The Echo

  “Marcel...” Jin said softly.

  The name resonated like a forbidden spell. Inês could feel all of the memories and what ifs bubbling to the surface of the boy's mind as he uttered it, shell-shocked.

  Marcel landed before them in his own time, with a soundless, velvet foot. With diffidence, Jin stepped ahead, looking straight into the sentai's grey, unfilled eyes. His demeanor, straight and unblinking, radiated with cold, alien control.

  “Marcel,” Jin repeated. “It's me.”

  There was a torturous lull, during which not even the two titans disturbed the air. And then, with a swift, unyielding stance, Marcel bounded forward suddenly.

  “No!” screamed Lu.

  She leaped to combat. Despite her firepower having been extinguished, her physical body still retained tremendous strength. As Marcel darted forth, she grabbed him by the sleeve and lapel, throwing the boy over her back and face first into the dirt. He crashed into the ground with a bone-breaking toll.

  “Wait!” Jin yelled in a panic. “It's still him, even if he's being controlled.”

  Marcel rolled away in a flurry and flew off with a quick rustling of his sokutai. Finding refuge on the branch of a bare maple tree, he wiped the blood from his mouth, unfazed. At the same time, the titanic gantlet opposing the megatruck and the Yuki-onna relit, the robot's blinding beams hatching the night sky in circular arcs of technicolor streaks, sometimes returned by the shrine mirror.

  Under the cover of a sudden outburst of flashes, he vanished. The branch he had just left swayed lightly, still. The group looked around frantically, probing the darkness for his presence. There was a quietude among the chaos. Then, he attacked; surging from the woods behind the now smoldering shrine, almost horizontal and parallel to the floor, he hit Lu with the full brunt of his body, sending her wheeling against a broken stone lantern with a sordid sound.

  “Lu!” Inês cried out in a spine-chilling shriek.

  She ran to her, steering clear of the rocketing laser beams and pixelated debris. She kneeled down next to Lu, Debuu-san by her side. The bug's pompon tail and triangular ears were trembling in chorus. The girl was conscious, but in rough shape; her small body contorted at improbable angles. She winced as she made a puny attempt to get back up, cupping the back of her head with her hand.

  “Somehow, that feels worse than the truck,” she said, grimacing in pain.

  Marcel stood a few paces away, glaring an empty stare. Inês stood tall, positioning herself in front of Lu.

  “What now?” she asked. “Are you going to beat me up, too?”

  Inês balled her fists, ready to fight. Marcel remained silent, seemingly impervious to her words. Above them, the rumble of the battle raged on; vibrant rays plastering on the giant mirror with a staccato rhythm.

  From the side, Jin stepped into view cautiously. He moved toward Marcel with his hands up, not in a defensive position, but as if to show he wasn't going to try anything.

  “Let me speak with him,” he told Inês, his eyes intensely fixated on Marcel.

  He placed himself halfway between the both of them.

  “Marcel,” he started. “You know this isn't you. You're a good person, you don't want to hurt us. We're your friends.”

  Marcel didn't respond. He remained perfectly still as the long sleeves of his sokutai danced with the wind.

  “I know you were scared of what might await you outside,” Jin continued. “You thought living out the rest of your days here might be better than getting out and having to go back to a life of torment and secrecy, or maybe being dead already, but look at you now: you're not saving anyone."

  Bit by bit, Jin was getting closer to Marcel as he spoke. They were mere breaths away, at present.

  "You could pretend your life had a purpose before, that it meant something because those people… those fragments of people were made to tell you so, but now… you're just a brute.”

  A shadow came over Marcel's barren visage. With a swift glint of his mirror fan, the boy struck Jin in the face, drawing blood. A large gash permeated his cheek, from his right ear to his nose. Jin wiped it with his sleeve, wincing.

  Inês cringed and looked away, covering Lu's body with hers.

  “Do you remember the first time we met?” Jin asked as if the strike hadn't happened. “It was just the two of us in this very shrine. My heart about skipped a beat when I saw you. I thought I'd died and gone to Heaven. That maybe you were an angel, there to guide me.”

  Marcel's brow furrowed. He kicked Jin in the stomach, pushing him back against the shrine's cindering carcass. Jin hit it with a spark and a clamor, before slumping to the ground.

  "Jin!" Inês cried out.

  There, he coughed and cleared his throat as he struggled painfully to get back to his feet. He spat some blood before continuing. A blue laser beam struck the exact location where he had just been standing seconds before, vaporizing the ground into an unshapely mound of pixels.

  “How about the House of Still Waters?” Jin persisted with a feeble voice. “That first conversation in the onsen… You were so shy, you could hardly even look me in the eye. You looked away the whole time, blushing.”

  Marcel moved ahead once more, pushing Jin to the cinders of the smoking shrine. Something was different, though, Inês thought. It seemed as though there was less conviction behind his movements.

  “Or the night after the tanuki fight?” he asked, rising to his feet once more as Marcel grabbed his collar with trembling hands. “You held my hand and said you wanted to be with me forever. You said you loved me.”

  Jin put his hand on Marcel's and, pleading, he added: “Whatever's waiting for us outside, we can face it together.”

  There was a rumble on the other side of the yard; the Yuki-onna and the megatruck were now engaged in hand to hand combat, their every movement heavy with mountainous weight, shaking the world around them. With a judo-like roll, the Yuki-onna sent the machine flying into the undead forestland. The resulting tremor was such that Inês, Jin, and Marcel all fell to the floor. The shrine, having been incinerated by Lu's flames, was unable to support the shock, and the walls crumbled with a forbidding sound. There was a sinister crack and the roof collapsed.

  “No!” yelled Inês.

  She grabbed Lu and moved her away from the rubble in one vault. Setting her against a tree on the forest's edge, on the other side of the battlefield, she looked to Debuu-san for guidance.

  “What do we do!?” she asked, panicked and adrift.

  Debuu-san's eyes darted from the blackened wreckage to the shifting horizon where the megatruck was slowly getting back to his feet.

  “I think there's only one solution,” said the bug gravely. “Hopefully it works.”

  There was a slow stir among the shrine's remains.

  “What is that?” asked Lu, pointing at the sky above it.

  Bits of darkened, smoking ruin were jumping to the high heavens; one, two, three. Then, a figure emerged, tall and flowy. As it approached, right toward them, they saw it was carrying something.

  Marcel came down slowly. Inês could see that his eyes had awoken; they were alive, complete.

  Jin was laying half-conscious in his arms. They were both covered in soot and blood. He placed Jin next to Lu and took a step back, shamefaced.

  “I...” he started, looking at the ground. “I'm sorry about everything.”

  Inês stared at him blankly for an instant. Then, turning back to Debuu-san, she asked: “What can we do to help Yuki?”

  Debuu-san closed its eyes and took a breath. When the bug opened them again, Inês noticed herself and the rest of the group reflected in the emerald pair, the halo of the distant beams shining their light on them.

  “You can't do anything right now, but I can,” it said decidedly.

  Then, turning to Marcel, Debuu-san smiled and added: “It's good to have you back.”

  And, fluttering to the gleaming mirror still in the Yuki-onna's hands, Debuu-san looked back right as it was about to step into it.

  “Don't waste this, kids,” said the guardian with a bittersweet smile.