Shuya Nanahara (Male Student No. 15) suddenly woke up. He saw the blue sky framed by brilliant green grass.

Yes, it was all a dream.

He’s out on the school field, taking a nap. He realizes he overslept and needs to hurry to literature class, which is actually his favorite. He thinks about how he likes to write lyrics and how he admires Noriko, the best student who writes beautiful poetry. He wonders if his dream means he really likes Noriko and how it’d be bad to fight with Yoshitoki over her.

The first thing he saw was someone lying by the lectern.
Ms. Okazaki…
It wasn’t Ms. Okazaki. It was their head instructor, Masao Hayashida. And…
His head was missing. There was a puddle where it was supposed to be.

The rest of the seats are filled with his classmates’ corpses, depicting their actual deaths in the game.

Shuya moved forward. He shook Kazushi Nüda’s body. Kazushi’s body tilted with a jerk, revealing its face.
Shuya felt a chill run up his spine. Kazushi’s eyes were now two dark-red holes. Blood and a slimy egg-white-like substance oozed out of them. Then… there was a gimlet-like object with a thick handle stabbed into his mouth.

Including deaths he never saw.

The dream continues to include his own group.

Shogo Kawada—that standoffish transfer student with the bad reputation—had deep stab wounds all over his chest. His eyes were half-open and looking down at the floor…they were out of focus.
Shuya took a deep breath and looked over at Noriko Nakagawa’s seat. It was right behind Yoshitoki’s, so he could have noticed earlier. For some reason though, it felt as if his classmates’ seats were swirling around with the corpses. He finally managed to locate Noriko.
She was still sprawled on top of her desk.
Shuya ran to her and held her up.
THUD. Her head fell off. Leaving behind her body, it landed with a thud on the floor and rolled around in a pool of blood…and then looked up at Shuya.

The fact the other deaths are all accurate make this seem a lot more ominous than if it were just the bodies he’d actually seen, but at the same time I find it hard to swallow that the other deaths would be accurate to start with.

Anyway, he wakes up to see something white, a light, and then that there’s someone’s hand touching him.

His eyes followed the hand up to the arm, the arm up to the shoulder, and finally discerned a sailor-suit figure with braided hair— female class representative Yukie Utsumi (Female Student No. 2), smiling warmly.

Time to find out what the remaining girls have been doing.

The next chapter starts off right where that left off. Shuya tries to get up and then realizes that’s a horrible idea. Yukie explains he’s badly injured. Shuya is confused about why she’s there and she explains he’s been unconscious for thirteen hours, which to my understanding isn’t as sinister a number in Japan but on the other hand they’ve imported plenty of English stuff so maybe it is intended. Probably would’ve just said fourteen if they meant it to be a bad sign, though.

Shuya immediately asks about Noriko and Shogo, and Yukie says they haven’t been mentioned on the announcements. Then Shuya remembers Kazou and freaks out about how they’re all gonna diiiieee. That is indeed a rational response to remembering Kazou is out.

Yukie gets him to calm down and says the place is safe. They’re a group of six and the rest are on watch.

Six, you may recall, is the same number of extra girls to boys among the current survivors.

Shuya raised his brow. Six?
“Who?”
“Yuka Nakagawa,” Yukie mentioned the cheery girl who had the same last name as Noriko. Then she continued, “Satomi Noda and Chisato Matsui. Haruka Tanizawa. And Yuko Sakaki.”

He says that they’re her friends, so he trusts them too. Then he asks if anyone else has died while he was out.

Lots, he finds out. He really wasn’t expecting to hear Shinji’s name.

At the same time Shuya was struck by how he wasn’t all that shaken up. He’d gotten used to it. That must have been it.

Also, he’s probably concussed and stuff. Poor Shuya. It’s been a bad day for everyone, but he’s one of the few who’s been battered around without dying of it.

Yukie also gives him a map with the new forbidden zones marked on it. Shuya sees one of those areas is the place where Noriko and Shogo were waiting for him, and he remembers how in his dream, they were already dead.

Yukie explains he’s in a lighthouse on the northeast, where the girls have been hiding the whole game. He ran off the edge of the cliff right in front of them, and the girl on watch found him and brought him in.

Shuya finally realized his torso was naked and that his throbbing left shoulder was bandaged. (Given how it felt, he deduced the bullet shattered his shoulder blade and was now lodged in there.) The right side of his neck—he felt a burning sensation right below his collar where there was another bandage (but this bullet wound must have been a minor scrape). And then on top of his left elbow. (It felt heavy. The bullet had most likely exited, but perhaps because the bone or tendon was torn off, it felt paralyzed.)

I particularly like that last bit, making it clear that even nonfatal wounds can be crippling. Of course, it remains to be seen if the author will remember he’s badly injured, but given that most of the book is done with, I think there’s a decent chance he’ll keep his injuries for the remainder. Certainly Noriko’s wound was handled pretty well.

Anyway, the girls had a first aid kit and also tried stitching up his wounds. Let’s hope they remembered to disinfect the needle and thread first. Yukie thought he needed a blood transfusion, which, if you had to have one in circumstances like this, it’d be best to be in Japan where at least everyone knows their blood type. (Unless you lie about it, but since it’s really only AB blood you’d want to lie about and they’re universal recipients, you should still be okay.) Whereas I don’t even remember my blood type or my family’s, and certainly never even knew anyone else’s.

(Fun fact! If you put the wrong kind of blood in, you don’t just die. What happens is your immune system freaks out at all the foreign red blood cells and decides to just destroy everything. Your blood turns to pink water. In the event you’re ever in another universe and considering a transfusion from Wolverine or someone else with superhealing, make sure to ask if they also have a super immune system, because if so, the transfused blood will probably just murder yours on principle even if the blood type is the same.)

Anyway. Shuya thanks Yukie for the whole saving-his-life business.

“Oh no,” Yukie smiled kindly. “I can’t believe I got to touch a guy’s body! I even got to take off your clothes.”

Haha, Yukie. I like you. Shuya thinks the same and even flashbacks to once saying to Yoshitoki that she was his type because of how outgoing she was. I think he’s pretty oblivious to the fact she’s actually got a crush on him, though.

She offers him water and he is amazed at how great that is.

He thought, how impressive, Representative. You’ll be a wonderful wife some day, no, a wonderful woman. No, you might in fact be a wonderful woman now.

Shuya is really smitten. He gulps the water and asks if they happen to have any painkillers. Also, he’s amazed they let him in.

Yukie confesses that actually she kind of made them, because she’s the leader of the group and it was Shuya. Shuya, either really oblivious or impressively on the ball, focuses on the part where that implies other people don’t want him there. Yukie says not to be offended, it’s just everyone’s really edgy due the all the childmurdering.

Then she starts to cry and says she was terrified he was going to die, and Shuya finally realizes that she’s in love with him.

Of course…this might have been a psychological result of their confinement.
…
now that the survivors were becoming fewer and fewer, maybe a boy that you liked “a little” ever since having an exchange in the corner of an elementary school gym might turn into somebody you’d “die for.”

I think that makes sense, but he thinks it’s not what’s going on here, since why would she have pushed her friends to let him in unless it’s sincere? Shuya, for god’s sake, you just mentioned how someone you like a little might turn into someone you’d die for. She probably did have a real crush on you before, but sitting for a day thinking about how you might be dead, then seeing you covered in blood and well on your way to actually be dying, then waiting another half day to see if you’d live…that’s going to leave you a bit strung out. I’d be crying over literally anything if I’d spent a day and a half constantly worrying if it was going to die.

Anyway, Yukie asks about why he asked about Noriko and Shogo, if he’s been with them. She’s surprised about Shogo, and while Shuya’s trying to explain that Shogo is actually super nice, he remembers they’re planning to escape and now everyone there can escape too!

Yukie asks how, which reminds Shuya that he still has no idea and that’s not very convincing, so he decides to tell the whole story from the beginning.

“So Tatsumichi…” After he was done she brought up Tatsumichi Old first for some reason, “…that was an accident?”
“That’s right. Just as I described it,” he replied and knit his brows, looking at her. “What about it?”

Yuko is in the group, and that’s the girl who saw him pulling the ax out and ran away. With that in mind, it’s a lot more understandable the girls would be split on letting him in. It’s not simply a matter of thinking they can’t trust boys as a group but of knowing this boy in particular was willing to kill someone.

Shuya lets this go without explanation and lets Yukie return to the topic of not being sure about Shogo. He says that if they could just talk to him they’d understand, and she admits they haven’t been able to think of anything else.

She explains to Shuya what we already know – they waited outside the school for other girls. Yukie actually ran away at first, but she came back right after Kazushi ran off, missing Shuya and Noriko. Shuya is impressed she was brave enough to stay when she saw the bodies, but as she says, it’s not like she had any better plan, so she just trusted to the trees to keep her hidden. It probably helped that she ran into Haruka, her best friend, on the way back. It’s easier to be brave when you’re not alone.

Anyway, they weren’t quite brave enough to call to boys. Shuya asks if Yoshimi ran off like Kaori, and as we’ve worked out, Yukie confesses they didn’t ask her to join them. She says she wanted to, but some of the others were scared.

Yukie said looking away. “So she’s dead. We let her die.”
Shuya said, “No, you’re wrong.”
Yukie looked back at Shuya.
“It was beyond your control. It’s no one’s fault.”
He knew it didn’t sound very convincing, but that’s all he could say.

It’s nice of you, but as we omniscient readers know, Yoshimi would indeed have still been alive if they’d called to her. Possibly, she might have decided to venture back out to find her asshole of a boyfriend, but it seems quite unlikely. She wasn’t even thinking of finding him initially and was hoping to run into another friendly girl.

Shuya says they should’ve trusted Shinji, but they were bothered by how he was a playboy, which seems kind of weird to me but maybe there’s some sort of cultural nuance I’m missing, and also he was smart enough to seem threatening. They also didn’t try Kazuhiko, who was popular and, considering how devoted he was to his girlfriend, must have been about as nonthreatening as it got. And again with our view of everything, we know that had they contacted Kazuhiko, he and Sakura could have joined the group rather than committing suicide at the start.

So the moral is, overall, to trust people, even though we’ve seen that there are plenty of people who shouldn’t be trusted. So far, trust has only backfired when dealing with Mitsuko, whose whole shtick is looking harmless and appealing. The rest of the problem cases have been pretty obvious about it. The only one who’s otherwise made a mistake about trusting has been Hiroki, and honestly, he was being insanely stupid to respond to someone taking potshots at him by trying to make friends.

Finally, they ran into Yukie last night.

Yuko just stumbled by here. She was totally terrified.”
Yukie stopped as if she had something else to say. Shuya was about to ask her what was wrong, but Yukie continued, “…in any case, everyone knows Yuko. So it wasn’t a problem.”

Shuya feels he shouldn’t ask about why she was so upset, because being on her own he can guess there’s lots of bad stuff to traumatize you.

Did she survive someone’s attack, or did she see students killings each other, or did she come across a corpse torn up from fighting?

It doesn’t even occur to him that he’d be involved, though.

Yukie wants to know why Hiroki wants to find Kayoko, but since Shuya doesn’t know either, he’s no help. But that does remind him of how Hiroki was told to contact the rest of them! Shuya can do the same to get Shogo to start doing the bird call.

Kazou is probably a bird watcher in addition to being everything else and will immediately recognize that it’s the wrong bird for the season or something and hunt them down, but maybe he’ll be too busy killing someone else.

Shuya’s all excited and she tells him that yeah, that’ll have to wait because he can’t really move right now. That was part of why the girls were okay letting him in. And even if he does manage, that’d just scare them. She’ll go explain things first while he rests up and get him something to eat. The lighthouse was well stocked so they’ve been eating well.

She walked over to the door and said, “I’m really sorry but I’m going to have to lock the door.”
“Huh?”
“I’m sorry. There’s someone who’s terrified. So please, just wait,” Yukie said. She smiled kindly as she opened the door and went out. Her two braids of hair swung like some mysterious animal’s tail, and he caught a glimpse of a gun stuck in the back of her skirt.

Shuya doesn’t find any of this especially threatening, luckily, even as he goes on to notice that the windows have also been planked up against intruders. He just lies back and thinks about Jailhouse Rock.