Chapter 122: Master Pakku's Onslaught
The ceasefire did not end with a shout, or a horn. It ended with the light.
The weak, grey dawn that crept over the shattered wall was not the pale blue of a polar morning. It was the color of old bruises and dirty smoke. And in that sickly light, the Fire Nation moved.
The first sign was a deep, rhythmic thumping that vibrated through the ice, felt in the bones before it was heard by the ears. Then, monstrous shapes lurched through the gaping hole Zuko had made. They were not ships. They were iron turtles on whirring, clanking treads, their metal hides scorched black. Fire Nation tanks. Their hatches were sealed, and from their snouts, glowing red orbs of concentrated fire began to pulse, building like angry hearts.
On the walls and in the streets, Water Tribe warriors braced themselves. The empowering light of the moon was gone, replaced by the harsh, revealing glare of a smoke-choked day. The advantage had shifted.
A tank's snout flashed. A sphere of fire the size of a man shot across the canal, not as a wave, but as a compact, screaming projectile. It struck an ice barricade. The ice did not melt. It exploded. Shards like glass knives scythed through the air, slicing into the warriors behind it. The screams were short, cut off by the next explosion.
"Do not let them advance!" Master Pakku's voice roared from a command post, raw with strain. "Sink them! The canals are your weapon!"
Waterbenders, their faces grim, thrust their arms downward. The ice of the main canal beneath two of the leading tanks fractured. But the tanks were heavy, their treads designed for mud and rock. They sank slowly, grinding, but their turrets kept turning. One fired its cannon straight down into the water as it submerged. The superheated water erupted in a geyser of steam, scalding the benders who had tried to drown it.
The Fire Nation Infantry poured in behind the tanks. No longer in disciplined phalanxes, they came in screaming waves, their armor clattering, their faces twisted with battle fury. They carried not just fire, but spears and swords and axes.
The battle dissolved into a thousand brutal, personal fights.
A Water Tribe warrior, clad in furs and bone armor, swung a heavy club at a firebender. The firebender ducked, pivoted, and drove a fist wrapped in flame into the warrior's side. The fur ignited, the smell of burning hair and flesh filling the air. The warrior fell, beating at the flames, and a soldier drove a spear through his chest.
Two waterbenders worked in tandem, one pulling a wave from a side channel to douse a squad of advancing soldiers, the other instantly freezing the water solid, trapping them up to their necks in ice. For a moment, it worked. Then a Fire Nation officer calmly walked down the line, placing a hand on each frozen helmet. The ice steamed, then melted in seconds, but the men inside did not move. Their heads had been cooked inside their own armor.
Sokka was no longer on the rooftops. He was in the street, his boomerang lost, his club slick with soot and other things he refused to think about. He fought beside a grizzled tribesman named Inatuk. They fought back-to-back, a pocket of desperate resistance.
A firebender lunged at Sokka, a short sword in one hand, fire coiling around the other. Sokka parried the sword strike with his club, the impact jarring his still-tender shoulder. He saw the firebender's other hand coming, the flame shaping into a blade. He had no time to dodge.
Inatuk's harpoon took the firebender in the throat from three feet away. The man gurgled, the fire dying in his hand as he clutched at the bone shaft. Sokka didn't have time to thank him. Another soldier was already there, and Inatuk was turning to meet him.
High above, on a broken section of the wall, Azula watched. She stood perfectly still, a statue of red and black amidst the chaos. Admiral Takeda stood beside her, his face grim.
"The tanks are effective, Princess, but the city is a maze of canals. We are paying for every yard."
"Good," Azula said, her voice devoid of emotion. "Let them pay. Let them spend their lives, their water, their hope. We have more to spend than they do. Press the advance on the central spire. That is where their command will be. Crush it."
On the ground, the brutality was intimate. A young waterbender, no older than Katara, tried to form a whip to trip a tank's tread. A soldier shot her in the back with a crossbow. She fell face-first into the slush.
An old tribesman, too old to bend, stood on a bridge with a fishing net. He threw it over a squad of soldiers, tangling them. For a precious few seconds, they were helpless. Warriors from the alleyways fell on them with knives and clubs. It was ugly, desperate, and effective.
The air was a soup of conflicting sensations. The crackling roar of fire. The hiss of water meeting flame, creating billowing clouds of blinding steam. The metallic shriek of tank treads on ice. The cacophony of screams, of rage, of pain, of final moments.
The beautiful, ordered canals of the Northern Water Tribe ran red and black. The ice, sculpted for generations, was pocked with scorch marks and slick with gore. The serene city had become a butcher's yard, and the Fire Nation's knives were very, very sharp.
The sun, hidden behind the pall of smoke, climbed higher. The waterbenders fought with grim determination, but their power was diminished. They were being pushed back, street by street, canal by canal, by the relentless, grinding machinery of war.
The full invasion had begun. And it was not a battle of elements. It was a meat grinder.
From his command post, a raised platform of ice overlooking the central junction of three main canals, Master Pakku watched the relentless advance. His sharp eyes missed nothing. The exploding ice barricades, the slow, grinding push of the tanks, the way his young benders were being cut down by soldiers who fought with a cruelty he had spent a lifetime pretending did not exist at this pole.
A cold, familiar fury, one he had buried under decades of discipline and tradition, began to thaw deep within him. It was the fury of a man watching his home, his legacy, his very culture be methodically fed into a furnace. It was the fury his nephew, Tsu, had accused him of not possessing.
His usual precise, elegant forms were for the training yard. For saving a foolish prince from pirates. For teaching a talented, frustrating girl.
This was not the training yard.
"Fall back to the second line!" Pakku's voice, amplified by a funnel of ice, boomed across the junction. "All non-benders, clear the central canal! Now!"
His students and warriors heard the shift in his tone. It was no longer instruction. It was the cracking sound of a glacier preparing to calve.
As they scrambled back, Pakku stepped to the very edge of the platform. He shed his ceremonial over-robe, letting it fall to the ice. He stood in his simple training tunic, an old master facing the modern engines of hell.
Three tanks clanked into the wide central canal junction, their treads churning the bloody slush. Their commanders spotted him, a single old man. Their turrets began to swivel, the air humming as their fire cannons charged.
Pakku did not wait.
He took a deep, grounding breath, his feet settling into the ice. Then he moved.
His opening stance was not a defensive circle. It was a wide, powerful sweep, as if he were gathering the very ocean to his chest. From the three intersecting canals, the water did not rise in tendrils or whips. It exploded upward in three massive, churning columns, as if the city itself were vomiting its lifeblood to defend its heart.
The volume of water was staggering. It was more than any ten lesser benders could have moved. The tanks, each weighing tons, rocked on their treads as the geysers hit them.
Pakku's hands clenched into fists. The three columns of water, each as thick as a tree trunk, did not fall. They coalesced, swirled, and shot forward like colossal, liquid spears.
The first spear struck a tank directly on its front armor with the force of a tidal impact. The iron did not melt. It crumpled. The cannon barrel was bent sideways like a soft reed. The tank was lifted, thrown backwards, and landed on its side with a deafening crash of shearing metal. It did not move again.
The second water spear was more precise. It did not strike the tank's body. It shot into the gap between the turret and the hull, a pressurized jet of liquid force. Inside, there was a horrific grinding scream of metal, and then steam—real steam, from boiled crew and shattered machinery, began to hiss from every hatch and viewport. The tank became a coffin.
The third tank fired. Its cannon loosed a blazing orb of fire directly at Pakku.
The old master did not flinch. With a sharp, downward chopping motion of his right hand, he split the oncoming fireball with a blade of compressed water so thin it was nearly invisible. The two halves of the blast dissipated harmlessly to either side of his platform. With his left hand still held aloft, he made a twisting, pulling gesture.
The water from the canal beneath the third tank did not rise. It simply vanished, dropping away as Pakku bent it all into his control. The tank lurched, its treads spinning in empty air for a second before it dropped five feet into the suddenly dry canal bed with a catastrophic crunch. Before its stunned crew could react, Pakku brought his left hand down in a fist.
The water he had pulled away returned. Not as a wave, but as a solid, plunging hammer. It fell from above, a thousand tons of water crashing down onto the trapped tank, driving it deeper into the canal bed, flattening it, silencing it forever.
For a moment, there was a stunned lull in the fighting around the junction. Fire Nation soldiers stared, aghast, at the wreckage of three war machines taken down by one man in less than a minute.
Pakku did not pause to admire his work. The cold fury was fully awake now. He saw soldiers, not just tanks. He turned his gaze on the infantry squad that had been advancing behind the tanks.
He shifted his stance, his movements becoming fluid, relentless, and utterly ruthless. He was no longer performing the forms of a master. He was performing the function of a force of nature.
He swept his arms in a wide arc. A wall of water, twenty feet high and razor-thin at its crest, rose from the canal and swept down the street. It did not push the soldiers back. It hit them like a moving cliff. Men in heavy armor were lifted and smashed into the ice walls of buildings. The sound of breaking bones was a sickening percussion under the roar of the water.
A firebender officer tried to rally his men, launching a sustained jet of flame at Pakku. The master flicked a wrist. A tendril of water shot from the main wave, wrapped around the officer's ankle, and yanked him off his feet. He was dragged, screaming, into the depths of the canal and did not surface.
Pakku advanced. He was not a man walking on ice. He was the epicenter of a localized monsoon. Water orbited him in a deadly whirlpool, lashing out in whip-cracks that could slice through leather and break limbs, in crushing waves that pinned soldiers against stone, in precise, freezing jabs that sealed mouths and nostrils in an instant of fatal ice.
This was not the defensive, yielding water of his teachings. This was the water that carved canyons. The water that sank fleets. The water that, when focused by a will of iron and a heart filled with cold rage, was the most brutal element on earth.
He was buying time. He was buying space. He was showing the Fire Nation that the Northern Water Tribe was not just ice. It was the relentless, drowning depth. And for the first time in a hundred years, its depth had a face, and it was the face of an old, furious master who had finally stopped teaching and started killing.