“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.