A setup? The words made Naegi blink, and in that brief flash of darkness he could still see Hina's body crumpled on the trial room floor. She'd been torn away from them all in a brutal fake-out of an execution, murdered for the crime of daring to reach out to her closest friend… and it had been part of a setup? His stomach lurched at the thought, the sick idea churning together with stomach acid into a flood of sour nausea.
But no matter how much horror he felt, it paled in comparison to the awful grief twisting across Sakura's face. "Hina…" The name caught in her throat, ending in a broken rasp. She clenched her fists, head dropping till her chin fell flat against her chest, and the force of her pain pulsed out from her bowed body with crackling darkness.
The sorrow hit Naegi like a wave of electricity, and the corners of his eyes burned from the intensity. Hina's death and Sakura's grief… so much pain between them, and Junko had used it like a building block for her plan. The sheer injustice of it boiled through his heart, hot and fierce, until it exploded out in a burst of anger. "It's not fair!"
A breath hissed through Sakura's teeth, as though the words had landed a blow that all the physical training in the world couldn't soften. Guilt gnawed at his chest — had he just made his friend's suffering worse? Would this send Sakura back down that dark path she'd barely stepped away from?
"You're right. It isn't fair."
Calm words anchored him, a lifeline to help him pull back from that spiral into pain. He looked up to Kyoko, who stood beside Sakura's maelstrom of grief without so much as shifting aside.
"Those actions might not have crossed the absolute letter of the rules," Kyoko continued, eyes fixed on Hina's portrait, "but they weren't fair. Not the way that the mastermind got the power to decide how it would play out — and not the way they were used to mislead us in this trial."
"Fair, huh?" Junko propped her chin on one fist, watching Kyoko with the indulgent smile of a mother observing her children mid-game. "But you said yourself it didn't break any rules. Isn't 'fair' just your label for anything that doesn't go your way?"
"Maybe that's true — but it isn't my label that matters." Kyoko smiled. "After all, what audience would appreciate a game that doesn't play out fairly?"
Naegi nodded, spotting the direction she meant to go with this. "And using a recording in the middle of a trial, when we've never been able to use recordings before, just to make it look like I had a big complicated plan when I didn't — that's definitely not fair."
A low rumble that could have been a laugh or a sob shuddered through Sakura's entire body. "Nothing about this game has been fair from the start."
A rustle of paper, and she pulled out the picture of Hina that Naegi had given to her from the headmaster's files. She looked down at it as though she were meeting her friend's eyes — Hina as she'd been at her very best, not the dull monochrome of her trial ground portrait. This picture showed her colorful and alive, smiling with the bright energy she could bring to any room — and he could see that brightness reflecting back into Sakura's eyes.
"Just because one event happened before another, it doesn't have to mean that the first was the cause," Kyoko said quietly. "But in the absence of other evidence, if the facts are presented with the intent of deception… it can look like an unrelated action caused a dramatic result."
"And that's why they chose her." Sakura stared down at the picture without blinking. "They could have taken me instead… they should have. I'd betrayed all of you, and then I betrayed the mastermind as well. I used the screwdriver on the door without checking to see if I'd broken anything. Not just that — I broke open the door to the headmaster's room. It should have been me."
"But it wasn't." Kyoko picked up the thread when Sakura's voice faltered. "You lived, Asahina died, and the mastermind gained a recording that could alter our perception of why that specific sequence of events occurred."
"Seriously? You're gonna look at a direct chain of one event leading right into another, and say it can't be right cause it was all too perfect?" Junko twirled a lock of her pigtails around one finger, twisting it near her temple in the same gesture used to call someone insane. "Sounds to me like you're making it all a little too complicated! Isn't the simple answer usually the right one?"
"It hasn't been so far," Naegi said, jaw clenching at the reminder of the game they'd been through until now. "Every other time there's been a trial, there was an obvious answer. The rules say that to win, a blackened has to get away with their actions — so they have to make it look like someone else was guilty. The simplest answer would never be the right one!"
"And this trial is no different than the others in that regard," Kyoko said, jumping in before Junko could try to twist the conversation away again. "We have to solve the mysteries in order to win — so the mastermind's only choice is to try to mislead us. They didn't show us that recording so that we could find the truth — it was to hide what really happened."
A breath hissed through Sakura's teeth, and she finally looked up from Hina's picture. "They used what happened to Hina as a feint, to hide the real attack. Which means… what we saw in the recording can't be true." She turned, slow and creaking like a rusted hinge, to stare at Naegi. "You didn't mean to get her killed."
"Of course not!" Naegi met her eyes dead on, pouring all the sincerity he could muster into the shared gaze and hoping it would be enough.
She caught her breath and nodded slowly. "Then I must apologize for my accusation. You… you aren't the one behind this game after all."
Relief burst through his chest. She believed him — even after everything that Junko had attempted, Sakura still believed him. An unbidden smile brightened his face, just for a moment —
Until a flash of silver and a dull thunk interrupted them.
Naegi blinked at the scissors embedded in Sakura's podium, inches away from her fingers, then turned to gape at Jill.
Another pair of scissors dangled from one finger as she looked back at him, her usual fury of motion stilled. "Talk about wishy-washy. You're guilty, you're not guilty, you're dead, you're alive, it's all back and forth till it makes me wanna puke."
Red eyes narrowed at him, and Naegi had to grit his teeth not to look away. "I'm telling the truth."
"Maybe — but who the hell knows anymore?" Jill gave a sharp shrug, and the scissors dangling from her hand swung precariously in all directions. "Say you're right and the whole thing with the cameras and the executions and whatever was one big plan to screw us up — that only has a payoff if we make it here. So if we buy into your story — are you saying the mastermind expected us to get this far all along?"
