Thank you for all the wonderful reviews! They're all greatly appreciated! I love writing Toph. This I think is going to be the best chapter yet, had the one fight scene brewing in my skull bucket for ages, so hold onto your seats and enjoy! – Arual-san
Katara had meant to douse the flames at the stakes as soon as they had begun but for several of the guards on the lookout decks having run to stairs to join with their comrades. She, Zuko, Toph and the Kyoshi Warrior Pimaea were outnumbered four to sixty, so it'd be fifteen each if the rookie could keep up. The length of water she had intended to use on the prisoners had to be pulled back to keep herself from getting blasted but as she pulled she was able to slice through the two stakes closest to her. She couldn't spare the men a nasty fall.
She turned back full attention to the enemy and none too soon as they all began to attack in trained synchronization. What she needed was to neutralize them to get them out of the way and she managed to whip two of the soldiers to the wall and freeze the water that had struck them in that same movement. They were pinned and couldn't be freed in one go without getting roasted.
One of the men had been hoping to nail her when he'd managed to penetrate her immediate space when she was focused elsewhere.
Her snapback to face him and catch him dead in the eye made him falter and in that instant Katara procured ice daggers between the gaps of her fingers and let them fly just as she'd seen the emotionless Goth girl do so many times.
She hadn't the experience to put any art into the man's frozen pose like Mai would have but it did the job.
As she fought Katara noticed that Momo had gotten out of her bag at some point and was doing what only a little lemur could to help, zooming by in the air and throwing dirt in guard's faces, spinning their helmets round so that they couldn't see.
Katara noticed the two men had managed to free themselves.
"Hey!" she called to them. "Come help us! There's a row of weapons over there and-!"
Neither of the men heard her plea. They scrambled for the exits, never to return.
"Useless!" She returned to fighting.
Katara had brought two canteens of it but she had to be conservative with her water when the firebenders had started to evaporate her whips into the air. She could naturally suck the moisture back into her palms but the effort would take concentration she hadn't the few seconds' peace to give.
"Behind you, Toph!" shouted out Zuko when a soldier pulled the dirty move of jumping from the roof.
Toph couldn't detect the man while he was in the air but fired a charging round of earth where Zuko had said. Only a moment's shock registered before the man crumpled to the ground unconscious. Like moving in rhythm to music only she could hear, Toph stomped the earth beneath her and soldiers toppled to the ground.
Beset at all sides, Zuko was unable to go to the aid of his mother as the flames at her feet devoured the wood. It made him a force to reckon with. The fire he had wasn't enough and so he leeched all that burned from the stake on his end.
"Get 'em, Pimmy!" cried the proud uncle to the Kyoshi Warrior using her acrobatic skills to kick and backhand her half, using force and her fan where the others used elements.
A soldier came in with a comet of fire and the bound man started but the girl arched her spine back as far as it would go on a normal non Ty Lee person and evaded the attack by inches. She snapped back and landed a blow to the man's gut.
Rather than chase after her, since Pimaea it seemed was automatically deemed weakest by the fortress by the fact that she hadn't yet bent any the earth of Kyoshi's nation to her will, the soldiers focused in on the bigger game when the girl slipped away from the group she'd been working on to make a beeline for the captives. Before her a man was wildly firing at Momo, who scrambled up and down his legs and when he could bit the man's kneecaps.
Pimaea slashed her fan to the rope of the spiritualist who'd been meditating in silence but was jolted from it at hitting the ground and she cut the binds from the man claiming to be her relative.
Pimaea was about to move on when the man seized her by the shoulders, eyes shut and smiling.
"Oh, Pimmy, I-!"
The girl gave a highly irritated huff of impatience that he was slowing her down in the midst of battle and she waved a fan to where the weapons of the fortress laid. If he wanted to give praise he could just as easily help out, that or get out of the way. All of this she did in only seconds so he could barely glimpse her before she was onto Ursa, pigtails bobbing, who was next in line.
Pimaea readied her fan but was intercepted by two angry firebenders.
Where Ursa was bound the first plumes of smoke had begun to rise and irritate her nostrils and she moved her head aside to breathe in the pure oxygen while she could. She couldn't dare to look below as the fire licked the tips of her shoes.
Zuko had had enough fighting off wave after wave of soldiers who had recognized him for the prince he was. Each of them had wanted the bounty for bringing him into his father's hands and most of them didn't know when to stay down. His element could not solidify like Katara's or be used as a blunt instrument like Toph's so he'd had to use time and precision to incapacitate his enemies into submission.
No more.
His feet barely skipped along the floor so fast did Zuko run one level up with benders in hot pursuit. He reached a corner, almost undershot it and clutched his side in reflex. He was nearing his mother and the wall directly behind her.
A blast of fire singed his heels. He spun now that their aim had improved and reinstated his attack. One went down and then two more dropped like flies but still they kept coming. He took down so many that he'd begun to sweat but he didn't stop and did it as quickly as possible.
So focused was Zuko on the soldiers before him that he didn't take in the ones below.
Two soldiers took time from fighting Toph to seize the opportunity that was Zuko's distraction and fired at him. Zuko felt the heat before he saw it and only just had time to put up a half-dome barrier of fire to keep the rest of his body from matching his bad eye but it wasn't enough to stave off the force of it.
He was blown clear off over the cliff.
It took Zuko a second to process it, the wind rushing by him as he rocketed head first straight towards the unforgiving surfaces below. He sent blasts of flames down but they did little to slow his speed. He was going much too fast.
His voice caught in his throat. He coughed it back.
"Help!"
"What's up, Princess?" asked Toph, the first to hear, as she pummeled a man who thought he could be within five feet of her. "Are the big, bad benders too much for-?"
"Falling!"
That got Toph's attention. She ran to where she heard Zuko's voice coming from and erected below her a single stair to reach the upper level. The benders below simply wouldn't leave her be so she next rolled a bunker of rock all around that was as a shell.
Fire pounded on her bunker from every direction but Toph knew it would hold long enough.
"Where are you!?" Toph called, nodding her head around sightlessly.
"Here!" Zuko shouted over the wind.
Toph stomped and from the cliffside a platform emerged.
"To the left! The left!"
Again Toph tried and again she failed to snag him. As he passed the second platform by Zuko still grasped his hands out to try to reach it though it was a good five feet away. He continued to fall.
After a third failed attempt Toph noticed something that made her brighten. "Hey, there's a whole bed of rocks right below you! I can just-!"
Zuko went paler than a fish's underbelly when the jagged black slate below, intimidating enough as was, stiffened straight up into a row of spikes for his landing.
"Not those! Not those!"
Only when he said so did Toph take the half-second to analyze the structure of the rocks selected. She put them down. She couldn't go about this the way in which she was accustomed and there was no time to go for Katara.
Toph grumbled in that she had been reduced to this but there was no other option.
"I'll have no sass from you this time."
A simple stomp would've made a reasonable division like rock, dirt or mud yield to her commands but Toph had to dance up a drumming tempo to tempt the sand that lay beneath the waves. A tan head surfaced and rose like a crude, twisting snake, not one of Toph's best creations.
Zuko couldn't move closer to it, he could only fall closer and closer to the rocks that would be his end and Toph worked to keep her crumpling, already ailing creation alive.
"Is it below you!?"
"Yeah!"
"Okay!"
Through the connection she felt in fragmented vibrations Toph made the wet sand into a funnel and hardened it. The makeshift landing strip wavered every second that it was kept aloft but Toph managed to keep it there as Zuko neared.
She could only hope it would hold under the pressure.
Zuko hit the strip. There was some resistance in the hardened earth but the sand shattered. Toph readied two more to slow the force he had picked up in his fall and was able to catch him safely. Pulling him back up was another obstacle.
Toph pulled and it was like pulling a rope that had been gnawed to the last strings in several places by rats. Several of those connecting strings broke with regularly and as she pulled him in she had to constantly re-forge her connection. For Zuko it wasn't much better. He had to be fast on his toes to predict Toph's next move. Luck was never his strong suit and he thought he would fall every time there was a jolt in the structure.
Red hail continued to pound Toph's bunker and she shouted in frustration for the benders to shut up.
"Almost there!" she promised.
Wet sand seeped out in chunks from the snake as she moved Zuko up and up to meet her. The two had a scare when it broke and Zuko dropped a few feet only to be picked up yet again.
Zuko exhaled in relief when he was level with the roof the building…he didn't know what to think when he was raised several feet higher than need be.
"Hey, you can stop now."
"What!?" called out the girl throughout the violent quaking of her bunker that was on its last reserves.
"I said you can-!"
A final blast of flame cracked the shell that was Toph's protection into a hundred tiny fragments and in the disruption it brought the sand Toph had been working gave a mighty jolt forward over the building, no longer with the solidity to keep him airborne.
Almost out of water, sensing it behind her, Katara whipped a hand back as her eyes remained locked forward.
"Thanks for the reserves, Zuko!" she said as she leeched the water from the sand above, too busy to care to see where it had come from, and her attack was given new strength. Their side was winning.
"What I'm here for!" he shot back in irritation as he started to fall for a second time. Toph hadn't the time to help him again and he didn't need it. Zuko fired a spurt of flames at the sand below him. Nothing happened so he summoned up from his core the hotter blue flames that Azula produced with ease, driving them up to a toasty 3110 degrees Fahrenheit.
The grainy sand that Toph hated solidified into clear, purified glass that cooled in contact with the air.
Zuko landed light as he could on the line of the fragile material and knelt low to pick up speed as he sped down its twists and turns like a slide. He came to a running landing and took out with one hit the first soldier he came into contact with.
He didn't take time to notice the work of art he'd unintentionally made. The flames were roaring now and the bases all swallowed up in the element's hunger; those unfortunate enough to still be bound winced as it moved to devour their legs. Zuko allowed it to progress no further. He brought all the fire to him and threw it away, melting the glass behind him.
He was at his mother's stake in the stroke of a second hand. He got her down from the awful structure and laid her on her back.
The fire's gone! he chanted to himself. It can't hurt her anymore! She's fine!
Ursa's eyes were watering and she couldn't keep them open so hard were the coughs that made her buck from her chest. She was struggling just for air to breathe and Zuko recalled with a sinking feeling that smoke often killed more often than burns. He did what he could and laid her head on his lap to help her breathe better. He talked to her, told her to keep coughing it out as he shielded them from attack.
"It's okay! Just breathe! Breathe!"
Ursa coughed. Her coughs were tearing at her body and it pained Zuko to see.
An explosion spawned by a combination of earth and fire made the ground shake with the force of any natural earthquake. The girls all recovered quickly and continued like it hadn't happened but Zuko couldn't follow suit.
His mother lay still on his lap. No breath rose from her chest.
For a moment Zuko couldn't breathe, didn't think of it. She shook her, spoke to her, yelled at her and she didn't respond.
He twisted his upper half round in a wide circle, eyes searching throughout the flashing figures and winding elements, desperate.
"Katara!"
The cry caught in her ears and reverberated there like a cave's echo.
While her body kept pace to the fighting dance Katara was engaged her mind told her that it was the first time that Zuko had ever dared to call her by her name. Never had Katara heard Zuko call out in the way she did in that single uttered word.
The veins in his system could've been set aflame and produced a lesser result.
"Katara, please!"
I am so evil. Sorry for another cliffie but that's how I roll. Updates soon! Plan to finish this fic before the start of the season finale.
- Arual-san