"Sorry! Pardon me! Coming through! 'scuse me! Sorry! Gangway! Just need ta get past! Whoopsydaisy! Sorry 'bout that! Got places to go! Lots of things going on! Oof! Hey…sorry…really sorry, didn't…heh…see you there. See ya! Sorry! Passing through! Can't stop! 'scuse me! Watch ou-AAAGH! …owwwww…" Aang leant up to rub the bright red gash on his forehead inflicted by an inconveniently-placed lump of rock jutting out the floor of the torch-lit cavern. The short-haired, heavily-mudded boy winced at the contact of his fingers on the inflamed skin as he lay sprawled across the ground with one arm stretched behind to keep him at least half-up. Various irregulars and other support personnel looked warily at the two-left-footed boy who was tearing his way through the caverns at high speed, only to fling themselves out the way of a fundamentally more obstinate force of nature. Aang groaned, "it's impossible to be polite these days…hwuh!"
"Come on, dead-weight, get your butt in gear!" Toph pulled Aang up by the arm and dragged him behind her at high speed, leaving him finding it hard not to trip over from the surprise. Whatever the case, she seemed to know where they needed to be going.
"'Dead-weight'!? Is that my new nick-name now!?" Aang asked loudly in-between gasps as they ran. Toph faced straight ahead of him, seeming intent on whatever direction she was dragging them both in. Aang gibed, "I could have picked a better insult than that!"
"Unless you want that name to be literal, you'd better keep that trap shut!" Toph snapped back, running head-long down a long corridor before abruptly twisting into an adjoining tunnel without any prior warning, leading the somewhat-Avatar to yelp as he was dragged violently into the dark abode. As Toph let go of Aang's hand he found himself crashing into the centre of a sizeable alcove, having lost any semblance of a centre of gravity. He looked up to see Katara and Sokka, framed in torch-light, looking down at the both of them in some surprise. The stone shelves that ringed the chamber behind the two red-clothed Water Tribe teenagers were stacked with barrels of various unknown and potentially exciting substances.
"There you are!" Sokka remarked angrily, "we're never going to get our stuff back and out of this place if you keep wandering off whenever you feel the urge."
"It's not my fault I had to feel across half the base for you guys!" Toph counter-attacked, "something really bad's going on. We don't have much time."
"I was worried about you, Aang," Katara leant down to inspect the gashed boy with sympathetic eyes underneath her two brown bangs, "we didn't know what happened to you! It's not safe around this place. We're not welcome here anymore and you…look…disgusting. What the heck happened to you two!?"
Katara looked up accusingly at Toph as if their wet, mud-encrusted condition was all the blind girl's fault. The Earthbending Master huffed irritably, "sheesh. You're welcome, your sugary majesty. Nice to know you're so grateful for us trawling through the rain and muck to find out that Smellerbee and Longshot are Dai Li plants and that the Earth Army is going to storm Colonel Yuung's base any second now."
Katara was left flabbergasted, and any offence she felt at Toph's insult was utterly swamped in sheer shock, which somehow managed to be swamped in turn by an even greater shock at how her brother responded to the news, "great! We can use the distraction to get our stuff and escape!"
"What do you mean, 'great'!?" Katara exploded at the Warrior, who found himself flattened against the barrels as he stepped back as far as he could from Katara's advancing, rageful face, staring angrily at Sokka's diminishing figure, "the Dai Li's tortured and brainwashed the last of Jet's friends, Azula's cronies know where we are, these people's last hope is going to be destroyed, and all you can say is GREAT!?"
"Kataraaaaa…" Sokka made a vain attempt to calm his venomous sister, holding his arms out in a conciliatory gesture, "please, please, please, just for once, at least try to see the big picture?"
"Don't you dare talk to me like that, Sokka," Katara growled in a low voice, millimetres from her brother's face, emanating fury from every pore in her body.
"He's right, Katara," Toph stepped marginally closer, the only one there with the wherewithal to actually contradict her, "there's nothing more we can do here. It's beyond help. All that's left is to help ourselves."
"I can't accept that!" Katara turned angrily at the blind girl, instinctively clutching onto her mother's necklace inside her red clothes, onto the very idea that there was nothing more important than fighting for what was right. The Waterbender looked down at Aang, still sprawled on the floor, the one for whom they all fought, the living embodiment of the world's conscience, and appealed, "Aang…we can't accept that…"
Aang looked up at Katara, unsure how to answer. He wanted badly to agree with her, but when it came down to what he really knew, all he could do was look down to avoid the Waterbender's gaze. It represented in itself a decision that this wasn't a battle worth fighting. Once, what was literally a lifetime ago, he could have made a difference to this place. Not anymore. Now the Avatar was just…dead weight.
A cascade of gongs rumbled through the ground beneath Aang's fingers, and soon the tunnels outside the alcove were in a state of organised chaos, like antibodies fighting to isolate a virus, unseen. The Army had begun to storm the base, and throughout the tunnels came calls to hurry, to get out, to grab everything and run as fast as possible. The strange distance between the activity outside and the moment of contemplative stillness inside the group's alcove seemed to reinforce the palpable difference between the worlds the two gangs of fighters inhabited. They couldn't allow themselves such distance for long.
"We can argue later," Sokka decided in all seriousness, "right now our first priority is to get out of here. You all head to the nearest escape tunnel. I'll wait until the Colonel's left his office and grab our stuff, then I'll come join you."
"Wait…wouldn't the Colonel just take the stuff with him?" Toph picked apart the obvious flaw in Sokka's plan. Sokka looked condescendingly at Toph, as if he had anticipated that all along. On recognition that he hadn't, the warrior abruptly started spazzing in frustration, clutching his skull while making irritating whining sounds.
"Argh! I'll need to get there before him!" Sokka realised, running through the three of them out into the tunnel opposite, pausing only to point commandingly at the rest of them, "you get to the tunnel! We don't have much time! Come on! Move! Move! Move!"
Sokka was gone in a flash, leaving the group alone to stare at the Sokka-shaped lump of thin air the Warrior left behind, contemplating his entertaining but nevertheless highly disturbing outburst. Aang had to shrug, getting to his feet and wiping off his muddy self, "well…it's not like we can stay here."
The group, in single file, treaded out of the alcove and made their way in the direction of the nearest escape tunnel, dull-minded and drained of urgency in spite of the gongs. Their distance was very suddenly shattered by a series of abrupt explosions of earth from further down the tunnel behind them. The tunnel erupted into a smorgasbord of dust, shouting, and stamping, and the red-clothed benders were instantly much more motivated to run as fast as their muscles could cope, their ears ringing with primal screams.
The organised chaos of the liquidation of Yuung's base was rapidly turning into bog-standard, ordinary chaos, leaving Sokka relatively unmolested as he ran down the tunnels towards Yuung's office, nearby where they were hiding beforehand. While teams of irregulars erected defences and collapsed corridors to harry an as-yet-unseen foe, throwing supplies from one to another like they were balls in some kind of contact sport, the Warrior ducked and weaved through the bottlenecks of people running, stacking things, shouting and other strenuous military-related activities. He was starting to suspect that the military life really wasn't what it was cracked up to be. He may well have ruminated how being a lone hero against the odds fighting with the Avatar for peace in the world was much more rewarding, but as of that moment most of his mental energies were directed towards the rather more immediate task of staying alive.
Halting himself from a wild sprint by flattening his back against the cave wall near the narrow portal to Yuung's 'office', he took a second to regain his breath and peered around the corner to see the sparse and barely-used interior of Yuung's centre of operations. Sokka had guessed the Colonel to be far too hands-on to keep a regular filing system, and it'd never even occurred to him that asymmetrical warfare would need anything resembling paperwork. Everything was functional, consisting of weapons, spare clothes and something half-soft to sleep on, entombed in unlit darkness. Easily noticeable, however, was a small bag dumped on a stone stump that may have been either a seat or a desk depending on Yuung's mood, Sokka reckoned. The room looked empty, and the bag looked very assuredly his.
Peering rapidly left to right, Sokka started from his prone position to a flying sprint into the centre of the dark room, stopping suddenly just before the stump to grab onto the bag's strap with one hand, exclaiming quietly "don't mind if I do!"
"Don't mind if you do what, exactly?" a low voice obliterated the Warrior's thought, rooting him to the spot in unutterable, immoveable terror. A large, grubby hand shot out of the shadows to the left of Sokka to clamp onto the red-clad Water Tribesman's outstretched arm. Eyes flitting down at the impossibly strong arm, he found himself giggling in fear as his hand snapped open and the strap of the bag fell out of his fingers. Colonel Yuung's haggard face emerged from the darkness, his other arm holding a bag of the supplies had been packing over his shoulder, and spoke menacingly, "because if you were about to take some valuable property of the Earth Kingdom Resistance with the intent of using it for your own petty purposes…I think I'd mind."
"Come on! Move your scrawny, unblemished butts! The Army's going to be on us any second!" Heng, the old man of the Yalujiang tunnel, waved the last few stragglers through the wide escape tunnel, torch in hand and ready to scarper himself at a moment's notice, peering with some justified paranoia towards the rapidly-clearing corridors behind him, feeling the shudders and shaking as the last few rear-guard irregulars fell…one by one. It was long past time when he could have been able to make a stand, but he earnestly envied those young 'uns who volunteered to stand and fight to let crotchety, useless people like him run away with their tails between their legs. The flow of escapees ended and he decided to wait for ten seconds for any stragglers to turn up. Nine seconds later, to his great surprise, the only member of the Resistance in uniform strode angrily into view. Despite all appearances, Heng recognised authority, but felt himself old enough to ignore the traditional rules of deference, "what the heck took you of all people so long!?"
"Trouble with a fraudster," Yuung advanced quickly towards the tunnel, holding two bags of supplies over his shoulder with one hand and dragging a complaining red-clothed teenager behind him on the floor with the other, "didn't want to recognize he'd outstayed his welcome. Did the rest of the Avatar's team pass this way?"
"Yeah…yeah they did," Heng scratched his head at the circumstances, but nevertheless affirmed the Colonel's question, "I've no idea what you think they're involved with, but from that look on your face I really don't want to be in their shoes right now."
"Look! You got it all wrong!" Sokka appealed, attempting as hard as he could to seem conciliatory, "with all the gongs going off, I just wanted to help! I was just gonna help you with your stuff! You know…logistics and all that!"
"I told you to get lost. You'd have helped my logistics a whole lot more by just following my instructions," Yuung reached the tunnel and threw Sokka inside ahead of him, making the Warrior yelp and then groan painfully as sharp rock gashed his cheek. Yuung was less than unrepentant, "our operation's been discovered and my forces dispersed in six separate directions. If I have to worry about a self-serving, two-faced little rat who doesn't care for anything except his own hair, then you're an obstacle. Do you know what I do to obstacles?"
"Listen, I know we've had our disagreements…" Sokka turned over to face Yuung, holding his hand out while still lying on the ground, "but we're on the same side! We just need to…you know…pool our resources!"
"You don't have any resources to pool, short stuff," Yuung stepped into the tunnel to tower over the prone figure of Sokka, fists clenched, "if you want to help so badly, get moving. But don't you dare think about running out of my sight…"
"Hey! Hold the door!" a young voice called from down the corridor, distracting Yuung from the Warrior. Sokka peered down between the Colonel's legs to see Yama huffing his way down the corridor, holding a torch ahead of him. Just behind the 13-year-old boy he could see another figure, looking murderously intent beneath her war-paint…Smellerbee.
Sokka gasped a little and scrabbled as fast as he could backwards down the tunnel, turning abruptly to tear down the dark crevasses as fast as he could without hitting anything in the face. Yuung, looking back at Sokka's attempt to escape, moved into a stance with the intent of crushing the life out of the idiot, only for the young lookout to interrupt his frayed concentration, "Colonel! Sir! We've got something really important to tell you!"
Distracted enough to let Sokka escape, and knowing he was distracted enough to let Sokka escape, the Colonel thumped the nearest wall in sheer irritation and challenged the latecomers with all the authority he could muster, "this had better be good!"
"It's bad, sir! Really bad!" Yama halted in exhaustion before the Colonel, looking far more scared than anyone his age had any right to be. While Smellerbee snarled in impatience, clutching onto her knife and Jet's hook in both hands ready to kill anything that moved in front of her, Yama's voice trembled as sweat rolled its way down the side of his face, "we've been betrayed, sir!"
Yuung could tell this was the case, as the base seemed to be falling apart around him. He could feel the juvenile terror emanating from the young soldier before him, and Yama's gasp as a cloud of dust erupted behind him surged with adrenaline. Yuung stared intently at the cloud, seeing in the shadows the men stamping their way through it, men who had overrun the last few remaining positions. Earthbender fighting Earthbender, his own soldiers fighting his own soldiers. He grabbed onto Yama's shirt and brought him forcefully into the tunnel, "tell me on the way! If we don't get out now we'll never get out!"
Yuung's men didn't need telling twice, and ran down the wide tunnel as fast as they could. Yuung stepped back to take a stance, never daring to contemplate the last time he would see this place, knowing for certain that whatever remained, his people would understand. It was for them that he fought. And it was for him that they fought. He knew they'd understand, as he brought the entrance of the tunnel down, just before the Earth Army appeared in all directions. The last of the light disappeared from the tunnel.
The last of the rain was ceasing as they had emerged from the tunnel into the dark, tree-studded countryside. Good news for their clothes, but not so good news for their feet, as the mud sucked on their footwear. Katara, Toph and Aang had mostly ran alongside the rest of Yuung's men, swerving round the various corners and dead-ends meant to confuse anyone trying to trace the tunnel outside, and they didn't have much choice but to ingratiate themselves with the Resistance's routine while they waited for Sokka. The former soldiers were taking it upon themselves to make an on-the-spot roll-call by torch-light to figure out the make-up of this new battalion that had been rather arbitrarily formed. As the irregulars hid themselves in the bushes, Katara peered around the corner of the tree the three of them had been taking refuge under towards the tunnel entrance, jutting out of the ground at a 45 degree angle, and none of the insurgents wandered far from their rally point. She could see The Duke and Pipsqueak assisting one of the professionals with their roll-call.
"So, is that everyone here?" the soldier had asked the tiny, copper-helmeted kid who was assisting him, who didn't quite have it in himself to stand to attention.
"Yeah…I guess so…" The Duke sniffed and wiped his nose with his free hand, the other planting a pike firmly in the ground, "but Smellerbee and Longshot ain't here…"
"Never mind about your friends. You knew if there was an evacuation you couldn't count on ending up in the same place," the soldier stated with the regulation minimum of sympathy, leading Katara to momentarily worry from her vantage point about what would happen to Sokka. The soldier addressed the rest of the irregulars, "alright, listen up! As soon as Heng brings up the rear we'll be heading downriver to the Fourth Refugee Camp! We'll have to lay low before we can infiltrate the area, so that means we're gonna be sleeping rough for a few nights!"
"What if it's the Army bringing up the rear?" a sickly man wrapped in bandages spoke with steel behind his voice. The former soldier, dressed in civvies, let out a small laugh.
"Then they're going to know what a rice cake feels like," the soldier glanced towards the four Earthbenders flanking the tunnel entrance, their stance ready to collapse the entrance at a moment's notice. They tensed, as did the soldier, The Duke, Pipsqueak, all the irregulars in the bushes and the Avatar and his group hiding beneath the tree as someone seemed to emerge out of the tunnel. The figure scrabbled out, unlit without a torch, and seemed to look heavily confused before steadying himself on the muddy ground before the entrance.
"It's one of ours!" one of the Earthbenders called out, and indeed on closer inspection it turned out to be a red-clothed, top-knotted, disguised Water Tribe Warrior looking somewhat dazed and extremely worried.
"Sokka!" Katara called out, relieved that her brother was alright. Aang noticed, leaning against the tree, that as Katara ran out to meet Sokka, Toph seemed to relax against the tree, like she was holding her breath all this time until she was certain it was Sokka out there. Aang felt momentarily like giggling, but heavier concerns took over as Katara came closer to Sokka only for the Warrior to seemingly ignore her and wander towards the tree where Aang and Toph hid, occasionally looking back at the tunnel entrance in a series of nervous fits.
"Hey, Sokka, what happened back there…" Toph stood up to ask only to be cut off by the Water Tribesman's ramblings.
"Nothing happened! Everything fine! Just gotta go!" Sokka made an unnatural smile and sounded almost insane, looking past the two of them into the darkness of the forest behind them, Katara following urgently, as he muttered half-coherently, "lots to do! Places to go! Gotta go! Time of the essence!"
"But…what about our stuff?" Aang asked sincerely, standing next to Toph before the advancing Warrior, only to be spun around and shunted forward into the forest by Sokka, along with Toph, the both of them being a little too stunned to comment.
"Doesn't matter! Don't need it!" Sokka blurted, not breaking step even when pushing two 12-year-olds against their will, "everything's fine! Better than fine! Hurry hurry hurry!"
"What do you mean don't need it?" Katara spun Sokka around, and found that his entire body was coming out in nervous tics in regular intervals, "what's the matter with you!?"
"Nothing matter! Nothing wrong! Just need to move!" Sokka veered dangerously between creepy smiles and wide-eyed horror, "need to move now! Bad thing happen! Really bad thing happen!"
"You just said nothing was wrong!" Toph turned to face down Sokka, who looked like a guinea-robin being cornered by a ravenous, blood-thirsty croco-wolf. Toph pushed her advantage of being mentally stable, "Sokka, what is going to happen!?"
At this, Sokka's paranoia seemed to dissipate, as he relaxed and sighed depressively, holding his palm across the grazed half of his face, shaking his head slowly, "you know, things would be so much easier if you just do what I ask at times…"
"I'll tell you what is going to happen!" the air snapped with the electricity of Yuung's voice as all attention turned to him, and then to the group stuck in the middle of the irregulars, as the Colonel of the Resistance emerged in torch-light from the tunnel entrance, flanked by nervous Yama and blood-thirsty Smellerbee, while Heng closed the tunnel behind the three of them. Yuung stood the tallest of all the Resistance there, his voice carrying throughout the humid night air of the rally point, drawing all obedience towards it, "you're going to be surrounded, isolated and summarily executed for treason against the true authority of the Earth Kingdom!"
The change was instantaneous, as from all directions came a concentration of attention, with uncountable pikes, battle-axes and bending stances directed against them from every direction. Each member of the group turned outwards, taking a direction each. Sokka swiftly turned around with his sharpened boomerang ready, whirling it with him to slice the head of a pike that someone had attempted to skewer him with. Katara let her swift turning around flow through her arm, picking up a semi-circle of water in one swift motion and letting it rise and fall in preparedness. Toph swerved around to plant a foot in the ground, sending a small wave of earth outwards in her direction to ward off those who had dared to approach her. Aang, instinctively, turned in the last, uncovered direction and took up an Airbending pose, deciding intentionally to ignore the fact that it wouldn't have made a single difference what pose he adopted. Before him, The Duke had quickly scouted forward to point his pike straight at 'Kazuki', the Fire Nation boy, with a self-satisfied grin on his face, "I knew it…I knew it the whole time…"
"You're making a big mistake!" Toph warned the Colonel angrily, taking none too kindly to being cornered. While the irregulars surrounding them kept their distance, knowing the reputation of the Avatar's companions, Yuung took several assertive steps toward the group, clearly unafraid of Toph's threat. Yama and Smellerbee approached alongside him.
"I made a mistake in letting you in my base in the first place," Yuung declared, "you've acted suspiciously ever since we first crossed paths. Keeping secrets, stating half-truths, surreptitiously undermining every facet of my organisation, prevaricating and avoiding every step of the way. You people, so intent on reaching the Fire Nation that you were willing to steal documents even when the base was being raided, questioning my authority to the point of violence and just in general taking my people for a bunch of stooges. And now I know why. You're spies for the Dai Li."
"What!?" Katara exploded in rage, feeling a huge shudder up her spine in being associated with Azula's monsters, "that makes no sense!"
"It makes perfect sense," Yuung contradicted Katara, who momentarily had to warn off another pike by snapping it with a strip of water bended with a wave of her hand. Yuung halted a short distance from the group and stood with hands behind his back, authoritatively, "the Avatar is dead, yes? Killed by a Fire Princess who, by you own admission, controls the Dai Li. Nothing is heard from any of you for two weeks, then all of a sudden you turn up here for no reason, with a Fire Nation citizen embedded with you no less, voicing an earnest desire to enter the lands of our sworn enemy despite having no desire to actually do anything there. Then, the moment I prevent your passage from taking place, my base is invaded, and your 'warrior' here attempts to steal the means by which you can escape to the Fire Nation, leaving us behind to be captured. I knew even before this girl here told me she saw you conversing with Dai Li agents and aiding the kidnap of one of our conrades."
"Us talking with the Dai Li?" Sokka switched his attention between the shiny things pointed at him and Yuung's fierce, stone-faced gaze, his cultivated hatred now directed at all of them. Sokka yelled back, "why don't you ask that girl what she was doing all this time!? Toph and…Kazuki found her talking with the Dai Li!"
"That's funny, how you waited until now to mention that," Yuung voiced sceptically, "you'll excuse me if I find the much-delayed word of a Fire Nation boy and a collaborator a little hard to take at face value."
"It's true!" Aang blurted out, turning towards Yuung, "she and Longshot were captured when their leader Jet was killed! They've been in the hands of the Dai Li for nearly a month!"
"Don't you dare say that, Fire Nation!" The Duke advanced a step, bringing his pike closer to the short-haired boy's face and staring at it in inconsolable hatred. The two honest eyes staring back at him, even if they were Fire Nation, made him falter, and he wondered, "…how could you have known that?"
"It was you talking to the Dai Li! I saw you!" Smellerbee stood forward and faced them all before Yuung, visible in the dark, emerging moonlight peering through the breaking clouds, angrily, tearfully certain of what she was saying, "Longshot's been captured because of you! You always ruin everything when you come along! All of you! Jet wouldn't have died if it weren't for you! You could have helped him! And you killed him! And now you're helping the ones who murdered him!"
"Listen to her! She's contradicting herself!" Sokka challenged Yuung, "you want to take the word of a prisoner of the Dai Li over us, huh!? You trust anyone just so long as it feeds your ego!"
"You keep quiet, you traitor!" Yuung reacted badly to Sokka's insult, the knuckles of his hands turning white in rage. Sokka realised abruptly that he'd struck a nerve and, smiling devilishly, pushed his luck as far as it went.
"You can't call me a traitor, I was never part of your ridiculous organisation!" Sokka stared down the angry Colonel, "look at you! You have your own uniform when no one else has! 'Your' base, 'your' organisation, 'your' men! You even talk of the people as if you own them! You call on them and expect them to owe you something for putting all their lives at risk! And now you're calling yourself 'the true authority of the Earth Kingdom'! You're small fry, 'Colonel' Yuung! Using old men and boys to do your dirty work, killing old ladies in tailor shops, taking disagreement as tantamount to treason against your regime, strutting about like you own the place when all you own is a pile of dirt!"
"I do what I do for the people of the Earth Kingdom!" the Colonel spat at the Warrior, "you'll never understand that!"
"Oh, I understand it alright," Sokka targeted, "only too well. You can't tell the difference between what the people want and what you want. You don't love them. You just want them to love you. Well here's someone who doesn't love a cold-hearted, self-centred monster like you. Now what are you going to do about that?"
Yuung seethed in rage, breathing harshly, staring with utter, cold fury at the enemy. He'd spent his life killing people like that, anyone who didn't recognize him. Anyone who didn't love him. The scrawny little worm didn't deserve repentance, and neither did anyone else like him, the questioning, the confrontational, the other. Either they would love him or die. And he knew what to do with this mocking little insect.
"KILL HIM!" Yuung commanded to his men, "KILL ALL OF TH-"
Yuung was stalled by a sudden jolt to his system, and everyone halted in their orders to see the great and infallible Colonel Yuung sway unsteadily on the ground and blink in a haze of confusion. He reached behind himself and pulled something long and thin out of his back, and brought it round to look at it closely, his vision fazing in and out as he inspected the narrow, pointed stick of wood, quilled at the end and dripping some black substance out of the point. He stared angrily at the dart before it slipped out of his fingers, as his near-inhuman metabolism made a concerted effort to keep him conscious.
"No…no they won't get me! No matter how many there are they'll never get me! Look out, men, and fight for what you believe in!" Yuung stood assertively, rocking from side to side as he railed against fate, "believe in me, men! Believe in me! Don't listen to the traitors! To the collaborators! The enemy will perish! They're all around us! But they'll never get me! I know you'll do…I know…I know you love me…I know you love…"
Yuung plummeted into the mud, unconscious despite his best efforts, and everyone saw his fall. The Duke no longer concentrated on Aang, looking around fretfully at whatever was around them. Pipsqueak waved his trunk at every flutter of every leaf, as Yama and Heng waved their torches into the darkness. Smellerbee couldn't co-ordinate herself, not knowing where Jet's enemies could be. Being already in a defensive posture, the Avatar's group were the only ones who were even remotely prepared for what was coming.
The sound of marching filled the night air, shouts and cries of soldiers moving into position, from north and south, east and west, through the trees and through the muddy earth, as none of the irregulars had any idea where to place their attention. It was left to Toph to confirm for certain what they all already knew, in the darkness of the crescent moon, caught, in her own words, betwixt a mighty stone vice of doom. Expertly hiding the fear in her voice, she stated as plain fact, "we're surrounded."
To Be Continued…
Avatar: The Last Airbender Concept and Characters © Nickelodeon 2005-06
Author's Note: Bit shorter than typical, since this is basically the stopgap for the BIG BATTLE coming next instalment. That said, it's the most emotionally charged stopgap I think I've written thus far, since everything was basically leading up to this. I've had this scene playing out in my head for months, and now it's on paper I'm actually feeling a little dissatisfied with it. I'm never satisfied that my writing is as good as it should be, but the first half was largely written on the fly, being the stop-gap and everything.
I do love the Dai Li. They're such a handy plot device.