Responses to Reviews:

RonaldM40196867: I don't think any one nation has a monopoly on honour. The Fire Nation seems to place the most emphasis on it, but even they fail to live up to that ideal frequently.

Zigzagdoublezee: Yes, Zhao reckoned without the Avatar State when he concocted his bomb plan.

As Always, Please Review!

"What on earth is going on?" Pakku asked, leaning gingerly against the burned out ruins of a ballista.

He and Katara were both stood at the front of the ice-ship, both trying to make out what was going on on the deck of the fast ship that had sailed away with her father, Rinzen, and the Avatar now on board. But now nothing seemed to have happened for a couple of minutes. Everyone was standing very still. There was no fighting, or escaping, that Katara could see.

"I think they're... talking," she said.

"Why?" Pakku sounded baffled. "Either fight them or run away. Why are they hesitating?"

"Bomb," Katara told him.

"What bomb?"

"That entire ship is a bomb!"

Pakku didn't say anything for a moment, a look of shock passing across his face. Then he folded his arms.

"Then that's even more reason to run," he said.

Katara strained to see. Everyone on that ship was by now so far away that they were little more than coloured dots to her, but she could still just about make out what was going on.

Which was when the ship suddenly exploded.

Katara reeled backwards, closing her eyes against the sudden bright light, crying out in shock as she fell to the floor. As she lay there, it took a moment for her to remember what that meant.

"Dad!" She cried in horror, attempting and failing to scramble to her feet. "Yue! No!"

There was an awful, prolonged silence.

"Tui and La," Pakku murmured, as he fell to his knees. Katara struggled to sit up to see what she was looking at. When she did, her eyes widened.

There was a figure hanging in the air above where the ship had exploded, looking down on the battlefield with glowing eyes. Long hair whipped around her face and upper body, glowing with the same bright, ethereal energy. For a moment, Katara remembered the river, and knew what she was seeing.

Yue had entered the Avatar State.

Nothing happened for a moment. The battlefield seemed to have gone silent. Everyone, on both sides, was fixated on Avatar Yue, and seeing what she would do next.

Then the Avatar moved her arms, and Katara looked down to see an icy platform floating on the surface of the water. Lying on it were the inert forms of a sky-bison and two people. Katara could not tell if they were alright or not. Then she saw one of the figures shift on the ice, and relief swept over her. They were alive.

Then Yue began to float closer, passing over the top of the ice-ship Katara was on and carrying on towards the Fire Nation fleet, which was beginning to turn around to face her as their water tribe enemies fell back towards their city, rowing as hard as they could.

A fireball sailed past the Avatar, and then another, and another. The expression on Yue's face did not change, as she raised a hand. A wind blew up that stopped the next fireball in its tracks right in front of her; then she threw it back, as it crashed through the deck of the ship that had fired it. More began to fire on her, and she floated lower. Her movements were precise and calculated, more elegant than Yue had ever managed before- and all filled with the wrath of a thousand lifetimes. Each of them hit with devastating force.

One ship was completely frozen in an iceberg, as another was capsized by a tidal wave. Another one just suddenly sank like a stone as the water underneath it stopped providing bouyancy to its hull.

Katara watched the carnage in silence. She didn't know what to say. Not even at the river had she ever seen Yue do this. Ships were being sliced apart, crashed into each other, flipped upside down with what seemed like trivial ease. Each one was a metal behemoth weighing thousands of tonnes, and they were being treated like the toys the tribe's elders carved out of wood for their grandchildren. The wind howled, and the waters raged, and the ice-ship heaved in the sudden heavy weather.

Some Fire Nation ships seemed to have finally realised fhat the writing was on the wall, and were sailing as fast as they could in the opposite direction. The Avatar, or whatever it was that was controlling Yue's body, let them go. Those who chose to fight were not so fortunate. Katara watched as one of their ships seemed to jump out of the water, impaled on a massive spike of rock that had jumped up from the seabed and forced its way through the entire hull.

A moment later it snapped free, plunging back into the water with a tremendous splash, and beginning to sink as water followed the earthen spear into the hull. The Fire Navy was by now in complete disarray, surrounded by the sinking wrecks of many of their own ships and struggling to navigate in a maelstrom that the Avatar had created.

And then it was over. Almost as one, the will to fight of the remaining Fire Nation ships snapped. Those that could turned north and fled. Katara counted about 20 ships struggling north again, but there might well have been more. Some others took down the red banners of the Fire Nation they had been flying in a symbol of surrender. A couple were sunk as they tried to get away by the Avatar or by colliding with a sinking wreck, but soon a long, bedraggled line of Fire Navy vessels were receding into the distance.

Others were sat in the water with their engines off, surrendered but trying to fish their countrymen out of the water as, after a moment, water tribe ships began to turn around and return to the battlefield. There was a lot of work to do.

Katara sank back down and leaned against the railing, massaging her injured leg. She did not wait to see where Yue went. She had been so caught up in what she had been seeing that she had not felt the pain, but now it began surging back. She grimaced and waved a hand. Some water jumped out of the deck, which she then began running over her injured limb to heal it. The pain lessened almost immediately.

"... Princess?"

She looked up to find a nervous young officer standing over her, clearly not knowing what to do.

She sighed. Suddenly, she was tired. She couldn't even find it within herself to be happy about the victory. She just wanted to rest.

"Get us moving," she told him. "We need to pick up the Chief."