Chapter 90: The Scorched Earth
Consciousness returned to Zuko as a dull, throbbing ache behind his eyes and a metallic taste of dust and blood in his mouth. He was buried. Not deeply, but enough that the weight on his chest was suffocating. A frantic, gasping lunge freed his arms, and he shoved chunks of scorched rock and splintered wood off his body, sitting up in a cloud of fine, grey ash.
The world he saw was unrecognizable.
The midday sun, once filtered by the high peaks, now beat down unfiltered onto a landscape of pure desolation. Firebase Kaze was gone. Not ruined. Not collapsed. Erased. Where the formidable stone fortress had stood was a vast, smoldering crater, its edges fused into a glassy, vitrified slag. The surrounding mountainsides were scoured clean of trees, leaving behind skeletal, blackened rock. The air was dead still, heavy with the silence of a tomb and the faint, sickly-sweet scent of ozone and cooked stone.
He was sitting in a field of debris, the remnants of the inner keep. A few jagged, half-melted stumps of wall were all that remained to suggest there had ever been a structure here. Groans began to punctuate the silence as other survivors stirred, a soldier pulling himself from under a collapsed beam, another coughing up black phlegm. They moved like ghosts, their faces blank with shock, their Fire Nation armor scoured and blackened.
Zuko staggered to his feet, his body protesting with a dozen fresh pains. His mind, however, was a vortex of cold, sharp clarity. He ignored the dazed soldiers, his eyes scanning the devastation with a frantic, calculating intensity.
The brig.
He stumbled towards where he knew it had been, his boots crunching on the glassy ground. There was no door, no cell, no corridor. Just a deeper scar in the earth, littered with the twisted, half-molten remains of the platinum-alloy bars that had once been his ultimate security. They were now just grotesque metal worms, coiled and frozen in their death throes.
They were gone.
The Avatar. Katara. Sokka. All of them. Vanished without a trace, swallowed by the cataclysm and the subsequent escape it must have afforded them.
A cold fury, colder than the mountain air, began to burn in his chest. This was not just a failure. This was a systemic annihilation of his plans.
His gaze swept the crater again, and a new, chilling realization dawned.
The Mechanist. Teo.
He scanned the few stunned survivors again, his eyes cataloging them. Soldiers, officers, cooks. No portly inventor in an oil-stained apron. No boy in a clever wheelchair. They too had seized the chaos, melting away into the mountains they knew so well, taking their invaluable knowledge with them.
He became aware of a presence nearby. Azula was rising from the rubble a dozen yards away. Her royal armor was scarred and smudged with soot, a long, shallow gash marring her perfect cheek. Her hair had come loose from its topknot, falling in a disheveled cascade around her shoulders. For a single, unguarded moment, she looked not like a princess, but like a cornered animal, her eyes wide with a shock that mirrored the soldiers'.
Then she saw him looking. Her mask snapped back into place, the shock hardening into a familiar, venomous contempt. She straightened her back, ignoring the pain it must have caused, and strode towards him, her steps crunching loudly in the utter silence.
"Look at this," she hissed, her voice raw, gesturing at the apocalyptic vista. "This is what your sentimentality has wrought! Your precious leverage! Your delicate 'strategy'!"
Zuko didn't answer her. He turned his back on her, his eyes still fixed on the emptiness where the brig had been. He had orchestrated a trap, but the prey had not just escaped; they had obliterated the trap, the trapper, and the entire mountain in the process.
He had unleashed the Avatar State, but he had not accounted for its absolute, world-scouring fury. He had been so focused on his own game, he had forgotten the true power of the piece he was moving.
And now, he stood in the ashes of his own ambition, the prize gone, his key assets vanished, and his sister's voice a grating reminder of a failure so complete it was almost sublime.
The Dragon of Nan Hai, the master strategist, the Crown Prince, was left with nothing but the taste of ash and the deafening silence of his own miscalculation. The game had not just been reset. The board had been set on fire.
The cold fury in Zuko's chest was not a pretense. It was real, a white-hot core of frustration at the sheer, unpredictable scale of the Avatar's power and the collapse of his intricate plans. But he channeled it, shaped it, and let it erupt in a direction that served his new, desperate strategy. He turned on Azula, the movement sharp and violent.
"My sentimentality?" His voice was a low, dangerous growl that cut through the stunned silence, making the few recovering soldiers flinch. He took a step toward her, his golden eyes blazing with a fury that was entirely convincing. "You arrogant, reckless fool! This is your doing! Your petty, childish need to provoke and humiliate! I had him! He was contained! He was broken! All you had to do was follow orders! But you couldn't resist, could you? You had to goad the waterbender, you had to flaunt your power, you had to push until you unleashed that!"
He gestured wildly at the smoldering crater, his voice rising to a roar that echoed off the scorched rock faces. "This wasn't a battle, Azula! This was an extermination! You didn't just let them escape, you handed them a weapon and dared them to use it! You have single-handedly undone months of work and turned the Avatar from a target into a force of nature! My strategy was to control him, not to create a martyr that can level fortresses with a thought!"
He was screaming In her face now, every word a calculated hammer blow, reinforcing the narrative of her as the unstable, insubordinate liability. He needed the witnesses to see this. He needed to cement this story in the ashes.
Before Azula could form a retort, two figures picked their way through the devastation, their faces pale with a mixture of terror and awe. It was Commander Ryo, his uniform torn and his face smudged with soot, and Lee, the strategist, who looked as if he had just seen the fundamental laws of the universe rewritten before his eyes.
They stopped a respectful distance away, waiting for the royal tempest to subside. Zuko finally turned his searing gaze from a silently fuming Azula to them.
"Report," Zuko bit out, the word clipped and harsh.
Ryo saluted stiffly, his arm trembling slightly. "Your Highness… the base is… total losses are… incalculable. More than half the garrison is dead, the rest wounded or missing. The structural integrity is… non-existent. There is nothing left to salvage."
Lee, ever the analyst, spoke next, his voice hushed with a kind of terrified reverence. "Prince Zuko… the energy signature… the sheer release of power… it defies all known metrics of firebending or earthbending. This was not a simple application of force. This was a… a fundamental unmaking." He pushed his cracked spectacles up his nose, his hands shaking. "The stories of the Avatar State did not do it justice. We are not hunting a boy. We are attempting to cage a natural disaster."
Zuko fell silent, turning his back on all of them to stare out over the crater. He let the weight of their words, the sheer scale of the failure, hang in the air. He could feel their eyes on him, Ryo's desperate need for direction, Lee's analytical fear, Azula's poisonous glare. He was the center of this ruin, the prince standing in the ashes of his own command.
After a long, punishing silence, he spoke, his voice low and drained, the anger replaced by a grim, steely resolve.
"The Avatar's power is no longer a rumor. It is a confirmed, existential threat to the Fire Nation," he stated, the words flat and final. "He is wounded, grieving, and heading north. He will be more dangerous than ever, but he will also be predictable."
He finally turned to face them, his expression a mask of cold command. "Ryo, gather every able-bodied survivor. Triage the wounded. Secure what little supplies remain. We are not staying here to mourn this rock."
He then looked at Lee. "Lee. You will draft a dispatch to the Fire Lord. Detail the Avatar's capabilities. Omit nothing. State that Princess Azula's unsanctioned interrogation directly triggered the event that led to the destruction of Firebase Kaze and the escape of the prisoners."
It was the final, public nail in her coffin, delivered with cold, bureaucratic precision.
He looked between them, his gaze sweeping over the devastation one last time.
"We are done playing small games on mountaintops," Prince Zuko said, his voice cutting through the thin, dead air. "The war has just changed. And we will change with it. We pursue. Immediately."
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