Walking with only Mion to school made me miss Rena a lot.

"...What's wrong, Kei-chan?

Why are you looking around?"

"What?

Oh, nothing."

It was the same old path to school... but I felt nervous for some reason.

...I wondered what Rena meant when she said she was going to win a come-from-behind victory last night.

I couldn't stop feeling like something dangerous was going to happen.

Rena thought Mion was one of her enemies.

...She could be lying in wait to attack Mion with a knife...

"Don't worry.

Rena isn't going to do something as rash as that.

Even if she does, I can protect myself!"

Mion said it brightly as if trying to tell me she wasn't afraid of anything.

But... I couldn't be optimistic like her, because I knew exactly what Rena was going through.

Rena must be determined by now, and she probably wouldn't mind dying fighting against Mion if she wasn't going to win anyway...

...Of course, that didn't mean she was definitely going to take violent action.

...But I couldn't deny the possibility, either.

"This ol' man is more concerned about the reason why Rena went crazy all of a sudden."

...Was there any reason...?

I remembered... the tragedy.

...I couldn't remember

what made the world go crazy...

But I remembered we got lost in that awfully scary world.

It started... with small things, and those small things continued to pile up one after another.

If you thought about it calmly, you'd laugh, because it was really a stupid thing.

...But once those little tiny stupid things started to bother you, you couldn't ignore them... It was that kind of disease.

...If you could call it one.

But... there must have been a reason.

There must have been a reason that made the world go crazy.

But it must be such a small thing that you couldn't even notice.

...And unfortunately, the reason was very difficult to understand... and you wouldn't be able to figure it out until you died.

"I have a relative who is a doctor.

He said that if you have a tumor in specific parts of your brain, it can change your personality. Make you a totally different person.

People who suffered from this disease used to be considered haunted by devils or possessed by foxes. People dramatized it like it was something occult."

"...You mean Rena is suffering from a physical disease in her brain?"

"In her case, it might be better to say that it's a mental disease.

...Rena was upset and mentally unstable because of the murder of Rina and Teppei.

At a time like that, that stupid Ooishi told her about what happened to Tomitake-san in an exaggerated way..."

"...I think Ooishi-san and Takano-san's scrapbooks have many things in common."

"Really? Like what?"

"...Well... he believes in the series of mysterious deaths of Hinamizawa, but that's a delusion, isn't it?

...I mean, something actually did happen for five years in a row.

...But I think... there is no series of murders in the first place."

It was true that the mysterious incidents happened five years in a row.

...But they were each solved individually... It was the same as a past you didn't need to talk about.

We thought of them as a series of mysterious deaths, which is why we thought something was going to happen this year, too.

It led us to think that there was a conspiracy

and that the Sonozaki family was behind it...

We connect those things to the series of mysterious deaths, but we shouldn't do that in the first place.

Just like I tried to keep my distance from Rena when I found out about her dark past...

wasn't everybody trying to keep their distance from the dark past of Hinamizawa...?

Takano-san's scrapbooks are a good example. She dramatized both recent incidents and old cruel history,

and she made feasible stories out of them, saying that the Sonozaki family was behind it all.

Ooishi-san did the same thing, too.

He was so convinced that the Sonozaki family was behind it all that it was making him interpret things the wrong way.

...In that sense, we could say Ooishi-san believed in the same delusion as Rena.

"I think the Sonozaki family is partially accountable for that because you guys act like you're behind it every time something happens.

...In this village, people think it's the doing of the Sonozaki family whenever something strange happens.

...It's like a magic word that makes everything settle down.

...It's like those people who say they can explain all phenomena in this world with plasma."

"Oh, and what's that supposed to mean?

Are you saying all of this is the Sonozaki family's fault?"

"Exactly. It's all your fault.

So, I'll call you Plasma Mion from now on.

Aha, that sounds like a wrestler's name."

"Well, I like professional wrestlers!

Hey Kei-chan, do you know what abdominal stretching is?!"

"S-Stop, I don't want to wrestle with you in this freaking hot weather!!

N-no, that hurts!!

Stooop!!!"

"Good morning, Keiichi-san."

"...Good morning."

Satoko and Rika-chan looked a little sad when they saw only the two of us.

...If the three of us came to school together like always, they would've been really happy.

But our classmates were as noisy as usual. Nobody seemed to make a big deal about Rena's absence.

Chie-sensei was going to be here soon, and she'd start morning homeroom.

Everyone was fooling around as if they didn't want to miss a second of the time until then.

"Hey, something stinks today. Close the windows!"

"Silly, it'll be hotter in here if we do that!!"

It smelled like gasoline or something, and it really stank.

Someone from the forestry service must have been putting gasoline into the construction equipment or something.

Some students near the windows were making a fuss because they wanted to close the windows to shut out the smell.

Our school wasn't a normal school, compared to others.

We were using a part of the forestry service building. Unusual things like this happened sometimes.

"This is nothing!

I remember they once brought a few big piles of juniper branches!

That was awful. It had this distinct irritating odor that gave us all headaches."

"What's a 'juniper'?"

"......Meep,

that's a name of a vegetable.

We sometimes put it in curry."

"Wa ha ha ha!

You should look for it next time you go grocery shopping."

"Huh???

I know little about vegetables, but it sounds like it would be better to make Rika and Keiichi-san taste it first, just in case."

"What?!

Our ball is missing!

You hid it again, didn't you, Houjou?"

The boys seemed to be looking for their ball for a while, and they yelled at Satoko.

"Why would I hide such a stupid thing?

If I was going to hide anything, I'd hide something better than that."

"Hey, Chie-sensei is coming!!

Everybody take a seat!!"

"Hello, everyone.

Get to your seats."

I kept thinking about Rena the whole time during class.

I thought about what she said last night... I wonder what her "come-from-behind victory" means.

According to Takano-san's delusion, the masterminds behind the bioterrorism were the Three Families and a group of fanatical believers that controlled those Three.

...In other words, the Sonozaki family.

What could Rena do alone against them?

Mion lived with her grandmother, the leader of the Sonozaki family. There were only two of them in the house.

...It was possible that Rena would try to break into their house with a knife.

But I'd already come up with that possibility last night.

That's why I called Mion and warned her.

On the way to school this morning, Mion told me some bodyguards from the Corps had been at her house since this morning.

She told me she'd be guarded herself, too.

...There was a black car parked near the school gate. They must have been the bodyguards.

...But... according to Takano's parasite theory, the battle wouldn't end just by attacking the leader of the Sonozaki family.

According to the delusion she believes in, the conditions of her victory were more complicated than that.

She needed to expose the group of fanatics who are behind the Sonozaki family,

and she needed to destroy their research on the "parasite".

Plus, Rena didn't have much time left, thanks to that suspicious poison she mentioned.

...But how exactly could she win a come-from-behind victory under circumstances like that?

...She might interpret that the town council are the group of fanatics.

If so, she might attack them the next time they have a meeting at the Shrine.

The town council meets once a month at most.

It would be hard to believe that they were holding a meeting today.

She probably thought the place researching the "parasite" is... the Irie Clinic.

Rena suspected that there was something fishy about the clinic from the beginning.

...And that suspicion must've changed to certainty in her head by now.

Did that mean she was going to attack the clinic?

...This wasn't like an action movie. What could she do all by herself?

...Was she going to start a fire?

No, that would be pointless.

In order to expose the conspiracy, she'd have to get proof that they were actually studying the parasite.

...Was she going to break into the clinic and get questionable weird samples...?

The last problem of all was how much time she had left.

...If she believed she didn't have much time left, especially under desperate, disadvantageous conditions, she might try to stab whoever she thought of as an enemy.

...But Rena sounded like she really believed she would regain her happy and peaceful days after everything was over.

Rena probably meant she was going to stay alive and win.

Was there something like an antidote?

It didn't have to be real.

As long as it was an antidote to Rena's delusion, it didn't matter what it was. It could even be the water you washed your vegetables with.

But if she thought she could get the antidote so easily, she wouldn't have been so desperate about the time she has left.

...The antidote must be difficult for her to get.

...The easiest place for that, in her delusion... was that it was hidden somewhere in the clinic.

Putting it all together like that... I felt like Irie and his clinic were in danger.

Now that I thought about it, the elderly people in the village, including the members of the town council, hung out in the waiting room of the clinic all the time!

...If most of the board members happened to gather there, for her, it'd be the perfect place to attack...

I told Mion about that during lunch break.

"...If this were a normal situation, I'd say she wouldn't do such a stupid thing... but...

I can't actually deny the possibility...

I'm going to call my house.

I'll make sure that they send some people to the clinic."

Mion didn't object to my crazy idea.

She put down her chopsticks and went to the teacher's office to make a phone call.

"It sounds so dangerous.

...I can hardly believe Rena-san is going to do such a scary thing.

Are you sure she's going to attack the clinic?"

"Maybe she will,

maybe she won't.

...But if that happens, we're screwed.

...We need to prevent that disaster from happening."

"......I hope nothing happens at all."