"Yeees! Preparations are all done! Order anything you want!"
After we sat and waited for a bit, Usami came bouncing out in an apron.
"Uh... 'anything you want' is nice and all... but I don't even know what you have..."
"No need to worry! We have ingredients overflowing out the wazoo! I can serve you absolutely anything!"
"...Anything?"
"Yup!!"
As I mulled that over, Kyoko Kirigiri turned to me and spoke.
"This is my first time in a place like this. What kind of food are you supposed to order here...?"
"...Hm? Well..."
I almost started listing the usual drinking snacks you couldn't skip at a booze table, then froze. Come to think of it, wasn't Kirigiri basically upper crust?
The young lady sitting in front of me with those curiosity-filled eyes had been born with a silver spoon in her mouth, raised in some absurdly lavish mansion staffed with servants, and was the kind of person who could casually pay 600,000 yen for a single meal in one shot.
Meanwhile, I was just a dirt-poor commoner who'd been perfectly happy downing soju with army stew or dried squid on the side. How the hell was I supposed to satisfy her palate?
"Wait. It's not like this costs money anyway, right?"
Once I thought about it, there was no reason to panic. Usami had literally said she'd bring us anything, and we didn't have to pay for it, so shouldn't I just order the most expensive, flashy dishes imaginable?
"Alright, then... uh..."
But when I actually tried to order, my mind went blank. There was a saying, wasn't there? The guy who's eaten expensive food before is the one who knows how to eat more of it. No matter how hard I tried to think of something that would suit Kirigiri's tastes, nothing came to me.
In the end, after agonizing over it for ages, I decided to go with what I thought were the priciest foods in existence—steak, lobster, wine, stuff like that—and was just about to open my mouth when—
"Yeees! I'll bring exactly what you asked for!"
"Mm. Thank you."
By then, Kirigiri had already finished ordering everything from Usami.
"Uh... what did you order?"
"...You'll see when it gets here."
I had no idea what she'd picked, but the fact that Kirigiri had personally chosen our drinking food made me weirdly excited. Just how different could rich-people bar snacks be from commoner bar snacks...?
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"...Kyoko, what is this?"
"You need to eat well and build your strength. Starting tomorrow, we're going to monitor the footage in real time while handling Future Foundation work, remember?"
"....."
The spread Kirigiri had ordered was undeniably luxurious, but the ingredients were also... painfully blatant.
There were all kinds of dishes made with eel, oysters, figs, abalone, chives, ginger, octopus, and red ginseng, along with a ruby-red bokbunja wine. Just staring at the table made a chill crawl down my spine.
"Well then, shall we start drinking?"
"...Yeees."
And so Kirigiri and I emptied our first glasses. She set her cup down on the table, looked at me for a moment, then quietly asked:
"...K, about that... what was your past like? I want to know what kind of life you've lived."
"...Hm. My life, huh..."
What was I even supposed to say to that? The me in this world had a different past from the me in my original world.
I hesitated for a moment, then finally opened my mouth.
"My past was... pretty miserable."
"...Was it?"
"Yeah. These days people call me a 'counselor' and all that... but when I was a kid, I was the one getting counseling. Funny, right? A counselor who needed counseling... haha..."
At that, Kirigiri's expression softened with a trace of guilt.
"That sounds more painful than I expected. I'm sorry. If it's hard for you, you don't have to keep talking..."
"No, it's okay. Since I've already started, I kind of want to get it all off my chest."
"Then... please."
So I began telling my story again.
"The reason I was in counseling was severe depression."
"Depression?"
"Yeah. The reason was... well, you know my family situation was... kind of a mess, right?"
At those words, Kirigiri quietly lowered her head. She was probably assuming, based on the motive video from the first killing game, that I became depressed because I was an orphan. Well, in my previous world I was basically no different from one, so it wasn't exactly wrong.
"My depression got so bad that I was even admitted to a treatment facility once. But that place wasn't exactly fit for human habitation either. They crammed unstable kids into one room and forced treatment on us."
"....."
"Later, that facility ended up on the news and caused a huge social scandal... but that's another story. Back then, living there only made my depression worse. Even now, just thinking about it, it was a truly horrible pla—"
"...Where was it?"
"Ah, no... that facility was shut down ages ago... and besides, the whole world got flipped upside down once already, so..."
"Did you forget what my talent is? If I put my mind to it, tracking down the people who ran that facility would be child's play..."
"I-I'm really okay, I swear...?"
I ended up bickering with Kirigiri for quite a while as she pressed me with eyes practically on fire. Well, what could I do? No matter how brilliant a detective Kirigiri was, there was no way she could find people from my previous world.
"...Anyway, back then I never would've dreamed I'd become a 'counselor.' The therapist at that treatment center was a huge pain in the neck."
"...Then how did you end up starting counseling?"
"Uh..."
Even if she asked me that, I didn't really know either. The first people I counseled after arriving in this world were the children from the orphanage who had already been close to this world's version of me.
They were so attached to me that even when I said something completely ordinary, those exhausted, hollow-eyed kids would suddenly break into bright smiles. They looked so genuinely happy that, for a moment, I even wondered if maybe I really did have a talent for counseling.
And just like that, one particular nameless girl surfaced in my mind—the one whose smile had shone brightest among all those happy children. The same girl who'd secretly been holding a Future Foundation hacking gun during the video call in the first killing game.
"Ah... come to think of it, what happened to the orphanage kids?"
"The orphanage?"
"The reason I started counseling... was because of those kids."
That was what the interview article I'd read on the day I first came to the Danganronpa world had said, so it wasn't exactly a lie.
And honestly, seeing the orphanage kids smile so happily at my words was what made me start liking this whole 'counseling' thing in the first place, so it wasn't a lie for me either.
"Usami, there's something I want to ask..."
"Yeees? What is it?"
"My memories cut off around the end of the last killing game... so I don't really know what happened to the kids from my orphanage. Do you know anything?"
"Ah, you mean L?"
"...L?"
Usami smiled as she answered me.
"L, who was your mandatory rescue target in Towa City, and the children from the orphanage were all safely rescued by the Future Foundation afterward! Right now, they're waiting eagerly for you to come back at the Future Foundation's 14th Division!"
"Really...? That's a relief. Though, that kid used to insist she'd never take a name... so I guess she finally chose one? That's good. She must've completely overcome her trau—"
"...K, that child named L... is L a boy or a girl?"
"Hm? She's a cute little girl, why—"
Kirigiri's gaze turned glacial, and she started pouring alcohol into my cup with merciless force.
"Drink."
"Huh? No, I mean... we're already on the first bottle... maybe after a little break—"
"Now."
"...Yes, ma'am."
Under Kirigiri's icy stare, I drained the cup. Then she spoke in a low voice.
"Impudent K... should I put a lock on your tail?"
"T-tail...?"
"To borrow someone else's words, I mean a man's tail."
"...gulp"
After that, the two of us traded drinks in silence for a while.
"...K, what was that about Korea?"
"Ah, that... it's nothing special. I just know that my origins are in Korea... and I learned Korean out of curiosity because it was supposedly the language of my homeland. Other than that, I don't really know anything."
"...I see."
Kirigiri nodded, then sank into thought.
Come to think of it... what happened to Korea?
Meanwhile, a sudden question surfaced in my own mind. Was Korea in this world the same Korea as in the world I used to live in? Was its history the same? And what state was it in now?
"Hey, Usami. Do you have any information on Korea?"
"Korea...? Hmm... I'll search the Future Foundation's data..."
After searching for a while, Usami gave me a pretty textbook answer. Like other countries, Korea had been devastated in the wake of [The Biggest, Most Awful, Most Tragic Event in Human History], but was now being rapidly restored by the Korean branch of the Future Foundation.
"Well, that's a relief... if it's recovering quickly."
"...K."
"Yeah?"
"When everything is over... should we take a trip to Korea for a while?"
"To... Korea...?"
"Yes. I may not look it, but I am a detective. I might be able to find where you were born. Maybe even your parents—"
"It's okay."
When I answered firmly, Kirigiri looked genuinely surprised.
"Really? I mean it. I can make as much time as I ne—"
"I like things the way they are now. More than anything."
"Even so..."
"So there's no need. As long as I have my friends... the ones who've become just as precious to me as you... that's enough..."
".....!"
"Huh? W-wait... I mean... ugh..."
Thanks to me blurting out something unbearably cheesy in my drunken haze, we both went red in the face and spent another long stretch silently passing drinks back and forth.
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"Sooo... I was... like... your huuugest fan..."
"...Really?"
"Yeeah... I don't have a single thing I don't knowoo about you... so of course I know all that stuuuff..."
"....."
Avoiding K's dazed, unfocused eyes while secretly dumping my own alcohol was, in truth, absurdly easy.
Thanks to that, K got completely plastered exactly as I'd planned and started spilling all the stories he'd kept hidden until now.
When he proudly babbled on about the truth behind the Sirius Observatory Murder Case, the Detective Auction Murder Case, the Locked-Room Zodiac Murders, and the Crime Victim Rescue Committee—things only I and my fellow detectives were supposed to know—I was honestly shocked.
S3ovSUZ1NTRCWmordHpEeGxRTS9nbzNhcXIrMktyeXdSUW1OOFJnUm94Y1hLRmYvaSswR1R2dGRXTk1NSXgwRQ
And then there was the rose. I'd never once told him roses were my favorite, yet he pressed one into my hand with a bright, guileless smile, saying he'd picked it from the farm earlier, and then shouted that he loved me. That felt so wonderful... no, it startled me even more.
In any case, thanks to everything he let slip while drunk, my deductions about his identity had narrowed to two possibilities.
"Want another drink?"
"Ugh... uuuugh..."
K swayed as he accepted the cup. I did feel a little sorry for him, but it couldn't be helped.
The fact that I liked him was no longer something I could deny. It was a fact. But from the moment I first met him until now, there had always been unresolved questions surrounding him—questions that sometimes filled me with a creeping fear.
Through two killing games, he had always known truths no one else knew... truths no one should have known.
Because of that, during the last killing game, there had even been a time when I suspected him of being the Mastermind. Of course, after seeing his sincerity and his willingness to sacrifice himself, I abandoned that suspicion, but...
As we endured the killing game inside the Neo World Program, those thoughts began to creep back in little by little. Simply saying he hadn't lost his memories couldn't explain it. He always knew things that only the Mastermind behind a killing game could possibly know.
Of course, the possibility that he was actually the Mastermind was still vanishingly low. After all, he had openly told me everything he knew and desperately struggled to stop the killing game. So until this very moment, I'd kept those thoughts buried.
But wasn't this the perfect opportunity? A chance to hear the truth from him. A chance, starting today, to cast aside even the tiniest grain of suspicion I'd kept hidden in my heart and accept him as true family.
So now, I would confirm it.
Of the two possibilities I'd narrowed it down to, was the truth that he was some existence on the level of the Mastermind...? Or was it that other theory—the one that was, frankly, absurd, ridiculous, almost stupid... and yet the one every last piece of evidence pointed toward?
"K, there's something I want to ask you..."
"Mmm...?"
"What are you, really?"
".....?"
He stared at me with loose, unfocused eyes.
"Me...? I'm Kyyy..."
"No. I mean your real identity."
"Th-that... is kinda hard to explain..."
"If you don't tell me, I'll really put a lock on a man's tail..."
"O-okay... I'll taaalk...!!"
K hesitated.
"S-so, I am..."
Then he squeezed his eyes shut.
"I aaaam...!!!"
He shouted it.
And as I watched him begin pouring out the truth like a dam had burst, I smiled brighter than I had at any other moment.
Because that theory had been right.
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"Ugh... where am I...?"
When I opened my eyes, an unfamiliar ceiling greeted me.
"Oh, come on! What now!?"
At this point, I'd been through this enough times to develop a full-blown phobia of unfamiliar ceilings.
I hurriedly tried to sit up and assess the situation, only to spot Kirigiri lying beside me, staring at me wide-eyed. I froze solid.
"K-Kyoko... where are we?"
"Here? The motel on the third island."
"W-why are we here...?"
"If you're awake, hurry up and wash up so we can head to the central island. The kids on the island should be awake by now too. Starting today, we have to report the situation to the Future Foundation in real time, try restoring the avatars, undergo memory restoration treatment—"
"No, I mean... I blacked out last night, so I don't remember anything at all... what the hell happened?"
"What happened last night...?"
At that, Kirigiri—
"Nothing much."
—smiled.
Then she said, with a grin sharp enough to make my heart stop:
"I made your surname Kirigiri."
".....!"
And just like that, I became Kirigiri K.