Battle Royale (1999) by Koushun Takami sounds like a match.
Battle Royale takes place in an alternate timeline; according to the
book's prologue, Japan is a police state, known as the Republic of
Greater East Asia (大東亜共和国 Dai Tōa Kyōwakoku). From time to time, fifty
randomly selected classes of secondary school students are forced to
take arms against one another until only one student in each class
remains. The program was created, supposedly, as a form of military
research, though the outcome of each battle is publicized on local
television. A character discovers that the program is not an
experiment at all, but a means of terrorizing the population. In
theory, after seeing such atrocities, the people will become paranoid
and divided, preventing another rebellion.
Under the guise of a "study trip", a group of students from Shiroiwa
Junior High School (城岩中学校 Shiroiwa Chūgakkō), a junior high school
operated by the fictional town of Shiroiwa (in Kagawa Prefecture), are
corralled onto a bus and gassed, only to awaken in a school on an
isolated, vacated island, wearing metal collars around their necks.
After being briefed about the program, the students are issued
survival packs (along with a random weapon or a tool) and sent out
onto the island one by one. While most of the students receive guns
and knives, some students acquire relatively useless items like
boomerangs, some common dartboard darts, or a fork. In some cases,
instead of a weapon, the student receives a tool; Hiroki Sugimura
finds a radar device that tracks nearby students, and Toshinori Oda
receives a bulletproof vest.
To make sure the students obey the rules and kill each other, the
metal collars around their necks track their positions, and will
explode if they linger in a "Forbidden Zone" or attempt to remove the
collars. The Forbidden Zones are randomly chosen areas of the map that
increase in number as time goes on, re-sculpting and shrinking the
battlefield and forcing the students to move around. The collars
secretly transmit sound back to the organizers of the game, allowing
them to hear the students' conversations, root out escape plans, and
log their activities. The students are also given a time limit. If no
one is killed in 3 days, all of the collars will be detonated
simultaneously, and there will be no winner. It is mentioned that only
0.5% of Programs end in this fashion.
In the end, only four students remain: Shuya Nanahara, Noriko
Nakagawa, Shogo Kawada, and antagonist Kazuo Kiriyama. There is a car
chase and shootout between the three main characters and Kazuo is
killed. Shogo fakes Shuya and Noriko's deaths and boards a ship with
the soldiers and Sakamochi. When Sakamochi reveals that Shuya and
Noriko are alive and attempts to execute Shogo, Shogo kills him. Shuya
and Noriko board the ship and kill the soldiers on board and meet up
with Shogo, who succumbs to his own wounds and dies. Heeding Shogo's
advice to "show no mercy," Shuya and Noriko escape to the mainland,
where they become fugitives.
Very Hunger Games-eque, has a lot of adaptations- Manga and Movies.
