Last time, the explanations are finally done.

Shuya heads into the hallway. He sees that the windows are all sealed up and realizes it’s against attacks by the students – I wonder if it’s just a precaution, or if it’s in response to an attempt one group made.

He sees the way out, but on the other is a lit up room, so he goes that way.

It’s packed with soldiers. Shuya says there’s one for every kid. Shuya had been considering that maybe if he and some others had a gun, they could take out Sakamochi and the couple soldiers. Now he realizes there’s no chance of that.

One of the soldiers tilted his head and glanced up from the mug in his hand at Shuya. Like the faces of the trio in the classroom, his also lacked any expression.

The soldiers are disturbing.

One thing is that soldiers are often young. Not that the average fifteen year old would see it that way, but it adds another depressing edge to all this if you picture a bunch of twenty year olds sitting with their guns in case a bunch of fifteen year olds try to fight back.

Shuya quickly heads for the door instead. Since he can’t attack the soldiers, he’ll just have to hope uniting outside will somehow help, and he worries there might be more soldiers to prevent that as well.

Under the moon, an empty athletic field the size of three tennis courts spread out beyond the building.

You know what’s creepy? It’s not just that this place was inhabited. It’s that it seems likely the people will come back later. Imagine going back home knowing a bunch of kids killed each other there.

Shuya says the game isn’t always on an island. Some are held inland and fenced off, or inside an old prison, but in his area, they use islands.

He doesn’t see anyone waiting. At least there aren’t any soldiers, but…

If we scatter like this, we’ll fall into the government’s trap. It might be all right if you were forming groups with your friends. Sakura Ogawa and Kazuhiko Yamamoto might be meeting somewhere, likewise Kazuo Kiriyama’s gang. But anyone hiding alone would eventually have to confront someone….

And as optimistic as Shuya is, he doesn’t see that ending well.

But there’s still plenty more people to go, so he can try waiting now.

Then he notices something. It’s a body.

The body was in a V-shape, lying on its side, face down. The single pony tail tied with a wide ribbon looked familiar. No wonder. He’d just seen her off only three minutes ago. The stiff body belonged to Female Student No. 14, Mayumi Tendo. Right beside her lobster-shaped braided hair, a dull, silver, twenty-centimeter stick poked out of the back of her uniform, diagonally, like a transistor radio antenna. There were four tiny flaps resembling a fighter plane’s tail at the end of the stick.

Rather like Katniss’ silver bow and arrows, isn’t it?

Shuya just gapes at it. He tries to think about what’s going on, but it doesn’t make sense. And no one’s shooting, and why would the killer leave?

was this some engineered “provocation”? Did the soldiers at the end of the hall kill her to convince everyone that some of their classmates were already willing to play the game? But if that were the case…

Then it occurs to him that she might still be alive and just knocked out, but before he can check an arrow wizzes by his face. It’s someone on top of the building.

Shuya grabs the arrow and zigzags away.

Under the dim moonlit sky, a large, dark shadow loomed above the gabled roof of the single-story school building. Could that be…not Shogo…

He can see that the person’s aiming at him. So he…throws the arrow. As a distraction.

But thanks to Shuya’s gifts as a star shortstop, the arrow flew at incredible speed and traced a fine arc right at the shadow. The shadow groaned, held its face, hunched over, and then began to sway. Then it fell.

This is dumb. It’s the particularly frustrating kind of dumb where this wasn’t even necessary. Are there no rocks on the ground?

Whoever it is falls off the roof and into the light from the school.

It was Yoshio Akamatsu. He was motionless now, perhaps because he was unconscious.

We’ll just chalk this bit up to Shuya not wanting to realize he may have killed someone, since otherwise that’s the first guess for why someone who fell off a roof isn’t moving.

Yoshio, you may recall, is the big but easily bullied kid. He had a bowgun and a bunch of arrows.

Noriko walks out. He sees her staring at Mayumi and Shuya remembers his hope she’s just unconscious. But when he checks the body he finds no pulse.

She was dead. There was no doubt.

Checking pulses is actually pretty tricky, even if you’re trained, but then, if you’re not trained you probably don’t know that.

Others might be in the same state of mind as Yoshio. And one of them might just suddenly return this time, perhaps with a gun.
Shuya had no choice but to change his attitude toward the game now. So this was it. When Sakamochi said, “As soon as you leave here,” this was what he’d meant.

So Shuya grabs Noriko and runs for it.

This is probably a mistake. So far, out of thirty kids, only one came back to kill people. And you should probably take Yoshio’s weapon if you’re not willing to kill him. But it makes sense for Shuya to panic.

I’m liking Shuya more than in the manga, where I recall he talked Yoshio down with a speech about the power of friendship and otherwise was too perfect.

He drags Noriko for the woods. He thinks about shouting back to the kids back inside, but he rationalizes that they’re not going to be idiots like he was and they’ll just run away anyway, especially when they see the corpse. And they flee.

39 students remaining

Yup, Yoshio isn’t dead.

So, our first death during the game. It’s another student we didn’t know anything about, which is disappointing.
The next chapter opens with Yoshio’s POV. It takes a minute for him to realize what’s going on, at first he thinks he’s still at home.

As he sat up, the sky and earth rotating ninety degrees, an empty field unexpectedly spread out in front of him. There was a mountain beyond the field, shaped like a bow, darker than the night sky. All of a sudden, everything came back. Sakamochi, Mr. Hayashida’s corpse, Yoshio’s departure, discovering the bow gun in his day pack once he found some shelter in a small shack, his returning here, observing Takako Chigusa (Female Student No. 13) whose face was a little severe but beautiful, looking tense now as the track team’s best runner dashed away at full speed, him struggling up the thin steel ladder by the side of the building in order to reach the roof. Then how, due to the trouble he had loading his bow gun with an arrow, Sho Tsukioka (Male No. 14) also managed to escape his reach. And then…
He turned around and saw the girl in the sailor suit uniform lying there.

Yoshio doesn’t feel any guilt, just more fear. He’s always been pretty timid, and although most people weren’t cruel to him, they didn’t do anything to help when Ryuhei bulled him. (Moral – stand up against bullying or the victim will go crazy and kill everyone?) This whole section is written very badly on a mechanical level, although I agree with the sentiment.

He looks for the bowgun.

Yoshio felt a blow against his neck as if he were struck by a club.
He fell forward with thud. His body twisted into the shape of a V, and his face scraped against the moist soil. The skin of his forehead and cheeks peeled away, but this no longer mattered to him. He was already dead by the time he had fallen.

Someone else found it already.

The next chapter jumps into another POV. It’s Kazushi Nüda. He came right after Noriko. Unlike what Shuya hoped, he doesn’t run but just stands there shaking in a panic. He picks up the bowgun. It’s already loaded, so when Yoshio gets up, he’s startled and hits the trigger.

the first thing was to get out of here. That was the priority. What he should have done in the first place was ignore Yoshio Akamatsu and Mayumi Tendo completely and run away. Given the circumstances, he had no other choice but to kill Yoshio. Yoshio Akamatsu had obviously killed Mayumi Tendo. So Kazushi hadn’t done anything wrong.
Kazushi was very good at making excuses.

Eh, I think that’s a pretty reasonable chain of thought. After all, we know that Yoshio would have shot him if he’d left the bowgun on the ground, and it’s impossible to say if he’d have run or attacked without that.

He then grabs both of their packs before running, so now the scene looks like a third person killed both of them with a bowgun and then fled.

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.
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.