Usogui - Vol. 22 Ch. 236 - Heihaizi

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Just throwing in my two cents: Usogui is the "eldest in the family", the hair seems to point to that at least
 
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Honestly that backstory is just horrifying to think about, and feels like something that could very well be real.

So what the hell is going on now? It's hard to tell just what Baku and Suteguma expected and didn't expect up until this point.

Complete shot in the dark here
Suteguma chose 14 as a bluff as a means to determine if Baku knew what the original input was. When Baku had no reaction to it, he may have determined that Baku didn't know what the input number was. This was true, at that given moment. But the moment the Dotty got closed for the third round, Baku knew what the input was, and more than that, he also was fairly certain about his answer. I don't think Marco was told to actually input 13, or that Baku actually believed the answer was 13. This is ultimately Baku's final misdirection to get out of the final Dotty round alive. The point of this round was to keep Suteguma from setting Hyougo and Leo after Marco once more.
 
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I just realized, since Usogui sort of predicted losing his eye, isn't it possible he might have make a copy of it beforehand? He would have to somehow copy the whole eye though, since it's a retina scan. In real world, this would be hard to do, but not completely impossible. So he might have sent Marco to enter it, as part of the bluff.

In any case, there is no way in hell Usogui thought 13 is correct when entering it.
 
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@rooster I actually could see something super insane like this. Nowa mentioned how Usogui could also enter 15, so I bet Marco was instructed to enter both 13 and another number using something like this method, and the reason Usogui wanted to go for a 3rd Dotty was to make sure Hyugo and Leo wouldn't go after Marco on his way up, and I imagine that this allowed Marco to set something up that would prevent Leo and Hyugo interfering if they wanted to.
 
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@gaaaaaa I think 15 is the number Suteguma will guess now in Dotty, which will be incorrect, so he will go up and enter 16, which will be incorrect and Usogui will win with 17.
 
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Baku better join the BAU, his profiling was like 90% correct, damn.

I won't dive into details since it would be spoilers, but speaking as a person who read the entire manga raw, you can pinpoint Suteguma and Baku's number using the hints shown until now.
 
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I think im gonna reread this arc tomorrow to clear my mind a bit. Its a complex ride.
 
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@tack215

Ah, now that you've said that, I'm gonna spend way too much time trying to figure it out! At least this arc is hype enough to justify rereading carefully.
--

[No spoilers below, just condensing the post.]

About Baku using 13 as a bait
I wonder if something like this is allowed: saying 13 or another number even though it was implicitly disqualified by other guesses? They said 'impossible' guesses weren't allowed based on your own number of beads, but would the Dotty detect guesses that have been ruled out by others guesses? For example, what if Baku guessed 13 to make Suteguma think he has 6~9 beads when he actually has 3~5?

Also, if it does factor in the Dotty guesses, would it even factor in the incorrect input '8' password guess (since enemy players shouldn't know of it normally)? If it doesn't, then Baku could have 4-5 beads while guessing the 'valid' 13 which was crossed out by the '8' guess. This would make it a lot harder for Suteguma to rule down the actual number of beads and make bad guesses.

Suteguma's ability speculation
I think this chapter and the previous chapter gave some hints as to what Suteguma's "ability" is. I'm not too confident though, it could just be crackpot theory, but I'm thinking that his ability is in his eyes and is related to facial agnosia, or face blindness, which is when you can't recognize people's faces.

So, based on his actions up until now in the Dotty & Poker game, I think it's likely that his ability must be either visual or hearing related. Somehow, he is able to gain information about the opponent's cards/beads very easily. However, how could being face blind even help achieve this? I think the hint lies in this chapter, there were a few instances of 'blurry' faces, more interestingly the old man's at the start was 'blurred', but later turned 'unblurred' . What if, his facial agnosia has some sort of condition to seeing a 'blurred face', and that can act as some sort of tell? One hypothesis would be it shows whether someone is being truthful, or lying at the moment? Like his facial agnosia can pick up extremely small movements of people's faces when they make lies or are tense. Using that, he could tell when someone is bluffing in Poker, which means they have a weak hand, (or if they aren't, they have a strong hand), and in the Dotty game, combined with each his 'number' speed in the first round, could potentially see whether or not someone is overly tense to a number.

It's a bit of a stretch, and I think there could be more complexity to the 'face blurring' that more elegantly explains it, this chapter alludes a lot about Suteguma and his ability but I haven't quite understood how to fit it in the theory yet.

Suteguma's weakness speculation
Again, related to his eyes. I noticed two weird things in particular:
1) Suteguma's left eye seems to squint at a crucial moment: Imgur Link.
It happened in the poker game when he lost that one round, and it may have happened two times in this Dotty game, although the evidence is a bit weak.

2) Baku, while trying to "read" Suteguma in the round 2 of Dotty (Chapter 228), turned his back to him twice, and each time afterwards he looked at Suteguma, trying to get a reaction. Was he trying to prevent Suteguma from seeing his own face? Or trying to trigger something else...? The second time he turned back is when he got the 'small reaction' from Suteguma.

I'm not too sure what to think of it all. It might be that his facial agnosia is partial in one eye or something, or that when his eye is strained, his ability isn't working for that one brief moment..?

This arc has so much mystery and build-up! Still haven't even gotten to thinking about what their real bead counts are.
 
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@catx3 You make some pretty interesting points. One thing I want to clarify is that Suteguma's "ability" isn't that complicated; he can instinctively tell the people he can win against(either physically or psychologically) from those who are more powerful than him. If Suteguma can see their faces, then it means that the person in particular is "prey" for him. This ability is pretty much essential to animals which aren't at the top of the food chain, hence the narration described the ability as a "means of survival that man has long forgotten". I think the translation was a bit wonky for this chapter.
 
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The events of his backstory and the way they were told reminds me of Gyro.

Kinda makes me wonder how they lined up chronologically regarding actual release dates.
 
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@catx3 Yeah, I was about to say what @tack215 said before me. Fairly evident that his ability simply subconsciously distinguishes between people he can beat (or prey) and the people who he can't (at least right now). What's also interesting is the fact that his "elder brother" or whoever that was, was the only child shown who wasn't prey (or possible prey, I guess) from Suteguma's viewpoint, which makes me wonder why... Additionally: is that really the extent of Suteguma's ability? This just seems to me like a subconscious signaling system to help Suteguma determine whether or not he can win, but it's not actually helping him to win concretely. In physical scenarios I can see where that might be enough but when it comes to mind games I wonder how that even works, especially since he beat that old guy at the poker game who is supposed to be fairly experienced, and he did so in a peculiar manner as well. Hmm... I suppose it could work if the ability was constantly updating itself, as in, he could see the face of his opponent on all the poker rounds where he had better hands (or he could win in general), and he couldn't see their face in those rounds where he couldn't win (which would explain the small tick of Suteguma's eye in that one round where he couldn't win, imo, since the old guy's face changed from being visible to blurry again, presumably in the middle of the round). I suppose we shall see.

Also, those times when Usogui showed his back to Suteguma point towards him already having figured out Suteguma's ability or maybe at least his prosopagnosia. How that plays into his plan I'm not entirely sure...

Honestly I was expecting this to happen. Usogui doesn't strike me as the kind of person who would kill someone simply because of a grudge, and his course of action as it has been analyzed so far seemed too simple for me. It would make no sense for him to force a 3rd round of Dotty if he had already figured out Suteguma's number with 100% certainty, especially since whatever he told Marco to do on the upper floors worked so well that he even figured out Hyougo's wrongly inputted number (presumably). So he could've just walked to the top with Marco and input the correct number. It wouldn't be efficient at all, that's not how Usogui does things. 13 was a feint, in order to make Suteguma think he had one of two numbers, so he would choose the wrong number in the Dotty, then also wrongly believe to know the correct password. I'll try to figure out the exact numbers later when I think about it in more depth.

I'm also wondering whether or not Baku really just profiled all of that information out of him or if he was aware of it beforehand... Even for Baku it would seem like a stretch for him to be able to deduce Suteguma's past to that extent, so I'm skeptical. Especially since he had prior knowledge about him.

The second eye theory is interesting, but I don't know if it's really necessary. He told Marco to finish it with 13 but he could've just planned with him beforehand to make sure he doesn't enter any password no matter what he tells him after, and to wait for him to finish the 3rd round. Since Suteguma can't see whether or not Marco actually entered the password there's not really any need to prepare such a feint; although I won't say that it can be completely ruled out, since I don't know what will happen after this.
 

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