"I have no business with you. Be gone," Jin said coolly, but his eyes were riveted to Shoko's hands.
What she held was a thing that, at a glance, resembled an umbrella, yet in truth, it was something closer to heavy machinery.
The handle was surmounted by a ponderous motor unit, utterly incongruous for the shaft of an umbrella. And set into the frame of the folded canopy—along the rim—was a vicious array of metallic saw-teeth, like the jaws of a shark.
It was no tool for warding off the rain. It was a rotary cutting device for reducing its target to mince.
Shoko brandished this "chainsaw umbrella," preparing to deploy it.
"Are you also here to pierce me?"
"No," Shoko answered, her expression cool as ice. "I shall not be piercing you. I shall only be opening this."
The color drained from Jin's face.
The terror of his confrontation with the mangled corpse in the rainless air returned to him, now compounded by the immediate, physical threat of dismemberment.
--- Section 16 ---
From beside him, the freakish corpse's gleeful laughter echoed.
He had to escape. Jin's instincts screamed alarms, a frantic, chaotic clamor, but his body would not move. It was because the freakish corpse, seeing straight through his desire—his yearning to escape this perilous umbrella and once more be battered by the rain of diamonds—now clung to him, refusing to let him go.
It was too seductive to be called a restraint, too violent to be called an embrace.
The corpse's arms coiled around Jin's body like serpents. She slid a hand deep within the folds of his clothing, caressing and binding him with the audacity of a thief attempting to pluck his vital organs from between his ribs.
The sensation of a drenched corpse. An irresistible intimacy, as if an Undine, a spirit of water, had taken on mass and pressed herself against him.
Jin was rendered immobile.
In that moment, Shōko, with a merciless hand, yanked hard on the motor's recoil starter—the pull cord.
With the first pull, a low groan echoed from the umbrella's heart. It was the growl of a savage hound, shattering the calm before a storm.
And the second.
Shōko threw her weight into the pull, and the engine exploded into life.
VRRMMMM! GRRIIINNNNDDD...
The menacing contraption known as the chainsaw umbrella roared like a beast dragged into a fighting pit. Not a trace remained of what might once have been a small and charming device. All that was there now was the shriek of a monster. The scream of grinding metal, the death rattle of compressed air—all fused into a violent cacophony that shattered the elegant tranquility of the poolside and scattered its fragments.
Unable to bear it, Jin clapped his hands over his ears.
But it was useless. Even with his state-of-the-art noise-canceling function—which the manufacturer boasted was quieter than the abyssal depths of Titan—at maximum output, he could not block out the sound.
It was not mere sound waves, but a vibration of pure terror that seemed to carve away at space itself. It tore through the defensive walls of his auditory sensors with ease, the engine's drone reverberating as if to violate his very central nervous system.
In the inescapable din, only the embrace of the freakish corpse, ironically, tethered him to a tangible reality.
"Stop!" Jin screamed. But it was clear his voice was not reaching Shōko's auditory device.
He glanced up to see her eyes, which had transformed into a sinister crimson, eclipsing the cool blue of the poolside.
But it was not the change in color that made Jin shudder. It was the roar Shōko had unleashed, and the shape of *that which* had been deployed.
Sharpened metal blades—vicious revolving teeth that would shred anything they touched by even a nanometer, causing it to spurt blood the same color as her eyes—unfurled in unison along the umbrella's edge.
It was a violent blooming, like some great flower composed of steel blades, or a carnivorous plant opening its maw for the kill.
Without hesitation, Shōko closed the distance and held the spinning flower of death over Jin's head—no, she *opened* it for him.
The rain of diamonds that had been striking Jin was once again cut off.
Through the transparent material, he could still see the sky and the rain. But the crystalline blessing no longer reached his body. In its place rained down only the eardrum-shattering roar of the chainsaw.
The very instant the rain ceased, a searing agony shot through Jin's abdomen—the central region where, in a humanoid's structure, the gyroscopic stabilizers and the spinal frame crucial for power transmission were concentrated.
A phantom pain, as if the chainsaw had just sliced his torso in two.
That the rain could be blocked, that this could bring such torment.
Jin's logic circuits were flooded with an ineffable scream: a cascade of error codes. He wanted to be free of this agony, even 10⁻²⁴ seconds sooner.
But before that—why had this individual so suddenly opened the umbrella?
"Why in God's name are you using the umbrella?! I gave no such order!"
To Jin's protest, Shōko replied with a cool expression, yet in all seriousness:
"I am your maid. Seeing my owner being soaked by the rain, it is my duty as a maid to offer him an umbrella."
"A maid's duty is to obey her owner's commands, not just to open an umbrella whenever it rains!"
"Not I."
--- Section 17 ---
Shoko stated with utter composure.
"This unit's base programming has been coded for this situation and this situation alone. In the event of rain, to prevent the owner from getting wet. My functions activate with a singular focus on that one objective."
It was pointless.
Their sensibilities were fundamentally incompatible at the source-code level. Jin knew with chilling certainty that a logical exchange of data—a "conversation"—could never halt this rampage.
Amid the searing pain, the sanity check maintaining his CPU's integrity was nearing its breaking point.
A knowing smile was plastered upon Shoko's face, as if in conspiracy with the grotesque corpse, or perhaps in resonance with her own madness.
Jin reached for the side table.
Beside the bowl of sugar cubes lay the automatic pistol that had silenced Satoka moments before.
He gripped it once more and turned the muzzle toward Shoko.
"Stop it!"
A sharp, restraining voice cut through the air.
It was the corpse. Looking down, Jin saw her gazing at him with an expression of profound disappointment, as one would a dangerous lunatic.
"Are you really going to shoot that sweet little child with that menacing gun? Unbelievable!"
"A surprisingly human thing to say, for a corpse. As I said before..."
Jin spat out the words, his reason hanging by a thread as he endured the torturous pain.
"That is a machine."
"A machine or not, a child is a child! That's her *setting*. Her innocent appearance is designed to engage the gears of an adult's protective instincts, is it not? Why can you not obey such a fundamental moral algorithm?"
Further debate was unnecessary. More to the point, he had no resources left to withstand the deafening roar and the phantom agony.
Without another word, Jin squeezed the trigger.
Tearing through the chainsaw's roar, a gunshot thundered.
Jin's high-performance visual sensors captured the bullet's trajectory in extreme slow motion.
The lead slug ripped through the air at supersonic speed, forming a Mach cone of shockwaves in the surrounding atmosphere as it carved a straight path of maximum aerodynamic efficiency.
The kiss of death found its mark without hesitation.
A small hole opened in the center of Shoko's smooth forehead.