Now, the reason why I think Baku is saying that "there are no safe strategies for me ANYMORE" is that the speaking clock malfunction is planned to be at a certain time, and if he were to use the safe strategy he would screw up the timing of being "D" by the time the clock malfunctions. What bothers me about this, though, is that if there is only a specific time during which he wants to be "D" and he was delaying for this, then why did Souichi checking early (and failing the check) interfere with the timing so much? Oh, while writing this I think I arrived at a satisfactory answer(a bit obvious in hindsight, lol): even though Souichi checking early seems like it simply results in less time being spent until the planned malfunctioning time, it obviously is the opposite for a simple reason: Souichi failed the check by checking early, and thus has to experience a near death. I even mentioned earlier how Baku had calculated the length of a near death to account for his plan, and yet somehow completely forgot that Souichi's near death wasted a lot of time. This would explain Baku's perplexed face, since he did not plan/expect Souichi to fail the check by checking early (he probably thought he would go for the safe strategy and did not want to drop early and let time accumulate) which ended up wasting a lot of time, so Baku can no longer waste time by using the safe strategy if he wants to get the "D" role by the time the malfunction happens, forcing him to gamble by turning early. So from what the last few chapters have shown, my hypothesis still holds for now.