Fuyuhiko Kuzuryuu laid there for a long time before they came for him. He didn't know if they'd expected him to make it back to the school on his own, because he had been waiting for a while, but he had just managed the strength to push himself into a sitting position and was working on a makeshift bandage when a barrage of soldiers came for him. He looked up at them, wondering if his affiliations would make them want to kill him.

He'd been thinking about that. While he'd been trying not to die.

But they didn't. They picked him up and they carried him back. He was starting to get his hearing back in his right ear. Everything was fuzzy and quiet and mumbled, and that stupid ringing noise was still the loudest sound bouncing around in his head, but it was coming back. So he'd be half-deaf and half-blind, but not the whole way.

He thought about Peko falling, about losing his grip because of the knife in his eye and letting go of her fingers, and seeing her body slam against the rocks and break. Part of him wanted to think that it wasn't his fault, that it was Enoshima, Enoshima throwing the knife, but the bigger, smarter, more honorable part of him knew that he would have dropped Peko anyway. Because he wasn't strong enough to pull her up. He would have tried, and maybe she would have tried to climb up even though she'd been wounded, but she would have fallen anyway. Enoshima had just speeded up the process.

The soldiers weren't making this easier or more comfortable for him. They bounced him around, and his wounds bled and his eye ached and his bag was pulling against his chest tightly. Too tightly. It felt like it was cutting off his airflow, and he moved to try and claw it away. They caught him reaching for it and yanked it off of him. Maybe they'd thought he was reaching for a grenade.

They passed bodies as they walked. Kiyotaka Ishimaru lying in a field of flowers next to Hiyoko Saionji, crumbled in her orange kimono. Two bodies with their heads blown off. Celestia Ludenberg, her head gone and skirts up, showing more than Kuzuryuu had ever wanted to see of her. The area between B9 and the school zone hadn't been a high-murder area. There had probably been one, maybe two incidents. The island was a big one, and while Kuzuryuu hadn't seen much of it in his time with Peko, he would have thought that more would have died near the school.

When they got into the school, he spotted Akane Owari's body slumped against the side of the hallway. He wondered how she'd gotten in to do this. He wondered how many she'd taken down with her – because he'd known her. He knew that with Owari, it wasn't a matter of if she beat anyone. It was a matter of how many she managed to beat.

But they hadn't left the bodies of their dead out.

Kuzuryuu was dumped unceremoniously in front of the man who had done this to them. The one who had been in the classroom that first day. He sat with his fingers skimming over a piece of paper, tracing the lines he was reading with a frown on his face. When the soldiers left, he lifted his head and started speaking. Kuzuryuu caught "…kill…but…" and a few other words, but for the most part stared at him blankly. The man sighed and pulled out a whiteboard. Like he'd been expecting it.

Your hearing's not back?

"No," Kuzuryuu said.

The man nodded, erased his message, and began writing again. He wrote a lot, writing small and cramping the board with his words. He handed it over to Kuzuryuu when he was done.

I should kill you. If not here, on the way back. I'm not going to, because I know that you can get this done with. I want this to be over with, because my daughter was in this group of children. It would have been better had Sonia Nevermind or Byakuya Togami won, but the anger of their families will do much for the cause.

Kuzuryuu wondered how none of them had recognized him sooner. It must have been the lack of sleep. The lack of sleep, the confusion – though Kirigiri must have recognized him. He'd seen her stiffen, seen her hands draw into fists.

The man was Jin Kirigiri, former headmaster of Hope's Peak, and Kyouko Kirigiri's father.

Jin Kirigiri took the whiteboard back from him, and wrote one thing more.

I will get you home.

One more chapter, to wrap things up… and then we're done! Wow.