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“Ichinose-san identified Chiba-kun as a position holder, so Horikita-san loses one Life Point.”
Horikita had no idea how Ichinose could have arrived at that answer, but Ichinose had succeeded in making a quick nomination.
“Yeah, okay. I thought it was Chiba-kun,” Ichinose mused.
She said as much without faltering. She didn’t stammer at all. Ichinose said that student’s name as though the findings were a matter of course. Horikita had faced Hamaguchi and Kanzaki thus far, but neither of them made a nomination in the first round. Everyone, Horikita included, had chosen to pass. Though Horikita didn’t have a grasp on the exact details, she figured that Hirata, who had gone first for her class, wouldn’t have been an exception to that either. Perhaps it was because an announcement had been made in the room urging Chiba of Class D to leave the room, but Horikita could tell the students on the other side of the monitor were a little bit flustered, even though the representatives couldn’t hear any sound. That was because they didn’t know on what basis he was nominated.
“You did a good job in figuring that out,” Horikita muttered reflexively, unable to help being impressed.
“It’s just because I’ve been seeing these people from up close, more closely than others, I think. Even if I didn’t hear anything directly from Chiba-kun, there are moments when I can tell whether he’s lying or telling the truth by watching his gestures,” said Ichinose.
Ichinose seemed to be saying, “I know everything there is to know about my best friend.”
“You were especially close to him, then,” said Horikita.
“Especially? No, I wouldn’t say especially. I feel like I can probably tell as much about others as I can about Chiba-kun. I think I saw a little bit of who else had been appointed to roles in the discussion too, but I wasn’t sure about the other one yet, so I thought I’d wait and see,” said Ichinose.
Horikita felt a shiver run up her spine over how casually Ichinose made that statement. She just said that she had discerned the positions of multiple students simply from watching a single discussion. If Horikita had been up against someone like Sakayanagi or Ryuuen, she would have strongly suspected that would be a bluff. But since this was coming from none other than Ichinose, Horikita couldn’t help but be tempted to think it was really true.
“I see. If that’s the case, then I’m going to be put in a corner before long. If it’s true, that is,” snapped Horikita.
Horikita, hating the fact that the situation had instantly turned stifling, straightened her posture and fired back with snark. Ichinose was a student who didn’t easily tell lies. That was precisely why bluffing in this situation would be extremely effective. If Horikita assumed that Ichinose’s statement was true, then it would make her hurry to make a nomination, but if it was a lie, then there wouldn’t be anything more foolish than running ahead recklessly.
In reality, the fact that Ichinose was able to spot a position holder was brilliant, but Horikita still had doubts as to how much of that was due to her keen observation skills. Unlike the model students, the odds of getting it correct by nominating someone as position holder weren’t that bad, considering there were four possible students you could name out of the fourteen participants. It was quite possible that it was coincidence, or that Ichinose simply went out on a limb and succeeded.
Since panicking wasn’t going to change her chances of success in the current situation, Horikita recited to herself various scenarios and tried to exercise self-control. It was still a little too risky to make a play when the probability was low. Instead of letting herself get carried away by the situation, Horikita tried to think about how she could handle herself, to directly carry herself to victory.
She had lost one Life Point. It wasn’t a serious degree of damage—that was a significant detail. Horikita settled down and tried to concentrate.
The second round began. Horikita wanted to find clues to help her discern what the roles were from how participants acted first, before Ichinose did. That’s what she had wished, but the five minutes of discussion offered few clues, and it passed by in the blink of an eye.
The time for nomination was coming, and Horikita did not get enough information to do anything decisive. However, even if she was fine with choosing the option of passing again, she needed to stop each time and think. Horikita wondered if there was anything in the discussion that just happened that would be enough for Ichinose to make another nomination. She wondered if what Ichinose said at the end of the first round was true. Horikita had not yet found any information or pretext to be able to launch an offensive, but…
Two people had already been removed from the room because of Ichinose’s nomination and the nomination from the model student. Horikita decided to go on the offensive, going after someone she suspected could have been a position holder, so that she could get a feel for things.
“Announcing the results. Ichinose-san identified Minamikata-san as a position holder, so Horikita-san loses one Life Point. Also, because Horikita-san has nominated erroneously, she will lose one Life Point.”
Horikita had decided to go with her determination and make a nomination, but the situation worsened. Not only did she get it wrong, but Ichinose had once again made a successful nomination. The only silver lining for Horikita here was that she had nominated an average student, so the wounds she suffered were shallow.
“Did you really know? That Minamikata-san was a position holder?” asked Horikita.
“Yep,” Ichinose replied. “She was one of the people who I was wondering about in the first round.”
Ichinose had correctly guessed one of the position holders, without hesitation, out of the twelve participants remaining. On top of that, from the way she spoke, there were other candidates that caught her attention as well. Horikita, having a hunch that Ichinose was telling the truth, started to feel slightly dizzy.
“In that case, are you saying that the number of people you can nominate has grown after these two rounds?” asked Horikita.
“Yeah. I still can’t distinguish them from the model students yet, but there are three other people I have my eye on,” said Ichinose.
As she said that, Ichinose turned to Horikita and looked her straight into her eyes. It wasn’t a lie. Without a doubt, Ichinose was going to continue making nominations from this point onward, in a calm and collected manner. If Horikita wasn’t careful, she could even discover a model student next time. If that happened, Horikita might only have one more round left, in the shortest possible scenario.
It was impossible for Horikita not to feel dizzy by this turn of events. Horikita wondered if, no matter what kind of person she was sitting in her seat right now, this was an opponent against whom she couldn’t win. Horikita couldn’t help but feel terrified of Ichinose’s astonishing powers of perception. There was a total of ten minutes of discussion that Horikita had thought to have yielded no promising clues whatsoever. She wondered if perhaps she had overlooked something, but thinking back on it, Horikita couldn’t find anything that stuck out in her mind, even when she focused only on the two students that Ichinose had identified correctly.
“I was lucky. The two people I picked out were friends from my class,” said Ichinose.
With those words, Horikita had regained some of her composure. The only difference, if there was one, was that. Even if you were being charitable, you couldn’t say that Horikita knew the students in Ichinose’s class very well. On the other hand, Ichinose understood her classmates better than anyone else.
In any case, Horikita didn’t have much of a buffer remaining. That was why Horikita had decided to start attacking aggressively from this point on, because even if she tried fighting this fight simply with a head-on approach, her opponent would continue to dominate the field. If Horikita was inferior in terms of friendships and the observations that came with those relationships, then she had no other choice but to try to rattle, fluster, and deceive Ichinose.
“You certainly have pulled one over on me. And splendidly so. But I have a feeling about this special exam, since I’ve been fighting for a while now already. My interpretation is that the exam is designed in such a way that the position holders are distributed between the two classes almost equally, in the interest of fairness. If that’s true, then it’s highly likely that the remaining position holders are among my classmates. It may be difficult even for someone like you to correctly identify the remaining position holders, then,” said Horikita.