Chapter 43: Battle for Nan-Hai
The sun was still low, its pale light spilling across the rolling plains outside Nan-Hai. Morning mist clung to the ground, curling around boots, hooves, and steel as two armies faced one another across a stretch of open field that would, by day's end, be caked in blood and ash.
On the Earth Kingdom side, banners the color of deep jade rippled in the cold breeze, each marked with the bold square-and-circle insignia of the kingdom. At the forefront, General Fong sat astride his ostrich-horse, its scaled legs clawing the dirt impatiently. His armor gleamed in the muted light, layered plates of lacquered green and bronze that covered him from throat to shin, the breastplate embossed with the same geometric emblem that adorned the banners. A segmented skirt of reinforced leather fell over the tops of his greaves, while the distinct rounded pauldrons of the Earth Kingdom curved upward to guard his shoulders. Beneath the armor, thick quilted padding softened the weight, though the uniform's stiff collar still pressed against his jaw.
Behind him, four thousand men stood in disciplined ranks. Earthbenders in full armor gripped their stone gauntlets and bracers, their stance wide and heels dug into the dirt, ready to draw power from the ground at a moment's notice. Infantry in lighter green-and-brown tunics carried long spears and heavy shields, their edges bound in bronze. Cavalry units sat tall on their ostrich-horses, each mount fitted with green cloth barding and plate over the chest. Farther back, siege lines waited, rows of catapults carved from sturdy oak, reinforced with iron, their slings already loaded with boulders cut smooth for distance and accuracy. Even the non-benders among them moved with grim purpose, hauling ammunition, adjusting counterweights, checking straps and braces.
The air on that side of the field was heavy with resolve, steady, immovable, the kind of confidence that came from defending one's own soil.
Across the expanse, the Fire Nation stood in formation like a coiled serpent. Nearly seven thousand strong, their lines shimmered with the heat of barely restrained firebending. The first ranks were made up of armored infantry, men and women in red-and-black lamellar plates, the segmented armor overlapping for mobility. Behind them loomed the fire rhino cavalry, their beasts pawing the earth, armored from brow to flank, horns tipped with steel. Firebenders stood in disciplined lines, hands loose but ready, the faint shimmer of heat already radiating from their bodies. The siege lines were a stark contrast to their Earth Kingdom counterparts, heavy fireball catapults mounted on broad iron frames, each designed to launch spheres of oil-soaked stone that would ignite midair.
At the very front of the Fire Nation's center stood Crown Prince Zuko. His armor, polished to a muted shine, caught the early light in deep red tones. The layered plates across his chest and shoulders were heavier than standard issue, a clear symbol of rank, but fitted for movement. His helm, cradled under one arm, bore the stylized flame crest in blackened steel.
To his right stood Sergeant Rin, his armor scuffed from past battles but his posture sharp, eyes scanning the horizon with a soldier's instinct. On Zuko's left, Lieutenant Commander Donji rested one hand on the pommel of his dao, his other tucked behind his back in the stance of a man ready to give or receive orders. Behind them were several generals and captains, their faces a mixture of determination and anticipation, each waiting for the command to begin.
No one spoke. The only sounds were the distant creak of siege weapon frames, the heavy breath of beasts, and the low hum of bending energy building in the cold air.
Zuko's gaze swept the enemy lines. He found Fong almost immediately, tall, broad-shouldered, his ostrich-horse restless beneath him. Their eyes didn't meet at this distance, but Zuko felt the weight of the man's presence.
This was no border skirmish. No probing raid. This was the battle for Nan-Hai.
And there would be no retreat.
Rin stood beside him, arms folded under his breastplate, his eyes locked on the green-and-bronze sea across the plain. "Hard to believe, huh? By nightfall, this place'll either be ours… or a smoldering graveyard."
Zuko smirked without turning his head. "I'm not planning on the graveyard option."
"You always say that," Rin replied, glancing at him. "But the last time we faced Fong, you were bleeding out, half-conscious."
"I remember," Zuko said quietly, his gaze steady on the enemy lines. "That's why this time is different."
Rin's lips twitched in something between amusement and disbelief. "Different, huh? You going to tell me how? Or is it one of those mysterious prince things?"
Zuko didn't answer immediately, his eyes narrowing as if he could already see the moment of victory playing out. "I don't need to tell you. You'll see it."
Before Rin could reply, a deep voice rang out across the open field.
"Are we going to do this," Fong's voice boomed, "or are you just going to continue staring at me like some lovesick noble?"
The Fire Nation lines shifted slightly, soldiers tightening their grips on weapons, murmurs passing down the ranks.
Zuko took one slow step forward, his voice carrying across the field. "I've waited long enough." His tone sharpened, each word deliberate. "This day will be the day my legend rises on this world."
He walked forward, one step, then another, closing the distance to a mere ten feet ahead of his men. His hands extended outward, palms turned slightly upward, and began to move in wide arcs from side to side. The motion was slow, deliberate, almost ritualistic, as if he were drawing the air itself into his grasp. His shoulders rolled with each shift, his elbows bending as if shaping something unseen.
Fong tilted his head, smirking. "What is this? You dancing for me, boy?"
Zuko ignored him. His feet planted firmly into the dirt, knees bending just enough to root himself. The arcs of his arms became sharper, faster, his fingers curling as if hooking into something massive and invisible. The air around him shimmered faintly, heat distorting the cold morning haze.
The prince's movements shifted again, hands rising above his shoulders now, pulling apart as though widening an enormous curtain. Then, abruptly, his arms thrust skyward, fingers spread wide, palms angled toward the heavens.
For a moment, there was nothing.
Then they saw it.
Thin streaks of flame, hair-thin at first, snaked upward from the ground around him, drawn into an invisible vortex above his head. Dozens became hundreds, weaving together like strands of molten thread. The flames thickened, swirling in a slow, deliberate spiral, growing brighter, hotter. The cold morning air seemed to retreat, replaced by a dry, blistering heat that rolled in waves across the field.
The threads fused into something far larger, the shape swelling until it hung over Zuko like a second sun, ten meters across, a roiling sphere of fire so bright it hurt to look at. The shadows of men and siege weapons stretched long and sharp across the ground.
Even from across the field, Fong could feel the heat. His smirk faltered.
"You still call this dancing?" Zuko's voice cut through the growing silence.
The miniature sun blazed above him, the crown of a prince who intended to burn his name into history.
Zuko didn't wait for the world to decide what to do next. He moved like a man who had spent too long sharpening an idea into a weapon and was finally ready to use it.
His hands were still high when he let go.
The sphere that had hung above him, that convective, living thing of light and heat, peeled away from the air as if it had been a molten moon cut free from its tether. It plummeted with an impossible weight, a comet of compressed flame that chewed the air to ash on its way down. Sound came with it: a low, keening roar that buried the creak of armor and the clatter of gearing siege engines. The ground itself seemed to recoil.
On the plain the world changed. The cold morning that had bit the lungs now tasted of a sudden, sharp heat. Men squinted against it. Metal sung in its presence; helmets expanded, straps snapped with the first bite of thermal stress. A fine, dry wind raced ahead of the falling sun, carrying with it the scent of scorched grass and the sick-sweet tang of hot iron. Shadows vanished beneath the light; those that remained were sharp-edged and white-hot.
Fong's voice cut clean through the rising panic, not a shout of surprise but a command, honed from decades of cracking earth. He made no attempt to meet the sphere with some grand counter-gesture. Instead his body became the instrument of a thousand hands. He stomped once, and twice, and the ground answered: a network of columns exploded up from the soil, not a single wall but a serried line of hammer-forged pillars and slabs that locked into each other like the ribs of some monstrous ship. Earthbenders dropped to their knees and shoved, palms grinding soil together, bending rock into compact, living armor. They moved like one organism; their faces were stone-set and wet with sweat as they drove the bulwark higher and higher.
The wall that rose was magnificent in its own brutal way: layered till it was a moving cliff, lip to lip, the surface smoothed by practiced hands until it shone with the sheen of trodden basalt. Men behind it climbed, forming a human crown upon that earthen bulwark, shields braced. For a heartbeat the Earth Kingdom force looked as immovable as the mountains.
Then the miniature sun hit.
The contact was not a gentle implosion but an annihilating collision. The sphere hammered the wall with all the stored fury of a contained star, heat, light, and an explosion of kinetic pressure. Stone vaporized at the point of first contact; the front of the wall blistered, faces of boulders flaked away in molten curls. The impact uncoiled like a whip: the wall shuddered, then bulged outward in a violent, shattering bloom of rock.
Chunks the size of houses tore loose and cartwheeled in slow, dreadful arcs. The shockwave boiled up through the field, flinging men off their feet. Siege beams cracked and splintered; catapult frames twisted like paper. Anywhere the light struck without earth between it and flesh, there were burns, clothing charred to lace, leather blackened and split, skin reddened and blistering. Men screamed, some in sudden, raw agony; others in the animal panic that comes when the world rearranges itself into an immediate threat.
And yet, the wall had not failed entirely.
Because Fong's bulwark had been built from living earth, hammered and braided by practiced hands, it ate the brunt. Where the sun smashed through, its force was spent more in pulverizing basalt and kicking up a choking ocean of heat and smoke than in vaporizing living tissue. The energy that would have incinerated ranks of infantry was instead converted into shattered rock and a cascade of heavy, incandescent debris. The wall's collapse became armor: slabs of stone, hurled like shields, smothered pockets of flame and snuffed some of the worst of the radiation. Where men would otherwise have been reduced to ash, they were instead crushed, broken, and burned grievously, horribly, but not entirely consumed.
Rubble rained across both sides of the lines. Fire rhino saddles caught; hides smoked black and shied; bipedal war-birds, the ostrich-like mounts snarled in fear, hooves skidding as burning grit peppered their flanks. A couple of catapults nearest the impact exploded outward in a thunder of splintering wood, their payloads and frames turning into flying shrapnel. The ground around the impact became a cratered, steaming soup; where the blast had scorched the dew from the grass it hissed and turned to vapor, casting a fog of steam that rolled like a ghost across the field.
Up close, the carnage was immediate and blunt. Men stumbled, clambered up from the dirt with blood on their hands and faces streaked where heat had peeled off skin. Some clutched missing limbs; others lay like broken statues, faces turned away from the light. But there were far more survivors than there would have been if the sphere had met only flesh and cloth. The bulwark had been raw, brutal triage: it saved lives by turning final light into blunt, mortal force.
Zuko felt the strike reverberate through him like a bell struck from within. The prince's chest heaved, breath coming in ragged pulls, the exertion of shaping and hurling that construct sapping more than he had expected. Heat licked at his shoulders and the hair along his arms stood on end; sweat ran into his eyes, stinging. For an impossible second he saw everything in hyperreal clarity, the way the air moved, the way men flinched, the way the ground smoked.
Across the shattered trench Fong kept his posture, face a mask of contempt and calculation. He had not expected his wall to stay whole; he had expected a storm. He had built a shield not to defy the sun but to blunt it, and it had done exactly that. His bared teeth showed in a skeletal smile. When men behind his wall screamed, he did not flinch. He barked orders instead, his voice snagging through the fog of steam: directing medics, pushing fresh earthbenders forward to brace the broken stones, sending riders to pull the most grievously wounded away. He had planned for this contingency, not for total survival, but for salvage, for delay. The battlefield, in his estimation, still belonged to the one who could keep fighting after the light diminished.
Rin, standing on Zuko's flank, had his fingers pressed white into the haft of his sword. For a second he looked stunned, then furious. "By the chefs," he swore, spitting into the dust. Donji's face was a mapping of white rage and worry, men he'd fed, trained, laughed with now streamed blood across their cheeks.
A silence fell across the field that had nothing to do with exhaustion; it was the stunned hush that follows an unthinkable demonstration. Both armies reassessed in that breath: where had the edge been, and what price had been paid for it? The Empire had shown a new godlike weapon; the Earth Kingdom had shown the depth of its will to survive.
The crater smoked and simmered. Men coughed and staggered up from behind fractured shields; some began, almost immediately, to gather the wounded. Others, with the raw contempt of soldiers, checked weapons and counted losses. From either side, voices rose again, not the single sound of battle, but a hundred small, human sounds: the keening of the injured, the clack of orders being given, the low, surging calls to let blow follow blow.
Zuko's miniature sun still blazed, but no longer hung as a perfect orb; fragments of earth spun through it, and the light wavered as if in pain. He could have burned it fuller, pressed until the entire front line turned to ash and the field became a cave of smoke. He felt the raw possibility in his limbs, the terrible ease with which he could press the advantage.
He lowered his hands.
That, too, was a choice, a lesson in control that tasted of both mercy and calculation. He had shown what he could do. He had paid a price; Fong had paid a price. The field lay redefined: scarred, smoking, and suddenly small enough to be measured by tactics rather than terror.
Fong barked one final order at his men, hold them close, bandage the worst first, keep the formations tight and the roar of the battle crept back in, slower, like a tide rebuilding itself after a great and violent gasp. The morning air was still thick with steam and scorched dust when the first sound tore through it, Fong's voice, raw and savage, carrying across the battlefield like a war drum.
"Enough standing! Advance! All of you, now!"
His fury was an open wound. The near-destruction of his forward line, the burns licking across his men's armor, the shattered bulwark, none of it dulled his fire. If anything, it had stoked it into something primal. He stood tall on the broken remnants of the wall, his uniform, green lacquered chestplate and pauldrons stamped with the Earth Kingdom sigil, dusted white with powdered stone. His voice ripped at the air, turning confusion into cohesion.
Earthbenders slammed their palms into the ground in unison, a deep bass thoom-thoom-thoom pulsing through the soil as they raised fresh cover and propelled themselves forward. Riders on their ostrich-horses kicked hard, mounts screaming as they surged into a gallop. The clink of armor became a rolling roar, boots pounding in step with the beasts' claws.
From the rear lines came the long groan of straining timber, the catapults. Teams of benders and laborers heaved massive levers into place, their payloads loaded and bound with thick rope. With a synchronized snap the first wave of siege stones hurtled skyward. The air filled with the sound of stone splitting air, a bone-deep hiss, followed by the shadows of boulders blotting out the rising sun.
From the Fire Nation's line, men tensed. The front ranks braced shields, cavalry pawed at the dirt, and the archers drew, eyes fixed on Zuko.
The prince stood still in the center, flanked by Rin and Donji. His face was unreadable, his hair still damp from the morning's chill, the scent of scorched earth lingering on his robes. He didn't call for a counterstrike or shout for defenses to be raised. Instead, he simply lifted one hand, palm open toward the sky.
The boulders arced closer, their stone skins glinting in the light. Zuko's gaze followed them, unblinking. And then, with the calm precision of a blade sliding into its sheath, he lowered his hand.
That was the signal.
The ground beneath the Fire Nation army seemed to pulse as firebenders across the line ignited their stances. Arrows tipped with flame screamed into the sky to meet the descending boulders, shattering some midair in bursts of molten shrapnel. The rest slammed into hastily raised walls of fire or were deflected by bending-redirected air currents from the flanking ranks.
The war horns of Nan-Hai roared. The lines began to move.
The battle for Nan-Hai had begun.
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