Ozai wasn't a stupid man.
He hadn't come out here without a reason. He knew that his father didn't expect him to live. He knew that at this point, a single ship and a single man would never be enough to take on an entire base here in the South Pole. The original fleet that he had been sent out with had numbered from twenty to thirty ships with more than 3,000 soldiers. They hadn't had any tanks or cavalry with them. Just 3,000 soldiers armed with swords and pikes.
They were a minor fleet, insignificant in the grand scale of war and their only task was the destruction of an equally insignificant, equally unimportant fortification in the South Pole.
The people there had nothing to defend. The Water Tribes were just an annoying pest that had to be taken care of. They had nothing the Fire Nation wanted. Just snow and ice.
But the stupid people there loved their stupid little home. They loved their stupid piles of snow and pathetic little houses of packed snow and they adored their flimsy little towns of snow and decided that they needed something to protect all that stupid insignificant snow.
They needed a stupid, pitiful little fort of snow, complete with fragile snow towers and comical snow walls.
It was stupid. They were stupid.
But they had amassed a sizeable force, an army of nearly all the men in a thousand-mile radius, 2,000 soldiers and only enough "boats" (which is what they called them, but as far as Ozai was concerned they were just dead animal carcasses turned over in the water) to haul a quarter of that number. Then they gathered all their hunting tools and called them weapons. Bones from dead animals, stones and the occasional piece of metal, but of course, it was futile and endlessly moronic.
There weren't even that many benders in the South Pole, just a feeble ragtag army of men-too-old and men-too-young
And they thought that they could defend their worthless piles of snows and frozen water.
So of course, some sadistic soul in the admiralty saw fit to crush these wannabe-soldier's and ordered a force of 3,000 Fire Nation soldiers to slaughter whatever foolish snow-tossing idiots they may come across.
It was a pointless mission. Nothing to take or conquer, the only thing to do in this artic wasteland was kill and die. Neither of their lives mattered, Fire Nation or Water Tribe. It was a battle between hopeless armies and it was why Ozai had been assigned to this mission while his brother was in the Earth Kingdom commanding real armies and fighting real battles.
But now here he was, alone with a ship that he couldn't properly operate.
And as inept as they were, 3,000 against one were not odds Ozai was interested in.
It didn't take long for Ozai to spot the fort of ice and snow. It was meant to protect all the villages in the South Pole so of course it was built at the very front, situated on top of two giant glaciers. The two behemoths of ice were the size of mountains and they stretched as far as the eye could see.
Entering the South Pole would mean passing through the thin valley of water between those two hulking glaciers.
Placing a base there on top of it all was probably the only smart thing the Water Tribe had ever done.
And with a fort so high up, if Ozai could see them than they could definitely see him.
Immediately, the prince went to the ship's helm and without a moment's hesitation turned the boat around.
He wasn't running, but he didn't plan on charging straight into his death. The Water Tribe would probably think he was a scout for a much larger army and they'd probably be up at arms at the moment, fully prepared for some epic battle that was never coming.
He'd let them wait a while like that. Ozai smiled as he steered his burly iron ship behind an iceberg and out of sight. Then when those "soldiers" much-too-young and much-too-old were all tired and weary, he'd begin.
But for now he just had to wait. At least until the sun set.
