Monogatari Series - Volume 17 - Chapter 1.11

011

“Huh! So you narrowed it down to nineteen suspects─this is getting exciting. Or maybe that’s inappropriate. Am I in trouble? Heheh,” Ogi said, showing self-restraint but laughing openly. It made me want to throw some water on her enjoyment.

“It’s not that simple. Yes, everyone in the study session was suspicious, but that didn’t clear everyone who hadn’t participated of all doubt,” I noted. I wasn’t just throwing some water, I was trying to drown her enjoyment. “To give an extreme example, someone might have stolen the answers and put them in the head of someone in the study session, indirectly influencing how they answered the test questions.”

“Indirectly, you say. Hmm, possible, I guess,” Ogi said, amused.

Any wet blanket I could throw was going to land on red-hot rocks, and the only thing that was flailing its arms was my dignity. “If the plan was to have fun by raising the class’s average score, that’d be the best way…”

“Would that really be so fun?”

“Who knows, I wasn’t the one─but think about it. It’d be fun if you didn’t care about the consequences. It’d make you feel like a god.”

“Playing god… I don’t think I approve.”

Hm? It felt odd that her reaction had gotten a little more negative. Maybe as Oshino’s niece, she was sensitive to talk of the divine? I told myself this before putting us back on track.

“In any case, you could supply the info to the study session without being a part of it.”

“If that’s what happened─the culprit would be a student who didn’t participate in the study session who got a good score on the test,” conjectured Ogi. “In other words, someone who got a grade on the same level as the students in the study session despite not being a part of it─other than you, of course.”

“Hah. Sure, sure, I had no conflicts of interest with anyone in class…” Oikura might have glared at me, but there was only conflict between us, not any kind of interest.

“Oh, don’t pout like that. Here, I’ll be kind to you.”

With that, Ogi put both of her arms around my neck. In an instant, they were wrapped around my throat─like she was a scarf or something.

“I think you’re a little close,” I finally cautioned my underclassman, as a guy with a girlfriend.

“Excuse me. This level of distance is normal where I grew up. Just think of it as the kind of friendly physical contact that Gekizaka gave everyone,” Ogi retorted, unembarrassed.

Gekizaka was never that handsy with anyone, I’m pretty sure…

“Anyway, please continue─which one of the nineteen was the culprit?”

“Didn’t I just say it wasn’t necessarily one of them? And even if it was a student who skipped the session, he or she might not have done well on the test. You might get a bad score on purpose to avoid suspicion, in fact. So everyone’s back to being a suspect.”

“Intentionally? Who’d go that far on an all-important test?”

“You might, or you might not─I’m trying to convey that we didn’t know anything. I’m going to go ahead and spoil it here, Ogi. We failed to identify the culprit at that meeting.”

“What?”

“In that sense, there’s no neat conclusion to this story, just confusion. The class council’s investigation turned into a class-wide castigation. Things got as ugly as they could, and it seemed pointless to everyone by the end, whether you were Oikura or Shui or Tetsujo. Basically, it fell apart, and we weren’t able to learn anything at all. And then─”

“Oh, okay!”

Ogi smacked both of my shoulders, going beyond physical contact to plain assault. The longer I talked about this, the more depressed I felt─jumping to the end was my idea of cutting the whole thing short, but it had given her an idea.

“Now I know how we can escape from here. We just have to solve the unsolved case from two years ago and then we can leave.”

“What…do you mean?”

“Oikura declared that no one would be allowed out of this classroom until the culprit was revealed. Which means identifying the perpetrator of that case─is how we escape this room. Am I right?”

“…”

Was she right? Well, if the classroom was a faithful recreation of what took place that day after school in Year 1 Class 3, then…she was.

We’d learned nothing through the fierce debate (a nice way to put it, “pandemonium” would be more accurate) that lasted until it was time to leave the premises. That’s how the class council ended─yet the clock in the room was stopped right before closing time.

The windows were locked, the doors were shut tight─we couldn’t get out.

“The regret left behind in Year 1 Class 3’s hearts that day must have taken form as this structural gap,” Ogi insisted. “Call it the ghost of the class council meeting.”

“A ghost, of a meeting? Are you claiming we’ve been trapped by something that nonsensical? And why me…”

“Hard to say. Maybe because you’re the one it still bothers most─you never know, your life did change that day.”

“It changed?”

“Since that day, you’ve avoided thinking about what happened. You’ve been dodging it─you’ve never forgotten about it but never thought about it either. But it’s come at last─the day when you have to face your past. Time to unravel this mystery.”

I didn’t know how Ogi could be so sure… There could be plenty of other reasons for this aberration.

She grinned─invitingly.

“I’d be happy to help you reason through it, if I can manage to be of any use. Go down the list, and tell me what happened. Let’s start with those nineteen suspects’ profiles. At the end of the day, they’re the most suspicious, right?”

“Okay…I’ll go down the list. I’m skipping the ones I already talked about, though─”