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“Eh,” Kirima said. She whirled her mass of water into a rotating ring around her waist. “We don’t socialize enough for that.” Wong shot Kyoshi a hurt, accusing look for not being in touch more. He was always the most sensitive of their bunch.
Kirima sent a fresh torrent at Yun. He raised a neat shield of earth to block it again, but it was caromed off to the side by Wong’s own stone. The blast of water knocked Yun’s feet out from under him.
Kyoshi tried to sink his limbs into the ground, like he’d done to the nobles of the Fire Nation court, but Yun simply pulled free of the solid rock, dusting it off him like flour from his hands. “The earth is my element,” he said, ignoring the giant plane of tiles twice his height that Wong was folding over him from behind. “I just let other people borrow it sometimes.”
The sheet of flooring crashed down on Yun. It would have flattened a normal person, even a skilled Earthbender, but for Yun, all it took was a flick of his shoulders for the slabs of rock to splash off his back. The stone shattered around him in a neat circle, organizing its own debris for his convenience, spreading away from him like the petals of a flower.
He looked up at Wong. “Sorry,” he said to his astonished fellow Earthbender. “I guess the Avatar’s friends will have to try something else.”
“Sure,” Rangi said. She stepped forward and inhaled so deeply it could be heard over the courtyard. She exhaled and then breathed in again slowly, not caring how big of an opening she was leaving on herself. She was almost constraining her power instead of releasing it.
Upon her third pulsing, charging breath, she lunged, releasing a flame so intense it nearly turned from yellow to white. It was pure avenging wrath given solidity.
Nothing would withstand such a blast. Yun slid to the side, riding a swell of earth under his feet. Rangi followed his trail, snapping the columns of the training ground with the continued force of her firebending. She was trying to scorch out of existence the man who’d nearly killed her mother.
She ran the fire after Yun as he escaped along one side of the training ground. Her rage carved holes into the walls of the building, consuming its value as fuel in moments, leaving charred, blackened ruins behind.
The flame didn’t run out until it reached the corner of the yard. Yun hopped off the stone he’d been riding and backed away a few steps from where the smoking trail of fury ended, his eyes wide with surprise. There was a momentary break in the fight. The ferocity of the attack had shocked everyone but Rangi herself.
“Wow,” Yun said. “You’re really playing for keeps.”
Rangi responded by inhaling through her nose again.
Yun’s head tilted and his eyes went dark. “I guess I should too,” he said. He sank into a deep stance. Kyoshi realized, with sudden fear, that it was the first time she had ever seen him perform a fundamental of bending, like a beginner.
He swung his fists, snapping with his waist, and the earth began to violently twist back and forth. Kyoshi and Rangi were thrown off their feet, the solid ground pulled out from underneath them. The sturdy foundations of the mansion wobbled like jelly.
Yun’s stance was low and wide, but his arms were as loose as rope darts as he painted his destruction. It was Jianzhu’s personal style of earthbending, warped to liquify and annihilate the stone instead of constructing from it. Around them the walls folded in on themselves, sucking downward in a groan of tearing wood as if the house had been built on quicksand instead of bedrock.
Kirima and Wong finally lost their vaunted balance and tumbled off the roof into the courtyard. They tried to right themselves midair by dust-stepping and mist-stepping, but the technique still needed a firm base to work. The vibrating ground shook apart the tiny columns of their elements, and they crashed to the earth, hard.
Kyoshi had ordered Jinpa to stay floating above the fight, both to save him from having to participate in violence and also to rescue anyone who might be in trouble. Now the Airbender decided, correctly so, that they were all in trouble. He came flying down on Yingyong to pluck whomever he could to safety.
Yun raised a hedge of stone spears. A nightmarish memory of Kelsang gliding over the iceberg spread across Kyoshi’s vision. “No!” she screamed.
Jinpa saw what was going to happen and rolled Yingyong around so that the bison’s back faced Yun, covered by the large saddle for at least a measure of protection. But the maneuver left the rider horribly exposed.
The first sharp point took a chunk of fur out of Yingyong’s tail. The second and third buried themselves in the floor of the wooden platform. But the fourth spear landed home. It ran Jinpa through the shoulder, pinning him to the saddle horn.
Yingyong let out an anguished roar on behalf of his master and pulled out of the dive. In a moment of terrible slowness, he drifted over the battleground, letting Kyoshi see her friend from the Southern Temple.
Jinpa stared at the stone embedded in his body. The shock in the monk’s eyes faded to accepting calmness. He leaned back against his bison’s withers as if he were taking a nap.
Yingyong had had enough. With a powerful stroke of his tail, the great beast fled into the sky, trying to take his Air Nomad companion away from the danger.
“It was a mistake to bring others into this,” Yun said, shouting to be heard over the grinding of the soil and the house finishing its collapse into rubble. Wong and Kirima had recovered and managed to get a sense of timing over the spasms of the ground. They sprinted and skimmed over the earthquake to get around to his blind side, their feet blurs of motion. Yun didn’t turn his head. “You’ve just left yourself so . . . vulnerable,” he said to Kyoshi.
He hammered his fists down. Cracks parted underneath the oldest members of the Flying Opera Company, neatly placed pitfalls that swallowed them up to their knees. There was a pair of sickening crunches as their own momentum broke their legs. They let out brief screams before clamping their mouths shut, unwilling to give Yun the satisfaction of hearing their pain.
With only a few gestures of earthbending, Yun had plucked away the foreign elements from Kyoshi, leaving behind only what she’d started with in Yokoya. Her and Rangi. He condensed the shaking of the world down to just the patch of ground under their feet, yanking the surface out from under them each time they tried to stand, intentionally undercutting them into the most clownish, humiliating postures. It was no coincidence that the only way fo
r them to stay stable was to remain on all fours, bowed before him.
He pointed at the corner of the decimated training ground. Broken earthbending disks flew across the courtyard and smashed into Kyoshi and Rangi. The training tools were designed to break apart into dust upon impact, but they were also meant to leave lasting bruises, under the belief that the best and fastest teacher was pain.
Yun struck them about the shoulders with the flying lumps of clay, in the stomach and back. Kyoshi knew he didn’t want to knock them out. He wanted to chastise them. This was a punishment befitting of those who overstepped their bounds.
To put the finishing touches on his statement, he made sure Kyoshi and Rangi each took the final training disk to their jaws. The impact flung them head over heels, laying them out on their backs, leaving them both gasping at the sky overhead, choking on the suspended dust.
