In a circular linked list, among the nodes that remain in the list, which…

Concept: A circular linked list is defined by one invariant: every node's next pointer always points to another node inside the same list — including the last node, whose next points back to the head — so at no point does any node's next ever hold NULL. This is exactly what distinguishes a circular list from a linear, NULL-terminated list.

Application: trace the deletion on a concrete 3-node circular list A → B → C → (back to A), where C is currently the last node:

1. Locate the node whose next currently points at the last node C — here that is B, the second-to-last node.

2. Deallocate C from memory; C is no longer part of the list once this step completes.

3. Redirect B's next pointer away from the removed C and toward the head node A, so B becomes the new last node and the loop stays unbroken.

4. At every step, the pointer that changes (B's next) is set to point at another node (A), never to NULL; the only pointer removed from existence altogether is C's own, along with C itself.

Cross-check: Contrast this with a linear (non-circular) list, where deleting the tail sets the new tail's next to NULL because the list must terminate somewhere. A circular list never terminates, so this deletion — or the deletion of any node — never introduces a NULL pointer into the structure; the affected pointer is always retargeted to another node, never cleared.

Edge case: if the head node itself happens to be the node immediately before the last node — which happens only when exactly two nodes remain — deleting the last node redirects the head's own next pointer to itself, forming a one-node loop. That pointer still targets a valid node (itself), so it is still never NULL.

This also resolves why 'Last node' is not the answer here: some implementations additionally clear a node's own next pointer to NULL as a defensive step immediately before freeing it, but that node is no longer part of the list once it is deleted — so this is a detail of deallocated memory, not a next pointer belonging to any node that remains in the circular list. The question asks about nodes within the list, where the 'no NULL pointer' invariant always holds.