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Sou’s head hurts. It’s a kind of dull throbbing, stiffening his shoulders and drawing a wince from his usually imperceptible features. He’s alone in the boxing ring, asides from Kurumada, and he’s reaching around inside the wall grates, so someone seeing him isn’t an issue. But it’s been so long since he’s let his guard down, even when alone, that it feels bizarre to let that brief flash of honest emotion cross his face, even if it’s something as simple as physical pain.
It’s been a torturous few days, constantly dodging questions, answering to a name that isn’t his and trying not to see zeroes every time he closes his eyes. Of course, things were bad before, but they’ve taken a sharp turn into hellish recently.
First, he finally begins to - not trust, because trust is an entirely too strong word - but to identify with Sara, and truly work together with her. And immediately afterwards, she betrays whatever shaky bond they’d formed by voting to kill Kanna - a child, who’s done nothing but help those around her, who Gashu had cheated into surviving the Sacrifice card, and who Sara had murdered anyway. As far as Sou was concerned, Sara might as well have planted the flower seeds herself.
Then, they stumble their way onto the fourth floor, to be confronted with what Sou can only describe as a living ghost; the real Sou Hiyori, back as if he were an avenging angel, making Sou and the others pay for his own deception.
In comparison, the little puzzles and survival traps they’re confronted with as they explore seem pathetic. Tiny drops in an ocean of non-truths.
Of course, he also doesn’t fear for their supposed allies’ survival in the same way the others do, so they’re nothing more than petty distractions to him. Who cares if the numbers thin a little? It doesn’t matter.
But they make it through with their group one hundred percent intact, thanks to Sara, as always. Her victory rate may read 15.5 but it might as well be 100. There’s no conceivable reality he can picture where she dies in one of the main games - so he’ll just have to take matters into his own hands.
He remembers knowing he’d hate her the second he laid his eyes on that sheet of numbers, frantically tearing them as he’d been ordered, being told again and again by the dolls that he would die, he’d always die.
He’d seen him and Sara, most likely to survive and dead-last, and considered how it would feel to kill the organisation’s strongest competitor, watch their odds be disproved by his hand. This was all before he knew what a genuinely evil person she was, of course. But anyone who could choose his useless little life over Kanna’s was obviously deranged. She really was a murderer.
If it takes Sou sharing that crime to stop her, then so be it. He’ll kill her with a smile on his face.