Chapter Five: Demo Playtest, Day Two, Investigation Time ①, Scene Two

Kamo felt a deep relief and looked at Yuki with a painful smile.

“Thank God, you worried me half to death.”

“I'm really sorry. The system wouldn't let me log in... but I heard all of you through voice chat, so I'm pretty sure I know what's been going on.”

He gave a rare apologetic look and shrank into his own body. MUNAKATA folded his arms and whispered “Kurata, come out here. Why were the release times of MICHI and YUKI's ghosts different?”

A laugh echoed from somewhere.

“How lame, can our great detective not even figure that out?”

Murderous rage flashed in MUNAKATA's eyes. He inhaled, but YUKI cut him off before he could speak.

“The reason my ghost couldn't be released was because you wanted to emphasize that my room was an impossible locked room without even my own ghost left inside... right?”

“That's right. Wouldn't it be a waste of a good locked room mystery if the ghost of the victim appeared in the room before someone broke in from the outside? In the future, anyone who is killed in their own room must have a third party confirm their character's death in order to release their ghost, that is, give them permission to log back in to the VR space.”

By now, MICHI had managed to get up from the mass of puppets.

The puppets were all dressed in modern styles, mostly white collar types interspersed with a few holding fishing rods, paintbrushes, or shovels.

She kicked the axe that had fallen to the floor back into the pile of puppets and spoke as if to cover up her shame. “So that's it. I wasn't killed in my own room so you didn't have to worry about me exposing the locked room, so I was released early.”

Meanwhile, AZUMA, who was sitting on the bed, gave a wry smile and said “This room doesn't have any windows, and the door is the only way in or out. At a cursory glance, setting aside the autolock, even the thumbturn lock is locked, right?”

Hearing her, Kamo turned his head to look at the damaged door and its frame.

The door lock had been completely destroyed, and the swing bar had come loose, but judging from the exposed latch, her analysis was correct.

Kamo nodded and spoke. “Well, it's double locked. The swing bar was set. And there's no sign of tampering on the thumbturn.”

“The second lock can only be locked by turning it from the inside... I'm afraid double locking the room from the outside would be very difficult.”

FUWA waved his hands and said “Forget all that for a moment, let's hear the victim's story. Mr. Yuki, please tell us what happened last night.”The ghost of YUKI looked for a moment at his own corpse with disgust, then began to explain.

“It was about three in the morning when we received instructions to log out and back in, wasn't it? I was saving before logging off, but I was surprised to feel a sudden tightness in my throat as soon as I drank the water... immediately followed by my entire body locking up so tight I couldn't move.”

Kamo nodded.

“That was probably the VR operation suit. That thing covers up to the neck, I guess it inflated with an airbag to apply pressure to your neck, then the whole body.”

Hearing that explanation, YUKI smiled embarrassedly.

“Thinking about it calmly, you're right, of course. But at the time, I felt like I was trapped in the real world as well, and I was very alarmed.”

Nobody could remain calm in a situation like that.

As a matter of fact, Kamo had been frightened for quite a while after taking just a minor injury to his fingertips in the VR space. It was hard to understand the fear that came from getting hurt without actually experiencing it.

A cup rolled on the floor in front of the body. Needless to say, it was the cup used for saving.

...Kurata claimed the idea was to recreate classic save systems, but in the end, it was just facilitating another way of killing by forcing them to drink.

YUKI, who was also staring at the cup of water, suddenly made a strange face. He flipped his body over to check the other side, then tilted his head.

 “...It's not there.”

“What's not there?”

AZUMA asked, and YUKI replied with a frown “I always refill my glass before I drink, and I did it the same way before I was poisoned.”

“So according to you, there should still be water left in the cup, right? In that case, the poison might not have been in the pitcher, but poured directly into your cup.”

“I think that's very likely... Moreover, I only took a sip after pouring it full to the brim, so when the cup fell, the remaining water should have spilled on my clothes and the floor, but there's no water left in the cup, and my clothes and the floor are almost completely dry.”

Just as YUKI said, the water cup was empty and the floor showed almost no signs of dampness. Just to be sure, Kamo also touched the body's clothes, and found that even the area around the chest, which had been on the floor and was hard to dry, was just barely damp.

Kamo put the corpse back down and sighed “You're right.”

“I've only been dead for five hours, this dried out way too fast. Is the humidity in Puppet Hall set super low?”

KENZAN seemed uninterested in YUKI's questions as he examined the pitcher on the lower shelf. “...How did the murderer poison it?”

FUWA listened with a blank expression.

“Huh? What's strange about it? The murderer put the poison in Mr. Yuki's pitcher before the game started. Although the scene looks like a locked room murder, that's actually just because Mr. Yuki himself locked the door.”

KENZAN shook his head firmly.

“Impossible. We all drank water to save before Crime Time, right? And we should have done it a few times after that to return to the real world. Mr. Yuki wasn't poisoned at that time, so it's safe to assume that the poison was added during VR Crime Time.”

He paused, then turned to YUKI and asked him “When was the last time you saved without getting poisoned?”

“It was when I returned to the real world... about thirty minutes after midnight, I poured myself a full glass of water and took a sip, and nothing happened. So we can conclude that the poison was added sometime after 12:30 at night.”

“You didn't do anything stupid like letting another player into your room, did you?”

A normal person would be upset to be asked something like that by a high school student. But YUKI instead made a face that showed he found it amusing.

“I wasn't going to do anything like that, we'd already been told that the Murderer would be acting soon. When I returned to my room I made sure to lock the door and set the swing bar, and I even checked that pile of puppets to make sure there wasn't anything suspicious in the room. And I can also assure you that I didn't let anyone else into the room.”

Hearing that, AZUMA rested her plump cheek in her left hand and said “That said, as long as there's any way to enter the room, it's not really hard to poison the water when Mr. Yuki isn't there to see, is it?”

“It should be easy to poison me if you just look for a gap when I'm off in the real world. I left for the real world to use the bathroom at 12:30 and came straight back... The time I was out of VR space was about five minutes.”

“Five minutes is plenty of time to poison someone. In this incident, the 'how' of how they poisoned the water doesn't seem too important. But there's no way to continue the investigation without figuring out how the murderer entered the locked room.”

Listening to the two of them talking, FUWA's face darkened and he muttered “It's too hard... I thought it was just a simple poisoning incident, I didn't expect things to get so complicated.”

Meanwhile, KENZAN asked another question to YUKI.

“Was there anything unusual in your room after the start of VR Crime Time?”

“That's right, I remember I thought there was movement in the corridor around 12:50.”

“Movement?”

At that moment, MUNAKATA took over.

“I heard it too. At that time there was a knocking sound coming from the corridor that lasted for about a minute.”

YUKI nodded vigorously.

“I was writing and drawing things to help myself think, so I thought I'd just ignore it. But that sound just went on for far too long, so I stepped outside to have a look. A few moments later, Mr. Munakata came into the hallway too, so we checked around together.”

Kamo looked down at the paper on the table.

On the paper, there were drawings of puppets and the MegalodonSoft logo, as well as several marks left by broken pencil tips, showing YUKI had exerted quite a bit of force at the time.

...Looking at it, it looked like he wasn't actually thinking and was just drawing.

Kamo let out a long sigh. KENZAN stared at the map from his watch as he continued to ask questions. “Ms. MICHI's room is also in the southern section, but she's the only one who didn't come out, didn't you find that strange?”

“No. Whether you come out or not is a personal choice, I guess.”

MUNAKATA finished with a shrug, and MICHI smiled bitterly.

“Actually, I'd already been killed and logged out by then.”

KENZAN turned back to YUKI.

“You only investigated the corridor?”

“We also went into ROPPONGI's room to look around, but we didn't find anything out of the ordinary. I also checked the main hall with Mr. MUNAKATA... but someone had turned off the lights and gave us quite a scare.”

Kamo interjected immediately. “What? The lights in the hall were turned off at 12:50?”

“Yes. So we turned them back on to check, then turned them off and went back to our rooms. The time in the corridor and the hall added up to about ten minutes, I think. Of course, that was the only time I left my room.”

MUNAKATA aggressively added “For the record, I was against turning the lights back off, that was 100% Yuki's doing.”

“I thought if the lights in the main hall were turned off by the Murderer, we shouldn't have disrupted their plans... Anyway, at that time we found a black cloth on the carpet near the dollhouse, remember, Mr. Munakata? You picked it up.”

MUNAKATA pulled out a piece of black cloth from his left pants pocket.

“This is it. The system shows it with the name 'Mystery Cloth Piece'.”

Kamo looked at it and his heart skipped a beat.

After he'd been cut by the utility knife's blade, Kamo had opened the drawer underneath the dollhouse to check the items inside. At the time he was still slightly panicked... he must not have noticed that a piece of the cut Crime Glove had dropped off at that time.

...Now's when Munakata is going to reveal the truth about the trap he set on the doorknob, isn't it? 

Kamo steeled his resolve and waited for the hammer to fall, but MUNAKATA didn't say anything and just smiled. ...It looked like Kamo was going to have to suffer listening to that time bomb tick for a while longer.

FUWA folded his arms and nodded several times.

“Eventually we'll be able to find out what that piece of cloth is, but right now I'm more concerned with what the state of the round table was at the time.”

YUKI responded to that firmly. “There weren't any puppets on the round able when we checked the main hall at 12:50. Although we don't know who the Executioner is, they must have placed the puppets after that.”

AZUMA raised a question.

“When you were investigating the corridor, could someone have slipped into your room or thrown some poison in while the door was open?”

“That's not possible. After I left the room, I double checked that the autolock had locked. At that time, Ms. Michi should have already been logged out, and Mr. Munakata didn't make any suspicious moves while he was in the corridor.”

Everyone was silent for a moment.

Why were the lights in the main hall turned off? Why had the roof of the model been lowered? The number of details they couldn't make sense of kept on increasing.

...When he was coming up with his crime plan, Kamo had made a point to design ostentatious tricks that could only be performed in a virtual space. If Kurata had done the same, this could prove to be an extraordinary case.

***

“It's time to investigate the death of MICHI, that is, me, next, right?” the ghost of MICHI said cheerily.

“I was attacked in the storeroom. But save that for the main course and go somewhere else first. I don't know what happened after I died, maybe they moved my body out of the storeroom.”

Her proposal was strange, but as it happened, Kamo wanted to investigate the entire building, so he didn't object.

The group left YUKI's room and went to check ROPPONGI's room first to make sure there wasn't anything unusual in it. Then they took a cursory glance around the main hall before proceeding to the foyer.

The door that “led out” of Puppet Hall was metal and looked very heavy, more like a vault door than anything. There was a thick latch on it and the window to the right was shrouded darkness.

KENZAN stared out the window and muttered “There's really nothing out there...”

Just then, Kamo caught a glimpse of something from the corner of his eye. He looked to the left side of the door and barely stifled a scream – a black glove was on the floor of the foyer.

The glove lay on the brown floor tiles. It looked familiar. It was one of the Crime Gloves Kurata had given out.

AZUMA also spotted the glove and reached down to pick it up.

“What's this? The color and material are different from the Investigator's Gloves.”

The glove she'd picked was for a right hand. KENZAN smiled knowingly and said “Since none of us Detectives have ever seen it before, that means it was dropped by someone with a killing role, right?”

...At least it isn't mine, Kamo thought darkly, since I brought my glove back to my room. Could it have been dropped by the Executioner?

Kamo took the glove from AZUMA's hand and examined it carefully. The glove was so worn that the non-slip layer was about to peel right off. The entire glove was covered in wood shavings and tattered black fibers.

Unfortunately, the glove, like Kamo's, was a generic, universal size due to its stretchy material, so it was impossible to deduce who it belonged to by the size.

At MUNAKATA's suggestion, they compared the glove to the piece of black cloth they'd picked up in the main hall.

That piece of cloth had come from Kamo's glove, so the result was obvious... Both were made of the same material.

After some discussion, it was decided that MUNAKATA would hold on to the cloth and YUKI could keep the glove.

It was unanimously ruled that YUKI, who had been in a state of forced logout ever since he'd died in his room, was the least likely person to be the glove's owner.

YUKI put the glove in his left pants pocket and then stared at something.

“Ah, the rest of you might not be able to see it. The moment I put the glove in my pants pocket, the system showed it in my inventory as an item called 'Crime Glove (Right Hand)'.”

MUNAKATA also stared at empty space and said “The name of my piece of cloth just got updated, too, now it's called 'Fragment of Crime Glove'.”

That was all information Kamo hadn't known. However, like this, it should have been able to prove if a Detective's deductions lined up with the facts.

Next, they moved as a group to the unoccupied room in the northern section.

This was the only room in the northern section that could be called a common area. ...Naturally, MICHI's body wasn't in the unoccupied room.

The next room they checked was the laundry room, which naturally contained several washers and dryers.

There wasn't any detergent or fabric softener, though. That lack of detergent... If clothes got dirty in the course of a crime, it would be difficult to remove the stains. It seemed in the future, he would have to be careful not to shed blood while committing crimes.

Bath towels, pillowcases, sheets, and other items were piled up on shelves deeper in the room, so it seemed this place doubled as a linen room.

Finally, Kamo and the others walked towards the kitchen. Nobody had spoken in a while, and Kamo dragged his heavy body onward with reluctance.

The kitchen had a sink, stove, refrigerator, and several cabinets.

The cabinets contained several spice jars lying haphazardly around, there were a number of plates and empty bottles thrown in the sink, and neatly stacked plastic crates in one corner of the room contained bottled natural water.

Walking past the water bottles, they arrived at the door to the storeroom.

All of the building's interior doors were wooden, except for the storeroom door, which was iron and sturdy.

YUKI walked up to the door and tried to turn the round knob, but found that the small wheel underneath it was set to “closed”. The door was equipped with an integrated lock, which could be rotated to lock the door.

Generally, that kind of lock could also be used as a door handle, and was a strong yet simple design, often used on areas that required soundproofing like recording studios.

But the door in front of them was a humble storeroom, and already had an ordinary round doorknob.

YUKI turned the wheel to the “open” position then turned the knob, but only responded with a confused look.

“Huh? Even though I unlocked it, it's still catching on something and I can't open it.”

AZUMA crossed her arms and pursed her lips as she looked at the wall.

“Mr. Yuki and Ms. Michi are both ghosts, can't they just go through the walls and take a look?”

“How could we!? If there was a bug like that, the whole concept of the deduction game would break.”

“Didn't Kurata say we can only do the same things as normal characters?”

That was consistent with the information about ghosts that Kamo had been given while he was helping to prepare the game, so he should have been able to trust it regarding YUKI and MICHI as well.

KENZAN had already started checking the storeroom door.

“It opens a few millimeters if you push it hard enough, so I think something is blocking it from the inside.”

“Let me see.”

AZUMA appeared to suspect that YUKI and KENZAN were only pretending that they couldn't open the door. But... she was wrong. AZUMA pushed the door herself and found that she could only open it a crack that you could have barely fit a ruler through. She tried to look through the crack, but no luck. She had to leave the door.

FUWA saw her like that and smiled bitterly.

“Guess we'll have to break it down again.”

This time, Kamo chose not to help the group break down the door. He retreated to the back of the kitchen with KENZAN and YUKI to see how the rest of the group would open the iron door.

The trouble was... MUNAKATA didn't move at all.

He may have already recognized that Kamo was the one who “killed” MICHI. And somehow, Kamo could guess how he'd figured it out.

MUNAKATA had set a trap on the doors, which he naturally couldn't have hidden from the eyes of Kurata, who monitored the entire game. They could assume that the Executioner was warned of the trap as the Gamemaster's accomplice. That was within MUNAKATA's expectations.

...In other words, the trap was only aimed at the Murderer.

Kamo looked down at his right hand, which was still oozing blood.

Earlier, MUNAKATA had immediately gone to checks the doors to the northern and southern sections to see if the traps had been triggered, and then removed the hidden blades.

By now, MUNAKATA should have already been able to deduce that Kamo wasn't the one who'd killed YUKI.

The person who killed YUKI added the poison during VR Crime Time. And that person had also made a loud racket in the corridor to lure YUKI and the others out of their rooms. Both of those things were hard to do remotely, so the person who killed YUKI had either entered the southern section during Crime Time or been there from the beginning.

If Kamo had killed YUKI, the first thing he would have had to do was go to the southern section to commit the crime, where he would have triggered the trap on the southern door and been injured. But in reality, only the trap on the northern door had been triggered.

MUNAKATA probably combined all of those clues together and deduced that “Kamo's most likely the one who killed MICHI.”

When the group threw themselves into the door for the second time, the sound of something falling to the ground came from the other side. Kamo had been suffering from a slight ringing in his ears all morning, which combined with his extreme fatigue to make the sound unbearable.

By the time he returned to his senses, KENZAN and YUKI were gone. He smiled.

...So far, everything has gone according to plan.

KENZAN and YUKI rushed into the storeroom in unison, and in unison they tripped and fell on a huge orange object. AZUMA noticed what the object was and froze.

“A... A rubber boat?”

Behind the door they'd forced open, there was indeed an orange rubber dinghy.

The rubber dinghy was leaking air, and it released a wheezing noise as YUKI got to his feet on top of it.

KENZAN grimaced and rubbed his head as he said “I remember seeing this rubber boat yesterday during Investigation Time. I'm pretty sure it was folded up and placed on the shelf in the storeroom back then.”

Kamo had prepared the rubber dinghy that could carry two people. Despite the air it had lost, it was still the size of a single bed's blanket. As for the weight, it should have been over six kilograms.

YUKI dragged the rubber boat into the kitchen, and the walnut shelf underneath was revealed.

The shelf had fallen to the floor. It looked very old, and the surface of the wooden boards was stained slightly.

“I see, that noise just now was this shelf falling over.”

So saying, FUWA walked forward to inspect the shelf, but was startled by a scream from AZUMA.

In front of AZUMA's eyes – deep in the storeroom on the left hand side – a person lay on their back.

Needless to say, it was MICHI's corpse.

Her face had turned purple, and a rope was still wrapped around her neck, leaving clear strangulation marks. There was a streak of blood on her chest where she'd bled from her nose, and a little extra blood from both ears.

The body was so realistic it was hard to believe they were still in VR.

The ghost of MICHI immediately ran over.

“My corpse is just too bad, even my ears are bleeding.”

YUKI laughed and replied “No, my poisoned one should be even worse.”

“How could it be? Look at me, I'm...”

Seeing the two victims competing over whose corpse looked worse, Kamo couldn't help but laugh. At the same time, he felt a new surge of relief that the real people were still safe.

A water stain gradually spread out on the concrete floor, flowing from the fallen shelf.

The shelf was almost empty, except for two crates of natural water on the bottom shelf. Naturally, that was something Kamo had set up. The glass bottles had broken when the shelf fell to the ground, and the water flowed out from there.

“...Anyway, let me start with what happened when I was killed.”

MICHI took the initiative and began airily.

“There was a card in my room that said 'Go to the storeroom at 10:15 P.M.'. I knew it was an instruction from one of the killing roles, but I went anyway.”

“Why didn't you ignore it? You might have prevented the crime.” MUNAKATA asked pointedly.

MICHI looked shocked that he'd asked.

“How... How could you even ask something like that?”

MUNAKATA tried to reply, but MICHI cut him off before he'd even opened his mouth.

“The one who left me that card was probably the Murderer. If my character dies, that doesn't mean anything, but if the Murderer fails to carry out their role they'll be killed for real.”

“Be reasonable. Which is better, sacrificing the Murderer or the whole lot of us dying in here?”

“...You aren't human.”

“I don't want to hear that from an actual criminal.”

MICHI shrugged and said to the group “I carefully made my way to the storeroom, and after I investigated in there for a while, my whole body suddenly went cold, and then I suddenly became extremely heavy, as though my entire body were being smothered... Before I even realized it, I couldn't control my character anymore.”

Almost everyone looked intensely at MICHI, with the exception of MUNAKATA. His eyes never once left Kamo.

Kamo prayed he wouldn't see his inner turmoil and lifted his watch, pretending to check the map. It was now after 9:00 A.M.

AZUMA, who had been holding her face in deep thought, spoke up. “You couldn't move your body... Were you also poisoned?”

“Maybe. I wiped my mouth and nearly died of shock when my hand came back covered in blood. I don't know if it was from me vomiting blood or my nosebleed... but I have a feeling it would have been a nosebleed.”

“Then your character died and your were forced to log off.”

AZUMA tried to summarize, but MICHI shook her dead, denying her.

“No, my character didn't die right away. That state of me being unable to move lasted a while while I was still logged on. I'd say it was about three minutes. Then I felt my neck tighten again, and it wasn't long after that I was forced to log off. I didn't see the murderer the whole time.”

AZUMA looked at the rope around the body's neck and grimly said “So you were strangled from behind.”

“It's hard to say... It could also be that the poison was just slow to act and took a while to kill me. All I know is that after I died, my body was moved.”

Saying that, MICHI pointed to the bloodstains on the concrete floor. There were traces in them of the body being dragged.

“The place where I originally collapsed was at the far end of the room, directly across from the door. As you can see, the trail of my nose blood extends from there to where I am now, so the culprit should have moved me to the east side of the storeroom.”

FUWA examined the rubber boat on the floor and asked “Was the body moved so the shelf wouldn't hit it when it fell?”

MICHI grinned at FUWA.

“Whatever the reason, the key to this case seems to lie in how the locked room was created.”

“I feel the same way. But when you were called to the storeroom, this shelf wasn't placed in such an usual place, right?”

“Yeah, it wasn't here.”

MICHI started walking around the storeroom. The shelves against the walls were covered in a thin layer of dust. Because the shelves themselves were brown with a blackish-purple tinge, the dust was easy to see.

Most of the shelves were empty, with only the occasional rusty tool or broken kitchen utensil. The most eye-catching thing about the storeroom wasn't the shelves, but the puppets on top of them.

The puppets in the storeroom were mostly non-human creatures, including vampires, werewolves, bloody nurses, and so on... Hundreds of the small dolls were amassed into a creepy display. The inhuman beings posed in a variety of ways looked down on the group.

Kamo couldn't suppress a shudder.

Those puppets hadn't been there when he was rehearsing, they must have been another of Kurata's cruel additions.

A few moments later, MICHI stopped at the right hand wall (relative to someone standing in the doorway facing in).

There were no puppets on the shelves along the northern wall, and one of the shelves near the door was missing.

“I remember when I entered the storeroom last night, the shelves on this wall were covered with puppets... The shelf on the floor should have been here originally. Someone used this shelf and a rubber dinghy to block the door.”

KENZAN frowned and muttered “But why?”

MICHI have him a surprised look.

“Huh? To make the crime scene into a locked room, of course.”

KENZAN poked his temples with his index finger and continued. “Sorry, I'm better at solving the sorts of minor mysteries that come up in everyday life, I'm not very good at these sorts of meticulously planned crimes... But if someone creates a locked room, the reason is either to 'fake a suicide' or 'frame someone else for the crime', right? Otherwise there's no point.”

MICHI pondered that for a moment.

“Makes sense. But looking at the situation, this is obviously a murder. And I don't see anything that would result in someone being framed.”

“That's right, at first glance, this locked room is quite elaborate... But it's a bit strange. Because it isn't obvious why the room was locked at all.”

YUKI suddenly giggled. KENZAN glared at him.

“What are you laughing at?”

“If this were an ordinary case, then Kenzan would be absolutely right. But right now, shouldn't we be considering the specific situation we're in?”

“Situation?”

“Within this space, everything is controlled by the rules of the game 'Delicious Death for Detectives' created by Kurata. If you want to carry out good reasoning, you have to abandon your common sense and limit your thoughts to the game.”

An attitude was implied in those words – “You should, because I don't plan on reasoning at all”... Yuki continued, “In the game, the Murderer and Executioner's main goal is to 'avoid being caught by the Detectives before the time limit runs out'. Since they only need to survive for a day or so, wouldn't it be better for them to exaggerate the impact of the scene with an impossible crime? As long as we can't solve the trick they used, we can't make a move against either of them.”

Hearing YUKI's words, MICHI's face looked doubtful.

“You mean that... the Murderer and the Executioner will both use various tricks to create extraordinary crimes?”

“Yes, so I think it's important to mentally prepare for that.”

Kamo looked at YUKI with a complicated feeling.

Yuki had experience solving an incident with its own unique rules. Even Kamo had been stunned when he'd heard the younger man's account of what had happened.

Yuki was the type who could accept the abnormal and incorporate it into his reasoning without any effort. Looking at him, Kamo thought Yuki was someone who could demonstrate more impressive abilities the more unusual the situation he was thrown into.

Kamo thought to himself, Whether he realizes it himself or not... in this game where common sense is of no help, Yuki might be the most comfortable person here.

However, Yuki giving up on trying to solve things was undoubtedly a stroke of luck for Kamo, who had been cast in the role of Murderer... yet at he same time, it was also deeply unfortunate.

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