Togami frowned at Kirigiri, trying to follow her train of logic. "You're saying that you believe Makoto deliberately incited Jill's attack on him as preparation for Ikusaba's falsified murder trial? That's ridiculous. Even putting aside the fact that we know he didn't kill a girl who'd been dead for weeks at that point, getting attacked didn't accomplish anything. There would have been simpler ways to get an alibi."
"Ways that would let the mastermind control everyone's whereabouts while the fake murder scene was being assembled?" Kirigiri raised an eyebrow. "Considering the grim mood of the school after Fukawa's trial, it would have taken something rather significant to convince all of you to behave in the ways they needed."
"The frozen Monokuma robot worked well enough for that," Togami reminded her. "In hindsight, it's easy enough to see that someone planted it to keep us occupied, and eventually to lead us to the crime scene."
"Which was only possible because Naegi's injury also required someone's presence. With two locations needing someone in attendance, you were forced to split up — creating possible opportunities as you moved, communicated, and traded places." She crossed her arms. "Or do you imagine that the bomb you found in the robot could have gotten upstairs to mutilate the body if you hadn't had an incredibly important reason to leave both the library and the crime scene unattended?"
His lips tightened at the implication of incompetence. "The bomb could easily have been there already. If they had access to bombs in the robots, they could have had extras on hand. If the bomb hadn't been present when I first found the body, I could have unmasked it and exposed the entire plan."
"No — no, you couldn't," Ogami said, her hands clamping down on the edges of her podium. "You wouldn't have had a chance. The room had been filled with poison at the time. If you'd remained long enough to examine the body, you would have inhaled enough to cause serious harm."
He recalled the overwhelming rush of dizziness, collapsing to his knees and fighting to drag himself free of the poisoned room. It had nearly taken him in spite of everything he'd done. Even if he'd done his best to hide how close a call it had been, the others knew enough to piece the truth together. He couldn't pretend that it had happened any other way.
"The room could only be entered safely after the poison was neutralized," Kirigiri went on, seizing control of the conversation again while he was distracted by his own thoughts. "But in order to make us believe the falsified cause of death, someone had to experience the poisoned air before it could be counteracted. This setup ensured that only one person would be available to encounter the poison initially, and that you would then have a good reason to leave the room unguarded while you checked on Naegi and Ogami."
"One person?" Jill demanded. "Forgetting about something?"
"No, but I think you are. After all, this would have been right around the time that someone locked you up." Kirigiri glanced up at Enoshima, who had decided to sit cross-legged on the throne with her elbows propped on her spread knees to support her chin. "It should be clear now that the person voicing Monokuma would have been the one behind that attack, too. With Monokuma out of action to distract Togami, it would have been a perfect opportunity."
"So I got taken down by a short-skirted big-boobed schoolgirl?" Jill jerked back, staring up at Enoshima in what Togami considered to be excessively dramatic horror. "No way! It should at least have been an adorably straight-laced detective boy who could put up a heart-thumping game of cat and mouse before letting me slip through his fingers!"
"The frozen Monokuma, the poisoned room, and the attack on Jill all had to be deliberately planned," Kirigiri said, continuing her argument before Jill had even finished speaking. "The highly-structured plan to set up a fake murder wouldn't have worked if even one had happened differently. But those elements only worked correctly due to everyone's initial reactions to the attack on Naegi." She raised an eyebrow. "If all the rest fit together so well, can you really say the first piece of the puzzle is a coincidence?"
"Yes."
"Naegi had the trip ticket to ensure he and Jill would be trapped alone," Kirigiri spoke over his furious objection. "He knew exactly what to say to provoke her into attacking him, and he had confirmation from her own mouth that she didn't want to murder him. And the timing was exactly right to set up the conditions that would put the false murder plan into motion."
"Not if I'd actually killed him, it wouldn't've been!" Jill's scissors shot out to point across the circle, glaring like she was imagining the scissors stabbing right through Kirigiri's heart. "He and I were trapped in there all by our lonesome, remember? That bear locked us in so we couldn't leave, or you can bet I wouldn't have stuck around to hear him yap! And sure, I'm the best there is when it comes to cutting bodies open, but that doesn't mean I can go both ways!"
Kirigiri raised an eyebrow. "But it didn't stay shut. When you tried to leave the room to retrieve Ogami, you were able to do so."
"Nope — it rattled once, then opened right up!" Jill shrugged. "Probably just broke or something."
"If so, you would have been killed," Kirigiri pointed out. "The rule against breaking locked doors was still in effect. So if the door was truly locked while you and Naegi were in the library, there's only one person who could have opened it." She looked up at Enoshima. "So? Why did you decide to unlock the library door so Jill could fetch help? Why not allow him to die and then hold a class trial for his murder?"
"Huh? Me?" Enoshima jolted up, eyes popping comically wide with all the alarm of a student caught sleeping in class. "Oh, uh… I dunno. I guess it sounded like a good idea at the time?" She gave a sheepish little giggle.
Kirigiri looked just as unimpressed with this response as Togami felt. "You're claiming that you decided to use a flexible interpretation of the rules that favored someone's survival — on a whim?"
"Well, it's not like there would've been any fun in a trial with an obvious answer, right?" Enoshima said, just a touch too brightly. "I mean, what would the folks at home think if they were stuck watching you all twiddle your thumbs after working out whodunnit on the first try?"
"But the complexity of a murder hasn't been a consideration of the game before this," Kirigiri shot back without missing a beat. "We've been forced into the trials in order to foster distrust among us and to make sure we would have to work against one another — not because anyone behind it actually cared whether or not we solved the cases. The mysteries were never the goal."
"Uh, pretty sure they were, hon." One hand on her hip, Enoshima looked down at them all with the most obnoxiously condescending expression Togami had ever seen. "Kinda went through a whole hell of a lot to make sure they went according to plan, you know?"
"No, they weren't — you said so yourself." Kirigiri met Enoshima's eyes without flinching, too confident in her deductions to let the whirlwind personality shifts faze her. "When we asked you about why you were doing this, about the purpose behind the killing game, it would have been the perfect moment to refer to the mysteries — but you didn't. You said the purpose was despair, and nothing else."
"Well, naturally despair is the ultimate goal." Enoshima rolled her eyes with far more drama than necessary. "We forced you to solve mysteries as a means to that end. But more intricate mysteries would breed more suspicion and doubt amongst you, which would bring you more despair in the end than if you'd found the answer right away."
"Would it? I'm not so sure. The trials have been difficult, of course — but it's all been the same type of challenge. Every time we've faced it, we've grown more determined to defeat the uncertainty, bound more tightly together in the face of doubt. We could prepare ourselves for those trials, as much as anyone could. But," she raised a hand, "what would have happened if we'd been faced with another kind of trial instead? What if rather than the unknown, we had to walk knowingly into a horror that we could see coming?"
And in spite of himself, Togami could see it — what it would have been like to face the trial she'd suggested. If he'd found Makoto broken and gone, if he'd seen Jill smeared with the blood she'd used to stage his lifeless body. If he'd had to stand at a podium and stare across the circle at the girl he'd known had been the one to take away the boy he loved. The slow march towards the inevitable, the pointless arguments circling round and round what they couldn't avoid, and the grief gnawing deep beneath it all.
"No." The word escaped before he could stop it, his fingers fumbling back to Makoto's pulse point with a clumsy desperation. Only when he felt a heartbeat against his fingertips did he breathe again, eyes closing in a brief moment of relief. Makoto might be frozen and afraid, too shattered by betrayal to move — but he hadn't gone completely. "God, no."
"That should be proof enough that it would have had quite the effect."
His eyes snapped open again at Kirigiri's words, and he caught the tail end of her gesture towards him. She didn't even bother to glance in his direction, though — she'd kept her sight zeroed on Enoshima. "You had the opportunity to cause that kind of despair — but you passed it up. You opened the library door to let Jill save Naegi's life." Her eyes never wavered, a statue-still hunter's waiting for her target to flinch. "Why?"
Schedule Note: Since next week is Thanksgiving here in the US, I won't be posting next Sunday or the week after. Next chapter will be up on December 15. See you then!
