Cold Wrath

 The nihonga tableau had been painted over with a surreal, cubist nightmare: disemboweled, the shrine lay engulfed in flames; the torī gate was dissolving into a thick cloud of dark pixels; and there, towering twenty meters high, stood a Frankenstein's megatruck, made of sentient, bellicose ice cream trucks, looming like Benkei, unyielding against his foes.

Lifting his foot up in the air, he fractured the ground under his still planted leg into countless shards of jagged pixelated artifacts.

“Terminating protocol initiated.” he said in a chorus of mismatched tones.

The menacing shadow of his mechanical base advanced on the group with a vengeance. Then, with a booming clang, it stopped dead in its tracks; big and growing bigger, the Yuki-onna now stood at half the megatruck's size and she was holding his foot up with her hands, pushing back with all of her strength against his weight. The stone pathway grated at the skin of her feet as he pressed her toward the ground bit by bit. As she grew further, though (now two thirds of the megatruck's size), she managed to anchor herself in place; she threw one leg behind his and made the robot hit the torī gate with full force. The structure atomized into the night sky, disseminating the smell of burned plastic. The megatruck fell down the stone steps and into the cedar trees below with a blasting noise.

“What is this?!” asked Lu, gesturing broadly.

The Yuki-onna stood bare, her skin alive with a multicolor shimmer from the reflections of the fire and the moon. As she gazed down at the megatruck from atop the stairs, her torn kimono, navy and red shreds of shed layers, blew away in the wind.

She turned her inky, bottomless eyes to the group.

“It's thanks to you.” she said, her voice resonating fiercely. “You melted the snow.”

Inês felt a warm tug at her heart. Next to her, Jin shifted. She thought the both of them might have been sharing similar thoughts. She placed a hand on his shoulder and squeezed it tightly. They exchanged a timid, hopeful smile. Then, through the night's fleeting respite, a set of buzzing beams: red, green, blue, came flashing through the air like lightning, hitting the Yuki-onna in the chest. Despite her size, her body was projected several meters backward, crushing the rapidly disappearing shrine under it.

“No!” exclaimed Lu.

The group ran toward the structure. There was a stillness in the air from which only the overwhelming crackling of the fire stood out. Down in the steps behind them, they heard the megatruck moving, its heavy metal shifting and rearranging to arise. There was another slew of luminous projectiles, shot up like distant arrows on a battlefield. The group scurried to avoid them. Wherever they landed, they distorted anything they touched into further corrupted cubes.

The ground trembled as the machine took its slow, hulking steps.

“We have to try again.” said Jin.

He raised his komabue once more and began to blow. Just as the first time, only a static noise sprung from the instrument. He looked at Inês, pleading. She nodded and closed her eyes. Gathering her breath, she opened her mouth to sing, but the air got stuck in her throat. She clutched her chest; it felt like drowning. Finally, it was Lu's turn to try. She danced with abandon, stomping and twirling, but nothing ignited. With tears in her eyes, she looked back at Inês and ran into her arms.

“Debuu-san?” asked Inês. “What should we do?”

She tried to disguise the worry in her voice, but she had little control over it. For its part, the bug's expression was hard to pinpoint. It seemed to be running through its own calculations at a rapid pace, its gaze darting through futures no one else could read.

Then, it arrived. At the top of the steps in place of the majestic torī gate, now stood a repulsive monstrosity; a patchwork of frigid technology, powered by human thought and bodies, looking to kill the same people it couldn't subsist without.

There was a blinding glow in the megatruck's headlights, where it prepared its next attack. Then, with a splitting sound, it busted forward. Inês thought it was the end, but with a clinging toll that ringed in her ears like church bells, the beams plastered against a sudden barrier. Her eyes closed despite herself and she held on to Lu tightly as a gale tore through the night air. When she opened them, she saw her, the Yuki-onna, standing above them, holding the shrine's gleaming mirror in its expanded state. She felt safe.

“Yuki...” she said, looking up at her in awe.

The Yuki-onna's expression was one of determination. Even without ice powers, fighting against a monstrous abomination, she was a formidable opponent.

The megatruck fired more laser-beams in quick succession, but she sent them all back. A few of them reached him square, morphing chunks of his sheet metal into barbed spikes. Kneeling, he uttered a terrible plaint. With a faint, blue glow, he let out a pressurized noise from his chest, from which carbon dioxide vapor came tumbling out. From the dark cavity emerged a figure, tall and thin, with brown hair and silver eyes like two full moons. The boy was wearing a flowing sokutai in shades of deep blue and pearl grey. As he leaped from the megatruck and flew above the battleground, his mirror fan reflected the fire's flames and the pale moonlight in erratic flashes. As the light illuminated his face, his vacant eyes gleamed like a beast's in the night.

Looking up in shock, Jin let out a gasp.

“Marcel.” he said softly.