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That, too, was a solution that didn’t require any courage, or hope, or dreams…but maybe it’s crazy to look for such things in a person’s demise.

It felt like a total dead end. I needed a helping hand. I wondered idly how Hime-chan would mangle that expression.

“Hm?” Something. Was on the tip of my brain. “Well, forget the quiz. Sorry it was so lame. But seriously, this is one weird school, huh…”

“Is it? I really like it.”

“You don’t think about what it might be like if you’d had a normal life?”

“What other life would let me put my skills as a tactician to such good use?” smiled Shiogi, undaunted. “Same as there aren’t many places where your ‘non-action’ would come in handy─which reminds me. I wanted to ask, did you go to a normal high school?”

“Nope. I didn’t even finish my compulsory education. After that…” She probably knew about ER3, but maybe it was best not to mention it. “I got my GED, and now I’m a freshman at Rokumeikan University.”

“Is that the truth?”

“I’m not lying to you. I’m just not telling you everything.”

“When you’re trying to deceive someone, doesn’t that amount to the same thing?”

This was a conversation fit for a tactician and a charlatan, regardless of time or place or circumstance. Lying, deceiving, dissembling, misrepresenting, bullshitting, falsifying, prevaricating. Dammit, it was like we weren’t even having the same conversation.

“Do you have dreams for the future, Shiogi?”

“Dreams, no. The future holds only reality for me. So if I can manage to keep on like this until I ‘graduate,’ I think I’ll probably get a job with Rule.”

“Get a job, sure… Who do you think you’re kidding? Where does that lead, to becoming Zhuge Liang? Or Hannibal? I gotta say, I think a girl’s happiness lies elsewhere.”

“Whoa. That’s a horribly outdated opinion. What, are you telling me to become a housewife?”

“That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying it’s clear that if you go somewhere like that, you’ll end up unhappy. Which is your prerogative… Ultimately you’re the only one who’ll ever know what happiness means for you─but more importantly.” As we went up the stairs to the top floor and walked the halls, I asked Shiogi another question, stalling pointlessly. Though that said, it was something I really did want to ask her, something that interested me. “If I really am leading you to where Aikawa is right now, what do you intend to do? I don’t believe for a second that a tactician like yourself would challenge humanity’s strongest without some kind of plan, but I also don’t think there’s any trick you can pull against a one-woman Dirty Dozen like her.”

Relying on some kind of material superiority won’t work against Aikawa. And you certainly can’t get to her with underhandedness or unfairness. Even this charlatan can’t come up with a single way of hurting her. As I said to Shiogi, Aikawa might have the good grace to be a little shocked if she found out I’d “betrayed” her, but she’d quickly transform it into positive energy. That’s how mighty she is.

“Trick, no─stratagem, yes,” said Shiogi, nonetheless brimming with confidence. “Overkill Red may be the world’s strongest contractor, but that doesn’t make her the world’s strongest person─and that’s what I’m going to exploit.”

“Hmm.”

“My opponent may be the world’s strongest, but my name is Shiogi Hagihara. The Devil himself has to take a number to see me. I don’t play fair, so watch as I make a surprise attack from plain sight.”

What did that mean, was she planning to outwit Aikawa? Was she looking for a back door? That woman doesn’t have any doors at all, let alone a weak point or any inconsistencies, so it seemed like a pretty tall order─

And that’s when I realized. Of course. That locked room. My thoughts returned to it. That’s right, no matter how─I mean it, no matter how─meticulously the culprit set up that locked-room scenario, the opposing force was Jun Aikawa. Jun Aikawa has no weak points, no inconsistencies─and for her, nothing is impossible or incredible. Only illogical. Faced with some outdated locked-room mystery, Jun Aikawa’s your woman. Whether the truth turns out to be that “the door wasn’t actually locked” or something else, it doesn’t make a difference. Nothing gets by Jun Aikawa.

And yet, Aikawa had yet to unravel anything.

“How…”

How can that be? Isn’t that the most illogical thing of all? For humanity’s strongest to stumble at such a low hurdle has to mean that someone’s cheating. A master detective who can’t solve the case, a serial killer who doesn’t kill people, a nonsense user who acts on behalf of strangers─the whole thing was positively overflowing with contradictions.

And if so─no, precisely because it’s so. Shouldn’t that dismembered corpse yield an obvious answer? The body of Noa Origami, chopped up with a chainsaw─zigzagged.

Reconstruction…approximate expression…adaptation…and finally compilation.

Then, my thoughts arrived at something even more important. At a deception so overpowering that something on the order of a locked room vanished into obscurity. Working backward from the solution, I arrived at something more fundamental.

Shiogi’s response when I’d asked her about the truth behind Tamamo’s death.

Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t possess that kind of technique. Only “Zigzag” could pull it off─that “Don’t be ridiculous.”

As if I’d muddled something she took it for granted I should know. Come to think of it, Tamamo had sounded that way too. If the dissonance there, if the significance of our crossed wires─was that there was no such student as Yuma Shisei─

If.

I already knew Zigzag─if I considered not why I hadn’t realized, but why I couldn’t have realized, then─the lies.

Deception.

“I-It can’t be.”

This wasn’t my voice, but Shiogi’s. She’d stopped somewhere behind me─and had turned as white as a sheet. Her eyes were vacant. She looked aghast─despairing. Confused by this sudden change that had come over her, my thought process ground to a halt.

“What’s wrong, Shiogi?”

“Th-That quiz─was it about the Director?”

“─!”

Fierce regret. Damn─she’d figured it out.

Of course she had. If someone like me could arrive at a given “solution,” there was no reason why Shiogi Hagihara, the best tactician at this academy, couldn’t get there too. And I was the one who’d given her the necessary materials to do so. Working backwards from her own words, and from my attitude and that less-than-innocent quiz─she’d figured out that there had been an incident, and what that incident was. Inverse operation was the tactician’s forte, not the charlatan’s. No matter how many times I’d reminded myself that this girl was an expert─I had still underestimated her. To be able to figure it all out from such scant information.

What a mind.

A mind so misfortunate, it made me want to cry.

“Bu─no way. The Director─the walkie-talkie.”

Moving like a revenant, a sort of half-smile on her face. With tottering steps, devoid of her usual flowing grace─Shiogi came towards me. Almost as if she was looking to me for salvation. As if she wanted me to take her in my arms.

I was unsure of what to do. Lie? If I lied to her now, would she buy it? Even if I’d succeeded at manipulating her movements, could I manipulate this truth that Shiogi had discovered? No, it wasn’t a question of whether or not I could─it was a question of whether or not I would.

Would I lie to her more than I already had?

Even if it wasn’t nonsense.

“Tell me…is my─” Shiogi paused, barely able to catch her breath. “Is my mother─”

“Yeah. She was murdered, a good long while ago.”

The charlatan didn’t lie.

(2) chapter number given is likely out of range: 0

Chapter: 27

Suspension 1

2

But the real shock to Shiogi in fact came a moment later.

Whum whum whum, a dull sound like the hum of an engine rent the air─and Shiogi’s right hand, with which she was about to grab me by the front of my blouse─

Shhhk

detached from her arm at the wrist, like a piece falling off a toy. The hand itself, having lost its fulcrum, went spinning comically through the air until it landed on the floor of the dim, unlit hallway with a thud.

“Uh.”

Shiogi stared at her severed hand in astonishment. Then looked down at her right arm, which now came to an abrupt end just below the wrist. She didn’t scream. And she managed to choke back her tears. Her eyes continued past her arm─and she turned to look behind her.

It was too dark to see anything. A deep, disturbing blackness. Out of which materialized a girl in a black uniform─

“Guess the jigs are up─”

Along with these words.

“Ms. Jun was right─we all get ‘caught in our own webs.’ Really, truly, what a washout, this was unanticipated, there were just too many unexpected elements─there was Hagihara, and Saijo, and then there was you, Master: totally unanticipated. I figured Ms. Jun might bring help, but…never in a million years did I think it’d be someone like you.”

With a melancholy smile─Ichihime Yukariki took the stage.

“Nh, guh─”

Regardless of the fact that her hand had been lopped off─Shiogi charged at Hime-chan without hesitation. And she did so regardless of the fact that the distance between them was not the prescribed nine steps, but much farther. At that long range─she was no match for Hime-chan.

For Zigzag.

Hime-chan shook her head gently, as if to say, “guess I’ve got no choice,” and revealed her hands, encased in a pair of black gloves.

“We all get ‘caught in our own webs’─although…”

She performed that little conductor-like movement of hers.

Whipping her finger up, hungrily─and snapping it back down with finality.

“This time you’re caught in mine. This is the end of your plans, Shiogi, I’m cutting you off.”

Whum─even as I wondered if I’d actually heard the sound, Shiogi’s body froze in midair, but only for a moment, the true blink of an eye─and then her body was slashed into zigzagging pieces, cut up like a jigsaw puzzle. Like a tumbling house of blocks, her head and chest and abdomen and shoulders and arms and hands and fingers and hips and buttocks and legs and feet slid apart in perfect rings, one after another in orderly succession, all formalities observed; the pieces scattered across the floor, and finally, the blood began to spray.

This was my second experience with them, so I was just able to make them out. Those hyper-attenuated “lines” crawling through the air like living things. Making the blood shimmer. Making the darkness shimmer. And there it was again─that whum whum.

The sound of Hime-chan reeling in her lines.

“After all, tactics alone can’t contain the Zigzag, senpai. If you wanted to survive, your only shot was to disable my hands and feet with a surprise attack, like you did the first time─or else to stage our showdown outside, where I can only use my ‘lines’ directly. You had two chances, and you let them both slip away─and that’s why you lose, Hagihara.”

Then Hime-chan added, However.

And continued, “I don’t gets it… Why would a tactician of your caliber waltz right into ‘enemy’ territory like that? You left yourself as open as a high school girl in a teen rom-com… Not that I care.”

When she was finished with this speech, delivered to Shiogi’s severed head where it lay on the ground, Hime-chan turned to me. Treating me to the full radiance of that broad, melancholy grin.

“I feel like I should thank you…but it doesn’t seem like you saved me, does it,” I observed.

“It doesn’t, doesn’t it,” nodded Hime-chan. “It was just that Hagihara figured it out. If possible, Hime-chan didn’t want to kill any of the students─”

“You already killed another one, though. Tamamo.”

“Oh. Right.”

She’d clearly forgotten all about it.

“So I did. Well, witnesses would be a problem.”

Right─Zigzag. When we rappelled down from the school building, she pretended to try and recover her “lines” afterward, but in fact she was just giving a tug on the wire she’d wrapped around Tamamo’s head while we were still up there.

“She’d already contacted Hagihara, though, so I guess it was too late.”

“…Does a little tug have enough force to sever a human head? It’s not like you’re very strong.”

“Of course. Here’s the thing, Master─Hime-chan doesn’t need to be ‘strong.’ Friction. Pressure, attraction, gravity, magnetism. Tension, stress, resistance, elasticity, centrifugal force, centripetal force. Action, reaction, the principle of oscillation and the principle of the pulley. The recoil coefficient and the friction coefficient─our world is filled with forces we can exploit. Hime-chan doesn’t need ‘strength’ of her own─”

And she lightly flicked her finger. It was hard to tell amid the gloom, but there were dozens of “wires” wrapped around those gloves, layer upon layer, layers layered on layers of lower layers, like a puppeteer, very much indeed like an illusionist─

The glass in the window behind me shattered without a sound.

“Killing a person is easy enough.”

Right. That’s the whole point of webs and the weaver.

“You’re quite the washout, Hime-chan. So Zigzag is the name of your technique… I made a misguided assumption about that…a bit of a misunderstanding. Though you really exploited that assumption to the fullest. O, what a tangled web we weave. I must say, you had me completely fooled.”

“I wasn’t fooling you. Though I did lie to you.”

Sure─same thing.