Chapter 13: ESP and the Roulette of Life and Death
"Haha... Hahaha! Worrying about math class? You are truly amazing!"
Midari Ikishima laughed maniacally, as if she had just heard the funniest joke in the world. She grabbed the stack of patterned ESP cards—Zener cards used for testing extrasensory perception—and scattered them across the table with a violent motion, like she was throwing ashes.
"Fine! As long as you play through this round with me, I'll let you go to class! The rules are simple: there are cards with five different patterns here. I'll draw one, and you guess what it is."
She raised the heavy revolver. The dark muzzle gleamed oily under the dim light as it swayed back and forth between my forehead and her own temple.
"If you guess correctly, I'll fire a shot at myself."
"If you guess wrong, I'll fire a shot at you."
"Five rounds in total. How about it? Fair, right? This is the ultimate fifty-fifty choice, the roulette of life and death!"
I looked down at the circles, crosses, waves, squares, and stars on the table.
For an ordinary person, this wasn't just a gamble of luck; it was a psychological execution. Every guess carried a risk of getting shot in the head, a pressure immense enough to make a normal person's mind go blank or cause them to vomit.
But for me, this was a simple task of information processing—easier than primary school arithmetic.
"Let's begin," I said flatly. "Make it quick."
Round One.
Midari reached out and drew a card, pressing it tightly against her chest after taking only a single glance.
"Come on! Guess! What am I holding?" She panted with excitement, her finger already stroking the trigger. Her eyes were unfocused; she didn't care about winning or losing, only the sound of the gunshot at the moment of impact.
I looked up at her.
Whenever a human receives visual information and processes it in the brain, the body produces uncontrollable micro-physiological reactions.
The moment her eyes touched the card, her pupils did not move horizontally, indicating the shape was simple and symmetrical. Furthermore, there was an extremely faint twitch on the left side of her mouth—a subconscious reaction as she suppressed a response to a "sharp" shape.
Not a rounded circle, not the complex waves.
"The star," I provided the answer instantly.
Midari froze for a second, then erupted into even more frantic laughter as she flipped the card.
It was indeed the star.
"Correct! You got it! Does that mean I get a prize?"
She unhesitatingly pressed the muzzle against her temple, her bloodshot eye filled with sickly anticipation.
Click.
The hammer fell heavily, striking an empty chamber.
"Tch... a dud..." She looked disappointed, as if she had just lost a million yen.
Round Two.
She drew again. This time, the pressure of her fingers on the card was 3% greater than before, and the pad of her thumb turned slightly white. This tension usually stems from shapes with stiff, direct lines.
"The square."
"Correct! Hahaha! Again!"
The gun was pressed against her head once more.
Click.
Another empty chamber.
Round Three.
"The waves," I judged, even before she had fully processed the card.
Her eyeballs had performed a subconscious left-to-right scan the moment she took the card—an instinct for reading continuous horizontal lines.
"Correct!"
Click.
Round Four.
"The cross."
Click.
The air in the basement became incredibly eerie.
The masked subordinates nearby were watching in a daze, cold sweat dripping from their chins. This wasn't gambling; it was a unilateral sentencing.
The transfer student named Ayanokoji hadn't even twitched an eyebrow, appearing as though he were reading a script directly from Midari's mind.
Meanwhile, Midari's emotions had shifted from initial excitement to a shuddering mixture of fear and ecstasy. The unpredictable chaos she had craved was being crushed by something called "absolute order."
"Amazing... truly amazing..."
She tremblingly picked up the final card, her voice turning hollow.
"Hey, Ayanokoji... are you a monster? Can you see through my heart?"
Round Five.
This time, I didn't even look at her face; I just stared at the gun.
"The circle."
Midari slowly flipped the card. It was the last one: the circle.
Five guesses, five hits.
According to the rules, she had to fire the fifth shot at herself. This was also the second-to-last chamber remaining in the revolver.
"Only two spots left..." Midari swallowed hard, looking dreamily at the gun in her hand. "Four empty clicks just happened. That means the probability of the bullet being in this position is 50%..."
"No."
I stood up and brushed the dust off my trousers, interrupting her self-indulgence.
"The probability is 0%."
"Ha?"
"When you spun the cylinder earlier, the torque applied by your wrist was approximately 12 Newtons, and the cylinder rotated roughly four and a half times."
I looked at her, my tone hauntingly calm.
"At that rotational speed, the heavier live round undergoes a slight deflection due to centrifugal force. The final stopping position can be calculated."
In that split second earlier, my dynamic vision had already captured that fleeting flash of brass.
"This shot is also empty. The live round is in the next one—the sixth position."
Midari froze.
She had thought this was a high-stakes gamble with her life on the line, a roll of the dice by the gods. But in the eyes of the man before her, was this merely a physics problem with a standard answer?
"What... did you say?"
"If you don't believe me, feel free to pull the trigger. But it's a waste of time."
I picked up my bag and turned toward the door.
From behind me came a click.
As expected, the fifth shot was also empty.