Scattered Pieces of Truth
"When we came to this broadcast room after our first experiment, there was already no one there."
When I entered the broadcast room, I immediately opened the hidden door.
"There was a hidden door in the back with a few gas cylinders inside. And that word "singularity." It is hard to say that this has nothing to do with this case, but honestly, I feel like this is a fake hidden room prepared by Anzai. It is too obvious. There must be another place where he is hiding now."
I left the hidden room and walked over to a boom box, which was placed haphazardly on a table with speakers, microphones, and other broadcasting equipment on the right.
I pressed the play button, but heard nothing.
"Did the killer take the cassette? From the results of the first ordeal we heard here, we wondered how the killer could have guessed the exact number of people. We came to this broadcast room right after the first experiment. I think it took less than three minutes. How is it possible to record the results of the first experiment and the content of the second experiment on a cassette in such a short time?
The culprit's voice did not sound particularly impatient as far as I could hear. The fact that the speaker and microphone were left on means that the killer anticipated that we would be here. Or maybe he or she saw us coming up on the surveillance cameras and ran away. Either way, the culprit is too clever. It's as if the culprit is guiding us. But surely this is the first trick to give the killer an alibi. So on the contrary, someone with a perfect alibi would be suspicious. But, well, if someone had a perfect alibi in that situation, it would be too suspicious. In fact, everyone is dead except for me, so there isn’t enough people to prove…"
I let out a huge sigh and started to walk away when I accidentally tripped over a trash can by the table and took a spectacular fall.
"Ouch. Huh, a disaster indeed."
The next was a game of tag-like ordeal where you either chase your clone or run away from your own clone. I thought it would be exactly half chasers and half runaways, but since none of the six of us were being manipulated, it seemed that more people were running away. Here we found that the clones had the same physical and thinking abilities as us. I honestly don't know where the others were except the six of us in this ordeal.
We hurried downstairs to the first floor, thinking it would be more advantageous to run away in the schoolyard than to hide inside the school building. But when I went downstairs, Kazuhiro and Risa, who had taken the lead, were not there. But after about ten minutes, they both appeared in front of us, bringing along clones of me and Risa.
Next gone were Keisuke and Kazuhiro. They acted as decoys and allowed Risa and Minami to escape, who were nearly out of stamina. Meanwhile, when we were about to evacuate to the schoolyard through the cafeteria window, we came across Risa's clone. Shōta stopped her and I took them into the woods.
After a little while, Minami couldn't wait any longer and ran out to find the three of them. Immediately me and Risa tried to follow, but we lost her. Shortly thereafter, a muddy Keisuke showed up, and the three of us heard the violator's announcement.
After a while, I heard Minami's screams and headed over to find Shōta dead. At this time, Shōta was clearly dead. Therefore, Shōta is not the culprit. Because no one could imagine that he could come back to life later… wait a minutes. I've seen it on the news before. As I recall, AI is now…"
I went out to the schoolyard, walked up to the clone of a male high school student standing nearby, and gently touched its right arm.
I could not feel any body heat at all. Even though it looks like human. His mannequin-like expression showed no sign of life.
I muttered the rest of my deductions as if talking to the mannequin.
"Just as the second ordeal was about to end, Kazuhiro appeared, unusually dirty with sand and sweat. That's how serious Kazuhiro was trying to escape from the clones. Then the ordeal of finding the guard's head was emailed, not broadcast. There must have been a reason for this."
As I was walking around the schoolyard for no reason, it started raining heavily.
"Rain again."
I stayed there for a little while, letting the rain fall on me. The rain made both of my body and heart feel colder than ever.
