Focused Fire (ATLA)

“What’s his crimes?” Kilin asked as she stared at the gagged, wide-eyed man bound to a stake.

Xing glanced to his side where a well-dressed young man a few years older than himself stood. The surprisingly young governor of Zilang didn’t miss a beat. “The condemned,” he said with a sour face, “is convicted of multiple counts of murder.”

“Huh. I thought it was partisan terrorism?” Xing asked.

The governor shook his head. “The terrorism charge would unfairly involve his village, who had been highly cooperative in turning in this scum to us in the first place. Plus Unc- Overseer Dae also said that declaring this scum a terrorist would be legitimizing him, and might give other aspiring resistance fighters the wrong ideas.”

Kilin didn’t appreciate the finer workings of all those words, but she did note the disgust and hate in the governor’s eyes everytime it was directed at the criminal.

“Who’d he kill?” she asked out of curiosity, and the official snarled rather viciously. 

“Two civilian engineers, one foreman, and fourteen of his own fellow villagers, of which four of them are children.”

A sudden void dropped in the elder waterbender’s guts at hearing that children were involved.

The governor spat on the ground as he glared daggers at the bound criminal. “The bastard covered a few barrels of blasting jelly with his earthbending, and then sent the booby-trapped boulder rolling down at the newly built creche. The foreman and engineers tried to stop it with their own earthbending, but the barrels went off and turned all the rocks and dirt into lethal projectiles. The villagers sent a runner to one of our patrols, who quickly hunted him down and dragged him here.”

It was confusing as it was horrifying to hear that someone could do that to their own friends and neighbors. Kilin stared at the gagged man, and met a gaze that held only contempt.

“You said something about partisan terrorism?” she asked, remembering the other more obscure charge.

“Yeah, bastard had to be gagged because he kept screaming profanities at anyone in any form of Fire Nation uniform, and spouting nonsense about punishing traitors and…’collaborating whores to the Fire Nation’ to everyone else.” The governor spat again. “Fucking coward doesn’t have the balls to go after things that can fight back. According to the report, he was too busy trying to flee rather than put up a fight against the squad that captured him.”

Kilin’s gaze hardened and turned deadly cold on the man at the stake. The young man was right, this…filth was nothing but a spineless coward with delusions of righteousness. “I’m surprised he’s still alive,” she remarked. Every second he drew breath was more air he wasted and tainted with his existence.

“Eh, it’s only been a week,” Xing said. “Supposedly the local judges were debating on how to execute him?”

The governor nodded grimly. “More or less. Some magistrates are arguing that he should be executed in the village for their closure, but since the place is still being rebuilt others have suggested to just get it over with. Then there’s the debate on whether to make it quick or slow.”

Xing grinned. “My thanks, Governor Hanh, for loaning him to us. I’ll do my best to keep him alive for his inevitable execution.”

“Eh, if he ends up dying, just make sure he suffers.”

The governor bowed (surprisingly offering one to Kilin as well) and then left, leaving Kilin with Xing and his soldiers in one of the regiment’s smaller training grounds. 

“Now then, elder, with your help, hopefully this sterling example of human monstrosity will get to live through everything I have planned.”

The waterbender found herself smirking thinly, and her voice thick with malice. “I’ll make sure he won’t even pass out,” Kilin promised.

She walked with Xing towards the bound prisoner, and kept a hand on the boy’s shoulders to track his chi paths as he centered himself. If the whispers were right, someone or something had purposely changed the boy, and for the better. He still didn’t have a normal person’s chi network, but the holes in his chi paths had been…tidied up, as best as Kilin could describe it. 

While before they might be akin to severed limbs that were left open, now they felt more like robust Earth Kingdom stone pipes with some sort of gate or valve to it.

The prisoner’s head shifted back and forth as he tried to speak through the cloth gag, but both waterbender and unusual firebender ignored him. Xing drew in a breath, and Kilin felt chi that was not his flow in and circulate through his body. To her waterbender senses, it felt like opening the floodgates to let the irrigation ditches be flooded. It was a potent, heady rush that even seeped into her through her meager contact with Xing.

Xing reached out and pinched the madman’s ear, and the chi began to flow away from it. Ignoring the muffled groans of growing pain, the healer focused on bringing her hand down the boy’s back, tracing his many severed chi paths and noting the prodigious torrent of energy flowing out of Xing. The paths were no longer buckling and deteriorating, and his body was not losing heat as rapidly as it used to.

There was barely any change in his body’s heat at all, come to think of it. Kilin noted no cold sweat or shivering from the boy, and a quick tap on his neck confirmed that Xing was about as healthy as he could be. The healer finally looked over to the prisoner, and was surprised to find him shivering instead. His eyes were fluttering, and he was slumped over with only his bindings to keep him up.

“What are you doing?” Kilin muttered in surprise, and the flow of chi through Xing stopped as he glanced over to her. There was a loud crack as he snapped off the man’s now-frozen earlobe and showed it to her. The thing had turned blackened, and Xing gave a casual flick with the other hand to produce a solid pinging sound. A glance back at the victim saw the rest of his ear in an equal state of frostbite, with not so much as a droplet of blood seeping through the jagged wound.

“It seems that I’m able to make use of my previous freezing issue.”

That was…new. Terrifyingly new. Xing could drain heat?

“Did you take it from him or the air?” Kilin asked with sudden urgency.

The boy frowned. “The air. I tried to draw it from him, but…it was taking too much effort.”

The aged waterbender hummed at that. So it was likely this was a result of drawing chi, not unlike what he was doing before, except that the side effects had changed?

“Can you do it at range?”

Xing shook his head. “I haven’t tried. It feels like I can barely control it this way.”

Kilin nodded and proceeded to back away. “Well, that’s what I’m here for. I’ll be at a safe distance.”

The young soldier waited until she and his bodyguards were right by the entrance before he took an unusual open stance several paces away from the bound convict. Kilin could see elements of firebending in his short movements, but the movements were too jerky and clumsy. Xing’s lack of proper bending experience was clearly showing now, as he seemed to struggle in channeling the energy.

There was a moment where he seemed to get into a smoother flow, and Kilin began to notice the ground around Xing’s feet turning paler as it dried out. He finally punched out with two open palms pressed together at the base, but nothing came out. 

Nothing that could be seen, anyway.

The prisoner gave a muffled scream as something washed over him and his exposed skin turned pale. His attire became stiff as if the linen suddenly turned into paper boards. The wooden stake he was tied to creaked and glistened from the sudden accumulation of rime ice on its surface. A thin fog wafted down from both man and stake that slowly faded as the ambient heat returned to warm both up.

In contrast, steam was visibly rising from Xing. He wasn’t sweating, but the air around him was distorted with a heat haze that quickly dissipated. The ground around his feet had dried to the point that they cracked.

As she stared in stunned silence, the boy slid back into the start of the same stance and began to move again. The prisoner noticed and shook his head desperately, his pleas still incomprehensible through the cloth gag. Xing’s hand shot out again, and this time the criminal’s scream was much more tortured.

His face flushed red, his once stiff clothing turned soft again and dripped with melted moisture. The stake creaked as it sweated water. And this time it was Xing’s back that was covered in rime, and the cracked ground by his feet lightly dusted with falling ice.

“Heat…heat bending?” one of the bodyguards muttered in silent awe.

Kilin couldn’t find anything to disprove that claim, and stared harder at Xing. He didn’t look any worse for wear, especially when compared to his usual bouts of white fire. Forcing herself to return to her responsibilities, the waterbender cleared her throat

“How’s your firebending?”

Xing looked over to her with a grin. “Better than it ever was.” His hand lashed out, and a stream of white fire roared just inches past the bound man’s head.

“No cold anymore?”

“Not even a hint of a shiver,” Xing proudly announced.

Whoever - or more likely whatever - that did this must have been really talented. To not only undo the damage on Xing’s chi pathways, but improve it so that he could turn the weakness into a new asset?

If it wasn’t clear that the spirits favored the boy, this new feat should confirm it for the doubters.

Still, best not to let it all get to his head; Can’t have the boy be too smug that he becomes careless. “It’s all well and good, but your form needs working.”

Xing slumped a bit and nodded. “Yeah. I’m figuring it out as I go. Normal firebending styles aren’t good for it, I’ve tried.”

Kilin nodded in understanding. It was the same with waterbending water whips and ice spikes. Different forms were better suited to channel chi into different purposes. Healing utilized a different level of manipulation and control as well. Xing being so used to blasting his white fire was putting him at a slight disadvantage now since he had no formal bending to use as a foundation.

“Well, you’ll have to take it slower and have a feel of how the chi is moving.” She walked over with a nod towards the terrified captive. “Let me see how he’s doing and then we can figure out how good’s your control. Where’d you put his ear?”

Fortunately, Xing had a talent for heatbending which proved more controllable and malleable than his white fire. With occasional tips from the bodyguards in relation to the stances, they spent the day establishing the initial understanding of this new art, and Kilin felt her mind race as she took in the staggering implications of heatbending.

Ice attacks against the boy would be useless. She tried the forms that she knew, and all the frozen spikes and hailstorm did was douse Xing in lukewarm water at best. At worst, Kilin watched the water flash into steam. On the other end of it, he could drain out all the heat from an area and literally freeze limbs off.

With Xing’s creativity and ruthlessness, Kilin could already imagine the bloody wake that would follow once he utilized it. 

Governor Hanh returned in the evening to retrieve a ruined corpse. Xing was good, but not that good. It was a mistake to have let the boy try and freeze the man’s tongue out; the cold air had seeped all the way down to his lungs and asphyxiated him. After that, there was no point in trying to heal up the rest of his frost- and burn- related wounds.