"You're not the mastermind."

The words he'd needed to hear curled up safe and warm around Naegi's heart, and the weight of the trial room seemed to lift from his shoulders. Even with his injuries weakening his body, even though he had no physical defenses, he felt a burst of strength welling up through his soul. Kyoko had finally seen through Junko's lies and found the truth, just like he'd known she could. She'd spotted the trap before it could snap shut around them, and now everyone could —

"You've got to be joking."

Naegi's froze, thoughts screeching to a halt at Byakuya's flat words. He'd leaned back from his podium, arms crossed against his chest like a shield, and mouth flattened into a thin white line.

"You've been arguing for this entire trial that Makoto has been behind everything, not to mention most of the last one — and now you're saying you just changed your mind?" He rolled his eyes, and for a moment he looked just as he had during those first couple trials, when he'd clung to a fierce determination to win. "If your opinions are that easy to alter, why should we believe anything you say?

The cold, confident voice called back to the Ultimate Affluent Progeny at his worst, dismissive and proud — but then Naegi blinked, and the similarities fell away. This wasn't Byakuya as he'd acted back then, no matter what mask he'd tried to slip on. He couldn't hide the cracks in his facade any more than the ill-fitting tracksuit and untamed hair, and Naegi could recognize the uncertain quiver of fear lurking behind his eyes.

"You should believe Kyoko because you know she's right." Catching Byakuya's eyes, Naegi tried to pour all his sincerity into their shared gaze. "I would never put any of my friends through a game like this. I wouldn't let you think I'd been killed. I wouldn't."

"You —" Byakuya broke his eyes away with a sharp shake of his head. "You're still trying to figure out if you can trust me, aren't you? You need to be sure." He took a deep breath, but Naegi could see the way it caught in his throat. "Well, I'm not going to give up just because she came up with a new idea that doesn't have any basis in reality!"

"But it does have a basis," Kyoko said, her calm voice a stark contrast to Byakuya's barely-masked uncertainty. "Quite a strong one, in fact."

Naegi didn't need to be told twice to recognize one of her verbal cues by now. "You mean the way that Junko kept trying to get Byakuya to — to turn on all of you?"

"Exactly." She gave him a brisk nod, like she'd never doubted that he would fill in the pieces she'd needed. "The real mastermind revealed their hand during that little spectacle — though it's only thanks to Alter Ego that we have a chance to do anything about it."

Alter Ego shifted in place, a faint blush coloring his cheeks. "Oh, I-I'm just glad I could help. But I'm sure you would have figured something out even if I hadn't been able to intervene."

"Not in time to make a difference." Kyoko's tone left no room for further modest contradictions. "If that plan had actually gotten far enough that one of us had been killed, it would have been too late. The mastermind might have tipped their hand in those last moments, but their identity wouldn't matter any longer if the trial ended with the survivors murdering one another out of despair."

"Ridiculous." But Byakuya's face told Naegi quite clearly that he wasn't as sure about that as he wanted to sound. "You're obviously bluffing, just trying to make me doubt what I know. Twist the facts all you like, but you can't refute all the evidence that you've built up until now!"

"That's true," Sakura said, eyes darting from Kyoko to Byakuya as though she didn't know which to keep an eye on. "No matter what's happened during this trial, it won't erase the facts that happened before this. Enoshima might look suspicious at the moment — but we heard the recording of what Naegi said to Hina just before she broke the rules. He drove her to get executed!"

Naegi flinched back from the accusation, his conversation with Hina flashing back through his mind. He could try telling himself that he hadn't known what she would do, that he hadn't meant the words the way she'd taken them… but that wouldn't ease the pain of knowing the consequences of his words. He'd encouraged Hina to talk to Sakura, and she'd gone and broken down the door —

Wait. Naegi blinked, letting the memory replay in his head. Hina had plotted a way to break down a door… but when the actual breaking happened, she hadn't been the one holding the screwdriver.

"That's not what happened." He gripped the arm of his wheelchair, clinging to his memory of how the events had actually occurred. "I mean — yeah, I told her to talk to you, and I gave her my toolkit. But then she gave the screwdriver to you, Sakura. You're the one who broke the door open."

"But the plan was hers." Sakura's gaze turned aside, to where Hina's gray portrait looked out at the circle. "And the one who comes up with the plan is the one at fault."

Kyoko shook her head. "Not necessarily. That's only stated in a rule about who becomes the blackened in a case with accomplices. It was never explicitly stated that it would apply to other rules as well."

"So what?" Byakuya snapped. "It obviously does!"

"No — it's not obvious at all." She took his furious response in stride. "The situation with Asahina and Ogami gave the mastermind a gray area where none of the rules neatly applied. They had to decide which student should be punished, based on their own judgment."

"Then — you mean the mastermind just killed Hina because — because they wanted her to die?" Sakura looked furious enough to tear the offending party to shreds, and the only obstacle keeping her in place was that she didn't know whether to go for the throne or the wheelchair.

"I'm not sure it's quite that simple," Kyoko said, apparently unconcerned that she stood beside a crackling aura of rage. "The mastermind chose their victim based on the impact it would have on the rest of us. They decided to kill Asahina rather than you — and then they went on to show us a video of Naegi apparently urging Asahina to her death." She raised an eyebrow. "That sounds a little too much like a set-up, don't you think?"