It had only been a few days since the unilateral declaration of independence, and already an insurgency had broken out on the western border of the country. The Jian's we're prepared for this; there had been ethnic tensions with the Yellow tribals living in the country for years and they knew as soon as they seceded that outsiders would begin to stir up trouble. It was no coincidence that the insurgency started out west either. It was in the foothills that made both farming and military mobilization difficult. One of the most important principals of guerilla warfare is that no insurgency can survive without support – supplies, training, and intelligence – from another friendly nation. The Fire Nation. Naturally, being on the border made outside help that much easier. The border was porous like a sieve and the enemy could scurry back into the Earth Kingdom at a moment's notice.

There are two things that you can do in this situation. Mobilize the army and have them secure every town under martial law, sweeping house to house, acting as police when they've only been trained as soldiers to shoot whatever they consider a threat. Or, if the insurgency is still in its infancy, you can mobilize teams of special operators and light infantry, working in small groups moving light and fast, to smother your enemies before the violence spreads. The generals and political leaders of Jia wisely chose the latter option.

While Jia did have a functioning military it was still lacking in manpower. They had plenty of grunts to do grunt work, and ex-military Water Tribesmen were flocking to the country by the blimp-load to act as private security for farmers. But for a spec-ops team you need spec-ops soldiers with spec-ops training and spec-ops experience. To that end, the Jian's were forced to outsource on occasion to men and women her were not of Water Tribe ethnicity. Hei Bai tells me I was handpicked for this job.

When I served as a special operator in the military I was part of a sniper team. There's a common misconception about snipers among the civilian populace. It's often thought that snipers are individual hiding out in apartment building or on the rooftops, but this isn't true – at least not of the professionals, anyway. Nor do they usually work in simple pairs. In fact most professionals work in teams of six. The commander is an experienced sniper working as the spotter. His protégé is the triggerman with a scoped rifle. You have a radioman next, to receive orders or report the enemy and call artillery strikes. Next is a demoman. And last are the two meathead gunfighters – that's me.

Being part of the lucky twenty percent of the population that was gifted with bending, I was a prime candidate for special operations. Being a fire bender in the Earth Kingdom practically guaranteed it.

I still remember my very first combat deployment as part of a sniper team. I was only nineteen at the time. I had seen combat before – it was one of the pre-requisites to make it into special forces, after. I had been a firing range instructor back then. I requested to be moved up to a front line forward outpost during the Taku insurrection to give the soldiers there some live-fire training with new equipment. I really just wanted to get my combat badge. Sure enough, some insurgents began taking potshots at the camp from almost half a kilometer away, I fired a few rounds in their general direction, and at the end of the day I went home with a medal.

This was different.

This was the real thing.

"It's alright if you're scared," Korah said to me. "You just don't want to show it."

I was young. I hadn't learned yet to bury everything inside like Captain Jian Li or Corporal Yui. I think everyone in the powered glider was scared, and they called me out for reminding them.

There was a little jungle country south of Gao Ling . The territory was in anarchy, control was being vied for by several different warlords. Disease ran rampant. The people were mostly uneducated and illiterate. Healers Without Nations tried to send humanitarian aid, but many of the natives were superstitious and believed that they could cure their venereal diseases if they had their way with the water bending healers. After reports of gang rape reached the media, there was a huge outcry for the Avatar to do something about the situation.

Avatar Sun Yu called upon the United Republic to mobilize its forces, and as the army restored order across towns and villages, special teams like mine were sent into the jungles to scout ahead, plant traps, or assassinate warlords.

We flew to the coast of that country and were inserted by air. The light in the back of the cargo bay blinked red. A loud and terrible gust of wind flooded the compartment.

"Thirty seconds!" our pilot shouted over the wind.

I did a double check of my parachute, my dive mask, and regulator – all systems good. The light switched from red to green.

Two by two we jumped. Naturally Korah the air bender jumped first with Yui the water bender right behind him. I ran after them just as I had so many other times in training. With a final leap my feet cleared the back of the glider, my stomach rising to my chest and my heart skipping a beat as the empty nothingness swallowed me up.

Bumi's words to me before takeoff that day crept into my mind, "Listen up, new guy. I'm gonna be right behind you in the lineup. I absolutely hate night jumps, even more than you do. I'm depending on you not to screw this up, but I want you to know that if you lose track of Korah, I'll be right behind you. If you get lost, I'll find you."

I looked down into the blackness and saw a single star of clean white light. It was the strobe on Yui's back that would guide me to my destination. She, too, was guided by the strobe on Korah's back. Just like the strobe on my back would guide Bumi above me. It helped put my mind at ease.

The light below me appeared to split into four pieces as Yui opened her parachute with four little strobes in the corners. I pulled my parachute in turn and winced as I was yanked from one hundred ninety to sixteen kilometers an hour in only a handful of seconds. I'm finally slow enough to take in the reflection of the moon on the water, marking the silhouette of the distant coastline. I can hear the crashing of invisible waves beneath me. A second set of strobes rises up from beneath Yui's till it passes her, as Korah – job complete – opens his chute and rises to my level. It was Yui's turn now. About a minute later and her strobes turn from white to red, signaling that she has ejected from her harness.

A leap of faith, I eject from mine as well. I can only trust her judgment of how close to the sea we are. My heart wells up into my throat again but only for an instant.

From toe to head, the sea reached up and engulfed me. I opened my eyes. More blackness. Darker this time, too. I could not see my hand in front of my face; whether my eyes were open or closed made no difference.

I felt something brush up against my aide and I startled. I drew my dive knife and raised it to stab whatever threat was near me. Something grabbed my wrist, stopping me from thrusting. I squirmed and flailed my free limbs for some good time before my wits returned to me and I had the common sense to turn on my head lamp with my free hand. It was Yui gripping my wrist. She slowly shook her head side to side, her eyes burning with contempt at my lapse in intelligence. I still can only imagine how she found me and the others in the darkness – some sort of water bending sixth sense. Well, it was her job after all. Though not only did she find us, but she guided us ten meters deep through five kilometers of Unagi infested waters to our destination.

We emerged from the surf, rifles drawn and at the ready. Even in water up to our waists, we moved fast and quiet up the beach. We were ghosts. As we moved through the mango grove deeper into the jungle, we encountered our first enemy, a lone rebel sentry. We were only fifteen meters away, but he did not see us through the dark. We walked through ankle-deep water, but he did not hear us through the waves. Yui's turn again.

The sentry did not notice her till the last second. He wheeled around just as a bolus of water enveloped his head. He tried to escape, but his feet were rooted to the ground with ice and his trigger hand uselessly frozen to his rifle. I'll never forget the man's face, wavy through the water engulfing it, his eyes wide in terror, drowned while standing in only ten centimeters of water. I'll never forget Yui's either. Her teeth gritted, her brows furled together. Yui's anger was cold. It was collected.

No. Anger isn't even a good word for it. What Yui felt was hate

There are a lot of different ways to deal with death and killing. I was inexperience and the time, and let things like the sentry's downing get to me before I learned how to deal with it. Jian Li turned to hardiness and resolve. Korah was the exact opposite. He turned to black humor. More than that, he turned to his rifle's scope. It pulled him out of reality. Looking through his scope he never really had to look at death; it was like watching a film. The scope of Korah's rifle was his condom: it let him interact with the world without ever having to really feel a part of it or dirty himself with his own action.

Then there was Jet, our demoman. He just worked on his earth bending to distract himself. Bumi, the only nonbender, would drown his sorrows.

Yui learned to hate. They say it's hard to take another man's life, but that's not true. You'd be scared of what you were capable of if someone put a gun your hands and someone else were shooting at you. Killing in cold blood, however, is another matter entirely. It takes a lot of passion and a lot of will. Most of all it takes a way to cope. Killing in cold blood is much easier your victim is less than human, and that's why Yui learned to hate and despise her enemy. She had a huge reserve to rely on, too. Many member of the Water Tribe join the military to escape the factories or the communal farms. Yui joined to get off the streets and whatever sort of life she led left her angry and bitter.

We abandoned our dive gear shortly after. Without his dive suit's hood, Korah's blue arrow tattoo glimmered quietly in the moonlight. I was glad to be able to ditch the live bomb of compressed air from my back. Glad to get rid of the weight, too; we had a long way to go. Sweat dripped into my eyes like little stinging drops of fire. The air hung heavy with moisture and the taste of salt dripped into my mouth. I tried to wipe the sweat from my eyes and brow, but only succeeded in rubbing it into my eyes. Our target was the apex of a hill over-looking a dirt road. To get to the hill involved a twenty one kilo hike uphill through the jungle; we made it in three hours.

Our mission was to kill a rival sniper known as the Painted Death. An amateur and a singleton. Unremarkable, if not for the name – and the namesake mask. That's how it is, however; the legend always far exceeds the man. So for every peacekeeper he actually killed there were two more psychological casualties. We needed to nip his legend in the bud. A fake intel leak here and there, and he'd believe our team had come here to assassinate one of the local warlords. Sniping an elite EKA spec-ops team was an opportunity to fuel his legend we knew that he couldn't resist. He knew we were coming, and have the drop on us. We'd just have to aim better than he could.

Every war has legends and heroes. The Great War against the Fire Nation had myriads of heroes including no less than the legend of Aang himself. There was Kuvira and Korra in the next, and innumerable before. People forget that the people behind the legends were still human. We were here to ensure there would never be a Legend of the Painted Death.

We reached the clearing at the top of the hill. If they had laid an ambush we would have smelled them on the approach. The hilltop was empty. This meant that either we were being stood up, or the Painted Death had accepted our invitation. Yui, Bumi, and I set up a defensive perimeter. Korah got into position and loaded his rifle.

"Anti-personnel, tracer, silicate core," Jian Li whispered to him

I could hear Korah open the bolt of his rifle, insert the round into the chamber, and then lock the breech closed. Korah got into position and then spun ninety degrees to his left. This was the moment of truth: the Painted Death had the advantage, he could already see us. Korah had to better than him; being good doesn't cut it.

"Do you have eyes on target?" Korah asked.

"Five degrees to your left," Jian Li answered

"Negative."

"Look for tree-cancer"

"Got him… "

"Range: eight hundred meters, elevation: seven degrees. Crosswind: four knots. Korah, hold the air."

"Holding"

I didn't notice how loud the breeze was until it was stopped. Suddenly the whole jungle seemed to go quiet

"Take the shot."

"Sir, I think he can see me, he's looking right at me"

"Take the shot!"

The Bang! of the report rattles around inside my skull like a thunderclap. I jolted awake in my sleep as if I had been the one who was shot. I was still in one piece, only another of many dreams and nightmares to come.

"It's the heat," said a cigarette smirched voice.

I looked to the cot beside mine. Kneeling at the foot of the bed was a man. A yellow man like me, not of the brown skinned Water Tribe. However from his features and rugged scars I could that he was not a northern Earth Kingdom member, and certainly not a member of the Fire Nation, but rather a local tribesman from the Jian peninsula.

"Everyone wakes up early form the heat around here," he continued, "It's only six hundred hours, but the sun's been up since O' five hundred"

"Wh—who are you?"

The man gave a smile unlike Buno's or Hei Bai's. It was a warm and gentle smile. The sort of smile a father was supposed to have.

"I am Chang,'' he said, tightening the laces of his combat boots."I'm the squad machine gunner in Hei Bai's lance."

"Small world," I said. "I'm one his riflemen."

"I already know… Breakfast is at O'-seven hundred in his tent. You need to be there," and with that he left.

I crawled out of bed half an hour after our exchange. I fought to keep the sweat out of my eyes as I tied my boots. Not from the lack of sleep but from the heat alone I was already exhausted, and it was only morning. I opened the flap to our tent and stepped into the blinding angry sun. I started to look for Hei Bai's tent, and as I meandered through the encampment in a state of confusion I soon became lost. Eventually I ended up behind the burn pit and I saw what I wished I hadn't. For all of Chancellor Du Lin's talk of building a better nation state, she managed to drag along all the usual degeneracy into her paradise, especially the expected baser nature of the Water Tribe conscripts. Hiding behind the burn pit from their officers who were no doubt turning a blind eye, were a handful of noncombatant enlisted men, shooting up their heroin, or opium or whatever was the drug of choice around these parts.

I turned around and headed back to my tent, disgusted and disappointed. Not disappointed in them, but rather in myself for naively expecting any better. As in the ghettos, so in Jia. I returned to the tent with a scowl on my face, laid back on the bed, and tried in vain to go back to sleep.