So now everyone’s sitting quietly again. In the back, someone throws up.

Sakamochi explains that their teacher didn’t like the class getting picked, so now he’s dead.

You know, if this is one class every two years, a teacher objecting can’t be that common or they’d be out of teachers. I don’t know how many total classes there are, but, if it’s say, ten, then odds are your class would get picked sometime within twenty years. And the adults must know it’s completely futile to object. Now, you can see parents doing this because they’re parents, but a teacher getting himself killed for no reason is harder to believe.

Maybe he was already someone they wanted to kill. This seems like the sort of government that kills political dissidents, so a teacher with suspect loyalties would be a good choice. You get rid of them and any kids they might be trying to influence at once.

They had to escape.

And right there is why this succeeds where the Hunger Games fails. Shuya is a good person.

He has no idea how they might escape, of course. The government keeps the details of what happens a secret. But he’ll join up with his friends first, and from there they’ll figure something out.

The kids not knowing much also avoids another problem, which is the lack of gaming the system. They could have attacked Sakamochi when he arrived – the solders are outside, so it’s not too survivable, but neither is the game and you might as well kill this guy. Or you could try to take him hostage – the odds of that working can’t be worse than your odds of winning the game, and it involves less murder of your friends.

If this was a reality TV show, you’d expect someone to have planned what they’d do by now. But this is all new to them. When they woke up, they didn’t even know why they were there, let alone how things worked.

But speaking of Shuya’s friends… Yoshitoki decides to speak up. Since he’s an orphan, he wants to know who they contacted. The answer’s really obvious, the orphanage, but I think that’s what makes this seem like a real question. They’re all scared and can’t think straight, so he wants to get a definite statement about something he could work out for himself, and that doesn’t matter anyway, because even if they didn’t tell the orphanage, they’d still find out when they heard the class was taken.

“I remember there was someone from one of the welfare institutions. So you must be Shuya Nanahara? Let’s see, according to the school report you were the one with dangerous ideas. So…”
“I’m Shuya,” Shuya interrupted, raising his voice.

Good job, Shuya.

“Well, like Mr. Hayashida, she was very uncooperative. They both didn’t accept your assignment, so in order to silence her, well, I had to…” Sakamochi continued calmly, “…rape her. Oh, don’t worry. It’s not like she’s dead.”

In the manga this is accompanied by a full page depiction, but that’s all we hear on the subject this time. Thank you, book.

Yoshitoki starts screaming about how he’ll kill him. Shuya explains that Yoshitoki is almost always kind and friendly, even when people are cruel to him But when someone he truly loved was hurt, his response was extreme. This was something Shuya admired about Yoshitoki.

Sakamochi is just amused. Shuya tries to get him to stop but Yoshitoki doesn’t hear him.

Sakamochi spoke in a strange, kind voice, as if to appease Yoshitoki.
“Look, Yoshitoki. What you’re doing right now is voicing your opposition to the government.”
“I’ll kill you!” Yoshitoki didn’t stop. “I’ll kill you I’ll kill you I’ll kill you!”

So the three solders shoot him.

Yoshitoki collapses into a twitching heap. Noriko is near him, so she runs to the body and gets shot as well, in her leg.

Sakamochi explains that no one’s allowed to leave their desk until he says so.

“What the hell are you doing!? We have to get some help for Yoshitoki…and Noriko…”
…
Noriko, completely pale from looking at Yoshitoki lying underneath her, slowly looked up at Sakamochi. She seemed overwhelmed with anger more than she was with the pain she must have been suffering from. She raised her eyes and glared back at Sakamochi. “Please get some help.” She spoke each word deliberately. “For Yoshitoki.”

Part of what makes it easier to care about these people is that they care for each other. It’s obvious this is futile, but they won’t accept the idea they’re all supposed to kill each other.

Sakamochi just orders one of the soldiers to blow Yoshitoki’s head off. Now he’s no longer in need of any medical help.

They’re told to go back to their seats again, but neither’s reacting, just staring at the corpse. The soldiers aim at them.

Beyond Yoshitoki’s empty seat, Shinji Mimura had his hand raised. Noriko slowly looked at him too.
“Hm? Let’s see. You must be Shinji Mimura. What is it?”
Shinji put his hand down and spoke, “Noriko looks injured. I was wondering if I could help her get back to her seat.”

He wipes the blood off Noriko’s face and manages to pull her upright, and once he’s got his back turned to Sakamochi he gestures at Shuya to sit down. Shuya’s group, at least, is all acting with humanity so far.

They’re both still really out of it, but at least neither is about to be shot.

Noriko sat down. Blood poured out of the wound in her right leg dangling from her seat. Her white socks and sneakers were soaked in red, as if she were wearing Santa Claus boots, but only on her right foot.

Shuya keeps describing everything in these sort of obsessive cataloging ways, making all sorts of comparisons to innocuous things. It does a good job of getting across how hard it is to process what’s happening.

He wants to attack Sakamochi, but he realizes it’ll just end like it did with Yoshitoki.

And more importantly…now the girl whom Yoshitoki adored so much was severely injured. If he were to die now…what would happen to Noriko Nakagawa?

This is an awkward bit, in that she’s also his friend and this makes it sound like he only cares about her as Yoshitoki’s fantasy girlfriend. It makes a bit more sense if you assume that he’s not saying this is his whole motivation but that that he’s now got the additional motivation of trying to do what Yoshitoki would have wanted, and he’s thinking in those terms because his friend just died and he wants to do something to keep him alive in memory.

Shuya keeps thinking about how this can’t be happening, he and Yoshitoki were always together and zones out again.

Shinji is more on the ball. He says that Noriko’s injury makes the game unfair. When Sakamochi agrees, he suggests they postpone things until she recovers.

Sakamochi makes the counter-suggestion that they just shoot her, resolving the unfairness that way.

Shuya could see Shinji’s back underneath his school uniform stiffen as he immediately responded, “I take it back, I take it back. Come on, I was just kidding.”

One of the things I bring up a lot is that people should make attempts. Not necessarily that whose things would work, but that you should at least try, even if it’ll fail. So I like how this is playing out. The kids don’t know what they’re doing, but people are still trying things and hoping.

Sakamochi explains that there’s no such thing as equality. Everyone’s already unequal, so what’s a little crippling?

Then he throws a knife into Fumiyo’s head because she was trying to whisper to Yukie.

Yukie stared at the sight, her eyes open wide. A stranger sight though was Fumiyo herself raising her eyes, struggling to locate the knife planted in her forehead. Her head arched back in this attempt. Then she collapsed to the side.

Well that was horrible.

From a control perspective, this was masterfully done. Yoshitoki got a lot of advance warning, which gives the impression you can safely test out the limits of what Sakamochi allows. But now he’s killed someone without warning, over something trivial that he gave no sign wasn’t allowed. No one’s going to do anything now.

I also suspect he meant to kill Noriko and did this in part because he needed a second victim. They started off with equal numbers of boys and girls, but now he’s got one extra girl. He can’t kill too many of them, they’re meant to kill each other, so I’d assume anything that seems impulsive is actually calculated to look that way.

It certainly works on Shuya.

Shuya held his breath and thought, “He did that on a whim! A whim! Damn it! Our lives are totally at the mercy of this asshole Sakamochi!”

Which is likely exactly what he’s meant to think. They obviously have this down quite well by now.

40 students remaining

While the deaths here work, they’re not particularly unexpected. You have one character who the main character cares a lot about who dies to motivate him – although it is nice to see that character not be the girl – and another who didn’t have any screentime before now dying to show how meaningless and sudden the deaths can be.

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. “
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
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.
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.
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
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.
19 Chisato Matsui: always quiet and withdrawn
20 Kaori Minami
21 Yoshimi Yahagi: Part of Mitsuko’s group.