- Incredible… all of them went silent…

- See? It’s not that hard. But, I guess a little poor girl that want just to lie in peace is unable to do something as easy as that… Oh, well. Maybe is time to go…

- Wait! – Shinkuu run over the wall of crystal, where her reflection was about to give her the back.

- Oh, so you have some backbone, after all – slowly the reflection turned again towards its original.

- I just… don’t know how to do it. Could you… please teach me?

- Ha! That is easy, girl: If you want to beat their cruelty, you need just to be even crueler than them. If they laugh at you, laugh at them harder, until their nauseating voices are buried under your strong will!

- Laugh… harder?

- Exactly! Just think about how stupid and pathetic they really are, trying to appear better than you, feeling soooooooo superior, when they’re actually nothing. You can try imagining suffering, being nude, don’t know. The important is to make them feel the way you feel, and even more. Only in that way you can beat those soulless shadows…

- I… I’ll try!

Closing her eyes, Shinkuu tried to concentrate to make a good laugh. The first attempt was an almost mute laugh. Her reflection incited her to laugh harder and higher. “Remember what they did to you, remember all that grief, and laugh at their faces!”, kept saying the reflection. “Watch them die, drown in their own tears, burn to ashes, split in thousands of pieces, laugh at them for their misery, their stupidity!” Little by little, the memories and the hate built up on Shinkuu’s chest, filling her lungs with the negativity she had accumulated in so many years. As her reflection suggested, she visualized in her mind the inversion of roles: they suffering, she laughing at them, in their suffering. Without noticing, she found in herself a side of pure cruelty as she really joyed for all the violence in her imagination towards her past bullies.

Shinkuu exploded in a nervous laugh, soon become stronger and shrill. It was like those of the villain in the cartoons or films she was used to watch, a laugh fed by cruelty and sadism. With the crescendo of her voice, all of the other laughs were muted. Even when she wasn’t able to hear the shadows laugh, she couldn’t stop. Her laugh went out of control, resonating all over the cave, and even if her chest and stomach were hurting, she kept laughing. Soon the cavern started to tremble, and a strong earthquake make the crystal walls of the cavern broke, one by one. Rocks as well fell from the top of the cavern. In the middle of the chaos, there was Shinkuu, laughing with all her strength. After a while, the shaking stopped and, slowly, also the voice of the girl decreased. Exhausted, she left herself fall to the ground, still laughing in a low voice. Eventually, she stopped.

Everything then was silent again, as in the forest. All of the walls in the cave broke, the pieces of the broken crystals all over the place. With some difficulties, Shinkuu returned to breathe normally. She felt strangely light, as if a heavy weight was casted away from her chest. She stood again and noticed that the previous labyrinth of crystal was totally gone and, in front of her, some meters away, there was a breach in the rocky wall of the cave. “That most be the exit”, she thought.

Outside the cave, the gray sky and gray landscape, so familiar to the young girl, welcomed her back to the usual face of the Ibara. Under her feet, the usual path, at her sides, the usual dead trees and tangled ivies. “I guess this means I have more to walk before arriving at my destination. I really wonder who is waiting for me at the end of all of this…” Shinkuu proceeded in the usual path, in which there were no choices, no turn backs, no deviations nor shortcuts.