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Grave Danger

They followed Xue Yang all across the city and well into the evening. Their chase led them all the way to a lake on the outskirts of Ba Sing Se. But because of the headstart he'd had, they could only watch from a distance as he took a Dai Li agent hostage and forced him to open up a tunnel and head underground.

"Must be the Dai Li's hideout," said Smellerbee.

"Must be," Sokka agreed. "We're getting close.

Aang, who none of them had been able to dissuade from coming along and only convinced him to hang back to stick with them, spoke up, "You know, this might be a really good time for you to finally tell me what demonic cultivation is."

They had all been infuriatingly vague when talking about it, even Ty Lee, the supposed Grandmaster of it. Not out of shame, but by the unanimously agreed on thought that Katara and Aang were too young to know what it truly entailed.

"It would actually be a really good time for you to go back to Katara, actually. Go protect her and Toph, just in case," said Sokka. "Why don't you do that instead, actually."

"Sokka, Toph would kick my butt if I did that," said Aang stubbornly (though he wasn't wrong). "Just tell me what's going to happen. I know you and Zuko don't like demonic cultivation, and Yue and Mai say they only trust Ty Lee with it. But it's here in our world now, and as the Avatar I need to know how to deal with it. What is it? Why is it so bad?"

Sokka shared a glance between Smellerbee and Longshot, before sighing and saying, "In a nutshell, demonic cultivation is when you harness resentful energy instead of spiritual energy for power."

"Okay?" said Aang, still confused as they made their way to the lake. "And why is that bad? How can energy be resentful?"

Unseen by them in the light of dusk, ripples began appearing on the lake's surface.

"Well, aside from being a cultural taboo, it's bad because it's hard to control and it can hurt both the wielder and everyone around them," said Sokka.

"And it's not so much that the energy is resentful. It's what gives off the energy that is," said Smellerbee.

"Okay, then where does resentful energy come from?" asked Aang as they walked along the shore to the entrance.

"It comes from-" Sokka started to say before a splashing sound drew his attention to the lake.

What met his gaze was a horrific sight rising up out of the water and shambling towards the shore. The repulsive stench they gave off wafting through the air, and the sound of their rattling groans made their hair stand on end.

"-From the dead!" Sokka finished as he brandished his new sword in their direction, Smellerbee and Longshot following his lead.

Aang, meanwhile, was frozen in terror at the sight, as closing in on them were the bloated and putrid faces of people long dead and left to decay under the water of the lake.

"Aang!" Sokka said sharply, snapping Aang out of his stupor so he could point his staff in the corpses' direction.

Only for groaning sounds to come from the entrance to the Dai Li stronghold, and more corpses began shambling out of there as well, most of them fresher looking and dressed in Dai Li uniforms.

"This is demonic cultivation," Sokka continued as the dead grew closer. "It can do many things, but the most well-known use of it is to raise and control the dead."

Aang gritted his teeth to avoid letting out a whimper.

Longshot sent Smellerbee a look that seemed to hold an entire conversation.

Smellerbee's eyes widened at whatever was said, and she said, "You're right! they're not aiming directly for us!"

"They're not?" asked Aang, but even as he asked he could see she was right. While most of the corpses were moving toward their general direction, the angle was off, like they weren't the real target.

Sokka's gaze followed their trajectory and cursed. "It's the city!" he said urgently. "Xue Yang's sending them to the city!"

"He's setting them loose on the people! To make another, bigger Yi City!" said Smellerbee, having the same realization. "We have to stop them!"

Aang gulped and used waterbending to push the corpses in the lake back under the water. But the ones he pushed down just picked themselves up and started coming back again, and his stirring up the lake only seemed to knock more dead bodies loose to come climbing out in greater numbers.

There were too many corpses. They'd never make it out against such overwhelming odds, and Aang was the only one who could fly away. And even then, they couldn't let this many corpses reach the city and wreak havoc. If they were going to stop them, it was here and now.

For that, they needed Wei Wuxian. They needed Ty Lee.

But Ty Lee likely didn't know where they were, and by the time she got that information, it would likely be too late.

It was up to them to tell her, and Sokka could only think of one way to do it as the corpses closed in.

"Aang, you need to firebend!" he shouted before a Dai Li corpse pounced on him and he needed to fight it off.

Aang, who looked seconds away from going into the Avatar State, looked at him in alarm. "I can't! I swore I'd never hurt someone like that again!"

"I'm pretty sure these people are a little past being hurt!" Smellerbee shouted as she managed to slice off a corpse's leg, but it continued to crawl along the ground toward her.

"But what if someone else in there is still fighting them!" Aang protested, pointing into the Dai Li compound. "They could get burned!"

"You don't need to shoot it at them!" Sokka said as he finally got free. "Shoot it at the sky! We need a signal flare!"

While still reluctant, Aang nodded in agreement and used what little firebending knowledge he had to send a fireball into the sky. It was a small, weak little thing, but it shined brightly in the growing darkness. Sokka could only hope it would be enough.

For a long moment, nothing changed, just more fighting against a countless hoard…

And when the sound of a wild dizi cut through the sounds of battle and the dead stopped in their tracks. Only then did Sokka allow himself to feel relief.

Flying towards them, bright under the rising moon was Appa, and atop his head, Ty Lee stood wreathed in shadows with her eyes burning red as she played her flute. Behind her and ready to spring from the saddle were Zuko, Mai, Iroh, and an Earth Kingdom girl they hadn't seen before but must be a reincarnation of someone if she came with them.

The corpses all seemed to be listening to Ty Lee play. Then, as one, they all seemed to turn on each other, and Sokka managed to clap one of his hands over Aang's eyes and wrap his other arm around his head to block his ears (and hoped the Avatar's earth-sense wasn't good enough yet to know what was going on) before they lunged.

The corpses tore each other limb from limb in a frenzy of absolute carnage, but Sokka quickly noticed a pattern emerging in the slaughter, and the corpses dressed as Dai Li agents were the ones most targeted by those in civilian garb.

The reason why was obvious. It was because the Dai Li were the ones who caused their deaths.

Unbidden, a memory sprang to Sokka's mind.

"Since the executioner killed hundreds while alive, why not dig up their graves? Stir up their resentment, unite them, and have them fight against the executioner's fierce corpse together?" Wei Wuxian had once asked in class. At the time he was proposing a solution so ludicrous, so heretical, that Teacher Lan had kicked him out of the room.

Looks like Ty Lee was proving that theory an entire lifetime later.

Sokka tore his eyes away from the gruesome sight and focused on hugging Aang to his chest without letting him see or hear anything. Despite that, the twelve-year-old was trembling in his arms, and Sokka was not about to let that go unaddressed, so he comforted him as best he could.

Finally, the corpses felt avenged or at least had thinned each other out enough that the melody on Ty Lee's dizi changed to one Sokka recognized. Rest, the Lan song that calmed the dead and helped them move on so Xue Yang could not call them back again.

Finally, the last corpse fell to the ground peacefully, and Ty Lee had to take a breather with Mai to fuss over her. Sokka turned to the new arrivals as Appa landed. "Thanks for coming," he said. "Who's the girl?"

The Earth Kingdom girl pulled a fan out of her sleeve and fluttered it. "Why, Jin-Xiong, don't you recognize me?" she asked coyly.

It was the fan more than anything else that made it click for Sokka. "Nie Huaisang?" he asked.

"Yup, though funny enough, now I'm Jin," she said with a smile. "As in my name is Jin, not that we're related."

"Hilarious," said Sokka in a deadpan at the dig at his past family.

Jin then pouted. "Though you really have terrible timing. You interrupted my date with Zuko."

"Thank the gods," Zuko muttered as Sokka gaped at that bit of news. The Fire Prince busied himself looking over the battlefield for any corpses that might still be moving. Iroh observed the scene beside him, looking disturbed, but not as much as the rest of them. Then again, he had been a general and had probably seen scenes like this in the war.

Ty Lee, meanwhile, was making her way over to Smellerbee. "Xiao Xingchen?" she asked.

Smellerbee squinted at her in the gloom of night like she had a hunch who she was, but wanted to be sure. "Yes?" she said. Then she recognized her. "Wait, you're the Fire Nation girl from the ferry!"

"Yes, I am. We're sorry for the trouble, but we came here to help the Avatar, and couldn't let ourselves be caught." Ty Lee then bowed to her. "My name is Ty Lee, but in my last life, I was Wei Wuxian. I am honored to be able to meet you in this lifetime, Shishu."

Smellerbee's eyes widened at the fact Jet had been right when he'd gotten arrested, and she was now being faced with the martial nephew she'd never gotten a chance to meet in her last life in an area full of corpses she'd just taken down.

Ty Lee then bowed to Longshot and added, "And it is nice to see you again, Song-Dàozháng. And thankfully in better shape than I saw you last."

Longshot bowed back to her and gave her a look of respect and gratitude, before sending Smellerbee a glance that contained an entire book's worth of content.

Smellerbee's eyes widened at the sight of it, before bowing back to Ty Lee more relaxed than before. "Longshot says it's thanks to you and your lover we were avenged and able to pass on peacefully. Thank you, and I'm glad to finally meet you too. My name's Smellerbee."

Ty Lee smiled brightly. "Let's be friends in this life, shall we?"

Smellerbee returned the smile with a small one of her own. "I'd like that," she agreed.

Back with Jin and Sokka, the latter asked, "Why are you here? Unless something changed after I died, I don't remember you being all that fond of fighting."

"Oh, I'm not," said Jin, closing her fan and looking serious. "But when I heard that Xue Yang said he knew Dai Li secrets, I had to come too. Those creeps have information on everyone, and knowledge is power. And if we want to root out any corruption that causes places like this-" she waved her hand around at the battlefield, the dead, and clearly shady compound. "-to exist then we need all the knowledge we can get." She then smiled a little more sheepishly. "Rest assured, if there's any more fighting, I'll be hanging back behind General Iroh where it's safest," she added, patting said General on the shoulder.

"Aw, you'll make me blush," Iroh said, looking bashful, before getting serious. "Princess Yue briefly told us what happened," he said, picking his way around the bodies with distaste, then pointed into the entrance under the lake. "I suppose the miscreant we're after is within?"

"Unfortunately," Smellerbee said, looking grim.

Sokka noticed Aang was starting to squirm in his arms, and that he was still covering the boy's eyes. "Then let's get going," he said, walking with Aang still covered into the tunnel and away from the bodies before letting him free.

Then all of them traveled into the darkness.

A/N I never feel like I write horror scary enough. I hope it came through here at least. Poor Aang. Now he's got even more trauma. Sokka tried to help, but there was only so much he could do. But the gang's all here now, so it's time to take on Xue Yang.

If you think this chapter was dark, buckle up, it gets darker under Lake Laogai.