Wandering Prince
Avatar the Last Airbender, Zuko SI
17
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The town of Gaoling was, unfortunately, not close enough to the coast to just dock the boat there. No, it was up in a mountain range, several miles away from the coast. It was actually closer to drop the boat in a river nearby. So, after a little night time aerial survey of the area, that was what we had done. Then, Yue had pushed it up onto the bank and we took the time to hide it in a thick, untraveled part of the forest, by downing some trees and covering it in debris. After that, Yue had changed into her Earth Kingdom colored dress, we’d packed our bags with some extra clothes and money, and we traveled downriver on an ice barge courtesy of Yue just far enough to come ashore without giving away where the boat was hidden.
From there, it was a few hour run to Gaoling if we wanted to rush, but we took our time, stretching it out to a couple of days. We took the extra time to enjoy walking through the countryside as the forest cleared out into fields, hills, and mountains not far away from the river. Also, we used that time to get some much needed training in.
“So, we’re going to do something different today. And by ‘we,’ I mean you,” I told Yue on the start of the third morning. We’d seen the lights from Gaoling on the horizon the night before, so we knew it wasn’t more than a couple of miles away now and expected to be there by midday.
“What’s that?” she asked, sending me a smile as we walked through a thick bank of fog rolling in off the mountains. It would probably burn off soon, but at the moment, it was a sight to behold—with mountains looming out of the fog and the play of light and shadow making it just a bit eerie.
“Give me your bending water,” I instructed, and Yue handed me her water skin, which I tied off to my belt. “Alright. You’re unarmed. How’re you going to fight me?”
I gave her some time to think on that as we came across an outcropping of rocks and I set my bag down, Yue following suit with her own. After a moment, she answered, “The fog.”
I shook my head. “Yeah, normally. But that’s not what I’m looking for here.”
Yue looked confused. “It’s not?”
“Nope,” I shook my head, before moving away from the rocks and into a nice, grassy spot and motioning for her to follow. “Water is all around us. There are the obvious sources. Lakes, rivers, streams, snow, ice, clouds,” I gestured around us, “fog. It’s also below ground. There are underground rivers, yes, but there’s also the water table, where we get groundwater. It can be as shallow as just below the surface or hundreds of feet deep depending on where you are. And you’re going to pull it to the surface. Create a spring. Then we’ll move on.”
“Below us,” Yue murmured, nodding. “Okay.”
“While you’re doing that, I’ll be over here getting in some practice myself,” I nodded back towards the rocks, where I could throw around fire without much risk of hurting anything.
I left Yue to it and took off my shirt, enjoying the cool air as I settled into my usual routine. As I went, I let my mind wander. My breath came in a deep, even rhythm, cycling ki through my body and stoking the fire within me as I moved through sword forms, then unarmed forms, then moved on to throwing out fire. As the flames danced, burning off lichen and moss from the rocks before flickering and going out, a thought occurred.
What is fire?
There were a multitude of answers to that question, most of which actually applied. It was one of the four major elements of the world. It was light, flame, and heat. More poetically, it was associated with ardor, with desire and passion—and I could attest that most firebenders tended to be ‘passionate’ by some meaning of the word. It was also seen as inspiration, intellect, knowledge—it was Prometheus who gifted fire to man, but the fire was more than literal, it was the metaphorical spark of human ingenuity. But that was getting philosophical and while all of that was true, I was thinking of something simpler, more… fundamental.
At its most basic, fire is combustion. You can get into the chemical processes behind it, but at its simplest, it’s releasing stored energy from matter and that energy is in the form of heat, light, sound, radiation, and so on. And energy is all around us…
Maybe it was because I had been doing the ‘fire as water’ thing lately, but I found myself moving through those new forms, without actually creating fire. Instead, I closed my eyes, focusing instead on the heat I could sense, and reached out to the world around me. Nothing happened at first, but slowly, I began to notice the way heat currents shifted. From there, it was just like trying to direct fire I’d already tossed out, made to behave like liquid.
I saw large swathes of the space around me go ‘dark’ as the heat rushed to my hands, growing brighter before winking out—but I felt the energy resting in my palms. Opening my eyes, I saw trails of ice glittering in the light as they fell, an entire section of the fog bank flash frozen as it’d had its heat stripped away from it. Looking down, I saw familiar glowing spheres of energy in my hands—energy that hadn’t come from my body, but which I had gathered from the world around me.
Makes sense that heat would be easiest, since it’s connected to fire. So, what can I do with it? No, first, can I repeat it?
I tossed the energy spheres up into the air, letting them hang there, then tried again. This time, the entire process came much faster, and I watched as large sections of the ground were coated in frost.
Uses way less energy than normal bending. Infinite energy glitch? Maybe bend the energy from the surroundings to throw at enemies, I mused, tossing one of the spheres in my hand. Wait…
Feeling inside myself, I could tell that even with my continuous absorbing and cycling of more chi via breathing, I was still about a quarter down on my reserves due to my practice. But I’ve got a lump of pure chi right here. So, can I just…?
I focused on pulling the chi in. On taking it into my body the same way I would have expelled it, just in reverse. The same way I was constantly breathing in more chi with my breathing exercises.
Slowly, the sphere in my hands shrank and I felt the pure chi settle inside me, mixing with my own fire attuned chi and restoring my vitality. I sighed at the sensation. Getting so much at once left me a little lightheaded and I took a moment to adjust to it. More than that, the chi in my hands had been concentrated—not the loose stuff I pulled from the air in breathing exercises. It rapidly expanded to fill my body, filling me to capacity and a bit beyond, and leaving me feeling spiritually stretched. It didn’t feel dangerous yet, but I could definitely tell there was a limit to how much I could hold at once. However, just as with expanding my chi reserves the normal way through exercise, it felt like if I did this regularly, I could expand my natural reserves further and faster than normal bending routines ever would.
But why not combine them? Exercise to exhaustion, refill with energybending, repeat. Get experience and more exercise out of it.
“Zuko!” Yue called, pulling me from my thoughts. I turned and found her grinning as clear water ran from the ground, directing it around her body. Her eyes narrowed into a glare at me as she pouted. “You didn’t tell me I’d be trying to pull it through rock!”
I looked around, taking in the mountainous terrain and the abundance of rocks in our general vicinity. Yue followed my gaze, then blushed as she realized what I was getting at. “Good work, Yue.”
“…Thank you,” she chuckled, back to smiling.
“You can practice doing that faster later, because you’re definitely going to need to be able to use the water you’re pulling to saw through the rock and ground between you at some point. But first, the other lesson.”
Yue nodded eagerly and let the water around her drop to the ground. “Is it going to be harder than pulling it up through a mountain?”
“No, no. Should be super easy,” I sent her a grin. “So, fun fact. Humans are about sixty to seventy percent water by volume. Plants can be up to ninety percent. That water’s just there, waiting to be used. Your next goal is to be able to strip water from plants to use for bending, with the end goal being to eventually get good enough to bend the blood within someone’s body.”
I knew bloodbending was a thing from the series, but I seemed to recall it could only be done during a full moon. However, Yue being moon blessed and as much of a prodigy with water as Azula was with fire, I had a sneaking suspicion that maybe, just maybe, she might be able to do it on her own.
“Okay, I’ll try that next,” Yue smiled, turning away to go back to her practice.
As for my own, I considered what I’d learned so far. The fire-as-water thing apparently worked really well for energybending for some reason—or at least, using it as a base had. So, I decided to lean into the water aspect and see what happened. Pulling another ball of ki from the air, I sat down and began to roll it between my hands, emulating the back and forth movement of waves as I thought on it.
What if I sent it out then tried to pull it back? That’s pretty much the basis for a lot of water techniques, so…
Shrugging, I sent the ball out into the air, waited for it to get a short distance away, then abruptly pulled back with energybending. The ball reversed course and streaked back to my hand, where I caught it and sent it out again.
Alright, that works. So, can I shape it into something other than a sphere? A wave maybe? A crescent, that is.
It took a little playing around with it, but I eventually figured out how to shape the energy in my hands how I wanted and was soon sending out and pulling back a crescent shaped wave of energy. With my success there, I decided to try to see if I could compress the leading edge to make it sharp, then fired it off at one of the rock formations nearby. The rock split and cracked where it was struck and the energy wave dispersed, but I could sense all of the energy still right there, just a rapidly expanding cloud of chi. It took a bit more effort this time, but I managed to pull it back and condense it down into a sphere again.
I practiced that way for a while before a silly idea occurred and I chuckled. Pushing myself to my feet, I shook my head. “Fuck it, why not?”
Drawing the sphere to my side, I focused on trying to push it outwards in a blast of energy. I want to call the name, but I think I’d actually die of embarrassment if Yue saw me doing it.
Unfortunately, my knockoff kamehameha went absolutely nowhere. Oh sure, the energy rushed outwards, but instead of a torrent of power blasting through the rocks in front of me, it was more of a… fart on the breeze, by comparison. Pulling the energy back, I frowned as I compressed it again at my side. I tried it again, this time trying to hold it together as much as possible, to much the same result.
Okay, so, that’s not gonna work. Why?
The answer was pretty obvious when I actually thought about it. The problem there was twofold.
Firstly, Goku, even kid Goku in the original Dragonball, had a ridiculous amount of power. I did not. If I was going to compare power levels, which was dumb because the systems between this world and the world of Dragonball were different, then the world of Avatar was generally on the low end of the Dragonball scale. The Avatar might be able to throw around an energy blast like that, but I wasn’t the Avatar. Energybending might give me a way to skirt around that limit however, if I pulled the energy from my surroundings to supplement my own…
Secondly, it was a physics problem. I might actually be able to emulate it with the power I did have, but I was going to have to lower my expectations. Thinking of it like water, I was effectively trying to force a five gallon bucket’s worth of water down a fire hose. It’d go, but there wouldn’t be any pressure—it’d just be a trickle. But even a single gallon, forced through a small enough aperture, could cut stone…
I tried it again, but this time, I compressed the sphere down smaller and pulled more energy from my surroundings. The air around me got colder as the fog began to clear, falling as ice to the ground. When I was ready, I pointed the sphere at the rock ahead of me and opened a pinhole—
A flash of light nearly blinded me while a clap of sound and force knocked me on my ass. Faintly, over the ringing in my ears, I heard Yue yell, “Zuko?!” Through the ground however, I felt a rumbling and thumping.
Opening my eyes, I sat up as Yue helped me to my feet. “Are you okay? What happened?”
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I flexed my jaw, popping my ears to try to relieve the feeling, but after a moment I gave it up and lit my hands up with green fire before pressing them over my ears. I felt my inner ears tingle and pop, then pulled them away. “Say something else.”
“What did you do?”
I chuckled and explained as I looked at the damage. The rock face I had aimed at had collapsed, blasted to rubble. “I was trying a new technique. Got a little carried away.”
Yue glared, before smacking my arm. “You could have hurt yourself. You made me worry.”
“I’m sorry,” I pulled her into a hug, which Yue returned with enough force to pop my back. “I’ll be more careful next time.”
“Mm.” Eventually, she let me go and returned to her own training, but I noticed she had turned so she could keep an eye on me.
So, what went wrong? I wondered as I went back over what I had done. Playing it back in my head, I figured it out pretty quickly. I had used a lot more juice in that attack than I usually threw around in even the most explosive firebending. That power was compressed down as tight as I could make it and when it hit the rock, it exploded as it expanded. The rock reflected some of that explosion back my way and knocked me on my ass.
In short, I stood too close and used too much force. I couldn’t think of it only like water, because it wasn’t. It was energy. The rules regarding fire and explosions might be more appropriate when using it as a weapon. Every firebender was taught early on not to do stupid things like catch themselves in their own explosions, suffocate themselves by burning off all the oxygen in a room, and so on. I’d have to keep them in mind in the future.
But it worked really well as a weapon. It was my own fuckup that saw me getting caught in the back blast. Ruling that out, my only complaint was the time it took to gather it. Need to work on that. So… why not kill two birds with one stone? Smaller, faster, less likely to blow me up, but keep it compressed so it’s just as dangerous if it hits as the big one. Kind of like a gun—
I blinked.
Oh. Not a kamehameha. It’d be better as a…
I pointed towards the rocks, gathering energy from around me into a brightly glowing sphere the size of a marble at my fingertip. Taking aim, I kept count in my head of how long it took to charge. At the three second mark, I let it go.
“Spirit gun.”
There was a much smaller flash and crack from the pile of rocks, but the rock I’d been aiming at—about the size of a torso—exploded in a shower of debris. I grinned and did it again, and again. Then, I began pulling in energy from my surroundings and holding it around me without actually condensing it. After a few seconds of buildup, I began condensing and firing what I had as fast as I could. I got it down to about a shot every half second before I was satisfied.
I can’t wait to actually try this in a fight…
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I watched Yue as she turned this way and that, eyes wide as she tried to take in everything about Gaoling at once. Chuckling, I pulled gently on her arm in mine, making my way towards an inn that several locals had suggested when asked. We made our way inside and quickly stowed our things in our room, before heading out again to see the sights. Yue, of course, made a beeline straight for the marketplace.
Watching her look over pretty dresses and other things, I took the time to chat up a few more merchants while she was occupied. Unfortunately, most of my queries towards a certain underground fighting ring were met with confusion. It was only as I was getting dinner for us from a street vendor that I finally struck pay dirt.
“Thank you, sir. Before I go, you wouldn’t happen to know of anywhere I could take my girl to see something exciting, would you? We’re both into bending, so any kind of local tournaments or anything would be great.”
“Oho!” the vendor grinned. “I just might.” I transferred the shishkebabs I was holding to one hand and fished out a silver coin, sliding it across his counter. He swept it up and disappeared it into his coin purse. Leaning in, he whispered, “The Rumble is back.”
“The what?” I asked, putting on a confused look.
“The Earth Rumble! It’s exactly what you’re looking for, if you’re into a little bloodsport! Eh, eh?”
I nodded. “That’s what we’re looking for. Something to get the blood pumping, you know?”
He glanced at Yue at another stall a short distance away. “She doesn’t look the type, but I guess you just can’t tell by looking. It’s always the quiet ones,” he chuckled, wagging his eyebrows. “The Rumble is held just outside of town to the north, beneath a mountain. Just take the road out of town and…”
I listened, nodding along as he gave directions, then thanked him and made my way over to Yue. She looked up and happily accepted one of the skewers I offered her, along with a paper cup of tea. “We should look for somewhere to train, while we’re here,” I suggested.
“Mm! But um, what about,” Yue trailed off, looking around.
“Then we’d better find somewhere secluded,” I sent her a grin, and she nodded.
We left the market, eating as we went. Thinking back to our aerial reconnaissance, I remembered seeing a large, walled in estate on the north side of the city, with a stream running beside it—the same stream that fed into the center of the city, in fact. Turning us towards the north, we wandered along until we found the stream and turned down a street to follow it.
Eventually, the buildings thinned out and became homes and small estates—the clear divide between the rich and the poor of Gaoling. Yue looked around in interest at all the homes. “I can tell the ones made by earthbenders, and I understand those, but how do they build the other ones if they can’t just bend them into the shape they want like we do?”
“Hard work. Men come and level the land, then lay a foundation. Then, they put up the wooden frame of a house. Then build up walls brick by brick. Put a roof over it. Until eventually, it’s a house. It usually takes a few months.”
“Months? That’s awful,” Yue made a face and I shook my head.
“Earthbenders have it lucky that way. They’ll never want for shelter and a halfway competent one can sell his services either building houses or just making building materials. I’d love to be able to just wave my hand, stomp my foot, and create whatever I can imagine.” Sending Yue a smile, I added before she could ask, “But I wouldn’t trade away what I have for it.”
She hummed, pressing herself into my side and pulling my arm around her hips as we walked. “Zuko the builder. Hmm. I can’t see it.”
Eventually, we spotted the walls surrounding a large compound—larger than the others we’d come across so far. The image of a flying boar was painted over the front gates—which themselves were guarded by a pair of men in uniform. Yue perked up a bit. “It’s big. Is that the one we saw from above?”
“I believe so,” I nodded, turning us to follow the stream running beside the compound, to its east. “I think it belongs to some local merchant family. I saw a bunch of places with that heraldry in the marketplace.”
Yue thought for a moment before nodding. “Right, I remember. They must be pretty wealthy then.”
We passed the compound and followed the stream until we were clearly out of town. Circling back, we found the north road leading out and with a bit of scouting, I found the mountain that would hold the Earthen Rumble. Yue arched an eyebrow as she took in the entrance to the cave. “Why are we all the way out here?”
“That’s a surprise,” I sent her a smile, before nodding away from the mountain, towards a grassy hill nearby. “Let’s go sit a while.”
Yue eyed me skeptically, but agreed and we made our way over to rest. We ended up laying down in the grass as the sky darkened and the stars began to come out. Eventually, the sounds of people and carriages reached our ears and Yue sat up. “Zuko? Why is everyone going into that mountain?”
Kicking myself to my feet, I offered her a hand up. “Let’s go see.”
“…Where are you taking me?”
“A little event I heard about from some of the vendors. It’s a bending tournament, of sorts. I thought it’d be fun to watch.”
Yue considered it for a moment before smiling. Taking my arm in hers, she pulled me forward faster. “Alright! Let’s go!”
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“And it’s another win for the Blind Bandit! Is there no one brave enough, MAN ENOUGH to challenge her?!”
Toph smirked, crossing her arms over her chest as she observed the crowd with her senses. The first night of Earth Rumble always drew a big crowd—the last night being the only bigger draw. Her heart soared as they stomped their feet and chanted her name, the sound washing over her in waves.
“BANDIT! BANDIT! BANDIT!”
Man, I can’t believe I thought I could give this up. What was I thinking?! This is awesome! Oh. Right. The owner told me to fuck off for a year so he could shake up the betting pools and get some fresh suckers and new talent in, or I wouldn’t be allowed back.
“How about you? You’re a big man! What’s the matter? Scared of a girl?!” the announcer, Xin Fu, yelled as he began singling people out from the crowd. This was just part of the routine. He did it for everyone who won enough matches. It got the crowd riled up and introduced the element of a potential wild card. She could count on one hand and have fingers left over for the number of times an actual, genuine challenger had appeared from the crowd. And just as she’d thought, tonight was no exception.
“Well, since none of you are willing to face the Blind Bandit, you’ll just have to come back next week! Perhaps by then, we’ll have a worthy challenger!”
Toph left the stage to the sound of cheers, feeling a hundred times better than she had when she’d entered. For one night, she could forget about being Toph Beifong, heiress of the Beifong family and all the things that came with it. No one treating her like an invalid. No one talking around her, like she wasn’t even in the room or a part of the conversation. No suitors hounding her to get her family’s money. No surprise arranged marriage negotiations and her parents trying to marry her off. For the night, she could just be the Blind Bandit—a fucking badass with the earthbending skill to back it up, and put her foot in the ass of anyone who tried to deny it.
She collected her earnings, counting everything to make sure it was there, before stowing it in her purse and making her own exit from the arena. It’s not enough. The spread wasn’t good enough. The moment they saw my name, the odds changed. Shit. At this point, I’d make more money betting against myself and throwing the next fight. But fuck that! I won’t do it!
Toph took her time making her way home, following the familiar sound and feel of the stream that ran beside her family’s home as she let her mind wander to how she could make some fast, easy money. After some thought since her initial decision to try to escape, she had decided that if she needed someone to be her eyes in the world, then it might be easiest to just buy out Su’s contract from her parents and get the maid to help her escape. She needed money though, and everyone in Gaoling’s underbelly knew of her scams by now. That had dried up when she was twelve and she’d had to give it up.
It was as she felt she was about halfway back to her home that an unfamiliar rumble through the ground pulled her from her thoughts. Toph frowned as she felt the rush of water leaving the stream, felt it splash on the ground, felt lots of heavy, thick pieces of ice slam into the ground. As she got closer, she felt footsteps and her senses showed her what was going on.
Two people were fighting around the stream. One of them—a woman and apparently a waterbender—was using the stream itself as a weapon, sending out blasts of water, using tentacle whips, and shooting off chunks or ice or raising walls of ice to block attacks. The other was a man, a head or so taller than the woman, who attacked furiously as he worked his way through her defenses—somehow knocking aside or disrupting streams of water at the last moment, punching his way through walls of ice, and always staying one step ahead of the continuous barrage of chunks of ice the size of his head that would have surely brained him.
Unsure who to root for, what to do, or even if she should do anything, Toph just stood there and observed through her senses as they fought it out. Until finally, something pushed her to action. Heat registered against her skin and something exploded, shattering one of the ice walls.
Firebender!
Indecision gave way to action and she moved, rushing forward to help the waterbender. When his back was turned, she stomped the ground and sent a boulder up, then kicked it at his legs. The boulder hit with a solid crunch of bone and the man yelped as he went down. Toph followed through by burying him up to his neck.
“Zuko?! What happened?” the other woman yelled as the fight came to an abrupt end.
“Oww,” the man buried in the dirt groaned. “Something broke my leg.”
“That was me,” Toph answered.
“Why would you—” the other girl began, before shaking her head and gesturing at the firebender. “Get him out of the ground!”
Toph tilted her head in confusion. “But… he’s a firebender. He was attacking you—”
“He’s my fiance! We were sparring!”
Toph felt her cheeks heat in a blush. “Oh. …Oops.”
“‘Oops,’ she says,” the man, Zuko grunted.
“Well can you blame me?!” Toph yelled back, even as she pushed him up out of the dirt. “What’s a firebender even doing in Gaoling? And with a waterbender? What the actual hells?”
“It—”
“Yue,” Zuko groaned. “Explain later. Set the bone now please.”
Yue winced and dropped to her knees beside him. “Sorry! Hang on.”
Toph listened and followed along with her senses as Yue pulled some water from the stream and surrounded Zuko’s thigh with it. She hid a wince at the sound of bone against bone as Yue pulled and pushed, realigning the bone. Not just the sound, but the sense of it. Ever since learning how to sense through her earthbending, everyone she ‘saw’ looked like sacks of flesh wrapped around much more solid bone that she could perceive better than the flesh itself. She could recognize someone by their skeleton but never by their face. So she had a front row seat to the spectacle that was Yue lining everything up and moving all the little pieces back into place.
“Nnn!” Zuko bit down on a yell as Yue set it into place, before sagging with a groan.
“Wow, I think every dog around for miles heard that,” Toph blurted.
Shit! Good going Toph! Just let your mouth run off ahead of your brain, when you’re the one who fucked his leg up in the first place. Ugh. Maybe I can just sneak away? …No, I’m not that asshole. Besides, they might see me head home.
Zuko let out a ragged chuckle. “Yeah, probably. You should hear me when I stub a toe.”
Toph blinked, her mouth falling open. He doesn’t sound mad?
“Alright, hold it still,” Zuko instructed, and Yue nodded. A moment later, Toph felt fire warm her skin again.
“What are you doing? It’s not sticking out, right?” she asked, as in her senses, Zuko pressed his hands—which were probably on fire given the heat—to his leg.
Instead of answering, he groaned. “Oh fuuuck~ that’s better.”
Toph’s mouth fell open again as she saw something impossible. Sure, she’d heard of healers from the water tribe, had even met one or two when her parents hired them to try to cure her blindness. She’d never heard of using fire to heal, however. And yet, as she ‘watched,’ the man’s femur fused back together and the swelling retreated. After only a few moments, it was like he’d never been injured at all.
“Are you okay?” Yue asked, and Zuko sighed, collapsing back onto his back.
“Yeah, I’m good. Just give me a minute to lie here.”
Toph shook her head. “Hang on. What are you even doing here? A firebender with a waterbender? Sounds like there’s a story there.”
The pair on the ground were silent for a moment, before Zuko’s head turned towards her. “Oh hey, aren’t you the Blind Bandit? We saw your fight earlier. Good stuff.”
“…Yeah?” Toph asked. “What about it?”
Zuko hummed. Yue, meanwhile, turned to face Toph, then back towards the Beifong estate. “Do you live there? We’re sorry, we were just trying to find somewhere to practice.” Standing, she abruptly bowed. “Where are my manners? I’m Yue and this is Zuko.”
“…Toph,” the earthbender replied as she studied the two, listening to their voices, paying attention to their heart rates. Yue was telling the truth, which just made Toph more curious. “So?”
“Your turn to tell it, I did it last time,” Zuko grunted, pushing himself to his feet. “I’ll go grab some firewood.”
Yue sat down and patted the ground. “Come sit with us, Toph! But if you reeeally want to know… you’re going to have to share a story of your own.”
Toph considered for a moment before shrugging. Stomping the ground, she raised a seat for herself and sat down. “Fine. But it’d better be a good one.”