Claim of Responsibility

The beginning of the story. The opening act.

Outside of the window was a cloudy sky. The season in which summer has not yet started. There existed a single rumor whispered about.
No one knows the details. No, no one was supposed to know them.
Just that, even if the empty book and bookmark are found, it is said that they must never be touched.

Rules of the Demise Game

A game with a single traitor, a “fox”, has begun.
If you wish to escape, pay attention to the following conditions, and seek the end.

—Now, the beginning of a fun Demise Game begins.

・To reach the end of the game, the “fox” must be killed.
・If the “fox” cannot be found, everyone else will die.
・While searching for the “fox”, Kokkuri-san’s demands must be met.
・Kokkuri-san’s demands will be sent via letter.
・You will be given one week to fulfill Kokkuri-san’s demands.
・If the demands are ignored, you will die.
・If the demands are shown to someone outside of the game, that person will die.
・Until the end of the game is reached, you absolutely cannot escape.

“This is a news flash.
Today, in a high school located in ○○ Prefecture, the body of a male student was discovered.
Police are now beginning an investigation into the possibilities of the case being either a murder or an accident——”

The announcer’s robotic voice echoed around and filled the small room.
As if the world was spinning around, I was attacked by a wave of something like vertigo.

The overview of the incident is as follows.

It happened towards the end of the lunch break.
The first witness was a female student from the same school.
The student had gone to recover a ball that had rolled behind the bushes, and accidentally crashed into someone that had been standing there.
The person had fallen over from the impact.

When the panicking student raised her head to apologize, that’s when she noticed an abnormality.
—the person she had crashed into had no upper body, and only the lower half of the body was there.
According to the student’s testimony, “it” had certainly been standing by itself before she crashed into it.

At around the same time, on the grounds of a narrow alley at the school’s back gate.
The first witness here was a male student in the same school.
Walking by the front of the back gate to put away cleaning equipment in a tool shed, when he walked by the back gate again, he noticed an anomaly.

——In front of the back gate, where there was definitely nothing before, was an upper body.

On the ground several meters away, the traces of something having been dragged across the ground were left behind.
That was…moving in the direction of the lower body’s location.

Naturally, although there were many students on the school grounds during lunch break, there was not a single person who witnessed the culprit.
In other words, it occurred in the closed room known as the school: a closed room murder.

“……So it was true.”

On that day, an emergency meeting was held, and the school was soon closed for the time being.
The students seemed to have lost touch with reality, and as a result were soon dismissed and forced to go home.
But the students who had stayed behind to listen to the situation, and those that were waiting for their parents, it was soon clear there was no way all of the students would leave the school.

On the second floor of an old school building, in a classroom that was originally used as a music room, several people had gathered together.
It was different from the vague fear of other students; their expressions were tense.

“——Hey, who told him? ——Who’s the traitor?!”
“I wonder if we’ll also die, too……?”
“……Calm down.”
“There’s no way I can calm down in a situation like this!”
“……You still…don’t understand, do you……? It could have been a coincidence……”
“There’s no way that was a coincidence, right?!”

“Calm down!!”
“……”
“……If anyone else gets involved……You don’t want to die, right?”
“……tch!!”
“Anyway, someone received a letter……”
“In other words, all of that was true, right? Um……”
“It seems like it.”
“…………”

For a while,  we remained silent. A silence to the point where one’s ears would hurt.

“——Hey……what should we do?”
“For now, we don’t really have any choice but to watch how it proceeds, right? Since someone will soon receive a letter……”
“Yeah, so after one week passes, one of us will die.”
“Since, since it’s this kind of incident, the culprit will soon be found, right?!”

“……………that is, if there is a culprit.”