2:30.
Nanami Kira arrived at the cinema entrance. The building had been cordoned off, plastered with police tape. Officers patrolled the perimeter but kept their distance from the interior—orders from above, no doubt.
He'd been under house arrest for two days, but the school hadn't truly suspected him. They'd even kept him informed on outside intelligence and the latest developments in the investigation.
Kira understood the school's calculation. They called it house arrest, but they kept feeding him intel. The game was simple: if things spiraled out of control, they wanted him ready for emergency deployment.
In the end, jujutsu sorcerers are shit.
He knew the bodies had been removed. The manner of death was horrific: burst eyeballs, bloated torsos, limbs twisted at unnatural angles—each corpse like a grotesquely inflated giant.
According to the reports, the boys who had beaten Junpei outside the school gates were among the dead. If Junpei hadn't been right beside him that day, Kira might have suspected him too.
Not that any of it concerned him. No matter how many people died, it no longer stirred him in the slightest.
Whether Junpei was the killer or an innocent bystander made no difference to him.
Off the clock, Nanami Kira cared only about himself. Anything that disrupted his peaceful life was the enemy.
The bodies had been sent to Ms. Ieiri for autopsy. Kira didn't care about the bodies—he was here to search for residual traces of Cursed Energy.
The enemy could easily have killed everyone without leaving any CE residue. But they had deliberately left traces behind.
A lure, meant to draw people in. And who was leading the search this time? Right—that money-grubbing woman.
Mei Mei.
She wasn't stupid. She'd certainly already pinpointed the enemy's location. But she hadn't reported it to the school. Was she planning to handle it alone?
Interesting.
In truth, Mei Mei's reason for not filing a report was simple: if she solved the problem alone, she'd have a much better case for claiming the bonus.
Kira slipped into the cinema, weaving past layer after layer of police tape. He moved like an agile cat, leaping through the midday sunlight, casting flickers of black shadow on the ground. For a semi-special grade sorcerer, evading ordinary police was trivial.
Soon he was inside the screening hall, creeping through the narrow ticket lobby in the dim light, past row after row of red seats—red as blood. The theater was old, as if cut from a black-and-white photograph from the last century: gray, decaying, the walls cracking in great patches. But the seats were brand new.
The dingy hall and the vivid seats composed a faintly absurd tableau.
The murdered man's seat was in the back row, outlined in chalk.
Dried blood still stained the floor.
Kira reconstructed the scene in his mind. He'd been annoyed by the noise that day and had used his shikigami to scare everyone out—which left his own CE traces at the scene.
They'd been watching the 11:00 AM showing. According to school records, at 11:15, during the very next screening, every audience member was killed.
The timing was deliberate. A fifteen-minute gap was negligible—CE traces fade over time, but the difference between a fifteen-minute-old signature and one left fifteen minutes later was virtually indistinguishable.
That meant suspicion would fall on him—that he'd stayed for the second showing and slaughtered everyone.
Clearly, some Cursed Spirit—call it X—had known Kira's itinerary in advance. Hoshino Ei had told it.
X had infiltrated the cinema beforehand, probably disguised as a patron.
It must have understood his temperament—known he couldn't tolerate that much noise, that he'd deploy Killer Queen, that he'd intimidate or even hurt people.
That would leave CE traces. And then, during the next showing, after Kira left, X would launch the attack.
The noisy patrons might even have been acting under its influence—hypnosis through a Cursed Technique, perhaps. Any number of possibilities. That would have made the setup foolproof.
Even if the lunch restaurant nearby could confirm Kira was eating there when the attack occurred, it proved nothing.
Everyone knew his Sheer Heart Attack could operate remotely at long range. Annihilating a cinema with it was well within the realm of possibility.
Of course, Kira was only a suspect. The school hadn't seriously believed he was guilty—he had no motive, and the method was far too sloppy for someone of his caliber. They'd placed him under house arrest purely as a precaution.
But keeping him locked up was their real objective.
Something had happened during those two days—something Kira didn't know about. And that was the key.
His fingernails were growing uncontrollably again.
Nanami Kira despised anything outside his control. He loathed change. He loathed being unable to follow his schedule. And he still hadn't eaten lunch. His fingernails kept growing.
Kira exhaled softly. His eyes had gone utterly blank.
"Kira-sensei?"
He turned. A boy stood in the doorway.
The light was dim, falling across the newcomer and making him look even grayer, even more hollowed out. He wore a black suit—black jacket, black hat, white necktie—draped in a thin layer of mourning hemp.
The dim light fell on him, bloodless, vacant.
Like a dead man.
"Junpei."
Kira said it quietly.
"Kira-sensei."
Junpei's face was still drained of color. Only his pupils contracted slightly.
"Tell me—why do good people have to suffer?"
Kira frowned. He was in no mood for this. His patience was shot, and he had no interest in listening to a kid's complaints about schoolyard bullying. He answered in a low voice:
"People like to chew on others' pain to taste something sweet—to make themselves feel happier."
He dropped the words and turned away.
"My mother is dead."
His feet locked in place.
He turned back slowly.
The cinema was so gray, like a weathered corpse. The chairs were so red, like blood that hadn't yet dried. Junpei stood beneath the light in his funeral clothes, tears streaming down his face.
"She was murdered—the same way those people died."
"It happened just recently. Right before Itadori told me you'd left the school. I was still happy then."
"But my mother is dead. She died the same way as the people you're suspected of killing."
Junpei was crying, but there was no grief in his eyes—only a dead stillness, flat and gray. He tilted his head and spoke softly:
"Was it you?"