As they had planned, Akiko gradually began to come to school less and less often. Her family was falling apart, and was behind on her tuition payments, so nobody thought this at all unnatural.
She got her friends hooked, and Yurihara and Saotome took them. The first one they nabbed was Suzumiya Takako, second year, Class F.
It was easy to take her. She and her friends always gathered in seclusion, and all that Yurihara and Saotome had to do was follow them as they left and simply take them down.
Unfortunately, they were unable to alter them in the way they had altered Akiko. They died, but they did not return.
"It seems it requires a very deleate balance."
"Good thing we decided to experiment first," they said, whispering in the darkness.
They had been killing Shinyo Academy and other local high school girls, one after another. To cover this up, they laid down a few red herrings to throw off the authorities.
Once the precedent was established, the rest of their work went smoothly. There were no signs of fuss at school. At Shinyo Academy, there had even been a special meeting and a resulting morning lecture, but that was all. Missing person reports had probably been filed with the police, but they were burried in a mountain of missing girls totally unrelated to them, and swiftly forgotten about.
"The students that ran away were all slackers to begin with," the guidance teacher told Saotome at the discipline committee meeting.
The generalization was so insensitive to the students' individual circumstances that the committee president, Niitoki Kei, stiffened her tiny body and turned her cute, childish face downwards to hide her steaming glare.
But Saotome was taking minutes, so he wrote the gist of the comment down in his notebook. "Disturbance in behavior precedes disappearance." As he wrote these words, he was expressionless.
He never let a faint smile steal across his lips.
Everything was going exactly according to the plan.
Still, he was left expressionless. Nothing the teachers said and nothing happening around him could change this. He had killed five people without so much as remorse, and here he was, still acting like an ordinary student.
But when the teacher stated that, "Incidentally, the infamous Kirima Nagi failed to arrive this morning. Make sure to keep an eye on her, you hear? No telling what that girl's plotting in the shadows," Saotome's cold heart skipped a beat. He didn't show it, but even now that he had the Manticore, hers was one of the few names that could affect him.
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Kusatsu Akiko's behavior became strange after a month after she had been altered.
Even when she came to school, she seemed particularly out of it.
When people spoke to her, she barely seemed to notice, much less reply.
(...Uh-Oh.)
Saotome figured that Akiko had begun to break down much faster than expected.
They couldn't leave her like this. If she collapsed somewhere and was taken to a hospital, they would surely discover her condition, and the 'institution' that made the Manticore would soon find out. So Yurihara was forced to eat Akiko, and the first stage of their experiment ended. Unfortunately, they had still not managed to recruit a second subject with any real success, and it was putting considerable strain on both Saotome and Yurihara's relationship.
"Damn it! Why doesn't it work?!" Yurihara yelled, growing ever more high strung.
"It's nothing to worry about. We will have many more opportunities."
"I know that, but..." Yurihara said, and then looked up at Saotome. "I'm sorry. I'll get it right next time."
"We should wait a while," Saotome replied calmly.
"Why? I can do it now!" Yurihara said, almost shrieking, her voice clearly echoing through the empty parking garage.
"That's not the problem. We're reaching the limit of what we can do in the school. We have to look for more prey elsewhere. But we need to prepare. Not only for more experiments, but for your food supply as well. We've taken care of both of them at the same time so far, but you need other forms of nourishment, don't you?" he said gently, showing a marked contrast to the horrific meaning behind his words.
He rested his hand on her shoulder.
"All right, we shall do as you say." Yurihara nodded obediently.
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The day after Akiko vanished, Saotome involved in something a little out of the ordinary.
During a break, he was on his way back from returning a slide ruler he'd borrowed from the teacher's room, when a female teacher came flying around the corner, extremely flustered.
"Y-you! You're on the discipline committee, aren't you?!" she asked, her face brightening the moment she saw Saotome.
"Yes, Saotome, 1-D," Saotome replied.
"Thank god you're here! Please keep a watch! Don't let her go away!" she shouted, and continued on down the hall.
Saotome looked puzzled, and walking in the direction that she had come from. It was the staff bathroom.
Since it had been a female teacher, he poked his head through the door. He had no particular enthusiasm for ladies restrooms, but he didn't hesitate at all in his actions. He simply walked straight inside.
But once inside, he was badly shocked.
"Oh, it's you, Saotome-kun," said Kirima Nagi, in the flesh, standing smack dab in the middle of the white room, nodding at him.
"Senpai, what's going on...?" He didn't need to finish. The moment he asked, he noticed the unlit cigarette in her hand.
"That's...!"
"Yeah, well, you know how it is," she said, making no effort to hide it.
"They caught you, didn't they? But why... And in a place like this?"
"Whatever," Nagi gave him a half grin. It made quite an impact. It was this sort of impression that had made him fall in love with her in the first place.
"Senpai, umm..." he tried to talk further.
She cut him off. "Sorry again about the other thing. I still think it's better for you this way."
"Oh, no, that's..."
"Oh, hey, you were 1-D, weren't you?"
"Yeah..."
"Were you friends with Kusatsu Akiko?"
Saotome thought his heart was going to leap out of his mouth.
"Er, n-not really..." he mumbled.
Kirima glared at him. "You knew her?"
"I went out with her once."
"On a date?"
"No! I mean, uh, it was like..." he said, scrambling to form a coherent sentence.
Kirima looked at his face, and grinned again. "Not what I'm asking. You notice her acting weird lately?"
"Well, yeah, I guess so."
"How long?"
"Maybe... Two or three weeks."
"Matches up..." Kirima whispered to herself.
Saotome felt a shiver run down his spine, but he didn't let it show.
"Matches what?"
"Hmm? Oh, never mind," Kirima said evasively.
"Something happened to Akiko? If there's anything I can do to help, senpai..." he pressed.
"Nah, it's nothing important."
"Of course it's important. I mean, this is deliberate, isn't it?" he said, taking the cigarette out of Kirima's hand.
"Hey, Saotome-kun," Kirima said, troubled.
"It's something big enough that you're deliberately getting yourself suspended, isn't it? Let me tell the teachers."
"They won't do anything! Teachers are nothing but wage slaves," she said coldly.
Saotome couldn't argue with that. He had suggested it precisely because he had the same opinion. If they left things up to the teachers, everything would be forgotten in no time.
"Then..." he persisted.
Kirima took his hand and held it tightly.
"Thanks, but no. You're normal, and you shouldn't have anything to do with this."
"But..." he said as three male teachers came stomping into the ladies' room.
"You again!" they shouted at Kirima.
Kirima was unaffected.
"Umm..." Saotome tried talking to them, but they didn't even look at him.
One of them took the cigarette out of his hand, and said, "This is evidence!" thrusting it out towards Kirima.
She said nothing.
She was hauled off to the guidance office like a wanted criminal.
Saotome followed after her, looking worried, but one of the teachers told him to go back to his room, so he simply watched them leave.
There was nobody else around, and the color on his face slowly faded.
From down the hall, he heard the office door slam open.
All Saotome could do was turn and walk away. There was no emotion left on his face.
Kirima's choice of words kept echoing in his mind. She had said, "Matches up." All he could think was it matched up to the first girl who had 'run away,' Suzumiya Takako.
Kirima knew something.
Something too close for comfort.
His mask cracked for just a second, letting out a glimpse of his true face underneath.
His eyes withered, inhuman, like a man who had just wandered in the desert for a week with no water and let sand creep into every pore on his body.