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alpindale

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light-novels

like 24

When she got back up, her entire face was bright red and she was staring daggers at me. She kept opening and closing her mouth but couldn’t get anything out, and in the end she gave up and strode off quickly down the hall, her pretty hair streaming behind her. Hm, I’d blown it (but at least I’d tried).

Oh well. Giving up is the crux of any relationship.

“That reminds me,” Shiogi said after she’d proceeded in silence for a while, “I still don’t know your name. It’s inconvenient not to have something to call you, so if you wouldn’t mind, I’d appreciate it if you’d tell it to me.”

“Ah. The thing is, until now I’ve only told my real name to─”

I.

Began to answer, glancing casually out the hallway window as I did so. At present we were on the second floor, so we weren’t all that high up─which is exactly why. Exactly why I was able to catch sight of Ichihime Yukariki walking unsteadily through the garden between the buildings.

“…”

What was she doing there? Even if the faculty building wasn’t close by and took a while to reach…why should she be skulking around here, way off target? I only caught a glimpse of her before she slipped into the shadow of the trees and was out of sight─but there was no mistaking who it was.

“Are you all right?”

“Oh, um…um.”

She couldn’t have come back out of concern for me again, could she? Only to find that we were no longer in the courtyard─was she trying to find out where Shiogi and I had gone?

What─a pain in the ass. What a fucking busybody. Even if Shiogi was right that I was a magnet for weirdoes, freaks, and crazies, no one could be that worried about someone who was basically a stranger. I specifically told her to leave this to me. How similar did she have to be to “her” before she’d be satisfied, fer chrissakes… I started to get kind of pissed off.

“I, uh, just wanted to know your name.”

“Right. My name…my name, my name…”

Shiogi hadn’t noticed Hime-chan yet. When she did, she’d be liable to leap right out the window. She had no real reason to face Jun Aikawa. Hime-chan hadn’t noticed us, either. If she had, she wouldn’t be dilly-dallying down there.

In which case…in which case it was time to carry on with the charlatanry.

“Okay, let’s make it a guessing game.” I turned to face Shiogi such that my body was blocking the window. “I’ll give you some hints, and you try to figure out my name.”

“Ooh. Sounds fun. I love games like that.”

Of course I didn’t tell her that I hate them.

“How many hints do I get?”

“Three. You can ask me three questions. No restrictions, except you can’t ask me my name or anything like that.”

“Hmmm. Okay, challenge accepted.”

Whereupon Shiogi lapsed into thought.

Lapsed into thought and forgot all about Hime-chan.

“Okay, QUESTION ①. Tell me all your nicknames.”

“Nicknames?”

“Yukariki called you ‘Master,’ and Overkill Red called you ‘Iitan,’ right? That kind of thing.”

“Gotcha. Up till now I’ve been called ‘Master’ and ‘Iitan,’ as you know, plus ‘Ikkun,’ ‘The Big I,’ ‘Ii-Bro,’ ‘Iino,’ ‘Inosuke,’ ‘Nonsense User,’ and ‘Charlatan.’”

“Those are all such lame terms of endearment… So the ‘I’ is the key, huh?”

“Is that one of your questions?”

“No, just thinking out loud. But why does Yukariki call you ‘Master’?”

“Good question…I’d love to know the answer myself. Because she’s the nonsense user’s disciple, I guess?”

“Huh… Anyway, next question. When you write your name in roman letters, how many vowels and consonants are there, respectively?”

Wow. It may have only been a diversion to distract Shiogi’s attention from Hime-chan, but I was kind of impressed. She really made her questions count, as befits a tactician. It was a cunning way to get around asking me point-blank how many characters there were in my name.

“Eight vowels, and seven consonants.”

“Hm. Interesting. On to my final question. If you convert the kana in your name into numbers, with ‘a’ being ‘1,’ ‘i’ being ‘2,’ ‘u’ being ‘3’…and ‘n’ being ‘46,’ what’s the sum?”

Checkmate. Man, her wheels turn fast.

“134.”

“That’s a pretty strange name you’ve got,” Shiogi giggled.

“Who knows, maybe it’s an alias. Since I pride myself on the fact that I’ve only ever told my real name to one other person.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. And while your guess is probably correct, you’d better not call me by that name. Only three people ever have, and none of them are still alive.”

“Only…three?”

“One was Harukana Ii. My little sister. She died in a head-on collision between two airplanes. One was Tomo Kunagisa. My friend. She’s alive but not alive, dead but not dead. And one was Magokoro Omokage. She…well, what would you call it. Her whole body was a playground for human experimentation, at the end of which she burned to death in a roaring conflagration.”

“Because she called you by your name?”

“That’s how I see it.”

“In that case, what shall I call you?”

“Whatever strikes your fancy…”

As I said this, I glanced out the window. Good, Hime-chan was gone. I didn’t even see any indication that she was hiding somewhere. She’d seemingly managed to get away safely.

What was I doing? I was in limbo: I’d helped Hime-chan get away “for now,” despite not even being able to decide whether I was going to betray her and Aikawa or stick by them, but now what the hell was I going to do? It was a real conundrum. And I was blabbing to Shiogi about all this personal stuff.

Dredging up three unpleasant memories at once. Things I’d worked so hard to forget.

No.

Who was I kidding? I hadn’t forgotten them.

I didn’t need to dredge them up, they were always on my mind.

“Oh, right. Excuse me for a moment.”

From her breast pocket, Shiogi produced the same kind of cell phone-looking walkie-talkie thing Tamamo had been carrying and used it to contact someone.

“Uh huh─yes. Currently enacting the next phase of the strategy─I’ve acquired a ‘collaborator.’ Yes, please leave it to me, current location is…”

A status report? The bidirectionality of information transmission is important, so of course that would be necessary. If soldiers on the battlefield were left to their own devices to go every which way they pleased, the war would never get off the ground.

But with the Director dead, who could she be talking to? A member of the faculty? Or the infamous “Zigzag”─

“Roger that, Director. Signing off,” Shiogi said as she ended transmission.

I─naturally didn’t let my shock show on my face. But internally I was a maelstrom of confusion. Why do you have to give me even more to think about? What you just said, who the hell were you addressing?

Did this mean that someone else was calling herself the Director─or no, that conversation just now could’ve been an act Shiogi put on for my benefit, but why would she need to do that?

In which case Shiogi couldn’t be the culprit─since she didn’t know that the Director was dead. Come to think of it, I’d decided she was behind it based on essentially nothing. There was no real evidence, I’d just thought it might be her since Tamamo’s head had been chopped off, same as the Director’s. But now that I really thought about it─

“Shiogi. It’s my turn to ask a question… Did you kill Tamamo Saijo?”

“Huh?” She looked truly taken aback. “Why would I, Shiogi Hagihara, need to kill my own comrade?”

“I mean…with her head in the courtyard like that…”

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

A-ha. Speaking of, the wounds on the Director’s and Tamamo’s necks had been different. The Director’s had been horribly rough─while the plane of Tamamo’s neck where the head had been severed was incredibly smooth. Was this what Hime-chan was talking about─“Zigzag,” the weaver? A lunatic who could use those filaments, which for me amounted to nothing more than a rope for rappelling, as a tool of murder─

“It’s absurd to imagine that I’d kill my comrade. I used a head I found lying in the courtyard as part of my subsequent stratagem, that’s all.”

“…”

Not sure what to think about that, either. Maybe that’s just how it is with “tacticians,” but Shiogi did seem to be lacking some element of human compassion. That may well be attributable to the influence of Hang ’Em High, but it seemed to me there also had to be some deeper issue with Shiogi herself.

But precisely because she was that kind of tactician─it was undeniably true that she’d never pointlessly kill her comrade and decrease the number of “pawns” at her disposal. Just as a shogi player would never ignore her knights, even if they aren’t particularly useful.

In other words, “Zigzag” was the antithesis of a tactician, closer to Tamamo than Shiogi─a berserker?

What did that mean? For the locked-room question. And the dismemberment question. Judging from the wounds, the Director’s murder was not the work of “Zigzag.” The culprit was someone else. I’d suspected Shiogi─but if she hadn’t killed Tamamo, then my basis for that suspicion was pretty thin. And there was no reason to suspect Tamamo of the Director’s murder, since she’d been killed now too.

So was the culprit a member of the “faculty” after all? Speaking of which, it was seriously suspicious that none of them had poked their noses out yet. If one of them was pretending to be the Director and still manipulating Shiogi and her crew─if Shiogi the Tactician of all people was being manipulated like a marionette, her head suspended from a string…

Embroiling me, and Shiogi, and Hime-chan and Tamamo, and even Jun Aikawa…

In something as stupid as a power struggle within the school? A proxy war? Something with not even a glimmer of hope for success. Not in the culprit’s wildest dreams─and. Did she really think she was going to get away with it?

Maybe it was time─to take this puppet master down a notch.

“Are you all right? You got so quiet all of a sudden.”

“Yeah, I’m fine. It’s a hobby of mine to get quiet all of a sudden. By the way, Shiogi, mind if we play another game? Do you read detective novels at all?”

“Why would I?” Shiogi cocked her head in confusion.

“I mean…to pass the time, or to study, or…”

“Using books to study, hah… Katai Tayama says, ‘We can derive much greater inspiration from living people than we can from books.’”

“It’s cool that you aren’t even quoting from Throw Out Your Books, but you actually read Tayama?”

“Sure. Doesn’t every high school student?”

Apparently.

“Okay then, Quiz Time. How about this scenario…”

Without letting on that it had actually happened (and of course not telling her that Hime-chan and I were involved), I told Shiogi all about the locked-room murder and the Director’s dismemberment. About the strictly controlled iron door, the corpse within, the body parts, the suspended head. Top floor, double locks on the windows. The one-way ventilation shaft.

“That one’s pretty simple,” said Shiogi. “Doesn’t make for much of a quiz.”

“Simple, eh?” Of course, I’d posed this question to Shiogi not only to get her opinion, but also to see if she had any kind of reaction to it, on the off chance that she was in fact the culprit. But as far as I could tell, she wasn’t flustered. She just wore the disappointed expression of someone who was hoping for a challenge. “Okay then, let’s hear the solution.”

“The door was never locked in the first place,” answered Shiogi, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. “From what you said, they assumed that the door was locked from the start, but no one ever actually tried it out, right? They just assumed it was a locked room when in fact it wasn’t.”

Someone had said something like that earlier, hadn’t they? When you decide that it’s a locked room, there are two possibilities. Either it is a locked room, or it isn’t. Interesting─just because something appears to be a locked room doesn’t mean it necessarily is. What a hackneyed trick.

When you try to cover up a lie with another lie, the first lie is instead laid bare. In which case starting with a single massive lie obviates the need for any follow-ups─was that it? If the door was “just closed” all along and not locked, then literally anyone could have killed the Director. Which would mean we’d jumped the gun in determining that it was a locked room─

“No, that’s wrong.”

If it were just me and Hime-chan who’d discovered the body, I’d have no problem accepting Shiogi’s solution as the correct one. But there was someone else: Jun Aikawa. No way she could’ve made such an elementary mistake.

“Really? Then─yeah. That room wasn’t necessarily the scene of the crime. After dismembering the body, the culprit tossed the pieces in from the next room through some opening─through the ventilation shaft, maybe. Through it, for instance, she’d be able to tie the severed head to the lights without ever entering the room.”

“But the ventilation shaft can only be opened from inside the room.”

“Which is why it’s just a for instance. Even if it wasn’t the ventilation shaft, the culprit surely would’ve been able to find some passage, some opening that a chopped-up corpse could fit through. A garbage chute, or a drainage pipe or something.”

“I dunno…”

“Or they just had a master key.”