I went to investigate the first corpse I had found—the one with Amino's head. By now, the stench of blood was hanging in the air throughout the whole room, and I felt the bile rising in my throat again. I covered my nose with my sleeve as I approached.
The blanket had been pulled back enough to expose the cut between the head and the torso. I tried pulling back the blanket even further.
The torso looked like it belonged to Enbi. I remembered his black tank top. It had a muscular physique, too, which led me to believe that it hadn't been just the clothes that were switched.
The arms had been severed at the shoulder, too. At a glance they had looked like they were connected to the torso, but evidently, they'd just been positioned with the cut edges placed right up next to each other. And that wasn't all—each arm was cut into three pieces. One section was the upper arm, from the shoulder to the elbow; one was the lower arm, from the elbow to the wrist; and one was the hand, from the wrist on.
They sure were dismembered, all right...
I took a step back, toppling down until I was sitting on the floor. There was no way I could be in my right mind looking at something like that.
I suppressed the urge to scream, summoning my willpower to get back on my feet. If this atrocious crime had really been committed as a challenge to a detective... then I absolutely had to win. A detective has to fight for justice.
I grit my teeth and went back to surveying the corpse. Apparently, the different parts of the arm had come from different people, too. The different sleeves and skintones were arranged in an unmistakable eerie mismatch. If it hadn't been for the fact that the bodies had been cut up wearing their clothes, I might not have been able to identify the owner of each part. The upper arms were probably Amino's, the lower arms were Enbi's, and, through process of elimination, the hands would be Inuzuka's. Each arm had its pieces lined up in place like some sort of puzzle.
The horror show didn't stop there... Each leg had been cut into three pieces that had been swapped out, too. The parts were arranged in the same order as the arms.
All in all, the corpse had been cut up into a total of fourteen pieces.
I put a hand over my mouth, unsteadily making my way back into the main hall. Sitting in the armchair, Kirigiri looked cool and composed, as if she had already foreseen my reaction from the beginning.
"It's just like you said..." I near-sobbed. "Why would this... If this really is a game, it's downright insane..."
"What condition was the corpse in?" Apparently, Kirigiri cared more about dead bodies than she cared about me.
I sank down onto the floor, explaining the corpse I had just seen.
"I see... It appears that this incident is even more cruel than I had assumed."
"Do you really think so?" I asked, peering up at her face. "What exactly is this...? Why would they need to dismember people like this...?"
"If you refer to the challenge you received in the mail, Yui-oneesama, you can see that the dismemberment is related to some sort of trick."
"A trick...?"
"That leads me to think that the corpses were cut into pieces for some specific reason."
"A reason for dismembering the corpses..."
"I can think of several possibilities, but most involve making them easier to carry."
"Carry...?"
Easier to carry the bodies to the beds, maybe? It was true that carrying the bodies of full-grown men, each of whom weighed more than 60 kilograms, would be no easy task. But if they were cut up into little pieces, then transport would be a breeze.
"Go investigate the other bodies," directed Kirigiri.
I had the strong desire to respond with, "You do it," but since I'd promised to investigate things myself, I refrained.
