Chapter 39.3- And so the Dragons Danced

 I couldn’t blame them to be honest, I knew my body looked good. Anyone else who had seen as much war as I had would be a mess of scars, but there was not a single scar to be found on my body. A combination of Amara’s prodigious healing ability and my own skill in the battlefield meant that I got to enjoy war toned musculature with none of the common war scars. If I belonged to a lesser culture, then the lack of scars would have been a weakness in and of themselves, but here in the Fire Nation, it meant strength. That was why when Ozai sought to punish his son, he did so by scarring his on his face. A readily visible symbol of his dishonor for all to see….I wondered how he had managed to rule in canon with such a glaring weakness to be targeted.

Azula shrugged off her own over jacket, exposing a toned midriff. Her sensitive areas were covered in a bra top that did a good enough job of preventing every man here from getting a view. She shot into motion, and I settled and waited. In the beginning, our spars had been easy for me to win. She was a prodigy, yes. But she had only ever fought her trainers in structured matches. I was a war veteran. Slowly, however, she had begun to make me work for it more and more. She was getting better at a consistent pace.

She reached me and attempted a high knee aimed straight at my head. My hands rose and blocked the knee as well as the blue flames that followed it. She landed on the floor and tried to sweep my legs out from under me. I jumped over the attempt and used the force of my flames to boost myself into a backflip the took me well out of her range. I took my stance and punched out in an exaggerated movement, sending a truckload of fire at her that made the crowd gasp in amazement.

From the flash of blue that appeared in the middle of my flames as they were about to reach her, I guessed at her plans and shot from my position right towards her. She came out of the fire, unharmed, after cutting through my own flames. I attempted a roundhouse kick once I got close enough and she dodged underneath it, having learned the hard way not to try blocking my attacks. She tried to stab her fingers into my midsection and I danced out of the way smoothly. If only Ty Lee knew how much attention Azula paid to her Chiblocking exercises. That had been one hell of an awakening when she’d used it a week ago to briefly gain the upper hand in one of our spars.

Her next attempt to send fire rushing at me failed as I countered with my own fire. Red and blue struggled for a minute but then red overcame blue and forced her to jump away from the fire blast that hit a statue of some Earth King long passed and blew it up.

“Another one” She sighed, and I resisted the urge to chuckle. The private rock garden in the Earth Kingdom palace contained multiple statues depicting past Earth Kings. When we chose to use this for our spars, we’d not expected them to last long, but the present rate of destruction surpassed even my expectations.

Still, I took advantage of her inattention and force her into running as I sent multiple powerful fire blasts at her in quick succession.