The Scream

 Truck-kun's dream Japan had reached critical deliquescence: the ground was gradually pixelating here and there into jagged cubes of data, leaving little in the way of room to walk; the trees and the water, the rocks and the clouds, it had all vaporized into an amalgam of artifacts, their masses unrecognizable one from the other; and in the night sky, the stars had bled into the velvet black with light, zebra streaks. Among the horror-striking, repulsive tableau, laid the body of the Yuki-onna, white and bare; luminescent, with a cindering hole in her chest where her heart should have been. Next to her, the leavings of the shrine mirror she had used to return the megatruck's laser-beams and beat him over the head in close-quarters combat glittered in shattered rest.

An indomitable wave of stomach-churning anxiety, mixed with pure indignation, passed over Inês, vibrating in intense energy peaks. She screamed. It was a primal, piercing peal; barbed and keen. Her body trembled with rage; so did the earth – or what was left of it. With a low, ominous rumbling, the saw-toothed ground breached; cavernous rifts, dark and bottomless, birthed small islands, adrift in the digital sea. Behind the veil of obscurity, the world flattened, textureless; details were deleted; all that was left were grey models, outlines and connecting vertices; geometry. It was as if the whole world had become the girl's instrument.

The megatruck arose laboriously, his brewing storm of pixels circling his combat-wearied frame. Despite what the Yuki-onna had put him through, he was still formidable. He stepped forward, but Lu reacted straight away: leaping from her island of solitude forward, she set herself up on a stage better suited for her and launched into a frenzied, whirling assault; performing her ancestor's dance with pride. Her movements were precise and ebullient, with a joy and power that lit up the air around her in radiant arcs. She sometimes held her skirt up like colorful wings and sometimes let it trail behind her like a tail feather. Schock-waves of red-orange flames shot up from her every stomp of the ground, her every step and twirl pulsating like blood from a severed artery. Swiftly, they melted through chunks of the megatruck's metal sheet and chrome frame, warping the machine into a mutilated husk and sending sparks flying into the dark.

Dripping with sizzling, super heated alloy, the colossus let out an eldritch cry. Rushing toward Lu with destructive momentum, he jumped over the cold cyber void, his grille mouth opened in a distorted threat. She bounced moments before his metallic frame crashed into the brittle ground. With an undaunted hand, Jin raised his komabue and began to play his grandfather's song; blue notes of a mournful, pensive piece. The effect was instant: as the megatruck attempted to get up from the ground, his every move got jerky and hesitant, as if his limbs were being held back by invisible strings; and then, his already decelerated velocity slowed down further, like he'd been pushed into quicksand.

As the song continued to resonate, Marcel stepped into action, turning his rapier in whistling motions; gleaming ribbons of waters springing forth in a rush. It was just like fencing, in a way. Jumping from platform to platform around the hors de combat megatruck as he maintained a safe distance, the boy struck at every critical point: the joints, the sensors, the hydraulics; he knew the machine well, having spent some time trapped in it. Billowing clouds of steam erupted in concert. Exchanging a look with Jin across the ruins of Truck-kun's dream world, they harmonized a silent plan; Marcel enclosed the megatruck in a cosmic sphere of water as Jin's music guided the currents into constriction. Violent flashes of light glared from within, but the laser-beams, weakened and sedated, never made it out.

Inês closed her eyes. For an instant, she needed to recuperate; she needed home, her sibling, her mother, her father, her country. Then, she sang. She sang a song of the people; people tied to the rhythms of nature. People who suffer, people who are tired. She sang of sorrow and of the destiny of the Portuguese soul. She addressed you and she addressed me. She sang of endurance in a commanding way and she channeled centuries of grief into one performance. The remaining plots of ground exploded, leaving nothing but a blur of dust. The megatruck convulsed. His body cracked and shattered. As Inês finished her song, her sister began to dance, her burning fire boiling the megatruck's watery grave. The sphere trembled as the waves of sound and fire collided with it, throwing curling clouds of steam in the air.

Finally, it happened: there was a deafening detonation, followed by a blinding blaze; the sphere evaporated in the blink of an eye, and the megatruck, Truck-kun, collapsed in a pile of smoking carcass. And like a dying heartbeat, a flicker of blue glitched on and off deep within the scraps.