16. Live Burial (2)
"Arm-shovel."
"…"
I silently accepted it.
Then, together, we began to dig again—
this time not with our bare hands, but using the severed arms of the girl as shovels.I remembered hearing once that Rin's body had been customized—probably by her owner.
When I actually held the arm, the texture, the grip, the density of it—everything felt different from a mass-produced humanoid.
It was remarkably sturdy.
The outer skin wore away quickly, but the inner metal frame seemed far stronger than that of either mine or Oto's.
As a shovel, it was the perfect tool.We dug in silence again.
The repetition numbed the mind—not boring exactly, but waves of monotony washed over me in regular intervals.
Each time it came, I looked away and, by chance, found myself glancing toward Rin.Her head had turned slightly when her arms were torn off, so her face was now directed at me.
The empty, hollow eye sockets stared in my direction—
like the glassy eyes of a stray cat that had died by the roadside on a rainy day.
And then—
the corners of her mouth slowly curled upward into a grin."…"
She wasn't dead.This wasn't a burial.
It was a live burial."Oto—she's alive!" I wanted to shout.
But my speakers must have broken in shock.
Like a torn membrane after too-loud sound, my mouth only opened and closed soundlessly.
Rin's CPU was still functioning.
But I had no way to tell Oto.She continued digging with absolute concentration, utterly absorbed in the task, lost in mechanical focus.
There was nothing to do but keep going—
finish the hole and throw the still-conscious Rin inside.I was certain now.
Rin was no ordinary being.
Her very existence was an anomaly.
No wonder this village worshiped her as a god.
Even with the back of her head blown open, even with both arms torn away—
she could still smile like that.What would happen after we buried her, I couldn't imagine.
But somehow, I felt she would be fine—
that even being buried alive wouldn't end her.
She didn't seem to want to stop us.
If anything, she looked as though she welcomed it—
as if she were looking forward to being buried.
That smile was directed at me like a love letter.While my mind drifted through these thoughts, the hole was finished.
A hollow big enough to fit one girl-type humanoid lay open in the metallic earth.Oto stood up, swaying a little, dizzy.
I rose too, sharing that strange, pleasant vertigo, and met her gaze.
For a moment we both simply looked down at what we had made—our creation—
and then at Rin.At some point, her glaring sockets had closed.
The deranged grin was gone, replaced by a calm, sleeping face—
a sleeping princess.Wordlessly, Oto walked over to her.
She gripped Rin by the shoulders—where her arms had been torn away—
and I took hold of her bare feet at the ankles.
We lifted her together.The cicadas' shrieks pressed down on us so heavily that I nearly dropped her several times,
but somehow we managed to carry her to the edge of the hole.Standing across from each other, we held Rin suspended over the opening—
her body forming a bridge between us.
Our eyes met, exchanging not words but immense data—
a hundred terabytes of meaning flashing between us at light speed.
And then, together, we released her.Rin's living corpse fell neatly into place inside the hole.
We looked down at her,
and then, like offering flowers on a coffin,
we threw in the spent shovels—her arms.Following Oto's example, I removed my shoes,
and with our bare feet we pushed the piled dirt back in, slowly filling the hole.
The metallic soil settled silently, covering Rin's body.From the disturbed ground, the cicadas' cries still echoed.
The sound pressure was unbearable; my inner ears burned.
Lubricant seeped from them like blood, trickling down like tears.When the burial was done, I whispered softly—so faintly that no one could hear:
"Because of the cicadas… I cry with my ears."