"Holy crap…"
Moe spent nearly two minutes dragging elementary-school math out of the back of her memory, opened the calculator on her phone, checked the numbers once, then checked them again.
Only then did she finally understand the so-called "guaranteed winning method."
And it really was guaranteed.
Truly.
As long as they formed a group of eight people, victory at the end became almost inevitable.
Even a minority-rule game could be won as a team.
At that moment, Moe finally understood what Petelgeuse meant in Re:Zero whenever he kept saying that his brain was trembling. So that was what it felt like. To understand the structure of a cruel game, to see the hidden logic behind it, and then to discover a way to break it… the sensation was absurdly satisfying.
Of course, within the story itself, things were not that simple.
The protagonist, Shinichi, had only been able to enter the game because one of the contestants had been deceived after winning ten million yen in the first round. Shinichi had taken that person's place.
In other words, among the twenty-two participants, there was a dangerous player hiding in plain sight. Even if that person lost, they still had the ten million yen they had swindled from someone else, enough to offset their own debt.
If, among the eight people Shinichi had gathered, that person happened to be included - someone who had never feared losing or falling into debt from the very beginning - then they would become an unstable variable.
They might change sides halfway through, sabotage the plan, use some underhanded trick to monopolize the entire prize, and cause the team strategy to collapse completely.
After all, once people know they have a way out, they stop holding back. And in a game like that, someone with no fear could easily become reckless, even deranged.
To make sure nothing went wrong, Shinichi had to find eight people he could trust. More than that, he had to make sure the hidden player was excluded from the group.
At the end of the third episode, the protagonist's group of eight was finally complete.
Then came the first vote.
10–12.
Shinichi and Chisa were lucky. Both of them were among the ten winners.
But right at the end of the third episode, even after the first round concluded perfectly and the result turned out exactly as planned, Shinichi faced the camera again with that unbearably smug expression and said one more line.
"I have a feeling something is wrong. Everyone… everyone is wrong."
The first vote was 10–12. If the next vote is 4–6, then this game will have entered the worst possible scenario.
It was another outrageous cliffhanger.
Moe's head felt dizzy.
Just understanding the rules of the minority-rule game and Shinichi's guaranteed winning method had already drained every brain cell she had left.
For people who had studied logic or were good at math, Shinichi's group-of-eight method might not have been that hard to grasp. But how many ordinary viewers of Japanese dramas were actually good at that kind of thing?
Most of them were regular working adults who had left school years ago.
And on top of that, the third episode had left behind another mystery.
Why would the situation become the worst possible scenario if the first round was 10–12 and the second round was 4–6?
Wasn't that one of the voting outcomes Shinichi himself had predicted in his simulation?
Moe did not understand.
She truly did not understand.
She had originally planned to sleep. But once she lay down, the more she thought about it, the more unsettled she became. Every time she closed her eyes, the numbers 10–12, 4–6, and 1–3 floated up in her mind like a curse.
"I'll check the forum. Maybe someone has already figured out what happens next."
Once that thought appeared, there was no way she could fall asleep.
However, when she opened the comment section of the Kōchi Alliance's official account on the NatsuYume forum, what she found was complete chaos.
"Can someone explain the rules of the minority-rule game? I don't get it, but it's really fun to watch."
"The actor playing Shinichi is called Natsuki, right? Has he been in any other dramas before?"
"Sora is insane. He's just a high school graduate who makes anime, so why is he this smart? I can barely understand the minority-rule game while watching it on TV. How did he even come up with this setup?"
"How did Kantoku Naofumi get this strong? Wasn't he known as the king of trash productions in the Kōchi Alliance before this cour? How did he suddenly direct such a good drama?"
"Isn't it possible that Game of Fraud would be enjoyable as long as any above-average Kantoku handled it? It's low-budget, has no action scenes, and almost everything happens either in a small room or a large room. The whole crew probably only has a few dozen people. The real appeal is Shinichi acting like a genius and the plot itself. Honestly, I don't think the directing skill matters that much here."
"Why does the game enter the worst possible situation if the second-round score is 4–6? What's so bad about 4–6?"
"My understanding is that it's too extreme. In the first round, the vote could end in all sorts of ways: 1–21, 2–20, 3–19, all the way to 10–12, plus an 11–11 tie. With so many possibilities, landing exactly on 10–12, the result with the fewest eliminated players, already has a one-in-eleven chance. Honestly, that's a little suspicious. And if the second round becomes 4–6, again the result with the fewest eliminated players, that has a one-in-five chance. Anyone who was decent at middle-school math knows that the combined probability is one in fifty-five. Considering there's a Mr. X inside the game, someone who scammed another person out of ten million yen, someone with a get-out-of-death card who isn't afraid to lose… a one-in-fifty-five chance doesn't look like coincidence. It looks like manipulation."
"What if someone else also realized the guaranteed winning method with a group of eight? Then…"
"…"
"Holy crap. I get it now."
"That one sentence woke me up. I understand. If there are two groups of eight using this method to clear the game, then in the first round, the only non-tie winning scores possible are 10–12 or 9–13. That's because each of the two groups would assign four people to 'yes' and four to 'no.' Added together, the two voting pools become 8–8. For the remaining six unaffiliated players to pass the first round, they would have to split their votes either 1–5 or 2–4. Add that to the earlier 8–8, and you get exactly the two outcomes I mentioned."
"So if that guess is correct, then in the second round there would be ten people left: eight total members from the two groups, plus two outsiders. The two teams using group strategy would inevitably split their members 4–4 between the two voting pools. As for the two outsiders, they would be doomed. As long as the tie repeats enough times, there will eventually be one round where both of them vote for the same side, creating a 4–6 result and eliminating them."
"After that, in the third round, the four remaining members of the two teams will keep tying forever. No winner will ever appear."
"Why would the four remaining members keep tying forever?"
"Because this is a minority-rule game. Once only four people are left in the third round, the only way to win is a 1–3 result. If you know what your teammate voted for, you absolutely can't vote the same way, or you'll be eliminated together. But the four players from the two teams will all think like that. So no matter how many times they vote again, the result will always be 2–2. An eternal tie."
"That's the worst-case scenario Shinichi was talking about. In other words, the group-of-eight guaranteed winning method only works if there is just one group using it. If, among the twenty-two participants, there are two or more groups trying the same strategy, then there will be no winner at all."
"What a complicated drama, damn. If I tried to figure this out on my own, I could break my head open and still never imagine that a simple minority-rule game could have this many layers."
"Sora is smart, but the continuation got predicted after all. What a shame."
"But are all these guesses we're making here really going to be the plot of episode four? What if we're on the second floor while Sora is already up in the stratosphere?"
"Relax. There's no way episode four can be more complicated than this, right? Besides, figuring out that there are two teams using the eight-person method probably isn't even the main point of the continuation. The real problem is, once they reach the third round and fall into an infinite tie, how do they break the deadlock? I can't think of anything."
Moe spent half an hour reading the forum. By the time she finally put down her phone, her heart was racing and her head hurt.
She had never imagined that watching a television drama would force her to dig up probability knowledge buried since school.
Meanwhile, elsewhere, Kantoku Naofumi from Kōchi Alliance TV was also reading the online comments from the drama's fans.
"Wait… so the minority-rule match in this series could still develop like that?"
Naofumi's sturdy build contrasted sharply with the utterly confused look on his face, making him appear strangely adorable.
"But the actual direction of the script is even more complex and more exciting than this two-team theory… Could it be that Kantoku Sora already predicted that, once the drama reached this point, the audience would anticipate this kind of development? Did he predict the viewers' prediction, and that's why the fourth episode script turned out the way it did?"
The more Naofumi thought about it, the more likely it seemed.
Little by little, he began to feel genuine admiration for the young man he had only met three times during the script handoff and casting meetings.
Putting everything else aside, the mere existence of the Game of Fraud script was enough to prove that the boy's intelligence was extraordinary.
"As expected of you, Kantoku Sora."
As he thought that, Naofumi also felt secretly relieved that Sora had not taken this script and turned it into an anime.
Otherwise, in this cour's Japanese drama market, what space would be left for Naofumi?
The next day, the third episode of Game of Fraud recorded a 4.87% viewership rating.
The series, which had debuted in sixth place among dramas of the cour, had now climbed directly to second.
Its score had also risen from 9.1 at the beginning to 9.3, ranking first among all dramas that had premiered this season.
While anime media outlets continued trying to downplay Sora, television media outlets were praising him like mad.
The contradiction was so chaotic that professionals across the Japanese television industry were left completely bewildered.
What exactly was Sora trying to do?
And you media outlets… what exactly had you been reporting for the past month?
It looked like collective schizophrenia.
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