He realized now that this was the first time he had seen an insane person. But at the time he had no idea what was wrong with her. He only felt inexplicably afraid, as if he'd seen a ghost.

Shuya believed he had asked, "What is this, Ms. Anno?" Ms. Anno only shook her head and replied, "Oh it's nothing." Ms. Anno turned away from Shuya slightly and whispered, "Poor girl." Yoshitoki Kuninobu had already stopped watching a while ago and was preoccupied with eating his tangerine.

As Shuya grew older, this same local report, given at the rate of once every two years at any time without any warning, felt more and more ominous. From a pool of all third-year junior high school students, fifty classes were issued an annual guaranteed death sentence. That was two thousand students if each class consisted of forty students, no, more accurately, that was 1,950 students killed. Worse yet, it wasn't simply a mass execution. The students had to kill each other, competing for the throne of survivor. It was the most terrifying version of musical chairs imaginable.

But...it was impossible to oppose the Program. It was impossible to protest anything the Republic of Greater East Asia did.

So Shuya decided to give in. That was how most of the third-year "reserves" from junior high school dealt with it, right? Okay, our special conscription system? The beautiful homeland of Vigorous Rice Plants? How many junior highs were there in the republic? The birth rate might be declining but your chances were still less than one in eight hundred. In Kagawa Prefecture that meant only one class every other year would be "chosen." Put bluntly, you were just as likely to die in a traffic accident. Given how Shuya never had the luck of the draw, he figured he wouldn't be chosen. Even in the local raffle he'd never win more than a box of tissues. So he'd never be chosen. So fuck off, man.