Chapter 7: Perpetrator A is Laughing – Part 1

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Translator: Soafp

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He had practiced the angle at which he raised the corners of his mouth in front of a mirror.

When talking about his failures, he lowered his eyes slightly. When talking about how he had rebuilt his life, he looked the other person straight in the eye. Even the way he switched between an expression of regret for the past and one full of hope for the future had come naturally after giving so many lectures.

“Even if you can't change the past, people can change.”

As he read the script in the back seat, the manager in the passenger seat nodded with satisfaction.

“That line really hits because it's coming from you, Renji.”

“Thank you.”

“The students at this school are all close to your age. I think they'll react even more than usual.”

“Even someone like me, who once went down the wrong path, can start over. If even one student understands that, I'll be happy.”

“You've really become someone impressive.”

Renji smiled shyly.

To the public, Renji Kuze was a composed young man who seemed older than eighteen, didn't run from his past, and spoke about his delinquency in his own words.

He didn't hide that, during middle school, he had repeatedly committed extortion and assault and had been sent to a juvenile detention center.

If anything, that past had increased his market value.

His autobiography, The Courage to Start Over, had gone through multiple printings, and his channel had more than 300,000 subscribers. He had been hired for corporate youth-development programs and was planning to enroll in a correspondence university next spring.

“When we arrive, let's greet the principal first. After the lecture, there's a photo session with the student council, then an interview with the local paper.”

“Understood.”

The car stopped at a convenience store along the way, and the manager got out to buy drinks.

The moment the door closed, Renji's smile vanished.

Inside his jacket, his phone was vibrating.

The screen showed a message from Hayato Kirita, who had attended the same middle school until three years earlier.

Inside his jacket, his phone was vibrating.

The screen showed a message from Hayato Kirita, who had attended the same middle school until three years earlier.

“I'm not paying you any more.”

“I watched Reo Sagisawa's stream.”

“One day, El will find us too.”

“You should tell the police everything.”

Renji snorted.

“Do whatever you want.”

“But you were the one filming Mizuki when she fell.”

“If that video gets to the police, it's over for you too—not just me.”

Above the message box, the three dots appeared, showing that Hayato was typing. But no reply came.

Renji hid his conversation with Kirita and put his phone back in his pocket.

The manager returned to the car with two drinks.

“Sorry to keep you waiting. Nervous?”

“A little. But I'm looking forward to meeting the students.”

Renji put on his practiced smile again.

At Inori's high school, preparations for the gymnasium had been underway since morning.

A large screen had been set up on the stage, with banners on either side reading “Youth Rehabilitation Lecture.” The display board introducing the speaker showed a photo of Renji Kuze smiling while holding his autobiography.

“It's kind of like an idol event.”

“Renji's actually pretty handsome.”

“He looks more mature in person than in his videos.”

As the students made their way to the gymnasium, they talked more about Renji himself than about the lecture.

But when Inori passed through the hallway, the girls' eyes all shifted to him.

The girl who had been talking while looking at Renji's photo went silent the moment she passed Inori, as if she'd forgotten how to speak.

Inori paid no attention to their reactions. Carrying paper bags in both arms, he headed for the gymnasium.

Inside were sandwiches and sweet bread Nao had prepared, nutritional supplements, chocolate, and thick corn soup in a thermos.

“Amou. Are you planning to eat all of that in the gymnasium?”

His homeroom teacher asked, exasperated.

“If my stomach growls halfway through, it would be rude to the speaker.”

“No, no. Don't you think eating during the lecture would be even ruder?”

“But it interferes less than starving to death during the lecture.”

“People don't starve to death in two hours.”

“There are individual differences.”

The teacher pressed a hand to his brow as if fighting a headache, but eventually allowed it on the condition that Inori eat quietly in the back row.

Nao had explained Inori's unusual appetite to the school as “a change in his constitution after medical treatment.” There was no doctor's note, but the school was afraid of being criticized for expelling a student who had been missing for more than half a year all over again, so it couldn't press him too hard.

As the entire student body began gathering in the gymnasium, a small commotion broke out at the school gate.

“Please. At least let me ask him a question.”

“We cannot allow unauthorized visitors onto school grounds!”

“I only want to ask one thing about my daughter. I have no intention of disrupting the lecture.”

“Please leave. If you don't comply, we'll call the police.”

Takanori Shiraishi was being blocked by two security guards.

He was a man in his fifties whose hair had grayed considerably over the past three years. In his hand he held a photograph of a middle-school girl and a sign reading: I demand that Renji Kuze explain my daughter's death.

Himura and the young detective were watching from a car parked a short distance from the gate.

“Something happens every time we come to a school.”

The young detective in the passenger seat—Kyoko Morikawa—grumbled.

“Apparently, school gates aren't fences designed to stop human problems.”

Himura got out of the car and approached Takanori.

“I'm Himura from the prefectural police. May I ask you a few questions?”

When Himura showed his police ID, wariness and hope appeared on Takanori's face at the same time.

“I've already told the police everything.”

“About Mizuki Shiraishi, right?”

“You know about my daughter?”

“I looked into Renji Kuze this morning. Three years ago, a student from the same school died at a water-treatment facility.”

“It wasn't an accident.”

Takanori said immediately.

“My daughter was killed by those boys.”

The security guards exchanged annoyed looks.

Himura led Takanori toward the car and questioned him somewhere no one else could hear.

“Do you have evidence that Kuze pushed your daughter in?”

“Evidence… they destroyed it.”

“Then how can you be sure it was Kuze?”

Takanori took out an old smartphone.

“About an hour before my daughter died, she called me. I was at work and couldn't answer. There's a thirty-second voicemail.”

With trembling fingers, he played the recording.

First came the sound of something rubbing against fabric. Then several people laughing, and the echo of water droplets. The noise was severe, and most of the words were impossible to make out.

But near the end, a girl's thin voice could be heard.

“…Renji-senpai, please st—”

The recording cut off there.

“The police at the time said they couldn't even make out the name. They said I might be imagining it.”

“Do you still have the original audio file?”

“I haven't touched anything. I was afraid my daughter's voice would disappear.”

“Please let me keep a copy. We'll analyze it again with the latest technology.”

“Will looking into it now change anything?”

There was the weight of someone exhausted from hoping in Takanori's voice.

Himura looked at his bandaged fists.

“…The past can't be changed.”

He answered, remembering what the black smoke had told him four days earlier.

“But the way we read the record can change. If there's something we overlooked, we will absolutely find it.”

Takanori stared at Himura for a long time. At last, he sent the audio file.

From the school building came the chime announcing the start of the assembly.

---

Renji Kuze appeared on the gymnasium stage to loud applause.

A slim suit. Clean, neat hair. His features were even more refined than in the photos, and under the stage lights his smile showed none of the nerves of an eighteen-year-old.

But the first person Renji noticed from the stage wasn't one of the girls applauding.

It was Inori, in the back row, ignoring him entirely and munching on a sandwich.

The moment Renji looked at him, he couldn't look away.

A slender, fragile-looking high school student—that alone wouldn't have been unusual.

But that boy alone seemed to have a different density from the rest of the world.

Renji forgot what he was about to say for a moment.

The principal standing beside him quietly prompted him, and he finally recovered his smile.

“Hello, everyone. I'm Renji Kuze.”

His voice spread through the gymnasium through the microphone.

“Today, I'd like to talk about how I went down the wrong path, and how I managed to start walking again.”

The lecture proceeded smoothly.

His dissatisfaction with his home life. The loneliness of having no place at school. Meeting bad friends, taking money from younger students, using violence. At first in juvenile detention, he had resented society for everything.

Renji didn't hide his crimes.

But he never once said Mizuki Shiraishi's name.

“There was a teacher at the detention center who didn't give up on me and kept scolding me. He told me: you can't erase what happened in the past, but you can choose what you do from now on.”

The students listened quietly.

“One mistake doesn't decide a person's worth. Even people who have failed have the right to start over.”

In the third-year section, Ichinose clenched his fist without realizing it.

Even people who have failed have the right to start over.

The comfortable, lukewarm words soaked into his chest.

Maybe killing Inori had been a mistake. But he was still a high school student too. If he said he regretted it, maybe he could be forgiven someday.

He had wanted to protect Aoi.

He had been afraid that if Inori came back, he would lose everything.

If he said that, maybe someone—just one person—might understand.

Ichinose listened to Renji's lecture as if clinging to a future that suited him.

“Even if you can't change the past, people can change.”

When he said the same words as the lecture title, the gymnasium erupted in applause.

Inori was the only one who didn't clap.

He folded the empty sandwich wrapper and opened the next sweet bread.

“What a remarkably forgiving school.”

Inori murmured under his breath.

The boy sitting next to him asked, “What do you mean?”

“They applaud a perpetrator who claims to have reformed, but demand that a student who insisted he was innocent reflect on himself. I was impressed by an educational policy more flexible than a Yogibo.”

A few rows ahead, Aoi's shoulders trembled slightly.

Inori hadn't said it to her. He hadn't even looked in her direction.

But to Aoi, it felt as if the words had pierced straight into her chest.

---

“Finally, I'd like to take some questions from everyone.”

When Renji invited questions, several students raised their hands.

“What was the hardest part of juvenile detention?”

“Were you able to make up with your family?”

“What do you want to be in the future?”

Renji answered each question carefully. He added humor to stories about his failures and always followed the heavier topics with hope.

As the scheduled end time approached, one hand rose from the back row.

It was Inori.

“Then, last, this young man—”

Renji called on him with a smile.

He was probably curious what question the boy who had ignored him and kept eating would ask.

Inori slowly stood up.

The students gathered in the gymnasium all turned around at once. Among the girls seeing Inori face-on for the first time, some were already blushing before he even began his question.

“I have a question for you, Kuze-san.”

“Go ahead.”

“Does facing the past mean honestly telling the victim what you did?”

Renji nodded brightly.

“Yes. I think real rehabilitation can't begin until you admit your mistakes.”

“Then, what did you admit to Mizuki Shiraishi—?”