If they survive this

Chapter 8: Don't Ask Me Questions I Don't Have The Answers To

There was a hush over the courtroom as everyone tried to comprehend Shirogane's words even the inside of the exisal was miraculously quiet as both Ouma and Momota were too shocked and confused to even argue with each other. Which just went to show how completely lost they both were.

Ouma tended to pride himself on typically being one of the smartest people in the room at all times so not knowing what was going on wasn't an enjoyable experience for him. His ability to analyze any situation wasn't even really a pride thing it was just a fact. He'd always been good at reading people and analyzing information and data, scarily good. To the point where he could almost predict exactly how someone would react in nearly any given situation. That was one of the reasons why telling someone they weren't 'boring' was the greatest compliments that he could ever give them.

He had discovered at an early age were if you built up a big enough database of personalities and behavior patterns that you could predict what others could do, and while predicting what others would do or trick them into reacting in ways that he just *knew* they would, had been fun at first everything quickly became well predictable for him and after some time that predictability became boredom.

Boredom was like a poison eating away at him and his mind. That was what Ouma had decided back when he thought that it would be that boredom that would kill him. That was before he found the many, many other more dangerous things that wanted to kill him, though even now he sometimes felt as if boredom would kill him. If Ouma had let his boredom consume him he might as well have let something else kill him.

There were two things that had the possibility to save him from boredom when he was younger though. The first was a feeling of falling into nothingness, the unpredictability of people when they were pushed to the brink fed by their darkest impulses acting in ways they never would in normal society. He's later discovered that this feeling could be accurately called despair which might be what the others had been talking about in the trial? But regardless at the time he discovered it, it didn't matter what it was called Ouma didn't like it.

Even if what they did could surprise him Ouma did not like people getting hurt after all. Hurting others was what was really boring in his opinion. That was what his younger self-had felt and as he got older it was obvious that relying on despair to dissipate boredom was an awful idea anyway because then if there was enough despair in the world then despair itself would become predictable.

The second thing that saved Ouma from his boredom was the thing that usually saved Ouma, himself.

When he was younger Ouma often felt like he was tossed around by fate a lot everything in his life decided by the adults around him that couldn't give a shit about him, but there was one thing in his life that Ouma could control, himself. He found that if he acted in ways that others weren't expecting then they themselves would subconsciously deviate from the expected normal pattern.

So teasing people and playing pranks made his life fun and most importantly not boring.

But considering he was the one putting in this effort it still made people who could surprise him on their own, people who could act in ways he never expected them too like Akamatsu, Saihara and still unbelievably Momota incredibly rare and precious finds.

Ouma liked to think his way of playing pranks and annoying people was the superior way of elevating boredom but since this game had started Ouma often wondered if the person that designed this killing game had had a similar problem to himself and went with the despair option.

After all the unpredictability of the killing game was one of its most terrifying aspects. It was near impossible to predict what people would do when pushed to the edge just look at his own actions! While the liar did like being surprised his need to also have control since so much of his life has lacked it destroyed any enjoyment that he could ever have for this sick game.