She unscrewed the tank’s cap and happily chugged its contents. The liquid inside was of course not alcohol, but it burned going down all the same. Within moments, she’d drained the flamethrower’s many gallons of fuel as if performing a magic trick. She smacked her lips and tossed the weapon back to him, saying, “All done.”
Snake let the flamethrower clatter onto the ground. The faceless corpse oriented toward her and took a different fighting stance than before.
Her eyes widened. Drunk as she was, she still recognized that stance. Despite his missing arm, the stance remained familiar to those who knew it—and Tiger knew it.
She grinned with delight. “Hey, that’s snake style! Nice. Nice. Snake boxing versus drunken boxing—kind of old school, huh?”
Then the next instant, her mood soured. Severe mood swings were a drunk’s staple, but she took it to the extreme, growling and baring her teeth in rage.
“What the hell? You’re just a corpse, aren’t you? Some goddamn corpse under someone else’s control?”
She’d come to the realization perhaps a bit late—but she’d noticed something that would have clued in anyone no matter how drunk or how ignorant of necromanticism.
Not a single drop of blood flowed from the arm’s stump.
Several hours had passed since Rabbit had killed the younger twin. Rigor mortis was beginning to set in—Snake’s movements had begun to slow, and the blood inside him had completely coagulated. This development had little effect on the zombie, whose movements were already sluggish to begin with, but it mattered to Tiger.
The woman, whose Drunken Fist was more powerfully charged by blood than by alcohol, said, “That’s it, I’ve had enough. This is stupid. My blades,” she said, brandishing her claws, “are thirsty.”
Tiger released her fighting stance and got to her feet. Whatever her particular grievance, the woman losing interest in the fight was—from a broader point of view—entirely reasonable. Setting aside her possibly fetishistic desire to get drunk on blood, from her position as one of the few remaining fighters, battling Snake at this point would be of limited benefit. The younger twin had been killed before the Zodiac War began; having never swallowed the poison jewel required for victory, he didn’t possess one for her to take. Fighting him now, even assuming she would win, would bring her nothing of measure.
Killing him would fulfill some strategic purpose in reducing Team Rabbit’s strength, but she had no particular need to do that here and now. If her goal was to be the ultimate winner, then she could leave the corpse for a rival to fight—or, looking at it from another angle, force a rival or rivals into fighting the monster. To do so risked Rabbit gaining yet another follower, but that outcome wasn’t guaranteed. Also possible was the ideal result—that her rival and the corpse killed each other. If she instead chose to fight, the worst outcome was the corpse somehow getting the upper hand on her. Tiger had no compelling reason to risk her life by fighting Snake.
Whether or not Tiger, in her drunken haze, had performed such an analysis of the scenario, the fact remained that she had lost all desire to fight the corpse. And if she didn’t want to, she wouldn’t, instead choosing to back down from the standoff. The decision was one of incredible arrogance, but the dead Tatsumi brother didn’t respond.
But a response was required of him. Her insolent, one-sided withdrawal faced him with an internal conflict he struggled to resolve.
The conflict didn’t stem from any emotional source such as anger or indignation. He was, after all, a corpse, and her lack of consideration for him was normal, in a sense. He didn’t feel slighted, nor did he have the capacity to—but his instructions compelled him to follow two separate and incompatible actions: to pursue the leaving woman, and to let her go. No matter how loyal the corpse was to the necromanticist, no matter that he would never betray his only friend, a contradiction in his orders made following them impossible—just as an error in programming code created bugs in a program.
If Rabbit told him to fly, Snake didn’t have the capacity to obey. If Rabbit told him to turn left and right at the same time, Snake couldn’t do that either—well, seeing how he was a dead body, he probably could have torn himself in two and followed the command, but that was beside the point, which was this: the younger twin had been ordered to seek, fight, and kill his target—Nezumi, the Fighter of the Rat—and to kill any other fighter who tried to stop him.
On the surface, this appeared an entirely reasonable command capable of covering a wide range of circumstances. Besides, instructions much more complicated than that would have been more than an unthinking zombie could handle. But the orders left one question unresolved—how should he deal with a fighter who didn’t try to stop him?
Faced with the puzzling behavior of the fickle drunk, who first stood in his path but then turned away on a whim, the zombie didn’t seem to have permission to attack her, and so he didn’t know what to do. Even the dead man could recognize he shouldn’t let Tiger get away, but without the proper instruction, he couldn’t. Instead, he froze.
This lasted only a brief moment. The indecision did not present an infinite loop. The conflict would resolve itself as soon as she left his sight, and even if she didn’t, the problem was not so complex as to be insurmountable. In the end, he would have likely concluded that his primary directive was to find Rat, and if forced to choose between pursuing him or Tiger, the corpse would choose Rat.
Snake didn’t know that the necromanticist hadn’t actually placed that much importance behind the order. Rabbit had simply intended to use the headless corpse to lure away an interloper from interfering with his true goal—to make Monkey his follower. Rabbit just hadn’t bothered to overwrite the command. The necromanticist felt no particular attachment toward the instructions, and—though he probably hadn’t forgotten about them entirely—he would hardly think twice before replacing them, should another need for the zombie arise.