Two guests at once is a hell of a trip.
With Osoto more or less situated, our guests this week are a pair of teen girls, one who starts out with a Kendo helmet for a head and the other a smartphone. It turns out they know each other, revealed to be respectively a serious dojo heiress and her childhood friend, the flippant ace of the Kendo club.
Their main situation seems to be that a shelf of supplies collapsed on them while they were having an argument over taking Kendo club seriously or not. It would be a tragic enough resolution, with Serious declaring that she’d commit seppuku if she’d gotten her friend killed over their misunderstanding… but Osoto decided to play detective and help the fashionable girl work through her memories.
On Osoto’s side, some of the other hotel residents (namely the monkey dude who… I’m not sure what his deal is) confirm the rules of the Hotel, and that they are firm and extremely literal. Kill somebody in Limbo, and Hell will claim you. Osoto seems to think this is just fine.
As it turns out, while investigating the case of the fashionable girl, who did in fact die from a dumbell to the head, he lied to her and told her that a dead individual could trade fates with a living one by offing them. He also convinces her that her death was outright murder rather than an accident, so when they talk and it turns out that their situation is as such, she springs at the opportunity to, if Osoto weren’t lying, reclaim her life.
She comes to regret this right at the end, when she sees how guilty and devastated her serious friend is, but it’s too late, and the serious one finishes the job, more or less throwing herself on the sword that both their hands are on.
The remaining girl panics, running out of the Hotel when she spots Osoto glaring down at her. And, evidently, her responsibility in this death was direct enough, for the gates of hell open and drag her in as the girl who should have lived crumbles into nothingness – a miserable end for everyone except Osoto, who has (indirectly) gotten to kill a girl, which he enjoys, while also confirming how the rules of the Hotel operate. And he gets away with it, being not culpable for what the girl did and denying having ever spoken to her, even if Neko is on to him.
And now, we have two things that might have been trouble for Tasokare Hotel resolved: an Antagonist and Stakes.
Osoto was kind of set up as “a bad guy”, but since the Hotel by policy doesn’t judge your morals (except for the very dramatic Hell thing, but that’s for a clear transgression against the system itself, not anything anyone did in the world of the living), there was a chance he was just going to be vaguely threatening set dressing.
Now we know that Osoto is willing, perhaps even eager to give other guests a Bad End, and that he has the manipulative chops in order to actually do it, while also seeing that there are at least two fates worse than generic “dead” that a soul could suffer, either being dragged to hell or vanishing into oblivion. This means that every future case will have a lot more riding on it, since we now have seen just how badly things can go, and also that we have more of a meta-plot around Osoto as well as the slow-burn possibilities of solving Neko or Atori.