Prologue

My name's Toph Beifong, and I was the chief of police of Republic City for forty-seven years. Not all those years were great, though.

You'd think that since the hundred year war ended, everyone would've at least tried to give peace a chance, even in Republic City. You'd hope that people would remember what so many people had died for and fought for and try to honor that. That's what I thought when I became Chief of Metalbending Police for the city. I thought the job would be a cakewalk, at least in my lifetime when the war was still fresh in everyone's minds. No one would think to mess with me, a war hero, I thought.

Even today, I still feel pretty stupid for being as naive as I was, but I've still got no regrets at all for doing what I did in all my years on the force.

The thing was that Republic City, after a while, was not like any other city.

You see, there's always been somewhat of a class system in the kind of cities I grew up with, but in Republic City it's taken to a whole new level. There's such a giant gap between the poor, middle, and rich classes that most people that are born in each one stay there forever. But the thing about Republic City's system was that with hard work and a lot of balls and brains, you could move up. At the time, this was revolutionary. Moving up class systems was unheard of in most big cities. But the thing is, as more people got richer, more people wanted to steal from them and in some cases, murder them. They just couldn't work for their money so they had to go and rob other people's shit. Some people were twisted enough to where they raped and killed and stole just for the fun of it.

And when they got caught, there was no real guarantee that they would get locked up. There had to be a legal trial and everything. It wasn't like the old days where if you caught a murderer you could have him killed, or if you caught a thief and you could cut off his hands, or if you caught a rapist you could just cut his balls off and send him on his way; that would be considered cruel and unusual punishment to the system, even if the person deserved it. The only thing they really left alone was the death penalty and there had to be a long process for even that. The way it worked was that you needed to find sufficient witness testimony and evidence to convict someone of a crime. If the evidence checked out, they went to jail or got killed or whatever it was the judge wanted. Simple, right?

No, not really.

As you probably guessed, along with anything else legal, there was plenty of room for manipulation and rule bending of the legal system, especially back in the days when the system wasn't even thirty years old. As the criminals got smarter, they realized they could have the judges bribed or even have criminals working on the inside. One criminal perfected it, though. He was a real ruthless bastard. He was smart, too. He knew the system inside and out. He knew its flaws and everything.

But what really set him apart from the rest of the shit that populated the streets was that he was a bloodbender.

Even though bloodbending's been illegal for the last sixty years, he was never convicted for it. For one, like I said, he knew the legal system inside and out. Two, he had the money to get the best attorneys you could buy. And three, nobody wanted to prosecute him because they were scared shitless of him. I mean, this guy can control the blood flow in your body and along with that everything else in your body. He was so good at it that he didn't even have to lift a finger to bloodbend an entire fucking room of people. That's why no court and no judge wanted to have to deal with him. They knew what he could do.

One day he was standing trial for bloodbending a guy to death. I may have been blind, but when I got to the crime scene, all it took was my seismic sense to tell that he had used his bending to wrap the poor bastard's body up like a pretzel and then essentially have the blood boil inside to where it literally exploded. It was a bloody mess. There were parts of him all over the place. We'd find his eyeballs and brains stuck to the ceiling, his arms and legs all scattered throughout the room, you get the picture.

And to top it all off, he was still breathing when we got there.

it took forever to get rid of the new paint job he caused. There was one witness. And when he stood up there to testify, he didn't say a word. He was trembling and I knew he wanted to say something, but he didn't. The judge was in on it, too. He had been bribed by one of his cronies to not convict him. The guy went free that day just like he did all the other times. Do you want to know why he always went free?

It was because of fear. They knew what this guy could do. They knew they couldn't just put him behind bars because he would just bloodbend the guards to let him go and then kill the guards. And I couldn't whack him because I'd get killed for it either by bloodbending or formal execution for murder. He had all the judges and all the prosecutors and attorneys in his pockets. He was untouchable. As the years went by, we discovered that he was the leader of a gang called the Red Monsoons. It's a triad gang of waterbending mobsters that mainly extorted money from people and stole. They were like any other gang in that aspect. But what set them apart was their leader and the sheer amount of money they had.

That's all it took was money to really make him untouchable. The guy was a pure psychopath and there was nothing we could do about it. If it was twenty years earlier, I could've just killed the guy myself and gotten it over with; he wouldn't have been the first one. But I couldn't do it anymore.

But with the legal system, there's a loophole to everything, and I mean everything. Even for dealing with the bloodbending motherfucker named Yakone.