Chapter 3: The Trial

[John Dark Souls]

You feel like you could almost see steam coming out of Mishy's head before you realize it might actually be real smoke coming out of his left ear. No, clearly you are just imagining things.

"This is crazy, something is clearly not wrong. The more Mishy thinks about it the less sense it makes. Mishy's memory has more holes than in any blankets appearing in all these murders, more than in swiss cheese, even more holes than in little boy's theory during first trial... Ahahaha, now that Mishy started trying to find them, he noticed there are even short blanks in memory happening during this very trial. One, two... Access denied. Session could be terminated due to an unidentified error. Wh-wh-wh... What did Mishy just say..?"

Mishy's eyes open so widely you could almost worry they'd fall out if only Mishy looked down like this, his expression filled with pure horror his eyes staring straight at the spinning roulette table.

"What is happening to Mishy?! Is Mishy going insane!? Is Mishy going to die?! No... Right... If Mishy fails to find culprit, Mishy will die regardless of if what's going to Mishy going to do it first... But how can Mishy trust anyone here when Mishy can't even trust his own memory?! What if Mishy is actually the culprit and just can't remember..? Mishy doesn't even have any idea what are all these locations everyone is talking about! Mishy has never been there! Mishy never seen them! No... This is wrong, words should come out differently, not like this, why can't Mishy properly say it!?"

Realizing Mishy can't understand things alone, Mishy looks towards everyone.

"Somebody, anybody! Please say you saw what Mishy did was doing since last trial! Please tell Mishy where he went and what he did! Anything is fine!"

[King V]

-RIN gives Mishy another really suspicious look, but refuses to say anything. The gun dilemma still seems to be weighing heavily on her mind-

[John Dark Souls]

Mishy gives RIN a suspicious look as well while shaking terribly whether from fear or anger or what else.

"What's with those eyes? You know something about Mishy don't? But don't intend to speak a word until somebody decides to point out a solution to your completely pointless problem with a gun? Then let Mishy give you a solution. Your gun with 1 missing bullet was BROKEN, CRUSHED, DESTROYED. Mishy is sure that if a weapon specifically prepared for the purpose of this murder game was broken, these robed figures will go and bring new one completely fixed and replenished and clean up broken fragments as if nothing ever happened just as cleanly as they clean up the corpses after murders. Isn't that right?"

Mishy looks at lords with disgust.

[Daiwa Scarlet]

"If the stakes do not match completely, there is a chance that Pierrick had been moved after falling on the spikes. There are holes on his body which do not have a spike through them, but I thought that had come from people investigating. Could someone confirm or deny this?"

[The City [EclipseZwolf]]

Cessair: "It seems I need to step in due to this mysterious gun. I grow tired of seeing you all run in circles because you think something is missing. Between the Two Pistols found during the murder and all the pistols in the black market, all pistols are currently accounted for with known locations. No pistols were destroyed or removed from the Clash."



Rikka: "Aha! The Veil of deceit is lifted! The state of the fallen soul Pierrick is the dominion of myself however! When myself and the dark flame found him, he was underneath the cloth of darkness! Its abyss like color hid the body and spikes from sight! With our powers combined we tore this cover away to reveal the remains of the one known as Pierrick!"

[King V]

-RIN shakes her head-

"This witness refuses to believe such an illogical explanation. You mean to say that the culprit chose the gun that I used, out of countless others, simply out of coincidence? Confirming whether the gun was functional isn't a valid explanation, the culprit choose to use 2 guns and still just so happened to choose the gun that I used."

"None of these coincidences add up. This witness proposes that the loud banging noises that we heard were not gunshots, but in fact a large blunt object striking something. The missing bullets were fabricated by firing the guns at a wall, or perhaps they were fired at the ceiling where delusional quarter no.3 found the area chipped and marked. The blanket was used to muffle these gunshots so we did not hear them. There were in fact only 6 gunshots, but the culprit made it seem like there were 7 by using a large blunt object and striking a wall so that we would assume falsely."

"Unless there is evidence otherwise, this witness refuses to believe that the gun was not used as a framing device."

[John Dark Souls]

"Looks like everyone here is too busy thinking really hard on this murder to try not to die themselves to reply to Mishy. Fine, then Mishy will try to be productive towards the cause. Mishy has no idea what places or items you are talking about, but Mishy can clearly tell that the larger holes in body and cloth were not from stakes. Which means they were from an object other than wooden stakes. Yet they were probably not bullet holes either, it's hard to think that if culprit fired 7 shots at the body, all 7 would pierce all the way through body and none of the bullets would remain inside unless culprit decided to go out of the way and get to body and remove bullets from inside one by one anyway. Though size-wise its obviously not bullet holes."

"Oh, right, how did culprit even get the body on the stakes? When it was found, was body impaled on them? Was body wrapped in blanket or just covered by them? What eyepatch girl says can be taken both ways. Wouldn't easiest way to get body on them be to just throw it down from above since judging from those pictures it was quite far bellow the walkways? If those holes were made by something else, then murder itself might have taken place somewhere entirely else and only body itself dumped into sewers afterwards and gunshots made in order to mislead the time murder was done at."

"In first place, why did you two even decide to go outside at that kind of time to that kind of place to find a corpse?"

[Daiwa Scarlet]

"Pierrick seems to have impacted the spikes from the side, likely from sliding down the bowl of the sewer. Yuusha and the fallen angel probably entered the sewer because of the note, but if that was to lure us to the body then Pierrick had died prior to the notes being slipped into our rooms."

[The City [EclipseZwolf]]

Yuuta: "I went down to the sewers after receiving a note telling me Rikka was in danger. I rushed down to the sewers after getting it. The note specifically mentioned the southern sewers, so that was where I was headed. I believe I received the note around 3:45 AM. I had only just begun searching when I heard some crazy laughter echoing through the sewers, following by seven loud bang noises, which I am fairly confident were gunshots. After the seven bangs, I heard a kind of splash sound before it became quiet. I hung low for a time to make sure it was safe before attempting to get back above ground, but ran into Rikka on the way."

Rikka: "The Dark Flame speaks the truth! I received a note stating he was in danger around 3:30 AM and rushed down! I was searching in the sewers for a bit when I also heard the laughter and banging from the darkness. After it stopped and I determined the time was now, I rushed back to the central sewer to head above ground and ran into the Dark Flame!"

Yuuta: "While we were making sure the other was alright we were looking around to try and avoid being surprised and noticed that we couldn't really see the drain in the central sewer. Normally its hard to see, but from the edge you can still see the sewer grate. We couldn't even see that, just a mass of black. We decided to check it out and slid down. We found the body of Pierrick and the stakes underneath the black blanket, which was what we saw from above."

Rikka: "Indeed! After the two of us flipped back the curtain of darkness the announcement of doom rang out!"

[The City [EclipseZwolf]]

-Silver Mask steps in to respond to Mishy's earlier question-

Silver Mask: "Regarding the destruction of items and their replacement. If an item we provided for the clash was arbitrarily destroyed by someone intent on stopping or hindering the clash we would replace it as soon as possible. If something was destroyed with purpose, but has since lost all relevance and is merely a nuisance, we will fix or replace it upon request, look no further than the hole in Nanashi's room. We will not replace anything we deem important to a current or upcoming investigation or trial. In addition, if we replaced an item for any of these reasons, as it is irrelevant information to the trial, we would reveal it here to avoid causing excess confusion."

-Silver Mask bows slightly-

Silver Mask: "We have not replaced any destroyed weaponry from the black market. And since we confirmed earlier that all pistols were accounted for, no pistols have been destroyed."

[Daiwa Scarlet]

"It is possible that the bullets did not have to be removed before the culprit hid the wounds by shoving a stake through it. The bullets could pierce through thinner parts of the body like an arm or leg. I also did not want to harm the body, so I never checked whether the bullets might still be lodged inside. This could explain the seeming lack of relevance that the pistols have with this case."

"Yuusha, fallen angel, and Mori Summer. Would you care to compare the notes we received?"

[Exusiai]

"Since Satone showed her note, I guess it's my turn!"

"Would you mind showing us your notes too—Rikka, Shinka, Yuuta?
I'm not sure if we can find anything important by comparing them, but at this point of the trial, I don't think it would hurt to pursue this a bit further.
Without those notes, Rikka and Yuuta wouldn't have found the victim, but it makes you wonder why someone would write those in the first place."

[The City [EclipseZwolf]]

-At Nanashi and Satone's request, Shinka, Yuuta, and Rikka all start to pass their notes around the casino table over to Satone. During this time everyone gets a good look at the three notes-

"Yuuta will be killed in the southern sewers tonight."

"Yuuta will be killed in the southern sewers tonight."

"Rikka will be killed in the southern sewers tonight."

"Pierrick is going to be Killed in the Sewers."

-Its only when they all make it around to Satone and she holds up four notes that everyone realizes somewhere along the line an extra note was added to the jumble....-

Lloyd: "One. Two. Three. Four. Yep, definitely not three. Anyone care to admit to putting in the extra note....?"

[Daiwa Scarlet]

"The note looks as if it had been soaked for a while, but no one had been particularly wet when we met for the investigation. This means that the note was either on Pierrick and someone is playing around or the culprit had changed to dry clothes after their deed... That might explain why the lint from the dryer had been cleaned."

[King V]

"All of these notes are meaningless. The culprit's intentions clearly do not matter at all. Did the last culprit's intentions matter in the slightest in the end? No? That's what I thought. Whydunnit holds no purpose here. All that matters is logic."

"This witness has not heard an explanation to the gun dilemma yet. If no explanation is given, this witness will not provide any further evidence."