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“You’re actually pissed!” Even Aikawa was surprised at this, and she put up her hands in surrender. “Wow, that’s a shocker. My bad, I didn’t realize she was so sacred to you…I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I was wrong.”

This apology was delivered in Maki’s voice.

Really got my fucking number, don’t you.

“Why are you really here?”

“No reason. Hadn’t you been hoping I’d come? After all, you’re still just as ignorant as you were at the beginning. So I came to entertain your questions.”

“A-ha… Well, it’s my policy not to get too deep into things that seem like they might be bad news. But I’ll ask anyway.” Still unsure of Aikawa’s true intentions, I began with: “What happened to Hime-chan afterwards?”

“Starting with the hardest question first, are ya, pal? Awright. Here’s what happened to Himecchi.” Without asking, Aikawa took an apple from my basket of get-well goodies and chomped into it. “That stun gun did its work. She lost her memory, and now she’s in a secret hospital.”

“Ah…”

“Her body’s in rough shape, too. It was already starting to wear out thanks to all the training she’d been through in that place, and to sustain that much damage on top of it? Burns all over her body. The fingers directly connected to those lines─particularly nasty. It was mitigated somewhat by her gloves, which had seven layers of insulation, but even if she can hold a pencil, she can’t hold chopsticks. You know about that stuff? Ohm’s law, Joule’s laws, and so forth.”

“So there’ll be some serious lasting effects, huh─” Despite the fact that Aikawa had brought that stun gun for the purpose of taking Hime-chan unharmed. Still, she got off a lot better than if she’d taken on the contractor directly.

“Which is exactly what makes it so tough,” Aikawa said. “Losing her memory means she’s probably forgotten about killing Noa Origami and the rest of the staff, not to mention Shiogi Hagihara and Tamamo Saijo… And it may even mean that she’s forgotten all about Hang ’Em High itself. And as long as her injured fingers haven’t healed, she won’t be able to use Zigzag. You know what that means, right?”

The thought flashed through my mind that that must’ve been why she took the limiter off the stun gun: to temporarily seal away Zigzag itself, along with the abhorrent memories of it. That may’ve been nothing more than my own narrativistic sentiment, though.

“It’s gonna be hard,” Aikawa went on. “It doesn’t make the things she’s done go away. The people connected to the ones she killed aren’t gonna stand for that. The Origami family, Rule, they’re falling all over themselves to find the person behind it all.”

Just because the culprit forgets the crime doesn’t make it go away, and it doesn’t mean she can get away without being punished. Whatever the whys and wherefores, she has to take responsibility for her actions. Of course.

“Plus, if I were to ‘pretend this never happened’ and let Ichihime off the hook, I have a feeling you’d lose respect for me.”

“That’s not something I ever expected to hear you say. Do you even care about how other people see you, Jun?”

“Qua? If you were just another person, I wouldn’t care at all.”

She grinned an unpleasant grin. I don’t really know why, but I felt like she was making fun of me, so I just shrugged my shoulders and asked a different question.

“How did things all fall out in the end?”

“Hang ’Em High is now effectively shuttered. Just as Ichihime hoped. The students…I wonder what’ll become of them. That still seems to be up in the air. And it hasn’t come out yet that the three of us were the perpetrators.”

I’m an accomplice now?

“Don’t worry about it, I’ve got a few irons in the fire… The Origami family owes me, so no worries on that front. That still leaves the problem of Rule. Nothing you have to worry about, they’ll leave you alone. Ichihime, though… I wanna keep them off her scent, but I also wonder if I should.”

“So even you have moments of doubt, Jun.”

“Sure. Not like I want ’em, of course. Her memory might return, and her finger might heal up again. I also figure it’s not a good idea to stick my nose in too far. It’d be one thing if she’d actually asked me to conceal the murders.”

She hadn’t─probably because she couldn’t fully trust Aikawa. Which was neither Aikawa’s fault nor Hime-chan’s, it was just one of those things. Like me, I imagine Hime-chan just fundamentally couldn’t trust other people. But she still looked to them for help─and as in this situation, she cooked up a half-baked plan and ended up caught in her own web. Though maybe that’s less fear or trepidation─than vanity and yearning.

“But why did Hime-chan want to kill the Director…no, want to shut down the academy in the first place? What was her initial plan?”

“First, there’s something I wanna apologize for.” Aikawa moved her chair closer to me and leaned in close. “In the beginning I told you something like, ‘Ask Ichihime for the details…she’ll be able to give you a proper explanation.’ That was a lie, sorry.”

“It sure was.”

You only had to talk to her for a minute to know that. Hime-chan was totally incapable of giving a decent explanation of anything. Whatever lies and false fronts she may’ve used to mask her true self, that at least I could say with certainty.

“Her Japanese wasn’t very good, to begin with. No way she was going to give a proper explanation.”

“I figured you’d do a better job if you didn’t know the particulars. I never expected Ichihime herself to actively deceive you… Did she tell you why she’s so bad with words?”

“Let’s see. She said she was raised in America.”

“Yeah? That’s not why, though.” Aikawa tapped my temple with her finger. “Her frontal lobe. An a posteriori injury to her language center.”

“…”

“You know what the frontal lobe does? It’s the part of the brain that controls personality, the ego, and our ability to communicate with others. That part of Ichihime’s brain was damaged. Which is why she has problems with language. She doesn’t even recognize it when it’s happening.”

“Recognition…”

Language recognition.

Or no, was it her word recognition circuit?

“Because of that, conversations with her always go off the rails somewhere. It’s kind of like a Japanese person and a Chinese person conversing in Korean, somehow it never quite comes together.”

Kind of a zigzag feeling, chuckled Aikawa.

“Which is why─I’m pretty sure we’ll never find out Ichihime’s true motivation, even if we ask her. Since any kind of mutual understanding is difficult in the first place. What she was thinking when she abandoned herself to those acts will remain an eternal mystery.”

“That’s true of everyone, though, isn’t it?”

No two people can ever fully comprehend each other. It’s simply a question of whether or not you can convince yourself that you can, whether or not you can delude yourself into believing that it’s possible.

Sure is, nodded Aikawa. “So I’ll have to stick to spouting vague approximations based on my best guesses. I suspect she had it all worked out from the start. She inserted me into her machinations by getting me involved, getting me on her side, and pulling the wool over my eyes. She took care of the Director and the rest of the staff first, before sounding the alarm over her own escape… Oh, and FYI, they discovered a ton of dismembered corpses in the staff room. About thirty-seven people’s worth.”

“─”

I already knew she’d killed them, but to hear the actual number said out loud was enough to take my breath away. Thirty-seven people─plus Shiogi and Tamamo and Noa Origami makes forty. Mr. No Longer Human didn’t even kill a third that many last month.

To be perfectly honest, once the number of murder victims exceeds about a dozen, I cease to be able to render a normal value judgment. Quite the reverse, in fact: a certain admiration for Hime-chan even started to well up in me, for pulling that off inside a closed-off space like their school. Which I know is totally inappropriate.

One person in the locked room of the Director’s office, thirty-eight altogether in the locked room of the faculty building─and forty altogether in the locked room of Hang ’Em High.

A closed-off space. Impossible to tell from the outside what’s happening on the inside. Because it was a warzone─because it was a closed-off warzone.

It was probably a piece of cake.

Locked rooms are locked rooms precisely because they’re closed off, but who knew it could be so different─depending on whether they’re closed off to keep things in, or to keep things out.

It’s why this happened, why she did those things.

Can you approve of that behavior?

Well, can you? Mr. Defective Product?

“Her Zigzag was originally intended for crowd-control. It’s not a killing technique, it’s for restraining people. Something like a thread is ultimately more effective than rope for tying someone up. So she restrained them, then chopped them up with a chainsaw. Lessee, what else. She used the walkie-talkie to contact Hagihara on the Director’s dedicated frequency and informed her that ‘Ichihime Yukariki has escaped.’ Her plan was discovered around the time you infiltrated the school, not because she blew it. She revealed it to them herself.”

“She expected it to be you.”

“But I sent you in ahead of me. Which Ichihime dealt with as well as she could’ve…but it did make things a little more precarious for her. She couldn’t use Zigzag in front of you, so when they took you two by surprise, she was captured.”

Is…that why Hime-chan had been so insistent about staying in that classroom? But I was already taking action even as she tried to veto it. I was definitely an unexpected element for her.

“And I went to have a chat with the Director, just as she guessed I would… That part would’ve gone the same whether you were there or not. With her flight already revealed, I was even surer to head to Noa’s spot than I would’ve been if it hadn’t come out yet. Haha, the little fucker really read my mind.”

“So Hime-chan had a certain facility with vocal mimicry and mindreading herself.”

“Sure. Though it’s not like she was my disciple or anything. So we were together─and this is crucial─we were together when we discovered the Director’s body. Then she could play the role of the victim, framed for the crime.”

“But that’s a dangerous game…”

“That danger worked in Ichihime’s favor too, I guess. Same as hiding under the desk. The more of that she did, the less I would suspect her. I did think the way Noa was killed resembled Zigzag…but maybe it was a fake, a copycat? It gave me all kinds of things to waste my time pondering.”

“So you knew about ‘Zigzag.’”

“Yup. I didn’t tell you about it since Ichihime seemed to want to keep it secret. The fact that it was her trump card aside, I didn’t think it was the kind of thing she’d want everyone to know. But how did you figure out that she was a weaver? Tamamo’s death was one thing, but the person who killed the Director didn’t need to be one.”

“It all came into focus simultaneously for me. Like a chain reaction. I guess once I figure out one thing, it all falls into place. That’s just the kind of person I am: one is all, and all is one. Conversely, that means that until I figure it out, I don’t understand anything at all… Something did trigger it, though. Hime-chan tried to cover her tracks, but it just seemed unnatural that someone would carry around all those threads if they weren’t a weaver. She may have had no choice but to use her lines if she wanted to kill Tamamo without my realizing she’d done so… Still, it was rash.”

Though maybe she just didn’t take me seriously. On that score, I have to admit that Hime-chan wasn’t so crazy after all. If I hadn’t worked backwards from the solution to the locked room, I probably never would’ve figured it out.

“Also, there was the fact that Shiogi was so damn cautious. Her ‘tactics’ were way too elaborate for dealing with any old washout. Like, why not just rely on her material advantage? The answer, of course, being that trying to overwhelm ‘Zigzag’ with superior numbers would be the worst possible strategy.”

“Hmmm.”

“Plus…there’s something fishy about the idea that a washout would try and bamboozle the one and only Jun Aikawa. A nonsense user like me wouldn’t make much of an enemy for the world’s strongest, and neither would plain old ‘Ichihime Yukariki,’ even if she could be her friend. And ‘Zigzag’ was the only likely spot left on the roster for Hime-chan to fill.”

And─above all.

The most important clue came from my conviction that none of the characters around me could ever just be cute or weak or pitiful and nothing more.

“Well, there you go. But the part about being a washout wasn’t a lie, ya know. Apart from that one skill…she had nothing else going for her.”

“Of course, the fact that you knew about it means…that Zigzag was a skill she acquired before enrolling at the academy…doesn’t it, Jun.”

“Got me there. It was five years ago. I had a friend who was a failed weaver, nickname of ‘Zigzag.’ It wasn’t originally meant as a compliment, you with me? Anyway, the two of us did a certain job together. On that occasion we rescued the twelve-year-old Ichihime Yukariki…and since then, Ichihime has idolized the two of us. Me, I didn’t pay too much attention to her, but…”

Was that also when she sustained the injury to her frontal lobe? But that wasn’t the question I needed to ask. There was only one thing to ask now.

“Was the person’s name Yuma Shisei, by any chance?”

“Huh?” Aikawa looked up in surprise. “You know about her? It’s not like she’s all that well-known.”

“No…not really. Anyway, she…”

“Yup. She was Ichihime’s master.” Aikawa smiled cynically. “And a former teacher at Hang ’Em High. Thanks to that connection, Ichihime started going to a middle school affiliated with the place, and here we are. Now, back to the topic at hand. Let’s see, how far had I gotten? Oh right. Her decision to be our fellow suspect. Once again she was right on the money: she figured that even with the door locked, I’d find some way to force my way in… Dammit, she was always a sneaky little minx. You know more about what happened next than I do, so I’ll leave it at that.”

“She didn’t want us to think she was the one who killed the Director… But what about the mountain of corpses she’d left in the staff room?”

“She must’ve figured I’d assume that if she wasn’t the one who killed the Director, someone else must’ve killed everyone else too. But that was where she took it too far. Once you and Ichihime were gone, what the hell could I do but come looking for you, so I left the Director’s office as well. But I decided to stop by the staff room and say a quick hello. I headed down to the floor below…and holy shit. However abnormal Hang ’Em High might be─Ichihime Yukariki was the only person there who could possibly do that on her own.”

Was─that when it all came out? Her crimes laid bare not by suspicion but by trust. But she could never have let the staff live. In which case Hime-chan’s strategy was blown from the start.

…Or.

No, that’s probably not how it went. Probably Aikawa─hadn’t realized the truth in any real sense until she overheard me and Hime-chan’s conversation in the hallway. Whatever she herself may think, I’m pretty sure that’s how it went.

That’s the kind of person she is.

“But be it the locked room or anything else, I can’t believe it would’ve been opaque. To anyone but you, Jun.”

“I was the only one she needed to fool. Otherwise she wouldn’t have had any reason to kill you…or would she? You are an irritating son of a bitch.”

“…But if she had never summoned you to the school in the first place, you’d never have found out. Choosing to actively deceive you instead of holding onto a secret that might or might not be revealed… Talk about ‘getting caught in your own web.’”

“Thing is, she made a promise, a long time ago. When she became Shisei’s disciple. That she would never use Zigzag to kill.”

“But that technique…oh. Originally it was meant for restraining people, for self-defense, huh?”

So that’s why she had to hide the truth from Aikawa, in particular. It probably wasn’t the only reason but went some way towards explaining that bit. A motive for murder is always a complicated tangle of different threads, hard to put into words…but it seemed we could safely say that one of those threads was Hime-chan’s master, Yuma Shisei, and another was Jun Aikawa.

“But the academy wouldn’t allow her to honor that promise…which is why she never should’ve gone to a school like that in the first place. She’s dead already, let it go…stupid kid.”

But Yuma Shisei─knew what would happen.

“When I think about the Director, though, or Shisei, it’s not like I don’t get it. Actually you know what? Never mind, I don’t get it.”

“But─I’m just going to come out and say this, Jun: you’re too soft. Where was your mindreading on this one? In retrospect, whose handiwork could that locked room have been but Hime-chan’s─”

“Not like you figured it out right away.”

“But I’m just incompetent.”

And this was never my riddle to solve in the first place.

“Hanh. Not to sound like Maeda Keijiro Toshimasu, but trusting and being betrayed feels better to me than being suspicious and staying safe.”