The broadcast began at nine o'clock in the evening, prime time. It was presented not as a police bulletin, but as a special segment on a popular human-interest news program. The production was a masterpiece of emotional manipulation, a testament to the cold, ruthless genius of Miss Marple's design.
The subject was a man named Kenji Tanaka, a low-level yakuza enforcer recently apprehended after a botched robbery. The footage showed him in a stark hospital bed, his arm in a cast, his face a canvas of pain and profound regret. The camera lingered on the tears welling in his eyes as he spoke not of his crimes, but of his five-year-old daughter.
"I know what I did was wrong," he whispered, his voice hoarse and broken. "I deserve to be punished. But my little Hana… she doesn't understand. She just wants her papa to come home and read her a story."
The segment cut to a photograph of a smiling little girl holding a crayon drawing of her family. Then, back to the hospital, where the man was now openly weeping, his pleas directed not to the justice system, but to the heavens.
"Please, Kira… if you can hear me," he begged, his face and name clear as day for the entire world to see. "I will spend the rest of my life in a cell. I will pay for what I have done. Just… let me live. Let me live so my daughter doesn't have to grow up alone."
In the hotel suite, the air was thick with a grim, funereal silence. The detectives watched their own cruel theatre play out, the weight of their actions heavy upon them. Watson, the physician, could not watch, his gaze fixed on the floor. Poirot stared at the screen, his face a mask of distaste for this chaotic and emotional gambit. Even L was perfectly still, his usual fidgeting ceased, his eyes locked on the broadcast. They were poking a god with a stick, and no one knew how it would react.
The segment ended. On a split screen, the broadcast showed the live, unblinking eye of a camera fixed on Kenji Tanaka in his hospital bed. The trap was set. The world was watching.
One minute passed. The man in the bed sobbed quietly.
The task force held its collective breath. This was it. The moment of truth. Had they found the flaw in Kira's divinity? Had they found the flicker of human pity, the hole in the bucket?
Five minutes passed. The man's sobs subsided into a weary, exhausted silence.
Ten minutes. The medical monitors beeped with a steady, monotonous rhythm.
Nothing.
A slow, creeping sense of anticlimax, of profound failure, began to fill the room.
"It appears," Holmes said at last, his voice a low, disappointed rumble, "that our quarry is not moved by such sentimental displays. His heart is, as we may have suspected, made of pure ice."
"The plan has failed," Poirot sighed, a note of weary relief in his voice. "We have our answer. There is no humanity to appeal to. He is a machine of pure logic."
They believed they had lost the battle, but had at least learned something valuable about their enemy. They thought they understood the game.
They had no idea.
It was Connor who saw it first. His calm, synthetic voice was the first tremor of the coming earthquake. "Anomalous event detected," he said, his LED flickering from blue to yellow. "A priority news alert has been issued. The CEO of Gen-Tech Industries, Haruto Ishikawa, has died of a sudden heart attack during a board meeting in Osaka."
Before anyone could process this, another alert came in.
"Second anomalous event," Connor announced, his voice rising in urgency. "Colombian authorities are reporting that the cartel leader, Hector 'El Martillo' Vargas, has died of a heart attack inside his maximum-security compound."
And then the deluge began. From across the globe, a storm of breaking news alerts flooded their screens. A Russian arms dealer under FSB protection in Moscow. A human trafficking kingpin on the FBI's Most Wanted list, found dead in his panic room in Miami. A corrupt senator in the Philippines. A triad boss in Hong Kong. Twelve of the world's most untouchable, high-profile criminals, figures who had been laughing at the law for decades, all dead from a heart attack. All within the same hour. All while the world, and the task force, had been distracted by the pathetic, tearful plea of a single, low-level thug.
The trap had not just been avoided. It had been used against them. Their carefully crafted experiment had been nothing but a smokescreen, a diversion to occupy the children while the real work was being done.
Light Yagami leaned back in his chair, a slow, triumphant smile gracing his features. He had watched their pathetic little broadcast, and he had been filled with a profound, almost nauseating, contempt.
Fools, he thought, the word a symphony of scorn in his mind. Did they really think they could test me? Me? With such a cheap, sentimental, utterly human ploy? Did they think a god could be swayed by the tears of a single, worthless insect?
He had seen the trap for exactly what it was. A crude, emotional snare, designed to provoke him into an illogical act. To kill the man would be to admit that their pathetic morality play had an effect on him. To spare him would be a victory for them.
So he had chosen a third option. He had refused to play their game at all.
While they were hunched over their monitors, waiting for him to flinch, he had opened his Death Note. He had pulled up the list he had been curating for weeks, a list of true monsters, the ones so powerful, so protected, that no police force on earth could touch them. And with a calm, steady hand, he had brought them all to justice. One name after another. It was the single most audacious and significant act of judgment he had ever committed.
He turned to a new document on his computer. It was time to make his statement. To turn their failed trap into his greatest victory.
Back in the hotel suite, amidst the chaos and the dawning horror, a final message arrived. It was not a private communication. It was a text file, sent simultaneously to every major news network on the planet. L projected it onto the main screen.
To the so-called detectives who believe they can test a god with a puppet show:
Your efforts are noted. And they are beneath contempt.
Tonight, while you wasted the world's time weeping for one pathetic, insignificant criminal, I have passed my judgment upon twelve true monsters. Men your governments were too weak, too corrupt, or too incompetent to ever bring to justice.
Haruto Ishikawa, who poisoned a town's water supply for profit.
Hector Vargas, who enslaved thousands through the drug trade.
(The list continued, naming all twelve, and their most heinous crimes.)
Do not presume to understand the nature of my justice with your petty, sentimental games. Your trap was not a trap. It was a useful distraction.
And I thank you for it.
- Kira
The message was a public, global, jaw-dropping humiliation. They had not just been outsmarted. They had been used. Their own plan, their own resources, had been turned into an instrument of Kira's will.
The detectives stood in stunned silence, the sheer scale of their defeat washing over them. Light Yagami had not fallen into their trap. He had watched them set it, and then, from his untouchable mountaintop, he had used the light from their own campfire to burn down the whole world around them.
L stared at the screen, his face a perfect, blank canvas. He did not speak. He did not move. He had lost. No, it was worse than that. He had been so thoroughly, so contemptuously, and so publicly outplayed that it was as if he had never been in the game at all.