Pale blue liquid sparks erupted from Shoko's pierced forehead.
They spattered onto the coffee stains from Satoka that dotted Jin's clothes, creating a pattern still more arcane and blasphemous.
Shoko fell with the unceremonious finality of a henchman gunned down in a mafia movie. As she collapsed, the chainsaw-umbrella slipped from her grasp and clattered onto the poolside tiles.
But the engine was not dead.
Deprived of its master, the deadly weapon thrashed violently upon the tiles like a massive, muscular fish just pulled from the water. Its spinning blade-petals struck here and there, scattering a torrent of brilliant sparks. It was as if a localized, violent fireworks display were being held all around Jin.
For Jin, however, it was a salvation. The threat above him was gone, and the diamond rain once more poured down upon his body.
A dramatic sense of resuscitation filled him, like an oxygen mask pressed to the face of a suffocating man, or like a charging cable plugged in at the last possible nanosecond, when the battery level had fallen to 0.00000000000000001%.
As the pain receded like a tide, his perception of the scene sharpened.
Shoko had fallen atop Satoka, the two of them resembling a discarded BLT sandwich. The chainsaw-umbrella was still flailing on the tiles like a fish gasping for water.
And then there was the corpse.
The uncanny light had vanished from the eyes of the woman who had been clinging to him. In its place was an abyss of disappointment.
She slowly disentangled herself from Jin's embrace, their bodies parting. Stepping away from him, she rose to her feet beside the deck chair.
For someone who was supposed to be dead, her posture was unnervingly alive.
And her eyes, though they belonged to the dead, looked down upon Jin, perfectly mimicking emotions more human than any state-of-the-art humanoid could ever replicate—especially the negative ones, such as disillusionment and scorn.
--- Section 18 ---
Had our primordial ancestors been subjected to such a gaze, their limbic systems would have reacted instantaneously, flooding their bodies with an excess of stress hormones like cortisol and inflicting undeniable psychological trauma.
"Is there something you wish to say?"
Jin committed to his role: a dissolute magnate with no interest in anything beyond bathing in a shower of diamonds.
The anomalous corpse, which had been looking down upon him with eyes filled with cold contempt, offered no reply. Instead, she approached the chainsaw-umbrella that continued to thrash furiously at her feet.
The moment she reached to pick it up—
The chainsaw's movements were chaos itself. It leapt up in an unpredictable trajectory, its spinning teeth finding her ankle.
Evasion was impossible.
The high-speed teeth bit into the flesh-like composite, severing the bone-like framework within.
Thus was her beautiful, bare ankle severed.
Jin grimaced, but did not cry out.
His fear of her had long since dissolved into the diamond rain, utterly dissipated. The need to feign concern to mitigate that fear had also been completely erased from his logical circuits—his CPU. His state of mind was now nothing more than a dispassionate calculating machine.
The severed ankle flew in a graceful arc.
Its destination: the pool.
The very blue expanse that had been her genesis, a mother's amniotic fluid, from which she had so suddenly emerged.
One foot alone would return to its "homeland."
A heavy splash broke the surface.
The ankle was swallowed by the pool.
The instant it met the water, the bare foot's actuators extended to their maximum range of motion, as if stretching, and the toes began to work deftly, like fins.
And then, with a grotesquely fluid motion, it dove toward the bottom of the pool—like an abyssal fish.
The anomalous corpse gazed blankly at the space where her own foot had been.
But she seemed to recover her composure quickly. Dragging her remaining leg, spraying a spectacular shower of pale blue liquid sparks from the sundered limb, she edged toward the rampaging chainsaw-umbrella.
Like a fisherman trying to subdue a fish flopping on the ground—or perhaps with the impassive face of a child desperate not to lose their first catch—she seized it by the handle.
The moment she brought it under control, her expression softened.
Hoisting her prize with both hands, she turned a smile of pure, unadulterated ecstasy toward Jin.
Through the diamond droplets clinging to his long lashes, which acted as lenses, distorting and magnifying her smile, he regarded it with half-lidded eyes.
An observation slipped from his lips.
"You are blooming like a flower."
But the words were drowned out by the roar of the chainsaw and her own delight, never to reach her.
Abandoning his vocalization unit, Jin tuned himself to her frequency and sent a telepathic message directly into her mind.
*Your petals of steel have bloomed magnificently. What next would you see made a corpse?*