"She's so pretty..."
A young man murmured lazily to himself, sprawled across the hillside like he'd been dropped there from a great height and simply hadn't bothered to get up. The grass was cool and soft beneath him. His brown straw hat rose and fell on his chest with each slow breath, riding the tide of it.
In his hand, held up against the pale afternoon sky, was a portrait — a famous actress. Ink on paper. She'd been the talk of Gaoling's theater district for the better part of a year now. Her name in every mouth, her face on every wall.
Son Kuro's face, on the other hand, was mostly hidden beneath that hat.
He was perhaps ten years old. Perhaps eleven. He had stopped counting somewhere between getting swallowed by the Spirit World and clawing his way back out of it — a feat, by any measure, that most grown men and women would never manage. Spirits were not known for their hospitality, and the realm between worlds was not the sort of place you returned from on sheer stubbornness alone.
And yet.
It had been about a year since he stumbled back into the land of the living, blinking against sunlight he hadn't seen in what felt like decades. Time moved strangely in that place — thick and slow, like water full of sediment. He'd been nine when he went in. He still wasn't entirely sure what age he'd come out.
What he was sure of was this: society could wait.
The East side of Gaoling was all rolling hills and open land and greenery that seemed to breathe. To Son, it was the only part of the city worth anything. The kind of place where the earth felt honest beneath your feet — not buried under stone streets and market stalls and the noise of people who all seemed to be in a tremendous hurry to get absolutely nowhere.
He didn't bother adapting. Didn't see the point. Whatever shape the world had taken while he was gone, he'd bend it back to fit him eventually.
*Son Kuro. A boy of mischief. Thief of peace in a peaceful countryside.*
*...Also an actual thief.*
---
*Yawwwn.*
He stretched both arms wide, the sound escaping him with great satisfaction. His garments — a baggy, dull-green tunic and loose-fitting shorts held together by a brown belt that had seen better decades — billowed gently in the breeze. He lay there a moment longer, savoring the warmth on his skin.
Then he reached into his bag for a boiled potato.
His hand closed on nothing.
He reached again. Still nothing. He turned his head slowly and looked down at the bag with the quiet, creeping suspicion of a man realizing something has gone very wrong.
"...What the hell!?"
He scrambled upright, rifling through the bag with both hands, shaking it, turning it upside down. Empty. Completely, thoroughly, insultingly empty.
"Damn it." He muttered, sinking back onto the grass with a scowl.
Then the ground shook.
It was faint at first — a low tremor, the kind you might blame on a passing cart. But it built steadily, rhythmically, the way footsteps do when there are a great many of them moving with singular purpose.
Son turned.
Coming over the ridge of the hill was a mob. A proper one — pitchforks, torches, red faces, the full arrangement. At least thirty people, maybe more, marching with the kind of coordinated fury that suggested they had spent the last hour working each other up into it.
At their head was a lean, wiry man with thinning hair and eyes so bloodshot they looked painful. He was holding a pitchfork like he intended to use it.
"SON KURO!!"
His voice cracked on the second syllable. The kind of scream a man produces when he has been wronged on a deeply personal level.
"You little *shit* — I'm going to kill you *personally* for stealing my crops!"
Kuro rose slowly to his feet, unhurried. Settled his hat on his head, tilting it down so that the brim cut across his eyes. From beneath it, a lazy grin spread across his face.
"What crops?"
The vein on the man's forehead throbbed visibly. "Don't — *don't* play stupid with me! You think I wouldn't find you?! I *always* find you! Everyone here — we're taking back everything you've stolen, you little rat!"
Son tilted his head, considering this. Then he reached into his belt and produced a small pouch, giving it a deliberate jingle.
"Old man. What exactly do you plan on taking from a child? I've got nothing but the coins from the last time I sold your potatoes." He paused, letting that sit. "Lovely crop, by the way. Very sweet."
The man's face went a remarkable shade of purple.
"*GET HIM!!*"
The mob surged forward as one, a tide of noise and fury and waving implements. From the flanks, Son noticed a second group breaking off — earth benders, maybe eight or ten of them, moving to cut off the exits. Within seconds, they had him ringed in from every direction. A neat enclosure. Someone had thought this through.
Son looked around at them all.
He cracked his neck.
He reached down and kicked off his worn shoes, letting his bare feet press flat against the earth. He felt it immediately — the deep hum of it, the solidity, the way the ground held memory in its layers like sediment. He settled into a low stance, balanced and quiet.
The first hands reached for him.
He stomped.
The earth answered.
A crater split open around him in a perfect ring, the ground along its edge lurching upward into rough walls that threw the front row of the mob back and knocked two of them off their feet entirely. The rest stumbled, grabbing at each other, staring at the sudden barricade with expressions that ranged from confused to genuinely frightened.
"What in the — "
"Bring it down!" The lead earth bender barked. His group moved in sync — feet planted, arms driving down — and the wall crumbled fast, breaking apart in chunks.
They weren't wrong to be confident. They had numbers. They knew what they were doing.
What they didn't account for was the second ring of rock that had already formed around Son while they were dismantling the first.
*Zoom.*
One of the four corner-stones launched from the formation like a slung shot. It caught two of the benders square and sent them tumbling backward before they could react. A second projectile followed immediately — spinning, edged — and forced the rest behind a hasty wall of raised earth.
The wall held. The impact against it did not.
Cracks webbed through the stone. Chunks fell away.
Son stomped again. Harder. The ground shook in a way that went beyond simple technique — there was something in it, something that rattled in the chest and made the bones remember their fragility. The remaining six benders raised a thicker wall, dug in deeper, braced.
"*Ha!* Idiots."
Son twisted his right foot into the ground and extended both hands outward in a single, fluid motion — precise, almost gentle.
The earth *beneath* the benders rotated.
Not the wall. Not the hill. Just the two meters of ground directly under their feet — spinning slowly, steadily, until every one of them was facing the wrong direction entirely, their backs exposed, their wall now behind them instead of in front.
One of them started to understand what had happened. *He's not fighting the wall. He turned the ground under us so our—*
The pillars came up from below. One for each of them, fast and precise, catching them at the spine and throwing them hard into their own stone barrier. The sound it made was final.
Silence settled over the hillside.
Then:
"I don't think I want the money back anymore."
One of the farmers, already mid-turn, voice thin and very reasonable.
"No — no, me neither."
"The boy's a *freak* — "
"Leave it, just *leave it* — "
The mob dissolved the way mobs do when the math stops working in their favor — rapidly, enthusiastically, every man suddenly remembering somewhere else he urgently needed to be. Within thirty seconds, all that remained were the groans of the earth benders and the sound of retreating footsteps fading over the ridge.
Son tipped his hat.
For just a moment, from beneath its brim, his eyes caught the light — bright, unnatural green, vivid as new growth after rain.
Then the shadow of the brim fell back over them.
"Just in a day's work." He dusted the chalk and grit off his shoulders, rolling one and then the other with casual satisfaction.
He looked back at the hillside — at the craters and the jutting stone and the churned earth that had, fifteen minutes ago, been a perfectly pleasant green pasture.
He looked at his bag. Still empty.
"Still need to eat." He scratched the back of his neck, already walking. "I wonder if the Earth Rumble matches are running today. Prize money ought to cover it."
He disappeared over the hill, hands in his pockets, hat low, the sound of distant groaning drifting behind him on the wind.