14
I do not know where I heard this from, but humans are supposed to only be able to track eight different things with their sight at the same time. There are stories in fiction, where people can see out the back of their heads and track more things and see further. Those things are easy for comics and cartoons to depict; after all, even Toph's ability to 'see' is depicted by vibrations. Now take that up to eleven, multiply it by a sixth sense, and add the depths of information coming at us from every direction, and you will have just a glimpse of what we are doing.
We are watching the pirate Jolt with our eyes. Our sight takes in every twitch as Azula looks for weaknesses and I look for his next move. She studies his ghastly features—those hollow eyes, roguish goatee, red headband, and strange apparel—for where his psychological weaknesses might lie. I will not lie; I think she is doing this subconsciously, whereas I am actively trying to predict his next move.
Our eyes also watch the men behind him, who outnumber Captain Guai's crew slightly. Their first mistake is not pouring onto the deck immediately, choosing to creep and walk behind the lead pirate in an almost orderly fashion. It is almost like they are disciplined, but it is more likely that they have practiced this many times and carried it out even more.
At the same time, the other, smaller galley charges on, just twenty meters away and trying to knock our ship onto one of the nearby rocks. They are not going to try to take our ship, it seems. Eighteen of them are below decks rowing, with fifteen of them being chained to their seats. One man is standing at their front, his mouth wide, possibly yelling. We cannot detect sound or the vibrations in the air; we aren't that good. Eleven are above the deck. One of those men is steering, one is latched onto a sail, and the rest are on the edge with spear-like weapons drawn.
Our girls have their swords and not their shields. We are not prepared for an open confrontation; so they will have to go with a sword-and-dagger combination. I remember talking with them just once, about different tactics being used in different locations; pike walls are good for open fields, but they are terrible for sieges. I remember saying off-handedly that if we are caught fighting on the seas, we cannot rely on the spears and shields in our packs, because we simply will not have the room for such things. It is nice to see that the girls have been paying attention, yet they aren't listening to our instructions to stay low at all. They are all following Lin up and readying themselves on the right side of the ship for the galley's pirates to board.
The ironclad has more people. Some of them are small, probably children or women, I cannot tell. They stay lower, unlike the twenty-seven who are behind the scum named Jolt. There are three of these serving wenches and three other men below decks in a boiler room. This large vessel looks more and more like a repurposed Fire Nation destroyer with a shabbier, deceptive shell.
The crew behind me is scrabbling. Some are trying to get below to hide, some are shaking and inching towards the rails, and others are spitting in their hands. There are all sorts of sailors, but very few crews are so diverse. For a moment, we wonder if this crew is just one that has recently been put together.
All of these things are happening at the same time, within a fifty meter radius around us. We are seeing and feeling everything happen at the same time, and I find this hard to express in words. How do you describe a sixth sense? How do you tell a blind person of a newly discovered color? How do you write into words what it is to smell sound, taste color, or to see heat?
This is just a moment's contemplation.
It ends.
The cocky gait of the pirate captain is an irritation, a pimple on the world's ass. Each step makes an exaggerated clinking sound as hefty bags of coins jingle at his belt and in his pockets. He has this smirk on his face that just makes me want to punch his face. Dreadlocks flutter in the night wind as he displays his rotten, yellowing teeth for the whole world to see, and a draft of a foul, urine-like odor drifts towards us.
We wrinkle our nose. It's disgusting.
"Well, well, what have we here?" And as if his speech cannot begin in a more stereotypical way, Jolt sways from side to side as he speaks. Right at the heels of the urine, the heavy scent of alcohol wafts over and they mix into an unholy concoction. "You know, merchant ships heading over to the Earth Kingdom usually have the courtesy of stopping and paying toll. It leaves… what's the word?"
Neither Azula nor I want to banter. It's not just dumb, it's silly. I mean, I want to, if I don't have to stand the stinging sensation in our nose this whole time. But more importantly, bantering is something that is done between near-equals.
This idiot, who walks right into our range of fire, does not even come close to our intellect.
A roar deafens the seas as we flip and fall to a crouching horse stance, twin fists thrust outwards. We throw as much as we did into the first galley into this wild, raging inferno. It is conical from our lack of control, though it starts off as two overwhelmingly large balls of fire that merge into one even larger. The blue stream is the result, with hundreds of tiny embers spiraling and zigzagging around, orbiting the flame as if it were a sun.
There is a reason for this. I am panicking inside, because his lightning is almost instantaneous and lethal at a glancing blow. Azula knows what cold fire is, and this affront to her legacy cannot stand.
"Boys," Jolt lifts a bottle to his lips.
The four men directly behind him leap forward and fall into a stance higher than ours. They stand strangely, not in a straight line but in a diagonal one. Each has the heat of a firebender about to unleash their power upon the world.
The closest man approaches first, his arms flailing wildly. 'No, those are not the moves of a human shield…' He does not block or deflect the fires with his own. Instead, he coerces them to his right and diverts them away from the wood.
The next man takes a step forward just as the previous man finishes flinging. He redirects the flow of our flames further.
And then the next and the next; they all do the same.
'Why do I have a feeling that they aren't normal pirates?' I feel our eyes grow wide. This is not a simple team of firebenders. They need to have perfect trust in the previous not to leave their companions to be swallowed in fire.
'Because they aren't. That is not something that is taught even to normal soldiers.' Azula shifts our attention back to the swaying captain. 'Pay attention.'
That is not swaying! That's…
Another bolt of lightning flies above us, jabbing through the masts of the junk and Captain Guai's first mate. We are temporarily blinded by the light, but we sense the pirate captain's outstretched arm aiming where the lightning disappeared into the night.
He starts chortling, "And here we thought we had to fight a firebending master. It's just a kid!"
We duck down and behind the wooden cabin on the deck of the junk, just as the pirate's four men shoot streams of fire at us. They are individually even slightly below the Qiao sisters' ability in terms of power, but four at once? Our sails are burning. The wooden beams that make up the mast creak and groan above us, with a huge hole in its middle. Yes, that will fall soon.
"Come on out girlie. I won't hurt you," Jolt laughs again. "But you rascals… wait, Guai, is that you? Ha! Looks like you've come to the end of the line, eh?"
'He isn't even treating us like we're a threat!' Azula sounds angrier than she was before.
'At least Captain Guai is a levelheaded man; he knows he can't give us up,' I try to calm her.
'No need for that. I'm going to melt these… these scum!' Azula takes a half-step forward, only for me to hold her back.
'Wait, we need a plan. Calm down!' I urge again. We are only strong if we are working together; if we let it go, then we're probably going to burn out before the fighting's over. And that isn't all that hard, considering we're already feeling sluggish.
'I am calm.' Suddenly, it feels like someone dumped a bucket of ice over our head, but suddenly, there is no more rage. I do not mention that she was raging though. There is no reason to be counterproductive.
'Then you know how he sways? We can attack when he's down,' I strategize.
'No.'
'What?'
'He's leaving himself open on purpose. Besides, that necessitates provoking him to attack. If you haven't noticed, the ship is about to collapse on itself.' Azula rolls our eyes.
Do I feel stupid for being told off by a ten-year-old? A little, but our enemy can hurl more lightning than Emperor Palpatine. This is no time to worry over something so minor!
'Then we take care of the others first. Isolate and eliminate,' I suggest next slowly. Do we go after the fire benders or the men behind him? They all look more armed than I want to deal with.
'Right. Let's throw them overboard.' We turn towards our right side, where the pirates on the other galley are already throwing roped hooks at our merchant vessel.
Remember that all-direction heat sense? It works through all sorts of barriers, right?
We duck low and start pushing and pulling at the galley. The heat of the wood is barely there, and throwing any flames will give us away. But the heat is there, and even if we cannot even dream of pulling off the first move one more time, we can swing it upside down.
At the same time, the flaming sails above us fall, and we only notice at the last moment because the intense focus required for moving something so large.
Mai tackles us out of the way.
Lin is above her, shielding us from the flaming wreckage that falls as the masts fall into each other.
"Azula, stop spacing out," Mai growls.
We blink in surprise and maybe a little deliriously from exhaustion, "Mai, that's the most emotion you've shown all day!"
"Now's not the time for that, Princess!" Lin yelps, pushing away the burning sailings. Another lightning bolt flies over head, utterly severing the wood holding up the every function of the ship above us.
"Now's the perfect time to…" We shrug out of Mai's grasp and stomp forwards again, our eyes of the prize. "Push!"
The galley creaks much like the masts did. It takes a lot of effort to break a ship in two, especially one so carefully constructed. Even if we try to rip it into two, the effort needed is greater than we can muster as a whole. There are just too many different factors in play; it's almost as if the heat within each plank needs attention on its own. To compress it as a whole is equally hard, almost too difficult for us as we are. If we do it—and I know we can—we'll probably collapse on the deck right then and there.
So that only leaves us with this 'rock the boat' method. It's slow, but after ten or so swings of the pendulum, the galley is already swinging from side to side enough to throw most of the pirates above deck off.
There is a trick to this too; if we do it too hard, not only do we lose valuable energy, we also might have the galley's mass crash into our merchant vessel.
And really, throwing the pirates off should be enough.
But Azula pulls again.
'Wait, that's going to crash into—'
'Push,' Azula commands, and I follow suit instinctively. The galley flips over with the sickening sound of a hundred wooden planks doing a belly flop.
There are screams too.
I feel a little numb. Those were slaves below deck, weren't they?
Should… should I be upset?
Why don't I feel anything?
But then again, I feel what Azula feels.
A thin stream of fire hits our shoulder, dislocating our right arm and causing us to be flipped over in the air before we crash down on the deck of the junk on our side. Our vision goes dark, but we feel Mai running towards us, knives flashing.
Lin runs up to Mai and blocks the next three streams. She is singed all over, because she herself does not have the aptitude to block so many hits. I feel the heat on her stomach. That is going to take off her skin if she…
For a moment we black out.
It is just a moment.
Lin cannot block every flare, and we are feeling something hot tickling the side of our head. It is scalding, but it doesn't burn. 'Focus. I barely blocked that one, and it still hurt.'
'… Sorry…' We pick ourselves up and immediately wobble onto Mai's comfortable shoulder.
'How are we so weak?' Azula asks. I cannot tell if she is angry or curious. She can be feeling anything right now. I can be feeling anything right now. And I will never actually know what that feeling is, because we have been holding an absolute control over ourselves for this entire encounter.
'I think we can't use the heat sense in such a prolonged way. We just discovered it.' I tell her my first assumption. It makes sense, considering how it even takes Toph many years.
Thinking about it, my using only one, single outlier as my only example is a rather bad idea.
'Might be… but that's not what I'm talking about.' Azula nods towards the remaining pirates, who are now exchanging blows with Lin and the girls at a distance. As brave as our girls are, they are inexperienced, and outnumbered, and they are taking a lot of hits.
Instead of helping, Captain Guai set his sailors to doing something with the boat. I'm too tired to care… it's probably something to do with the fire.
'We need something that can't be thrown away by those firebenders.' I sigh. 'I can't believe we're fighting firebenders.'
Azula grinds our teeth. 'We can figure it out afterwards. A whip is a possibility.'
'And there's also the men behind them. Looks like they are securing their boat to ours. And there's also Jolt himself.' I point out.
'Are you being deliberately obtuse?'
'… No.'
Azula shakes our head and we flip ourselves up and back into the cover of burning debris.
"Mai, how good are you with the knives?"
She deadpans, "Good enough."
"Good," We nod. "Here's what we do…"
We jump over Lin and throw our fire-whip. Only, this is not a whip in the traditional sense of the skill. Something so thick cannot cut, even if it is still attached and thus harder to bend away. So what can we do but make it thinner and smaller?
Ultimately, it comes down to our control of our Qi and our body for the fires, and the control of emotion for the extra component that holds this thin line of fire together. After all, no one can tell us we can't reinforce firebending with heatbending (I refuse to call it something as childish as starbending).
We swing it in from our left, where the last in the line of the four firebenders is. This is planned for two reasons. First, if he severs our connection to our fire, we are still connected to the remainder of the whip that hits the next three pirates. Secondly, though their diagonal formation is something interesting that I have not seen before in squad tactics against a single, powerful firebender, this is not anything new in the art of war.
The thread of fire sears through the first man's neck, the second man's torso, and the third man's forehead before the fourth realizes that his companions behind him aren't supporting as they should and jumps away into the icy waters.
We are about to bring the thread of cutting fire around for a second go at the mass of pirates now focusing on us, when Jolt walks up again, swaying.
Mai must have gotten a little trigger happy, because her knives are skewering through Jolt's hands and feet before he even starts sparking up. The pirate yelps, but he can't get away since he is pinned to the deck. A second wave of knives secures him until he can only move his head.
We make a lazy wave with our newly invented technique, but most of the pirates, seeing their leader and his elites fallen, decide on the better part of valor.
Annoyed at how anticlimactic the ending to our fight turns out to be, we turn to Mai. It is not completely one sided, sure, what with more than half of Captain Guai's crew lying dead, more than a few of our girls missing in the chaotic scuffle that we barely paid any attention to, and Lin lying to our side cooling a bit as if she might not wake up… but Mai. Damn it, Mai.
"What? It's not like I killed him."
"That's not the point!"
Our body chooses that moment for us to pass out again. And this time, it takes us a while to wake up, probably.
