PART THREE
FINAL STAGE

So that’s another bit of overlap with Hunger Games.

17 students remaining

We’re now back with Noriko and Shogo.

She hears the sound of guns, then the machine gun in particular, and wonders if it’s Kazou caught up with Shuya. Come to think of it, their group is now in the position of knowing both of the current serial killers on the island – no one else knows about Kazou and only Hiroki knows about Mitsuko. They don’t know about the guy who killed Hirono, though.

Then there’s an explosion, which shocks even Shogo. He heads out to take a look and tells Noriko that a building’s on fire. It’s nowhere near where Shuya was headed, though.

Noriko’s relieved at the time, but an hour later, there’s still no sign of Shuya and she keeps picturing him with a bullet throug his forehead.

She starts talking to Shogo, who, as always, is upsettingly calm.

That was definitely Kazuo’s machine gun. Unless they supplied an identical machine gun to someone else. And given how the explosion occurred over there, it means that Kazuo was fighting someone besides Shuya. Shuya escaped from Kazuo. I know that much.”

Well, that’s not entirely certain, since there’s no way to know that Shuya wasn’t chased by Kazou into a fight with the third party. But yeah, it does seem plausible that he wasn’t involved.

Still, that doesn’t mean he’s okay. Shogo suggests he’s lost or hiding, Noriko feels he’s hurt. And if he ran into F7, the new forbidden zone, he’d be dead by now. She can’t believe someone like Shuya could die, but she also can’t stop feeling terrified he is.

Shogo says there’s no way they’re looking for him. Shuya risked himself to protect her, so they should respect his wishes and not get themselves killed now. Which is pretty convenient for Shogo, and also I’m not sure Shuya’s concern for Noriko is to the point of not wanting anyone to even glance around to see if he’s there.

Then Shogo starts asking if she believes in a sixth sense. Noriko isn’t too certain. Shogo says he thinks it’s garbage.

“But sometimes without any apparent reason I’m certain about things I can’t know for sure. And for some reason I’ve never been wrong when this happens.”
She remained silent and stared at him.
He said, “Shuya’s still alive. He’ll be back. I know it.”

Also convenient. I’m going to assume he’s bullshitting Noriko because it’ll make her feel better, because Shogo actually having a mysterious sixth sense is silly.

Then he says that Shuya’s really lucky to have her, and she explains that no, Shuya’s into this other girl.

“She’s really awesome. I don’t know how to describe her. She’s so strong and beautiful. I’m jealous, but I can understand why he’s attracted to her.”

You know what’s really nice about this book? There’s none of the usual tearing down of opposing love interests. To bring up a totally different book that the one I’ve been mostly comparing this to, in Harry Potter love is supposed to be this great thing, but it’s behind everything that goes wrong: Voldemort is born because his mom was in love with a noble and mixed up some rape potions. Voldemort finds out about the prophesy because Snape is in love with Lily. Even Wizard Hitler v1.0 is partly because Dumbledore was in love with the guy and let him do bad stuff. And part of his original motivation was his love for his sick sister! And so on, all the way down to how all the kids act like dicks to each other over their stupid romance subplots. The only positive thing love does is the love-powered spell on Harry, and that manifests as the most sadistic spell seen in the series. The bad guys fire instakill lasers. Harry can kill someone by grabbing them and watching them scream as their flesh crumbles under his touch.

…

So, back to this. Shogo says that he thinks Shuya might be more interested in her now, then says she should sleep.

If Shuya shows up, I’ll tell him to wake the princess with a kiss.”

So she lies down but finds she still can’t sleep.

Next we return to Hiroki. He’s still doing his thing where he focuses his checks on the uncoming forbidden zones, which amounts to actively sabotaging his search, and furthermore he’s aiming at the fight scenes, so now he’s seeking out corpses. Really, Hiroki. It’s like you don’t actually want to find her.

Anyway, he finds Shinji, Yutaka and Keita’s corpses and doesn’t see the machinegun user, but figures someone else might show up so he keeps going. He’s shocked Shinji could possibly lose.

Even if they’d fought according to martial arts rules, and even though Hiroki was ten centimeters taller, Shinji would have easily defeated him in a match. Besides, Shinji was much smarter than him. Even if Shinji couldn’t escape the game (although it was likely he’d considered it), Hiroki firmly believed no one else would be able to kill Shinji. And yet the machine gun shooter somehow managed to do just that.

So I guess Shinji is intended as more of a worf than a sue. This is meant to emphasize how big a deal Kazou is. But Kazou already was unstoppably awesome, so it’s not really needed, and it doesn’t really work because Hiroki is super humble about his own skills. Either he sounds dumb for not realizing he’d actually win the fight or he sounds like he’s actually not that great at martial arts, rather than that Shinji is so awesome he can beat a martial arts master.

What mattered now was finding Kayoko Kotohiki. He had to find her soon—if the machine gun shooter found her, someone like Kotohiki would get instantly killed.

THEN STOP FOCUSING ON CHECKING CORPSES AND EMPTY AREAS YOU MORON

Since sector G=3, forbidden at 3 a.m., was on the northern side of the southern mountain peak, Hiroki decided to head over there.

ARG.

He keeps thinking about how worried he is about Kayoko and how disturbed he is by all the fighting and how he wants to just start shouting for her but worries that might not work and so on.

He saw a blurred double image of the star mark indicating his position at the center of the display. Oh no, I’m getting tired. Even my vision’s going now.
Hiroki was still looking down when he realized he was wrong. At the same time, he turned around and swung his stick in his right hand. Following the martial arts technique he had learned so thoroughly, his elegant swing traced a graceful arc.
The stick impressively landed on the arm of the figure standing behind him. The person groaned and dropped the object, a gun, in their hand. Someone had snuck up behind him when his guard was down for that brief moment.

I thought it would be Kazou, because Hiroki did blunder onto the site of his most recent kill and he’s likely not gone far. But the fact the other person didn’t attack despite having a clear shot makes it clear it can’t be him.

First, it was only the sailor suit. Then the beautiful face, brightly lit by the moon—angelic—it was unmistakably hers.

Now, I wonder if this is Mitsuko’s flaw? From the sounds of it, she was more than close enough to have just shot him. But she may not be too confident with a gun and didn’t want to risk firing and not getting a kill.

Mitsuko lifted both of her hands and stepped back. “Please don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me!” she shouted. She staggered and fell on her behind, revealing her white legs up beyond her thighs under her pleated skirt. She continued coquettishly to move back in the pale blue moonlight.

While she’s overconfident in her ability to prevent others from harming her.

She continues to stammer and beg about how scared she’s been.

Without saying a word, Hiroki picked up the gun Mitsuko had dropped.

Really, really confident. Maybe it’s more that it’s a power thing – she wants to prove that they’d fall for it more than she wants a regular kill.

He acts like he’s going to hand it to her, then presses it against her forehead.

Mitsuko’s face was twisted with dismay and horror—at the very least it looked contorted. She was priceless. It wouldn’t matter how many sordid rumors you heard about Mitsuko Souma, most people (particularly guys) would have to believe her once this angelic face of hers pleaded for mercy. No, even if you didn’t believe her, you’d still end up doing anything you could for her.

I feel like this is overstating things. The reason why most women don’t try this gambit is that not everyone wants to play knight in shining armor. Mitsuko might be confident she can kill any rapist before they finish and get around to killing her, and she’s probably very skilled at defusing anger aimed at her, so she may be generally confident that she can prevent someone from hurting her, so I can see why this might make sense for her in particular, but there’s more risk here than the book seems to realize, even though it just had Takako as a lesson on how being attractive to someone can have horrible downsides for girls.

Anyway. Instead of just shooting her like a smart person, Hiroki says he knows from Takako. Mitsuko makes a valient effort to say it was an accident and Takako attacked her, but yeah, guess that’s not gonna work? Plan B!

Still sitting, Mitsuko pinched the edge of her skirt with her left thumb and index finger, pulling it back slowly, once again revealing those enticing legs.
Hiroki looked up.
“How about it? If you help me, you can do what you like with me. I’m not bad, you know.”
…
“I guess not,” Mitsuko said. She said lightly, “Of course not. I mean I’d kill you the moment you let down your guard. Besides, how could you sleep with the girl who killed your girlfriend—”

Plan C works. Hiroki is too freaked out by Mitsuko’s angelic look, cheerful tone, and the horrible content. He asks her how she could do this, which just makes her keep doing that as she explains that duh, she’s killing because that’s how the game works.

He wants to know why, so she explains that she got gangraped when she was nine.

One of you did it. Although they were middle-aged men.

Which is an interesting turn of phrase that fits the idea she’s got issues with all men from this, although there hasn’t been much actual support with that in her behavior (after all, so far the only guy she’s killed was because she thought he wasn’t going to hurt a girl). This also taught her that guys like it if you cry, something that served her well in her later prostitution.

While Hiroki is gawping at all this, she stabs him in the shoulder and takes off.

He knew if he didn’t kill Mitsuko Souma now then Kayoko Kotohiki might be the next one to fall into her trap. But Hiroki couldn’t bring himself to do it.

Which brings up an interesting question of ethics! This is like the Batman and Joker problem – at what point does not killing someone leave you responsible for their murders? To find killing abhorrent is a sign of a good person. But to allow killing to happen on the basis you’re not directly responsible is a sign of a bad person.

It’s interesting as a character trait, because it’s one of those rare things that’s positive and a flaw at the same time. Sort of the inverse of making your character “clumsy”.

Hiroki ponders the story Mitsuko told and thinks it’s probably true and that’s probably not even the whole of it. He guesses that’s why she’s so messed up. Also, he’s bleeding badly from the knife in his shoulder. Deal with that, then you can go back to your pondering.

Now it’s Toshinori. When last we were in his head, he’d just strangled Hirono.

He didn’t feel particularly sorry for her. After all this was a serious competition. You get what you deserve. Hirono Shimizu didn’t even think twice about shooting him the moment she saw him. Of course, he’d been the one who snuck up behind Hirono to choke her.

Remember how the book didn’t sound particularly sympathetic for Hirono? Seems it was just warming up for this guy. I’m kind of disappointed, I like the sympathetic chapters far more.

We learn next that he’s planning to move out of the soon-to-be-forbidden area into another house.

After all, he came from a privileged family and lived in what was probably the nicest house in the prefecture (Kazuo Kiriyama’s house was probably the nicest, but Toshinori would never admit this). Hiding in bushes was beneath him.

He admits that going into houses is more dangerous, but he’s pretty confident. He started with the bulletproof vest, just got a gun, and he’s also found a motorcycle helmet to protect his face.

he was appalled at the sensation of dirty soil. The dull pain he felt from Hirono Shimizu’s shot in the stomach area of his bulletproof vest only infuriated him more. Why did he have to be thrown into this coarse game and writhe around on the ground with the “vulgar masses”? (This was an expression his father, who ran the largest food company in the eastern part of the prefecture, often used at home, but it was a favorite phrase Toshinori himself used to express his scorn for the “vulgar masses.” Of course, he was well bred, so he could never say it out loud.)

Yeah, really not getting a good take on this guy. This seems like something out of some more traditional slasher horror, where the writer says screw it, I’ll just write assholes so the audiance will enjoy watching them die.

It goes on to explain that he’s been learning violin since he was a little kid, and he’s one of the best players in the area. There’s more ranting about vulgar people and how his violin skills make him more worthy of life so he’s fine murdering everyone.

But he has a particular issue with Shuya.

Toshinori was vastly superior to him in term of music ability, given his ear training and understanding of music theory. And yet, in spite of that, the vulgar bitches in his class would scream out indecently at the sound of Shuya Nanahara plucking out kindergarten-level chords on his guitar (I mean come on those bitches who listen to Shuya Nanahara playing during the short break before music class, they might as well have printed on their foreheads in thick Gothic font: “Oh, Shuya, do me now, right here”). In contrast, they’d only politely applaud when Toshinori finished playing an elegant passage from an opera at the music teacher’s request.
For one thing, those loser bitches could never appreciate classical music, and for another, it was only because Shuya Nanahara was good-looking (although Toshinori would never admit it, deep down inside he couldn’t stand his own ugly face).

See, this just makes me feel bad for him. He does sound nasty, but being really good at something and people ignoring it sucks and would naturally breed resentment, especially when you’re being looked down on for other reasons on top of that. And there’s a good chance he’s right that Shuya isn’t actually any good and is getting by on the fact rock is popular and he’s got a nice face.

Anyway, another rant on how women aren’t people and how he’s worth more than anyone else.

He finds some houses and then sees another person wandering around across the border in the area that’s about to be forbidden. Being kind of dumb, he decides to take a shot now rather than hoping the person has misread their map and will stick around long enough for the collar to explode.

Hiroki, being ridiculously forgiving, just tells him to stop because he’s not playing. Toshinori gives another rant about how he hates Hiroki for being pretty, tall, and knowing karate, and also dating Takako who is similarly vulgar but hot. He is baffled by the claim of not playing. Is it some weird trick?

Toshinori decides to pretend he’s not playing right back, apologizing and pretending to stutter. He approaches and then tries to shoot him again. Hiroki dodges and then shoots Toshinori in the hand. So basically it’s really easy for everyone but Shinji to manage a disarming shot. Toshinori freaks out because he needed that finger for violin!

Hiroki decides that since he’s playing, there’s no choice but to shoot him. As expected, he’s aiming at Toshinori’s chest. That’s the whole idea of the helmet, to discourage anyone who might try to headshot instead.

Ironically, Hiroki is saved by his gun jamming. He doesn’t manage to shoot Toshinori, so Toshinori’s play-dead-then-shoot plan never happens. Instead he takes off and Toshinori has to hurriedly take a shot at him, which manages to get him in the leg but doesn’t get him to stop running. And then he’s too far and Toshinori can’t hit him at all, and he disappears into the forest.

He decides it’s too dangerous to follow because he’ll be exposed. Instead, he heads toward the house he wants, in a lot of pain from his hand.

He saw a guy standing on the farm field six to seven meters away, right in front of the house he wanted. The guy had appeared suddenly out of nowhere. He had slicked-back hair that reached a little too far behind his neck and cold, gleaming eyes.

Kazou is really getting around today.

He shoots and Toshinori plays possum. It doesn’t work.

Some of the point-blank shots turned into colorful sparks from scraping against the reinforced plastic shell of the helmet while others, after exiting Toshinori’s skull, ricocheted inside his helmet, rattling Toshinori’s head along with the helmet

Gruesome. The book explains that he should have paid attention to Yumiko and Yukiko’s deaths and how the killer had shown up on the platform to finish them off.

Furthermore—it was quite irrelevant now—he had no idea his killer, Kazuo Kiriyama, had, in his mansion that was much larger than Toshinori’s home in Shiroiwa-cho, mastered the violin at a level far superior to Toshinori’s a long time ago (and then tossed his violin into the trash).

I GET IT, YOU HATE HIM.

16 students remaining

So in one day, sixty percent of the students are already dead.