Qin Lee had always known the prince was good. Anyone who could use their own flame to weld metal together needed to have the focus to maintain a sustained burn and the concentration to narrow it to a fine point, but to also have the raw reserves to keep using it for extended periods of time made him a bona fide prodigy. He had watched him years ago work all night assembling what would later turn into the earth bending powered metal harvester.
It wasn't combat, but that had been enough to quell the rumor mill at the time on why the prince only had one of the royal procession attached to him when every other royal child always had two. There were rumors going around that he had lost the Fire Lord's favor, or that he wasn't deemed as important. But what most of the nobles forgot was how only adult royals recognized capable of defending themselves were always only allowed one assistant.
And Qin Lee was never a bodyguard.
His own appointment, however, only made sense two years ago when the prince first found and chased Fai Lan. And his now unfortunate drinking buddy had the privilege of seeing just well how the prince could manhandle and carry a mostly grown man while gliding over rooftops and narrow alleyways with the unnatural and terrible grace of a tiger monkey. Qin Lee wasn't assigned to the prince. The prince picked him because he was the lightest.
A woman, the prince explained, would have been lighter but he was still a male and had very short arms.
The entire procession was given the direct order to never speak of the truth. Or of anything that occurred behind closed doors. All the nobles saw was a prince who stopped openly practicing and displaying his skills with the imperial forms. What they didn't know was how the prince was using that time instead to create training regimens for the procession, passing on whatever he figured out was well and ready for use by everyone else.
That he taught children to eventually keep pace with soldiers more than twice their age was a miracle in and of itself. Extreme hide-and-seek was what he called it, but it was really just the royal procession hunting down his friends while they tried their best getting away. And day by day his colleagues watched those children learn and grow so fast it was scary.
Their cooperation was used as a testing ground for the coming paradigm shift, of the imminent future of combat where wars would no longer be fought on open ground or seas but in the streets and cities, door to door and with friend and foe almost indistinguishable from each other. It was the same with the gangs around the caldera. One moment they were fighting for their lives and the next and they might be that young man playing pai sho or that old woman selling her hot cakes around the corner.
And finally, the prince deemed his wait over and sent a message to the nobles through his exhibition at the bending rings. It wasn't even a proper fight. He had fought the prince properly before. The prince never used his flames until the last minute when he was serious. The show with the earth bender was not the prince displaying his prowess but was instead the imagined wrath of an angry spirit descended with the entirety of Agni's ire manifested.
"All clear," the prince said.
The youngest royal lead the way over the countless bodies—all still breathing—littering the hall. Qin Lee knelt down and removed the mask on one of the participants in the secret meeting. It was a man he couldn't place a name on. It had only taken a few weeks for their group to resume their clandestine affairs, and the organization fell soon after that.
The prince overturned some masks on his own, and each one he saw was marked with a frown against the dim light.
"Figures we wouldn't find anyone too important."
"It's too convenient," Qin Lee said. They didn't even have any guards or lookouts and they met yet again in the same place the prince's friends found them in.
"Well, they were either that stupid and confident, or they were bait. And at this point, it's just safer to assume someone else is still behind all this."
The prince crouched down and punched the ground. A moment later the team waiting outside came in with Xin Fu in the lead. They started tying the sleeping people up and put sacks over their heads, standard procedure for any hostile extraction.
The earth bender shot him a look. Qin Lee shook his head. Xin Fu shrugged. This just meant it would likely be another sleepless night for the prince.
"We'll take them to the holding areas for interrogation," Xin Fu said.
"No violence for these guys," the prince said. "I think they just got in over their heads."
They didn't even know what hit them. The prince had eventually mastered the art of dampening the inner fire of others enough for sleep. It might have been a blessing or a payment from Sephiroth since no one else so far had learned the technique to do so. And not for lack of trying.
"Yes sir," Xin Fu said.
"Let's call it a night here," the prince said. "Not much point trying to keep going when we won't be getting any new leads until these guys wake up."
Qin Lee hoped for the best. The Fire Lord had given the prince a month at most to do his own investigation until he would be forced to take a break. He was a driven person, but not everyone could keep going for so long with just determination keeping them going.
The following morning the prince was already in his office and thankfully wearing different clothes than the night before. He had his notes before him all laid out on the table while he stared outside towards the morning sky from his desk. Xin Fu and his men had already squeezed everything they could within polite means and had passed their information to Qin Lee with a small scroll.
He bowed. The prince nodded back.
"Here's what we have on the people we found."
He passed the paper over. The prince skimmed through it and sighed.
"Just as you expected, we didn't find anything too important. Mostly minor governors and clerks."
"Admiral Chan stayed put ever since Ukano got caught. Guy wouldn't have climbed the ranks otherwise."
He didn't want to say it but that was the last lead they had on the matter. Ukano told them everything he knew only after the prince threatened to tell Mai of his involvement with the group. The man was loyal, but at least his priorities were on point. After that he had agreed to the terms of his punishment as long as Mai never found out. And in a way letting the man stew in his own pot was crueler than flat out telling him his daughter already knew.
But some lies were kinder than the truth.
"I don't wanna leave this alone, but it really looks like I don't have a choice." The prince stood up. "We'll just need to keep our ears on the ground in case something else surfaces, but as it is, its as good as solved."
But the distaste was clear on his face.
"Fai Lan's people haven't been exposed yet to the nobles as far as we know." Because they would have heard rumors of royals abusing their powers had it been picked up by the rumormongers. "Which means there might be someone out there who even knows the gangs are on my side."
Qin Lee also didn't want to point out how the only people who knew about his involvement with the gangs were limited to a handful of people. His friends, the field staff of the research department, and the other royals. And believing any of them cooperating with this treasonous group was either an exercise in futility or very unhealthy. Knowing the prince, he'd thought over and through the possibilities already.
"Maybe some of the other nations are trying to destabilize ours?" It was an alien concept when the prince first shared such a tactic before, but it predicted the happenings to the Earth Kingdom to the dot after the end of the war.
"That's one of the possibilities, yes. And right now I don't know enough about the other nations and how they might go about achieving something like this." The prince set his face against the hard wood of his table. "This is why I really hate it when people don't keep proper bank records. This would be so much easier if we can just check their books and find some suspicious ins and outs."
Bribery, coercion, generous donations in either coin or kind. It was the privileged language of the nobles and a very pointedly unwritten one. No one in their right mind would have kept such incriminating information on them. And no noble worth their salt would ever sell out another noble unless the gains outweighed the losses. And even then, it was still through trust by word of mouth.
The prince had his work cut out for him.
Then the prince groaned and shook his head. Still against the table. "I mean, if it really were from the Earth Kingdom, surely they'd have used Fire Nation coins to pay, right?"
Qin Lee rolled his eyes at the very real possibility.