Despite his caution, nothing could have prepared General Tan-Hwa for the one-sided carnage. The choking gas of the enemy was a mild surprise and easily dealt with once the grizzled general saw it in action, but their firebenders were a much greater threat.
To be outnumbered and yet still put up a firestorm that warranted the attention of nearly every earthbender in the front was impressive, concerningly impressive. The messengers brought back reports that the front line was only just keeping up the shield wall.
‘Only just’.
There were at least three times more earthbenders keeping the wall up than firebenders trying to blast it down.
If that wasn’t enough, a new form of fire literally splashed over the walls, and the chaos it brought could be judged by the screams that wafted towards the back lines. Tan-Hwa instantly realized the danger this exotic flame brought, but it would cost a lot of lives to pull back and reorganize.
At least it knocked the youthful arrogance out of Wenli. His protege wore a grim, sober mask as he took in the unfolding chaos. When Tan-Hwa gave the hard order to abandon the front ranks and erect a second wall, the younger general only hesitated for a moment before agreeing with it.
But then the damned explosions started, and projectiles flew through earth and men that effectively broke the second barrier and signaled the end of the engagement. Tan-Hwa saw the Fire Nation force pour through the breaches, and saw how they quickly pushed back the force that was supposed to overwhelm them with sheer ferocity. Even from a distance, even in the chaotic mess obscuring his one good eye, he saw them tear down the opposition.
In less than a dozen seconds, Tan-Hwa realized that these were not Fire Nation soldiers. They did not fight. They were murderers, butchers, executioners… They slaughtered their way through the Earth Kingdom army, even their firebenders preferring to wade into savage close quarters to spill blood and cut throats.
The general saw why many in the south feared the Fire Nation’s 11th Regiment.
“We must pull back,” he had wanted to say, and was prepared to argue with Wenli and the other commanders around him for it. But a bright flash in the back of the Fire Nation’s lines caught his attention, and instincts honed from countless battles told Tan-Hwa to stomp his foot and raise an earth wall.
That saved him and Wenli from the deafening explosion that followed, but the force of the blast sent Tan-Hwa flying into the ranks of confused soldiers around him. His armor protected him from the worst of it, but the breaking of bones told the general of the demise of the unfortunates who literally broke his fall. Charred remains of bodies fell onto him, half burying Tan-Hwa. The living troops around him were either too distracted by the explosion, or hadn’t thought he was alive to be recovered.
Tan-Hwa wanted to yell at them to free him, but then he saw what they saw.
The Young Dragon stood in the midst of a blackened crater, practically naked save for some scraps of burnt clothing. Unbridled malice radiated from the boy, bringing with it a promise of death.
“I am open to accepting your surrender now, gentlemen.”
Colonel Sai had gotten back to his feet, and answered with a defiant roar and a hail of stone spikes. The boy left wisps of smoke as he evaded all of them, and in the same steps closed the distance to press a small hand against the colonel’s half-melted armor. An explosion of white flame cored Sai out and incinerated several troops behind him, and the noble colonel fell dead with a smoldering hole in his chest.
The Young Dragon looked around him with a cold, violent grin. “Let the record show that my offer was refused. I now only offer all of you the mercy of a quick death.”
Some lieutenants at the edges of the crater took the words as a challenge, and charged, swords and stones leading the way. The Fire Nation colonel ducked and weaved between them, and an elbow strike blew apart one officer at the waist, while a palm strike underneath the chin erupted into a flame that devoured the front half of the victim’s head.
The boy began to dart about with all the lethal agility of a sand shark. Wounded colonels and captains who were just rising were immolated with kicks that rendered them to ashen heaps. Valiant bodyguards were torn into smoldering pieces as white fire bloomed from each strike of the Young Dragon.
Tan-Hwa saw none of the flowing aggressiveness of a firebender. The boy’s movements were clipped and coldly precise, but his attacks were a storm of punches and elbows and kicks, just as explosive as his flames were.
The general heard some of the men around him mustering some courage, the sergeants and captains urging their men to overwhelm the boy, but his own troops entered the fray. The savagery that followed would have been impressive, if not for the boy to suddenly open his mouth and live up to his namesake.
Tan-Hwa squirmed back into the corpses as the condensed beam of fire swung right above his head. Even with his eyes closed, its light stabbed into the back of his eyes. And if not for the corpses blocking him, the heat of the passing attack might have been the end of him.
He wasn’t surprised when he heard his army routing. He would’ve likely ran too, if not for his current state. With the rush of that spectacle over, Tan-Hwa finally felt the effects from his fall seeping in. He bit back on the sharp pain in his legs and right arm, and struggled to worm his way out of his grave of burnt bodies.
“Ah, general.”
Tan-Hwa froze at the voice addressing him, and turned to see the young colonel, draped in a cloak, walking over towards him. An armored guard stood beside the boy, veiled face quietly regarding the surroundings for threats.
“You look like you could use some help.”
He felt too tired to muster much, so the general simply sighed heavily. “Just…get it over with,” he said, locking a stare at the boy. Tan-Hwa would not shy away from his end, he still had enough courage and defiance for that.
“You’re not going to surrender, then?”
“Accept my men’s surrender, but I will not shame myself with capture.”
The Young Dragon gave an annoyed sigh. “Do you have family, general?”
Tan-Hwa’s stare turned blank, caught off guard by the question.
“What-”
“Do you have a family back home? Wife, children…grandchildren? You look old enough.”
“You leave them out of this!” The general managed to roar, finding a burst of anger to fuel him.
His foe merely sighed again. “So, you won’t shame yourself with capture, but you’re fine with abandoning your family. Isn’t that more shameful, general?”
Despite the pain throbbing across his body, Tan-Hwa stiffened at the sudden turn of questions. “You don’t-”
The arrival of more Fire Nation soldiers interrupted the conversation, and Tan-Hwa’s heart sank as he saw a battered Wenli lead a gaggle of soot-covered survivors, probably no more than sixty of them, their arms behind their back in surrender. They all stopped a few paces away, and one of the red-clad soldiers saluted the boy.
“Colonel, we’ve started rounding up prisoners. There’s a general in this group.”
The colonel turned to the new prisoners, and he was about to speak when Wenli dropped to the floor and shamelessly groveled for mercy. “Please spare me! I-I can pay you anything you want! I’ve got the money! I’m a brother of the duke!”
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Several other captains and colonels followed suit, dropping to their knees and begging for their lives. It shocked and hurt Tan-Hwa to see his men, his student especially, so…reduced to this.
The Young Dragon regarded them dispassionately, but the postures of the Fire Nation soldiers present betrayed their disgust. The boy was turning to one of his soldiers when Tan-Hwa saw the lips on Wenli’s wailing face tugging upwards into a grin.
Tan-Hwa’s blood ran cold. “Wenli! No!” he would’ve shouted, but it was too late. His protege’s mask dropped, and his hands, once clasped together pleading for mercy, quickly slammed into the ground to send a ripple in the ground towards the boy.
The Young Dragon twisted aside as a quartet of spikes as tall as he was shot up to impale him. Shouts of alarm rang out from the Fire Nation soldiers as the other groveling officers unveiled similar treachery, stomping feet or slamming palms to shred the ground with more spikes or tear open small chasms.
It was an impressive display of an otherwise disgusting act, with some of the Fire Nation troops being speared through armor and limbs as they just barely failed to evade the ambush.
Wenli and his conspirators quickly got up to follow up on their attack, but their enemy was far less unbalanced than they’d expected.
The Young Dragon looked furious as he sent a swift kick at a charging lieutenant, the column of fire from it leaving a blackened lump of flesh and slag. The guards and soldiers around him burst into lethal motion, protecting their commander.
Colonel Sungyo tried to send out a pillar of rock, but a firebender who had escaped the ambush unscathed dove at him, sending a flaming hand chop that broke and seared his neck.
A captain got into the stance to begin hurling boulders, but spears plunged into his battered armor and lifted him entirely off the ground.
Another found himself barely taking a running step towards the Young Dragon when several soldiers tackled him, their daggers quickly working to pry apart his limbs.
“I want that general alive!” he ordered coldly as he sidestepped a wave of rocks and reached for the offending earthbender with an open palm. The explosion that followed was such that the man’s limbs were torn apart as his burnt body was flung away.
Within a few dozen seconds of the ambush, Wenli and his men were brought down. The general himself was subdued by a roaring giant, who grabbed him from behind and lifted him bodily into the air. The last of the treacherous officers were swiftly incinerated or simply stabbed to death with daggers and spears.
In exchange, maybe a dozen soldiers of the 11th were pinned by rocky spikes or thrown to the ground. Temporary wounds, all of them. Save for the chance of infection, they’d avoided the worst of the surprise attack and would at most need some time to recover.
It was an abject failure.
The boy surveyed the fresh corpses, and then with cold rage in his eyes turned to Wenli who was still in the arms of the giant firebender, and then to the prisoners who didn’t take part in the ambush and stood back in stunned surprise, and finally turned his gaze to Tan-Hwa. The general drew in a breath and steeled his resolve, for the sake of his men. “I knew not of this ploy. I swear, by the spirits, that they acted alone.”
Tan-Hwa shifted in his prison of corpses and tried to draw himself up as best as he could. “Punish me for their failure, if you must. But please, I beg of you, accept the surrender of my men.”
The Young Dragon’s fury suddenly flared and just as suddenly snuffed out. His shoulder slumped a little, and the boy finally broke his glare to shake his head bitterly. “We cannot trust this group,” he muttered, and Tan-Hwa felt a cold void in his guts open up as the Fire Nation soldiers surrounded their prisoners who had realized what was to come. Wenli started screaming and struggling in protest, for what little it was worth.
Officers and common soldiers alike began to plead for their lives, dropping to their knees in genuine despair.
“I didn’t know about them, I swear!”
“We didn’t have anything to do with them!”
“Mercy, please have mercy!”
The boy locked his gaze once more onto Tan-Hwa, and then gave a slow nod. With spears corralling the prisoners into a tight group, the firebenders began hurling their flames into them. Tan Hwa closed his eyes and turned his head away, and shamefully thanked the spirits that the screams of his men were drowned out by the roar of a localized firestorm.
Once the fire and the screaming died down, the colonel’s next order further deepened Tan-Hwa’s anguish. “We will not accept the surrender of any earthbenders from this army.”
“Understood, sir.”
When the general dared to open his eyes again, he found the boy standing before Wenli, who was now slumped over and sobbing. “Know that neither me nor my men wanted that to happen, know that it was your actions that forced our hand.”
Tan-Hwa found himself freed from the press of corpses as several Fire Nation soldiers helped him up. He tried to struggle, but the flares of pain brought his attention to his unnaturally loose right arm and his likely broken legs. He was carried over and placed at a short distance from Wenli.
The Fire Nation commander regarded him with a cold stare. “Tell me that you would have acted differently in my place, general. Tell me I am a monster for ordering what I did against a false surrender.”
Tan-Hwa flinched away from the stare, and as he grit his teeth and growled helplessly, the general hated that he could not truthfully voice his protest. The protocol of surrender was one of the few rules of war that any side adhered to in the century-long war. If the roles were reversed…Tan-Hwa knew he would’ve ordered every Fire Nation soldier, fleeing or surrendering, to be hunted down and buried alive.
His silence was all the answer the boy needed, and he turned to the younger general. “Unfortunately, I need you alive. As you said, you are a brother of a duke, after all. Let him down, Kai.”
Tan-Hwa watched in silence, with spears hovering from his neck, as his protege was callously dropped, and the Young Dragon reached out to grab the general by the wrists.
“You will send a message for me, general.”
For a second, Tan-Hwa thought the boy was talking to Wenli, but then the colonel’s attention was turned towards him. The cold pit in Tan-Hwa’s stomach made itself known once more.
“You will be treated, and then released.”
Wenli screamed as light seeped from the boy’s tightening hands, until finally they closed into fists, and Wenli’s hands fell off from the stumps that were his wrists.
“You will then take the duke’s brother back to Chenbao, and tell the duke that the 11th Regiment is coming, and that we have had our fill with treachery.”
The Young Dragon gave a nod at his nearby guards. “Spread his legs out.”
They did as ordered, and the boy pressed a foot onto an ankle, brutally severing it with a burst of white flame. The other foot suffered the same fate shortly after. Wenli’s screams filled the air, drawing the dispassionate attention of nearby Fire Nation soldiers.
“Let the duke and his people know, the next time we encounter a false surrender, all prisoners we take from then on will end up like his brother.”
The boy turned to a nearby soldier. “Send this general to Elder Kilin. As for the other one, just make sure his screams don’t distract everyone.”