Chapter 26.4- And so the Dragons Danced

He wasn’t fast enough. The fire bender general turned away from him and instead jumped over Headhunter’s attempt to trip him up. It was a smooth backflip, the kind of thing that defied gravity with the chain on him. At the apex of his flip, he seemed to stop, hands on headhunter’s shoulders. In seconds, those same hands had moved in such a way that the chain was pressed against his colleague’s neck. When the General landed on his feet, Headhunter slammed into the floor a second earlier. He rolled to the side to avoid a boulder sent at his head, and that was the Boulder’s own reminder to move, but just as he took his eyes off the man for a second to force the earth to move, the man was at his side in that second. The heat on his throat gave him no illusions as to what was going on.

Perhaps seeing his chances of escaping this alive dwindling in the sunlight, Lin began to run. The “Fire Nation Man” fled the kingdom he was paid handsomely to pretend to support, and this General allowed it with an amused chuckle. Xin Fu was a different sort of man. A harder one. That’s why he did not flee. That was why a spear of pure stone flew at the Boulder’s position and he knew precisely what was being asked of him. ‘Stay still and this will pass through you and kill the man behind you’ the attack almost seemed to whisper. But he had not survived this long by making sacrificial plays. His hand moved while being careful to keep the rest of his body still. Still enough that the Fire Nation man at his back would not think him a threat.

The spear shattered against his fist as he brought his own bower to bear and forced the earth to bear.

“How interesting” He heard whispered against his ear and then a kick to the back of his knee forced him to bend before he felt two fingers against his neck. And then unconsciousness.

XXXXXXXXXX- NATSU

The last one did not put up too much of a fight, even as chained up as I was. When my army finally managed to catch up, it was with Toji at the helm, and to the sight of me slumped against the piled up bodies of three unconscious men and one dead one. The split second I’d woken up after that dart had been shot into me had proven to be their undoing. It hadn’t taken much to tell that I’d been poisoned, and it also hadn’t taken much to know what to do. My many times GreatGrandfather had married a woman with a penchant for poisoning after all. He’d done it to claim her family lands and wealth, so he ate every meal with the expectation that it had been poisoned. That expectation was valid on more than one occasion. That led him to developing one of the most interesting fire bending techniques that I had come across from my ancestors.

He called it overheating. By forcing our internal fire to burn hotter while never giving it an outlet, we could make it flow around our bodies. That technique served as the basis of my enhanced strength and speed techniques to a large extent, but using it to get rid of poison was a whole different ballgame. An exhausting ballgame as well. It felt like I had run a dozen marathons with boulders tied to each limb as I tried to take deep breaths and cool down naturally.