Koushun Takami - Battle Royale

Oh no. Yuko finally understood the situation. This is Shuya. Shuya is trying to save me. I… why? Why did I have to think I had to kill Shuya? Why did I believe that? It’s Shuya. And I always thought he was kind of cool… that he was really nice but no—

Then a different thought occurred to her. The action she took and its results. Yuko once again turned pale.

I… my mind was all screwed up… and… and that’s how I ended up—

Yuko burst into tears. Shuya saw this and looked puzzled.

“Shuya!” she screamed. “I-it was me! I tried to kill you!”

Shuya looked surprised as Yuko looked up with despondent tears in her eyes.

“I-I-I thought you’d killed Tatsumichi… I saw you two… and I was scared. I was so scared. So I tried poisoning your food… but Yuka ended up eating it… and then everyone… everyone…”

Shuya then understood everything. Hiding in a nearby bush, Yuko had seen him extract the axe from Tatsumichi Oki’s head after fighting him. She didn’t see how Kyoichi Motobuchi and Shogo appeared afterwards. She’d only witnessed that one moment. She could have interpreted it as an act of self defense on Shuya’s part or as an accident, but Yuko was too frightened to trust Shuya. And so she poisoned the food to kill him, but Yuka ate this by mistake… and everyone panicked with suspicion. The culprit, Yuko, ended up being the only survivor.

“It’s all right!” Shuya shouted. “It’s all right, just don’t move! I’ll pull you up!”

Shuya was nearly lying flat on the balcony, his body jutting out between the bars, but because his left arm was useless, he couldn’t grab onto the railing. Still, he twisted his body, and finally managed to tuck his right knee up to his body so he could rely on his back. He did his best to hold onto Yuko’s wrist. The pain from the wounds all over his body, his side, his left shoulder, and the right side of his neck was mounting. But…

Her face soaked with tears, Yuko shook her head. “No. No. It was my fault everyone… everyone…” she said, and suddenly her hand began to pry his fingers loose. The tight grip he’d finally managed to get on her came loose. Shuya gripped tighter in response, but the blood dripping down from his neck suddenly made his hand slip.

Yuko’s hand left Shuya’s. The weight on Shuya’s arm suddenly vanished.

Yuko’s face receded—

With a thud, Yuko fell on her back onto the roof of the single-story building below. Instead of slipping from his hand, she seemed to have appeared there suddenly via time-lapse photography.

Her body wrapped in her sailor shirt and pleated skirt was sprawled out… and her neck was crooked, which made her head look oddly disjoined from the rest of her body. The top-right side of her head spurted out a red substance in the shape of a shriveled up maple leaf.

“Ah…”

Shuya stared down at her, his right arm still hanging over the balcony.

Hiroki Sugimura (Male Student No. 11) took a deep breath.

He’d heard the rapid gunfire approximately ten minutes ago. He’d been wandering around the northern mountain, but he quickly headed east toward the shots. Then… by the time he arrived it was already quiet at the lighthouse. He knew it was there from the map, but he assumed Kayoko Kotohiki would never hide there alone in such a conspicuous location, so he’d ignored it until now. He wasn’t sure whether this was where the gunfire occurred. He looked down from the cliff over the lighthouse and saw a girl lying on the roof of the brick annex by the lighthouse. Even from a distance he could make out the red color and see that she was dead. The short hair and petite body resembled Kotohiki, as Megumi Eto’s corpse did when he discovered it.

He slid down the edge of the cliff. As he descended, the corpse on the roof disappeared from view. He reached the front entrance of the lighthouse. There was a pile of chairs and desks beyond the open door. Someone had formed a barricade, but for some reason this barricade was also torn down. He looked at the window that was sealed shut with planks and cautiously walked down the hall. (There was a room with a bed right by the entrance, and for some reason its door had been knocked down.) His detector responded. Six. Hiroki proceeded cautiously and stood frozen in the room splattered with blood.

The bodies of five girls were scattered all over what appeared to be a kitchen. There was the female student representative Yukie Utsumi on her back by the center table. To her right was Haruka Tanizawa, her head nearly torn off (!). And further down Yuka Nakagawa, whose face had turned nearly black. Chisato Matsui was lying face down in front of the side table to his right, her pale blue face turned his way. And then one more girl was lying face down behind the table, covered in blood.

The four girls, including Yukie, were clearly dead. But this one whose face he couldn’t see was…

Hiroki cautiously checked the room once again. He listened for any sounds beyond the opened door on the other side of the room. There didn’t seem to be anyone else hiding.

He tucked the gun in his left hand in back, walked between the bodies of Yukie Utsumi and Haruka Tanizawa, passed by Yuka Nakagawa’s body, and walked around the table. The soles of his shoes splashed against the blood all over the floor. He crouched down beside the girl lying face down, put aside the stick in his right hand, and lifted her body. He felt a sharp pain from the wound in his right shoulder where Mitsuko Souma had struck him. The gunshot wound Toshinori Oda had inflicted on his thigh though was only a scrape, so there wasn’t much bleeding or pain there. Hiroki tried to ignore the pain, in any case. He turned over the body.

It was Satomi Noda. There was a red hole in the left side of her forehead, and her glasses, though crooked, managed to stay on her face. The left lens probably shattered when she fell. Of course she was dead.

Hiroki put her down and looked over at the opened door on the far side of the room. That was where the tower was. That led up to the lantern room.

The other person on the detector was that girl on the roof. She was no doubt dead as well, but he had to check and make sure it wasn’t Kayoko Kotohiki.

Hiroki took his gun and entered through the door. There was a steel staircase. He quickly climbed them with hushed footsteps. Someone might still be up there. He held the stick and radar in his right hand, checking it as he went up.

There were no new responses as he came out into the lantern room. Hiroki put the radar in his pocket, tucked his gun also in back, and came out onto the balcony around the lantern room.

He put his hand on the steel railing. He took a deep breath, leaned over the railing, and looked down.

There was the corpse in the sailor suit. Her neck was twisted in an odd way and blood spread out from under her head, but the corpse wasn’t Kayoko Kotohiki’s. It was Yuko Sakaki.

Still.

He gazed at the sea. There was a strong breeze. Six girls had all died here at once. There were no guns in the room, but given how they were wounded and how the walls and floors were ridden with bullet holes, he was certain the gunshots he’d heard had occurred here. The most logical scenario was that the girls somehow got together and cooped themselves up here, but then someone attacked them. The five girls were shot down there first, and then Yuko Sakaki managed to get this far and fell to her death without being attacked by the assailant. Then the assailant left before Hiroki got here.

But given how they’d formed a barricade at the entrance—the planks nailed over the windows, every entry point probably sealed—why would they tear the barricade down? Did the assailant shove it away as he left? But then how could he or she have entered in the first place? Could there have been seven of them? And one of them had suddenly betrayed the rest—no, revealed his or her true intentions? No, that can’t be. The other thing was that Yuka Nakagawa didn’t look like she died from gunshots. She looked like she’d been choked. The blood splattered all over the table also didn’t make any sense. How could that large amount of blood end up there? There was more. The door to that room right next to the entrance. Why was it torn down?