Last time, other POVs. Now, back to Shuya.

They’ve been running for a bit, and he’s exhausted, so they come to a stop.

He felt as if they’d covered a good distance, but given how they’d been zigzagging, and how they’d lost all sense of direction climbing the mountain, they might have only been a few hundred meters away from the school.

Probably was dumb to zigzag when they likely weren’t pursued, especially when they were told they had to get at least two hundred meters away and now they’re not sure how far away they are.

Shuya checks his pack and finds his weapon is an army knife. I think they just hand out the packs at random, but if not this is a good fuck-you. Speak out against the government? Get a crappy weapon for their murder games. As I’ve ranted before, you really want a ranged weapon.

Noriko’s is even worse. It’s a boomerang. You don’t use boomerangs anywhere but open plains!

(He knew he wasn’t supposed to go through a girl’s things, but Noriko didn’t pack this bag. Shuya, really.)

They also have some bread and a bottle of water each. That’s pretty sucky, but I guess the game isn’t supposed to go on very long.

Shuya took out the plastic bottle from his day pack, broke the seal of the twist-off top, and sniffed the contents. He spilled some on his hand and licked it cautiously. Then after taking a sip, making sure he had no abnormal reaction, he handed it over to Noriko.

Shuya is actually looking pretty on the ball here. Manga-Shuya was pretty prone to dumb speeches, but this version seems convincingly competent rather than excessively nice.

He then checks out the wound. The bullet carved out a section of her leg one centameter deep but didn’t actually go right through it, so I guess it could be worse.

It looked like she needed stitches.

…Shuya, you don’t stitch up a giant gouge.

Luckily, he brought alcohol for the trip because he’s rebellious like that, so he pours that into the wound now, then uses bandanas as bandages.

She asks about the scene in front of the school, and he tells her what happened.

Now that he thought about it, Shuya suddenly realized he hadn’t taken care of Yoshio. He’d instinctively assumed Yoshio would remain unconscious for a while, but for all he knew Yoshio might have woken up immediately afterwards.

Honestly, it’s a shock that it would take him two or three minutes to wake back up. You usually wake right back up, and anything over thirty seconds is brain damage funtime.

Which meant he might have taken his bow gun, climbed up on the roof, and continued his slaughter. Was I being too naive again? Should I have just killed him over there?

This is an interesting connundrum, isn’t it? Shuya would rather run than fight, but he’d sooner kill than leave others to be killed. No one here seems interested in Batman’s moralizing bullshit about how killing is always, always wrong. Sometimes you have to snap a guy’s neck for the good of everyone, okay?

But it’s still a hard decision to make. Maybe you could reason with the person. Maybe if you just took the weapon that’d be enough to stop them. Maybe…

He checks his watch and sees that it’s almost three. By now, the rest of the students should have left.

Shuya says he can’t believe anyone is playing the game.

Noriko then explains that she thinks he was just scared.

The ones who were terrified might try to kill each other…The same idea had occurred to Shuya, but he had also thought the ones who were scared would basically hide out. But if they were terrified out of their wits, they might actually take their own initiative.

If anything, I think that’s underselling it.

I didn’t watch the new Batman movies, because everything I’ve heard about them suggests they’re the product of someone who thinks the world runs very differently than how I think it does. I did get the plot recounted to me, and one bit was about the Joker saying there were explosives on two boats, and that if neither boat blew up the other by dawn, both would explode. As I heard it, the idea was if people would sacrifice the other for survival. But to me, the immediate response would be fear the other side was going to do that to you first – that dawn may be a while off, but they can kill you right now.

People will do anything if they think the other person’s willing to do the same.

Then Shuya came up with an idea. “Hey, you think if he’d seen the two of us together he wouldn’t have attacked us? Wouldn’t it prove we’re not playing the game?”

It really doesn’t seem like the chapter we had in Yoshio’s head was a good use of time. From that, we know that no, this wouldn’t have done any good. We also already know Noriko’s theory and exactly how correct it was. I think this would all work better if this was only their speculation.

Shuya thinks that he panicked too, much like Yoshio. Because a single person was playing, he was scared other people were and gave up on his plan to wait for the others.

Still, there’s no helping it now.

Shuya tells her that originally, he wanted to get everyone together, and that if Yoshio wasn’t playing because he wanted to but just because he was scared, maybe it can work.

Noriko fell silent and tucked her knees under her skirt. Then she said, “Maybe I’m not as generous.”
“Huh?”
“I couldn’t handle some of them. I could trust my friends….” Noriko mentioned the name of their class representative, Yukie Utsumi. Shuya knew Yukie since elementary school. “Like Yukie. But I don’t think I could trust the other girls. There’s no way I could be with them.

This is really disappointing. Shuya has several friends, but apparently Noriko can only think of one? I think the author’s just not characterizing her well here, since it’s plural, but still, I’d expect Noriko to be more afraid of some of the boys than most of the girls.

Admittedly, Japanese media sometimes has girls doing incredibly awful things to each other, and I have no idea to what degree that could be accurate. It’s generally in the unrealistically horrible works, though.

Shuya sighed. The game was horrible. But it also seemed flawless. In the end, it was a bad idea to invite everyone indiscriminately to form a group unless you were certain about them. What if—let’s just say what if—they betrayed you? It wasn’t just his life but Noriko’s too he’d be endangering.

Not quite, Shuya. It depends on how many people you get. If you get one more person, they have a decent chance of killing both of you and getting that much closer to victory, right? But let’s say you’re in a group of five. One person is safer staying in your group than trying to take the other four of you on or risking three of you coming after them in retaliation for a murder. And currently, there’s thirty-six other kids out there to join up with. Even if you only found and joined with half of them, you’d be in a group big enough that individual betrayal wouldn’t be possible. Now, perhaps you could get a smaller group that tried to betray the rest, but to what end? Any attempt at escape would work better the more people are planning it, so the only reason to betray the rest is if you want to play the game, and it’d be really hard for people like that to work together – not only because they know the other people will turn on them right afterward, but because those other people are the only threat to their victory in the first place.

But Shuya just got shot at by a classmate, so I can understand him having trouble trusting people.

Then he realizes that if people might work together and then turn on each other, then just hanging out with another person won’t be enough to show he’s not playing, because people might assume he’s planning to kill Noriko later. And he gives up on the plan.

But what mattered to him was protecting Noriko Nakagawa, the girl Yoshitoki adored. Maybe he should have been content with the fact that at the very least Noriko Nakagawa was safe by his side now. He had done the safest thing.

Shuya, stop.

He does suggest finding Shinji, and Noriko agrees that’s a good choice. She knows him and he did just save her life.

And they keep thinking about how they could safely join up with others. Shuya has no idea. It’d be easy to get everyone by just shouting, but if there is anyone playing the games, it’ll get them killed.

Then he realizes he just casually referenced killing Noriko and that they’re discussing how they’re scared of everyone, so, why doesn’t she think he’ll kill her.

Noriko just says she knows he’d never act like that. A better answer is that Shuya obviously doesn’t want to play and has been risking himself to help her out. He also failed to finish off Yoshio and made no attempt to get the bowgun. It’s possible to be afraid he might eventually change his mind, like if there’s a day without a single death and they’re waiting out the countdown to twenty-four hours of no killing, but otherwise, it’s clear he’s not going to kill her. And because of the power imbalance with her being injured, she has no reason to kill him, so he wouldn’t ever get motivated by fear there.

But no, it’s because she has a crush on him. Shuya guesses as much from her language and thinks to a love letter he recieved. But he doesn’t ask because he’s already got a crush on someone else.

The most important thing now for him was to protect “the girl Yoshitoki Kuninobu adored,” not to find out “who had a crush on him.”

Seriously, enough of this.

Noriko asked him, “What about you, Shuya? Aren’t you afraid of me? No, wait, why then did you help me?”

For the former, you have no reason to kill him because you have even less chance of survival without him. For the latter…Shuya decides his creepy friend’s-crush reasoning isn’t appropriate right now, so he just says because she was hurt and needed help.

Incomplete explanation finished, they set off to find somewhere better to hide.

Males
1 Yoshio Akamatsu: “the biggest kid in the class, the timid type, the kind of kid who’d always end up the target of pranks and insults.” Bowgun weapon, kills Mayumi, killed by Kazushi.
2 Keita Iijima
3 Tatsumichi Oki: jock, handball.
4 Toshinori Oda
5 Shogo Kawada: Looks older than the rest, has facial hair already, transferred in, scarred.
6 Kazuo Kiriyama: Awesome.
7 Yoshitoki Kuninobu: Shuya’s friend since childhood, they grew up in the orphanage together.Killed for threatening Sakamochi.
9 Hiroshi Kuronaga: Part of Kazou’s gang.
10 Ryuhei Sasagawa: Delinquent. Part of Kazou’s gang. Bullied Yoshio.
11 Hiroki Sugimura: Tall and knows martial arts. Seems tough but is actually shy, likes Chinese poetry. Shuya’s friend.
12 Yutaka Seto: Class clown.
13 Yuichiro Takiguchi
14 Sho Tsukioka: Part of Kazou’s gang
15 Shuya Nanahara: Main character? Minor but utterly harmless teenage rebelliousness.
16 Kazushi Nüda: jock, soccer. Killed Yoshio by accident.
17 Mitsuru Numai: Delinquent. Part of Kazou’s gang
18 Tadakatsu Hatagami: jock, Shuya’s friend when they were younger. ‘Shuya had started playing electric guitar, which was considered an “unpatriotic” activity. Tadakatsu’s mother was uptight about that sort of thing.”
19 Shinji Mimura: Shuya’s current friend. ‘short hair and wore an intricately designed ring on his left ear’, highly athletic, knows a lot of information, particularly about the outside world. Extremely cool under pressure.
20 Kyoichi Motobuchi: Class representative, dad’s a government official.
21 Kazuhiko Yamamoto: Sakura’s boyfriend.
Females
1 Mizuho Inada
2 Yukie Utsumi: class representative, braided hair, Haruka’s volleyball teammate. The first one to speak after their abduction. Noriko’s friend.
3 Megumi Eto
4 Sakura Ogawa: Kazuhiko’s girlfriend.
5 Izumi Kanai: ‘the preppy whose father was a town representative’
6 Yukiko Kitano
7 Yumiko Kusaka
8 Kayoko Kotohiki
9 Yuko Sakaki
10 Hirono Shimizu: Part of Mitsuko’s group.
11 Mitsuko Souma: Delinquent group leader. “Even though Mitsuko had the gorgeous looks of a pop idol, she always wore a strange, listless expression on her face.”
12 Haruka Tanizawa: Yukie’s volleyball teammate, exceptionally tall.
13 Takako Chigusa
14 Mayumi Tendo: The first death in the game, killed outside the school.
15 Noriko Nakagawa: She has a crush on Shuya he’s unaware of and Yoshitoki has a crush on her she may be unaware of. She’s nice and likes literature. Suffering a leg injury.
16 Yuka Nakagawa: Yoshitoki says she’s fat. Class clown.
17 Satomi Noda : “model student who wore wire-rimmed glasses which suited her calm, intelligent face”
18 Fumiyo Fujiyoshi: Killed for whispering to Yukie. “She was the nurse’s aide. She was quiet but very caring.”
19 Chisato Matsui: always quiet and withdrawn
20 Kaori Minami
21 Yoshimi Yahagi: Part of Mitsuko’s group.