Naegi hadn't thought much about the results of Alter Ego's data analysis in a while. With everything that had happened to him since Alter Ego had finished his work, Naegi had barely felt like he had a moment to catch his breath, let alone to consider the complicated new information. It had receded to the back of his mind, too important to forget, but not immediately relevant enough to remember. It had been more important to figure out what to do about the deepening rifts among the survivors, or to find ways to help Kirigiri with her complicated investigations.

But he shouldn't have let himself get so distracted. Most of the information had been confusing — how could Hope's Peak have closed a year ago without any of them hearing about it? — but that one piece of data had gleamed critically in the midst of the riddles. The headmaster of Hope's Peak planned to isolate a group of students in the school, and was likely still in the building now.

But at least Naegi hadn't been the only one to forget this vital clue to their situation. Looking up at the stunned expression on Togami's face, the same look he wore whenever someone managed to come up with an idea that forced him to rethink some of his own theories, a tangle of shock and irritation — Naegi could tell that the other boy hadn't remembered Alter Ego's information about the headmaster, either. Of course he hadn't. When they'd been discussing Ikusaba, Togami had brought up the possibility of a seventeenth person wandering around the school as if it were an unlikely possibility that poked a hole in Ikusaba's story, rather than as a theory that had support from another source.

"The headmaster," Togami said slowly, his words slurring even more than they had been when he'd been concentrating earlier. "That would be another possibility altogether, wouldn't it? And its one that even she might not have seen coming."

There was no need for Togami to explain who he meant — he only spoke about one other student with that particular twist to his tone. Even Fukawa's stalking and Genocide Jill's cheerful discussion of murder hadn't earned quite the level of venom that Togami used to talk about Kirigiri.

"I think she'd have remembered, though," Naegi said, not allowing his eyes to drift over towards that body. "She wouldn't have forgotten something so important. It wouldn't have surprised her."

After all, Kirigiri had always been the most determined of any of them to uncover the mysteries of their imprisonment. She always seemed several steps ahead of everyone else on that front, and Naegi couldn't imagine that she might have lost track of even the tiniest clue. Had that been why she'd been so willing to accept Ikusaba's claims of being a mere subordinate who was willing to defect to their side — because she remembered that Alter Ego had identified the headmaster as someone else?

But Togami was already shaking his head. "That's not it," he said, sounding a little impatient. "She said something to me about it later, while she was still insisting we couldn't be trusted to speak to one another. She —" His gaze flickered towards the cameras. "She had some suspicions about whether we could believe the truth of what Alter Ego had told us."

Naegi blinked. Kirigiri had thought Alter Ego might be wrong about the headmaster? "She never said anything like that to me."

Togami shrugged, looking annoyed. "I couldn't begin to try to explain why that girl does anything. But mistrusting that data isn't an entirely unreasonable stance. After all, Monokuma did admit that he deliberately left it for us to find and decode. I doubt he'd have done so if it contained information that we could actually use against him."

"Unless knowing and not being able to do anything about it would be worse for us than not knowing at all," Naegi said, thinking back to Monokuma's utter glee every time he dropped some scrap of information for them to try to use.

"But if this is another possibility," Togami said, crossing his arms thoughtfully, "then it might explain why the killer went to so much trouble to prevent anyone from learning too much from the victim's body. If Alter Ego was right and the headmaster truly is here in the school, he's gone to a great deal of trouble to hide his presence. He would presumably want to prevent us from finding any trace of him."

"How would burning the body do that, though?" Naegi asked, blinking.

Togami scowled. "I don't have enough information to work that out yet," he said, the admission sounding like it had been torn from his teeth. "But it fits better than most of the other theories about why anyone would go to the trouble of setting a bomb to destroy the body."

A chill slid down Naegi's spine at the thought of that bomb going off so close to the other boy, and the music stand pole trembled in his grip as he couldn't suppress a shiver. "And to get rid of anyone who might investigate," he added.

But Togami frowned. "Actually… that might not have been a primary goal. The bomb didn't go off immediately — it had a few seconds of delay, enough for me to get away from the worst part of the blast. But it would have been just as easy to set it to go off the moment I touched the body, if they'd been determined to get rid of whoever found the body." His frown deepened to a scowl. "And I fully intend to make them regret giving me that chance."

Naegi tried to smile at the confident determination in the other boy's tone, overpowering even his inability to judge his own speech — but the best he could manage was a wobbling sort of grimace. Fighting the mastermind was important, but hearing his boyfriend draw their attention by making dramatic pronouncements of defiance wasn't exactly calming.

"I don't regret it," he said, swallowing back the lump that seemed to fill his throat at the thought. "I don't know what I would've done if you hadn't gotten out of the way, or if I hadn't been able to put out that fire. Even if they didn't mean to kill you right away, those flames could've destroyed the whole room if they'd gotten to the furniture, and I don't think I could've gotten you out. I had enough trouble just moving the bucket of water."

"The what?" Togami turned to look back at the ground near the body, scanning the area until his gaze fell on the empty bucket lying where it had rolled some distance away. He looked back at Naegi with a frown. "You're saying there was a bucket of water just… sitting around nearby?"

"Yeah, it was over there with a bunch of other stuff," Naegi said, nodding in the direction where he'd found the bucket of water. "I don't remember seeing any of it when we were in here the first time, though."