Book 3: Chapter 4: Introduction
THE SILENT WARFARE
On the 4th day on the uninhabited island, changes started to occur little by little and we reached a turning point. I went deaf to the complaints yelled around but then, at some point, I realized that non-stop laughter filled the place. We added some Indian corn we found to the fishes Ike and others caught. Every resistance against drinking the river’s water disappeared too. Some things, like the fruits that my classmates found, helped us in saving more points than we planned to get us through the trial.
Currently, the points used amounted to about 100 points, including setbacks like retirement. If we continued smoothly, we’d probably be able to finish the trial with a lot of points remaining. If we looked at D Class’s situation before the start of the trial, then this number was a perfectly satisfactory numeric value. Even Yukimura, who was the most hostile and opposing party, wouldn’t complain. Yes, not even one student was unsatisfied with this result.
I suddenly got a tingling feeling in my head and it hurt.
I secretly borrowed a ballpoint pen and put it in my pocket together with the folded paper. Then I left the base camp. I got started trying to know the situation of the island which I still couldn’t grasp.
This might only be my personal guess but, when we break down this special trial, we'd see that 80% of it was a defensive test that has to confirm whether there was a cooperative relationship within the class. And the remaining 20% suggests that it’s a test of scouting against other classes and attacking them to interfere with their information-gathering ability.
However, this 8:2 proportion is not directly reflected in the trial’s results. Or rather, I think it’s only that 20% that greatly influenced the results.
We’d already grasped the plan of each class. On this topic, we decided what to do. Simply attack the other classes.
So, I’d start moving to the A class area. As D class moved around the riverside, A class’s center of activity was probably the cave area.