Chapter 6 Trial: Trauma Tango (#37)
“I don’t think all of us saw it...”
“I hope we didn’t all see it...”
“...but there was a large cooler in the execution chamber.”
“I did see the outside of the cooler!”
“The lid wasn’t particularly accessible, though.”
“ ‘s that the thing you, like, totally told me not to see?”
“Yeah.”
“Is this regarding the tasteless disposal of empty shells?”
“That’s sure one way to put it.” Not exactly wrong, though. Especially the tasteless part.
“The cooler was full of dead bodies.”
“Dead...”
“Bodies?! Like, who?!”
“Who do you THINK it was, MORON?!”
“It was everyone—sans Aidan, of course—who died in this game.”
“Kokoro included.”
“And that’s supposed to PROVE her file wasn’t FAKE?”
“By itself? Maybe not. But not only was her body in the cooler...”
“...it was mixed in with the other victims taken off life support—between the fourth case victims at the bottom and the fifth case victims at the top.”
“In other words, Miss Tanukihara logically would have died at the same time as them, been disposed of at the same time...”
“...and stayed put.”
I nod.
“I didn’t exactly crawl into the cooler to take fingerprints, so I can’t prove all the bodies were exactly who they seemed to be...”
“...but preparing fake corpses to use like that, including where her own body would end up if she didn’t receive the motive vote, is kind of overkill, don’t you think?”
“So you mean the masterdude’s seriously Kokoro...”
“And she’s just, like, legit dead?!”
“And most certainly not by her own hand, as some fools have suggested.”
“Then MONOCHAP killed her?”
“If she’d already designated an heir to control the game after her, then what would be the point of making a fairly easily confused robot do it instead? Just to confuse us for a final trial that she had no reason to expect?”
“......”
“Besides, Mister Monochaperone couldn’t be considered the culprit. This trial is only taking place because a student committed the murders in question.”
“Yet he could be considered merely an instrument of the culprit, correct?”
“Okay, not sure what that means cuz I don’t think you mean, like, drums.”
“But why would she make Monochap kill her and then, like, not even bring her back? Totally wack.”
“Why hold this game at all, for that matter?”
“Kind of hard to look that deeply into the mastermind’s head after she’s died...”
“But one of us knew her a little better than the rest. Maybe we should ask her co-conspirator.”
[NEXT]