Minegishi Is Assassinated at Morioka Station

Minegishi Is Assassinated at Morioka Station is the sudden platform attack that brings Minegishi’s presence in the train’s unfolding violence to an end. Seen by Nanao and Maria just as they are leaving, the collapse is at once physical fact and unanswered question: Minegishi is down, a needle is found in his back, and the Hornet becomes the leading suspect, but no one witnesses the attack itself.

The Collapse on the Platform

Nanao and Maria are on their way to the escalator when a crash sounds behind them. Its force reaches Nanao as more than noise: he senses a tremor, as if something enormous has fallen, and feels the gravity of an event before he knows what has happened. A voice cries out. When he turns, the men in black suits are crouched on the platform, trying to support Minegishi. The man who had been standing so solidly is now on the ground, toppled like a broken wooden doll.

The scene gives the attack a stark before and after. Nanao sees Minegishi upright in the moment immediately preceding the collapse, then sees the men gathered around him; the decisive act itself remains outside his view. The disturbance draws a crowd, and someone shouts that something is stuck in Minegishi’s back. Another voice identifies it as a needle. The weapon is thus disclosed through the confused testimony of people at the scene, not through a clear account of who used it or how.

Suspicion Falls on the Hornet

Nanao and Maria do not stay to investigate. Maria urges him to leave, and he agrees that there is nothing to be gained by remaining. As they descend the escalator, he asks whether the Hornet was responsible. Maria initially misunderstands the name as referring to the insect; once she recognizes that he means the poisoner, she considers the possibility. Her reasoning turns on the Hornet’s prior notoriety for killing Terahara: an attack on Minegishi, she suggests, might be an attempt to add another prominent target to that record.

The possibility fits the needle and the Hornet’s reputation, but the conversation does not establish the assassin’s identity. Maria frames the theory as speculation, not confirmed knowledge, and the narration supplies no eyewitness who saw the attacker. Her further observation—that people may return to former successes when they have run out of ideas—casts the suspected strike as a repetition of an earlier achievement. That reading gives the attack a possible logic, while leaving its author and immediate circumstances unresolved.

Departure and the Search for Meaning

By the time Nanao and Maria reach the bottom of the escalator, police, railway staff, and security personnel are running in the opposite direction, toward the platform. Their response suggests that the disturbance has reached the authorities, whether through the events on the train or Minegishi’s collapse. Yet they may not know precisely what has happened, and Nanao and Maria are already moving away from the scene. The crowd and approaching officials mark the beginning of a public response, not an investigation whose findings the passage records.

The collapse also changes how Nanao thinks about the people connected to the violence. He wonders whether the conductor might be one of the Hornets and whether that man knows his partner is dead. Nanao himself killed her, yet he feels a pang of sadness for the man and imagines a band with one member missing, waiting in vain for her return. This thought does not solve Minegishi’s killing; instead, it places Nanao’s suspicion inside a chain of losses in which even an enemy’s grief can register. Maria then brings him back to a practical question: what happened to the suitcase he had been carrying?

The Train’s Other Violence

A later account of the events at Morioka adds a separate strand to the aftermath. Multiple men with gunshot wounds are found around car eight, screaming in pain; each has been shot through both shoulders and both legs, leaving them unable to move. Nanao concludes that the Kimura couple must have shot their way out of the train while it was crowded with Minegishi’s men. He has difficulty picturing the older couple repeatedly placing bullets in exactly the same locations, as if applying an official stamp, but judges that this must be what happened.

Those wounded men are not presented as the attackers who brought Minegishi down: their injuries are attributed to the Kimura couple’s escape, while the needle in Minegishi’s back points Nanao and Maria toward the Hornet. The two episodes therefore converge at Morioka without becoming the same action. Minegishi’s collapse exposes the vulnerability of a powerful figure amid the broader train conflict; the carefully repeated shots show the Kimura couple forcing a way out through his armed men. The station becomes the point where these separate consequences surface, while the identity of Minegishi’s assassin remains a suspicion rather than a witnessed fact.