At Togami's command, Jill bounded past him to leave the clinic. Togami hurried after her, eyes narrowing in concern – but she didn't show any interest in heading left towards the dorms, where Naegi and Ogami should still be. She turned right and made a beeline for the stairs, flying towards the second floor.

Togami had to put on much more speed than he'd expected to keep her in sight – and it didn't even look like the genocider was exerting herself overly much as she stayed easily ahead of him. Fukawa had never struck him as especially athletic – so how exactly was her alter ego managing it? And more to the point, what else could Genocide Jill do if she decided to put her mind to it? The strength and speed she'd demonstrated already could give her the makings of a formidable fighter – maybe even one that could give the Ultimate Martial Artist pause.

But at least for now, Jill didn't seem inclined to use her speed for anything other than rushing to the library. She skidded to a halt in front of the doors, then looked back over her shoulder until he reached her side.

"Well?" Togami said, making an effort to keep his voice even so as not to betray that their speed had left him slightly out of breath. "What am I meant to look at?"

She jerked her head in the direction of the closed doors. "Should be pretty obvious to anyone as eagle-eyed as my White Knight!"

Such a confident declaration left him with little recourse but to go see for himself. Togami scowled, forcing himself to take another step towards the library. His feet protested the movement, heavy and unwilling at the prospect of returning to the room where he'd found Naegi bleeding and broken. He didn't want to go back in there, to search through the broken furniture where Naegi had lain or the reddish-brown streaks where his blood had dried. It was all too easy to imagine that he might have been forced to return to this room not to look into whatever Jill had found, but to investigate for another class trial.

But that wasn't why he was here, he had to keep reminding himself of that. Naegi was still alive, in spite of the horrors Jill had inflicted on him, and the room beyond these doors was nothing more than a grisly reminder of what he'd survived.

Togami took a deep breath, bracing himself for the sight, and then pulled open the library door in a smooth, unfaltering motion. If he had to endure this room again, at least he wouldn't show any of the weakness it inspired to any observers.

But to his shock, the room wasn't quite as bad as he remembered. His memory had painted the library red with blood, the furniture in ruins and shredded paper littering the floor – but the reality didn't quite seem to match up. The floor was mostly clear, with only a few scattered piles of papers or books, and the only place he could see broken furniture was a single pile of splintered wood near the door. Most of the bookcases remained intact, if scarred by scissor marks, standing in tidy rows that screened the area where Naegi had been injured from view.

But they shouldn't have done any such thing. Togami frowned, looking around the room again and trying to match it against his memory. His recollection of the state of the room when he'd found Naegi probably wasn't entirely reliable – but he did know with complete certainty that he'd been able to see the boy the moment he'd stepped across the threshold. There hadn't been any bookcases in the way.

He rounded on Jill, sending her his darkest scowl. "If you've dragged me up here to see some rearranged furniture –"

"Not that," Jill interrupted, tossing her braids impatiently. "Behind the bookcases."

Togami turned to look at the bookcases she'd meant – the ones that stood in front of the very spot he wanted least to revisit. But he'd come this far. Turning back now would make him look like a fool.

The air itself seemed to thicken around him as he walked towards the bookcases, until he could almost feel the weight of it in his lungs with every breath he drew. The metallic tang of blood coated his tongue as he approached, so sharp that he couldn't tell if it was merely a trick of his memory or if the smell still lingered in the room around him. He swallowed against it as he reached the line of bookcases, trying to flush the foul taste out of his mouth.

He could feel the pressure of Jill's eyes on his back, understood the necessity of finishing the task he'd set out to do – but nevertheless, Togami found himself standing still at the corner of the bookcases. One more step was all it would take to bring him back to the scene where his worst nightmare had turned into a reality – and he couldn't bring himself to take it. No matter how he told himself that he was prepared to face this, his feet rebelled at the command, locking in place as though heavy chains bound him to the floor.

Togami's hands trembled at his sides as he curled his fingers into tight, frustrated fists. It was just a place, nothing more than a corner of the library, and it had no business to possess the power to affect him this badly. He needed to go there, to turn this corner and see whatever it was that had Jill so alarmed – that ought to have been enough for him to summon the self-control to do it.

What had Naegi done to him? A few short weeks ago, the thought of being this overcome by something as insignificant as an emotion would have been laughable – and now, here he stood, unable to walk forward and look at a scene that he'd already visited, just because of the feelings that overwhelmed him at the mere thought. Naegi had torn apart everything that Togami had believed himself to be, leaving him broken and bleeding from wounds to the parts of his soul he'd thought most invulnerable.

But – no. Togami frowned, stopping that train of thought as it ran through his head. No, Naegi wasn't the one tearing him apart – it was his injury that had caused that, not anything the boy himself had done. Naegi would be distraught if he thought that Togami considered him responsible for this – and Togami couldn't bear the thought of heaping emotional pain on top of the physical suffering Naegi had already endured.

It was that thought, the idea of keeping further pain away from the boy unconscious in his bed, that finally gave Togami the strength to drag himself out of his paralysis. He could get past this – he had to, if he truly intended to find something useful in his investigation of Monokuma's disappearance. And if Naegi could endure the attack that had happened around this corner, surely Togami could manage to look at the aftermath.

With that in mind, Togami took that final step around the bookcase corner before he could lose his nerve.

The scene he found was every bit as gruesome as he'd feared, with the bloodstained pieces of the collapsed bookcase, the smudged outlines of where Naegi had fallen, and the half-formed message Jill had begun to scrawl across the floor. But as horrifying as all those things were, none of that was what first caught his eye.

No, the first thing that Togami saw when he turned the corner was Monokuma, standing frozen in the middle of the scene.