===== Chapter 49 - Victory over the worst man ==========
Appa may have been a good buffalo, with very soft fur and a good temper, but hardly anyone around me could understand the happiness I felt as I jumped off him back to the ground to see the world again with my sixth sense. Once you get used to it, you become dependent on it. without sensory input, you feel information starvation, as if you have been separated from an important part of your own brain. But when my feet touched the ground and I remembered that after a severe burn I couldn't feel vibrations very well, I fell to my knees with pain on my face and touched her with my hands... that's better.
A bad radio receiver. That's exactly the analogy that came to my mind as vibrations from the surrounding world entered my legs and were clumsily processed by degraded qi points, because it's no secret that without antennas, the device will work just like a lame grandmother who has had her walking stick taken away. After the incident with my legs, I began to feel as if my vision had dropped to below zero: not using my senses is now equivalent to complete blindness for me. Of course, the power hadn't disappeared — touching the ground with my hands, knees, head, or even my butt, that is, any part of my body with a whole qi point, brought my sixth sense back into order, but there was a catch: I couldn't walk on my hands and, moreover, had recently been learning to fly in order to have less contact with the ground, which meant that something was wrong... It might seem that breaking away from the ground was a pointless endeavour: I was an earth mage, what was I supposed to do up there in the heavens, which belonged to birds, air nomads and the people of fire with their airships and megatons of dynamite, which they could drop on the heads of mere mortals? But I didn't want to think within the box. That's why I was forced to return to a more primitive option.
"Are you okay?" Tai Lee asked, tilting her head after jumping off the bison.
"Yes. It turns out that if you don't follow the beaten path, you have to find replacements for a lot of things," I said, getting to my feet and kicking up a cloud of dust. "That would be enough to sense who was moving around a short distance away from me." "Aang, are you there?"
Seeing that the boy was standing in one place, looking excitedly at the strangest structure his ancestors had built, on which they had inexplicably decided to paint an arrow and eyes, I walked closer.
"What if someone survived? I heard his whisper full of hope. Nomads can fly on bison, hover almost indefinitely on airplanes, and someone must have helped them. We had good relations with everyone, we never fought with anyone in the entire history of our nation.
It sounded logical, and the latest news about the discovery of the nomads' inheritance brought more hope to the young mind: how would he cope if something went wrong... but it turned out that I wasn't the only one who had thought of that. Katara gently placed her hands on Aang's shoulders and smiled at him with all her heart.
"We can check it out together.
"...Yes! Guys, I'll show you all what these things were used for," Aang said, tapping his folding staff on the ground and looking around, his gaze catching on some structure on the mountainside, as if a house had been carved out of the giant mountain ridge. Funny, I immediately sensed this place, saw a bunch of things, but there was no one alive there, which was an extra reason to doubt everything. Why spread the news about this place but leave it unattended?
Aang, of course, didn't think about that. He jumped up, grabbed Katara and Sokka, and ran to the destination. To make sure no one got killed, I had to follow them. When we got to this weird lair — for some reason carved right into the mountain, which didn't really fit with my image of nomads — we saw Aang, who was out of it... in a good way.
"Look, it's a drum that resonates with air magic and can spread a melody across the mountains! Oh, it's a horn that can amplify your breath many times over. It's usually used for rituals, but my friends and I have learned to use it to amplify our voices. Look.
Filling his lungs with air, he spoke into the horn, and a cheerful boyish voice rang out, as if he were using a loudspeaker. And the more he showed it off, the better he felt, as if he had brought guests to his home and was showing off his one-of-a-kind toy collection.
"Dagot, look what I found!" To the sounds of Aang running around the cave, Sokka banging on drums, and Katara admiring the sights, wanting to join the nomadic culture and find more topics to talk about with Aang, Tai-Li approached me. She had thrown yellow nomad rags and beads she had found there over her clothes and was holding a wide fan in her hands," - It felt like they could create a tornado.
"Hmm..." Slowly taking the huge fan she held out to me, I continued to frown and look at everything with fierce scepticism, gradually realising where this whole situation was leading. "It's a pity Afka isn't here, she usually deals with these kinds of things... Tai Li, allow me to ask you, as an expert.
"Huh? - Hanging from some ceiling lamp, she looked at me innocently.
"If you were being pursued by a man who relentlessly harassed you every time you met and was always coming up with cunning plans to kill you and the people around you, how would you get rid of him? Given that you can't kill him yourself.
"Hmm... wouldn't the dark spirits trick work anymore? - She figured out who I was talking about surprisingly quickly. But, shaking my head, I made this monkey think hard." "If you need to punish him without sending him to prison so that he can't contact you anymore... Oh, I know! After you told me about chakras and how Afka can block them, I started learning how to interact with them.
***
"They're caught, Commander Zhao," At the top of the mountain ridge, which offered an excellent view of all the visible expanses, stood a whole cohort of fire soldiers, beasts for moving through the mountains, catapults and shells with dynamite specially made for them. The occupied peak allowed them to remain unseen even to the most sensitive eye; only through a spyglass could anything be seen. "But that's strange... I can clearly see the sand mage, but there are some strangers with him, and some kind of creature.
"Let me see," Zhao, standing with blue circles under his eyes, nervously snatched the spyglass from the guard. Without it, people looked like mere ants, but when he looked through it, he saw the coveted sand mage, accompanied by several unremarkable children who did not deserve any special attention from the nervous Commander, and an incredible strange beast on which they had all arrived. A six-legged, woolly creature with an arrow on its forehead. When he saw it, Jiao's pupils contracted. "A flying bison, a long-extinct beast. It's true... The Sand Magician is the Avatar!
"The letter to the Fire Lord is already being sent," the soldiers immediately sprang into action, while the agitated Zhao clenched his fists in excitement.
"You have an amazing tactical mind," said the captain standing nearby. "You can hit your target even when it's not at sea. Amazing.
"The Fire Lord Sozin used the same tactic many years ago. The airbenders were difficult to track down, so they built caves like this one and furnished them to look like refugees were living there. Sozin fooled the subhumans by using their own household items as bait. Of course, capturing him would be too dangerous. Prepare catapults with incendiary mixtures.
"What... Commander Zhao, you want to kill the Avatar right now? Everyone knows he'll just be reborn! - The captain raised his eyebrows, but immediately became frightened by the furious and piercing gaze of his superior genius. He instantly understood — the Avatar's existence had been confirmed just recently, the problem was finding him, since he had been in hiding all this time and had only appeared on the floating prison, where he had even outwitted Admiral Liang. But now that Zhao had done this, he would be promoted either to Vice Admiral or, even more likely, to Admiral himself. Would he be able to escape possible punishment? Only he could! "I-I'm sorry, you're right.
"Hmm. What will you choose: to fight the experienced Avatar or his weak, reborn version who knows nothing? What's more, he will be reborn as a waterbender, which means we will have every right to invade the North Pole. Now... fire. And don't forget to aim at the flying bison.
With a snap of his fingers, he made the soldiers grab the catapults and send the already lit stones covered with dynamite to a pre-aimed location. In an instant, the sky was filled with projectiles that could level even a large village. Zhao was not concerned about the loss of a couple of ancient nomad figurines, because along with them, a living legacy would perish. Despite the fact that this approach had failed once before, on the island of Kioshi, when the Sand Mage destroyed all the approaching stones, the situation was different now.
Firstly, he couldn't see the shells, which meant he couldn't destroy them - Zhao, who had thought everything through, had deliberately driven them into a narrow space. Secondly, there were so many stones that if he miraculously stopped even one, the remaining three dozen would finish him off. And that wasn't the end of it. After all, they were capable of exploding and killing everyone with shrapnel and shock waves! That was real power.
Oh, and of course. The catapults weren't on just one mountain, and the attack was coming from several directions at once.
"This tactic was used at the southern air temple when catapults were erected on the mountains surrounding the temple. After all, everyone knows you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket.
However, as soon as the first stones flew into strange dust clouds, which, according to Zhao, had been blown here by a strong wind, everything suddenly went downhill. The first thing he saw was EVERY single stone projectile, each the size of two people, suspended in the air, never reaching their target.
"What?" The eyes of the people around him immediately popped out of their sockets.
***
It was too easy to guess that Zhao's favourite topics were catapults and long distances that would not expose him to my mighty and almighty blow. If there was no one near the warehouse of useful things, and you were more than completely sure that it was a trap, then of course it was Zhao, who had read his books on military achievements of the past and was now hiding in some burrow.
So I was not at all surprised when a couple of giant stones actually appeared in the field of action of my sand curtain. And although there were far too many stones, the energy accumulation technique, which the nomads had mastered almost to perfection, proved very timely. Flashing a huge fan, I used its excellent conductivity to stop the flying stones — controlling them, throwing them, or doing anything else was beyond my power, but keeping them in place was quite possible.
"Dagoth?" The people looked at me strangely after my first wave.
"Duck! - With another wave, I reinforced the stone surrounding us and created a couple more walls, after which a barrage of explosions followed. The presence of dynamite on the shells was also easy to predict, so we were only shaken, and a couple of stones fell from the ceiling, breaking some small items.
Stepping out into the street, I saw several more shells flying from literally everywhere. It was almost impossible to keep track of each one, or to understand which way Zhao was. But wherever he was, he surely thought he was out of reach. He thinks he's always smarter than everyone else — how glad I was to prove him wrong. Soaring upward with the help of sand particles, I could clearly see each of the approaching stones, and in a split second I began to stop even those that flew into my blind spot. What use were my senses, dust curtain or eyes when there was an area where all the stones obeyed me? I could feel the ground within reach, which meant I could feel every projectile.
"Dagoth, what's going on?!" Katara asked, running out into the street.
"Is someone attacking us?" added Sokka.
They were confused. Even Tai Li finally realised that I wasn't asking her questions for no reason, and that someone was really trying to attack us. As for Aang... I turned to him and froze. He was looking at the flying stones with a very bad mood."Choose:1 - Avatar Rage (Take the burden of responsibility off yourself and let Aang enter the Avatar state. He's angry about the destruction of the relics, so all you have to do is push him, and the Avatar will deal with every danger himself. You will be fine, and your enemies will be killed - your involvement in their deaths cannot be proven. Aang's emotional state will be threatened.) 2 - Obedient Friend (Help the frightened team escape. The group is not yet ready to face such obstacles, so give up your revenge so that you can all escape quickly. The relics will be destroyed for good, but this will trigger Aang's personal growth and encourage him to remember many things. Zhao will remain alive and continue to commit war crimes against other nations)3 - The one who can be called an older brother (Lend Aang a helping hand, calm him down, and deal with the problem yourself. Finish off Zhao once and for all: be careful, as drying him out and killing him will be negatively perceived by Aang. You will become a kind of older brother to the whole team. It will be much more difficult to establish relations with the Fire Lord after that, and your actions will destroy Zhao's family).
What is this? An option to enjoy the most pleasant ending to the conflict and see fountains of blood? It would be great... if only such things really brought me joy and increased the size of my boner. In fact, Zhao has never made me angry enough to enjoy seeing him get his comeuppance.
But the last two... how nice it would be to give Aang a reason to grow up and show him where he's wrong, and sometimes even stupid. Why the exceptional joy of the air nomads, which Bumi cited as an example, isn't always a good thing. But the rumours about me among the Fire Nation aren't entirely untrue; I am a cruel creature, and I want to end him as quickly as possible, ready to choose the third option just for that, but there was a way to combine it with the second.
"4 - Experience of a mad beast (Finish what the ghosts started and drive Zhao mad. Tai Li's skill will allow you to combine the second and third options, getting the best results from both)."
"Aang... - forcing the little boy to look at him, he gave him an extremely confident smile," - Stand and watch as the people who want to destroy your legacy fall.
Without moving and compressing the dust around me into rapidly spinning spheres, I pushed the surrounding boulders in different directions with such force that they seemed to have been hit by a train. It looked very much like air magic, which I used to attack my targets. For, rising high into the air and beginning to send my bombs towards the catapults visible on the mountains, everything exploded with shock waves and bursts of electricity. The huge fan in my hands was only used when stones flew from the sides; one swing and they flew off again, unable to reach their target.
Was it difficult? Surprisingly, I was less tense than before. Having found many new ways to interact with magic, I discovered new potential.
The soldiers screamed in terror, their fear of the one they considered a cruel Avatar palpable in the air. And then I noticed him. Zhao was pressed against one of the catapults, staring at me with wide eyes. He already looked slightly deranged, as if he hadn't slept or eaten properly in a long time, and I was ready to make that state even worse. The catapult behind him jerked, and one of the beams wrapped around him like a snake, then lifted him off the ground and brought him towards me. No one wanted to help him; everyone was afraid and quickly scattered. No one was shooting anymore.
He couldn't attack with his hands or feet, his heart was beating so fast it felt like it was about to jump out of his chest. But in a fit of rage, he directed his qi towards my mouth, wanting to at least breathe fire at me. It didn't work. I struck his throat with my finger, disabling his qi point, and he coughed loudly, his face contorted in pain.
"It's a pity you couldn't lift iron shells as high as you did during the siege of Kioshi Island, although even that wouldn't have helped. And yes, I have something for you," I smiled dryly, landing back on the ground with him and dropping his body in front of Aang and the others. Quickly introducing and familiarising them with the list of his "achievements," he caused them all to break out in disbelief. They couldn't believe that such a creature existed. On the one hand, he was lucky that Afka wasn't around to make him piss himself at every sound and cry at the slightest rustle nearby. On the other hand... after spending the night with Ty Lee — when we just TALKED, nothing more — she learned to do exactly the same thing.
Aang looked at him as if he were the person who could cause him to enter the Avatar State, while Katara and Sokka were terrified by his intention to throw stones and dynamite at everyone.
Shuh*
At that moment, Zhao opened his eyes to see Tai Li's familiar face. But she quickly and unquestioningly turned him onto his back and tapped his spine with her finger. The mage's body arched instantly, a silent moan escaped his lips, and tears sprang from his eyes. A rapid stream of blows rained down on his sacrum, stomach, heart, throat, centre of his forehead and the top of his head, knocking the soul out of his body. Figuratively speaking. In reality, she blocked all access to positive emotions, leaving only negativity.
Cruel? Very. Did the others understand this? Hardly... to them, Tai Li was just blocking his qi points, making it a little painful. No one wanted to know the details.