Togami knew Enoshima wouldn't have an answer for Kirigiri. He didn't need to see her toss her ridiculous pigtails or roll her eyes to tell that much. If Kirigiri had any claim to her Ultimate Detective title at all, there wouldn't be so much as a crack in her accusation. Enoshima really had behaved in a bizarre way, considering her stated motives.
Not that he would have wanted her to let Makoto die — of course not. Even knowing Kirigiri had manipulated his reaction to make a point, he couldn't stop the shudder scraping down his spine at the thought. Whatever else Enoshima might have done, he had to be grateful that it led to her sparing Makoto's life. But that didn't explain why she would have wanted to do so.
"Ugh, fine. If you're going to be all annoying about it!" Enoshima flopped back against her throne, crossing her arms tight against her chest. "He wasn't the one I was gunning for, all right? I'd put alllllll that work into finding a decent use for Mukuro's waste of a body, and I didn't want another corpse screwing up the plan!"
Togami frowned. It wasn't a bad explanation exactly — she'd been the one behind the fake murder, and that plan had been too intricate to set up on the spur of the moment. If she'd gone to all the trouble of preparing a complicated and hard-to-solve crime, it made sense that she wouldn't want it derailed at the last second by an easily guessed coincidence. But still… he couldn't shake the feeling that a piece of the puzzle didn't quite fit.
"Whoa, whoa, so you're saying you weren't aiming at Mahkyutie from the get-go?" Flashes of silver darted all around Jill as she spun her scissors in frenetic whirls. "You didn't wanna let me off him in the library — cause it would mess up the trial to get him axed?"
"Of course not," Kirigiri answered, before Enoshima could drag them down another rabbit hole of stupidity. "That trial was never intended to target Naegi — the available evidence made that clear from the start. It's exactly what I thought when I first learned about it — the mastermind meant to use that trial to get rid of me."
She'd claimed as much before, when they'd talked amid the string and paper tangle of her thoughts in the bathhouse — that when she'd first learned of Ikusaba's death, she'd believed it to be an attack against her. That she'd responded so harshly throughout that trial because as far as she knew, she'd been fighting for her life.
Of course, in the end she hadn't been the one who'd lost the trial. She'd escaped unscathed from the voting… and the one who'd been dragged off to a horrific execution had been Makoto. Nothing could ever erase that nightmare. But… if he thought about it… he supposed he could see how she might have come to such a conclusion about the mastermind's intentions. Even if she was —
"Right." Enoshima twirled a strand of her pigtails around one finger, eerily reminiscent of the way Kirigiri used to toy with her braid. "I mean, it must be pretty obvious now, huh? You were being a pest and ruining the game for everyone — of course we had to get involved!"
His eyes nearly shot wide open at those words — but years of controlling his expression and a lifetime of self-preservation intervened to lock his face into unmoving neutrality. But inside his own head where no one else could see, he could feel a grin of vicious triumph. We — that was what Enoshima had said, the word slipping in almost unnoticed. We had to get involved — meaning that the decision hadn't been hers alone. She'd all but admitted that another mastermind had pulled her strings.
"Shame it didn't go according to plan, though." Enoshima didn't even seem to realize what she'd let slip, chattering on and on without missing a beat. "I mean, I was all set to throw you into your own personalized execution chamber — but noooo, you had to screw that up, too! I mean, come on — you barely even got to see the crime scene, how'd you manage to pull any decent arguments together?" She rolled her eyes. "Man, it's a good thing I can swap the executions at the last minute, or it would've been an even bigger pain!"
"Oh?" One of Kirigiri's eyebrows flicked up, a mere fraction of a motion. "So you're saying that you didn't originally intend to use Naegi's execution on me?"
"Ugh, no way!" Indignant anger sparked from Enoshima's glare, as she raised a red-nailed hand as if to claw at her opponent. "What kind of poetic parallel would there be in throwing a nosy loner detective into the collapsing school execution? Yours would've been way more appropriate — with a nice slow conveyor belt leading you back to a big squish of an ending!"
"What do you mean, squish?" Ogami asked, though her tone suggested that she wasn't entirely sure she wanted to know the answer.
"Oh, you know… squish like a big ol' hunk of metal would've turned her into a Kirigiri pancake." She dropped her shoulders, looking down as if a terrible weight of grief had settled on her shoulders. "It would've been terrible… blood and guts and bones all smushed together on the bottom of the machine. I'd never have gotten it clean again."
Togami grimaced at the repulsive description — if he'd still had any doubts remaining that Enoshima had been the one speaking for Monokuma, this quelled the last of them. Who else could be so grotesque and childish in the same breath?
The thought of the end she'd planned for Kirigiri made his stomach churn, in spite of the many times he'd envisioned her death himself. He might have wanted her gone for any one of a dozen reasons, from revenge for Makoto's suffering to just keeping her out of his way — but the executions went too far beyond simple death. After seeing so many others, after Makoto's… he couldn't wish such a thing on anyone. Not even her.
"Sounds like a rookie mistake to me!" Jill's cheery enthusiasm rang too bright in the dark room, especially after Enoshima's disturbing description. "All the fancy machines might look cool fresh outta the box, but they're way too much of a hassle long-term. But these," she flourished multiple pairs of scissors from each hand, "are portable, easy to clean, and available in large quantities!"
"But they're pretty impersonal, right?" Enoshima heaved a sigh, shaking her head sadly. "How could I send off my classmates using the exact same method for each of you? Like you're all just interchangeable parts instead of precious and irreplaceable individuals who will leave a unique hole in the world when you're gone forever?"
"Then you had executions designed for each of us?" Togami regretted the question as soon as he'd asked it. The idea that the mastermind had created an execution targeted specifically at him — that even now it sat hidden somewhere in this very building — sent chills through his veins.
"Of course — one for each of you, plus a few just in case of surprises. I mean, it's not like anyone knew for sure who would break and start killing when. And you know, it's a good thing all the plans were in place from the start." Her lip trembled as if she were about to cry. "Just imagine what would've happened to poor Leon if his plan hadn't been ready, and he'd gone through all the despair of his trial only for a boring and generic death."
Kuwata's face flashed through Togami's memory — both the terror as he realized what was about to happen and the battered wreck that had remained when the baseballs finally stopped. A feeling that could almost be pity snaked through the back of his mind as he considered that a so-called boring death might well have been a relief.
"So everyone had their own execution method prepared?" Kirigiri asked, once again drawing them all back to what she considered the important point. "You knew in advance what each of us would experience?"
Enoshima shrugged, which seemed to be as close to a confirmation as she was likely to give in her current depressed state.
"And if the trial had convicted me, I would have been crushed beneath some sort of machinery, presumably decorated to be ironically meaningful. Yes, that does fit with the other executions we saw." She crossed her arms. "Baseballs pummeled Kuwata to death in front of a window, where all of us had to watch. Owada spun around in a metal cage, showing us the results of the inhuman pressures. Celeste had a truck fall directly on top of her, in a completely unmissable manner. And Asahina — well, the guns might not have been a planned execution so much as a punishment for rule-breaking, but nonetheless it happened here in the circle, directly in front of us all."
Togami narrowed his eyes, running through the options of where she might be trying to go with such a recitation of the deaths so far. They all knew how the other students had died — what did she get out of repeating it?
She didn't give him more than an instant to ponder it. "All the executions were designed to demonstrate death beyond a doubt — all of them except one. The method designed for Naegi's execution is the only one that doesn't show us a dead body at the end — the only one that allows for the possibility that the culprit might survive."
