*What next would you see made a corpse?*
In response to the telepathy Jin had cast, the anomalous corpse stared intently at the chainsaw-umbrella for a time before sending back a wave of thought.
*Love is to be the corpse.*
Jin shook his head.
*That is a request I cannot grant. You are already dead. An anomalous corpse cannot fall in love.*
*Then must I become not an anomalous corpse, but a corpse of love?*
*Cease these word games. I am serious. I do not possess so foul a taste as to embrace a deactivated humanoid.*
Rejected, the anomalous corpse cast her eyes downward.
At first, she glared resentfully at the chainsaw-umbrella in her hands, her expression seeming to say, "It is because of this umbrella that I was rejected." But that, too, was fleeting.
The color of her eyes transformed.
From red to violet.
A sign that the wavelength of visible light was shortening, its frequency rising to an extreme.
Her eyes began to glow a dense, high-energy violet.
She started to walk.
Dragging her unstable form, now missing a leg, toward Jin.
Her gait was like that of a toddling infant, or a drunkard, or perhaps an industrial machine forced to operate with missing parts.
She hoisted the roaring chainsaw-umbrella above her head with both hands, shielding herself from the falling diamond rain as she advanced.
A current of tension shot through Jin's circuits.
--- Section 19 ---
It was not the fear of being rent asunder by the spinning blades.
It was, rather, a revulsion. A revulsion at the thought of her approach, of being drawn into the sphere of her umbrella. The precious diamond rain would be cut off, and by sharing her shelter, he would be returned to that state of insufferable dryness.
To sit and wait was not an option.
With dispassionate calm, Jin rose from the deck chair.
He turned on his heel, and in the direction opposite his pursuer, he began to walk.
Jin's pace was languid.
He was barefoot. His slippers lay pinned beneath the remains of the two bodies he had, reluctantly, destroyed.
What met the soles of his feet was the hard tile of the poolside and the pale blue viscosity that spread across it. It was the liquid spark that had flowed from Satoka and Shioko, the physical sensation of "death."
Jin walked on, deliberately conscious of the slick, unpleasant feeling underfoot.
From behind, the roar of a chainsaw drew near.
The mangled corpse, missing a leg, was faster than he, who was perfectly whole. Jin was taken aback, yet felt no inclination to accelerate his own leg motors.
He had no motive.
Ever since being put on display in this beautiful yet tedious mansion, he had suffered from a chronic motivational deficiency syndrome.
And so, he apathetically accepted that the distance between them would close.
The mangled corpse caught up and offered him its umbrella.
As if thrusting a carving knife, it held the weapon aloft over Jin's head.
The canopy of roaring, spinning blades covered him, once again cutting off the blessing of the diamond rain.
What escaped Jin's speakers was not a scream of agony, nor a gasp of terror.
It was a deep sigh, the very sound of Uranus's azure hue, a symbol of primordial melancholy.
The sigh became an invisible hemorrhage, dripping, drop by drop, from his lips. Like a patient in the last stages of consumption, Jin covered his mouth, envisioning the despair that pooled in his palm.
The mangled corpse drew closer still, plunging the chainsaw umbrella deeper, ever deeper.
The rain was growing heavier, but beneath this ironclad defense, not even the splash from the ground could reach him. He was not permitted even the dampness at his feet. A perfect hell of dryness.
And so Jin, instead of fleeing, embraced her.
A thankless embrace for the one who so kindly sheltered him.
The sensation was far from that of holding a lover. It was closer to the feeling of lifting a mere "object."
As if in response to the kindness of her arms supporting the umbrella, Jin's own arms slid up her waist, across her back, and coiled around the nape of her neck. Their movement was smooth and cold, like two great serpents entwining upon a massive tree to mate, or perhaps, to prey.
His arms tightened around her neck.
And Jin squeezed.
Tightly.
A crisp snap.
A light sound, like the breaking of a long, thin biscuit, echoed faintly beneath the roar of the chainsaw.
Jin murmured, like an uninflected recitative.
"I am not strangling you. I am merely applying pressure with my arms. After all, you were a mangled corpse to begin with."
To Jin's defensive monologue, the mangled corpse smiled as if to say, "Of course."
There was no trace of agony. On the contrary, it seemed to be passively, almost pleasurably, accepting the damp, suffocating hug.
Jin applied more force.
The pressure exceeded all limits.
Precisely, perfectly, at an angle of ninety degrees so exact as to be immeasurable by any instrument known to this world, the corpse's neck was broken.
With a sharp crack.
It was less the sound of shattering bone and more the clean, satisfying pop of a pull-tab on an ice-cold can of beer.
The skin-like material of her neck, already etched with the marks of his strangulation—or perhaps, his contemplation—tore open, revealing the metal skeleton within.
From the cross-section of the bent pipe, a golden liquid erupted with the fizz of carbonation.
It was not blood, but unmistakably a "beverage."
The mangled corpse, spraying the liquid that gushed from its own neck like a champagne shower, turned the fount toward Jin and proposed gleefully:
"A toast, to celebrate."
Jin, utterly bewildered, demanded:
"A celebration for what, precisely?"
--- Section 20 ---
Then the bizarre corpse—like a half-lidded angel gazing down from the paradise of some distant heaven upon this pale blue dot on the frontier, upon Uranus—and as if steeped in the ecstasy of its imminent fall to that very world, spoke with a laugh.
"This marks the moment I was transfigured from a corpse of strange death into a corpse of lovelorn death."
For the span of a Planck time, Sumeragi devoted himself to meditating upon the morphological similarity between the written characters for *strange* and for *love*. He savored this resemblance, as one might a fine piece of cheese.
Like Dracula himself, he brought his lips to the neck of the bizarre corpse—no, she who was now a corpse of lovelorn death.
Connecting his lips to the cross-section of the neck, bent at a perfect right angle, he drank deep of the overflowing libation, his throat gurgling as he drained it to the last.