Naegi blinked as the other students all turned to look at him in the wake of Kirigiri's question, waiting expectantly for him to give them answers. It seemed a little strange to him — why would Kirigiri want someone else to tell about the events she'd seen first-hand? She did like to ask him questions during the trials, he'd noticed that right from the start… but this time felt a little different from the others.

In all the earlier trials, the questions had always been about specific pieces of evidence, things he'd found during the course of his own investigation. When she wanted to make a point, Kirigiri would ask him to answer her question about it rather than telling everyone herself — but that seemed to be a way of verifying her answer with another person's independent conclusions.

But the information about Ikusaba wasn't really something he'd uncovered during the investigation. He'd never met Ikusaba — he'd never even seen her alive that he knew of. All he would be able to do now was repeat the story Kirigiri had told him. Why would she want him to do something like that? Did she really think the others doubted her that much?

Did they?

Naegi didn't want to think that his friends would have made up their minds already, without even going through the trial… but one of the painful lessons he'd had to learn in this school was that he didn't always know what other people thought. And from the way the evidence had been piling up when the final announcement had sounded, he knew things looked very bad.

Well, if that was the case, then he would just have to try to convince everyone else otherwise. After all, if Kirigiri was planning to go through with a plan to attack the mastermind's carefully-protected anonymity, she would need all the support she could get from the rest of them. He'd have to do his best to try to reinforce her credibility.

"Okay. I'm not sure I know everything that happened, but I'll do my best to explain." Naegi looked around the circle at his friends one more time before turning back to face Togami. "We all assumed the fifteen of us who met in the entrance hall at the start of this were the only ones involved, but that's not true. There's been a sixteenth student hidden in the school all along — Mukuro Ikusaba. For the last few weeks, she's been working with the mastermind from behind the scenes, watching us through the cameras and talking to us through Monokuma. But the night after the last class trial, she stopped hiding and decided to approach Kirigiri."

"While she was searching the headmaster's office by herself," Togami added sharply.

"But I was under the impression that the mastermind barricaded the office door after I broke the lock," Ogami said, frowning.

"I got in before that," Kirigiri said calmly. "If the rest of you had thought to take advantage of the opportunity immediately instead of putting it off until morning, you might have been able to search the office as well."

"What the hell are you so excited about that place for?" Jill demanded, one hand on her hip. "It was nothing but a snore-fest — not a single picture of cuties in sexy uniforms or special detention gear in the whole place! What's the point of being the head honcho if you're not even gonna use it?"

"Wait — what are you talking about?" Kirigiri asked, a hint of frown flickering across her face for a moment.

"That's what I want to know!" Monokuma called out cheerfully before Jill could respond. "Are you saying I'm not living up to my headmasterly duties? Do you feel like there's some aspect of your wholesome school life I've failed to nurture? I would never want my precious students to feel like your needs are going unfulfilled!" He grinned at them, teeth gleaming.

Togami scowled at Naegi. "Is he saying anything relevant?"

"Uh… not really," Naegi told him.

"Then ignore him and get on with it," he ordered, crossing his arms impatiently. "I don't want to spend more time in this trial than we have to."

"Right." Naegi supposed that letting Monokuma distract them wouldn't be a good thing — not when they had so many problems to work through. "So Ikusaba found Kirigiri in the headmaster's office and decided to talk to her. She wore a mask and coat and stuff so Kirigiri couldn't recognize her later, but she introduced herself and explained what she'd been doing here in the school. And then… she made a suggestion."

Naegi couldn't help but glance across the circle at Monokuma as he began to reveal this particular secret. The mastermind already knew about Ikusaba's offer of betrayal — of course they knew, they had to know — but even so, saying it here felt like nails scraping down the center of his spine. The mastermind was their real enemy, and he hated the feeling that he was about to sell out a potential ally.

"Well?" Jill demanded, before Naegi had quite gotten up the nerve to continue. "Come on, Big Mac, you can't leave us high and dry after that! What was our mystery corpse's last request?"

Naegi grimaced. He would have liked to object to calling Ikusaba's discussion with Kirigiri a last request — but he supposed that was technically what it had been. "Ikusaba asked Kirigiri to work with her… against the mastermind."

He half-expected Monokuma to interrupt at that, bubbling over with some sort of ridiculous joke or disturbing innuendo — but nothing happened. The bear just sat silently on his throne, head tilted slightly to one side in his usual expression of mild interest. Naegi shivered and tore his gaze away, looking back at Togami. The sight of his boyfriend could usually steady his nerves… but the icy look of concentration on Togami's face now didn't make Naegi feel much better.

"Ikusaba said that she'd changed her mind about helping the mastermind while she was watching us over the cameras," Naegi went on after a moment. "She said she was just a part of a mercenary group the mastermind brought in from outside, and she wanted to help us escape instead of going through with the rest of the mastermind's plan. But she couldn't just let us out — she didn't know everything the mastermind did. So she said that she would unlock one of the hidden areas of the school that we couldn't access on our own, where the mastermind might have hidden something that we could use against them."

"A locked area?" Ogami asked, startled. "Do you mean that Ikusaba wasn't subject to the rule about locked doors?"

"Um… I'm not sure," Naegi said, glancing over at Kirigiri. She didn't respond, so he figured she must not know for certain either. "But it didn't really matter if the rules counted for her or not, because she had a key. She unlocked the door to the staircase that goes up to the second floor of the dorms, and Kirigiri went in to look for clues. And while she was searching…" Naegi trailed off with a sigh.

"So she tries to stab her boss in the back and ends up dead?" Jill said, tapping her scissors against one palm. "Not bad as motives go! Traitors have to expect to get it from both sides, huh?"

"She must have known the risks of trying to act against the mastermind," Ogami agreed, her eyes grim. "They would be even harsher when retaliating against a former ally than they have been when playing out the rules with the pawns of their game."

"Except that things aren't that simple," Togami interrupted, his too-loud voice almost violent as it shattered across the circle. "You're all acting like this was just a case of the mastermind executing an agent for treason — but we don't hold class trials for executions. Enoshima and Asahina were both executed for breaking rules, and the mastermind made a point of doing so publicly. There was no attempt to hide what had happened, and we didn't have to solve the riddle of why they died."

"No, we all knew what happened to them from the beginning," Naegi agreed heavily, the corpses of the two dead girls flaring bright across his vision. "The mastermind wanted us to know. Whatever happened to Ikusaba… someone definitely tried to conceal the truth about it."

"Of course they did," Togami said. "Getting away with murder is the whole point of the mastermind's killing game. And since we've been thrust into another round of it, we know that this isn't just another execution. Ikusaba's involvement might bring the mastermind into it, but this is as much of a trial as any of the others. We're still dealing with a killing among the students."

Naegi didn't move at those words, but he could see the way they made the other students shift. After Togami had made it clear that they were dealing with a student murderer, all three of the others had turned to look at Kirigiri.

Well, he'd known walking into this trial that it didn't look good. Someone had killed Ikusaba at some point during the last thirty-six hours, that much was certain — and there weren't a lot of options, not with the trial proceeding the way it was. Togami had said that meant this wasn't about the mastermind — but according to Kirigiri, the mastermind was at the root of this entire murder. With so many questions still unanswered, Naegi wasn't sure what he ought to believe.

No. That was the wrong way to go about it. He had to believe in his friends. They'd always managed to find their way to the truth before, however painful and difficult it might have been. He had to believe that they would be able to do it again. And above all else, he knew he had to trust in the two allies that had been with him through so much up to this point. Looking from Kirigiri's cool silvery eyes to Togami's fierce blue scowl, Naegi promised himself again that he would keep faith with both of them, no matter what happened.

And that meant he had to stop things from going too far in a direction they might all regret.

"Whatever we're dealing with, it's still a class trial," Naegi said firmly, his voice pulling the other students' gazes away from Kirigiri. Togami looked away last of all, only when Kirigiri herself shifted her attention. When Naegi was sure the other boy was watching, he went on. "We have to treat this like the other trials and figure things out piece by piece. Since everyone didn't get to see everything firsthand, that's the only way to be sure we've got the right answer."

"Except that answering every question was never our mandate," Togami pointed out, crossing his arms. "All we've been instructed to do is determine the killer's identity. If we can determine that beyond a shadow of doubt, is the rest of the trial really necessary?"

Naegi stared across the circle at him in disbelief. "Of course it is! We can't accuse someone just because a few things look bad for them. If we just voted based on how things looked at the start of the trials, we'd have been wrong every time so far!"

"That's true," Ogami said thoughtfully. "These situations have always changed between the start of the trial and the end. With our lives on the line, we shouldn't jump to conclusions."

"Don't get me wrong, I'm all for cutting the dumb trivia night chatter once we're sure," Jill added, snapping her scissors for emphasis. "But sorry, baby, doesn't look like we're there yet! That's how you can tell the real artisans — we're not afraid to take the time to do our stuff right!"

"Okay, good," Naegi said, relieved that the others weren't going to start arguing for an immediate vote against Kirigiri. "So we'll go through things one at a time. We know the corpse is Mukuro Ikusaba —"

"Do we?" Kirigiri interrupted, raising one eyebrow. "Is that established? After all, if there was one mystery student hiding in the school, who's to say that there aren't others?"

"Uh… well, I guess it's possible there was someone else," Naegi said slowly, trying to figure out what Kirigiri had meant by that. "The body was rigged with a bomb that went off when Togami tried to unmask her, so we never got a look at her face. And when we got the Monokuma File, it just said that the body was unidentified — it never actually said this was Ikusaba."

"But we know Ikusaba was in the school," Togami countered. "No one has seen any evidence of these other mythical students you're proposing. And Monokuma himself said that the game had sixteen participants."

"Incontrovertible proof," Kirigiri murmured, her expression never so much as flickering. "I never said there had to be other students — I asked how you can be sure this corpse was Ikusaba. It sounds to me as though you've simply assumed it without evidence."

"No — that's not right," Naegi said. "We do have a reason to think it's her. When you met Ikusaba, you said that she showed you the tattoo that marked her as a member of Fenrir, an elite group of mercenary soldiers. Well, even though the bomb made the corpse's face unrecognizable, we could still see that tattoo on her hand."

"I see. That does sound conclusive." The corners of Kirigiri's mouth tilted downward in a small frown. "Unless there were multiple people in the school with ties to the same group."

"Is that going to be your answer to everything?" Togami snapped, his glare scorching across the circle at her. "What-ifs and smokescreens of imaginary killers?"

"Better to consider all the possibilities than to fail to notice reality because it's unlikely," Kirigiri said calmly. "Why should it be only sixteen participants in the game, whatever you've been told? Introduce the idea of hidden players, and the options immediately multiply. Is there any solid reason to believe that the people in the school are limited to the sixteen we know about?"

A solid reason… Naegi frowned, thinking back through everything he knew about the game, the mastermind, and Ikusaba's role in the school. Nothing Kirigiri had told him eliminated the possibility of another student… and he supposed that Monokuma's ramblings on the subject weren't exactly real evidence. The rules in their e-handbooks didn't mention numbers either way, and the list of student profiles didn't even include Ikusaba.

The list of students… for some reason, that rang a bell. Where else had he seen a list like that? He was sure it was somewhere recent…

"The student roster!" The words burst out of Naegi's mouth as the realization hit him. "The sixteen of us were the only ones in the Hope's Peak student roster for our class!"