The Quintessential quintuplets in ANHS

8.7 The masterplan

Ayanokouji POV

"What would you like to ask?" I asked.

 "What were you doing during the test? Tell me," Horikita said. 

That was a much better question than I'd expected. She wanted to hear everything at once. 

"When the special test was announced, I didn't focus on anything except for the additional rules. I roughly understood how to manage the 300 points, but you couldn't manipulate them as an individual."

"But the additional rules were really difficult to understand. If you did things normally, you wouldn't have been able to identify the leaders. Right?"

"Yeah. First of all, I volunteered to join the search for the base camp. Able to move freely, I planned to search out spot locations ahead of everyone else."

 "You make it sound simple, but no one should have known the spot locations."

"That's not true. You didn't understand because you were ill and holed up inside the ship, but the school already gave us hints about the locations when we were sailing around the island." 

Katsuragi had also noticed this when the ship circled the island at an unusually fast speed. Horikita fell silent. The ship had been traveling nearly three times faster than a usual cruise ship. Besides, if it were just for sightseeing, it wasn't normal to use a strange expression like "significant scenery."

 Kouenji had noticed this hint, too. Well, it was probably a waste of time thinking about Kouenji, anyway. 

"Then, I reached the cave. I thought it was the most important base." 

"Sorry for intruding. But how was the cave, the most important place? Shouldn't it have been the river?" Itsuki interrupted.

"The spot itself wasn't what was important. Its location was." 

There were no spots close to the river or the well. However, there were two spots near the cave: the hut and the tower. It was the perfect place to exercise control. Horikita looked like she understood once I explained, unlike the quintuplets who failed to understand the cave can be used to monitor the other classes. 

"But what advantage is there in going into the cave if you don't have a keycard?" 

"Well, I'd intended to explore various things, but in the end, I discovered the leader's identity." 

"Well, I suppose that Katsuragi-kun was careless."

 No, that wasn't it. 

"There was that guy, Yahiko, remember? The one following Katsuragi around? He was the leader. I saw Katsuragi and Yahiko at the cave, but I didn't see the moment they occupied it. After the two of them walked away, I checked if the cave was occupied or not."

I explained the situation. When I saw them, Katsuragi had been standing near the entrance with the card in his hand. Yahiko came out of the cave, and they left together.

 "Wouldn't you have mistaken Katsuragi-kun as the leader?" she asked. 

"Do you think that the leader would have shown off the card so carelessly in front of people?" 

Horikita should have known how unbelievably stupid that was, precisely because she'd been appointed as the leader. 

"But why? Why bother deliberately holding onto the card, then?" 

"Because he didn't have any other choice. As far as I can tell, Katsuragi is a calm and collected man, excessively cautious. There's no way he didn't understand the high risk of occupying a spot immediately after finding it. In other words, the person who occupied it was enticed by short-sighted greed."