"Sergeant," I called to the duty guard—who turned out to be a bender.
"Yes, Captain?" the sailor snapped to attention.
"Send for the medic. Have him clean and dress their wounds." Seeing the soldier's surprise, I continued, "Headquarters will want to question them. And the more of them are alive and fit for interrogation, the better."
"Aye!" he nodded, then barked the order into the dimness of the guardroom.
Barely ten seconds later, a sleepy-looking boy of about fourteen (yeah, like I'm some old man myself) darted out and rushed off to carry out the command.
Nodding to the sergeant, I moved on.
The captured benders were held separately from the others, on the stern, with individual cabins assigned as their "residences." My order had been taken very literally—the area around the holding cells was practically cleaner than an operating room. I doubt it had ever been this spotless, even right after the ship left the shipyard. The prisoners sat obediently in restraints, barely daring to breathe. Even Tandao's interrogation victim had been secured with utmost thoroughness—though of all people, he certainly wouldn't be moving normally anytime soon.
After finishing my inspection, I returned to my cabin and once again buried myself in books on firebending.
I have to admit, over this time I hadn't paid it much attention, which was rather strange given my underlying desire and (let's call things by their proper names) a certain obsession with magic.
But the answer was simple: I had already gotten everything I could from my current foundation. All the various "fire forms" had been meticulously practiced and integrated into my fighting style, but it wasn't enough—damnably so. I simply didn't understand how it worked. The intermediate level available to most firebenders didn't answer the fundamental questions—it just drilled the necessary katas into you. Perform them, channel power at the right moment for the "fire show," and… that was it.
Even the fact that firebending relied more on Breath than on Movement—I had only found that in a single dusty folio. And even then, only because I knew what to look for. A certain phrase from General Iroh, spoken at the very beginning of this whole story to the future greatest squanderer of the Fire Nation's achievements, had stuck in my mind—that was all. If I hadn't remembered it, I'd probably still be flailing my arms and legs, trying to find some kind of pattern.
Still, realizing that Breath played some role got me exactly nowhere. A good, solid nowhere. Fine—proper breathing matters when performing "spells." But what does properly even mean? What am I supposed to do beyond inhaling and exhaling? And what do those chakras the books keep mentioning have to do with any of this?
Honestly, that whole spiritual-philosophical framework was a complete black box to me.
I had no doubt it mattered. Just look at canon Zuko—once he started drifting toward the "right side of the Force" (in terms of harmony and democracy, of course), he lost his bending entirely for a while.
Did that mean the whole "Through passion, I gain strength" idea, so beloved by certain lightsaber-swinging enthusiasts from a galaxy far, far away, applied—at least roughly—to firebenders as well?
Then why did Iroh, with his almost Jedi-like nonchalance, still burn bright enough to set the world on fire?
Questions, questions… and the answers remained somewhere beyond the horizon.
The idea of visiting that desert library was becoming more and more tempting. I'd need to carefully probe that possibility the next time I found myself at Headquarters.
What stung the most was that I didn't understand not just the spiritual-philosophical side, but the purely physical aspect as well. "It's magic, Harry" wasn't enough for me—I was trying to figure out the principles it actually worked on.
At first, I thought firebenders were manipulating oxidation processes—essentially the combustion of anything and everything. That would neatly explain the ability to create fire "out of nothing" and extinguish it at will. Even Azula's blue fire fit beautifully into that framework—more refined control over the reaction, drawing in components from the air, enriching it with oxygen, maybe even with traces of butane.
But lightning—supposedly the pinnacle of firebending—didn't fit that model at all. No matter how much you oxidize, you're not generating a high-voltage arc from point A to point B.
And don't even get me started on that bizarre focused beam from the assassin's forehead (once I got my commission, I managed to look into that a bit).
But the other theories sounded even more absurd—control over entropy, that is, over the motion of molecules and atoms, would allow not just lightning and fire, but flash-freezing fortresses solid and reducing entire cities to dust in the literal sense.
Given that firebending had been around for ten thousand years, someone would have figured that out by now. And the past century of war would certainly have pushed things even further in the direction of killing efficiency.
But nothing of the sort existed.
And it was hardly because everyone here was an idiot while some miraculous transmigrtor showed up and, in two years, spotted what others had failed to notice for millennia.
No—a fresh perspective, a different angle, could certainly yield a great deal. Gunpowder making its way from China to Europe proved that much. But not when that perspective is essentially "a schoolkid looking at a doctoral dissertation."
The third theory was even more absurd, something I came up with more out of desperation than anything else.
Really, the idea that all bending worked through transitions between states of matter—solid, liquid, gas, energy—was pure idiocy!
Sure, it could sort of explain what firebenders did. But it completely contradicted everything else—starting with the logical expectation that earthbenders would then control ice, and ending with waterbenders somehow dabbling in magma.
In short, I understood absolutely nothing.