A/N- Right on schedule. Let's go! Of course, we know that the normal release schedule here is once in two weeks, but with some space in my schedule, I should be able to upload the next chapter in one week, which is the 3rd of October. You could skip the wait and read the next two as well as continuous updates on Pa-treon right now. For Pa Treon, you can remove the hyphen between Pa and Treon and Google it, then search for my username—Oghenevwogaga. Or you could copy the link in my bio and remove the spaces before pasting it in your address bar.
Victory. But at what cost, I wondered. Of the crew of 45 men and women, brilliant firebenders one and all, I had lost 17. Four had died in the jump down the mountain. In retrospect, that was probably more risky than it should have been, and I really should have explored less risky means of achieving the same objective. The remaining 13 had found their deaths in the fighting. It was a lower number than should have been expected because I'd done such a good job of drawing all the attention and firepower to myself.
Cutting through the earth bender ranks like a hot knife through butter meant that there was space for my soldiers to get in behind me, and when the earthbenders turned to face me and attack, my firebenders could take them out from behind. It was an effective system, at the very least, and one that meant that I hadn't just led everyone into a pointless slaughter. Regardless of that, I'd still lost over a dozen of my best benders. I had hopes of training the rest of the army up to that level, but it stung. This was the first operation I was truly in charge of from start to finish, and that meant that each of those seventeen deaths was on my head.
Not a single man had died while I fought on the ground with them, but the second I jumped inside to face Fong, the Earthbenders had wisened up to the others and teamed up to levy their greater numbers on them. That had led to thirteen deaths between the second I stepped in and when I shot out with Fong's body beneath me. A large number, to be sure. Especially considering that in much the same way my presence had disorganised the earthbenders, my absence had done the same to my own men. It exposed a lot to be improved on, and that was what I needed to know.
"We will be leaving soon" I told Maki as she walked into what remained of Fong's command centre. I'd commandeered it and the writing materials within to write the After Action Report on our activities here, as well as take inventory of what remained of the fortress.
"I figured. Doubted you'd want to stay in this shithole much longer," She said.
"It's not such a bad place. Fong ran a tight ship, and most of the damage here was caused by us, remember?"
"Doesn't change the facts. The troops have been trying to find any spoils of war to keep, but apart from a middling treasury that you've ordered us not to touch, there isn't much to go off here."
"Find me a messenger hawk to send these off to the mainland," I said, ignoring the statement.
"The treasury?"
"I've made my orders."
"They're stupid fucking orders. These people just saw their friends die. At least allow them to walk away with something."
"We aren't Earth Kingdom barbarians. We fight for honour and glory, and the Fire Nation, not for gold and silver."
"_You_ fight for honour and the rest of that shit. Most of these people just want to make enough to retire before they lose an arm or something."
"Fair point."
"Thank you. Now, the treasury?"
"Let each man take as much as they carry. There should be enough in there for that."
"And your share?"
"As you just said, I fight for 'honour and the rest of that shit'", I said, getting a chuckle out of her as I moved to seek out one of the messenger hawks we'd brought with us.
We returned to the camp as conquerors. Weighed down by something as ridiculously plebeian as spoils of war, we took a much longer time to get back to the army than it had taken to get to our target in the first place, but there were few complaints. At the back of our procession, we had a caravan that contained the urns I'd filled with the ashes of all the men who had died in our attack on Fong's base. Thinking of it now, I was forced to accept that it was not just the desire for treasure that had slowed us down. The urns had come from Fong's treasury, but the ashes themselves had been a bit more difficult to secure. For those who had died on the base grounds, it was simply a matter of buying their bodies, and for those who failed to make it there in the first place, it was a harrowing two-day search to find each of their bodies.
It was actually almost impressive that we'd managed to locate all the remains. Not a single one of them looked pretty, but I guessed it was a good thing that the Fire Nation preferred cremation over any other form of burial. And it wasn't even just the bodies that had met gruesome ends from the fall, but those who had died against the earthbenders. If I had her wondered what someone killed by earth bending would look like after the body got some time to decompose, then I had had that question well and truly answered before the cremating. On one hand, it was a gruesome sight; on the other, it was just the kind of thing my men needed to see to truly put their hearts into the fight.
We'd captured about forty-six members of Fong's camp. Some of them had even been non-combatants. Cooks and the like. Ordinarily, I would have been fine with integrating them into our forces or otherwise leaving them beyond to be someone else's problem, but just looking into their hard eyes told me all I needed to know. They had been hard men and women who would never have submitted to Fire Nation rule. To my rule. So, I had to deal with things in one way or another.
Transporting them to Omashu would have been risky, but it seemed the only reasonable choice in the end. Making them someone else's problem was also appealing. But then the logistics of keeping dozens of earthbenders in line with my comparatively smaller force was impossible to work out. Sure, they had surrendered, but there was nothing stopping them from picking up arms and fighting again beyond their honour, and months on the front lines had taught me that Earth kingdom soldiers did not have much honour in them. So I asked myself WWSD- 'what would Sung do?' And that gave me an idea. I could never order my soldiers to kill prisoners. It might have been permissible since we were at war, but the stain on my honour would never have washed off. It was not a price I could pay.
So I never gave the order. I just hinted in conversations here and there that I would not mind it if the number of prisoners was drastically reduced. I never actually found out what happened to them. All I knew was that between those conversations and the day we were to leave, I heard nothing. And on that morning when I'd asked Maki to see to it that the prisoners were readied, she just lifted an eyebrow at me and asked, "What prisoners?"
X
Eastwards, I noted. We continued East. The Journey to Ba Sing Se was going to be a long one, and every possible second would count especially when I was certain that the defences of the city would be prepared to resist us if we tarried. I was not going to assume that the city was as unprepared as it has ended up being in the cartoon show. There was nothing here that gave the impression and considering that the Earth Kingdom military still hosted in this world, then they had to have some sort of presence in the city. Sure, they were disorganised, indisciplined and predisposed to failure, but that didn't make them a non-factor. In fact, the only reason I'd have an easy time with what I was doing was the presence of multiple Fire Nation armies in the Earth Kingdom's territories. They needed to have forces all over dedicated to stopping us on all fronts, and for a military force that was barely anything to write home about in the first place, it was proving to be a task too difficult to consider.
"So we'll get to Goaling in about two weeks, and from there, we should have a pretty straight shot at Ba Sing Se," Toji said as he rode by my side. I turned to him and lifted an eyebrow.
"2 weeks? Where'd you get your math from?"
"I've been looking at the maps. At our present speed, we'll take about 16 days to get there, hence two weeks."
"No, we won't. We'll only take a week at the very most."
"Do you plan to suddenly grant us the power of flight? The men might worship the very ground you walk on, but don't let that get to your head, Natsu, you aren't one," He said with a chuckle, almost like he found the very idea ridiculous.
"No. We're just going to take a straight path."
"A straight path?"
"Yes. A straight path. From here to Gaoling," I said while making a gesture with my hand like a missile travelling straight through the air. "As the crow flies."
"A straight path crosses over the Foggy Swamp."
"So?"
"It's going to be hell to go through. My boots are going to be soaked for days. Add to that the fact that the bloody cartographer himself lists the Foggy Swamp as an area to be avoided 'unless highly necessitated by the most precipitous of exigencies." He said, adopting his best impression of stuck-up Lord at the last part of that to make it clear that he was quoting the map maker. I chuckled at the comedy of it all. Shiro the Mapmaker might have been a once-in-a-generation talent who the Fire Nation had still never managed to replace even if he'd been dead for close to three decades now, but all that talent did nothing to hide his snobbish origins.
"Pretty certain he was a cousin of yours", I pointed out to Toji.
"Go back far enough and everyone is a cousin of mine one way or another" He replied with a shrug.
"We're still facing the Swamp, so do get ready to get wet."
"Fuck"
The difference between the Foggy Swamp and the rest of the surrounding earth was night and day. Perhaps that should have been the first sign that told us that this was not a regular fixture. Perhaps it should have been the first thing that pointed out just how fucked we were and just how much trouble we were about to be in. But it didn't. Nothing could have prepared us for what was coming, no matter how stubbornly I might have thought otherwise. We stopped at the edge of the swamp just as the sun was cresting the horizon.
"We set camp here tonight", I had told them before drifting towards my tent and falling asleep without a word to anyone or anything. It was when I fell asleep that the first sign that things were not as they were came to be. I still could not remember what she looked like. All I knew was that my every sleeping moment was haunted by the same woman. A woman who was my mother even though I could not see her face. I felt her hands trail across my skin and jolt me to wakefulness. Taking it as nothing but the dreams caused by a restless mind, I tried to go to bed again. Again and again. After the fourth time, I'd given up, and now here I was, sat around the fire with the men who were to keep watch over the camp while the rest of us slept.
It was one thing I'd taken from the way Sung ran his army. He had multiple scouting detachments out at every sleeping or waking moment while still making sure that the most disciplined of men were assigned the duty of watching over the camp itself and ensuring that everything was in order. It had come about after the Mountain had been able to slaughter all ur scouts that night that felt like years ago and move in almost undetected. Now, they'd be here to both present some sort of first line of resistance to any attack as well as an emergency warning system to those sleeping.
"So General, Sir. What do you think?" One of them, Horokoshi, turned to me to ask. I felt myself jolted into attention on hearing the title that I was forced to hear more than my own name these days. I racked my mind to try to find what they'd been talking about and thanked Agni that some part of me had been listening to it.
"I prefer my women tall and strong. The size of their breasts doesn't matter much to me. As long as they are beautiful enough, then I will be satisfied," I said in answer to the question. I watched as the men looked around themselves and then as coins swapped hands between Mori and Jinpei.
"What's that?" I asked them.
"Just a bet. Mori thought you'd be the type to like women with small breasts," He said in reply.
"And why is that?" I asked, genuinely intrigued.
"Well, if you look at all those noble-type women. It's usually really small, so we thought it was a preference kind of thing."
" I see. I see your point. But it's probably that most nobles have other things in consideration when picking a spouse that by the time the size of her chest comes up, there aren't even many suitable options in the first place," I said after stroking my chin in thought for a minute or two. It was a fair observation, and even as the military training urged me to demand they get back to work, I was enjoying the conversation around me too much to even consider ruining the fun.
"Other things. I can barely think of things more important than that," Jinpei commented, prompting the only woman in the lot to launch an elbow into his side.
"Oh, don't be like that, Tonfa", Mori said, stepping into his friend's defence.
"Tonfa is right, there's lots of things more important than a woman's chest. Her dowry, for one. Her family history, family fertility, number of fire benders in her family, personal fire bending skill and potential, and more things." I said, to blank looks from those surrounding me.
"I agree with the first part of what you said, General, but I thought for sure you'd have mentioned her personality or something. Now I don't even know who is shallower between the two of you," Tonfa said, making those around her burst into laughter.
We ended up spending the rest of the night cycling between topics as we spoke on all varieties of things. I learned about them, their lives, and their families and was struck with the fact that I had been a very terrible leader. Before today, I hadn't even known their names. It had taken what was essentially a random nightmare for me to learn that Tonfa had only joined the army to avoid jail time for stealing bread from some army supply depot or that Mori and Jinpei were cousins who had run away from inheriting a family farm to join the army and try to build a better life with their pay from here.
Horokoshi was the one with the most stereotypical reason. Just like me, his whole family had been in the army and had even served under the now-defunct blasting Jelly Corps. Considering the man had lost his arm while arming an explosive made of the material that gave his corps its name and he'd been one of the lucky ones, it was no surprise that the corps did not exist anymore. The last of the group of five, Kai, was the most interesting. He'd apparently been using fire bending to entertain people at a market for pay and had run into Jeong-Jeong, who had immediately sponsored him into the Army. The fact that the both of us had Jeong-Jeong in common was a common point of bonding, but I did make sure to say loudly and often how much I wanted to catch the man and toss him in prison for desertion.
After the night came the morning, and with the morning came the need to face our next challenge, actually crossing the damned swamp.
A/N; Chappy done. Chappy a bit choppy but c'est la vie. Like I said earlier, you can either wait till Thursday, the 3rd of October, for the next chapter or skip the waiting and read the next two, as well as continuous updates as I write on pa-treon (same username as up here- link in bio). Both are equally valid actions, so no rush. For Pa Treon, you can remove the hyphen between Pa and Treon and Google it, then search for my username—Oghenevwogaga. Or you could copy the link in my bio and remove the spaces before pasting it in your address bar.