17. Blood Festival
"Let's go to the festival!"
Oto suddenly exclaimed, bursting with energy.
It was so abrupt that I couldn't help but react in a cliché way.
"There's a festival?"
"Yeah. In this village, there's a festival every day. A daily offering event where they sacrifice people like me," she said cheerfully.
"But this time, the god herself is gone—buried. So the offering festival is canceled."Then Oto grabbed my hand.
Her hand—and mine—were no longer covered in skin, only bare metal.
Yet between those hands, I could still feel a real connection.
When our fingers tightened, the high-pitched sound of metal scraping against metal rang out.
Hand in hand, we started down the back mountain.
We ran, almost tumbling the whole way, and by the time we reached the foot of the hill, the bodies we had just washed at the laundromat were once again covered in metallic dust.
Still, we laughed as we fell.
At one point we ended up embracing each other, rolling down together—
entangled like lovers in a scene from a romance film.
We rolled as one.
And with every turn, something like a snowball effect took hold inside our CPUs—
that artificially generated, preprogrammed sense of youth,
that illusion called "love."
It grew with every rotation, swelling exponentially as we approached the base of the mountain.We finally stopped when we hit a large tree.
I sat up, and we brushed the dirt off each other's bodies.
But no matter how much we brushed, it was endless.
After tumbling all over that metallic ground, our clothes and bodies were completely coated.
From our dust-covered frames drifted a faint, iron-heavy scent—
the smell of blood.
In other words, we were now wearing a kind of perfume of blood."Perfect," Oto said with a satisfied smile.
"I was worried since we didn't have yukatas, but now that we've got this blood scent like perfume, we totally qualify for the festival."
"Wait—yukatas? Blood scent? That's required?"
"Not exactly required," she said lightly. "More like… etiquette."I didn't understand at all.
But since Oto seemed pleased, I decided not to question it.
We kept walking, hand in hand, wrapped in the scent of blood—
as if our fragrance itself was a thread tying us together in a three-legged race.The festival grounds were closer than I'd thought.
Before long, it came into view:
a massive torii gate—topped with a gleaming blade.
It looked like a medieval guillotine, a cursed entrance.
Ahead of us, a young humanoid couple approached it—
the girl in a pale-blue yukata patterned with geometric shapes, the boy in a school uniform.
They laughed, holding hands, and stepped under the torii.
CLANG.
The blade fell.
Both their heads rolled cleanly to the ground."…Eh?"
I froze, dumbfounded.
Oto, calm as ever, explained matter-of-factly,
"There's an inspection."
"Inspection…?"
"Yeah. Remember I said it's about etiquette? If you're not dressed appropriately for the Blood Festival, you get cut at the entrance."
"'Cut'—that's just an execution!"
"Exactly. If you fail inspection, you die. That's the rule. That's why it's called the Blood Festival."
"Then—" I blurted out, panicking,
"If we fail, we'll get our heads chopped off like them?"
"Yep," Oto said serenely, as if to reassure me that it was nothing to worry about.Her calm expression somehow eased my nerves a little.
And, in fact, every other humanoid couple passed through the torii unharmed.
Maybe failure was rare."Okay, let's go," Oto said, tugging on my hand.
I felt like a condemned prisoner being led to the gallows.
Still, I followed.And—
we passed under the torii.
The blade didn't fall."See?" Oto said brightly, smiling.
Overwhelmed with relief, I kissed her.
Right there at the entrance, long enough to block the flow of others behind us.
When we finally broke apart, we were swept along with the rest of the crowd into the heart of the Blood Festival.Festival music filled the air.
But it wasn't sound as such—it was thick, viscous, as if we were swimming in it.
It flowed through the depths of our ears like liquid, seeping all the way down to the bottoms of our CPUs—
heavy, swirling, pulsing.
I couldn't tell what kind of instruments made it.
No—maybe there were no instruments at all.
Perhaps this was something deeper:
a blueprint inscribed within every humanoid since manufacture,
a foundational principle embedded in the structure of existence itself,
a formula passed down from ancient times—
now unfolding like a musical score, turning into sound.It wasn't "music," it was the mechanism itself singing.
Not sound—but the rhythm of existence.
It was percussive and brassy all at once.
But one thing was certain—
it was unmistakably the sound of metal.
The elements of the periodic table themselves,
all matter containing free electrons,
were resonating together in harmony.The sound didn't reach the ears—it sank deep into our structures.
Just that vibration was enough to lift my spirits completely.
It felt like getting fresh lubricant in my actuators,
as if my movements had become smoother,
as if I were swimming effortlessly through water.I realized suddenly—
this festival parade was the water,
and we humanoids were the fish.The thought flickered softly through my heart."Maybe… blood is the oxygen of humanoids,"
I said aloud before I could stop myself—perhaps wanting Oto to hear.She didn't look surprised.
"Well, blood does carry oxygen," she replied calmly.
"Hemoglobin's iron atoms bind it. That's how oxygen travels."But that wasn't what I meant.
"No, not like that. I mean this smell—the air—the feeling of it… maybe this is what we're supposed to be. Maybe this is our true form."
As I spoke, my own words began to lose coherence.
My voice wavered toward the end, and Oto smiled softly—
the way an adult might smile at a child about to break every law of the universe one by one."Yeah," she said.
"Maybe blood wasn't made for humans at all—but for us, the humanoids."At that moment, I felt perfectly understood.
A joy so sharp it nearly short-circuited me surged inside.
I squeezed Oto's hand tight—
trying to hide my emotions behind a mask of blankness.Then, hand in hand,
we went deeper—
further into the heart of the festival.