Path Ahead

The Battle of Ba Sing Se

By night, the city was eerily quiet, the machines of war still. There were guards, of course, but they were spread thin and not very alert. The months of quiet since the walls had come down had apparently lulled the soldiers into a false sense of security. Besides, they undoubtedly knew that they'd be inspected and drilled constantly once The Phoenix King arrived, so they might as well take it easy while they still could.

Zuko smiled tightly to himself. Soldiers were the same everywhere. Come to think of it, people were pretty much the same everywhere. He supposed that was what Aang had been trying to tell him so long ago, after he'd discovered that Zuko was the Blue Spirit.

Their strike team was necessarily spread out due to the large area to be covered by a relatively small group of people. In addition, it was much easier for one or two at a time to slip past the guards. They could have taken out the guards, of course, but that might have alerted the larger forces inside the city to their presence, and they'd decided that the danger of being hit from both sides was relatively minimal. In fact, it was part of Zuko's job to keep those outer guards distracted until the main assault was well underway.

For the purposes of this miniature invasion, it was advantageous that the walls that had once shielded the city were no longer there. The openness now allowed their group to come in from multiple directions at once. Not very forward-thinking of the Fire Nation. Then again, they clearly weren't expecting any kind of attack.

Unfortunately, despite the gravity of what he was currently facing, Zuko found himself concentrating most upon something irrelevant that his mother had said just hours before.

Isn't she a little young for you? she had remarked upon seeing Toph. This had surprised Zuko and had been distracting him ever since. He and Toph were friends, that was all. She'd been the first person willing to accept him into the Avatar's entourage, and her background in a wealthy, upper-class family gave them more in common than Zuko had with the others.

On the other hand, Zuko couldn't deny that he'd missed Toph more than the rest while he'd been away. She helped him to stop taking himself so seriously, something he'd finally realized that he needed to do. And...she was the only person he knew who didn't care that he was scarred. As much as he tried to ignore it, he hated the reaction most people got the first time they saw him. Maybe it was because Toph was completely unaffected by his scar that Zuko felt like he could let down his guard with her. He could take off the mask he'd constructed to hide the pain and just be himself. Better than that, he could explore while he tried to figure out who he really was.

Suddenly, a bolt of lightning shot through the sky. That was the signal for the assault to begin, and Zuko stepped out of hiding and charged forward, setting aside all extraneous thoughts. His job was to take out the war machines that spread out in the area that had once been bordered by sturdy, stone walls. His mother, stationed some 200 yards away, shared the task with him. Destruction was something he could definitely do, and there was a certain satisfaction as he exploded the first one, hearing the cries of guards as they saw what was happening. He caught the flames as his mother did her part as well, and the battle was on.

Katara and Pakku swept through the city ahead of Sokka and Suki on ramps made of ice, softening up the city's defenders before the warriors closed in. They reused the ice as much as possible in order to conserve water, even though that required a portion of their concentration. As they sped along, they mowed down Dai Li and firebenders alike with a combination of ice and water. They hadn't started near each other, but their paths eventually crossed.