My shout seemed to have momentarily halted all ongoing battles. The clang of steel, the whistle of arrows, the rumble of the earth, and the furious roar of flames ceased to sound. Only the rain drumming on the ground could be heard.
The fighting resumed, however. Within seconds, it returned to the level at which I had interrupted it. But something had changed. In the air, one could feel the triumphant malice of the Ba Sing Se defenders and the uncertainty of the Fire Nation soldiers.
I placed Lu Ten's arm over my shoulder, hugged him around the waist, and used dense flame to slice off the earth spike. I heard footsteps. The clatter of boots reassured me. It was a Fire Nation soldier. Soon, a Firebender supported Lu Ten from the other side, helping me carry him to the edge of the wall, to the break in the fortification.
Another piece of good news was that this Firebender had a rope, which we used to carefully lower Lu Ten down, where several soldiers caught him and carried him toward our camp.
I nodded my thanks to the bender, climbed down from the fortification, and ran after the soldiers. What I saw was unsettling. As Prince Lu Ten was carried, blood streamed from his wound. Even in the poor light, Lu Ten's unhealthy complexion was noticeable. To avoid disturbing the wound too much, they carried the Prince to the camp as quickly as they could given his condition.
Upon seeing the spike sticking out of the Prince's chest, the healers initially didn't know how to help him. They simply watched in shock. This ended when the head healer arrived, who quickly dispersed his less experienced colleagues and ordered the Prince to be taken to his tent. In the light of numerous candles, Lu Ten looked even more horrific. Our army's armor is typically red and black. Lu Ten's, however, was a brownish color.
The sounds of an approaching battle rhino were heard. Soon, General Iroh burst into the healer's tent. His face was fraught with anxiety and distress. Judging by the small crumbs of earth in his beard and the dents in his armor, one could surmise that the news of Lu Ten's injury reached him during the battle.
"How is he?" General Iroh immediately asked the healer.
The healer, who had been gently examining the side-lying Lu Ten with an extremely grim expression, exhaled and hung his head.
"General Iroh, please accept my condolences… Prince Lu Ten died before he could even be brought to me. He could not be saved. His aorta was ruptured. The blood flowed out almost instantly."
I knew this, but I had hoped for a miracle. Magic, perhaps. Unfortunately, no miracle occurred.
Iroh approached Lu Ten with a wooden gait and embraced him, pain frozen on his face. Soon, the General began to sob silently.
I felt something on my cheek. A moment later, I realized it was a tear. I wiped it away with a dirty sleeve. I hate being on good terms with people. It's one of the reasons for my slight madness. After all, I have seen people I felt a slight fondness for, or even deeply attached to, die over a thousand times now. Sometimes very horribly and painfully. It's enough to drive anyone mad. No single personality can endure this without consequences.
A person can, of course, simply become callous, but sometimes the shell he built himself can crack, and then completely shatter. Again, it is because of people. From time to time, one meets those who can heal souls just by their presence. But after they die, the pain returns… It returns with a vengeance.
"General Iroh, death is not the end," I decided to share my experience with him. "Do not let Lu Ten's sacrifice be in vain, General…"
Iroh silently gazed at his son's face for a few seconds, then closed his eyes with a trembling hand and exhaled a small stream of flame from his nose. Rage was probably replacing the pain of losing his son now. Familiar. It happened to me dozens of times.
The General released his son and stood in a wide stance, throwing his head back, clenching his fists until they cracked.
"Aaaa!" The scream of pain was accompanied by a powerful jet of flame straight from the General's mouth. The fire's intensity was so strong that it instantly shredded the tent, and the healer, who was closest to the General, had to back away to avoid getting burned.
The flame diminished, and then disappeared entirely. No, it retreated somewhere deep inside Iroh. His eyes glowed with an otherworldly, frightening fire, even to my sight. Iroh looked in the direction of Ba Sing Se and took his first confident step…
But General Iroh's desire for vengeance, to vent even a drop of the pain from losing his only son, was not meant to be fulfilled. A soldier who hadn't participated in the attack on Ba Sing Se that night tried to shout to him from a distance.
"General! General… My General!" Iroh looked angrily at the soldier, who finally reached him. The fire warrior failed to notice his commander's foul mood. Gasping for air, he tried to relay something to Iroh. Something very important, apparently. "General… General… News from the front! General Jeong Jeong and several loyal men have deserted… We found out too late, when the soldiers the General sent home, who should have been on the front line now, appeared right near the walls of our Capital…"
But General Jeong Jeong's soldiers should have been somewhere else… If memory serves, they had a very important role for us besieging Ba Sing Se: protecting General Iroh's rear flank. General Iroh's eyebrows shot up. He, like me, understood what the soldier's next words would be.
"Reconnaissance reports that a large unit of Earth Kingdom soldiers, sent to Ba Sing Se from Omashu, will hit us in the back in an hour!"
This meant only one thing: we would be squeezed from all sides. A quick capture of Ba Sing Se would be impossible. The resistance, as always, was very strong. Also, that city has another ring of walls, behind which the nobility live, including the Earth King. General Iroh looked at his dead son, then shifted his gaze to Ba Sing Se and… sighed heavily.
"Sound… the retreat," he said barely audibly, hanging his head.
For a few seconds, none of the healers or soldiers present near General Iroh dared to move. They simply couldn't believe what they heard. They stood there with their mouths open. Only after I myself rushed toward the place where the signaling instruments, whose sound was supposed to alert the army to a particular order, were located, did people start moving.
Several men rushed after me. Not in vain. Because they wouldn't have believed the command to signal a retreat from me alone. But the nervous crowd that ran after me forced the commander responsible for the signals to act.
The sound from the enormous horn was almost deafening at close range. While two men took turns blowing the horn, several others sent streams of flame into the sky. It was indeed the signal for retreat.
The soldiers of General Iroh soon began fighting their way back to our current base, located precisely between the First and Second Walls. Surprise was on their faces. The battle hadn't lasted an hour, and they had received the order to retreat. But what surprised the soldiers arriving at our camp wasn't this, but the sight of the other group, which had remained in the camp, hastily breaking down the site and preparing the baggage trains, filling them with wounded men instead of letting the healers calmly examine and treat them in the tents.
About half an hour after the signal was given, the army was ready to move out. They were only waiting for General Iroh's command, which he soon gave.
While the army hastily gathered, Iroh conducted a funeral for his son with a heavy heart. Lu Ten's team was also present. One Fire Nation soldier was left to lie beneath a lonely tree somewhere between the First and Second Walls of Ba Sing Se…
We were bogged down in a battle even fiercer than the fight on the walls of Ba Sing Se. The enemy army, at a glance, was fully twice our size. At one point, it seemed to me that they had fielded the entire population of the Earth Kingdom against General Iroh's forces.
The enemy also had an advantage: although their soldiers had been marching toward us all night, they hadn't been involved in an exhausting battle until this moment. They were fresher than us, more collected, and motivated. They weren't the ones who had recently had to hastily retreat and surrender positions that had been won with sweat, blood, and the lives of comrades.
Earthbending was more convenient in terms of versatility than Firebending. When we clashed head-on, the enemy army quickly erected fortifications near themselves to protect against our destructive flame. Part of Iroh's troops, however, died because they simply had nowhere to hide from the enemy's attack, which seemed to come from all directions. Fortunately, General Iroh quickly thought to use the tanks as shields for his soldiers.
It was true that coordinated Earthbenders could sometimes literally bury a tank, leaving the Fire Nation soldiers without cover. But the defenses erected by the Earthbenders also did not last long. The high command of our army saved the rank-and-file fighters using all their skills. Including Lightning, which easily destroyed any obstacles in its path.
The distinguishing feature of this battle, perhaps, was that it was fought on the move. The march was not interrupted. Iroh did not command his army to halt. Stopping meant certain death for us at this point. The enemy's reinforcements could simply surround and crush us if we accepted a full-scale fight.
Again, they significantly outnumbered us. During constant movement, no matter how the enemy tried to encircle us, they failed. Furthermore, during our hasty retreat, scouts noticed strange activity on the walls of Ba Sing Se. The gates opened, and the city's army poured out. They could catch up to us and hit our rear. This was another reason why Iroh ordered the march to continue no matter what. That was the only chance for anyone to survive…
————
Read ahead of schedule here → patreon(.)com/Bluuuxx [remove the parentheses]