Chapter 82

This girl was not an ordinary firebender.

If the fancy armour or the pale blue flames hadn't clued him in, it was the sheer precision and skill of her attacks.

Aang had gotten a lot of practice at avoiding fireballs recently, yet even so he was struggling to stay one step ahead of the utter onslaught the girl was unleashing at him. It didn't help that the metal prison they were fighting in didn't give him the space to manoeuvre in ways that were needed to use his full potential, and yet he couldn't leave Bumi trapped here.

He ducked as another slash of blue fire came whizzing towards his head. The flames passed over him so closely that if he'd had any hair on his head, it would have set alight. A quick wind-enhanced jump to the side saved him from the fireball that followed after it, giving him temporary cover behind Bumi's metal coffin.

"Aang! You must leave!" Bumi warned him urgently. "Did your friend not give you my message? I am not the one who-"

"This isn't about finding a teacher!" Aang snapped. "This is about saving my friend! The only one I have left from a hundred years ago! The girl in charge here is dangerous!"

"I'm the girl in charge around here, that you very much."

Twin snakes of blue fire shot around either side of the coffin, twisting in mid-air to wrap around it. Aang leapt up, summoning wind to enhance his height, and shot a glance back at his attacker. For the first time since the fight started she didn't look smug, and her voice just then had held a sharp hint of irritation.

"Who are you anyway?" Aang asked.

The girl's arrogant smirk returned. "I am Azula, princess and heir to the throne of the Fire Nation." She announced proudly. "I believe you've already met my dear brother Zuko."

Zuko had a sister?! One who was apparently just as crazily obsessed with capturing him. He could see hints of the family resemblance now that he knew to look for it, but Azula gave off a totally different vibe to her brother. Zuko had been angry, but even at his worst he'd never seemed to enjoy violence. The way Azula had been acting during this fight suggested that wasn't a trait the whole family shared.

"Are you working for Tanya?" He hadn't known that Tanya had connections to the Fire Nation royal family, other than that she had some sort of history with Zuko. Come to think of it, he didn't really know much about Tanya at all.

Azula's left eyebrow gave a sharp, violent twitch. "I do not work for her!" She all but growled, lightning flashing dangerously in her glare. "She works for me!"

Aang's face scrunched up in confusion. "But… wasn't she the one bossing the soldiers around? It sure looks like she's in charge."

"Yes!" Azula hissed through grit teeth. "But I am next in line to the throne! The military serves the Fire Lord, and since I will be the next Fire Lord, that means Tanya serves me!"

Aang frowned. "Then why aren't you the one bossing everyone around?"

"I'm delegating! It's a perfectly normal thing for leaders to do!" Azula snapped.

Aang looked at her sceptically.

"Just shut up and burn already!"

For a moment Azula's face was twisted up in an expression of angst, and in that second Aang could finally see the resemblance between her and Zuko. Then another wave of blue fire came rushing towards him, and he narrowly swerved out of the way in time to avoid it.

"Come on Aang, think!" He muttered to himself. He really didn't want to fight this girl, but he couldn't abandon Bumi, which was problematic considering that he was trapped in a metal box. He needed to find a way to get the box open, or move it somehow. But how could he move something as big as that while someone was spitting fire at him?

Aang began to run away from Azula, enhancing his speed with a gust of wind. The smirk settled back on Azula's face as she watched him flee. "What's wrong Avatar? Scared?" She called. "Running away won't do you any good here."

It wasn't long before Aang reached the walls of the cell, but rather than stop, Aang placed his feet against the metal and ran up it, using the wind to push him upwards so that he appeared to be running along the side of the wall. Faster and faster he ran, looping around the room and building up speed with his wind sprint.

Azula caught on as to what he was trying to do as the air in the room began to swirl in the direction he was running, creating the beginnings of a vortex.

Carefully she took aim, adjusting her footwork ever so slightly to account for the speed Aang was moving at and the growing strength of the wind, and fired two precise bolts of blue fire. The bolts sailed through the air, riding the wind currents at the perfect angle so that their flight path would bring them to hit Aang right between his shoulder blades.

Yet it was at that moment that Aang reached out with both hands, seeming to almost grasp the violently swirling winds between his fingers, and changed direction. The firebolts shot narrowly past his shoulder as he rushed back towards the centre of the room where Bumi's metal coffin stood, seeming to push the vortex inwards on itself and condense it down into a smaller bubble.

"Umm…- Aang?" Bumi asked nervously as the strength of the condensing wind began to rock his coffin. "What are you doing?"

But Aang did not reply. His full attention was focused on pulling off the technique that he was improvising on the spot. His muscles strained with exertion as he compressed the gale-force winds into a smaller and smaller ball, similar in nature to his air scooter but on a bigger, more powerful scale.

Bumi let out a sound somewhere between a startled yelp and a whoop of joy as his coffin was lifted off the floor by the force of the winds, rising up into the air and leaning backwards until he was facing up at the ceiling.

As the technique finally came together Aang jumped up and perched on the flat surface of Bumi's coffin as if it was one of the surfboards he'd learned how to use at the North Pole. Bumi's coffin now levitated in the air, balancing precariously on top of an extra large air scooter.

Azula eyed the technique critically, torn between being impressed by its power or derisive of its goofiness. Tanya was right; The Avatar's ability to pull unusual techniques out of thin air was not to be underestimated.

Suddenly Aang threw his hands backwards, blasting out streams of wind that pushed the air scooter, and the coffin that balanced atop it, towards her. Azula twirled nimbly out of the way as the coffin nearly rammed into her and settled into a defensive stance, prepared for The Avatar to turn around and try to ram her again, yet to her annoyance he ignored her: instead riding the coffin out through the door and down along the hallway.

"For all his power, The Avatar is surprisingly cowardly." An echo of Tanya's voice spoke in her mind; a memory of a time she'd given a report on The Avatar's combat prowess.

"In all his encounters with myself, Zhao or Zuko, his main strategy was always to extract whatever valuable assets he could and then use his superior mobility to flee. The only times when he's stayed to fight was when we had something he couldn't afford to leave behind, but the moment we lost that bait he would turn and run immediately."

Azula frowned, cursing herself for not having expected this. She had fought opponents who'd given up and tried to flee from her many times, but never anyone who incorporated techniques that allowed them to switch between attacking and retreating at a moment's notice into their very style. No wonder such a craven race had folded so easily when the Fire Nation invaded.

Fire erupted from Azula's feet as she used it to propel herself along the ground like an ice-skater, racing off in pursuit of The Avatar. If he thought he could evade her whilst lugging that metal box around, he was in for a rude awakening.

...

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