Korra was flying an expanding sinusoidal pattern ahead of the airship, not sure what to look for beyond the obvious, there were now missiles available, those would have to be vehicle mounted or in boxes as big as a large truck to reach the airship at its current altitude.
Guns could also be effective given airships don't have the speed to evade, most combat was still done with bending powers although the presence of non-benders in large fighting vehicles such as cruisers, airships, etc. and the increasing experience of people effecting removal of bending ability had prompted the development of small firearms, but aircraft especially were just plain flying too high for benders on the ground to be effective, so guns had been developed for this. This airship had been reinforced against frag, so provided it wasn't a direct hit, the worst would be a controllable descent with plenty of time to pick a landing zone.
But given the speed and size of an airship, a direct hit would still be stupid easy to score.
Such guns would be easy to find, they point at a high angle and have barrel lengths tens of metres long and would need to use radar to compute the firing trajectory, sensors on the airship would detect those and they would have minutes to change course.
One frustration was Korra couldn't do anything until the enemy started shooting.
"Give me my excuse," inwardly thought Korra. That description of what Pi and chums had been doing to Jinora, near as makes no difference a cousin, almost a sibling since she had moved to Air Temple Island, no fucker does that to a person as kind and selfless as Jinora, "I want my excuse spirits damn it."
Korra actually knew she shouldn't be begging for war, a fight could go all manner of ways, that was always the nature of combat, but Korra was way too mad as hell to care, she found a high altitude gun emplacement and reported its location, the airship was equipped to locate her signal so they could log it for her once she reports overflying it.
Korras own problems hadn't completely gone away, nightmares had dropped to barely any, most the flashback triggers had been acclimatised down, but there were still moments, and there remained the possibility that something in her mind could still incapacitate her in the future. Jinora had all the severe and highly frequent symptoms of that ahead of her, and there was barely anything anyone could do about it. Korra could only sense Jinoras spirit by directly touching her, that's how severe the effect on Jinora was.
Hearing what had been done to Jinora, Korra speculated Jinora could have to relive at least a significant portion of it to be able to meditate into the spirit world. There was something else though, something lurking in Jinoras mind that she had been fighting to suppress, orders of magnitude worse than the persistent low effort torture she had been enduring, and off the back of considering that, Korra even more desperately wanted to wreck shit, "come on, I want an excuse."
"Repdip one, spike, ten o'clock, airborne source."
"Korra repositioning to defend Repdip One," sent Korra, maniacally grinning thinking "thank you motherfuckers," as she turned and climbed hard, using firebending to add thrust, taking her supersonic as she sought to position herself about half of the airships altitude.
The beam source was 10 o'clock, so a missile could originate from 8 o'clock to 12 o'clock optimally, or suboptimally from 7 o'clock to 1 o'clock, and it had to be a missile because gun emplacements would use their own radar because it would have to use boresight data to compute elevation and traverse to put the shell where needed, and the emitter needed for an effective radar would be a significant load for a missile to carry in addition to its warhead, so typically the missiles had passive seeker heads.
Korra smirked at the fact she knew all this was a side effect of being the Futuretech CEOs girlfriend.
"SAM, eleven o'clock," said Izumi.
Korra looked around seeing a trail of smoke off in the distance extending up in an arc that would put it on an intercept trajectory and Korra changed course to intercept it sending "Korra intercepting." Another fun fact Korra had to keep in mind was these missiles had proximity fuses, without needing to detect targets over the same distance as normal radar platforms those things absolutely can be carried on basically any missile they want to stick them on, if she fails to maintain adequate separation, she could get fragged.
The other issue is how much propellant is left in the missiles motor, Korra wanted to redirect the missile as soon as possible so that she can be more certain it'll make it to what Korra wants to blow up.
Korra overflew the missile and metalbent it up around her releasing it flying towards where she remembered the enemy radar platform was, with the missile on its way over there Korra turned to orbit around the front of the airship.
"Showoff," chided Izumi.
"And?" replied Korra.
"Enemy radar just turned off, missile probably won't kill them," said the airships radar officer.
"Got that," replied Korra, "Attacking gun emplacements." Until that missile passed the radar platform, the radar platform would be unable to illuminate targets, so the time bought was still a win if less of one than Korra was hoping for.
Korra selected the first one likely to threaten the airship and grabbed some rocks ranging from about 1.5 to 3kg along the way, hugging the deck as she maintained a transonic speed when she heard Mako broadcast "SAM, one o'clock … Another SAM, same bearing, three, four, they're chucking up a salvo, fifteen, eighteen, … twenty one."
"There's no spike, nobody's painting us," said the radar officer, he then added "missiles seem to be on a pre-programmed arc."
Korra arrived at the emplacement and used the rocks she had picked up to knock out the gun crew, having to make two passes to get them all, this also afforded her the opportunity to rapidly dump her own kinetic energy without having to make a third pass. Korra had worked out what the enemy were doing with those missiles, they obviously didn't want her trying to blow up their radar platforms again, and so would wait as late as they think they can while still assuring the missiles of the energy needed to deflect onto target when they do illuminate it.
"Okay, operate this turret, how hard can it be?" She asked. She noted the gravity magazine cages in the four guns had six rounds each, and the radar scope was active, tracking the airship, what she needed to do was task it to the lead missile of the salvo, she scanned the controls saying "no pressure … … erm … "
Korra identified a cluster of buttons with arrows, she pressed the left one and the gun moved, she also noted the boresight scope changed, there was now a circle on the screen around what she presumed had been the airship, the airship now represented by a dot, not a cross, she wasn't sure what that circle was, she suspected it could be the target selection reticule, she looked around and identified the missiles by their visible exhaust plumes, and managed to get the cluster of targets into view on the scope, she glanced around as she tried to put the lead missile in the reticule, asking "Right, how do I get the gun to capture the intended target?" she picked what looked like the correct button and pushed it and the circle disappeared, the lead missile had gone from being a dot to a cross, and the guns were moving to maintain an intercepting trajectory without her having to input any further commands, "good, now I need to shoot the fucking things," as she looked around again. She saw a sprung lid hiding something, she lifted it to find a button labelled "Shoot" and pushed it.
All four guns grabbed a round out the bottom of their mag, discharged them, and opened again, grabbing the next round and repeating until the magazines were empty, Korra commenting "Spirits that's loud."
Korra decided she needed to get over to those missiles in case this didn't work, getting in the air and caining it. The frag shells with their programmable launch delay fuses exploded right where they were supposed to, the shrapnel triggering the proximity fuses of about 16 missiles and Korra picked another high altitude gun to redirect the remaining 5 missiles to in the absence of a radar platform to redirect the missiles to.
Without anyone illuminating those targets though, the odds were against the missiles hitting the target, but without any targets having been illuminated to them at all, the remaining missiles returned to their preprogrammed courses, with the deflection Korra had imposed on the missiles they were no longer a threat to the airship even if the airship was illuminated for them, it was now going to be outside the sensor cone and they had lost way too much energy to make it.
"Zhu?"
Zhu looked at Jinora who was offering up pages from the notepad saying "I think that's everything I heard them discuss, let me know if any of it is useful."
"Thank you," said Zhu.
Jinora looked at Zhu for several more seconds and asked "You alright? You're usually on top of everything all at once."
Zhu thought about her answer and eventually said "those people that were abusing you for all this time, I negotiated a trade deal with them, spent about an hour forty five minutes exchanging pleasantries, charming as much as pressuring, really cozying up to them, knowing the overall system that they have. It shouldn't take me seeing someone I know being caught up in that system for me to understand what they actually do."
Jinora nodded and asked "you do realise you're not Raiko, right? You try to do good things, and have done way more good things over your term than Raiko would have because Raiko is default a cunt, only doing good when he has no choice but to, and you're the other way around."
Zhu nodded.
"Good. … I'm going to see if I can find something to eat that is neither semen nor dry pet food, and eat it sat up at a table using cutlery. I really miss that."
Jinora walked off the flightdeck to see what she could find as Zhu processed the current revelation of what those fuckers had been feeding her and the manner of that feeding. Indicated: Out a bowl on the floor. Maybe some cunt metalbender keeping her hands away from the bowl forcing her to lower her face into the bowl and lap the dry petfood up with her tongue like a kept animal would in order to get something of any nutritional value down her neck.
She then removed her glasses, slapped herself across the face a few times, and put her glasses back on and started reading through Jinoras notes. It seemed a bit backwards that a traumatised sex slave had just given a pep talk to a major world leader. Zhu needed to have her shit together, especially now they were in a fucking shooting war.
It had also occurred to Zhu that Jinora was laying on the light hearted 'I'm perfectly fine and functional' shit a bit thick. Surface level she seemed fine, but … …
'Can't worry about it,' Zhu concluded, she got back to reading Jinoras notes which focused almost exclusively on the business discussed at the meetings. Understandible on both counts of what these people were discussing that could be of military or economic interest, and what had been happening to Jinora had been pretty fucking vile.
"SAM, eight o'clock, times two, three, four, five," reported Izumi.
"Spike, nine o'clock," reported the radar officer.
"Korra defending," replied Korra as she went for the missiles.
Korra did wonder if they were doing anything new here, because this looked way too much like the thing they ought to be clear by now doesn't fucking work.
Could the missiles be different? About the most Korra could imagine being practical is if they had added remote steering systems to the missile, as in direct control, not using reflected radio energy to paint a target for the missile to seek, and even that seemed a MAAAAAAAAAAAAASSIVE stretch.
That still wouldn't do much, Korra would still at least redirect the missiles too far for them to recover from the energy loss involved in getting back on target.
Korra could only proceed as she had for now.
As Korra approached, within about 800 metres, the lead missile suddenly exploded.
It was bright, the flash felt like a piece of the sun, and Korra felt more than just blind and disorientated, she felt sick, her whole body tingled, and then a blast overpressure wave way the fuck out of proportion to a typical high explosive warhead of that size struck, the glide staff was pulled out of Korras hands and feet, leaving Korra freefalling through the returning air that had run out of the energy the explosion had kicked into it.
"Repdip One, Korra, fell off my glide staff, can't fucking see very well, no longer available to defend," as she finally figured up from down and sought to slow her descent with occasional blasts of air.
Her vision started to clear in spite of the remaining splodge of blackish blue in the middle of her vision.
After waiting way too fucking long Korra sent "Repdip One, Korra, comm check."
The fuck was happening? Battery was good for hours usually, Repdip one had reported no issues at their end.
With the horizon and terrain sufficiently visible now, Korra looked towards the airship again sending "Repdip One, Korra, fucking talk to me already, what's happening?"
Korra felt bile rising and pulled off her mask to puke, trying to spit it sideways so it didn't end up in her hair or headset.
That explosion had done something to her.
"Repdip One, Korra, landing to heal, let me know when-"
There was an explosion around about the location of the airship, it was also stupid bright.
"FUCK!" shouted Korra as she speculated on the odds of the airships passengers and crew surviving an explosion like that, she got close enough to the ground that she decided to firebend the thrust needed to slow her to a halt about a metre off the deck and then dropped down, finding herself deep in a forest, remembering seeing a creak several hundred metres away, she decided to use water from that for healing.
After she got that mercury out of her.
Except she couldn't feel any metal.
Because there was no fucking metal.
Shit, she was thinking of the mercury the red lotus had crammed into her through her skin all that time ago. At least this time that flashback had a decent excuse for being triggered.
That warhead could not have thrown any poison into her or at her, there was no material that could have escaped the fireball, all that hit her was the air next to her the blast had compressed.
That explosion had also been way more powerful than it ought to have been, at her distance, the blast should have been merely a loud noise with a chance of frag tunneling through her. Again, the heat in this instance seemed to preclude frag from being any bigger than atomic or molecular size.
And the heat was something else too, exposed skin still felt like it had been grilled.
She found the creek and knelt next to it, needing to fix herself up fast, her friends were still in danger. Jinora was still in danger. Jinora had saved her life. Twice. From Zaheer and from Kuvira. The second time Korra, having just lost Zaofu to Kuvira, an ENTIRE citys freedom hinged on how that duel went and Korra had fucked it up, Korra had felt unworthy of being rescued, She had heard Kuvira metalbend some strips, apparently blades she later found out, and Korras mental state in that moment would have been like "yeah, go on then."
And then Jinora and Opal blasted Kuvira away and made a defensive hurricane, risking their own lives to extract Korra. Korra made herself break out of that mound and get on that bison with them.
And now Jinora needed her, perhaps an order of magnitude more now than when she got captured by the spirit vines, Jinora probably would have been physically safe left in that pod, getting recaptured by Pi, looking forward to more of the same as she had experienced over the past few weeks, plus potentially extra abuse as a punishment for being rescued, Korra couldn't allow that.
And that dark splodge needed to get the fuck out of her vision right fucking now.
Again, what the fuck even was that?