2. Charge Kiss
Reduced to merely a head, Ray absentmindedly watched as the mysterious girl-type humanoid approached.
His battery level had entered the critical zone. He throttled his thought resources to the bare minimum, maintaining extreme power-saving mode while processing sluggish deductions.
Why was something with all limbs intact abandoned here?
There were no visible external injuries. Why did a unit so highly customized have to be discarded?
At the edge of his thoughts, a calm alert sounded: "Shutting down soon."
As if in sync with the slight impatience he began to feel, her gait changed. Perhaps sensing that his time was running out, she went from walking to a brisk pace, and finally broke into a run.
Seeing this, an inexperienced emotion—"worry"—ran through Ray's circuits.
Would those delicate bare feet, white as porcelain, be injured by the mountain of scrap iron covering the ground?
The surroundings were a wasteland of sharp metal parts and discarded components. One misstep, and those beautiful soles would easily be torn apart.
He hadn't felt a shred of fear when his own head was severed, yet here he was, concerned about a girl's feet. Ray sent a noise like a bitter laugh through the contradictory source code his CPU had produced.
Finally, she reached the top of the hill.
She had climbed the treacherous slope without a care for her appearance. At times on all fours, hands in the mud, nearly falling but pressing on desperately.
And now, she stood before Ray.
She was too close.
Because Ray's head was fixed at an angle looking up at the sky, he couldn't capture her full figure as she loomed near. All that entered his field of vision were her bare feet.
There was no major trauma on the feet that had been used so heavily to get here. However, the artificial skin on the side of her little toe—likely a carbon material—had peeled slightly, revealing the silvery-white frame underneath.
But right before Ray's eyes, the wound healed in the blink of an eye.
An astonishing self-repair speed. She was definitely not just a mass-production model.
Just as Ray became convinced of her high performance, it happened.
"Hey."
From above, a voice dropped down like a droplet.
The moment a traveler wandering the desert, suffering from thirst for years, finally receives a drop of oasis water on their tongue—even such a metaphor felt tepid. Overwhelming pleasure and moisture filled Ray's parched CPU as audio data.
The voice dripped again.
"Are you still... alive?"
*A strange question,* Ray thought. For a humanoid robot, the expression "alive" was fallacious, both physically and grammatically.
But the meaning behind those words conveyed itself painfully well. Ray sent a signal to his throat device to give an affirmative reply, but the speaker remained silent. It seemed that even the meager remaining functions had burned out as the price for uttering that single word, "Sublime," earlier.
Without a neck, he couldn't even nod. As a last resort to show his will, he slowly blinked his heavy eyelids twice.
A faint mechanical sound. That seemed to be enough. He heard a sigh of relief escape the girl.
She crouched down in front of him.
Reflected in Ray's visual sensor were her mud-stained knees and her outstretched hands.
Those hands reached toward Ray gently, as if scooping up clear water or cherishing a fragile object.
His tactile sensors were already dead; he could feel neither warmth nor touch. However, his vision swayed softly and the viewpoint rose, allowing him to perceive that he had been enveloped in her hands and lifted up.
His tilted vision was corrected to be perpendicular to gravity, the angle it should be.
Right in front of him was the girl's face.
Gaze met gaze, intertwining.
Her eyes held colors ill-suited for this Final Disposal Site smeared with iron rust and waste oil.
A southern seaside. Clear, translucent blue eyes, a mixture of emerald green and pale sky blue shining under the blessing of the pouring sun.
Those lenses of overly high purity were also a cruel mirror. Reflected in those eyes was his own miserable appearance. Armor distorted as if beaten by a thug, one eye crushed and half-closed—the head of the most ridiculous and pathetic boy in the world.
*(Don't look at me)*
A voiceless scream ran through his circuits. Unable to bear the shame, Ray closed his eyelids again.
The energy to maintain his visual sensors was at its limit, too. Blacking out like this and meeting his end in the palm of a beautiful girl wasn't bad.
Just as he was about to accept eternal sleep, in that split second...
*—Zap.*
An intense shock ran through him.
High voltage, like a spark, pierced his brain. His CPU vibrated like an earth tremor, and as if forced into a hard reset, the eyelids he had closed snapped open.
What jumped into his restored vision was the opposite of before: the girl's face, eyes quietly closed.
Her face was coming closer.
Her face loomed until it filled his vision, and soon Ray's nose tip touched her perfectly shaped one.
In that instant, physical depth returned to a world that had been only visual information.
Tactile sensor reboot—
Piezoelectric elements embedded in his epidermis sensed minute pressure, and thermistors read the temperature gradient. The smoothness of her skin, Titan's desolate wind, the pouring weak cosmic rays, the weight of the atmosphere. All that data became a torrent flowing into his consciousness.
When his sense of touch was fully restored and he could feel the world on his skin, Ray belatedly understood the situation.
Lip was upon lip.
The moment he recognized *I am being kissed*—
An energy so violent it was like the speed of light itself exploded.
"Gushing" was too tepid a word to describe it. Off-the-charts voltage and current avalanched into his head through the connection terminals in his oral cavity, rushing around as if to burn out every actuator making up his brain stem.
An intense electric shock that made every transistor in his skull stand on end not with fear, but with rapture.
The energy density was too supersaturated, surpassing Ray's processing capacity. Due to the sheer output, sensations from the neck down—which should have been lost—revived vividly. It was a simulation-based illusion, not phantom pain, but phantom pleasure.
It was as if his whole body had been thrown into the core of a power plant bundling hundreds of millions of power lines. From the top of his head to the tips of his toes, the sensation of being sunk into the deepest part of a trench of high-purity electricity, every single cell filled with lightning.
He knew without looking that his silver hair was standing on end with static electricity, making crackling sounds.
Surplus energy that couldn't be processed overflowed like plasma from every exhaust port on his head.
His eyes, which had been half-open like a dead fish, snapped open to their limit.
This wasn't on the dimension of an introverted personality changing to extroverted. Like a prophet who witnessed the moment of creation and realized the truth of the universe without preparation, Ray's very existence was being dramatically rewritten.
Just as his system was about to reach critical mass, the girl finally parted her lips.
Ray's lips, stiff from shock, were released.
"Are you awake now?"
That voice, thrown from point-blank range, vividly awakened Ray's consciousness from its dreamy state.
A transparent resonance, as if an alarm bell had rung in his head or cold water had been poured over him. Ray felt an "awakening" so clear it made him suspect all his operating time until now had been an event within a slumber.
Like a patient who had undergone surgery to open their eyes, he blinked his eyes that now captured the world vividly, and drove his speakers.
"...Awake."
The voice came out without stagnation.
It wasn't just that he could speak. A sense of omnipotence, that an impossible miracle had occurred in his body, dominated his entire being—though he was only a head.
A pleasant intoxication, as if his body might float away somewhere.
With just a single kiss, all his depleted functions had recovered and were fully charged.
Despite being just a discarded head missing its torso, Ray was tasting the strongest sensation of "being alive" since he was produced.
An overwhelming sense of life that made him, a humanoid robot, even hallucinate the beating of a heart.
Perhaps that overflowing energy and vitality conveyed itself.
The girl peered into Ray's face and said with a smile like a blooming flower:
"That's good."