"What were we talking about again?"
"The power of preservatives in cup noodles," Kaede answered wearily, settling herself to sit down on the cold floor. She wasn't used to standing this long, and her tendons were killing her. Pianists weren't exactly made for physical exertion anywhere other than their fingertips. "What was that huge crashing sound?"
"I just bumped into something."
"So, what are we supposed to do down here? Just hold hands and sing kumbaya not having a single clue what's going on in the surface? We have friends up there! Kirumi, Kiyo, Tenko, Angie, and Kiibo!"
"Are you counting the killers?" Kokichi asked her via paper.
"Yes..."
"And the new mastermind?"
"I thought Monomugi said it was this big powerful lady controlling the killing game! None of them is the mastermind!"
"I dare disagree." Monomugi's voice morphed into a more sinister tone. "The cruel woman in charge right now has not one, but <em>two</em> agents working. Actually, I guess there are 3, if you count Kiibo."
"The robot?" Kokichi feigned shock. "No way! He was my best mate in hard and horrible times! He was my only confidant! He was the only person I ever opened up to! I considered him my second in D.I.C.E!" He wrote a weird symbol next to the word D.I.C.E, a logo featuring two interlocked squares.
"You need to calm down. I don't think he's doing it of his own will. I said the other side was incredibly powerful, did I not? They have ways of manipulating him on the inside. I don't think he's even aware of what he's doing, just following orders from his 'inner voice'. It was Kiibo who knocked Kaede out and deposited her into the boiler room to die."
Kaede blinked. She had been vaguely wondering about how she had descended into this hell, just hadn't given it her full attention---so much had been going on that she barely had the brainpower to spare.
"I remember him being the last person I talked to in the Ultimate Academy..." Kaede trailed off, closing her eyes and trying to replay the scene in her mind. "We were together in my room. I had passed out and he had saved me, I think."
<em>"I think that's a very Kaede-like sentiment." Kiibo's face appeared directly on top of Kaede, his face showing a grim, almost sad smile. "I'm also really sorry about this."</em>
It made her insides hurt, so she pushed it out of her brain.
"Do we have any allies then? How is your stepbrother faring-Kokichi? What are you doing?"
The Ultimate Supreme Leader stood on his tiptoes and covered Kaede's mouth with his small, bony hand. He shook his head and took his pen out once more.
"Let me handle this. So, how is the outside world, Kiyo?"
<hr>
Angie.
Kiibo.
Korekiyo.
Kirumi.
Kaede.
Tenko, the victim.
This was what everyone else probably believed, Tsumugi grinned smugly. Thank goodness it was dark. Thank goodness no one was paying much attention to who they thought was Kirumi. Thank goodness everything was so overly complicated.
Tsumugi Shirogane hadn't wasted her stint of exile in the hangar. She had been planning, thinking, and analyzing Her movements. She knew that she didn't have much of a chance of undermining the Ultimate Analyst whom she had respected and worshipped for almost every nanosecond of her life, but she could at least try to go down fighting. Her plan was already in action, and she couldn't exactly stop it right now and beg for her life in front of the mighty Junko Enoshima. She had already done the integral first step. There was no going back.
Her extensive research proved that none of them had actually swapped bodies, they just <em>thought</em> that they did. Kirumi was still Kirumi, just talking and thinking like Korekiyo. With the added bonus of Sister. Korekiyo was still Korekiyo, just talking and thinking like Kirumi. All she had to do was shock him enough to remember his own soul and then swap with Tsumugi in the hangar. Tsumugi cosplayed as Kiyo, and used the extensive files to act completely like Kirumi was supposed to. That wasn't the hard part. The hard part was the cospox. Korekiyo Shinguji was a real Ultimate, after all. The ungainly red rash that did nothing but make her look really ugly. It didn't even hurt or anything. It was just--<em>bleurgh</em>.
She took to pulling the cap a lot and covering her eyes with cool hand poses that didn't look out of place at all, since it was Kiyo. Thankfully, no one seemed to notice. Their eyes were mostly fixated on the puddle of blood on the floor.
"I'll go get Monokuma," she insisted. "This is all wrong. We need an explanation. Besides, there is no physical body, only blood. Someone might have just made all this out of tomato juice and put some of Kaede's spare clothes into the pile to make it <em>look</em> like she was dead. If that is the case, our first priority is to rescue her. We need Monokuma's help for that, whether we like it or not."
"But-" Angie tried to interject.
"Do we even know where Monokuma <em>is</em>?" Kiibo waved her hands around in confusion.
Whoever was in Kirumi's body nodded in agreement. "He just seems eerily omniprecsent in times of trouble and whenever we approach a topic that he insists on censoring. This is such an exception."
This was it. This was the opening for her to strike. Thanks, fake Korekiyo.
"I came across a sort of storeroom with the sofa that the Monokubs sat on making announcements during cleaning. The room itself was locked, but if I pound on the window, I might be able to catch their attention. I'll go alone."
Tenko Chabashira, the mastermind of the Killing Games, gave her a dark sneer. It was time for open warfare, and she knew it.
Not giving anyone time to interject, Tsumugi turned on her heel as quickly as these enamel boots would allow and stalked off towards the main school grounds.
