Disclaimer: The following chapter is entirely fictitious. Any similarity to the history of any person living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional, except when specifically noted otherwise in the cast and crew credits. All celebrity voices are impersonated and no celebrities have endorsed any aspect of this fic.
Chapter Twenty-Two: Dalits
'-'
The little girl, Nazrin, had not stopped talking since they allowed in the four. While the young girl's cronies remained silent for their whole journey back down into the depths of the Resistance's headquarters, she poised herself almost as an adult among the four real ones. One thing for certain, thought, was that Zuko could not help but stare at the little girl's head. Half her hair was gone. Her right ear was missing. Whatever happened to her spread down past her neck and under her collar. What had she done to get something so horrible?
"You're staring at my head," Nazrin suddenly said in the middle of her conversation to Zuko. The three other adults turned their heads toward his as a small flush of embarrassment spread on his face.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to—"
"It's okay," the little girl said with a weak smile. "I should've known better."
"How did it happen?" Katara asked, now that the conversation turned to that direction.
"I lost a practice sparring. The teacher didn't send me to the infirmary because he said I wouldn't learn anything." Nazrin stopped in front of a large stone-like wall, carved with caution signs, gruesome images of scrawny humanoids subservient to human entities. She placed one palm on the caution sign, face twisting in contemplation. The four adults looked to her companions who had horror written all over them.
"We aren't supposed to go in there!" the shortest boy, Idzi gasped. "They're going to eat our faces!"
Aang cocked an eyebrow. "Who's going to eat your faces?"
"The people on the other sides," the little boy said quietly. "We aren't supposed to go in because they're monsters and they'll eat our faces!"
"You can't go into the Resistance alone," the little girl said to the group. "They might be able to help you."
"We can't get in there anyways," Zero said with anger to Nazrin. "Only a metalbender can get inside."
Tsuchi's face twitched. "Excuse me chillin'," she said, moving Nazrin and the other two aside, "but this is my forte." Placing both hands on either side of the stone-like wall, Tsuchi dug her fingers into the metal and tore the solid piece in half to reveal a black room.
"I don't see any—"
Before Katara could even finish her sentence, the seemingly empty room filled with the sound of hissing and scurrying of people to the back. And from the slightly lit room shot a head from the dark. A skull with skin stretched on top.
"The Dalits," Nazrin gestured inside. "Or—"
"The counterfeit Avatars."
'-'
In the blood pooled across the floor, dismembered bodies strewn in every direction with cremated limbs and human jerky, alongside corpses with caved in craniums and lungs dangling from their mouths, Kurogane walked, making sure not to trip. Moment by moment a new addition found its way to the casualty count from the oldest to the youngest of members. She closed her eyes tightly as she stepped over the smoldering corps of one of the children, the arrogant boy whose arms she pulled from their sockets not weeks ago. No one aimed their attacks towards her but she did not mind in the least since she had no plans to attack anyone. However, her journey was not to exit the headquarters. Rather, her destination was the heart of the operation.
"Resistance members, High Master Keme orders you all to cease your fire," the cowering secretary screamed into the loudspeaker. "All members participating in the fighting in the main lobby and any other area will be punished to the highest degree!"
Kurogane could not see the woman from behind the desk. Already two cremated bodies lied on the top of the desk where the secretary hid, meaning she was not going down without a fight. Kurogane pursed her lips. She mastered murder before, how could one of her own be any different?
Two fist punches was all it took before the screeching woman behind the desk immediately became silent. "I'm so sorry," Kurogane said to the crumpled up heap of person she stepped over to get to the entrance wall to the High Master's office, "I don't have an appointment, but I'm just going to let myself in."
Bending the entrance was not the difficult part, nor was finding her way through the maze of masonry to the High Master's office. No, the difficult part was confronting her attacker. Her boss.
Her enemy.
Her basics came in handy for her at that moment. With one stomp of her foot the wall to the most disgusting being on the planet shattered into forever pieces, exposing the man behind the wall.
"Miss Kurogane," the High Master said in such a smarmy voice, as if he had expected her. "I take it you are here to admit that you failed miserably at your assignment? Or to take responsibility for this chaos?"
"I don't understand what you're talking about, High Master," the woman said, standing as tall as she possibly could. "If you don't mind, I'll drop the bloody formality seeing as how you're more than likely going to die anyways."
The corner of the airbender's mouth twitched before letting out a soft chuckle. "I'm sorry, are you addressing that threat to me? Because it certainly seems so."
"You know damn well I'm talking to you," Kurogane said with her face contracting in a fit of rage. She stormed three steps forward before Keme held out his hand.
"Do you really thing that coming any closer to the High Master is such a good idea, Miss Kurogane?" Keme cocked one of his bushy, perverse brows and smiled. "You know you want to be a good girl and you know exactly what will happen if you try to do anything stupid."
Kurogane narrowed her eyes in disbelief. Flexing one hand behind her back, within a split second Keme began to twist into convulsions. "I think getting violated by a dirty old man is the least of my worries."
'-'
"What are they?" Katara hissed, shielding her mouth like the others to keep from inhaling the putrid smell that came from inside.
"They're the counterfeit Avatars I told you about," Zuko said, stepping into the room, disregarding the smell and the lack of light. "The Resistance made them in case they needed to combat the real Avatar.
"They're going to eat your faces!" Izdi screamed, covering his ears with his hands.
"How dare you, you insolent Resistance scum," one of the skeletons said in such a raspy voice it was almost soundless. The person stepped out from the darkness, perhaps a woman, hunched over and squinting her eyes to protect herself from the dim light pouring in.
The group shoved each other backwards in shock of the person's appearance, frail, pasty, hair so sparse and thin it only fell to one side. The woman stretched herself up as far as she could and caught her jade eyes against Zuko's, who had not back down like the others. Glaring even more, the woman growled. "Who are you?"
"I am Fire Lord Zuko," he said lowly. "I am with the Avatar to put an end to this mess."
Whispers broke out from within the darkness. "Silence!" the woman said to all still hidden and right away they did. She scanned the group over with her pale eyes and glowered. "Those children with you," she said, pointing with the only finger on her right hand to the three behind him, "they are from the Resistance, are they not?"
Zuko turned to look at the frightened children and nodded.
"She's gonna eat our faces!" Idzi screamed again, hiding behind Katara.
"Get those things away from my people!" the woman snarled, swinging her arm down to shoot flames to get everyone back. "You can leave now."
"What do you want from us?" another skeletal figure emerged from the darkness to stand next to the woman. This one, a man, with patches of hair on his head, placed a six-fingered hand on the woman's shoulder to nudge her back a bit. "Will you explain why they have not yet brought us food since the last day? Our people have been starving."
"They're in the midst of a fight," Aang said, finally pushing his way in front of Zuko. "I'm Aang, the real Avatar."
The two humanoids exchanged looks of doubt before turning to look at the slowly emerging people behind them. Ten in total, each as frail as the first two, crawled out from the dark. One with a kerchief around her head and no brow to speak of stood up, shorter than the first two, and whispered, "Are you here to save us?"
"We need your help to end these people," Katara said in a quiet voice to take her place near her boyfriend. "We know you want don't want to live like this. This is not the kind of life you want, is it?"
"We swear to you if you help us you won't have to anymore," Aang assured, holding out his hand to exchange a shake, however the two originals stared at it in disbelief.
"We have heard of this before," the woman snarled, throwing the man's hand from her, "of people making promises they cannot keep. I will not allow you to manipulate us for your personal gain only to discard us like you think you are better than us."
"We are better than you!" Zero screeched from behind Tsuchi, only to evoke a violent reaction from the woman who shot another fire whip towards them.
"Get that thing away from us," she snarled while the man held her back. "We will have nothing to do with you."
"Anki, let them speak!" the girl who crawled from the shadows cried out in a whisper. "He is the Avatar. They do not have the eyes of the wicked. We want to leave. Let them help us."
"You show your ignorance, Peta," the man said to the girl who spoke up. "If they are who they claim then we will surely die aiding them."
"But would not you rather die as a fighter than live another day under their control?"
The others behind them began muttering in their hushed voices, one groaning loud enough to echo down the hall. The one who spoke, Peta, pleaded with the two without any words, glancing to the others behind her. "You know we all want to leave. What about Fu? He needs help. We all do."
The woman addressed as Anki closed her eyes and breathed out in frustration. "She is correct, Yuji," she said to her counterpart. "As disgusted as I am to say so, we all would rather die free than live as slaves. If we do not agree to this then we will never get another chance of freedom."
"You are insane, the two of you," the man, Yuji, said in revulsion. "We cannot trust them."
"Think of Fu." Anki turned to Aang and Zuko. Nodding, she stated, "We agree to help you, but you must look after our youngest members and make sure they will see freedom."
Zuko and Aang exchanged glances and nodded. "We swear to you they will see freedom." Zuko held his hand out, this time Anki shook it.
"Those children are not allowed to say anything about us," Yuji added, pointing one of his twelve fingers at the boys still hiding behind Tsuchi. "And you should know, with them it is kill or be killed. No other option."
'-'
"This comes to as much surprise to me as it does to you," Kurogane smirked as she brought the undulating body of the High Master closer to her. "But understand that I have been dreaming of this for a while. I was just too stupid to do something about it."
"You know someone is going to come looking for me," Keme struggled to say as the bones in his body gradually began to dissolve from the tips of his toes upwards. "They will kill you before you have a chance to kill me."
The corner of Kurogane's mouth curled up slightly. "I highly doubt that seeing as how the body count outside your office is pathetic to say the least. I suppose you aren't as powerful as you like to believe."
The sound of bones crunching echoed loud in the confined space, only making Kurogane smile more.
"I will be honest; I don't know why this hadn't dawned on me earlier just to kill you." Kurogane shrugged. "Perhaps because I knew if I did then your stupid, little followers would come after me and do the same to me. I suppose it was easier to get everyone to kill each other first before I did the same to you. It just made everything easier that you have everyone here trained like little poodle monkeys that they don't even realize that they hate each other. But I recognized it. It might have taken me twenty-seven years too long but I figured it out. And I'm glad I figured out how stupid I've been.
"And I do have to say that the people you had me kill, bravo. Those were some smart people you needed out of your way for total world domination. But do you not see the illogical paradox in all this? Through violence we bring peace? How did you expect people to get on board with what you're doing? None of the other nations will follow what you want, what this society is about, are you insane? I hope you know the Avatar is on his way right now to stop us. Whether or not he succeeds is yet to happen but the fact that you would try and go against him would have only ended in your death eventually.
"And by the way, did you really think I messed up on my assignment? I did not fail miserably, I chose to fail miserably. I am the best assassin you have and that mission was just as easy as the rest of them. How dumb do you think I am? Take out the Avatar first and then everyone else would have fallen easily into place. The sad part is that you severely underestimated me. Albeit, Fire Lord Zuko did push me in the right direction. I suppose you should thank him for this chaos. It's a shame you wanted him killed. He's the kind of man you would have loved."
She knew she had reached the cervical spine of the struggling High Master, only moments away from his skull. Smiling as she knew she reached the base of the man's jaw, she stepped closer to the gelatinous body floating in the air.
"And by the way," she added as she watched the man struggle to fight back, "your only flaw was being born into an ethnicity so peaceful that you have no real way to kill anyone. So peaceful that no matter how evil you became there was no way in Hell that you were going to ever succeed."
The cracking reached the top of his skull as she divided each individual plate in his head. In a last violent swing, Kurogane drew Keme towards her, placing both her claws on his chest, and, with one thrust forward and back, ripped Keme's ribcage out from inside him to expose the entirety of his internal self. Kurogane dropped her blood soaked hands and allowed Keme's limp body to fall to the floor. Staring down at the lifeless man's blood pour out of his body and pool to the floor, Kurogane could not help but lose control of her emotion and suddenly a huge smile broke out on her face as she began to laugh.
"My only regret is that I didn't do this earlier, you disgusting bastard. But you were right," she smiled to the cadaver as she crouched down to analyze her kill. "Murder is an art. Lucky for us, art is subjective." She reached down to the dead man's throat and severed the disintegrated neck from the rest of the body, lifting the head up by the single ponytail of silver hair from behind his head. "And I do believe the Avatar and his friends will enjoy this."
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Insert DeviantArt promotion here. It's been forever since I updated, and I'm so hoping I get reviews, cuz I like reviews. I've been working on another side project not to mention I've been wanting to write a Legend of Korra fic as well. But I'm holding off on that for now because I'm terrible at multitasking. NEHO, I like hearing feedback. Signing Off!