The remaining days before the tournament flew by surprisingly quickly. I don't know about the others, but I personally did manage to find something to occupy my time.
During the day, I slept and halfheartedly listened to yet another round of reports along the lines of "not seen, not spotted, hasn't appeared." But at night... No, I wasn't fooling around with Suki. Or rather, not only that. The night belonged to Toph and me. Pleasant darkness, cautious rustling, and languid moans...
"...fuck!" I finished my tirade as I threw myself flat on the ground. Judging by the whistle over my head, I'd done so just in time. Unfortunately, no one intended to let me lie there. Roll, another roll, and... a blunt stone spike caught me just below the ribs, tossing me up and back onto my feet. Breathing became something of a problem, admittedly, but that was a minor detail.
"Bad," declared the monster who, for some reason, was pretending to be a little girl. "Very bad. You're doing everything wrong!"
"You made me take off my shoes, blindfolded me, and started shooting at me. At least you're using bags of sand instead of chunks of granite. And according to you, I'm somehow supposed to see something through all this. Agni, how?!"
"Hmmm... Maybe I really should switch to granite?" Beifong wondered aloud, seemingly asking herself.
"I'll roast you..." I warned the sadist darkly.
"You asked for this yourself, so quit whining, suck it up, and train. Feeling the earth is something every proper earthbender should be able to do."
"Funny, I never noticed any talents like that among the Earth Kingdom army's benders."
"I said a proper earthbender, not a 'trained platypus bear that knows a couple of tricks.'"
Yeeeah... Her analogies were certainly... colorful.
"Fine. What am I doing wrong?"
"Everything!" the girl summarized succinctly. "You're not trying to feel the earth. Instead, you're focusing on your hearing, and your experience helps you anticipate your opponent's attacks, but that's not what this is about. You shouldn't be trying to hear the whistle of pebbles in the dark or dodging because you know how someone finishes off a fallen opponent. You're supposed to see me launching those spirits-damned pebbles at you and see me trying to skewer you on a stone spike!"
"All right," I exhaled through clenched teeth, adjusting the blindfold. "Again."
"Well, at least you've got the stubbornness of a real earthbender," I heard the girl say, and then my ears once again caught that now deeply hated whistling sound...
To be honest, when I'd asked for a master class, I'd expected something rather different, but the Blind Bandit had become fired up with the desire to teach me to "see" the world through her eyes. Since, according to her, that was where the true development of an earthbender began, it would have been stupid not to trust someone who, at the age of twelve, could take down trained earthbenders by the dozen.
Besides, a talent like that could come in incredibly handy in everyday life—from becoming a "lie detector" (though that would be very difficult and take a long time) to simply "growing eyes in the back of your head" and "seeing through walls." Skills like that could dramatically increase a warrior's life expectancy, so they weren't something I could afford to neglect. There was just one ti-i-iny problem.
Toph was... not much of a teacher. Yes, she was a genius—that was indisputable—but understanding and using something yourself and teaching it to someone else were two completely different things. The second was impossible without the first, but the first was perfectly possible without the second.
And this was exactly one of those cases.
Still, I'd more or less expected something like this. After all, it was worth remembering that the Blind Bandit was a twelve-year-old girl. She simply had neither the experience nor the necessary teaching skills.
But that was only half the problem. I wasn't an idiot, hopefully, and I did have a brain in my head, while Tong's theoretical foundation shouldn't be left out of the equation either. The main problem lay in the difference in perception.
Young Lady Beifong had been blind from birth, as had the badgermoles who taught her. She had quickly found common ground with them, learned their sense of space and their bending techniques, and adapted them for human use. They perceived the world in the same way. Now, however, she had to explain those principles to a being whose perception of reality was completely different.
What was it that researchers used to say?
That eighty percent of all information humans received was visual in one way or another? Well, something like that; I couldn't remember the exact figure anymore. So it turned out that understanding the moles had been far easier for her than explaining how all of this worked to another human being. A challenge comparable to trying to explain to someone blind from birth what the color red was and how it differed from green, blue, and purple.
(End of Chapter)
P@treon: /SadRaven
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