Chapter 27: Kagehara Munemasa

“If I cannot solve it now, then I will set it aside.”

Resting her chin in her palm, Yomikawa forced her mind away from the maddening, unsolvable paradox of the open door. There were other, more tangible, avenues of inquiry to pursue. How, for instance, had the intruder—let’s assume, for the sake of argument, it was Senpai—managed to bypass the villa’s physical security in the first place?

“First, a baseline certainty. The intruder did not arrive on the night of June 11th. They were already here, secreted away, long before then. This holds true regardless of the culprit’s identity.”

On June 10th, her first day in this strange new life, she had discovered Ōshima Masaki’s severed head. Her immediate thought had been that Senpai might still be concealed somewhere on the premises. But a meticulous, room-by-room search had yielded nothing. And on that day, there had been no convenient power outage. In the bright, unforgiving glare of the villa’s electric lights, missing a living, breathing human being would have been an impossibility.

“This, then, establishes a clear timeframe for the initial intrusion. It must have occurred sometime after I had the locks changed on the morning of June 10th, and before I returned from school on the afternoon of June 11th.”

“Could she have entered through the front door? Highly improbable. The lock was new, and I possessed the only key. And since our voices and physical appearances had already been… reallocated… she would have had no means of obtaining a new key through conventional channels. In this, Senpai’s situation is fundamentally different from that of the locksmith. Therefore, entry via the main door can be logically dismissed.”

“Which leaves other potential points of entry. A ground-floor window, perhaps, left inadvertently unsecured? Or, more insidiously, a window that Senpai herself had previously tampered with – one that appeared to be securely latched, but could, in fact, be opened through some secret, specialized method?”

The thought propelled Yomikawa to her feet. A flashlight. She needed to conduct another, even more thorough, sweep of the villa’s perimeter. Perhaps, in her previous search, she had missed something. Some small, crucial detail.

But as she rose, the oppressive, absolute darkness of the room seemed to rush in on her, a physical presence. The familiar shapes of the living room furniture, which in the daylight were merely objects, now seemed to twist and blur, their outlines becoming strange and monstrous, like alien creatures lurking in the deep shadows. A cold, primal dread, sharp and unwelcome, prickled at her skin.

“Damn it!” she snarled internally, a wave of self-loathing washing over her. “There’s nothing here! What precisely is there to be afraid of? To be frightened by a simple power outage… that is the reaction of a small, helpless child!”

The more the fear clawed at her, the more a stubborn, almost suicidal, defiance rose to meet it. She had to prove it to herself. She had to conquer this pathetic, irrational emotion. She had to prove that she was not afraid of something as trivial as the dark.

“I am not weak. A simple search of the villa in the dark? What of it? A trivial task, easily accomplished. I will master this useless, contaminating emotion!”

Gritting her teeth, Yomikawa steeled herself and forced her trembling legs to carry her down the stairs, towards the cloying, pitch-black void of the storage room. She paused at the doorway, her heart hammering against her ribs as she stared into the inky blackness beyond. Then, with a soft, contemptuous snort directed at her own weakness, she plunged inside.

Her hand fumbled in the dark, her fingers tracing the cold surface of the wooden table. They brushed against something cold, metallic, sending it skittering off the edge. A sharp “CLANG” exploded in the silence as the object hit the concrete floor. She flinched violently, a jolt of pure adrenaline shooting through her. A tense moment passed. Nothing happened. A hot wave of shame washed over her at her own pathetic, knee-jerk reaction.

She crouched, her hands sweeping the floor. It was just a pair of scissors. She picked them up, her fingers wrapping tightly around the cold steel, a makeshift weapon. Her search resumed, and she finally located a large, heavy-duty flashlight. She thumbed the switch.

For a blinding instant, a brilliant white beam seared the darkness, illuminating the dusty, cluttered storage room in stark, unforgiving relief.

It works. And the batteries are full.

The thought was accompanied by a feeling of… relief. And the recognition of that relief brought a fresh wave of self-disgust. Damn it! Get out of my head!

With another frustrated huff, she clicked the flashlight off again, plunging herself back into darkness. Relying on light… it is merely a crutch, a compensation for the physiological inability of the human eye to see in its absence. It is not a psychological fear of the darkness itself. To prove this point, to reassert her dominance over this weak, fleshy vessel, she made a decision. She would complete her search of the house in the dark. She would only use the flashlight when she needed to examine a specific area in minute detail.

And so, clutching the hard-won but now-extinguished flashlight, Yomikawa began to feel her way out of the storage room. As she started up the stairs, however, her foot caught on the edge of a step. She stumbled, her ankle twisting painfully as it slammed against the hard wood.

A moment of pure, unadulterated, silent fury.

“Am I,” she thought, her voice a dead, flat whisper in her own mind, “an absolute and complete idiot?”

“I go to all the trouble of locating a tool designed to solve a specific problem, and then I refuse to use it out of some childish, misplaced sense of pride.”

She stood there, frozen on the darkened staircase, lost in a moment of profound, almost comical self-reflection.

Click.

After a long, silent moment, she switched the flashlight on, its powerful beam cutting a clean, reassuring swath through the oppressive darkness. I cannot afford to waste any more time or energy on these pointless, exhausting emotional fluctuations, she told herself, her voice now cold and resolute. Forget about it. Just… execute the mission.

It had been less than a full day since this… change… had occurred, but she was already beginning to grasp a crucial, fundamental principle. The more she dwelled on the emotional turmoil, the more she analyzed it, the deeper she sank into its chaotic, unpredictable grip. Conversely, if she simply… ignored it, if she forced herself to focus on the task at hand, to move forward with purpose… many of these strange, intrusive emotions were just that. Fleeting moments. Passing storms, of no real consequence.

She spent the next half-hour conducting another meticulous, and this time, well-lit, inspection of every window and door in the villa. The result, as she had suspected, was a resounding null. No hidden mechanisms. No signs of tampering. Nothing.

“Senpai could not have entered through a window. And she could not have entered through the front door.”

“Therefore, based on the available physical evidence and the established logical parameters of entry, Senpai must be eliminated as a suspect. But… can that truly be the correct answer?”

For some reason, in that moment, she felt a strange, unwelcome flicker of empathy for Ōgami Yōsuke and Kishida Masayoshi. The feeling of being confronted with a situation where all the available evidence, all the logical deductions, pointed in one direction, while your gut, your intuition, your very soul, screamed that you were missing something, that the truth lay elsewhere, just beyond your grasp.

After a long while, a heavy sigh escaped her lips.

Outside, the storm was finally losing its fury, the wind and rain subsiding into a low, mournful whisper. But the deep, pervasive chill in the air, and in her own heart, remained. Yomikawa had no desire to return to the cold, empty bedroom. Instead, she found herself back in the first-floor living room. She kicked off her slippers, then lay down on the sofa, draping an arm over her forehead, her gaze unfocused, staring up at the dark, invisible ceiling.

“Perhaps… perhaps the culprit really isn’t Senpai, after all. Perhaps I should… investigate that locksmith technician. When time permits.”

Perhaps it was the intense mental exertion of the past hour, but her mind felt chaotic, overstimulated, a buzzing hive of conflicting thoughts. Lying on the sofa, a profound inertia, a bone-deep weariness, settled over her. She couldn’t be bothered to move, to think, to even exist. Her eyelids grew heavy. She reached out blindly, her hand finding a soft, decorative pillow. She pulled it to her chest, hugging it tightly, and then, with a final, shuddering sigh, she let herself drift away.

And Yomikawa dreamed.

It was a dream of impossible, almost hyper-realistic, clarity.

In the dream, she was a child again. In her old body. The body of Kagehara Tetsuya. Elementary school, perhaps, or maybe just on the cusp of junior high; the precise age was… fuzzy.

But the place… the place was unmistakable. She was there, in that other house, the Kagehara residence. And she saw him. Kagehara Kenta. Her father.

The time of day was impossible to determine. The world beyond the living room windows was a featureless, void-like, absolute blackness. She stood at the threshold of her own first-floor bedroom, her small form concealed in the shadows, peeking through the narrow crack in the door, watching him. Kagehara Kenta, her father, was slumped on the living room sofa, unshaven, disheveled, a bottle of cheap whiskey clutched in his hand, drinking with a desperate, self-destructive thirst.

The faint, sour reek of alcohol wafted towards her. She wrinkled her nose, covering it with a small hand. She was old enough to understand, perhaps. Or maybe it was just an innate, precocious, and deeply unsettling ability to read the hidden currents of the human heart. In any case, she knew, with a certainty that went far beyond words, that Kagehara Kenta was profoundly, shatteringly unhappy. He was using the alcohol to numb himself. Or perhaps… to punish himself.

“It was someone else who committed the transgression,” the thought, cold and analytical, formed in her young mind. “So why is Kagehara Kenta inflicting the punishment upon himself? If that other person caused him such unhappiness, then the logical response would be to seek retribution, would it not?”

The thought had barely coalesced in her mind when her own mouth began to move, seemingly of its own volition, the childish voice translating the cold, logical thought into spoken words.

“Hehe. That’s because Kenta is not like us!”

A hoarse, ancient, and terrifyingly familiar voice rasped from directly behind her. She whipped around, her heart leaping into her throat. And she saw him. An old man, standing there, so close, so unnervingly silent, she hadn’t even heard him approach.

His face was a withered, grotesque mask, his features crowded together as if they were attempting to flee from one another in disgust. His body was slightly stooped, so thin and desiccated it seemed to be nothing more than yellowed skin stretched taut over a brittle frame of dry, sharp bones. He looked like a walking, breathing corpse, and a faint, sweetish, cloying smell of decay, of the grave, seemed to emanate from him, a foul, invisible aura.

Kagehara Munemasa. Her grandfather. A man who had profoundly, and irrevocably, shaped the person known as Kagehara Tetsuya.