Danganronpa Kirigiri

Chapter 1: Murder at the Sirius Observatory, Part 2

  For the time being, I left her behind, and moved across the hall. I went for the closest guest room. The door was slightly open. I slowly opened it further.

The lights were on in the room. The curtains were drawn, so I still couldn't see what was going on outside. There was a person-shaped lump in the blankets on the bed. Someone's sleeping. Probably one of the other detectives. From what I could see from the doorway, it looked like they were sleeping very peacefully.

—Without taking a single breath.

I hesitantly walked closer to the bed and peered over it. There was a man there, looking up at the ceiling with his mouth slightly agape. I was pretty sure he had said his name was Eigo Amino. He was a practicing detective in his mid-thirties. He showed no signs of noticing me, eyes cracked open and deeply asleep.

"Um... Sorry for bothering you while you're trying to sleep," I tried calling out to him. There was no response. I could tell that it wouldn't do any good no matter how many times I tried calling out to him. Somehow, even back when I had just entered the room, the scent of despair had already wafted my way.

He was unmoving, eyes open.

I frantically suppressed the desire to scream, slowly extending my hand to grab the blanket and carefully pull it off...

That's when his head turned towards me.

My hair stood on end, and I jumped away. His head rolled towards the side of the bed, stopping when the tip of his nose pressed into the mattress. Generally you wouldn't be able to turn your neck that far without changing the rest of your posture, but there was no sign of anything moving below the neck. Instead, it was just his head in a blatantly strange position. Once I removed the blanket, the reason was abundantly clear.

His neck had been severed from his body, decapitating him.

Underneath the blanket, there was blood all over, practically searing my retinas with the bright red color. I averted my eyes as if trying to let the color drain from my vision, backing away immediately.

My body started shaking of its own will. I felt suddenly cold. Was there a drop in the temperature? Or was it because I'd laid eyes upon a repulsive corpse? It was so cold, and yet I became covered head to toe in an unpleasant sweat.

I staggered towards the next guest room. Just like the last room, the door was slightly open. I could see inside the room a little through the crack. It seemed like, again, another detective was on the bed, under the blanket.

I didn't want to look. I didn't want to know anything. But I had to look, and I had to know. If I was going to call myself a detective, even for just a moment, I had to face reality. No matter what kind of tragedy or despair was awaiting me—

I entered the room and went up to the bed. It didn't look like there was any evidence of the room having been broken into. On the contrary, you could even say that the man's sleeping form seemed perfectly undisturbed, and classically beautiful.

He was wearing light grey sunglasses, but they weren't trying to conceal the shadow of death upon his face. Shiita Enbi. He's a detective in his prime. No—he WAS a detective.

When I tried removing the blanket, I saw that his neck was also cut through. But that wasn't all. I noticed something else strange. The head that was lying face-up on the pillow definitely belonged to the man called Enbi, but below the neck, the body looked like it belonged to someone else. I was pretty sure that Enbi had had a strong, muscular build. But the body lying underneath the blanket belonged to a stout, heavy-set middle-aged man.

I remembered that build. It belonged to another one of the detectives who had accompanied us: a man called Kou Inuzuka.

Wh-What does this mean?

This was just strange from start to finish. I had more information than I'd ever asked for swirling around in my tiny head.

I leapt out of the room, moving towards the next guest room. I had a feeling I knew what would be in there. And, as expected, Kou Inuzuka's corpse was on the bed.

But the question was whether it could really be called Inuzuka's corpse. Since, also as expected, it seemed like the body belonged to someone else. It didn't seem like Enbi's, either. So does that mean that it belongs to Amino, the first one I found...?

I see, so either the heads or the bodies were swapped around in a circle.

I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to warm up my freezing body, and went back out into the hall, dejected.

Everything was all messed up. Why was something like this happening? At some point, of the five of us who had visited the Sirius Observatory, three had died. Not only that, but their heads had been severed, and then for some reason the bodies had been switched around from the heads and left that way.

There wasn't anyone else other than us at Sirius Observatory. On top of that, we'd been visited by snowstorms both before and after we'd arrived, so the building was currently isolated by the snow. It was safe to assume that this wasn't the intervention of an outsider.

Eigo Amino. Shiita Enbi. Kou Inuzuka. Yui Samidare. Kyouko Kirigiri.

Of these five, three had been killed, and two were still alive.

Naturally, I could safely assert that I hadn't killed them. There were parts of my memory that were still fuzzy, but frankly, it was ludicrous to think that I could kill three people and yet have no sense of it at all afterwards. And why would I handcuff myself in the first place? There was no doubt that someone else had been the one to restrain me. It's possible that whoever did that was planning on killing me next.

So who was that person?

Going by process of elimination, I could only think of the culprit as the other survivor.

She couldn't have—