The Chong Sheng Trilogy: War by rachelthedemon

Wings

Disclaimer: I own not, you sue not.

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The Chong Sheng Trilogy

PART I: War

Chapter 17: Wings

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"We're gonna what?"

Sokka swallowed thickly, almost wincing at her voice. "You heard me."

"Oh I know I heard you," she growled. "I'm just wondering what kind of brain-eating parasite you ingested that would make you come up with something like that."

He looked to Zuko for a moment, hoping for some kind of support, but instead knew just by the boy's face that he was clearly on his own. "It isn't as crazy as it sounds, honest. The odds are a little nuts, but since when have numbers ever made or broken a battle?"

All three pairs of eyes continued to stare at him, wordlessly expectant. He smiled nervously at them, before striding over to where the glider rested on the fore deck. "Look, the Fire Nation has air power now. If we're going to stay in the game, we need to have it, too. And we do now. We always did."

"I hate to tell you," she said, "but getting into the air isn't going to be enough. We need to be able to do some damage up there. A lot of it. Just us against that whole fleet? You had to be hitting the cactus juice again."

"That's why I designed these different from the ones at the Western Air Temple." He stepped under the glider, gesturing to the uneven bars attached below the center of the wing. A pair of cables threaded through them, attached to each end of the wing canopy and dangling in loops from the bars. "Those, you needed to use the landing bar to steer, which meant you were out of luck if you had to use weapons or even bend."

He pulled on one of the loops, and the corresponding side of the wing canopy dipped toward the deck in response. "With these, you can steer and bank using your feet instead. Which leaves your hands free to actually do some damage." He gestured to the both of them. "You're both benders. And I can make a pointy weapon out of damn near anything as long as it splinters."

Zuko sighed, turning to Katara. "That...actually makes sense, if you think about it. Bending can do a hell of a lot of damage if you use it right." She frowned, looking from Zuko back to the glider.

"You saw how many there were."

"I know," Sokka said. "Believe me, I know the odds, and I know they're astronomically not in our favor. But when these guys are poised to flatten a city of a couple million people, I can't just have us sit back and let it happen. Not when..." He bit his lip to keep from saying it, taking another hard swallow before continuing. "Not when I know we can do something about it. Even if we fail, we can at least take a few down with us."

They each looked at him in heavy silence. Katara and Zuko both frowning in doubt and indecision while Iroh looked on with that passive, sitting-on-the-fence expression his grandmother always wore when she disapproved but didn't want to say so.

"Guys, I'm not saying we battle to the last balloon. If it starts getting too hot to handle, we'll retreat to safety with the citizens. But...we have to try."

More silence, the deck breeze tossing their hair about, scolding and cold. Zuko and Katara looked at each other, trading glances of apprehension. Iroh himself heaved a sigh, coming up and settling a hand on his shoulder.

"Your spirit is admirable. Your tenacity is enviable. But it takes more than those two qualities to be a leader. You must consider what you are asking, here. It isn't even the odds of winning, but the task itself." He paused, looking at him seriously. "In war, you either succeed or fail. There is no 'try.'"

Sokka swallowed again, looking back at Zuko and his sister. He knew the old man was right, much as he hated to admit it. He simply didn't want to word it as asking his comrades to throw themselves headlong at their own graves and pray to Kuruk they missed. But the look on his face was more telling than any words could be and he knew it, just by their answering expressions.

Zuko was the first to break the crushing silence, setting a hand on his other shoulder. "I'm in."

He cracked a tiny smile, looking over to Katara. She regarded both of them with a weighted look, before her brows narrowed and her hand joined Zuko's. "Me, too."

Sokka sighed as a surge of relief flooded through him, tempered with more than a touch of anxiety. The hard part had just begun.

****

Jin hunched over the walking stick Shen had given her as she followed Toph through the winding passage, holding a lantern aloft to see by. It was a small group that followed them, mostly composed of the people she'd spoken to in the square, including that strange-looking girl and her companion. They'd brought another friend, all three of them carrying sacks of supplies as they followed her to safety. But those groups had been steadily adding up over the course of days, and her last trip to Central Camp had seen at least a couple hundred refugees. Enough that they needed to start branching off from the main passage.

Toph herself had gone virtually silent after Aang had told her to stay back and help with the refugees, cold as the walls of the passages themselves, yet visibly stewing in that way all children did when ordered to stay out of the way. She hobbled up beside the girl, sighing.

"What's eating you?"

"What do you mean?" she snapped. "I'm fine."

She smiled a little, murmuring. "Being able to detect lies doesn't make you better at telling them, you know."

"It's nothing."

"Are you still angry over what the Avatar told you?"

Toph stopped short, but her hard expression didn't change. "What are you talking about?"

"You know better."

She lowered her head, fists clenching and teeth gritting for a moment. "He gets to make a last glorious stand for the city while I get to hide underground like a volerat. Just because it's an air battle and I can't hit things that aren't on the ground. This place is about to be bombed to pebbles and there isn't a damn thing I can do."

Jin stopped, resting that free hand on her shoulder and swallowing thickly. "He doesn't think you're useless, Toph. He knows the capable warrior you are. He wouldn't be learning from you if he didn't. But he also knows this is not a battle you have an advantage in, and rather than let you get hurt unnecessarily, he's giving you an equally important task that you are best suited to."

Toph raised her head, her eyes shining a bit in the glow of the lantern. "What do you mean?"

"Helping the refugees to safety. Guiding them through the tunnels. The earth is your element, you know it better than anyone alive. You can navigate this labyrinth without need of a map, and getting those we can rescue to safety down here will be of greater importance than an extra fighter up there. Even if he could fight back that entire fleet by himself, it would do no good if the attack leaves no survivors. All his effort will have been for naught."

Toph did her best to stifle the hard sniff as her shoulders slumped, though she made no reply. Jin held her walking stick out further ahead, illuminating more of the tunnel. "This war is far from over, child. Even if you sit this one out, there will be other chances for you to join the fray."

"None of them could count as much as this one."

Jin frowned, wishing for a moment that the girl could see her expression rather than simply hear her. "I doubt that. The fighting ahead will be just as integral." She quieted, speaking more to herself than to her companion. "Perhaps even moreso."

****

"We have the battlements ready, Avatar. But at the moment, I'm afraid there isn't much more we can do to prepare until they arrive."

Aang nodded, stepping out to the edge of the wall. "I know. And I'm not expecting anything we do to be enough."

General Sung strode up beside him, frowning. "Then why all this effort when you know you can't win?"

His eyes narrowed as he scanned the horizon, calm but determined as ever. "You know about positive and negative jin, I'm assuming."

"Well yes, but...what's that have to do with this?"

"A friend of mine told me a while ago of a third, one that was neither negative nor positive. Neutral jin. It's what happens when you don't retreat or attack, but lie in wait for the right time to strike."

Sung arched a brow, confused, but nonetheless interested. "But aren't you attacking?"

Aang shook his head. "Hardly. Right now, the Fire Nation air fleet has positive jin since they're on the offensive. Since we're evacuating people into the tunnels, we're technically retreating, even if we don't actually leave the city. We're just falling back deeper into it. If we do nothing else, that'll leave us with negative jin. So we need to do something to balance it out to neutral."

His mouth set itself in a hard line. "Mounting an attack when you're being attacked first is defending. Even if we don't win, we can't just run away. We can't let the Fire Nation think that we're ready to give up without a fight."

"General Sung!"

Bith of them turned to the voice, which belonged to a young soldier not much older than Zuko, waving frantically with one hand and pointing behind him with the other. Sung's face drained of color as they both saw what he was raving about.

A towering plume of dark smoke rose into the air from one of the watchtowers further along the wall. Aang swallowed thickly, murmuring. "That...That means only a hundred, right? We can take a hundred..."

Sung nodded absently, and it was all the boy needed to pull out and open his glider, readying himself to dive off the wall. A hundred balloons was nothing. He'd leveled more ships at the North Pole. This was going to be easy enough. Until the general's hand clapped tight over his shoulder, and he looked back up to see him pointing again at the distant watchtower's signal.

Two more plumes slowly rose to flank the first. A trio of deadly harbingers.

He gulped, looking out toward the darkening horizon. All he saw against the crimson of the setting sun was a dark red line of what looked like a cloud reflecting the dimming rays. But as he squinted and shook off the general's hand to step forward, he saw it more clearly. And knew with a sickening dread what he was looking at.

Over a thousand of them assembled. The front line of the most massive airborne army he would ever live to see. His heart crashed down somewhere around his stomach and refused to get back up.

"Load and make ready!" Sung commanded.

Aang looked up at him, almost wanting to take back everything he'd just told him. Sung seemed to read those thoughts, shaking his head.

"Not without a fight." He turned back to face his battallion, who had the trebuchets ready to go. "Ready!"

They poised the counterweights, staring dead ahead. Sung turned around to face the sky again, crouching and stretching his arm out in front of him.

"Aim!"

The seconds ticked by endlessly. Aang stared down the distant army, silently daring it as they drew closer. Until at last he could see the shapes of the balloons themselves, and the black symbol of the nation emblazoned on their canopies. Sung made a decisive chop at the air.

"Fire!"

The sound of creaking wood assaulted his ears as the trebuchets loosed their stones, and he bit his lip watching. The volley of rocks arcked toward them, and he saw an entire line drop from the red cloud like an ominous rain.

Sung repeated his command for the second volley, only giving them less than two seconds between aiming and firing as it became clear just how fast the red army was approaching. And again, another line of them fell.

The knot that had been slowly building in Aang's stomach solidified as he turned to Sung. "You won't be able to keep this up for long. They'll be out of your range soon."

"I know. That's why the archery line is coming up to the wall now. Even if we can deflate the balloons themselves, we'll be in good shape." He forced a weak smile. "Worry not, Avatar. We'll handle it."

It did nothing to assuage the sinking feeling in Aang's heart. Trebuchets were one thing. They were at least somewhat effective and quick. Archers... It could take as many as twenty shots to bring down a single balloon and he knew it.

"No," he said. "I'll handle it."

"Are you out of your head?"

"The archers won't be nearly enough. If I'm supposed to have the power to stop the Fire Nation, there's no better time to test it out."

He didn't wait for a reply as he popped his glider open, mounting it and diving off the wall toward the red death cloud.



TO BE CONTINUED...

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