows up.

Gonta doesn’t know why only one of them had been fighting them until now, or why the second one had just shown up. Math isn’t his exactly his strong suit, but he is fairly sure there are supposed to be five of them. Five bears, five Exisals. Momota-kun had yelled to him at some point that Toujou-san had gone on ahead up the stairs, to clear the way for the upper floors and anywhere else off-limits. Five minus two… equaled three.

But they’d only been fighting a single Exisal all this time, up until now. Maybe Momota-kun and Toujou-san had done something to the others, somehow, trying to stall the bears from getting control of them all? They were both so smart—that must have been it. Gonta still has no clue about what happened to the third one, but a second one has come for sure.

Momota-kun freezes for a moment, still trying to readjust his Exisal after taking so many blows from the first one. Harukawa-san and Hoshi-kun look first at each other, then back at the Exisals before them, and Gonta isn’t very smart, but he understands nonetheless: they only have so many tennis balls, and their fighting style will only work as long as they’re ganging up on the same enemy.

In that single moment where everyone is frozen, Gonta makes his choice—

—and takes off full-force, running directly towards the second Exisal.

Everyone else is too shocked to stop him, and he screams, something sad and angry and frustrated from deep within his chest, and maybe the second Exisal didn’t expect someone of his height and stature to come running directly into the line of fire without hesitation because the bear inside doesn’t get a chance to raise the Exisal’s guns even once before Gonta slams into it with the full force of an oncoming train.

The Exisal goes staggering back into the hallway and Gonta goes with it, bullets ricocheting and debris flying everywhere until they both collide into the wall and leave a gaping hole in its wake. Dizzily, Gonta finds himself thinking of his promise with Ouma-kun. I wanted to be friends with him. I wanted to—Gonta wanted to get out of here, like we said we would.

It’s only after that thought brings the tears back to his eyes that he realizes that by some miracle, he’s not actually shot. Bleeding from the sheer force of metal and concrete, to be sure, but there isn’t a bullet wound anywhere on him.

“Gonta! Gonta, get back, man!”

Gonta rolls off and onto the floor of the classroom beside them just as the machine struggles to its feet, slamming its mechanical fist against the ceiling above in an attempt to steady itself—just before Momota-kun crashes into it with his own Exisal, repeating Gonta’s own reckless charge from moments before, sending both Exisals sprawling back as part of the ceiling comes crashing down where they’d been just moments before.

The noise is deafening, like a car crash from up close, and Gonta suddenly feels as though everything he’s hearing is very far away. He squints through the cloud of dust, trying to make sense of the vague shapes and ringing pitch in his ears. And after a moment or two, past the pile of desks, chairs, and debris where the ceiling had bee, he is just barely able to see Momota-kun’s Exisal standing atop the other one with one leg raised.

Momota-kun doesn’t waste a single second and sends the foot of his Exisal smashing directly through the cockpit.

The other Exisal might still be up and running, back near Harukawa-san and Hoshi-kun, but at least one of them was down for the count. Gonta feels extremely light-headed, like he might pass out.

“…onta…? …….ta!” Momota-kun tries to say something to him through the Exisal’s microphone.

Gonta holds what’s left of the wall as he pulls himself slowly to his feet. In the calmest tone he can muster, he says, “Gonta can’t hear very well right now.”

He repeats the phrase a few more times each time that Momota-kun’s Exisal points at him, until finally the ringing in his ears dies down and he can just barely make out what the astronaut is saying: “Gonta, man, c-calm down, you’re screaming your head off.”

“Oh.” He had tried so hard to sound like a gentleman, too. “Sorry. Did Gonta help, just now?”

“Forget help, you saved my entire ass you crazy son of a bitch. But you didn’t have to be so goddamn reckless about it—”

The other boy cuts himself off, and Gonta and Momota-kun both find their attention drawn upward, towards the gaping hole in the ceiling.

Someone is screaming again. And it isn’t him this time.

Chabashira Tenko doesn’t know how up became down, or how the world collapsed in on itself, but she’s terrified.

A dozen different throws, a hundred different stances, a thousand words she could’ve said to make things happen differently all came and went undone, unsaid, and Yumeno-san still fell through the floor because there was no changing that fact. That was what had happened. And despite all her training, all her master’s teachings, Tenko had been powerless to stop it.

She shouldn’t have let her guard down—it was a crucial mistake for a martial artist, especially one who had spent as much time dedicated to her craft as she had, but still. Tenko had just seen the excitement on Yumeno-san’s face when they entered the room, the absolute certainty she’d had that whatever she was looking for was in here. And Tenko had wanted to help her look for it, if it had meant even a small chance of seeing her face light up like that again.

That the other girl hadn’t even known what they were looking for specifically or where it might be was of minor importance to her. Tenko was, after all, a firm believer in letting intuition lead the way. She just wished her intuition had told her anything about what might happen when they went into this classroom.

As she pushes herself up from where she hit the classroom wall and scrambles to her knees, she hates herself. She should’ve done something, anything differently, but—it all just happened so fast. Even thinking the words feels like tasting bile at the back of her throat, but it was true all the same. Yumeno-san had realized what was happening before she did, and shoved her out of the way before Tenko could so much as make a grab for her hand instead.

There one minute, gone the next. Gone, gone… please, don’t let her be gone.

The first thing she does once she’s on her feet is scream. She gets to the side of the hole in the floor, she sticks her head through, and she screams Yumeno-san’s name over and over again without caring if the fighting is over or not.

If there’s an Exisal nearby, just let it try and kill her. Tenko will rip the guns straight off that revolting contraption with her bare hands. Nothing can possibly scare her more in this moment than the possibility that Yumeno-san might never open her eyes again.

There is an Exisal down below, it turns out, but it doesn’t move to shoot or attack her, so Tenko keeps screaming. Somewhere at the back of her mind, she notes that Gonta-san is staring up at her too, bleeding from the forehead but alive and well. Tenko ignores Gonta-san and the Exisal alike and because it’s only a single floor of difference, she drops though the hole without any hesitation to the heap of rubble below.

“H-Hey, Chabashira, what the hell is goin’ on? I can’t help if you don’t tell me what happened.”

Momota-san’s voice comes from within the Exisal, hoarse and alarmed, but Tenko hardly even registers his question. The only thing her panicked brain acknowledges is that if this one is Momota-san’s Exisal, then there really is no further danger at the moment. Which means she’s free to keep looking for Yumeno-san to her heart’s content.

“Don’t tell me… Yumeno didn’t fall down with all that shit when we were fighting, d-did she?”

Tenko struggles to fling chunks of concrete aside, his words going in one ear and out the other. The only thing she can do is repeat Yumeno-san’s name over and over like a mantra while her knuckles begin to bleed.

There are voices in the distance, and the unmistakable sound of another Exisal’s whirring mechanical parts. While they might be out of the immediate line of fire, clearly the danger wasn’t over yet. But Tenko doesn’t look, doesn’t care, can’t care, because how can she possibly keep fighting when the one person she wanted to protect more than anything in the world might be dead because of her?

She only stops her frantic scrabbling at the cracked and broken mess of concrete and metal when she feels a hand on her shoulder, warm and solid. Wide-eyed, she finally looks up and sees Gonta-san staring down at her, his eyes full of concern.

“Chabashira-san,” he says, “Please let Gonta help.”

And his words are so genuinely sincere, so full of good intent that she can only nod, feeling too dumbfounded and numb to snap at him or turn him away. Once upon a time she would have insisted that this was her job, her role to play—she had been the one who was supposed to protect Yumeno-san, and she had been the one who completely messed it all up.

But she knows, somehow, that Gonta-san has felt the same pain of wanting to protect something valuable and watching it slip through your fingers.

Gonta-san waves for Momota-san to go back, to help the others waiting for him at the end of the hallway, and although he lingers for a moment as though unsure, he finally steers the Exisal away from the wreckage, back towards the sounds of fighting and chaos. Tenko doesn’t blame him—in a fight like this, having control over one of those machines was too good of an advantage to waste. Their other classmates probably needed his help.

But right now, what if Yumeno-san needed hers?

She begins to fling away pieces of concrete with renewed desperation, and Gonta-san helps move huge pieces of debris all at once, his enormous arms reassuringly sturdy even while blood continues to slowly ooze out of that nasty gash on his head. Between the two of them, they begin to clear some of the roughest parts away from the top of the pile, finally unearthing the remains of some of the chairs and desks that had also gone flying when the hole in the floor opened up.

Despite the good pace that they’re making, it feels so slow-going that it’s agonizing. Tenko isn’t sure how much more of this she can take. “Yumeno-san,” she croaks out, her voice gruff and thick in her throat from all the screaming. “Yumeno-san, please... If you can hear me, tell me where you are.”

“Tenko…? S’ that you?”

Tenko freezes in shock, nearly dropping the rubble in her hands. From the other side of the pile, Gonta-san stares back at her. He definitely heard it. He heard it, too!

“Yumeno-san!? Yumeno-san, where are you!?”

There’s a very small cough. “I-I dunno. It’s dark.”

Before Tenko can even leap to her feet, Gonta-san steps towards the very center of the rubble, and with a tremendous heap he lifts the bulk of it in one smooth motion. Beneath the concrete, twisted metal, and tufts of dusty insulation, there is a bent-but-still-intact desk. And beneath the desk, equally intact, there is Yumeno-san, curled up on her side.

Yumeno-san squints up at them, her eyes struggling to adjust even in the dark, barely lit hallway. “I think one of my legs is broken,” she says, coughing again.

And Tenko bursts into tears. She flings the desk to the side and grabs the other girl in her arms, sobbing, wheezing, ignoring her friend’s yelp of surprise (or maybe pain) as she holds her tight.

“I th-th-thought you were dead!” Tenko wails, without making any move to wipe away the snot that is now dripping down her face and onto Yumeno-san’s shirt. “Y-Y-You were gone, and you w-w-weren’t answering…! I thought you’d been shot at, or crushed by all the rubble!”

Gonta kneels down next to both of them, and for some reason he’s crying too. Tenko welcomes the validation, the acknowledgment that her worries were never misplaced. “Gonta thinks… the desk might have saved her. The concrete would probably have fallen right on top of her, otherwise.”

“I think that’s what happened, but I’m not too sure,” Yumeno-san mumbles. “The floor collapsed, and that’s the last thing I remember. I kinda maybe might’ve hit my head on the way down? I feel sleepy.”

“Don’t! Don’t go to sleep!”

The words come out sharper than Tenko meant for them to, and when Yumeno-san shoots her the same exasperated look she always does whenever she’s being too loud, she has to fight the urge to sob even louder.

After all, it was just so easy to picture. Yumeno-san, with her head cracked open. Yumeno-san, with her tiny body full of bullet holes. The girl seemed so small and frail, so easy to hurt. And Tenko would swear she’d seen that horrible, grisly scene before—even if it was only in her nightmares.

“Why would you do something like that, Yumeno-san? Why would ju-ju-jump in front of—?” She cuts herself off with a shaky inhale. Part of her wanted to shake the other girl for her recklessness, and the other part didn’t want to make any of her injuries hurt worse than they already did. So instead she says, “You should’ve just let Tenko protect you instead!”

The corners of Yumeno-san’s mouth twitch. “But… you’re always doing stuff like that, Tenko… What kind of friend would I be if I didn’t repay the favor?” Then, a pause. And her eyes harden with a stony sort of determination that Tenko has rarely seen on the other girl’s face before. “I did it ‘cause I wanted to, honest. I didn’t want anything to happen to you, either.”

Tenko feels her eyes sting with hot, sharp tears and buries her face in her hands, wracked by a third round of sobs. She’s had so many friends in her life, so many people that she loves and cares about, but not a one of them had ever told her anything so selfless.

It’s only when she hears the clanging peal of metal on metal and the sound of distant voices from the other side of the hall that she comes to her senses. That’s right, this place wasn’t safe for Yumeno-san, not really. They’d have better luck going just about anywhere else—but she really didn’t want to try and move past the other Exisal again if she could help it, especially with Yumeno-san in her current state.

Yumeno-san seems to have the same idea, because she tries to sit up by herself and stops immediately as all the color drains from her face. “I-I can’t walk. Not like this.”

Tenko inhales, but before she can say anything—

“Gonta will do it! If—If that’s okay, I mean.”

Tenko turns to stare at him, and Gonta-san clams up instantly, fiddling nervously with what was left of his poor tie.

“It’s just, if you do it, she’s still going to have to get to her feet first before you can carry her, Chabashira-san. Gonta thought it might be better if he could pick her up in his arms, that way she wouldn’t have to move at all,” he stammers. “B-But maybe it’s a stupid idea, because Gonta isn’t very smart...”

With a deep breath, she stands up and puts a hand gently on his huge shoulder. “Gonta-san,” Tenko says, “just like every other boy in this school, you are a menace. And unlike every other boy in this school… you are definitely not stupid.”

His eyes widen in surprise. “Really?”

“Really.” Tenko closes her eyes. “You are the… the kindest, the bravest… the most helpful person that Tenko has ever met. And without your help, I don’t think I could’ve gotten to Yumeno-san under all that rubble. So, thank you.”

Gonta-san looks at her as if unable to truly wrap his head around her words, his eyes bleary and exhausted but almost hopeful. Tenko looks back at him, her grip on his shoulder firm. Menace or not, he had helped her save Yumeno-san’s life—was helping her save Yumeno-san even now. And she would never forget that debt for as long as she lives.

But before they can get going, they’re interrupted—not by Yumeno-san, like she expected, but by a sudden noise from above. There are footsteps in the rubble surrounding the hole in the ceiling, and slowly but surely she can make out two faces staring down from the upper classroom.

Tenko, Gonta-san, and Yumeno-san all look up, blinking.

Saihara-san and Ouma-san stare back down at them.

Yonaga Angie doesn’t know what, if anything, she believes in anymore. Certainly not in her classmates, that’s for sure. Not in Monokuma’s honeyed promises about graduation, not in any far-fetched promises about all sixteen of them escaping the school together. And not in god, either.

She keeps her arms pulled in close to her chest, shivering as she walks slowly down the fourth floor hallway. It’s not like she’s cold—the temperature in this school was always more or less the same. The same weather every day, the same dome overhead, the same fake sun in the sky, so different from the searing-hot sun that sat high in the sky nearly every day back on her island.

Her island. Her home. Ha. Not that those were any less fake than this school.

It felt as though it had been a lifetime since Shuuichi had said those two little sentences and turned everything she knew on its head, but in reality it had only been a few days. Just a few days since they had successfully waited out Monokuma’s time limit in the library together, and realized that everything they knew might be a lie in exchange.

It wasn’t as though it was set in stone, of course. Shuuichi’s theory was just that—a theory. Purely hypothetical. Angie understood hypotheticals, more or less: they were a way of saying what-if to any scenario, the vague and blurry spaces on the edges of the map written in with here there be monsters.

But ordinarily, a hypothetical couldn’t really hurt you because it was only speculation. There might be monsters lying in wait off the edge of the map… but more often than not, it was just more water. Hypotheticals were for people who didn’t, and couldn’t know all the answers… and that was simply not possible when god would always tell you everything.

But that had been before the worst hypothetical of all had been posed, and shattered Angie’s world-view like glass: what if god didn’t exist? Not the idea of some all-knowing deity in the more general, not the existence of religion or spirituality itself, because no one could ever truly deny that those things might exist, but god.

Her god. Her memories. The same god who had spoken to her nearly every day since she was old enough to understand that she was destined for greater things, as familiar to her as a parent or a teacher’s voice.

Despite what some people might think, Angie wasn’t stupid. She knew that some of her classmates here didn’t like her. They probably thought she was a sham, an overzealous con artist intent on tricking the less wary among them… but it wasn’t true. Whether other people genuinely believed in her god or not, Angie herself had never once doubted that they existed, that they spoke to her, and that she would be completely, thoroughly protected—as long as she did exactly what was asked and expected of her.

So what did it mean, then, if god not only wasn’t here to protect her now, but if they had never existed in the first place?

Strip away her god, her island, her custom and traditions and a million other eccentricities that made Yonaga Angie into who she was, and what did that leave her with? What sort of person was she, with all those things sanded off and stripped away? Not a priestess, or a messenger, not even an artist anymore, because in order to create art you had to hold some sort of inspiration in your heart, divine or otherwise.

Despite the fact that she was constantly surrounded by fifteen other people almost constantly, Angie had felt completely and utterly alone ever since that day in the library. She didn’t trust her classmates, and it wasn’t as though they particularly liked or trusted her either. And even if they did manage to escape this school somehow, nothing would change for her.

It was hardly even comparable: even if no one else knew what their lives had been like before coming to, they would still have lives to go back to. Even if none of their families or friends as they remembered them were real, they would move on, move past it, and adjust to making a new life for themselves.

But Angie had nothing to go back to. She’d had to bite her tongue in order to keep from screaming when Monokuma had told them all about that stupid phone booth—just who was she supposed to call? Her entire island might not exist, let alone her family, and they wanted her to just call collect?

Even if they all got out of here, she would still have nothing and no one. It wasn’t as though she even hated her classmates for it, either. She just… simply didn’t care about them. And she knew they didn’t care about her, either.

Angie shivers again as she stares into an empty wooden room full of paints, canvas, and sculpting materials. Without a doubt, it was supposed to be her research lab. Maybe if they’d ever made it this far, she would’ve loved it. But right now even the idea of trying to make art—to listen to the murmurs of inspiration and try to create something from the depths of your soul—makes her feel sick to her stomach.

Right now, the only real reason she’d like to get out of this school is so she never has to look at that room again.

So she keeps moving, with no particular objective in mind. When the Exisals had begun firing she had rushed out of the gym with everyone else, but everyone had split up and gone their separate ways almost immediately after that. And now she was all alone.

Ordinarily Angie hated being alone; where she was from (if such a place even existed) any company was good company. People lived and ate and bathed and danced and made art together, and even on the few rare occasions that she had been “by herself” she had never truly been “alone.” Not as long as god had been with her.

But for now, she finds the dark and empty corridors to be something of a relief. At least like this, she didn’t feel as though she had to watch every word and step she made, playing a role that she no longer fit into. She just keeps walking, one foot in front of the other, wondering vaguely just how high up this school actually goes.

It’s only when she reaches the base of the stairway leading up to the fifth floor that something actually shakes her out of her thoughts: the distant boom of an explosion, not distant and muffled like most of the others on the ground floor now were, but much closer. Somewhere up on the fifth floor, then.

 Angie’s feet carry her the rest of the way up more out of idle curiosity than anything else. If there was something life-threatening up here, she would just hide in one of the classrooms or labs. And if she couldn’t hide… well, there wasn’t much point in thinking about that.

As she searches the fifth (and what seems to be the final) floor, she quickly discovers the source of the explosion. Like she thought, it’s an Exisal—but unlike the ones on the ground floor, this one isn’t attacking anyone or prowling around as though trying to hunt them down. Someone besides Kaito and the bears must have gotten their hands on one of them, then.

The dust from the explosion begins to settle, and Angie watches as two figures slowly emerge from around the corner, where they seemed to have been waiting until it was safe to approach. She narrows her eyes, trying to make out their features… and is only a little taken aback to see the very unlikely duo of Miu and Rantarou.

“Are you both quite alright?” Kirumi’s voice comes from within the metal monster, as refined as Angie’s ever heard it.

Rantarou gives a cursory once-over to both Miu and himself before nodding. “Yeah, think so. Thanks for helping us out, Toujou-san.”

“My pleasure. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

“Yeah, me too.”

Angie approaches the group of three and begins to see, more or less, just what it was that Toujou had used her Exisal to blast open. There’s a door—or more accurately, what used to be a door, because now it has a huge, gaping hole right through the middle. Both the door itself and the wall surrounding it are a chaotic splatter of red and black, interspersed with things which might have once been a painting of some sort. Whatever it was trying to depict, she can’t tell now, but even with the door blasted open she can still sense a feeling of hostility drifting from the room in waves.

Miu’s the first one to notice her; she jumps nearly half a foot in the air before trying to cover up her surprise with a scowl. “Where the fuck did you come from?”

Angie doesn’t want a single one of her insecurities or second-guesses to show on her face, so she responds with an inscrutable smile instead. “Around. What’s wrong, Miu? I thought the point of this whole plan was for everyone to have a chance to investigate the school, but is there something wrong if Angie’s the one doing it…?”

“Now now, Angie-san. I don’t think that’s what Iruma-san was getting at.” Rantarou gives her an easygoing smile that’s only about half as fake as some of her other classmates’. “It’s just surprising to run into anyone else this high up, right?”

“No,” Miu mutters, “I think she’s a little troll and she creeps me the fuck out, sneakin’ up on me like that.”

Angie just tilts her head to the side, her smile never faltering, enjoying the way that Miu’s scowl falters as she scurries back a step or two.

Kirumi clears her throat to get their attention, and even though it doesn’t reach the microphone, it’s as if Angie can still hear her sigh within the Exisal. Now that she had helped to open up another blocked-off area of the school, it was clear that she felt staying any longer would be a waste of time. “If you’ll excuse me, I should really head back to the others. I’m not sure how Momota-kun is faring on his own down there.”

“Stay safe, Toujou-san.” Rantarou half-lifts his hand to wave, but she turns her Exisal without waiting for any further reply.

Cold, strict, straight-to-the-point. That was Kirumi. Whether she was a maid or a student or anything in between, Angie suspected that was always going to be Kirumi. The other girl had such a clear sense of self that for a moment, she can really only feel envious.

Angie doesn’t want that to show on her face either, so she only smiles a little wider. “Kirumi sure is dedicated, isn’t she? She’d make an excellent priestess back where I come from, you know.”

Rantarou finally stops watching the Exisal’s receding back and turns to give her a strange look. “Angie-san, do you mind if I ask you a question?”

“Sure, Rantarou. What’s up?”

“Did you manage to find your own research lab?” he asks.

The question is so genuinely unexpected that she actually blanches a bit. She doesn’t want to think about that empty wooden room again, about untouched canvas or the smell of paint. Her reaction must have shown, too, because Rantarou just nods slowly.

“I’m, uh… well I guess it’s not a secret that I don’t really know what to expect, right? Everyone else at least has something to go on about their lab or their talent, but not knowing anything’s been… tough.” He grimaces. “But I dunno if it’s worth it to go in there, either. Like… what if I find out I’m a pretty terrible person, or something like that?”

He doesn’t say it out loud, but it’s pretty clear to Angie that he’s thinking about that video they all saw. The one with Shuuichi. That had been the final nail in the coffin where her old world-view was put to rest: the undeniable proof that something definitely could and had already messed with their memories.

She looks away first. “There’s plenty of things we’re better off not knowing,” she says with a shrug.

“Right, yeah. But I guess I’m just trying to work up the courage to go in there and find out anyway,” he says. “I mean… it’s kind of the only place I have to go right now.”

Maybe she had miscalculated. Maybe there was at least one more person in this school who knew exactly what it was like to have every single thing about your identity thrown into question, your whole sense of self ripped out from under you.

“If you’d like, you can come in and help me and Iruma-san search the place,” Rantarou continues, and he makes the offer so casually that she knows he’s deliberately trying to be kind to her. “Should be easier with more people, yeah? And that way… maybe you won’t need to explore this floor all by yourself, either.”

Angie stares at him long and hard, debating whether it’s even worth it to take him up on that offer. She likes Rantarou well enough, but still she wouldn’t say she trusts him, any more than he or Miu or anyone else would say they trusted her.

And yet… where else did she have to go, truly? Normally, she’d have an answer to that question—or god would have an answer for her. But right now, she has to answer for herself.

Finally, she shrugs and nods, tugging at a loose strand of her hair. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll help you look, I guess.”

Amami pats her on the shoulder in thanks, Miu makes a sharp sound as though clicking her tongue, and one-by-one the three of them begin to climb though the red-and-black door.

To Shinguuji Korekiyo, the moon is incomparably beautiful tonight.

Inauthentic, perhaps, planted in the sky for their benefit just as everything else in this school had been, little more than a prop to be used accordingly. But beautiful nonetheless. And besides, who was to say whether such a beautifully crafted moon was more or less genuine than they themselves?

His thoughts have often tended towards the more nebulous, philosophical side of things, but never moreso than in the last few days. Anthropology and philosophy went hand-in-hand far more often than one might expect, but he had to admit that it was rare for his questions to turn so introspective.

By and large, Shinguuji had always concerned himself with the observation of others: other people, other places, other cultures. Always from afar, standing on the sidelines and sampling the different histories and creations and viewpoints of humanity as though tasting from an exquisite lineup of food.

But now, he had to wonder… who had been observing him, in the meantime? Had his own goals, his own mindset, been just as carefully crafted as the rest of this school, meant entirely for someone else’s enjoyment? He couldn’t rule out the possibility—and in the last few days since Saihara-kun had proposed the idea in front of the rest of them, everything that Monokuma had let slip since then had only supported this theory.

It was a disconcerting notion, to say the least. After all, he had spent the better half of his young life in search of one singular, defining goal. To hear that such a goal may have only been someone else’s creation, a seed which took root in his mind and shaped him into who he was for some outsider’s enjoyment... well, to say that it left even him a bit conflicted would be an understatement.

He doesn’t dare put a name to the source of those feelings, not even in the privacy of his own thoughts. To him, she was always Sister. Darling, dearest, very much deceased. The beginning of such a large chapter of his life, and at the same time the destination that lay at the end of everything.

Shinguuji stands idly on the stairway leading up to the third floor and stares past the barred window, looking at the moon in the sky. Had his sister been little more than a prop, too? Beautiful only from a distance, preserved perfectly in his memory despite never having existed even once?

Assuming that was the case… without sister dearest, what had everything been for? Assuming that ‘everything’ was as he remembered it, that it had ever actually happened. Questions like that gave rise only to more questions in turn—the rabbit hole was quite deep indeed.

Earlier, he had already ventured higher than this, taken a look around the fourth floor himself, and quickly discerned that there were no windows to be found anywhere up there, not even in their research laboratories. Which was a shame, on a beautiful night like tonight.

He had long grown tired of sleeping in the library for the same reason; while he understood the benefits of mutual surveillance and night watch shifts, he hated the lack of windows, of any real way to tell whether the sun was up or down without moving to a higher floor.

If nothing else, he thinks, still looking out the window, I suppose our nights of sleeping on a dusty wooden floor are over. There was no doubt in his mind that one way or another, Saishuu Academy would no longer exist as they knew it after tonight: the spark had been lit, the rules had been broken, and the all the carefully prepared props and set pieces were beginning to come apart at the seams.

Although no one had filled him in on the second part of the plan, he had quickly put things together once he began to observe his classmates in action. If anything, he admired Toujou-san’s ability to piece things together just slightly before him. Too much of his suspicion had been focused on Ouma-kun to account for the possibility that Momota-kun might be playing up his illness in order to come up with a convincing enough excuse to leave.

There was that, and the fact that the blood had very much been real. He knew the smell of blood quite well, and the sheer quantity of it had been enough to convince him that Momota-kun’s remaining time was most likely numbered. An oversight on his part, perhaps, to not consider that even a fool on death’s door could still be stubborn enough to participate in this game.

And in the ensuing chaos since then, he felt as though he’d been given a microcosm of humanity to study on a silver platter: his classmates desperately fighting for their survival, every ounce of wit and brawn and intuition they had between them now united in order to strike at the heart of this unfair killing game that they had all found themselves caught up in. Such intense emotions, and the frantic, fighting urge to survive through cooperation, rather than betrayal… should be beautiful. Truly, was this not a glimpse of humanity at its brightest?

And yet, only observing from the stairways and upper floors had left him feeling rather dissatisfied.

Shinguuji wonders if perhaps the joy of spectating has worn off somewhat, after being subjected so unwillingly to the spectating of others. If, perhaps, he might be feeling the urge to participate directly, rather than observing and analyzing from the sidelines.

He has little desire to put his trust in any of his classmates, but he concludes that it’s not… impossible, that the sheer tension of the situation may have put him in a somewhat more cooperative mood, now that things had come to this.

After all, he could only see two potential outcomes from this act of rebellion: either Monokuma saw to it that they all perished, or they succeeded in breaking out of this school. And if the latter was the case, he wanted to be a part of it—to see what really lay waiting for them outside of this little cage.

His sister… would not be there, most likely. And yet, had the nature of humanity not always been to adapt and overcome? He would never be able to make sense of these conflicting feelings, of how much he remembered was real or fabricated, unless he could see the truth for himself, with his own two eyes.

Shinguuji flexes the bandaged fingers of his left hand and spares one last glance at the stunning full moon beyond the window. Then he turns and walks the rest of the way up the stairs, back on the third floor once more.

He had thought that finally seeing his own research laboratory might interest him, that by virtue of being oriented around his talent it might hold something of interest worth investigating—but sadly, that hadn’t really been the case. Questioning the value of his own memories and even his talent put the veracity of the information inside his lab in question as well, and even the worth of the supposedly rare artifacts that it contained.

However… he had seen for himself just how valuable some of his classmates’ labs had become in their current situation.

Most of the conflict with the Exisals was currently oriented around the ground floor. He knew this, having observed the comings and goings of the rest of his classmates, as well as Momota-kun’s entrance on the scene with another Exisal of his own. And he had seen Harukawa-san and Hoshi-kun’s little stash of weapons, too.

Weapons were an interesting thought. He had access to one of his own, if he so wished: a thin, carefully crafted katana which was sheathed in gold-leaf, laying in a case within his lab. But while he knew quite well how to use a blade, there wasn’t much he could do with one against something as huge and sturdy as an Exisal.

Hoshi-kun’s tennis balls, on the other hand, had proven very useful indeed against the thick outer armor of those seemingly impervious machines. However, if he had seen things correctly (and his eyes were very keen indeed), the other boy had only been able to take two cans of tennis balls with him.

How many shots could that be, against a moving target that shot back at you? Even the Super High School Level Tennis Player might not be able to hit every single shot. And so, Shinguuji decides that perhaps supplying another can or two might be imperative to make sure that the tides of this battle turn out the way he wants.

He ignores the rumbling and crashing from the lower floors and selects another two plastic cans of tennis balls from the nearest closet before turning and retracing his steps. Unlike his languid pace from earlier, he moves briskly, always listening carefully to the sounds of gunfire and crashes below.

The tennis balls are just that: simple, regular tennis balls meant for nothing but a few hours of practice at the professional level. And yet Shinguuji handles them with the utmost care, as if transporting some priceless relic from one shelf to the next, with a firm but gentle grasp.

It’s not a grand contribution by any means, but it helps him feel like less of a spectator nonetheless. Right now, if only for tonight, he decides that he’d prefer to participate in, rather than simply witness, this desperate, beautiful struggle of humanity that his classmates have begun.

Toujou Kirumi feels the sweat rolling down her face, sticking to her hair, her chin, the base of her neck, and makes no move to wipe it away.

She hadn’t considered just how stifling the Exisal might be once she was actually inside one, but it seems incredibly obvious in hindsight. It was a small, enclosed space, and she had been moving nonstop since the moment that she’d brought the hammer down, back in the machinery bay.

Moreover, these machines seemed to have been designed with robotic operation in mind, rather than a human using one. Humans could fit, of course, otherwise she and Momota-kun would most likely have been gunned down immediately before they could even make it out of the hangar—but the bears, who used these much more often, were far smaller and would never sweat or feel particularly claustrophobic.

But none of that matters to her, especially not right now. She adjusts to the heat and the cramped quarters in the same way that she adjusts to the Exisal’s controls: quickly, intuitively, and without complaint.

It’s not her first time operating such a huge and dangerous weapon, either—at least, not to the best of her memory. Whether that memory was actually real was up for debate, but for the moment she can’t bring herself to care seeing as it worked in her favor and to the disadvantage of her enemies. If they hadn’t wanted her to adjust so easily to stealing one of their machines of mass destruction, then perhaps they shouldn’t have let her believe that she had experience in the matter.

Actually, as far as she could remember, Toujou had adapted naturally to almost everything she’d ever encountered. Cleaning, cooking, organizational skills, first aid, operating machinery and yes, even weapons—there was almost nothing that she had ever found herself unable to accomplish, as long as she put her mind to it. Even now, the very act of escaping this school had gone from mere wishful thinking to something tangible and just within her grasp, another insurmountable hurdle to overcome before moving on to the next one.

The only question that lingers in her mind was not if she could achieve this goal that she had set for herself, but why. For whose sake…? As she’d navigated her way through the school, felling any obstacle in her way, she found herself to shake the question entirely. Even when she hardened her gaze and tightened her grip on the Exisal’s controls, it lingered at the back of her mind, never entirely subsiding.

A maid was, after all, wholly defined by loyalty and dedication to others. Her abilities and knowledge were much easier to verify: such things were easily proven reliable because she could actually do them. Whether she had come to know such things because she was a maid, or whether that knowledge had come to her by other means, the results stayed the same either way.

But what was a maid without someone to serve? No employer, no contractor, no one to give the orders which she then oversaw to fruition. At most, she had a group of fifteen other students in a similar situation to her own—she could, perhaps, tell herself that she was doing all of this for their sake, that it was all in their best interests. She has always, for as long as she can remember, aligned her interests with those of the greatest number of people relying on her.

But right now, Toujou isn’t so sure whether all that talk of serving and assisting isn’t meaningless, now that everything about their memories has been called into question. As she bids Amami-kun and his small cluster of stragglers goodbye and turns to make her way all the way back to the ground floor, she can’t help but wonder whether he or anyone else would still thank her if they knew just how callously she thought of them all at times.

She does want to escape this school, though. Preferably, with everyone here still alive. Was that only because they were the closest thing to a group whose interests she could serve? Toujou ignores the sweat trickling down against the corner of her mouth as she leaps the stairs three at a time, frowning in concentration.

If the ringleader of this game ever showed themselves, and told her that there were other, greater interests to be served—that she could put her talents as a maid to better use and help far more people than fifteen other high school students… would she accept that offer? Would such an offer even have meaning, in those circumstances?

Toujou would love to say that she wouldn’t accept. That such an act of callousness was impossible, even in the name of “group interests.” But she knows herself better than that.

And yet, if it truly was the case that their memories had been tampered with… wouldn’t it be possible for her to redefine what being a maid meant to her? Rather than looking for someone whose interests she could serve, couldn’t she instead set out to accomplish something because they all wanted the same thing?

If everything else is a lie, Toujou decides that this, like her skills and knowledge, will be the truth: right now, she isn’t doing this for anyone but herself. She wants to survive, she wants to escape—and she wants to make amends to the rest of her classmates, for having even considered such horrible potential outcomes.

As she slams the Exisal against the bottom of the last stairway, back on the ground floor at last, she’s greeted not by gunfire or by another Exisal charging towards her, but by Shinguuji-kun of all people. Through the monitor in front of her, she watches as he turns from where he’s standing (near three briefcases full of weapons which Toujou can only assume came from some previously enclosed area of the school) and raises an eyebrow at her.

“Toujou-san, I’m guessing?”

Either Momota-kun or one of the others must have let him know that she was in the other Exisal they had commandeered, or he was simply smart enough to have pieced it together on his own. “Yes, it’s me. What’s the situation now?” she asks.

“Well you see,” the anthropologist tells her, “I believe you’ve come back just in time for the best part.”

And with one long and elegant gesture, he points to where Hoshi-kun is readying what seems to be a tennis ball against his racket.

Hoshi Ryouma’s right arm is almost numb. Never a good sign, that.

Back before everything, before even waking up in this messed up school, he had often pushed his body to the limit during plenty of tennis practices, but he had never had a practice that came even close to something like this.

No, this reminds him a lot more of darker times—the times just before he’d quit playing tennis entirely, when he’d decided to use his talents one last time to get back at the people who took everything from him. The times that had landed him in jail.

It wasn’t an accident that he knew just how fast and hard he could hit a tennis ball, or that they looked a hell of a lot like oversized bullets once they broke a certain speed threshold.

That is, assuming any of those memories were real, which they probably weren’t. It’s almost funny, really. What kind of fucked up son of a bitch put a memory like that in another person’s head? Trapping them all in this school, telling them all to kill each other, that was all kinds of fucked up in its own way—but Hoshi would genuinely rather they had just gotten it over with and killed him rather than let him become the person he was today.

Most of his classmates were probably devastated to hear that everything they’d ever known about themselves might be a lie. Hell, they’d already seen the proof that huge chunks of their memories were missing without a doubt. But Hoshi himself wasn’t sure how the hell to feel, even now.

Should he be happy, hearing that all the death and loss that he remembered might not have actually happened? Should he be grief-stricken, realizing that someone else had played with the memories in his head like putty for reasons unknown, making him think he’d stained his hands with blood and wasted years of his life, miserable and alone?

He doesn’t know which reaction is the more appropriate one. Maybe if they actually get the hell out of here, he’ll finally let himself feel something. But for right now, in this particular moment, he only wants to get the fuck out of this school.

But that’s not gonna happen unless he gets his shit together, and quick. His last few shots have been missing, only slightly too slow, always misjudging the Exisal’s reactions by an inch. Those things didn’t look it, but they could be surprisingly fast, even in these close quarters.

And anyone, even a Super High School Tennis Player who had killed an entire mafia group armed with nothing but a racket and some tennis balls, would get tired after swinging the ball that hard and that fast without stopping.

They didn’t know just how lucky they’d been, when Momota took out the other Exisal before it could do any real damage. They might not have Gokuhara to help them fight anymore, but it had still been the right call.

Taking out the second Exisal wouldn’t have been possible without Gokuhara’s reckless-ass decision to barreling right at the thing. The sudden impact had caught the bear inside totally off-guard and allowed Momota to strike the final blow, but a move that impulsive sure as hell wasn’t gonna work a second time.

The remaining Exisal was only playing things safer now—attacking less, dodging quicker, just waiting for him and Harukawa to tire themselves out, or for Momota to keel over with a coughing fit in his own Exisal. Whichever came first. And it was only a matter of time, really. No matter how much they outnumbered the thing, they were still at a disadvantage when it came to the fact that they would only tire themselves out at this rate, the more that they fought back.

He’d realized that two cans weren’t gonna cut it around the time that he’d missed the fourth shot. Small, vertical cans like these weren’t very big, but they were the professional standard: airtight and compact to ensure that the balls retained enough pressure. Three balls to a can, six balls total. If he’d made every shot, he would’ve definitely knocked a hole in the side of the Exisal wide enough for Harukawa to go for the kill—but then the fourth ball had skewed to the side, missing its mark entirely.

And the fifth one did the same—not though any fault in his aim this time, but because Momota had finally started to get tired. The astronaut had been covering for Hoshi and Harukawa as best he could, trying to distract the Exisal with his own even if he couldn’t get in close enough for a one-on-one fight, but there was no way he’d have been able to keep up that pace forever, even if he hadn’t been coughing up blood the last time Hoshi saw him.

His Exisal had stopped in its tracks at the moment he normally would’ve lunged forward to grab at the other one, and as a result, there’d been no one to stop the damn bear from moving to the left when Hoshi had sent the ball flying.

Every single ball from the first can had gone flying straight and true, but the second can was now almost entirely empty without even a single hit. Now his arm was numb, and Momota was definitely running out of steam. It wasn’t like it’d be impossible for Harukawa to take that huge Exisal down all by herself—but even an ax that huge could only be used at close range, and the closer she got, the more likely she was to get a bullet in her side if no one else was watching her back.

Hoshi tries to aim the sixth ball and then stops, disgusted with how his right arm has finally started to shake. For fuck’s sake, he thinks, trying to stretch the arm and rub some feeling back into it with no success.

Harukawa glances at the Exisal in the rubble-strewn center of the entryway, or what was left of it to count. The single red light at the top of its flat, mechanical head gave the impression of a glaring red eye in the dark, ominous as it watched and waited for them to finally run out of ammunition.

“There are still other weapons in the cases,” she says after a moment, still never taking her eyes off the Exisal. “You can use one of those if you run out of tennis balls.”

“Sure,” Hoshi agrees. “That’s what I’ll do.”

He’ll be far less useful without a racket in his hand, though, and she’s probably just as aware of that fact as he is. But what neither of them expects—

“There's no need for that.”

—is for another voice to join them, speaking quietly and without warning from the bottom of the first floor stairway behind them.

Harukawa only spares the stranger a fraction of a glance before keeping her attention focused back on the Exisal, and so Hoshi turns around to see Shinguuji, holding two cans of tennis balls for some inexplicable, godforsaken reason. The sight is so bizarre, so completely out of the blue, that he almost can’t process it.

“You,” he says. “You’re bringing me tennis balls.”

“I am,” Shinguuji replies. “And you could stand to sound a little more grateful about it.”

The anthropologist pries open one of the cans—Hoshi almost warns him about the possibility of getting cut from that, before remembering that the other boy’s hands are bandaged all over. He does the same to the second can, and suddenly Hoshi finds himself no longer cornered and down to one last, desperate shot, but with six extra balls on hand.

And even if his arm is numb, Hoshi Ryouma is more than sure that he can hit a moving target with six extra shots to spare.

Shinguuji nods his head and steps back onto the staircase, presumably to move out of the potential line of fire. Hoshi decides not to look a gift horse in the mouth, no matter how unexpected, and doesn’t ask any further questions.

Instead, he shares a glance with Harukawa. She nods almost imperceptibly, crouching forward ever so slightly as she tightens her grip on the ax handle.

And then Hoshi grabs not one, but two extra balls, letting them roll near his feet. Takes a deep breath, in through the nose and out though the mouth. And then—

--in the moment his heart rate slows, he sends the ball flying and yells, “Now!”

Momota veers his Exisal towards the center of the room, blocking off the nearest path of escape. Harukawa sprints forward without any hesitation, her footsteps quick and sure even as she picks her way across the rubble littering the floor. And Hoshi immediately sends the two balls at his feet flying after the first one in equally quick succession, slamming his racket against them so hard that he can feel the reverberations in every part of his body.

His arm is gonna be numb for a goddamn week straight, assuming he even survives this.

The Exisal—dodges the first ball, only to slide directly into the line of fire of the latter two. Both balls slam their way through the armor covering the cockpit at an angle, carried all the way through to the other side by their own inertia.

And the hole that they leave behind—the combination of six tennis ball-shaped holes left over the past hour—is big enough that when Harukawa dodges the swipe from the Exisal’s arm and jumps atop its back, she’s able to swing the battleax down and to the side with full-force.

There’s a spray of sparks, a noise somewhere between a screech and a crunch, and the other Exisal goes quiet and still as the bear inside is skewered through.

Everyone in the room stands motionless until it’s clear that, at least for the moment, nothing else is trying to kill them.

Hoshi takes a knee as Harukawa jumps down from the Exisal, and for a moment there’s nothing but the sound of them trying to catch their breath, every bone and muscle in their bodies thoroughly exhausted from such a long battle. Momota’s Exisal only moves a few steps over to the side, and Hoshi knows that Momota must be just as tired as the rest of them from the fact that he doesn’t even come on over the mic to celebrate.

Their exhausted silence is only punctuated by the sound of another Exisal approaching from the stairway—and for a moment all three of them stiffen up, momentarily forgetting that it couldn’t possibly be anyone but Toujou.

“Well,” she says, “I came back in order to help, but it would seem that you’ve all already finished the fight without my assistance.”

It’s her idea of a joke, perhaps. There was still plenty more to do, and they all knew it: most importantly, clearing the rubble from their battle out of the way and opening up the stairway back down into the basement. Soon enough, maybe they’d finally be able to get a good look at that hidden room that had been taunting them for so long down in the library.

Hoshi will help with all of that, as soon as he’s able to get back on his feet. But he makes a mental note in the back of his mind that, once they’ve gotten out of this school (and for once the prospect feels more like a when, rather than an if), he wants to get back into tennis again.

And the first person he’d like a match against, just as soon as he’s at the top of his game again, is Harukawa Maki.

Amami Rantarou doesn’t know what exactly he was expecting—but it sure as hell wasn’t this.

Maybe the outer appearance of the door to the lab should’ve given him an inkling of what to expect, but the inside is so much more bizarre than anything he could have anticipated. The mural, or painting, or whatever it had been before Toujou-san blasted a hole right through it—it had depicted a morbid assortment of weapons and blood spatter, giving him the impression that whatever was inside the room might be akin to a battle zone.

But the actual contents of the room were... strangely disjointed, seemingly unrelated to anything that he had seen on the door or even his second Monopad. The whole space was a wash of red: nothing but red wherever he looked, as far as the eye could see. Red walls, red carpet, red flowers sprouting from the floor as if they had grown there of their own accord.

In the center of the room was a massive, circular table, surrounded by sixteen equally massive metal chairs. Amami had raised an eyebrow, noting the swords interspersed throughout the flowers across the lab. Some tongue-in-cheek reference to King Arthur’s Round Table? he’d wondered to himself. But why?

The whole room seemed at odds with itself, torn between presenting an image that was both ominous and whimsical, chivalrous and chaotic. And while there was indeed a dull, nagging sense of familiarity about the whole place, even standing directly in the middle of the room hadn’t jogged his memories enough to recall if any of this was related to his talent in some way.

More interesting than round tables or swords, though, were the puzzling outliers they’d found within the room instead: namely, the two huge dials which dominated the back of the room, and a painfully out-of-place laptop laying innocuously on top of the table.

Of course, Iruma-san had made a beeline for the laptop almost as soon as they’d walked in, excited once she realized that it seemed to actually have power—though what she’d found had led them almost immediately to a dead end.

“There’s nothing on this thing,” she’d said, not even trying to hide her irritation as she tapped her finger against the solid wood of the table. “No files, no programs, no nothin’. I’m not even seein’ anything that looks encrypted.”

Amami had tapped at his chin, lost in thought as he looked at the laptop over her shoulder. “Can’t imagine the people running this game just left it in here fully-charged by accident. If there’s a laptop, there’s gotta be something to use it for.”

…Which was how they had found themselves taking a closer look at the dials, trying to decipher them. The left-hand dial was segmented into pictures representing the western zodiac, while the right-hand one similarly had pictures of the Chinese zodiac. That, combined with the fact that the dials could be moved, clearly suggested some kind of a puzzle.

Solve the puzzle, obtain the reward. If there was one thing Amami was sure of, it was that someone had designed this whole school with that premise in mind.

“Let’s see, we’ve got twelve options on both sides… twelve by twelve would be one hundred forty-four, right?” He rattles off the math in his head. “That sounds pretty doable, actually. Could be worse.”

Iruma-san stands beneath the left-hand dial, poised to turn it once he told her the sign that he wanted. “That’s still assumin’ this shit isn’t rigged to blow if you get the wrong answer enough times. If that happens, sorry but I’m outta here.”

“Well normally, if something was about to explode, it’d be up to you to stop it from happening, wouldn’t it, Miu?” Angie-san says. “I guess we’ll just have to hope Rantarou’s real talent is his luck.” Like Iruma-san, she stands positioned under the opposite dial, though there was still something uncharacteristically sullen about her demeanor, ever since he’d invited her to come along with them.

The inventor puts a hand on her hip, narrowing her eyes at the other girl. “Y’know, you and Ouma should talk more. Since you both love sayin’ shit that pisses me off.”

“Now, now.” Again, Amami raises his hands as he tries to appeal to them both. “It’s not going to explode… I’m pretty sure.”

He and Iruma-san had both checked as best they could, anyway, putting their ears to the huge metal discs and listening for any sounds coming from inside, checking the outer perimeter for any traces of explosive materials. It didn’t seem too dangerous—but then again, this was a school full of killer robots. They couldn’t be too sure.

Amami takes a deep breath and tells each of the girls one zodiac sign at random. The dials both slide into place—and nothing happens. Wrong answer, then.

“Guess luck isn’t my strong suit,” he jokes, trying to lighten the tension in the room once they’re all sure that the dials aren’t going to explode after all.

Neither of the girls seems too amused, but it puts Amami a little more at ease anyway. Despite their obvious distaste for one another, having Iruma-san and Angie-san around helped take his mind off the darker possibilities of whatever this ominous room might be for. They were around the same age as him, but in a strange and unexpected way they reminded him of his sisters.

His sisters. It was strange—even with such huge gaps in his memories, he still remembered that he had sisters. One of the only things he remembered about himself, and even that might not be true. The possibility lurks in the back of his mind, setting his teeth on edge whenever he thinks about it for more than a few seconds.

How could they not be real? Even though he could remember their names, their faces, the way that they all clung to his arms or jumped on his back whenever he’d come to visit them? That may have been the real reason that he’d been so willing to let Iruma-san and Angie-san tag along with him: he couldn’t tell anything for sure about his sisters, but these girls were real, and here, and looked just as lost as he felt. Having someone, anyone to take care of helped to take his mind off the looming specter of his own problems.

But surely telling these two girls who were near-strangers to him that they reminded him of twelve sisters who he wasn’t even sure actually existed would not exactly reassure them that he was in his right mind. So he doesn’t bring it up.

Instead, Amami decides to try again with the dials. But just like the first attempt, nothing of note happens. The dials don’t budge, and nothing else in the room seems to change. Given how many possible combinations there were in total, he’d hardly expected to actually guess right on the first few attempts anyway. But unexpectedly on the third time around—

—something solid clicks into place, loud and hefty.

Amami’s eyes go wide, and when he looks back at Iruma-san and Angie-san he can see similar looks of surprise on their faces as well.

Left-hand dial, twins. Right-hand dial, horse. He’d chosen the two signs at random, without any particular rhyme or reason behind that choice. And yet, the dials swing forward all the same to reveal a huge vault behind them.

Inside the vault there’s only a single USB stick, disproportionately tiny for such a huge vault. It couldn’t be more obvious what it’s meant to be used for, though, and Amami picks it up carefully, trying his best to keep the trembling in his hands to a minimum.

The three of them make their way back to the laptop in unison, and when Amami pushes it in, the USB slides into the port without any resistance. He lets Iruma-san take control from there, sliding her fingers over the trackpad to check the folder that pops up and reveals… only a single video file.

And Amami knows that it’s a testament to how focused she is that Iruma-san doesn’t even make a single joke about hoping that it’s a porno before she clicks the video and lets it play.

Immediately, the built-in video player fills the screen and suddenly…

“...Yo, hello there. I don’t really need to introduce myself after all this time, do I?”

…He’s face to face with himself.

Amami clenches the table beneath him, white-knuckled, bracing himself for the worst—maybe this would be more like that nasty little trap the ringleader had left for Saihara-kun in the gym than he’d bargained for. But the mirror-image of himself on the screen doesn’t seem all that different from the Amami Rantarou that’s standing in the room right now. No feverish glint in his eyes, no excited monologue about wanting to get away with murder.

As if in answer to his thoughts, the Amami on the screen reaffirms things for him: “First things first, let’s get one thing straight: I’m the real you, okay?”

He knows there’s no point (it’s just a video, and moreover, he doesn’t even remember filming it) but he finds himself almost wanting to nod in response. This, at least, feels like something to go off of. Finally, there was something to tell him more about his memories—

There’s a sound of pattering feet from behind them, and suddenly Iruma-san screams.

Amami jumps to his feet, struggling to register what’s going on. The laptop falls over onto its side as Iruma-san scrambles frantically, trying to get away from something, clawing at her—and he realizes suddenly that Monokuma has latched itself onto her back, emitting a frantic beep-beep-beep that grows more and more rapid by the second.

Maybe the vault hadn’t been rigged to blow, but that bear sure as hell was.

Where had it even come from!? He had assumed that Toujou-san and Momota-kun must have already taken care of it when they’d stolen the Exisals from the machinery bay, that Monokuma must have gone running over at the first sign of a rule violation. That would have explained the bear’s noticeable absence until now.

Clearly that hadn’t been the case, though. All too late, it dawns on him that as long as the ringleader was locked out of potentially making any new spares, they would want this particular copy of Monokuma to last as long as possible without risking it getting destroyed. Multiple Exisals were already stolen, and their killing game was quickly coming down in shambles around them—so they must have decided to save Monokuma itself for something that would do far more damage to their group.

Like taking out the inventor that had made it all possible.

Amami grabs the bear with both hands and tries to fling it away as hard as he can, but it’s all he can do just to rip it away from her shirt before the bear latches onto him instead. Maybe it didn’t matter too much who it was close to, just as long as the bomb went off. As long as they were all in this room, they’d all explode within a matter of seconds.

He closes his eyes and holds the bear closer, wondering if he can possibly lessen the force of the blast for the other two girls if he takes the brunt of it with his body—

And Iruma-san grabs something from under her skirt, screeches again, and pulls the top off a small, round, sphere-like object as she throws it towards the bear.

All at once, the beeping stops as suddenly as it started. Monokuma goes completely still. The laptop, still lying askew on the table, goes dark as though forced into hibernation.

“I-It’s only going to last a few minutes!” Iruma-san stammers. “We should get the f-fuck out of here, and fast!”

Amami scoots back on all fours and puts as much distance as he can manage between himself and the bear, gasping for air. He only barely has time to wonder how long the bear might have been tracking their movements throughout the school, or if it’s only playing dead again—

“You stupid piece of shit fucking bear!”

—when yet another scream interrupts his train of thought.

He looks to Iruma-san, but for once she’s not the source of the profanity. Both of them turn to stare, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, at Angie-san, just in time to see the other girl slam her foot though the bear’s stomach.

“It’s your fault! All of this is your fault, you useless piece of trash—!” She brings her foot down again and again, as if to punctuate each word with an unbridled rage that Amami wouldn’t have even thought her capable of just a few minutes ago. It’s as if the terror they’d experienced had finally shaken something loose in the other girl’s chest, setting free a torrent of emotion all at once.

Despite her small stature, she smashes the bear into pieces within a matter of seconds. One of her kicks even knocks Monokuma’s head away from the rest of its body, and when it rolls closer to her feet, she stomps her sandal directly through its face without hesitation.

Finally she stops after what feels like an eternity, her shoulders heaving with either exhaustion or rage. Then she kicks the last few remains out of her way and takes a seat right on the floor.

For a little while, none of them say a word. Iruma-san lets out a whimper but seems otherwise afraid to speak or move.

Amami decides to finally break the silence. “Gonna take a while to pay you girls back for that. Y’know, considering you both just saved my life.”

Iruma-san pokes her fingers together, as though at a loss for what to do with her hands. At last, she risks a question. “D-Did your god… tell you to do that… or whatever?”

“No,” Angie-san says, clasping her knees a little tighter to herself. There’s a look of exhaustion on her face after that explosion of raw emotion, something far more genuine than her usual smiles, perhaps the first sign of starting to heal. “That one was all me.”

Amami tries to laugh, though the sound gets stuck somewhere in his throat. Angie-san had gone and done the one thing that they had all wanted to do to that bear since day one. And considering all three of them were still alive to tell the tale, she’d made the right call, too.

He wonders if he should try to say something else—but any reassurances or words of comfort that come to mind only sound hollow. Instead, the three of them continue to sit in silence as they wait out the next few minutes, waiting for Iruma-san’s invention to run itself out, and for the laptop to come back on.

Kiibo has traversed all five floors of this school, but he still hasn’t found a trace of his own lab.

At this point, he’s come to terms with the fact that it must be somewhere outside the main school buildings, possibly out on the grounds like Iruma-san’s. That made sense; accounting for the fact that many of the rooms in this school were either normal classrooms or meant for communal purposes, like the dining hall or the library, there wasn’t nearly enough space in this school to host sixteen separate research labs.

And yet, his inability to find it posed a separate problem. It wasn’t as though he really thought that finding his lab in particular would give him all the answers to the mysteries of this school—but without it, he wasn’t entirely sure if there was anything he could actually do.

It’s just a hunch, a sinking suspicion really, but he’s fairly sure that a research lab meant for a Super High School Level Robot would come equipped with all kinds of useful items. Distasteful, irritating sci-fi stereotypes, perhaps… but useful all the same. Lasers, jetpacks, guns, maybe even (god forbid) some sort of robotic punching device. Anything like that would do.

Because even though Kiibo had hated such things for as long as he could remember, he was ready to accept that this was an extraordinary set of circumstances. And while knowing, seeing just how hard all of his friends and classmates were trying to put an end to this killing game in their own way—how could he do anything less than the very same?

But no matter how hard he searched, there was nothing like that in this school. And without a weapon, a special function, or a trump card of some sort, he was painfully average, as he had reminded these people time and time again. Average physical strength. Average reflexes. Average intelligence.

Just a normal student, really, except for the fact that he wasn’t.

The clarity of thought that had settled over him for the last few days had allowed him to more or less come to terms with that fact, no matter how much it stung. Kiibo had never been ashamed of his differences, had in fact always seen his unique identity as a robot as a source of pride, but although he had never wanted to become human, he had at least tried to cling to the idea of normalcy.

But that normalcy was little more than a lie that he’d told himself. If there was any real assistance that he could hope to offer his classmates in this killing game, it wouldn’t come from being a normal, ordinary student. It would have to come from being a robot—and a stereotypical one at that.

Once he reaches the third floor again, Kiibo closes his eyes and runs a cursory glance through the map of the school in his mind’s eye. He could try searching the grounds next, maybe. But there were bars on every window, and getting past the fight taking place in the entryway was next to impossible in these current circumstances.

With some sort of upgrade or new function equipped, he would be much tougher, faster, and harder to catch. But as he was now, he was every bit as fragile as his flesh-and-blood classmates.

It was unfortunate, but if that option was ruled out, then the next best means of assistance was continuing the search for clues. Not that he was entirely sure just how many he’d be able to find, with the Exisals downstairs currently blocking off the rest of the basement. He had searched a few of the research labs on the fifth floor already, but none of them had turned up any particularly interesting clues either—

His eyes snap open when the floor starts to shake, and he hears a resounding crash from one of the classrooms on the floor directly below. The shaking is so violent that he nearly loses his footing, but the moment it stops he takes off running, checking every classroom he can along the way.

Then there’s the sound of someone screaming—someone, a girl’s voice. Chabashira-san’s voice. Kiibo doesn’t have a stomach on account of the fact that he doesn’t need to eat, but he’s almost sure that what he’s feeling right now is close to nausea. He runs faster, and this time he can hear the sound of other footsteps ahead of his own, already racing down the stairs.

By the time he makes it downstairs and finds the right classroom, Saihara-kun and Ouma-kun have already beaten him there. The two of them are standing around a wide, gaping hole directly in the center of the room, staring down at the rubble below. Kiibo grips the doorframe hard, bracing himself, afraid of whatever they might have found ahead of him…

…but then he realizes that their expressions aren’t those of two people looking down at their classmates’ bloody, mangled corpses.

If anything, they look surprised. Relieved, for sure. And perhaps a bit curious, too.

Kiibo braces himself and slowly approaches the hole in the center of the room as well. When he joins them, Saihara-kun looks up only for a moment and nods. Kiibo follows the detective’s line of sight… and despite not needing to breathe, he exhales what can only be described as a sigh of relief at the sight of Chabashira-san, Gonta-kun, and Yumeno-san on the ground below. A little worse for wear, perhaps, but still very decidedly alive.

He considers asking them several questions, like if they’re okay, and what happened, and if they need any help, but Ouma-kun phrases it more succinctly than he ever could:

“What the hell happened to you guys?”

Gonta-kun looks almost apologetic. “Gonta got into a fight with one of the Exisals, and when it crashed the ceiling—uh, the floor up there fell through. Yumeno-san fell down, but…”

“’m okay,” Yumeno-san mumbles. But her bleary eyes and the fact that Gonta-kun was holding her in his arms so she didn’t have to stand on her own two feet seemed to suggest otherwise. “My magic broke the fall.”

Chabashira-san bites her lip. “She broke her leg. We need to get her out of here, as soon as we can.”

“If that hole in the wall from the Exisal is big enough, you could probably wait out on the grounds until the fighting dies down,” Saihara-kun suggests. “But before you leave, can I ask something? Um—why were you two searching this classroom, specifically?”

Kiibo blinks. He’d been so preoccupied with worry, hoping against hope that none of his friends had been killed, that he hadn’t actually stopped to consider just how strange that was. This wasn’t a research lab, after all. Nor was it some previously blocked-off room that looked likely to provide them with clues.

It was, by all appearances, just a normal second-floor classroom. One that they’d all seen dozens of times in passing.

He’d spared at least a cursory glance for such classrooms in his own investigation of the school, but he hadn’t bothered actually going in and spending time searching them unless they were completely new ground. It was definitely strange that Chabashira-san and Yumeno-san had both been searching this room when the Exisal had made the floor collapse.

Chabashira-san doesn’t even look entirely sure herself as she says, “Um… it was Yumeno-san’s idea. She said… that she had a feeling about that room.”

“A feeling?” Kiibo repeats, surprised.

“Yes, a feeling. Like she knew something was going to be in there, and she wanted to check no matter what. But we almost didn’t get a chance to search, before…”

“…Before the floor fell through,” Saihara-kun says with a nod, putting the pieces of the timeline together. “I see.”

There’s a strange look on the detective’s face that Kiibo hasn’t seen before—something between a look of deep concentration, as though trying to recall something important, as well as a growing sense of urgency.

“I-I think you three should get going for now,” Kiibo tells them. “Momota-kun and the others probably have the other Exisal under control, but it would still be dangerous if you fell into the line of fire again. Just wait outside, someone will come and find you as soon as it’s safe to do so.”

Chabashira-san nods, and she and Gonta-kun make their way down from the pile of rubble and leave, careful not to move Yumeno-san too much as they go.

Only a few moments ago, he would’ve been tempted to jump down and join them himself. The renewed possibility of going outside meant he could search the grounds for his research lab again, maybe find something at last that could help him contribute something more—but he finds himself still rooted to the spot by the odd, focused look on Saihara-kun’s face.

That… and the fact that the more he thinks about it, the more Chabashira-san’s words resonated strangely with himself as well. Such pinpricks of hesitation wouldn’t have even registered a few days ago, but the clarity of his thoughts for the last few days meant that even small sensations like that stood out much more clearly now.

The sensation is difficult to put into words. When he tries to dig deeper, uncover the deeper meaning behind it, all that he can guess is that it must have something to do with this room.

“Okay,” Ouma-kun says, and it’s clear from the nervous edge to his voice that he’s not used to being left out of anything, “do you guys have any bright ideas about what she just said, or…?”

Kiibo doesn’t know how to respond, but Saihara-kun backs away from the edge of the hole in the floor and turns to look at the remaining desks in the classroom.

“Only some of them fell through,” he mutters, as if to himself, “so hopefully it’s not down there…”

“Hey Saihara-chan, what are you—”

The detective bends down on one knee and begins searching the remaining desks in the classroom, looking so concentrated and efficient that for once, Ouma-kun actually stops talking and lets him work instead.

Most of the desks that hadn’t fallen through the center of the room were grouped fairly close together, closest to the wall with the door. Some lay askew on the floor, knocked over by the force of the Exisal’s impact from earlier, but by chance a handful of them had remained upright, knocked against either each other or the wall itself.

And it’s one of these still-upright desks that makes Saihara-kun freeze as he takes a look underneath it. His hands trembling, he leans it gently on its side before showing the underside to the other two boys.

“Wh—is that a keyboard?” Kiibo stammers.

Rather than just a simple keyboard, the bottom of the desk appeared to show an entire holographic display of some sort as soon as Saihara-kun’s fingers brushed against it. Kiibo had never seen such and advanced setup in his life, and yet the sight was oddly bizarre, like trying to place a stranger in a photograph.

Saihara-kun hesitates for only a moment before running his fingers over the display’s keyboard—causing the blackboard in front of them to jump to life, replaced suddenly with electronic screens and an even stranger display which read Flashback Light Setup.

The words are unfamiliar and strange, but they must mean something to Ouma-kun, because the other boy stares speechlessly at the flashing screens for several long seconds before the corners of his mouth curl into a sinister, leering grin.

“So that’s how she did it. I always knew those things were fake.”

“Excuse me?” Kiibo asks.

Unlike Ouma-kun, Saihara-kun isn’t smiling, but that steely, focused look in his eyes seems to have increased tenfold after seeing the display. “It’s… It’s a long story, Kiibo-kun. I don’t think we could explain it all right now even if we tried.”

It’s fine if you can’t explain everything right now, Kiibo wants to tell them, but please at least try to start somewhere—

But even that thought is cut short as Ouma-kun closes the distance between them, putting both hands on Kiibo’s shoulders. There’s a look on his face that Kiibo doesn’t know how to begin to describe: a mix of uncharacteristic seriousness and almost feverish glee, unsettling to even look at.

“Kiibo. You actually showed up at a great time.” Contrary to his expression, Ouma-kun’s voice is low and perfectly contained. Kiibo finds himself so startled that he can’t even manage to point out that that’s perhaps the first time that Ouma-kun has ever said his name correctly. “I need to ask you a question. I need you to answer me honestly. And I need you to do one very, very important thing for me.”

Ouma-kun looks so completely, fiercely resolute that there’s no feasible way for Kiibo to refuse. “Y-Yes, okay, I can try.” If it meant ending this killing game, then he was willing to try almost anything. “What is it that you need me to do?”

“Once you’ve answered my question, I need you to get downstairs. Fast.”

Akamatsu Kaede feels guilty all the way to her core. Not that she’s done anything to actually feel guilty for—not exactly.

But she hates sitting still, has always hated sitting still. Her parents always used to tease that she was born three weeks early because she just couldn’t stand to stay cooped up for a moment longer. Her friends at her old school had always given her such a hard time about how she was always the first one out the door as soon as class let out for the day, always itching to run back home and practice playing piano as soon as she could.

It was possible that none of those memories were real. But it doesn’t really matter, at least not for the moment, because the jittery tremors that she feels in her arms and legs certainly are.

And right now, she feels consumed with guilt, hating that she can only stay quiet and wait while everyone else is out there trying their hardest.

She would love to be out there with the rest of them. Piloting an Exisal, investigating the school, anything at all, it didn’t matter—just being part of things at this crucial moment would be enough. Everyone should be together, at a time like this. All of them, working together.

And yet… that dream was impossible. They wouldn’t ever really be working together, united in their desire to escape this killing game. Not as long as the ringleader was pretending to be one of them, hiding themself in their midst. She had seen that for herself back in the gym, when all of their hard work had come so dangerously close to being wasted.

Some of them—most of them had lied to each other by now. Herself included, with all her smiles and reassurances and heartfelt support for a plan that she had almost ruined before it began, as if she hadn’t been considering taking things into her own hands in order to end this killing game. She had lied to everyone else, the same way that Harukawa-san had lied about her own talent, that Saihara-kun and Ouma-kun had lied about the phone booth.

But someone was definitely lying more than the others. No matter how much they felt as though they had gotten to know each other in these last few days, how much they claimed to want to work together in order to get out of here, someone was actively working against them. Otherwise, there wouldn’t have been such a strong force pushing back against Saihara-kun’s plan.

Akamatsu feels the school around her shiver, and shivers with it. Not out of fear, but… anticipation. She can’t stand the silence, the inaction, the waiting around with nothing to do, no other way to help.

And the worst thing is that it might be for the best if she were to just keep waiting forever. If nothing ever happened, if no one ever came… because it would mean that she was wrong. The ringleader wasn’t one of their own after all, but some unseen outsider trying to pit them all against each other. Someone would come and get her and tell her that they’d defeated Monokuma and the Exisals, and they could all leave this place and go home together, hand in hand.

A happy ending for everyone. No pesky gut feelings getting in the way, no lingering aftertaste of betrayal to ruin their hard-earned victory…

…No such luck.

She hears the door to the room swing open, hears the sound of quiet footsteps as someone enters the room. By the time that person turns on the light switch, she’s already tightened her grip on the shot-put ball in her hands.

And as light floods the room, Akamatsu steps forward from where she’s been waiting by the corner sink of the first floor girls’ bathroom and comes face-to-face with Shirogane Tsumugi.

Her heart sinks. “…Shirogane-san,” she says. “I really hoped it wasn’t you.”

She had hoped it wasn’t anyone in their group. Even if it had only been a few days, Akamatsu felt as though she had known these people for a lifetime by now. But despite what she hoped, despite what she wanted to happen, she wasn’t naïve enough to really think that it would be the case.

Shirogane-san doesn’t move, only blinks every now and then as her eyes flick between Akamatsu and the cold, steel ball in her hands.

Then, her expression still carefully neutral, she puts a hand to her cheek.

“The girls’ bathroom is a pretty strange place to be just standing around in the dark. How long have you been in here?” she asks.

“Since we all ran out of the gym.”

“The whole time, really? That’s even stranger.” Shirogane-san’s voice is calm, no different than all the times Akamatsu had heard her talk while they ate breakfast together. “I didn’t think you were such a strange girl, Akamatsu-san.”

Akamatsu clutches the shot-put ball a little harder, her knuckles turning pale as she does so. “So what does that make you, Shirogane-san?”

The other girl gives her a level stare. And then, hand still on her cheek, she smiles. “Well, you already know that by now,” she says, “don’t you? Did someone else tell you I’d be coming here?”

“Not exactly.”

The other girl was only half-right. In the moments right before he and Ouma-kun had left Iruma-san’s lab together, Saihara-kun had taken her aside, bowed his head, and asked her to do something for him.

“Please… stay on the first floor, and don’t let anyone near the girls’ bathroom.”

Akamatsu had been bewildered at the time—she’d just heard about the plan with the Exisals after all, but this second request seemed to have come out of nowhere. When he raised his head again, she had searched his face, looking for answers and finding nothing forthcoming.

But… he was her friend, shy and anxious and always a bit too unsure of himself, but a friend nonetheless. And even if he wasn’t telling her everything, she could still fill in the blanks for herself enough to know that he wouldn’t ask something this bizarre if it wasn’t related to the rest of their plan.

So she’d done it, no questions asked. Because she had already made the decision to trust him, after already doubting him once before. And because she had seen firsthand just how desperate he was to put this killing game to an end.

When the Exisals had crashed into the school, when they had all fled from the gym and scattered their separate ways, Akamatsu had gone straight for the girls’ bathroom on the first floor—with only one other stop along the way.

Saihara-kun had asked her to come here after all, had asked patience and inaction of her even though it was the hardest thing in the world for someone like her, and while he hadn’t said it aloud, he’d still asked her to stay safe with his eyes, and the way he’d squeezed her hands before they parted ways. So she had run into the warehouse first, only just around the corner from the bathroom itself—and grabbed the first usable weapon she could find.

Just in case, she told herself. Just in case.

Because there might be smarter people in this killing game than her, but Akamatsu wasn’t nearly stupid enough to risk trying to stop the ringleader empty-handed.

And since then, it had truly been a waiting game. The crashes on the first floor were more violent than anywhere else in the school, and she’d known that she was right to come here as fast as possible when the whole room had started to shake at one point, as though the walls and ceiling were threatening to cave in on themselves.

Luckily for her, they hadn’t. But the constant rattling of gunfire and the sounds of collapsing rubble had confirmed that because of the Exisals, it would be far too dangerous for anyone to cross the entryway and come to the first floor hallways until the fighting either came to an end, or moved somewhere else.

That was why part of her had so desperately hoped that no one would come in here. And why she had also been so certain that if Saihara-kun was right—if this place was so important to the ringleader—then the ringleader would never give up the opportunity to try and do so anyway.

Akamatsu takes another step forward and pushes open the door to the utility closet in front of the line of stalls, revealing the open panel on the far side of the wall.

Saihara-kun hadn’t told her that was there—hadn’t known anything for sure, and hadn’t seemed to want to put any of it in words just in case there was even the slightest chance he could be mistaken. But she’d had an awful lot of time while standing here in the dark to take a look around, searching for whatever it was that would make such a common room so important in the grand scheme of things.

“Is this what you were looking for, Shirogane-san?”

He hadn’t told her who might come in here, either, only that it was a distinct possibility that someone might. Akamatsu had tried not to jump to any conclusions too fast; girl or boy, anyone could probably sneak into a girls’ bathroom long enough to go somewhere else as the coast was clear, after all. And she hadn’t wanted to guess which one of her classmates might be the one to come walking through that door…

“Yes it is, actually. I guess hiding it where anyone could walk in and find it was always taking a pretty big risk, huh?”

…so why was she not surprised to see that it was Shirogane-san?

She had always thought that when she finally found the person responsible for putting them through all of this, it would be some grand reveal: some sort of shocking and thrilling conclusion that she couldn’t possibly have foreseen.

But deep down, it feels as if part of her has already known for some time, a seed of tangled grief in her chest that she had already come to terms with before she’s even made the accusation aloud.

Akamatsu feels nothing but guilt, and grief, and just a spark of white-hot anger, tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. She had eaten next to this girl, comforted her, stayed awake at night in the same night watch shift with her… and none of that could possibly change the truth that was now staring her right in the face.

Shirogane-san’s smile never falters. “Congratulations, Akamatsu-san. You found the big, bad ringleader. My, it’s just really not my day is it?”

Akamatsu’s fingers clench around the steel ball that she’s holding, an involuntary motion that betrays everything she’s feeling all at once.

The other girl—the ringleader looks down at the shot-put ball in her hands and says, “Why don’t you go ahead and do what you came here for, then?”

Shirogane Tsumugi doesn’t know why everything in this killing game started to go off the rails.

In theory, this season was just like any other. There was no inherent flaw with her killing game, every piece of the puzzle perfectly aligned and selected accordingly well before they had wiped everyone’s memories clean and sent them all in here to kill each other.

And yet for some unknown, inexplicable reason it had started to come apart at the seams almost immediately. Without any rhyme or reason, before it could even begin to get off the ground—it had all started to come crashing down around her.

Shirogane still doesn’t understand, even now when she thinks back on those first few days. This shouldn’t happen, couldn’t happen. That was why the two day time limit and the graduation rule existed simultaneously, to prevent anyone from getting too complacent. To encourage the first blood to start flowing.

In a long, long line of fifty-two prior killing games, no one had ever just decided to wait out the time limit before. So why was that the very first plan that these fifteen students had come up with, as though already resolved for the worst from the very beginning?

If there was any flaw at all with her killing game, it must have been with the brainwashing. That was the only explanation she could come up with. Someone had screwed up the initial memory wipe—despite the fact that she had never even heard of that happening in any other game before this.

How else could Saihara-kun have come up with that little theory about their memories, though? He had to have retained something, or else he would never have been that confident in announcing such an absurd idea to everyone else. And he couldn’t possibly have been the only one whose memories hadn’t been properly scrubbed either, or else the others would never have bought into it.

Despite how perfect everything had seemed from the outside, something was definitely not right with this killing game. ‘Off the rails’ really was the only way to describe it.

Shirogane had been determined not to let that stop anything, though. This game was her life’s work, the product of all her sweat and blood and tears. To her, improvising new stories, weaving new fiction into reality—that was all as natural as breathing.

She’d like to think she’d been rather quick on her feet with some of those improvisations, too. Anything and everything was fair game, in order to keep the spirit of entertainment alive and well. She’d used ideas and threads which weren’t supposed to factor into this killing game until several murders down the line, pretended that at least half of this was all by design, in order to keep things interesting for the audience glued to their screens.

After all, boredom was a poison. To them, to her. To the fabric of this game itself. That there hadn’t been any deaths yet was already bad enough, but she couldn’t risk letting them grow bored and tired of this game.

…Which was why Shirogane had made two of her most crucial mistakes in this killing game.

Everything else, she could perhaps pin off on someone else—she wasn’t responsible for the faulty memory wiping, or for everyone else acting strangely out of character with the way she had planned things. Those were things beyond her control, and she was already doing her best to fix them.

But because she had wanted to prioritize keeping the audience well-fed… because he had promised her a spectacle, she had let Ouma Kokichi live after he’d seen her coming back alone. That was the first mistake.

The second was that following that line of reasoning, she had prioritized checking on him before anything else, instead of making her way to the library as fast as possible.

But she had wanted, needed to know what was going on before planning her next move. And by the time that she had rushed upstairs to see where Ouma-kun was going—

—the Exisals had arrived on the scene and blocked off the entire entryway, removing any chance she might have had to go to go back downstairs without getting caught in the line of fire.

The only bright spot in the entire situation was that at least Monokuma had still been intact, having avoided whatever it was that Momota-kun had used to hijack some of the Exisals. While not nearly as dangerous as an Exisal, the bear was nonetheless a sophisticated piece of machinery… with a bomb inside.

Shirogane had made the decision to forego the library entirely and tried to rectify her earlier mistake by prioritizing Iruma-san instead—selfish, cowardly Iruma-san who shouldn’t have even had the time or preparation to make inventions of this caliber in the first place, even with all of her talent.

But even that had gone awry, and then Monokuma had needed a spare. Which was impossible to make, as long as the first floor was a warzone.

It wasn’t as though she was afraid to lay down her life for this killing game, mind you, but if she was going to die then it wouldn’t be from a stray bullet or an accident. Murder was the only option.

Even in all the chaos, she had kept a careful eye on the comings and goings of her classmates, fading into the background of the emptier second floor rooms like a shadow underfoot. That was the benefit to playing this sort of character: with so much interesting new ground to explore, no one else would bat an eye or think anything of it if she kept to herself.

No one else except Ouma-kun, maybe, or anyone else he might have told his suspicions to. That had been her biggest concern. Had he told anyone else, or not? It was a pretty big accusation to make with no proof other than ‘she was coming back from the bathroom by herself.’ So she didn’t think he would, under normal circumstances—but there was nothing normal about anything he’d been doing since the game began, either.

Holing up in his room, hardly speaking to anyone for days on end even after he joined their group... Yes, that was probably the clearest indicator that something had gone wrong with the memory wipe. He was acting more like she’d expected him to now, but that was all that it was: an act.

If he’d told anyone else, it would have been Saihara-kun no doubt, but the question from there became how many other people might know? She’d waited in the dark to see if anyone would come looking for her, every muscle tense as she strained her eyes and ears.

Nobody came anywhere near her, though. And when she finally heard more footsteps running towards the second floor, and the sound of Ouma-kun and Saihara-kun yelling from a classroom she was all-too-familiar with, she’d known that would be her only chance to get back downstairs and make the spare.

Fortunately, it hadn’t taken much longer for the fighting with the Exisals to come to an end. The knowledge that every single one of the robots enforcing this game were by now either commandeered or completely out of commission hadn’t exactly been the most pleasant discovery, but there was nothing she could do about that without first addressing the issue of Monokuma. As long as Monokuma existed to play the game-master, there was still a chance of salvaging everything else that had been lost.

Shirogane had stepped back into her role without any issues, the perfect background character. How was everyone else down here, and what were all those noises she’d heard earlier, and was anyone injured? Most importantly, was there anything else she could help with?

When Toujou-san and Momota-kun had begun to try and clear the rubble from the basement stairway, that was when she’d seized her chance. After all, she would only have a very slim window of time before one of them made it down there and opened the last hidden door of this killing game, and then she would never have a chance to make a spare again.

It was her last possible chance. She would do anything, even sell her soul to keep this killing game alive. And yet, Shirogane had found herself completely and totally unsurprised to come face to face with Akamatsu Kaede.

The only salvation that she sees is that shot-put ball in the other girl’s hands. Smooth, solid, glistening silver from the fluorescent light hanging overhead.

“Why don’t you go ahead and do what you came here for, then?”

She smiles as if it’s what she’s been hoping for all along. It wouldn’t even be a bad way to be remembered, as far as ringleaders went. Even a single death would still count as blood spilled. And she knows that Akamatsu-san, brave and heroic and selfless as she is, most definitely has it in her.

Shirogane waits, watching as the other girl’s fingers twitch.

“No.” The word comes through gritted teeth, as if Akamatsu-san can hardly get it out. “I didn’t come here to kill you. That’s for everyone else to decide.”

It’s Shirogane’s turn to twitch, this time. “What, because you’re going to drag me back? Expose me in front of all the others?” she asks. “No offense, Akamatsu-san, but it’ll look pretty damning for you, too. You shouldn’t have had any way to know about any of this, either. Maybe I’ll just tell them you were in on it too, and you’re trying to frame me in order to dodge the blame.”

A muscle tenses in the other girl’s jaw, and Shirogane keeps smiling all the while, inviting death with open arms.

“If you kill me, then you and everyone else won’t have anything left to worry about, right? Isn’t that why you wanted to find the ringleader in the first place?”

Akamatsu-san doesn’t say anything, though the look on her face is enough to confirm it. Killing her isn’t part of the plan, but it is all too obvious that there’s some hurt and angry part of her that wishes she could do it anyway.

At this point, Shirogane would welcome even an ending like that. But as much as she might hope otherwise, something deep inside tells her that even this last-ditch appeal won’t be able to salvage this killing game.

The two of them stand in a stalemate as taught as a rope about to snap. Even if she were to run down to the hidden room in the library now, Shirogane doubts that she’d be able to make another spare before Toujou-san or someone else came smashing down the door. Still, neither of them moves.

And then the door to the bathroom opens slowly, and Kiibo-kun walks in, his hand pressed to his ear.

Kiibo-kun, really? she thinks. I guess that makes sense. All my other creations were already turned against me anyway. He was really the only one left.

Was the audience even watching though his eyes anymore? Had they all gotten bored of this bloodless, soulless killing game and given up in disgust? Or had Iruma-san or someone else somehow interfered with the signal meant to connect him to everyone else? From within the game itself, even she can’t tell—but neither answer would surprise her anymore, with the way that this game had been going from the very beginning.

“None of that will be necessary,” Kiibo-kun says, and even though his eyes look unsure, his words are as steady and cool as the calm, still surface of a lake. “It’s okay, Akamatsu-san. I don’t believe we need to let the ringleader force us to do anything else in this game. I got here as fast as I could, and… I was able to record most of what she said with my audio recording feature.”

Shirogane closes her eyes. No jetpack, no lasers, no spectacular upgrade courtesy of Iruma-san and her love for tinkering with machines. The final blow to her last attempt to improvise was an audio recorder. A simple, standard feature, the kind you could find on any cell phone in the world, let alone on a sentient robot.

Akamatsu-san lets out a visible sigh of relief, and though she still doesn’t let go of the shot-put ball, she manages to give Kiibo-kun a weak smile. “I wasn’t going to do it,” the pianist tells him, and Shirogane hates the ring of truth in the other girl’s voice. “I wasn’t going to, but… you came at the right time anyway, Kiibo-kun.”

In the end, they probably wouldn’t even let her have a trial. Not a real one, anyway. Of course they wouldn’t.

Because everything in this killing game had already fallen off the rails a long time ago, and there was no longer any way possible for her to set it back on course.

It was really just a memory from ten, or a hundred, or a thousand years ago of a blunder he’d made when trying to force everyone to watch their motive videos. Nothing important, really, except for the fact that he had blabbed about his true intentions without realizing that Kiibo could record it and play it all back for everyone else to hear.

A tape recorder. Kiibo had been so proud of it too, like it had been some huge ace up his sleeve. It figured that Iruma-chan could probably attach rockets to his arms, or get him to breathe fire from his nose, and instead his robotic, metal classmate had been proudest of the fact that he could press a button in his ear and play back a conversation.

Like a voicemail, Ouma had been tempted to tell him back then, however long ago ‘back then’ really was. But the night had gotten away from him, and his plans had gotten pulled out from under him as they always did.

For the past however long since then, it hadn’t stayed in his memory as anything more than a note long since filed away—something to tease Kiibo for at most, and something completely uninteresting under most other circumstances. It was just a recorder, not a voice-changer like the microphones in the Exisals, so it wasn’t even like Kiibo could use it to impersonate other people. Totally useless, in other words.

If it hadn’t been for that one, fateful night in Gonta’s lab, he probably wouldn’t have remembered it at all. But when he’d seen that flashback machine with his own two eyes and realized just how she must have set everything up so many times before, it had sunk in that the perhaps the biggest advantage Shirogane-chan had on her side was flexibility.

Hadn’t that been one of the biggest reasons he’d failed, in the previous loop? Just when he’d thought he had her cornered, forced into a situation where she had no choice but to give up and hand the game over to him—she’d turned around and as though the whole thing was always part of the plan, immediately coming up with something new and turning it against him.

She could make as many of those flashback lights as she wanted, simply revise and rewrite and improvise as many times as needed. He’d been assuming that the ringleader was someone who planned all their moves in advance, always trying to account for every possible situation in advance, but that was his own way of doing things, not hers.

No, the truth was much simpler: as long as there was even the tiniest room for leeway, Shirogane-chan only needed to see what the current situation was and then change her script accordingly. If he was a liar, then she was a shapeshifter.

Taking control of the school and the Exisals was only half the fight. What they needed was something that could provide cold, hard proof, something to force her to stick to one course of action without any chance of revising it or taking it back. Something kind of like… a tape recorder.

It had been obvious enough that she would want to know what his real agenda was, after he’d already told her to her face that he was going to end her little killing game. So Ouma had banked on her trying to follow him first, once the whole plan was kicked into motion.

And it had been equally obvious that, sooner or later, she would have to try sneaking back into her little hidey-hole again if she wanted any chance of trying to fix her game once all her little toys were taken out. So Saihara-chan had been right to ask Akamatsu-chan to block off the girls’ bathroom first, cutting off her opportunity to do so.

But Kiibo running into them had been little more than an accident: a fortuitous, wonderful accident that had jogged his memory in a way Ouma could never have expected.

All he’d needed Kiibo to confirm for him was that the tape recorder was something he already had. Not some feature Iruma-chan had yet to equip for him after one of their little maintenance sessions.

“W-Well, yes,” Kiibo had told him, “Iruma-chan has helped me with some maintenance over the last few days, but that’s always been one of my core features. Why?”

And Ouma had told him what he wanted him to do, and where he wanted him to go, though not the reason why. There wasn’t enough time, and when he’d said so, Kiibo had taken him at his word for it and jumped down to the first floor. Determined and reliable as ever, no matter how much shit Ouma gave him.

It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Akamatsu-chan—for once, he could honestly say that he did. He just knew what it was to have a game with Shirogane-chan one move away from checkmate, only to have the gameboard pulled right back from underneath him.

“You look pretty sure about all of this,” Saihara-chan had told him after Kiibo left the room.

“I’ve never been less sure of anything in my life. I’ve just made it my life’s mission to make sure Shirogane-chan’s life is a miserable, living hell as long as I’m still here.”

The detective had actually smiled just a little, the first smile that Ouma had seen him crack all night. “And what about once all of us are out of here?”

“Hmm. Guess I haven’t really thought about it that much,” Ouma had told him, putting his hands behind his head.

And in the end, that was all it had taken to finally put this game in checkmate. Just a little extra help for Akamatsu-chan so that Shirogane-chan couldn’t slither her way out of a corner one more time. A tape recorder, from a robot he would never be able to tease again. And the complete and utter once-in-a-lifetime miracle that was all the rest of his classmates working together, genuinely working together, without trying to kill each other for five goddamn minutes.

---

After that, there was only the tiny little matter of how to handle the Shirogane-chan situation, of course.

No one had seemed to know where to convene or what to talk about first—the only real condition that they all seemed to agree on was that it absolutely couldn’t be a trial, because that would only be giving Shirogane-chan and anyone else like her out there exactly what they wanted.

In the end, perhaps because they had finally succeeded in opening the first and last place that had ever been off-limits in this game, they had agreed to go back to the library, where so many things in this game had always seemed to begin.

Even with everyone still alive, their group must have made for a morbid little procession as they had gone down the stairs: sweaty, dirty, their clothes ripped and torn while they paraded one of their own to go down ahead of them, like a witch to a burning at the stake.

And after spending so much time wondering just what the inside of that godforsaken hidden room might be hiding and what it looked like… it’s a little smaller than Ouma thought it would be. Or maybe it’s only feeling particularly cramped right now because of all sixteen of them have crammed into the room at once, to see what Shirogane-chan had been trying to reach all along.

“This room… looks like a fucking nightmare,” Hoshi-chan mutters, pulling his beanie a little lower.

The décor is atrocious, though he’d expect nothing less from a room meant only for the game-master of a fucked-up game like this. But nothing highlights the poor taste of this this entire killing game quite as much as the giant Monokuma-shaped head which dominates the back wall of the room.

“You wanted to make a spare so much, why don’t you go ahead and make one now?” Harukawa-chan throws a pointed stare in Shirogane-chan’s direction, a dangerous glint in her eyes that would have made Ouma himself take a step back not too long ago. “Go on, show us how it’s done.”

Shirogane-chan just shakes her head, tapping a finger against her cheek. “Oh, no thanks,” she answers, so polite for a backstabbing traitor who had been trying to force them all to kill each other. “I mean, there’s not really any point, is there? You’ve all already heard it for yourself.”

Despite the fact that she has lost this game in every, unequivocal sense of the word she is far too calm—calm in a way that Ouma doesn’t like one bit. Because it means that for all her polite words, even stripped of all her little toys to hide behind, she is still very much a threat.

“I don’t suppose you feel like telling us why you did all of this.” Toujou-chan speaks in a tone that could almost pass for her usual calm and collected demeanor, if Ouma wasn’t already familiar with what her barely-contained fury looked like.

“Not really.” After being denied her one request for a trial at the very end, Shirogane-chan seems determined now to divulge and information only as she personally saw fit. She folds her hands in front of her skirt in the same, fluid way that Toujou-chan herself had done about a hundred times before, a clearly mocking little gesture. “Saihara-kun already did such a good job of laying out all the main points before, didn’t he?”

Saihara-chan frowns, but otherwise looks as though he’d expected her to bring his name into the conversation sooner or later. “So you admit it, then. Our memories…”

“Completely fake!” she agrees. “A bunch of total nonsense, pre-written for consumer entertainment.”

The fact that she’s got the balls to even make the claim doesn’t surprise him at this point, though his classmates are also less agitated by the reveal than he thought they’d be. Even if it was only a few days, maybe having had a little while longer to come to terms with the idea really had helped to brace them, prepare them for the worst.

It’s something he himself is still coming to terms with, on some level. Even after all this time, there was still a dull ache somewhere in his chest whenever he thought back on a certain motive video that he had once kept carefully in a drawer next to his bedside, or on those masks and walkie-talkies he had once seen in his own research lab, so long ago.

That this killing game was all some kind of show, that they had been given fake memories, that there were total strangers outside who wanted to watch them brutally murder one another—Ouma had reached those conclusions already, and was prepared to accept at least that much.

What he can’t abide by, though—

“Oh, and because your memories were implanted, that includes your feelings too, you know? How you feel about one another, your morals and beliefs, stuff like that, it was all decided a long time ago.”

—is a claim like that.

Ouma doesn’t buy it for a minute, knowing now just how willing she was to improvise and adapt her plans on a whim. There were definitely people watching this game, people who thought of it as sick entertainment—but everything planned in advance, right down to their feelings?

He doesn’t have to say it himself, though, because his sharper classmates have already caught on just as quickly.

“Come on, Shirogane-san. I already saw the video I left for myself, that survivor privilege.” Amami-chan taps a finger against his arm, his brows furrowed deep in thought. “That was about a previous game, right? Are you really gonna tell me that you planned for me to look and act and feel the same way, for two games in a row? What about Momota-kun being sick, then?”

Both of those are excellent points that poke plenty of holes in her claim. But without faltering at all, Shirogane-chan just tilts her head to the side and says, “Well, yes? That’s the point of running simulations like this, isn’t it?”

Everyone freezes, Ouma included.

That wasn’t what she was supposed to say. Simulations? It doesn’t directly contradict anything that she’s already said, but the word still lingers in the air like a resounding slap to the face.

As though sensing a foothold while climbing a sheer cliff, Shirogane-chan presses the point just a little further. “People watch simulations like this, you know? For entertainment. The whole point is to input the same basic factors. You know, memories, personalities, stuff like that. And then you only tweak one other factor—like something external, or maybe just one person’s personality or memories, like Saihara-kun’s in that video. And then you watch how the outcome changes when you run it again.”

She’s doing it again, Ouma knows. She’s doing what she’s done a million times before, what she had done every single time that she had ever managed to turn the tables on him and crush him like a bug underfoot.

“That’s why I’m not really bothered, you know. I mean, it’s frustrating I guess, losing when I should’ve had all the advantages, but you can’t win ‘em all. Because you know what happens when people get tired of seeing the same simulation play out, right?”

To put it in his own terms, it’s a bluff. It has to be. Another shameless, desperate bluff. Not that a ringleader who prided herself on a game like this would ever have any shame in the first place. It’s a bluff, it’s a sham, it’s the sound of her slithering her way out of the corner one more goddamn time.

“They change some things, they start them over, and then they run them again,” she says with a shrug.

And Ouma knows all of this, knows that the chances of this particular claim actually being the truth are infinitesimally small, smaller than the tiniest living organisms on earth that can’t even be seen with the naked eye. And yet—

“Oh, that includes the outside world too, obviously. I mean, the goal was obviously to keep you all in here, but even if you go out there, it doesn’t matter too much. You’ll just end up back here again when the simulation gets reset anyway.”

Didn’t that sound a hell of a lot like waking up in a small dark locker, over and over and over again?

There’s a rising tension in the air, and the looks on everyone’s faces have subtly started to shift from anger, to surprise, to something much, much more dangerous: something like distrust and panic and suspicion. The perfect brewing storm for a killing game.

And then Ouma bursts out laughing, in part because he remembers the vow he made to be a personal thorn in Shirogane-chan’s side for the rest of her miserable fucking life, and in part because there is quite literally nothing else he can do in these circumstances.

He laughs and laughs and laughs until his side hurts and he doubles over, clutching it in pain, and even then he continues to laugh some more. Every single person in the room stops and stares at him, and Ouma is well aware that he looks and sounds like a madman. Maybe he is, on some level, but it doesn’t really matter, because Shirogane-chan looks over at him too, her mouth pursed with annoyance she can’t quite manage to conceal.

As suddenly as he started laughing, Ouma stops, straightening up all at once. “Sooorry,” he drawls, “I just can’t believe that’s the best you’ve got, Shirogane-chan. Are you really the ringleader? I thought you’d be like, smart or something.”

“You’re sounding a little unwell, Ouma-kun.” Shirogane-chan touches her hand to her face again, a sympathetic little gesture completely at odds with the steely look in her eyes. But there’s something else to her expression too, something alarmingly discerning as she looks him up and down. “You should probably get that looked at.”

“Oh, yeah sure. You fuck with our heads, lock us all up in here, tell us to kill each other, and I’m the crazy one. And then when you get caught, you can’t even lie to save your own ass.” He tries to ignore her searching, discerning stare as he rolls his eyes, rolls the words off his tongue one after the other. “I could pretend to be a better ringleader than that. Hey, maybe I should, actually. Who wants to take a bet?”

None of his classmates take him up on the offer, but they’re watching him intently all the same, and when the panic on their faces begins to subside just a bit, Ouma knows that it’s because they’ve all latched on to the familiar grain of truth buried in his lies.

That was always how the best lies started, wasn’t it?

There is no way that Ouma Kokichi of all people should be able to lose in a contest of lies. Not when lies were the one thing he knew and understood as instinctively as most people understood blinking, or putting one foot in front of the other. He was more strategic, perhaps, more calculating than someone who took as many risks as Shirogane-chan, yet he still knew how to improvise and bluff when the situation called for it.

But specifically because this is Shirogane-chan—because she is the ringleader who has made a fool out of him right under his nose again and again, a natural at improvisation, and most importantly, a cornered animal—he knows that this lie isn’t quite convincing enough to cut it. To almost anyone else, the cracks in his façade would be imperceptible, negligible, but to her they were valuable chinks in the armor.

“You know, the longer the people watching this go without any entertainment…” She trails off deliberately, and even though Ouma doesn’t move a muscle, there must be something involuntary in his face that tells her that she’s struck gold, because she looks right at him. “…The more likely it is that the people running this simulation will start it all over again.”

“Let’s see,” Ouma continues as if he can’t hear her at all, even as his stomach flips over in a way that makes him feel like he might puke. “A simulation… what’s next? Oh, how about reincarnation? Or maybe something more sci-fi, hm? What if we were the only sixteen people left from the human race, sent to repopulate outer space like Noah’s Ark?”

Shirogane-chan raises an eyebrow at his last comment, but by now she is far too committed to a different act to let on that she knows anything about it. “How long do you think it’ll take them to get bored, if you try and break out of here into a simulation-replica of the perfect, unexciting little outside world?”

He’s already been trying for some time not to wonder the exact same thing himself.

It’s a bluff, Ouma reminds himself. She is bluffing. And he knows that, knows that making things up as she goes is the one area of lying in which she excels even more than he does, but it doesn’t change the fact that whether by coincidence or not, everything that she’s saying aligns so perfectly with the hell that he’s experienced too many times to even remember how long it’s been anymore.

“Why do you think they watch this kind of entertainment in the first place? Because it’s just so interesting out there?” Shirogane-chan shakes her head with a frown. “Even in the real world, everything outside this school would only bore you all to death. And in a simulation? They’ll reset this whole thing the moment you make it out there… because there’s just no point in watching something that boring.”

“If you’re gonna lie, at least try not to get all of your ideas from third-rate, two-bit sci-fi plot points,” Ouma advises her, and for the first time in ages he can feel a familiar, sour taste creeping at the back of his throat.

Because everything she was spouting was pure sci-fi, yes—but so was everything that they’d experienced in this school.

Were killer robots and flashlights that could overwrite your memory any more realistic than the idea that this killing game was a simulation someone else could reset at any moment? Was traveling back in time?

He had already experienced one virtual world for himself. Had killed people there. Maybe there was only a very thin line of difference between that world Iruma-chan had modified, and a killing game simulation meant to send its participants to the beginning. Over and over and over again.

“But there might be one way to keep the people who watch this game from getting bored, if you escape this simulation. For a little while, at least.”

Shirogane-chan looks him in the eye, taps a finger against the corner of her mouth, and Ouma knows that by even allowing her to talk on for this long, he’s already fallen into the same exact trap he had helped Akamatsu-chan to avoid earlier.

“Like, if you were to, say… get rid of the big, bad villain who was keeping you trapped in this killing game, and then you escaped to your little simulation version of the outside world. I think the people watching this game might feel like you earned your happy ending then, don’t you think?”

Ouma can smile at her words as though skeptical, act as though they don’t bother him at all, and pretend as though her lies are a weak attempt at best, but he can’t force himself not to hear her in the first place. And he hates her for that, hates anyone who has ever watched this game, hates the part of himself that would even consider the less-than-a-one-percent-chance that anything she said might be true.

Before playing this game for this one, final round he had always felt so much smarter than everyone else, so self-satisfied at the fact that he doubted any information he was presented unless he could confirm it with his own two eyes. His talent, his memories, his friends and loved ones—Ouma Kokichi had doubted anyone and everything, and used to keep that doubt close to his chest like a badge of pride.

So what happened when he encountered a lie that was impossible to ever prove or disprove, no matter how many times he repeated this game? What happened if that lie might involve not only himself, this school, these people trapped here with him—but the outside world and everything past that, too?

“It doesn’t sound so bad, right?” she asks, looking around the room before glancing back at Ouma, as though curious. “I’m sure a lot of you wouldn’t mind the chance to kill me, anyway. And you can rest easier, knowing that’s one less threat to worry about.”

Ouma should not take another life, cannot take another life after the disgust he felt in crossing that line once before, but if he said that he didn’t want to—that he wouldn’t do it, no matter what—that would perhaps be his biggest lie yet.

He’s afraid of what he might do if he lets himself, afraid of what might happen if he doesn’t do it, and so the only thing he can do without making things worse is sneer at her as though thoroughly unimpressed. Shirogane-chan watches him sneer and waits patiently, and while both of them are painfully aware that the other is lying, neither of them can do anything to prove it.

“Shirogane-san, just give up.”

Ouma doesn’t look away, but that’s Saihara-chan’s voice—mercifully firm, without any trace of a stutter.

“I was under the impression that I already had.” Shirogane-chan shrugs again, brushing a few strands of hair back over her shoulder. “I just thought you all might want an out, for a little while. You know, before you all get sent back to the beginning again.”

“No one here is going to kill you, Shirogane-san.” The certainty in the detective’s voice sounds just like Ouma remembers it, in about a dozen school trials that no longer actually happened.

She finally looks away from Ouma himself to stare at Saihara-chan, and then around the rest of the room in turn. “Are you sure about that?” she asks. “Even though it’s just a simulation?”

There’s a current of real anger in Saihara-chan’s voice this time, something bitter and frustrated and sad. “I don’t think it is, and even if that’s true, I don’t care. It’s real enough that I don’t want any part of it.”

Ouma remembers hearing the other boy say something very similar to Monokuma only once, this time around: No one here is going to kill each other over a maybe.

“If you really want to leave, then I guess you can all go see for yourselves,” Shirogane-chan says with a sigh. “You can use the machines in Kiibo’s lab to break though the dome, since the Exisals aren’t here to stop you anymore. Though I’d really rather you just left me out of that.”

Akamatsu-chan speaks up this time, and Ouma doesn’t look at her either but he knows she might be the only other person in this room who can understand how he’s feeling right now. “Sorry, but we’re taking you with us. You’d just kill yourself if we left you here alone, right?”

Shirogane-chan’s silence may as well be an affirmation.

“No matter how you look at it, you just really seem like you want someone to die for this killing game. Even if it’s just you,” Amami-chan notes quietly.

Even Harukawa-chan chimes in, her arms crossed and red eyes narrowed. “If we do get out of here and it turns out you were lying, I bet there might be people willing to tell us more if we keep you with us. So even though you’re a threat, I think it’s worth keeping you alive.”

Ouma knows that something must really, truly be wrong with him if he’s the only one in this room who even considered killing Shirogane-chan just now. Even if it was only for a single, very brief moment.

“Do you really want to do something that cruel to yourselves?” Shirogane-chan asks, and the fact that even now she bothers to feign sympathy sends another spike of nausea running through him. “Just don’t be surprised when you all wind up back here again, sooner or later.”

“I think we’ll take our chances,” Saihara-chan tells her.

By the time all of them are ready to leave the school building, the sun has already come up. They pick their way over the ruined entryway, past the piles of rubble and motionless machines, and make their way into the courtyard—some of them a little hesitantly at first, others at a run.

Saihara can’t blame them. The prospect of leaving is so tenuous, so hard to even imagine after everything they’ve been through that it hardly even feels real. It will still take some time for Iruma-san to fit Kiibo-kun with the machines in his lab necessary to break through the dome, still take time to find their way up there one by one, but those are only minor hurdles compared to everything else that they’ve done.

Some of his classmates are talking amongst themselves as they wait for that final step to be finished, while others are whooping excitedly, sprawling out in the grass.

Even the injured members of their group are looking a lot less dire than before: Yumeno-san tries to hobble around despite her broken leg and Chabashira-san’s frantic protests, and while Momota-kun still hasn’t made any move to clean the blood off his face or his clothes (“Once we get out there, I want ‘em to see me this way, Shuuichi. Serves ‘em right,” he’d said on the way up the stairs) he nonetheless seems to be finally regaining some optimism at the thought that whatever sickness he had might be treatable after all.

A little ways away from everyone else, Shirogane-san stands with her arms at her sides, looking up at the sky as though wishing it would fall down and crush her with its weight.

She wouldn’t get that wish, though. All sixteen of them were alive, even her. Soon enough, they would see the outside world for themselves—would get to make new lives for themselves in that outside world, even if they might not ever align with their old lives.

And even if the outside world was just like Shirogane-san had said, a place where fictional, made-up people had no business being… well, they had gotten very good at breaking the rules as of late.

This would be the last artificial sunrise they would ever need to spend under this dome. For a moment, Saihara is so caught up in that fact—in taking in the way the grass rustled underfoot, the beams filtering through the distant bars, and the sounds of his classmates’ laughing voices—that he almost doesn’t notice they’re one member short.

The moment that he does, he makes a motion to Akamatsu-san to let her know he’s walking somewhere else, and not to worry. Then he slowly meanders his way to the other side of the courtyard, a quiet back garden far removed from the noise and excitement that was taking place in front of the main building.

He finds Ouma-kun sitting cross-legged on the grass with his hands behind his back. Next to him is a concrete slab which, some other time and place, might actually have had something written on it, but in the here-and-now was smooth and blank.

Saihara had thought he might find him loitering somewhere by himself and had simply followed the little feeling tugging at his mind which had led him here, though it wasn’t an area of the school he had ever actually spent any time in.

Ouma-kun must have heard him approach, because despite the fact that Saihara hasn’t even opened his mouth yet, he turns his head to look back and gives him a very small wave.

In that brief instant, the other boy looks almost exactly the way he did when Saihara first met him: too thin and fraying around the edges, fleeting and nearly see-though like a ghost. And so very, very tired, the look of someone exhausted all the way in his bones.

It must have been a trick of the light though, because the two of them had met in a dark and dreary bedroom. Right now, there’s only a gentle, pale blue sky overhead and the morning sunrise illuminating them both, but the words he had meant to say die in Saihara’s throat all the same.

“Hey, Saihara-chan. What brings you all the way out here?” Ouma-kun smiles at him, an easy and open smile nothing at all like his usual grins or leering, twisted smirks. It’s a smile that should be reassuring, but isn’t in the least.

Saihara could take a seat next to him on the grass, or even on the concrete slab, but decides not to. He just keeps standing, frowning as he looks down at the other boy. “You know why I’m here, Ouma-kun. We’re leaving soon.”

“Ah. Yeah, not me.” Ouma-kun smiles again, blows at a loose strand of hair falling into his face the way a child might. “I’m staying right here, actually.”

“You’re joking,” Saihara says, but he isn’t. He isn’t, and Saihara knows it.

Ouma-kun looks back at him, and this time he knows for sure that it’s not a trick of the light, because the exhaustion is so prominent in each and every line of his face, like someone who had been aged far beyond his years. “I’m tired, Saihara-chan. I’m… really, really tired.”

“Ouma-kun…”

“Look, I’m not trying to be the center of the universe again. Really, I’m not. I’m just tired in a way I don’t think you could ever understand.”

Saihara doesn’t need the other boy to tell him that, because even if the rest of them were tired for a myriad of different reasons, Ouma-kun looks tired in a different way altogether. Tired in a ‘might-never-get-up-again’ sort of way.

“You can rest once we’re out of here,” Saihara tells him. “But for now, you’re coming with us. We’re all leaving together, remember?”

Ouma-kun smiles back at him, and Saihara only just now realizes that there are tears pricking at the corners of the other boy’s eyes. He’s only ever seen him cry once before, dry and ugly sobs that had wracked his entire body, but this was something different altogether. “And what if we leave, and I rest, and I make a nice little life for myself, and then someday I have to do it all over again, huh?”

Saihara finally decides to sit down on the grass next to him after all. “Is this about… Shirogane-san? You were the one who said she was lying.”

“Yeah, and what was the alternative? Let everyone else start killing each other again because they thought she was telling the truth?” The other boy laughs without even moving to wipe the tears from his eyes.

“There’s no way to prove any of what she said was real.”

“Even if we go outside, there’s no way to prove any of it was wrong, either.”

Saihara tries to imagine it: the idea that they might get out of this place and spend weeks and months and even years readjusting to some other way of life, trying to be happy, only for some unseen, shapeless people to one day reset the button and force them to go through the same thing all over again.

Once the dome was broken open, many of the claims that Shirogane-san had made (this time, as well as all of the others) would be easy enough to verify with their own two eyes: claims that the outside world was inhospitable, that it was a utopia, that it was full of other people being hunted for their Super High School Level Talents.

But what about the claims that went beyond what you could see and hear and touch for yourself? Even if ninety-nine percent of everything she had said was a lie, or contradicted itself, if there was even a one percent chance that all of the things beyond this school might also just be part of some game, or simulation, or story with a timer that would one day reset itself…

He could understand why even that infinitesimally small chance would terrify Ouma Kokichi.

But even if the whole world was a lie…

“Does that really matter?” Saihara asks, stretching his legs out on the grass. “Would it really change anything that we’ve already been through?”

Ouma-kun actually laughs, a soft and disbelieving sound. “You’ve gotta be kidding me. Saihara-chan, don’t tell me you’re about to give me another speech about the power of believing in people. It was fun the first time, but I’m tired of that too, you know.”

“It’s not like that. I’m just not going to let you stay here after everything we’ve been through together. You’re coming with me, no matter what.”

The smile finally slips off the other boy’s face at that. “And what, I’m supposed to go with you because it’s cute that you’re butting into my business? Everyone’s alive, Saihara-chan. That’s more than enough.”

“You’re scared of waking up one day and having to start all over, right?” Saihara asks. “So… come with me.”

“I already told you, everyone’s alive. It’s fine if you just go. What more could you want?”

“’I’m not asking you to stay with everyone once we’re out of here, not if you don’t want to. I’m just asking you to come with me.”

“Look,” Ouma-kun says, and there’s just a hint of annoyance in his tone this time, “you’re a great friend, Saihara-chan. Stellar, the best I ever had. But I’m too tired to move—”

Saihara interrupts, because he knows the other boy won’t let him get a word in edge-wise at this point if he doesn’t. “I wasn’t really asking as a friend.”

He drops those words into the conversation at last, and Ouma-kun’s face goes blank. Saihara would normally feel embarrassed (he is embarrassed, on some level), but much like Ouma-kun himself, he’s just too tired to care much about something like that right now.

“You don’t go through… whatever the hell it is that we’ve been through, and come out of it just being friends,” he adds, feeling just a little annoyed himself when it’s clear that Ouma-kun still has no idea what to say.

How long had he been aware of that growing, building pressure between himself and Ouma-kun? He’d definitely been aware of it back in the classroom, when the other boy had come barging in with his wild claims and schemes and prevented him from giving up right then and there, but there’d been other times, too.

Pushing away, pulling closer. Push and pull, run and chase. Just how long had they been doing this old song and dance? Saihara might not be able to remember everything as clearly as Ouma-kun could, but there was plenty that he did remember, if only faintly. Bloody fingers, and bandages, and warm, soft hands.

Saihara is tired of the fact that one of them always has to pull away. He grabs the other boy’s hand, cupping it over the grass.

It’s warm, and soft, and there’s a strong, beating pulse. Not even remotely faint, or fleeting, or ghostlike. When he squeezes that hand in his own, Ouma-kun squeezes back as though out of reflex.

“…See?” Saihara tells him. “That feels real enough to me.”

Ouma-kun continues to stare at him, blank-faced and appraising, and very, very slowly he lets down the walls enough to show a hint of uncertainty. “If you really mean that…” He trails off, shakes his head, and starts again. “If you really mean it, I just want you to know… that I am going to be tremendously hard to deal with.”

“You’ve kind of already been hard to deal with for a while now.”

The other boy lifts his free hand off the grass and punches him on the arm without hesitation. “That’s very rude of you,” he says, narrowing his eyes, “but I’m being serious here.”

Saihara winces. “I am, too. I just mean… look, I haven’t exactly been easy to deal with either. A-And I probably won’t be either, after… all of this.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But that’s all the more reason you can’t just stay here, Ouma-kun. You can’t just go right back to doing everything by yourself, now that it’s all over. And besides…”

Ouma-kun’s hand twitches a bit, but he doesn’t move to pull it away from Saihara’s. “…Besides?”

“…I want to know more about you,” Saihara tells him, and because his cheeks are finally starting to burn, he turns and looks away—back up at the dome, the sky, the buildings, anywhere but the boy sitting next to him on the grass. “Not you in a killing game, or some other life-or-death situation. Just you, Ouma-kun.”

He knew a million different facets of what felt like a million different versions of Ouma-kun: mischievous and playful, cold and calculating, apathetic and callous… compassionate and warm and scared to see anyone get hurt.

Saihara feels as though by now he must know Ouma-kun better than almost anyone he had ever met, close enough to work together, to trust each other, to stop a killing game together.

And that’s why he also knows it isn’t even enough to scratch the surface.

There’s a sudden, deafening sound of crashing glass in the distance, and when Saihara looks up and sees the hole that Kiibo-kun has torn through the far-center of the dome it’s a sight almost too dazzling to behold.

From this far away, the hole looks no bigger than the size of his hand, but the glimpse of the sky (the real sky) peeking through it is bright, and blue, and beautiful, a stark contrast to the washed-out colors from only moments before.

Ouma-kun stares up at the hole in the dome as well, dumbstruck, and as Saihara turns to look at him, he realizes that he has never seen the other boy surrounded by so much light. Not lamplight in a crowded library or a dim bedroom, not in the shadow of a phone booth, not with the setting sun to his back and casting shadows on his face in a dark and overgrown hallway.

Not harsh, fluorescent, artificial light but real, beautiful sunlight.

“Okay,” Ouma-kun says quietly.

“Okay?” Saihara repeats the word back, not bothering to move his hand even when tears begin to prick at the corners of his eyes, too.

“I’ll go with you. I already decided to trust you a long time ago, anyway.” Ouma-kun’s voice sounds small, and quiet, but no longer quite so tired. “But if I do, then you have to do something for me, too.”

That sounds fair enough, so Saihara just nods. “Okay,” he says. “Anything you want.”

“Just… stay by my side, okay?”

And Saihara does.

Chapter Text

Ouma Kokichi—

—wakes up in a locker.

The darkness presses in around him from every angle, preventing him from seeing anything. But he knows this darkness better even than he knows himself, knows it like the back of his hand, like his oldest and most familiar friend.

Ouma wants to open his mouth—to scream, to call for help from someone, anyone. But he can’t move an inch, and his voice sticks in his throat as though the darkness has crawled in there too, smothering him, crushing him.

There is nothing, nothing, nothing in this void, and without being able to move or yell it’s difficult for Ouma to tell where he ends and the locker begins. There’s only darkness and the metal wall of the locker at his back, cold and unfeeling and ready to throw him into this killing game one more time.

The metal wall of the locker. The cold, metallic slab of a mechanical press, as inexorable and merciless as the darkness surrounding him. Maybe the two were interchangeable; maybe they were one and the same. Maybe he would lie on that cold, metal slab once again and when it all came crashing down, it would chew him up and spit him back into this locker until he could no longer count the number of times it had happened.

And he can’t, can’t, can’t go through all of that even one more time, let alone repeat it until the mind-numbing boredom has ground his sense of self into dust—

—and the moment that he finally manages to jerk his arm forward, reaching frantically for the door of the metal locker in front of him, Ouma instead finds himself sitting bolt upright in bed, gasping for air. There’s a familiar, throbbing ache just above his right eye, and a sour, parched taste in the back of his throat: all the usual signs of an oncoming migraine.

For a moment Ouma just stays where he is, ignoring the cold sheen of sweat sticking to his clothes and his skin as his chest slowly rises and falls. The room is dark and quiet, to the point where he could almost imagine it was some other lightless bedroom, from some other time.

The images don’t quite align, though. Whenever he wakes up from one of these nightmares, Ouma always ignores the pounding in his head and tries to go through a mental list of all those differences one-by-one, like a child playing spot-the-difference with two pictures in a coloring book.

The room he knew before may as well have been a tomb, a crypt, devoid of light and life and any sound but that of his own breathing. Not this one. This room is dark and quiet, yes, but only in the normal way—the sort of darkness punctuated by street lights flickering through the gap between the curtains, by notifications lighting up the screen of his cell phone, by the occasional blue flicker of his laptop as it sits in sleep mode on the desk across the room.

Most importantly, in this room that sense of dreadful, looming quiet is broken up by the sound of one more person’s breathing besides his own—calm and gentle breathing that nevertheless betrays the fact that the other person in the room is now just as awake as he is.

Ouma reaches out beside him and takes Saihara Shuuichi's hand, squeezing it like a lifeline. Even if nothing else in his head, or his memories, or the entire damn world was real, that hand was real. Real, warm, and right by his side. Just like he’d asked, one year ago.

Saihara-chan squeezes back, and when Ouma finally inhales another shaky breath and manages to look over at the other side of the bed, the other boy looks back at him steadily. It’s been several months since the last time Ouma had woken him up with one of these nightmares, but Saihara-chan doesn’t seem the least bit surprised or confused.

He must have guessed a long time ago that the nightmares were still happening, even when Ouma had long since stopped telling him about it. How annoyingly like a detective.

But thankfully there is no pity in Saihara-chan's gaze either, just a look of calm and quiet understanding. And other, more embarrassing things that Ouma doesn’t want to put a name to.

Right now, the only thing that matters in this moment is that Ouma Kokichi is not in a locker. Not in his dark and empty bedroom from a lifetime ago, and not lying on a mechanical press waiting to die either.

Whether it’s a lie or not, he’s alive—and the building migraine behind his right temple sure as hell feels real enough to hurt.

They sit in silence for several minutes, and then Saihara-chan sits up, pulls back the covers, and turns on the light next to him on the bedside table. “I’ll go put on some tea,” he says with a sigh.

 ---

“Okay,” Saihara-chan tells him, “let’s take it from the top. Talk to me.”

Ouma sits across from him at their tiny kitchen table, his hands clasped around a mug of green tea. Nothing fancy: just plain and earthy, nearly hot enough to scald his throat. Exactly the way Saihara-chan always likes it, though he can’t really say it’s much to his taste.

He ignores the detective’s request, much the same way that he’s ignoring the near-imperceptible trembling of his own hands. Then he takes a sip—before promptly wrinkling his nose in protest at the distinct lack of sugar.

“Saihara-chan, your tea sucks. Consider it a kindness that you’re finding out from me and not someone else later in your life, where it could really bite you in the ass.”

With the air of someone whose patience is being tested, Saihara-chan pushes the sugar bowl (already on the table, of course, where it's been the whole time) a little further in his direction.

Ouma ignores the gesture altogether and takes another sip of hot, unsweetened tea. It’s not really that bad—if anything, his tastes run a little too sweet, and Saihara-chan is the normal one. Despite the lack of sugar, the liquid runs down the course of his throat and warms him from the inside out, gently easing away the remaining tension from his migraine.

While Saihara-chan had been busy preparing the tea, Ouma had popped down a migraine pill and jumped into the shower, standing motionless under the too-hot water until the throbbing in his head finally began to ease up a bit. Right now, with his hair still damp and a nice, hot mug of tea between his fingers, he could almost convince himself that he feels human again. Almost, but not quite.

And he could say as much to Saihara-chan, too—could thank him for the tea, for his patience, for his kindness, the way that he has thanked him at least a thousand times by now. But Ouma doesn’t have it in him to be honest just yet. Today being what it is, he decides that he’s allowed to be as petty as he wants.

“From the top,” Saihara-chan prompts him again, cutting through the distracted tumult of his thoughts.

Ouma grips the ceramic mug a little harder. “Fine, whatever. We’re all still stuck in a simulation and I’m going to wake up in that goddamn locker again any day now.”

“That’s what your nightmare was about?”

“It’s always the same nightmare,” Ouma snaps. “But you already knew that much.”

They’ve already been through this routine too, at least a dozen times before. In the first few weeks after leaving the dome, it got particularly bad: despite the fact that he wanted nothing more than to lie down and rest for just once in his life, Ouma couldn’t manage to sleep for more than a few hours straight without seeing the inside of that locker on the backs of his eyelids.

Seeing it as though it was right in front of him, feeling the sting of cold metal at his back, waking up drenched in sweat and gasping for air, while Saihara-chan had to ask him what was wrong at least three times before Ouma even heard him. Rinse, wash, repeat ad infinitum.

Eventually, he moved past it. Or he tried to convince himself that he did. If nothing else, the constant barrage of nightmare after nightmare grew a little less frequent, and he got better about not screaming himself awake whenever the memories of that killing game did visit him in his sleep.

Ouma still doesn’t know how to feel about the fact that Saihara-chan never really bought the whole act. There are too many different emotions clamoring in his chest right now, all of them contradictory: annoyance and appreciation, resentment and relief. And love. Always love, lurking in his thoughts, sometimes jolting to the forefront of his mind whenever their eyes met or their fingertips brushed.

“Don’t you think if Shirogane-san had been telling the truth, we’d have already seen a reset by now? I mean, it’s been… a year already,” Saihara-chan says gently.

He’s well aware of what day it is and how much time has passed, even without the detective reminding him. Hands still trembling, Ouma downs the rest of his green tea and sets the mug down on the table, a little harder than he meant to. But not hard enough to break it. Never hard enough to let the cracks show.

Finally, Ouma shrugs. “Maybe no one’s gotten bored enough yet. I mean, the trial’s today, isn’t it? That should keep the circus entertained a little bit longer. They always did love a good trial.”

The word trial sounds strange and wrong in his mouth, referring to anything other than the hell they used to be put through. Trials were for sizing up your fellow lying classmates and sentencing one of them to a public execution, for cramming as much mistrust and paranoia as possible into a single room, always with the rotting stench of death overlaying it all.

But that’s not the case anymore. Today, the word trial refers only to the opening trial procedures for Team Danganronpa representative Shirogane Tsumugi—and the motion to move forward with trying Team Danganronpa itself.

Ouma would love nothing more than for all of this to be none of his business—to not give a damn about dry and lengthy legal proceedings that would normally only bore him to tears—but unfortunately, it is. And even when he’s done his best to stay within the confines of this tiny little one-bedroom apartment that has become the new center of his and Saihara-chan’s world, he hasn’t been able to ignore all the other little reminders. Not the glimpses of news headlines on the television whenever he comes into the living room, nor the trending notices when he scrolls social media on his phone in the dead of night with all the lights off.

What’s more, he knows that as stubbornly as he’s tried not to make this trial any of his business, Saihara-chan has done just the opposite, throwing himself directly into the line of fire by offering to go on-stand as a witness. Today will be long and hard for him no matter what happens… and being woken at the crack of dawn like this can only make things more difficult for him. Ouma is well aware of that fact. Making things more difficult is and always has been his specialty, after all.

"Mm. It's today, yeah." The words come so easily, as though the detective had only just noticed—even though they both know that's a dirty, dirty lie. "But let's not worry about that just yet. Tell me more about what’s on your mind."

As usual, Saihara Shuuichi carries the weight of everyone else’s pain and suffering on his slender shoulders, even when it would be so much easier if he averted his eyes and stuck his head in the sand, and Ouma both hates and loves him for it.

Without the mug of tea to occupy him anymore, his eyes instead dart to the clock on his phone: six-thirty in the morning. It’s a time of day that seems like a lie, early enough to feel like they still have all the time in the world while never actually being the case. Pretty soon the sun will come up, all the boring little people in their boring little apartments will start their boring little morning commutes, and Saihara-chan will leave for the trial alongside them.

Ouma could stop that from happening, if he really wanted to. For just a moment, he considers throwing the mug against the wall as hard as he can until the ceramic shatters into a thousand tiny pieces, considers kicking over the chair, the couch, anything and everything in his reach. He wants to scream, wants to shake Saihara-chan by the shoulders and ask why he even bothers going through the terrible, masochistic form of self-flagellation that is bearing everyone else’s problems, but most especially that is putting up with him on a daily basis.

He wants to go back to bed and knock himself too unconscious to dream anymore.

He considers all of these options… and for Saihara-chan’s sake, he chooses none of them. Five minutes tick by on the clock of his phone, and Ouma bites his tongue, grits his teeth, and lets a little bit of the truth leak out of him. “I’m so tired of being scared shitless every day. Aren’t you scared? How can you even stand throwing yourself into other people’s problems every day?”

“…I am.” The dark circles under Saihara-chan’s eyes attest to the fact that last night was only one long and sleepless night out of many. Whatever it is that the other boy sees on the backs of his eyes when he dreams, it’s probably not much better than his own nightmares. “I think some part of me is always scared, at this point. But I can’t just pretend that none of it happened, either.”

Pretend that none of it happened? Ouma hardly even knows who he’d be now if it hadn’t. Did Ouma Kokichi even really exist, without a dark bedroom and a locker and a killing game to spit him back into? Did he really want to exist, when he got down to it?

“I don’t…” It’s such a stupid, stupid concern that he hardly even knows how to put it into words. Ouma stops, swallows, starts again. “I don’t even know if it’s just the idea that it’s all a simulation that scares me anymore. I think the opposite scares me just as much.”

“The opposite?”

The words are thick and heavy, a solid lump in his throat, but Ouma forces them out anyway. “If all of this is real, then I’m scared of that, too. I’m getting—getting too used to it. To all of this. And I don’t know how to feel about it.”

Saihara-chan closes his eyes in thought before finally draining the remainder of his own mug. He taps a finger on the kitchen table once… twice. Then he opens his eyes again and says, “It’s not as boring as you thought it would be, is it?”

It’s not. Maybe it should be, but it isn’t. For the past year, despite the nightmares and the memories and the scars on his mind and body, Ouma Kokichi has been living a perfectly normal, mundane, everyday life. In this boring little one-bedroom apartment, with their boring little kitchen table barely big enough to fit two people, and with their boring little balcony filled with boring little plants that he has recently taken to overseeing.

Even worse, as of late he’s discovered that he likes it. Likes all of this. And the more he likes it, the more it terrifies him. If anyone should be prone to fits of boredom, it should be him. He’s the first person who he thought would be twisted enough to grow tired of this routine, mundane, everyday life. Saihara-chan has never bored him, sure, is in fact still indecipherable to him and beyond his ability to figure out even after all this time, but surely everything else should have grown stale and predictable and boring a long time ago, right?

It hasn’t. He likes it. He wants these times to continue, wants to keep seeing what each new day brings, and now not only does the threat of someone else slamming the reset button on his life loom over his head like Damocles’ goddamn sword, but the alternative option looms just as large on the horizon, if not larger: sooner or later, he’ll have to actually come out of this apartment and start living again.

“…I thought I’d be bored by now,” Ouma agrees, and though the admission comes from him like pulling teeth there is something almost cathartic about actually saying it aloud. “Wouldn’t that just be the most fucked up, perfect little cherry on top? The guy who repeats the killing game on loop gets bored the moment we finally get out of there.”

“Ouma-kun…”

“I mean, what a sicko you’d have to be, right? To miss something like that, on some level?” Ouma has always considered the possibility that such a part of him existed, long before they made it to the outside world. He had never quite forgotten the sadistic thrill of lacing all his words with poison, of kicking the rest of his classmates where it hurt whenever possible. “I bet Shirogane-chan would just love it, if I was the first one to come crawling back after everything.”

“Ouma-kun,” Saihara-chan says again, and this time his voice is firmer as he cuts through the rising panic that Ouma feels. “There are a lot of things Shirogane-san didn’t account for, or else we wouldn’t have gotten out in the first place. And you didn’t enjoy it. You just told me yourself, you’re… not bored.”

“How is that even possible, though? How the hell am I able to get used to early morning cups of tea and watering plants when I thrived in a game like that?”

“You never thrived in there, Ouma-kun. The reason you’re not bored out here is because… we’re healing.”

Healing. Ouma could almost laugh—is pretty sure he would have laughed if he’d heard that word a year ago, six months ago, two weeks ago. But he realizes that he so badly wants it to be true, and for the first time since they sat down, Ouma stops fiddling with his phone or his empty mug and meets Saihara-chan’s eye instead.

The other boy looks back at him, and although the hollows under his eyes still look dark and weary, there’s no sign of regret, or disgust. No sign that he might suddenly disappear, if Ouma lets down his walls a little more. Maybe he doesn’t regret it because he really is telling the truth, and they’re both healing. Together.

“If you want the truth, I never really thought you’d get bored out here. I guess I thought… it might scare you away.” The detective presses on and while his words are gentle, his hand is even softer when Ouma reaches across the table and takes it in his own. “I meant it, you know, when I said I’m always scared, too. When we first came here, I really… really thought that maybe one day I’d wake up, and you’d just be gone.”

Ouma can’t even deny that he considered it, and more than once. Despite the fact that he’d been loath to talk to anyone besides Saihara-chan or show his face anywhere public since they got here, every now and then he felt the urge to venture out of the apartment—for groceries, for fresh air, sometimes just for a walk. On those occasions, it had crossed his mind plenty of times that he could just… go. Somewhere else. Anywhere else.

Unlike Saishuu Academy, there is no cage to keep him trapped here.

His fingers twinge, and he tightens them around Saihara-chan’s hand. There’s no cage, no dome, but he had still never found it in him to actually leave. Perhaps the simple truth of the matter was that he had never wanted to leave.

“I’m glad I stayed,” he says. This time, the words don’t even cost him anything. Maybe he does have it in him to be honest, just this once.

There’s something like the faintest, smallest trace of a smile on Saihara-chan’s face. “I know.”

“You know?” Ouma blanches at that, but he still doesn’t let go of the other boy’s hand. “What do you mean, you know?”

“No offense Ouma-kun, but it’s been a whole year since then, and I’m pretty sure I know you a lot better than I used to. I know that if you didn’t actually want to stay, you wouldn’t be here right now.” There’s so much certainty in the other boy’s voice right now that if Ouma weren’t so deeply embarrassed, he’d almost be offended. “So… I’m glad you stayed, too.”

“What, so you’ve got me all figured out by now? One year was enough to unravel the great mystery of Ouma Kokichi?”

“I didn’t say that. Just, you know, most of the mystery.” The detective no longer even has the decency to look ashamed of himself, saying something so embarrassing. “Besides… if you’d left, I would’ve just had to find you again. I’ve got a promise to keep, after all.”

“Oh, well. I’d hate to make a liar out of you. There’s nothing worse on this earth than dishonesty, after all!” Ouma wrinkles his nose, feigning disgust for the second time in this conversation, but there’s a lightness in his chest that he hasn’t felt in ages.

When was the last time he was able to breathe this easy? Probably more than a year ago, since that one last, beautiful moment when Kiibo blasted open the dome and bathed them all in a wave of blue.

Saihara-chan brings his hand closer, leaves a kiss on the back of it that warms Ouma from the inside-out almost as much as the tea. Then the other boy tries to stand up, no doubt to pick up the mugs and start washing them—but Ouma won’t let him. He’s up and on his feet, snatching the mugs out of reach and heading to the sink before the detective can protest.

The water from the sink is almost too hot to touch, much like the shower he had earlier, or the tea itself. Or the kiss from a few moments ago. Ouma ignores the heat and scrubs at the bottom of the closest mug, tries to keep his tone nonchalant, and says, “It won’t kill you to get some rest for a change. Y’know, for someone who likes to preach to me about it so much, you sure like to do everything on your own a lot, too.”

With all his attention focused on the sink, he can sense, rather than see that same, tiny smile on Saihara-chan’s face. “Point taken. I’ll make sure to do that, later.”

“I guess that’s why I’ll have to come with you, today. To the trial.”

There’s a pause, filled only with the sound of running water from the sink, and Ouma doesn’t have to turn around to sense the surprise that his words have caused. He keeps washing the mugs, despite the fact that they’re both more than clean enough by now.

Then, there's the sound of a chair being pushed aside, and suddenly he can feel the warmth of the other boy at his back, solid and real and closer than any other human being Ouma has ever let past his walls before. They stand like that, hugging in the kitchen while the sky outside the window gradually begins to brighten.

“Ouma-kun… thank you.” Deprived of the chance to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders alone, Saihara-chan lets down his walls, too. “I… I really could use the help.”

Ouma doesn’t turn around, doesn’t meet the other boy’s eye—but he doesn’t pull away from the contact between them, either. Instead, he leans into it deliberately and says, “I know.”

—

The press flock to both him and Saihara-chan the moment the two of them approach the front steps of the courthouse, their cameras flickering and snapping around them like a swarm of insects. And just like when he sees a bug, Ouma feels a deep-seated urge to swat them down.

Now wouldn’t that just be the perfect headline, if he started breaking cameras left and right? Crazy Reclusive Ex-Killing Game Contestant Attacks Paparazzi Unprovoked. As much as he usually likes the limelight, he’ll have to pass on that one—it’d just be giving them the sort of scandal that they wanted. And whether he’s in a killing game or out of it, being contrary is still second nature to him.

Their surprise does make sense, though. After all, this is the first time he’s let himself be seen in the public eye since they had all left the dome. Rumors about him have sprung up on the internet aplenty in the last year, the public’s curiosity fanned along by his notable absence.

His personal favorite among them was the niche-but-persistent little conspiracy theory that he’d died shortly after they all escaped the school, and that was why almost no one claimed to have seen him since. He liked that one enough that he sometimes even encouraged it on his various burner accounts, much to Saihara-chan’s annoyance.

Other than that one though, the rest of the rumors were too boring to be worth paying attention to. But every now and then there was still the occasional obsessed fan who started a new thread pointing out that everything had gone strange in Danganronpa Season Fifty-three since the very beginning, when Ouma Kokichi had holed himself up in his room and refused to come out.

Some people had even speculated on whether his refusal to make appearances since the game had ended was actually some sort of publicity stunt, recreating the same events that he’d used in the game to capture everyone’s interest. Hardy-har.

Danganronpa Season Fifty-three… the public’s favorite, disturbing little reality show. It was more or less what Ouma himself had suspected since the second or third loop: that the whole thing was some sort of game being played out for an audience, with necessary rules and steps that had to be followed. So many lives had been spilled in that bloodbath (were in fact spilled every year) for little more than a tacky bread-and-circus that fit between commercial breaks.

Ouma doesn’t know whether this answer repulses him more or less than the possibility put forward by Shirogane-chan. Just because he’d already suspected as much hadn’t made it any less revolting to step out into the outside world and realize that every private detail of their conflicts and struggles had been slapped up on a screen for easy consumer entertainment. The people who had welcomed them with open arms as celebrities were the same ones who had wanted to see them tear each other apart for sport.

Well… some of them were, anyway. Not everyone from the outside world was a lost cause, as it turned out, or else this little trial they were attending today would’ve never made it to court. Public opinion was actually pretty split after this latest so-called “season,” which had finally knocked Danganronpa’s popularity into a decline and sparked a discussion about whether the show should even be allowed to continue or not. Even some of the long-time fans were on the fence about the “controversy” of the way the latest season had ended, and whether the show had outlived its entertainment value or not.

On the one hand, the show’s detractors argued about effects like psychological trauma, the harm of normalizing real-life televised violence, and the moral implications of a show that preyed mostly on high school students too young and ignorant to read the fine print when it came to signing their memories and lives away.

On the other hand, most of the supporters who had actually enjoyed all the twists and turns of their little escape from Saishuu Academy claimed “no harm, no foul,” since this new season was the first instance where no one had actually died. A stupid fucking argument on multiple points, not least of all the fact that Ouma still remembered dying plenty of times in there.

The more he considers both options, the more he’s forced to come to terms with the fact that Shirogane-chan had probably been telling the truth. The outside world, the fan speculation, Team Danganronpa—none of it can explain why he repeated that game so many times, or the miracle that let them all escape it together.

If it was all a simulation, then that would wrap up everything up nice and neatly: none of it was real, and the audience didn’t care what happened to them because they weren’t real. Never mind the existential horror of not knowing when his entire life might be reset at any moment; right now, Ouma could almost find the simulation idea preferable to believing that people could ever want a show like this to exist in real-life.

But whether it was all a simulation or the worst reality show ever conceived, Ouma had been there. Had lived and died through it, and finally come out of it intact, if a little worse for wear. If anyone should be here to see the beginning of the end, it should be him. After all, no matter what the truth was, he still knew one thing for an absolute fact: he wanted this entire goddamn killing game to burn to the ground.

Mercifully, the cameras and vultures clamoring for interviews aren’t actually allowed inside the courtroom. It’s hardly what he’d call a safe haven, but it at least allows both of them a moment to breathe.

Ouma sneers and yanks the cap off his head at the first opportunity. “Never thought I’d be the one wearing this old, ugly thing,” he says. “Too bad it didn’t do me any good.”

“You know, you don’t have to call it ugly, since you were the one who asked to borrow it,” Saihara-chan points out, his fingers moving deftly to unbutton his jacket before he slings it over one arm. The early autumn weather outside was cold enough to leave a chill, but it’s almost stuffy inside the courthouse.

“Yes, I do. Normally I’d say I could make anything look cute, but this hat is beyond saving, Saihara-chan. I think I’ll need another shower, once we get home.”

These days, Ouma was fine wearing just about anything—as long as it wasn’t white, of course. But today he had deliberately dressed down for the occasion instead, clad in an oversized sweatshirt and jeans. Just before they’d left the apartment, he’d asked Saihara-chan if he happened to have a hat he could borrow… in the hopes that it might dissuade the exact sort of scenario they’d run into at the entrance.

As though reading his mind, the other boy gives him a small, half-apologetic smile. “They would’ve recognized me anyway, even if I’d worn one, too. They’ve, uh… gotten pretty good at spotting me from a mile away.”

Ouma wrinkles his nose again. “No wonder this whole get-up was a bust. If they recognize you at a glance, then of course they’re going to recognize me when I come in with you. You could’ve mentioned that a bit sooner, don’t you think?”

Saihara-chan clears his throat, and although he tries to keep his face neutral there’s still an almost sanctimonious air to his words. “You know… maybe if you actually left the apartment with me a little more often, you’d have known what to expect.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m getting rusty so rub it in, why don’t you? I bet you just wanted to see me wearing that ugly-ass hat for once, anyway.” Neither of them mentions it aloud, but Ouma knows perfectly well that the detective probably just hadn’t wanted to risk putting an early end to his decision to step outside for a change. “Hey, you got your wish, so I hope you’re happy with yourself.”

“Well, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t at least a little amusing…”

“Still,” Ouma says, twirling the hat on his index finger as he examines the faded stripes on the side, “I didn’t think it’d be the same hat. Why’d you hang on to this old thing, anyway?”

There’s a pause, and Saihara-chan lingers over some of the papers he brought with him to make his statement before meeting his eye. “There’s a reason, but… um, I’ll tell you about it later. Okay?”

Ouma feels nothing but the truth in that gaze, hears the weight of meaning in the other boy’s words, and decides to believe him. As always. “Fair enough,” he says with a shrug.

Only a few minutes remain until the proceedings begin, and even though Saihara-chan will probably be one of the first witnesses called to take the stand, they still need to take their seats until then. Ouma lets his fingers linger against the detective’s a little longer than usual as they scan the gallery for a place to sit—and then he pauses as several familiar faces in the crowd meet his eye.

The recognition hasn’t even had a chance to set in completely before one of those faces comes barreling towards him at full speed, towering head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd. Ouma considers trying to make a run for it for one brief moment, resigns himself to the fact that escape is futile, and just barely manages to brace himself before Gonta comes crashing into him and picks him up off the floor with a force that nearly cracks all of his bones.

“Ouma-kun, you came! Gonta and the others weren’t sure if you were actually going to turn up today!”

“Of course I came.” Ouma somehow manages to squeeze those words out, despite the fact that his internal organs feel as though they’re being smushed somewhere against his windpipe. Maybe all those conspiracy theories that he’d died after leaving the game were about to come true after all. “Saihara-chan dragged me here, on threat of death and pain and torture.”

That actually gets Gonta to loosen his grip, though he’s still holding him a good few inches off the floor. “Ouma-kun, it’s not nice to tell lies about Saihara-kun. He’s been working so hard lately, you know,” he says with a frown.

Oh-ho? Ouma’s pretty sure a gag like that would’ve gone right over Gonta’s head in the past, but maybe it wasn’t so surprising that the entomologist was a little less gullible since he’d last seen him. A lot could change in a year, after all.

“You know, I’ve tried telling that to Ouma-kun plenty of times but he never seems to listen…” Saihara-chan says, sighing. “But that’s okay, since I know he’s only lying right now to cover up how much he missed everyone else.”

Ouma throws the other boy a pointedly unamused stare before quickly wriggling his way out of Gonta’s loosened grip. “Alright, alright, my bad,” he admits, thankful when his feet finally find purchase on the floor again. “He didn’t threaten to torture me to get me to come here, he just promised to buy me a pony or whatever.”

“Really?” Gonta’s eyes widen—less gullible or not, he was still naïve at heart. “Wow, Saihara-kun, that’s so nice of you!”

“Of course he’s nice, ‘cause Saihara-chan’s a real gentleman.” Ouma dusts off his sweatshirt before throwing a mocking little wave at the detective. “My knight in shining armor on a white horse—or, y’know, that’s what he thinks he is.”

Unlike so many times before, Saihara-chan doesn’t sputter, or blush, or even react much, other than to arch one skeptical eyebrow—though that was fun too, in its own way. “If that were true, then wouldn’t it be my horse? Am I supposed to be buying a pony for myself?”

“What kind of monster would buy a pony for themselves and not share?” Ouma asks.

By this point Gonta looks completely and utterly lost, but from her seat in the gallery nearby, Akamatsu-chan seems completely unsurprised by all the commotion. She waves both him and Saihara-chan over with a smile on her face, patting the empty space on the wooden bench beside her as though she’d been expecting them both.

Ouma accepts the invitation, but rolls his eyes all the same even as he squeezes his way past her in order to take a seat. “So much for no one knowing if I would turn up or not. God, you people suck the fun out of everything.”

Akamatsu-chan puts a hand on Saihara-chan’s shoulder when he sits down next to her, full of unspoken reassurances and kindness, and then she shoots a sly smile Ouma’s way as well. “Maybe some of the others weren’t sure, but I knew you’d show.”

Spend an ungodly amount of time with them in the same killing game on loop, and suddenly they all think they know you. “Does anyone else want to rub it in, that I have a soft, bleeding heart and I’m too nosy for my own good? Who’s next, Momota-chan?”

Her smile softens a little. “Momota-kun’s at his physical therapy, today. But he’d definitely rub it in if he could.”

Physical therapy. Right. Considering just how many appointments and scans and surgeries that Momota-chan had been through for his lungs, maybe it was a small miracle that he was already recovered enough to attend physical therapy only a year later.

Saihara-chan had filled him in about the updates in Momota-chan’s health situation periodically as they occurred, but Ouma hadn’t realized how on-going the would-be astronaut’s progress still was, or that it might keep him from attending the trial today. Maybe this too was one of those things he would’ve already seen coming if he’d ‘left the apartment a little more often.’

It makes sense, though. Unlike him, most of his former classmates probably had lives of their own by now, and plenty of better things to do—jobs and hobbies and all that fun stuff. He wouldn’t be surprised if several of them simply couldn’t make it to today’s trial… or if they hadn’t wanted to come.

“That’s just totally unfair,” Ouma says, throwing his hands behind his head. “I force myself to come all the way here and then I find out that lucky bastard gets to skip? I hope whoever’s in charge of his therapy is putting him through the wringer.”

There’s a small scoff from behind him, and then a sudden voice speaks up. “Trust me, they probably are. God knows he’s been skipping out on his exercise routines for a while now.”

Ouma is only mildly surprised when he turns around to see Harukawa-chan, situated close enough in the row directly behind the rest of them that she must have heard most of the conversation. A lifetime ago, she might’ve tried to murder him for making the same joke, but now she only looks dryly amused. Her once-long hair is much shorter now, a sleek cut that only comes down to her chin at most, but he’d still recognize her anywhere.

He can hardly imagine her going to a salon to get her hair done. Maybe she’d chopped it all off herself? It’s easy to picture her grabbing the scissors and hacking it all off in an impulsive, spontaneous need for change—but he’s not going to ask if that was what she had done to her face.

“Are my ears playing tricks on me, or was that the first time you’ve ever actually laughed at one of my jokes, Harukawa-chan?” he asks, quirking an eyebrow. “What, is the end of the world at hand?” Y’know, again? he leaves unspoken.

“It must be, if you were actually funny for once,” she says with a shrug.

Ouma clasps a hand to his chest as though genuinely wounded, and Akamatsu-chan and Saihara-chan both laugh along at the whole display—most likely grateful for anything to take the edge off of their nerves. The corners of Harukawa-chan’s mouth turn up, as though glad to have beaten him at his own game for once.

Ouma lets them get their laughs in, and then takes the opportunity to scan the courthouse seating for any other familiar faces in the crowd. Behind Harukawa-chan, in one of the rows even closer to the back of the room he can make out Yumeno-chan and Chabashira-chan, as inseparable as always. The shorter girl seems to be talking animatedly about something as they wait for the trial to start, waving her hands and sitting all the way at the edge of her seat. It’s a welcome change from her old, dispassionate self—and judging by the way Chabashira-chan seems completely used to it, it’s not a recent change either.

A few rows ahead, he can see Toujou-chan, though it takes him a second or two to place her; unlike Harukawa-chan, she’s grown her hair out a fair amount instead, and her bangs are pulled back to frame her face instead of hiding it. Still, that stiff-as-a-board posture is ultimately a dead giveaway, and he knew better than to assume that she of all people would try to blow off such an important event.

And in the very front row, in the seats closest to the stand, Ouma spots something of an unexpected duo: Amami-chan and Kiibo, sitting side by side. He can understand why the former would want to see what happened with Team Danganronpa no matter what, considering he’d been part of not one but two of their games, but the sight of the latter does catch him a little off guard. After all… Kiibo was even more of a manufactured product than the rest of them.

Did a robot created by and on behalf of Team Danganronpa itself have a right to testify against them in a court of law? What were the logistics of that, exactly? Ouma had read online about how Kiibo’s built-in camera and audio functions had originally been intended to help him serve as an audience proxy for the so-called show—which wasn’t a far cry from what he’d suspected since the start, honestly. But instead, Kiibo had been instrumental in proving the ringleader’s identity and bringing the whole dome down to boot.

Maybe if they hadn’t wanted their creation turned against them, they shouldn’t have made him sentient, with his own thoughts and feelings and the ability to make his own choices. Whose bright idea had that been, he wondered. Maybe that went for the rest of them, too. Ouma knows that if he were in Kiibo’s place (and maybe he is, to some extent), he’d want to force them all to regret ever making him in the first place.

When he considers all of that… well, it’s nice to see him here, in any case. Even if he’ll never admit it out loud.

Judging by his headcount, that accounts for nine of them. Ten, if he counts himself. That’s a little more than half of them in total. And of course, there’s still one more former member of their group who’s due to show up at today’s trial.

As though right on cue, the courtroom doors open and Shirogane Tsumugi walks in, lawyers in tow.

Beside him, he can feel Saihara-chan and Akamatsu-chan stiffen, can see the way Gonta’s shoulders square up, can hear the sharp inhalation of breath from Harukawa-chan behind him, and Ouma doesn’t blame them; all the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end at once, his teeth set on edge at the sight of her plain and unassuming figure.

Nothing about her has changed since the last time he saw her, except for the clothes on her back. Besides that, everything is very much the same as it was a year ago: her frameless glasses, her long hair, even the calm and unaffected attitude she’d maintained since all her plans had been exposed. If she was still a chameleon, then she hadn’t had a chance to adopt a new guise to her liking in quite some time.

She takes her seat at the defendant’s table, fiddling with a pen in one hand absently even as both of her lawyers begin to lay out papers and memos in front of her, their whole defense no doubt planned down to the most minute detail.

But despite her love for trials, Shirogane-chan doesn’t seem to pay either of them much mind—no surprise, since she had always been more for the public spectacle itself rather than the letter of the law. Instead, she turns around in her seat, taking in the state of the courtroom much the same way that Ouma had done only a few minutes ago.

And of course, she spots them all in the crowd, as she must have planned from the start. His eyes lock with hers, and she throws him a small smile, equal-parts exasperated and amused, as if to say, Isn’t this quaint? Isn’t it ironic how they’re continuing this little farce even now when we both know this isn’t real?

Or maybe that wasn’t what she wanted to say at all. Maybe he’s just reading too much into the upturned corners of her mouth and the disinterested, pitying look in her eyes behind her glasses, but it’s what he sees all the same. Ouma knew that she would be here, had braced himself to see her again face-to-face since the moment he’d made up his mind to come here today, but something in his gut still twists instinctively at the sight of her, like suddenly stepping in something foul and rotten up to your ankle.

Beside him, Saihara-chan takes his hand and squeezes it. Ouma squeezes back, and all the sound leaks back into the courtroom little by little, even though it never really left. This courtroom isn’t surrounded by stained glass on all sides, isn’t hiding some contraption meant to kill one of them behind its walls. Here, she has no more power than any of the rest of them.

And even if this whole thing were a charade, a farce, a made-up little game to pass the time until whoever was watching them finally grew bored enough to make them restart from the beginning… he hopes that she’s bored and miserable out of her mind, waiting for it to happen. Bored in the same way her killing game had nearly bored him to death, like some slow-acting poison slogging through the veins.

What feels like an eternity after he’s broken eye contact with her, a judge enters the courtroom at long last and calls them all to order. Saihara-chan’s grip tightens almost reflexively—well, who would know what was coming next better than him, after all? His nerves were probably catching up to him again.

Soon, they’d call the detective up to the witness stand, the first of many witnesses to come. Soon, he’d have to talk passionately and at length about the damage that had been done to all of them, and how all of Team Danganronpa was completely accountable for that, with their dubious legal consent that meant nothing when their game so thoroughly took advantage of all its contestants. Soon, he’d have to testify about the years of their lives they could never get back due to the memories they’d signed away, even as they struggled to regain the years ahead of them as best they could.

Soon, today would mark the beginning of the end of all that had happened to them. Hopefully.

For once, Ouma tries to convince himself that that’s actually the case. He gives the other hand one more gentle squeeze, full of more unspoken words and reassurances than he could ever hope to give voice to in a single day, let alone in the next few minutes. And then he lets him go.

---

After court adjourns for the day, they don’t talk about what happened.

It’s not that the opening procedures didn’t go well. They did actually, better than either of them had probably allowed themselves to hope for. Once the charges had been read aloud, Saihara-chan’s testimony had been enough to convince the court that Shirogane Tsumugi should be tried as a representative of Team Danganronpa itself, rather than an individual acting outside of their control.

It was an outcome that everyone had most likely anticipated well in advance, including Shirogane-chan and her legal team, but it didn’t make it any less of a relief to know that this would be a trial regarding the killing game itself, instead of just the ringleader who had carried it all out. It’s undeniably good news, a decision that hopefully boded well for the rest of the trial—but that’s exactly why neither of them wants to bring it up for now.

Today had just been the first step out of many. The trial itself would be a grueling, ongoing process spanning several months, maybe more than a year depending on how hard Shirogane-chan and her lawyers fought back. For just right now at least, it’s enough to call it a win and put the rest out of their minds for a little while.

Which is how they find themselves walking along without a proper goal or destination in mind, once they’ve shaken off the headline-hungry press and left the courthouse far behind. They could just go right back home, Ouma knows that—but where would be the fun in that, given how little he’s set foot outside their apartment over the past year? So he and Saihara-chan walk together aimlessly, hand in hand, only stopping when they eventually meander across a small park.

The park is mostly empty at this time of day, especially at the farthest corner; the nearby street-lamps lighting their path are only just now flickering on as the sun begins to sink below the orange-dyed horizon. It’s a world apart from that dome-covered microcosm of the real world they left behind one year ago, and yet—the sunset, the lamplight, their warm fingertips brushing against each other in the chilly autumn air, it all brings a rush of familiarity. There’s an uncrossable ocean of difference between the Ouma Kokichi who wanted to give up and stay in that catbox forever and him as he is now, and somehow part of him still feels as though he never really left.

Maybe that was only natural, after all the deaths he’d met with back there, over and over again. Maybe it made perfect sense that part of himself was laid to rest the moment that dome came crashing down and the killing game was finally put to an end. He had dedicated every part of himself to that single goal for such a long, long time; it made sense, then, that once that goal was accomplished, it felt as though there was an empty hole where all of that determination had once been.

But even if parts of him are—were hollowed out, after they left the dome behind, he’s starting to find that new feelings can grow again in those empty places. Have already been growing for some time now, like a wild plant left unattended. Soon enough they’ll need even more space, more parts of him to fill in and grow.

For no reason in particular, Ouma finds himself thinking about the plants that he waters on the balcony. And perhaps it’s because he has plants and things that grow on his mind that he chooses to take a seat, not on one of the nearby wooden benches carefully stationed throughout the park, but on the grass directly beneath a large and spindly maple tree, its leaves awash with a brilliant shade of red in the last dying rays of sunset.

Saihara-chan takes a seat next to him on the grass. The irony of where and how they’re sitting, one year after everything, isn’t lost on Ouma.

The sun sinks ever-lower, the sounds and scents of autumn continue around them, and at last he decides to break the silence between them. “I still can’t believe I gave them all my real cell phone number before we left. Why the hell didn’t I just make something up?”

“You mean, besides the fact that you really did miss them?” Saihara-chan looks a little too pleased with himself as he reminds him of that fact for the second time in one day. “I mean, they all seemed pretty happy to have a way to actually get in contact with you. I think it’s nice, that you gave them your number.”

“They had ways to get in contact with me. Plenty of them. Contrary to what the internet says, I’m not actually dead.”

The detective rolls his eyes, but his hand still lingers next to Ouma’s on the grass. “An inactive social media account where you don’t do anything but lurk, and asking me to pass the message along to you at home aren’t exactly reliable ways to reach someone in the twenty-first century.”

“Well, sorry for using you as a messenger all the time.” Ouma really is sorry about that, but he also knows that if Saihara-chan had truly minded then he wouldn’t have given him so much space until today. “And I’m very active on social media, actually. So, y’know, there’s that.”

The corners of Saihara-chan’s mouth tug upwards, almost as though despite himself. “Burners and sockpuppets don’t count. I’m talking about an account where you’d actually respond if one of them messaged you.”

“Oh. Well then yeah, it was pretty much hopeless.” Ouma feigns a sigh and puts one mournful hand on his forehead. “But now I’ll never get another moment of peace and quiet, because none of them are ever gonna stop messaging me as soon as they get home.” Especially Gonta, but part of Ouma had always known that he would have to square up and face the other boy at some point. They were friends, after all—he’d promised that much.

“That’s not entirely true,” Saihara-chan corrects him. “At the very least… you won’t ever have to worry about Harukawa-san messaging you.”

Ouma actually snorts. “Okay, wow. Good point. If she’s the only one who won’t ever message me, then I might just have to make her my new best friend!”

“Ouch.” Saihara-chan arches an eyebrow, even as their hands intertwine on the grass. “Should I be worried, or…?”

“Oh yeah, definitely.” He smirks. “You’ll be old news, at this rate. Akamatsu-chan was even talking about sending me some of her favorite music later. Please, as if I don’t already know what sort of songs she likes.”

“As it turns out,” Saihara-chan says, and this time he smiles again, “she’s actually found a few new songs she really likes. Not just classical music, either. People can change a lot in a year, you know.”

Ouma had had the exact same thought, only a few hours ago. Not for the first time, he wonders vaguely if Saihara-chan might have some sort of gift for mind-reading—or at least for reading his mind, specifically. He stops smirking, smoothing out the expression from his face until all that’s left is something much more blank and serious.

Whether people could change, or not. Yes… he’d long ago admitted defeat when it came to that little debate. It was true: people could change. All his classmates, all his friends. Maybe it wasn’t impossible for him either, if those feelings taking root in all those empty spaces were a sign of anything.

Maybe living wasn’t going to kill him, after all.

“Alright, fair enough. A lot does change in a year,” Ouma agrees. Then he takes Saihara-chan’s old hat off his head with his free hand and holds it out to the detective, his curiosity getting the better of him once again. “So… what about this, then? Are you gonna tell me now why you kept it around all this time, or…?”

Saihara-chan blinks in surprise, almost as though he’d forgotten their earlier discussion. Then he reaches out—a little hesitantly at first—and takes the hat in his own free hand, looking intently at the faded, tattered fabric. “I guess… I’m not really sure how to put it,” he says, and there’s something a little different at the edges of his smile now, something wistful and bittersweet in a way that really does make Ouma feel as if they’re sitting back on the grounds of Saishuu Academy once again. “It’s a little embarrassing to put into words.”

“Try me.” Ouma squeezes his hand, tracing the inside of Saihara-chan’s palm with his thumb. “I’m always embarrassing you all the time, anyway. On purpose, no less.”

That manages to get a chuckle out of the detective. “I guess that much is true. I just… I didn’t really try to hold onto it or anything. Not at first. Back in the killing game, everything was so hectic all the time—I mean, you know that as much as I do. It was always one thing after another. By the time we got out, got away from it all, and found a place of our own… I realized the hat was still in my pocket.”

In the past he might’ve scoffed or sneered, but now Ouma only stays quiet and looks up at the maple leaves instead. An old hat left forgotten in a pocket… wasn’t so different from the scarf he used to wear so often, which had lain folded and untouched in his closet for almost a year. He inhales the autumn air, sharp and cold in his lungs, and lets Saihara-chan keep speaking.

“I thought about getting rid of it… at first, anyway. But I couldn’t.” Saihara-chan hesitates. “Or, I didn’t want to. I wanted some way to… to hold onto the person I was before. Even if I’m not quite the same person now.”

“Before what?” Ouma asks, still watching the red quickly fade from the maple leaves above him while the sun sinks below the horizon. “Before all of… this? Or before the killing game began?” He knows the detective must remember that video as well as he does. Not that either of them were ever likely to forget it.

Even if it had only been one of Shirogane-chan’s little ploys, there was something darkly compelling in that video, a painful grain of truth that resonated and wedged its way into their minds the way a splinter wedged its way under the skin. Nothing in that video was anything like the Saihara Shuuichi before him now—it had no bearing whatsoever on his current personality, no power over his choices or who he was as an individual. But it was also one of the only glimpses they’d ever had into the memories they’d signed away that didn’t come from one of her little brainwashing flashlights.

“Mmm… both,” Saihara-chan admits after thinking it over for a moment. “I mean, I’m never going to be that person again. But at the same time, I’m still… me, if that makes sense.”

“Not really.” It’s a lie through his teeth. Ouma does get it, probably better than most people would—but he doesn’t mind hearing the detective explain it to him anyway.

Saihara-chan sighs, in that way that means he knows he’s lying and has merely decided not to comment on it. “I’d just like to think that… it all meant something. Maybe who I used to be was worse. Maybe he was… weaker. Weaker, and selfish, and… more of a coward.” A pause, and the other boy looks up at the maple leaves with him. “But I’d like to think he was still part of the process in getting to where I am today.”

“Oh come on, that’s just basic trial and error.” Ouma feigns a yawn. “Well, if someone ever does slam the reset button on this whole simulation one day, it’s going to be a real shame to lose this super-cool upgraded Saihara-chan and get stuck with the old, boring one.”

Saihara-chan stops fiddling with his hat and turns to look at him instead. “You know that wouldn’t happen, though.”

Their eyes meet, and there’s something so serious, so wonderfully certain in the other boy’s expression that it makes Ouma’s pulse quicken. He decides he needs to hear those words, and asks the question anyway. “And why is that, hmm?”

“Because even if that did happen… even if we got sent back to the beginning, if we had to do it all over again, I don’t think that’d be a problem. Everyone would still remember. I’d still believe you. And we’d get out of there all over again.”

Ouma closes his eyes and smiles. Knight in shining armor indeed. But he knows Saihara-chan is right, so he doesn’t say anything this time.

“Who knows, maybe it would take us even less time to end the game if that happened. Even if this is all just some simulation, it’s one that hasn’t been working in Shirogane-san’s favor for a long time.” The detective pauses, mulling over his words carefully in a way that is so very familiar by this point. “That being said… I still don’t think this was ever a simulation or anything like that.”

The thought he’d had earlier in the courthouse comes back to Ouma—that if this were a simulation, that really would be the only way to wrap everything up nice and neatly. That’s been his theory for some time now, as much as the possibility both terrifies and repulses him. Before now, he never wanted to know what anyone else thought, didn’t want to hear any other explanations… didn’t want to get his hopes up. But right now, alone in a park at twilight, with the sun at their backs and the wind in the leaves overhead… he feels like he could be inclined to listen, for a change.

Ouma opens his eyes again and looks down at their intertwined hands on the grass. “So how do you explain the contradiction, then?” he asks softly. “How did the two of us—all of us, repeat all of that and come out of it remembering everything?”

“…Regret.” That single word comes from Saihara-chan slowly, heavy with meaning. “My regrets. Everyone’s. That’s how.”

And because he really and truly doesn’t know what to say to that, Ouma can only blink.

“I… This isn’t my first time, you know. Getting out of that game alive.” The other boy smiles again, that same wistful, bittersweet expression from before. “It’s hazy, but I remember some of it. At least… now I do. And the longer that we’ve been here, the more bits and pieces have been coming back to me. What the sky beyond the dome looked like. Living in the outside world. And how… sad and lonely it all felt.”

It’s the first time Ouma’s hearing about it. He wouldn’t know what that was like—up until last year, he hadn’t even thought that getting out of the game alive was possible. He stays quiet and lets the detective continue.

“I wanted to do it all over again,” Saihara-chan says. “Do it over, do it… better. Anything to make those regrets stop weighing on my chest. And… I don’t think I was the only one, either.”

You weren’t, Ouma wants to say. My regrets could bury yours. But there was really no point in comparing guilt between them. No point at all, when they were still struggling to be rid of that guilt one day.

“We said so many times that no one else would die, that we’d end the killing game together and... that never happened. Our regrets just kept piling up.” Saihara-chan stops for a moment, and there’s a tremor in his hands that makes Ouma tighten his grip. “So I think everyone must have wanted the same thing. The living… and the deceased. We’re not all here today because it played out according to someone else’s simulation, we’re here because of those regrets. Because of all of us.”

A cycle that was never at some unseen audience’s disposal, but born from regret and pain and love… “That’s wishful thinking.” They’re still alone in their little corner of the park but Ouma half-whispers the words anyway, even as he moves closer. “Don’t tell me you believe in magic at your age, Mr. Detective?”

“I believe in things that I’ve seen for myself,” Saihara-chan replies, in a tone just as soft, “and I’ve already seen everyone make a miracle happen when working together. And I’d rather believe in that than whatever Shirogane-san is selling me.”

Something in his chest unfurls at those words, something warm and weightless. Something hopeful. Ouma feels his pulse quickening again. “And… if that still turns out to be one big lie?”

“Then it’s my lie, and no one else can take that from me. I’m pretty sure a certain someone used to tell me about how important those are…”

“Sorry to tell you this, but that guy was full of shit.” Ouma lets the wind half-carry his words away even as he moves closer again, his face only a few inches away from Saihara-chan’s now. “Lies don’t mean anything, dummy.”

“I don’t believe you,” Saihara-chan says, and then he leans forward and kisses him.

Ouma meets him halfway to close the distance between them, and the kiss warms him from the inside out, warms him like the tea and the embrace warmed him earlier this morning—only not at all like that. It’s something warmer, far more tender, a moment that goes on forever and not long enough at once, and for the first time since he woke up Ouma stops thinking about simulations or killing games or trials or really much of anything at all.

Maybe it really didn’t matter, if everything was a simulation or not. Maybe it didn’t matter if it was the truth or a lie. Right now Saihara Shuuichi is kissing him, and his lips are soft enough to make his mind go blank. Right now, there’s a warmth between them even in the chill of an early autumn night. Right now, the two of them are still clasping hands even as they kiss, and they’re both alive in the here-and-now, and maybe the here didn’t matter nearly as much as the now.

Right now, maybe living not only wasn’t going to kill him, but was something worthwhile, something peaceful, something dizzying. Something he wanted to do more of.

Ouma runs his free hand through the other boy’s hair, and Saihara-chan pulls him closer in return, and the two of them stay like that until they can’t kiss any longer. They only stop when they’re reminded of the (unfortunate) need for air, but the warmth between them lingers even when they pull away. It felt like so much longer, but the kiss only lasted a minute or two, and the world continued to spin in their absence.

The park is still slowly coming to life around them, the glow of the street-lamps a little brighter now that the sun has gone down. Soon, more people might even begin ambling along the path to this deserted little corner, and Ouma knows they’ll need to leave soon even if the thought leaves a bittersweet taste in his mouth.

But he thinks again of the plants on their balcony, waiting to be watered. The messages from his friends, soon to blow up his phone notifications. The early-morning cups of tea, waiting to be made. And other, longer kisses waiting to be had.

The locker, the press, and the killing game all feel at least a million lifetimes ago.

Saihara-chan dusts himself off, gets to his feet, and then holds a hand out to him. “Let’s go home, Ouma-kun.”

“I’m already way ahead of you.” Ouma takes his hand, stands up, and doesn’t let go.