Togami stopped in his tracks the moment he noticed the change in the light, all his senses alert for the slightest change in the hallway around him. He didn't think there was anything out of the ordinary — but he couldn't be certain, not now. Normally, he had perfect confidence in his ability to notice someone following him, but that only extended to normal pursuers. A Fenrir soldier might well possess the skills necessary to throw off his instincts.

But no matter how he checked, he couldn't detect so much as a hint that anyone else might be in that hall, not even when he tried to peer ahead into the stairwell. But then again… would a person need to be physically present to alter whatever this device was doing? After all, it had started blinking of its own accord, without any outward prompting. Who was to say that it couldn't change the same way?

Or… no, he couldn't say that nothing had prompted the change, could he? Not when it had only happened after he'd removed the device from the rest of the robot and carried it out of the room. Had he triggered this somehow, in reaction to his investigation? But this reaction couldn't be caused by having disconnected the device — after all, it had begun blinking before he'd removed it.

Could it be something else, then? Togami frowned, running through the possibilities in his head. He could think of several options… but the difficulty with all of them was that there would have been other instances when they should have occurred. And they hadn't. Monokuma's red eye had only flickered when the bear had pretended to be amusing, faking a wink or a leer — it had never done anything approaching this strange pattern of slow blinks.

Was the blinking some kind of error? Maybe the light was meant to shine steadily, without all this flickering. But… if that was the case, then why was it such a regular rhythm? Or perhaps it wasn't that the flickering was disrupting the light… but rather that the steady shining came from the rate of the blinks increasing to the point of merging into a single red beam.

It was impossible to guess at the cause just from looking at the device, though. Togami glanced around the hallway one more time, then took a few more steps forward to the stairs. He kept a close watch on the device as he walked slowly down the first flight of stairs, counting the time between each blink under his breath. And by the time he'd reached the entrance to the first floor, the blinks had slowed back to their original rate.

But was it just a coincidence, or something more significant? Rather than exiting the stairs, Togami turned around and began climbing again — and sure enough, by the time he reached the second floor, the blinking light had sped up ever so slightly again. He kept going, climbing another flight to the third floor — and the speed of the flickering increased again before he'd even made it halfway.

By the time he reached the top of the final flight of stairs, the device seemed to have gone haywire in his hand, sending beams of red light skittering ahead of him onto the fifth floor. If Togami had had any doubt that the device was being changed by its proximity to something, he didn't any longer. Whatever had caused this change — it had to be close.

With the device in his hand blazing like the lights of an approaching police car, Togami didn't see the point in wasting time trying to mask his presence. He strode purposefully down the hall, red splashing on the walls around him like an ephemeral trail of blood. It only grew more intense as he passed the first two classrooms — but as soon as he turned left, towards the garden and the dojo, the flickering ever so slightly slowed again. Which meant…

Togami turned, staring down the long, straight stretch of empty hallway that led to the more sinister side of the fifth floor. The locked Biology Lab and the gruesome ruined classroom — why had he expected the device to lead him to anything else?

With every step Togami took down that hall, the light flashed faster, brighter, until it coalesced into a single blaze of solid red as he came to a stop just in front of the ruined classroom. He took a single step towards the Biology Lab, just to test his conclusion, but he hardly even needed the confirmation that the only place the light shone this madly was outside Classroom 5-C. Whatever he'd been tracking, it waited for him beyond those doors.

Had this been the device's purpose all along? Was it meant to lure him up the stairs, to the isolated fifth floor, where the mastermind could deal with him alone? But… that made no sense, not when he'd already spent hours alone in the library, concentrating on his investigation while the door was out of his line of sight. If someone had wanted to attack him, that would have been the ideal set-up, especially after Jill had gotten bored of watching him work. And could this device really have been planted specifically to trick him into following it somewhere? It had been a part of Monokuma's eye, after all, buried deep in the bear's head. No matter how far in advance the mastermind might have planned, surely they couldn't have prepared for that specific scenario.

But even if this wasn't a plan targeted specifically at him, it could still be dangerous. Whatever was behind that door had the ability to affect pieces of Monokuma, the tool the mastermind used to communicate with the students — and Togami knew he hadn't seen anything like that when he'd searched the room the day the fifth floor opened. Someone with power over Monokuma had put something in the ruined classroom — or worse, they might even be waiting there themselves.

And if so, they knew he was just outside. The scorchingly red light would snake through even the tiniest gaps around the edges of the door, announcing his presence as loudly as if he'd shouted. No one could possibly have missed it.

Which meant that there was no point in hiding it. Bracing himself, Togami reached out to yank open the classroom door. It stuck for a moment, but since the handle turned easily enough, it couldn't have been locked. If anything waited for him in there, it hadn't meant to keep him out.

But for a moment, faced with a silent, shadowy room, he wondered if he'd misunderstood. The classroom lights were off, and even when Togami flipped the switch by the door, nothing happened. The dingy hallway light seemed to stay behind as he took a cautious step into the classroom. The only illumination came from the device in his hand, its red glow giving new life to the old bloodstains, making them burn as if the blood had only just been spilled. Even the stench of death in the air had changed, shifting from the thick filth of human gore to something sharper, with acrid undertones that were almost chemical.

He took another step inside, his eyes slowly adjusting to the lack of light. He could make out the contours of broken furniture, fallen in the same places he'd seen it laying two days ago. He could trace the markings on the walls, abstract evidence that some kind of fight had taken place here. If he looked along the floor, he could see the chalk outlines where so many bodies had piled together —

And he could see the slumped form of a new body splayed across the ground where the dead had been the thickest, red light gleaming off the knife impaled in its chest.


Author's Note: And with that, I'm afraid I have to leave you. I will be taking a week long break to devote my full attention to moving. The next chapter will be posted on Sunday, July 3. See you then!