When he heard the shattering sound, Shuya just thought, oh, one of those clumsy girls must have dropped a dish, but when the sound was followed by an argument, he got up from his bed.

Huh. Shuya is surprisingly on the ball. I wasn’t expecting him to do anything until he heard the gun go off.

Perhaps things might have gone differently if he’d arrived in the room before Satomi fired on anyone. More likely he’d just have been drawn into the slaughter – there’s no mention of Satomi having a crush on him, and any new person arriving would likely inflame tensions even before considering that he’s a male newcomer and she’s already willing to believe the girls she’s spent the last two days with could be planning her murder.

Anyway, despite his injuries he does get to the door well enough, but as Yukie said, it’s locked.

It’s not locked in the usual sense, though. Apparently there wasn’t a lock on the door (or perhaps they didn’t know where the key was) so instead they used a plank to jam the door shut.

It’s then he hears the gun go off. He tries to kick the door down, which just leads to him falling over instead, landing on one of his various injuries. Although they’re painful, they don’t seem to be really hindering him, because next he moves the bed and pushes it against the door, then slams that into the door until it breaks.

It was completely quiet now. What the hell happened?

He enters the room and finds the dead girls. Yuko is the only one standing.

Yuko turn around. She gazed at Shuya with bloodshot eyes, but then went for the gun lying on the floor between Yukie and Haruka.
Shuya also came out of his daze. He tossed the plank he’d been holding with his uninjured arm the way he’d pitch a perfect fastball in Little League. (He wasn’t sure anymore whether such a game existed on earth. It seemed to take place on a distant planet in the remote Andromeda Galaxy where the inhabitants played this game using three arms out of five, although the use of one’s tail was permitted in the final inning.)

Shuya’s disconnect really fits here. He can’t really understand what’s going on with the scene – he can’t believe that the girl he was just talking to can be dead, that all of this could have happened. He sees Yuko in the center, but has no idea what that means – he just keeps walking into the room until she turns and goes for a weapon, at which point he acts defensively, but he doesn’t think she’s the one who killed the rest the way you’d expect. He doesn’t think. He can’t process the scene at all.

He’s also silent. It’s an interesting contrast. The girls’ fight was mostly spoken, with them accusing each other. As they argue and Shuya initially thinks he needs to do something, he’s acting – in the time Yuko spends frozen in disbelief, he gets up and tries to find a way out of the room. Seeing the room now, it continues to be actions rather than speech, with him entering the room silently rather than calling out to Yuko and now throwing the plank rather than saying anything. It’s the same way he acted back with Tatsumichi, which is a problem when it comes to how other people view your actions.

The wood hits in front of Yuko, not her, although it’s possible that’s just because Shuya missed. Regardless, it stops her and gives him time to grab the gun instead. Yuko doesn’t make any attempt for any of the other guns, she just screams and runs up toward the top of the lighthouse.

Shuya goes to Yukie.

The blood was oozing out under her body already, and her eyes were shut peacefully as if she were sleeping. Her mouth was barely open—
She wasn’t breathing anymore.

And for some reason, Shuya finds himself at the end of his rope and near tears. He doesn’t know why. Maybe because they’d just talked, maybe because he learned she was in love with him, maybe specifically because she talked about how she couldn’t stand for him to die. Maybe because it’s been two days of his class dying and he’d be like this no matter what.

The rest of the corpses are in even worse shape, so he doesn’t bother checking.

Shuya looked back at Yukie. His nearly paralyzed left arm supported his right arm so he could hold her up. It might have been a meaningless gesture. But Shuya had to do it.
As he held her body, he heard the blood dripping onto the floor from the holes in her chest. Her head hung back and her braided hair touched his arm.

And then, at last: Shuya burst into tears For whatever reason, this is just too much.

He doesn’t stay to mourn long, though. He heads after Yuko, demanding to know what happened. It’s interesting that he still hasn’t come to the conclusion Yuko killed the rest. She doesn’t answer him, but he hears her scream and climbs faster.

Then the next chapter switches to Yuko. She’s reached the top. There’s really nowhere to go now – the place wasn’t really designed to have multiple exits. She goes out onto the balcony, expecting to see a ladder down, but there isn’t one. She hasn’t been up for watch yet, so she didn’t know.

She was trapped now. Realizing this, she was about to panic, but she clenched her teeth and held herself together. If there was no ladder… then she’d have to jump.

This seems to be the same sort of reasoning as when she decided to kill Shuya. The only way she can keep her fear down is to believe she still has control over the situation, even if it’s suicidal.

And on some level she understands this, but it can’t compete with her absolute certainty that Shuya will murder her. All she can think about is the image of Shuya splitting her head open with his ax.

She climbs out through the railing, and realizes it’s much too far to jump, only to slip anyway. That’s the scream Shuya just heard. She manages to grab the edge but she’s now dangling precariously.

The entire thing is quite gruesome: The side of her shin hit the concrete edge of the balcony (she felt her skin scraping off) and . Then her entire right hand fell off the railing (she felt the nail of her index finger catch, but it peeled off and that was that). This really seems excessive. A lot of the gore can be excused as having a purpose in making the reader uncomfortable at the violence, but this just seems there for the sake of it and makes me wonder at the motivations for other gorey scenes.

Her other hand begins to slip, but Shuya grabs it at the last second.

“No! Let me go!” Yuko screamed. Any trace of rational thought had all but disappeared. “No! I’d rather die here than let you kill me! Let me go! Let me go!”

Shuya either doesn’t care what she’s saying or doesn’t even hear it – the latter is quite possible given that he’s pulled open a lot of his injuries. She sees the wound on his neck is oozing a lot of blood, enough that it’s run down his arm all the way onto her own hand. And she remembers that’s not his only wound, he was all shot up, but he’s still here trying to pull her up.

Strangely enough, it suddenly all came to her. The black mist clouding her thoughts suddenly cleared as if blown away by the sea breeze blowing against her body. The image of Shuya holding the blood-soaked axe, looking down at Tatsumichi Oki’s corpse, suddenly vanished as if shredded by the wind, and all her previous (although it was only two days ago) memories of the Third Year Class B classroom along with the cheerful expressions of Shuya Nanahara came back to her. How he joked around with his friends Yoshitoki Kuninobu and Shinji Mimura, how he looked so serious repeating a difficult guitar line while practicing in the music room, how he posed triumphantly at second base after making a perfect hit down the third base line during gym class, which she managed to see from the gym where she was playing volleyball. And then when she was pale from menstrual cramps, how he’d gently said to her, “What’s wrong, Yuko? You look pale,” interrupted their English teacher Mr. Yamamoto, and called on the nurse’s assistant, Fumiyo Fujiyoshi. How he looked so concerned then.
Oh no. Yuko finally understood the situation. This is Shuya. Shuya is trying to save me. I…why? Why did I have to think I had to kill Shuya? Why did I believe that? It’s Shuya. And I always thought he was kind of cool…that he was really nice but no—

I really like the resolution. As I’ve mentioned before, I think the book is best when it’s focused on ordinary people and how it would be believable that class after class of kids has turned on each other during these games. Not only is Yuko motivated by sincere fear rather than malice, but here at the end she becomes even more relatable losing her extreme terror and instead by thinking of their time before.

She starts to cry and confesses everything that happened.

Shuya then understood everything. Hiding in a nearby bush, Yuko had seen him extract the axe from Tatsumichi Oki’s head after fighting him. She didn’t see how Kyoichi Motobuchi and Shogo appeared afterwards. She’d only witnessed that one moment. She could have interpreted it as an act of self defense on Shuya’s part or as an accident, but Yuko was too frightened to trust Shuya. And so she poisoned the food to kill him, but Yuka ate this by mistake…and everyone panicked with suspicion.

And, of course, I like that it all comes down to fear and trust.

Shuya tells her it’s okay, he’ll pull her up. He’s not doing very well, though, since only one of his arms works and the rest of his body isn’t much more cooperative.

Yuko doesn’t want to be saved, anyway. She lets go of him. He tries to hold on, but the blood dripping down his hand has made it too slippery.

Instead of slipping from his hand, she seemed to have appeared there suddenly via time-lapse photography. Her body wrapped in her sailor shirt and pleated skirt was sprawled out…and her neck was crooked, which made her head look oddly disjointed from the rest of her body. The top-right side of her head spurted out a red substance in the shape of a shriveled up maple leaf.

And with that, there’s four girls and four boys left alive. Of those, all the boys are accounted for, but two of the remaining girls are still unknown: Mizuho and Kayoko, the girl Hiroki was searching for.

The next chapter brings us to Hiroki again. He heard the gunfire and headed to the lighthouse.

He knew it was there from the map, but he assumed Kayoko Kotohiki would never hide there alone in such a conspicuous location, so he’d ignored it until now.

It seems it made for a good hiding spot for the girls to have made it there safely for so long. Perhaps the fact it was conspicuous made everyone else assume there was no reason to go near it.

This is also more of Hiroki making the wost decisions when it comes to actually looking for someone alive. By now, three fourths of his classmates are dead. Two days have passed. He’s wasted his time running around forbidden zones instead of searching the places a live person would be, and now he’s continuing the trend. Anyone at the location of the gunshots still alive will have run for it, so he’ll only find corpses or other people who came to see if there was anyone to finish off. Unless he thinks Kayoko is playing, he can only be doing this to check the dead.

And indeed, he sees Yuko’s corpse on the roof of the house which resembles Kayoko’s at the distance and heads in.

There was a pile of chairs and desks beyond the open door. Someone had formed a barricade, but for some reason this barricade was also torn down. He looked at the window that was sealed shut with planks and cautiously walked down the hall. (There was a room with a bed right by the entrance, and for some reason its door had been knocked down.)

This always seems so creepy to me, even when I know exactly why it happened. There’s just something about it. Maybe it’s that barricades just signal such seriousness? A person setting one up is afraid and desperate, and at the same time, they’re committing themselves to possibly being trapped. Being in a situation where you have to tear one down is even worse than a situation where you have to put one up.

He finds the bodies of the girls. Satomi is face down, so he has to enter the room and turn her over to be sure, then he climbs the tower to see the body on the roof and confirm that she’s not Kayoko either. This is really ridiculous. If she’s dead, there’s nothing he can do, and he’d find out soon enough from the announcements.

He stays there, thinking about what happened.

Six girls had all died here at once. There were no guns in the room, but given how they were wounded and how the walls and floors were ridden with bullet holes, he was certain the gunshots he’d heard had occurred here. The most logical scenario was that…the girls somehow got together and cooped themselves up here, but then someone attacked them. The five girls were shot down there first, and then Yuko Sakaki managed to get this far and fell to her death without being attacked by the assailant. Then the assailant left before Hiroki got here…. But given how they’d formed a barricade at the entrance—the planks nailed over the windows, every entry point probably sealed—why would they tear the barricade down? Did the assailant shove it away as he left? But then how could he or she have entered in the first place? Could it be…there were seven of them? And one of them had suddenly betrayed the rest—no, revealed his or her true intentions? No, that can’t be…The other thing was that Yuka Nakagawa didn’t look like she died from gunshots. She looked like…she’d been choked. The blood splattered all over the table also didn’t make any sense. How could that large amount of blood end up there? There was more. The door to that room right next to the entrance. Why was it torn down?

And again, even knowing what happened, it’s creepy just to imagine being in this position. Something terrible happened and he can see the signs of it, but not make sense of what it means.

He can barely believe there’s only eight of them left.

Was Kayoko Kotohiki still alive? Wasn’t it possible she might have died between noon and now in some area he didn’t know about?
No, Hiroki thought, she has to be alive.
Even though he could hardly justify it, for some reason he was nearly certain. Eight students remaining, possibly even less. But I’m alive, and so must be Kotohiki. This is taking too much time. It’s been a day and a half since the game began, and I still haven’t managed to find Kotohiki. But…I will eventually.

IF YOU THINK SHE’S STILL ALIVE WHY DO YOU KEEP LOOKING FOR CORPSES YOU IDIOT?

He also thinks that Shuya’s group remains alive, but that if there’s a way out, he wants Kayoko to have it.

He heads back down and now notices the stew, which smells delicious even with the stench of blood. He hasn’t had anything but the bit of bread the government put in his pack. Still, he’s too queasy from the room itself to eat and he doesn’t want to take the time either, since he has to keep looking for Kayoko.

He also hasn’t slept at all.

Maybe that’s why he’s so calm about what happens next, or maybe that’s just how he always is.

Someone was standing at the entrance at the far end of the long corridor. Because the hall was dim, this person looked like a silhouette outlined from behind by the light.

Personally, I’d completely lose it at this. The only thing worse than dead bodies is suddenly seeing a mysterious person standing in the same area. Hiroki just bolts back for the more defensible kitchen, locking the door.

He recognizes the gunfire, of course. I wonder just how many bullets Kazou has for that thing.

For his part, he now has Mitsuko’s gun and bullets, but not the magazine for loading it, so he won’t be able to easily reload during a fight.

He examines his options and find he doesn’t have many. The planks over the window will take too long to pull off, and Yuko demonstrated that there’s no way to jump down from the top safely. Before he can think further, Kazou blows the doorknob off the door and rushes in. He then shoots into his blind spot behind the door, missing Hiroki entirely because he climbed up the shelf next to it instead.

He’d decided against using the gun since he wasn’t used to it and had tucked it away again. The important thing was to stop the assailant—who turned out to be Kazuo Kiriyama—from shooting anymore.

That is, he uses his broom handle to knock the weapon away, instead of focusing on killing the guy himself. This is terribly, terribly dumb. Even assuming he could pull it off, it results in the same problem as Mitsuko – letting a murderer go, even without their weapon, means they’ll just continue to try to kill other people.

He manages to keep smacking the guns Kazou tries to use out of Kazou’s hand. He should really have been concerning himself with the fact Kazou is also doing backward sumersaults in response to his assault, which might have given a hint to how things go next – successfully disarmed, Kazou switches to martial arts.

the stick stopped several centimeters before hitting Kazuo’s face. A third of the stick flew by Kazuo’s face. Strangely enough, he only heard it crack later. Kazuo had chopped off the stick with his left hand.
The next moment, Kazuo formed a spear fist with his right hand to strike Hiroki in the face. He was aiming for Hiroki’s eyes.

Hiroki’s still amazingly good, though, enough to dodge and counterattack. With him pinned and momentarily subdued, Hiroki then pulls out his gun and empties it into Kazou’s stomach.

I won.
He won against the Kazuo Kiriyama. The Kazuo Kiriyama whose athletic prowess was probably superior to Shinji Mimura or Shuya Nanahara’s, who’d never lost a fight as far as he knew. He’d defeated him.
I defeated—
Suddenly a sharp pain pierced the right side of Hiroki’s stomach. He groaned, gasped…then opened his eyes wide.
Kazuo was looking up at Hiroki. And in his left hand…was a knife digging into Hiroki’s stomach.
Hiroki slowly shifted his eyes from this hand over to Kazuo’s face. Kazuo stared back with eyes that were as always beautiful and cold.
How…could he still be alive?
Of course it was because Kazuo Kiriyama was wearing Toshinori Oda’s bulletproof vest

You have to give Hiroki credit, though. He beat the far better armed and presumably better fed and rested Kazou.

On the other hand, shooting someone in the stomach wouldn’t have been the proper move even if he didn’t have that vest. Unless it hits a major artery, it’s unlikely that would have killed Kazou immediately. Hiroki would have gotten rid of the major threat to the remaining kids, but it likely wouldn’t have saved him from being stabbed.

Kazou twists the knife and Hiroki sends Kazou flying, which just serves to rip a bigger hole in his stomach when the knife is pulled out in the process. Hiroki bolts and just in time – Kazou’s already grabbed yet another gun.

Badly injured, all he can do is run.