The projectile struck the nearest earthbender in the chest with a sharp crack. Before he could react or send it back at me with his bending, a thin jet of fire caught it—too much distance for anything stronger, but more than enough to detonate the charge.
One down. Four stunned.
As I moved past, I casually took a couple of foolish heads off—ones that had only just been sitting on equally foolish shoulders, their owners having assumed I was focused solely on the earthbenders and wouldn't notice an attack from behind.
"Damn you!"
Barely more than a boy—probably younger than me—he awkwardly tried to thrust his broadsword into my stomach. A step to the side, and I simply cut his arms off. Then, with a kick, I sent him tumbling under the feet of another group. His screams—and his youth—would distract the reinforcements, buying me a few extra seconds to reach the earthbenders who still hadn't recovered.
Four strikes. Four corpses.
I needed to conserve my strength. This slaughter had been going on for two hours now, and my sword was getting heavier with every swing.
Oh. They'd finally shaken it off—and were coming at me again.
"Die, you cursed Herald—khh—!"
You shouldn't swing your blade that wide and expose your neck like that. The throwing knife practically leapt into my hand.
The remaining six joined their comrades on the other side soon enough. At the end, I finished off the whimpering, armless boy.
That's it. I didn't see or hear anyone else.
I could rest… for a moment.
I sat down on the nearest relatively clean corpse—the rest were drenched in blood. Though, considering how soaked I was myself, worrying about clean clothes felt a bit pointless by now.
Fifty soldiers. Five earthbenders.
That had been rough—especially considering this was the fourth ship.
Well… Piandao had trained me well. I was already managing half of his "record," and I was only seventeen, compared to his achievement at thirty… Yeah. Still didn't make me feel any better.
I wiped the blood from my face with the back of my hand. My right brow twitched unpleasantly—the cut I'd taken just eight days ago from an overly nimble swordsman hadn't fully healed yet.
Damn. That would leave a scar—a nice, brutal mark. All the girls will be mine.
If I lived long enough to meet them. Which felt… doubtful.
Just think about it—just one month, and already five (!) major engagements with enemy forces and "pirates." And when I say "major," I mean major: three to five ships, each carrying a hundred to two hundred fighters.
Against my hundred.
Good thing my father and I had bent the rules a little during recruitment—or rather, I "used my authority." Instead of thirty soldiers and two firebenders, I recruited twelve soldiers and twenty firebenders. Honestly, it was probably only thanks to that—and the fact that earthbenders weren't at their strongest in naval combat—that we were still alive. There were simply too many people who wanted me dead.
Sure, I was "gaining experience by the shovelful," if you could call it that—but the fatigue, the mounting losses, and the steady drain on my ammunition were starting to take their toll.
At first, I tried to take prisoners. By the third clash, I gave up on that idea and focused on saving time and strength instead. The only exception was when we captured "pirates" aboard our own ships—then we kept just enough alive to ferry the vessel to the nearest base (under my crew's careful supervision, of course). Once there, I handed them over to the local commandant, and they stopped being my problem.
I got used to corpses and death quickly. After the first hundred, another perforated "bag of meat" no longer stirred any emotion—just another opportunity to make a hole in the next enemy "bag of meat."
My own people, of course, were a different matter.
It's not easy to treat someone as expendable when they're the one covering your back in battle. You'd have to be a complete bastard for that—and I hoped I'd never get that far.
But people get tired.
Even though we put in at bases or colonial ports every week or so—trying to rest and replenish our ranks—the constant turnover wasn't doing morale any favors. And even if I replaced one fallen veteran (and "veterans," for us, already included the lads who'd graduated from the warrior school just yesterday and gone out on that first patrol with me—hard not to toughen up when you're in a fight every couple of days; you either die or you harden) with two recruits from the colonies… it was still a bad trade.
As it turned out, the colonies did provide training—after all, they were, de facto, frontier territories and constantly clashed with the enemy—but naval academies were the domain of the Fire Nation Archipelago. Colonial forces were mostly infantry.
Some of them even got seasick!
So no, I didn't coddle my soldiers or tear my hair out over every fallen man—but I did my best to keep them alive and look after them as much as I could.
That's why I fought on the front lines myself.
Yes, from a command perspective, it was stupid. But where I could cut through easily or with minimal trouble, my unit would lose two or three lives—if not more.