Chapter 22.5- And so the Dragons Danced

Of course, the second that their boss died, every hand that surrounded me moved to take me out. I would have been more cautious and maybe leveraged the man’s life to escape the situation, but I could see something they didn’t. Bunched together as they were, over half their number disappeared in a spontaneous explosion they hadn’t seen coming. As for the remainder, they would be wishing they’d died soon enough. I pushed off the corpse of General Fong and backflipped over a piece of stone that was sent at me almost by reflex. The man who sent it was too slow with his follow up, and the wall he tried to raise between us was too little and much too late. It was still at about his knee-level by the time my knife hand had cleaved head from shoulders.

I did not spend much time on the ground, running and jumping at the next target in almost the same movement. This man managed much more than the others. A boulder and a raised earth spear to be more precise. Neither of which saved him from burning to dead in his armour. For the third, his foolish charge with raised hammers proved to be his undoing. I dodged left to avoid the first, ducked underneath the next, and rose with a hand that stabbed through his meagre armour and into his chest. The other three did not get the pleasure of my attentions I watched the men I’d brought with me gang up on them and take them out. Staring around the fortress, it was clear that much of the Earth kingdom force was dead and gone. Hundreds of men had fallen to a force of fifty.

Of course, Maki’s stunt with the tower had taken out much of their numbers. Collapsing the fortress itself had also killed white as few. And then there were the numerous explosions she’d fired into their numbers whenever they were foolish enough to bunch up. From her position atop the mountain, she’d killed more enemy soldiers than every single man on the ground. More than me, to be sure. I might have been the one to take Fong’s last words, but she was the one who made this whole thing possible.

Now if only the entire third-eye combustion bending training process wasn’t more likely to kill those who went through it than it was to spit out a success like Maki. She was a prodigy without compare, and that made me even more curious as to how she ended up at the Academy of all places rather than either being fast tracked to the front lines, or being a fixer for the super wealthy elites of the Fire Nation like sparky spark boom man.

My soldiers began rounding up those who surrendered and binding them in chains while I surveyed what remained of the outpost. I would have to write a report on this victory and it wouldn’t do to fail to convey the state of the fortress. Especially since I was certain that forces would be sent from the Mainland to take custody of the fortress and they’d need the information to know what exactly they’d be working with. Surely someone at Central Intelligence would write me an Ode one of these days.

A/N; Last bit of the chappy.