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Yui Samidare still remembers the events leading up to the moment she died.
One of her girlfriend’s best friends asked the two of them to look into certain mysteries surrounding Hope’s Peak. Her girlfriend, Chisa, took on a teaching internship that quickly became a full role so that she could do some light digging, with the understanding that if things got too dangerous, Yui would be called in. Of course, Yui wasn’t unknown to the headmaster the way that Chisa herself was, which meant Chisa could get in deeper than Yui ever could. Still – there wasn’t much to see that they hadn’t already, and even Chisa (and her best friend’s boyfriend) weren’t able to find much.
Then, a few months before the end of the school year, one of Chisa’s students, Chiaki Nanami, hired Yui to look into a missing person’s case. A fellow student (from the Reserve Course, oddly enough) disappeared halfway through the school year, shortly after the murders of two of the other students. (Yui wanted to ask Kyoko to look into those, but she knew better. Besides, the school covered all of that up, and any attempt from a real detective wanting to poke their nose into things…. Well.)
Yui finally decided to pull some strings and step into her own internship, presiding over Kyoko’s class.
She…wasn’t very good at it.
But they were good kids, all of them. A little troublesome at times, often at odds with one another, more than a few egos – but that’s Hope’s Peak! She’d graduated from here, too, after all. She knew what it was like! And every single one of them knew about her relationship with Chisa, a fair few of them guessed at her semi-familial relationship with Kyoko, and two of them in particular kept giving her advice about ways she could propose. One of those was harmless, but the other….
Junko Enoshima always felt familiar to her, but she was never able to put her finger on why.
Now she knows.
When Mikan disappeared – no, not disappeared, simply did not show up to class for multiple days – Yui searched for her, too. This was easier; people had seen Mikan much more recently than they’d seen Hajime, and all routes to Hajime pointed towards Hope’s Peak in a way that seemed…bad. (Kyoko helped look for him. Then her father asked her to look for someone named Izuru, and Kyoko asked Yui to join her – not because Kyoko wasn’t a good enough detective in her own right, but because disappearances and missing persons was Yui’s specialty. Kyoko eventually got distracted with the murders of the student council members, and Yui found—
Sometimes, it feels like Junko is lying to her.)
Yui found Mikan. She found Mikan and Hajime and Izuru because Hajime and Izuru were one and the same, and she has always been a sacrificial lamb for someone else’s slaughter, so of course, it would be that way, too, when she sent the other students away and stayed behind.
But Junko didn’t attack her. Just tilted her head to one side and murmured, “Yui onii-sama, I believe you still owe me a kiss.”
Now she knows.
Chiaki dies to break her classmates.
But Chisa’s death would not break Yui in the same way that Yui’s death would not break Chisa.
It’s the impossible choices that break Yui. She cannot save anyone, not even Junko herself, but she’ll try. Because Junko could be good. Lico could be good. She’d seen it. Maybe, if she’d done a little better, then Junko – then Lico—
Yui knows and says nothing, and the saying nothing breaks her.
Chisa knows that something is wrong that Yui won’t say, and that unspoken thing between them breaks them both.
When Yui forgets everything in the Killing Game that Junko starts, she remembers three people: Kyoko, Lico, and Chisa. She doesn’t know why she remembers them. The new headmaster tells her to kill someone to save them.
(Yui is a sacrificial lamb. She dies instead, unaware just how much of this Game was her design.)