96 AG
The rhythm of the waves against the hull was steady, low and even, barely felt beneath the deck, yet present enough to keep time with the company's movements. Lieutenant Aiku stood by the forward railing of the top deck, his posture relaxed, though his eyes quietly tracking the flow of the drills taking place behind him.
He didn't need to face the exercise to follow its progression. The rise of controlled fire, the subtle shifts in breath, and the placement of each step gave him everything he needed to gauge its course.
Aiku had been one of the Lieutenants when their last captain was still alive. He was content to keep his rank after the promotions and demotions that the new captain imposed. Since taking over the young girl had forged an elite unit of trained and experienced soldiers, where leadership had to be won on merit alone. She was one of the few officers in the army he knew who would never promote someone that wasn't worthy of it.
Aiku had served long enough to know that most companies rarely had such a thing. Elite units were uncommon too, some followed orders well enough, others fought hard when pressed, but few developed the kind of cohesion that turned every soldier into a thinking part of a larger machine. As the war continued through the years, less trained units were thrown to the front lines in hopes of keeping the tides to the Fire Nation's favor.
That kind of structure usually arose from years of consistent leadership, steady campaigns, and bitter experience. Captain Lin had imposed it in less time that he thought was humanly possible, driving those changes through constant refinement, relentless exercise, and a total unwillingness to accept even minor inefficiencies. She was truly an inspiring officer, one with the strength to back her claims.
He allowed himself a slow breath as he finally turned to observe the fire game in progress. The captain had introduced it only a few days earlier as a form of agility conditioning, though no one had ever gotten a clear answer about which sport it was supposedly based on.
Aiku suspected it didn't matter, since the concept was simple enough. One soldier stood in the center of a loose circle, while the others passed a small, stable fireball between themselves. The goal was to strike the center player without ever aiming directly at them, forcing misdirection, anticipation, and control.
The person in the center earned points for each successful dodge. Whoever landed a hit switched roles, and if anyone passed the flame too hard to be caught, they were eliminated. The result was a constant interplay between coordination and restraint, prediction and deception. Keeping the flame alive with fire control also added a level of concentration that required keen attention.
At present, the four platoon sergeants and five of the company's designated specialists were locked in a match against their captain; it was not going well for them. Lin remained in the center, alert and focused, her body poised with a precision that made her resemble a predator sizing up its prey.
Her eyes tracked her opponents every move and she had dodged every pass so far. Every time the flame came close, she shifted with the smallest possible movement. Sometimes pivoting on a heel, sometimes adjusting the arc of her spine or twisting slightly at the hip, wasting no motion at all. The fireball never touched her, not once.
One of the sergeants attempted a harder throw to create an opening, curving the flame wide before angling it back toward a specialist across the circle. The idea, though clever, demanded perfect execution; without the receiver knowing what to expect, the catch failed, and the flame slipped past the receiver's grip.
Another player was eliminated. The others readjusted quickly, never breaking the circle. No one questioned or complained the failure. A few groaned, realizing they couldn't yet win against the captain, but they kept playing all the same.
Aiku folded his arms behind his back and watched for a few more rotations. He had come to understand that Lin never introduced drills like these for entertainment or to break tension, but it was helping with morale all the same, a less stressful way of training her men.
She was shaping bodies, sharpening their reaction speeds, and refining their decision-making under movement, all without making it feel like it was training at all. Every action carried a teaching purpose. Even the posture each player adopted while waiting for the flame held implications.
Too stiff, and they were slow to pass. Too loose, and their throws lacked control. The central target, meanwhile, had to read peripheral movement and recognize patterns before they emerged.
Even after twelve rounds without being hit, there was no pride, or smugness in Lin´s posture. She dodged without comment and returned to stillness without acknowledgment. She wasn't demonstrating anything to prove a point; She was simply participating in a structure she had imposed, maintaining its integrity by committing to it fully.
It reminded him faintly of a master swordsman he had observed long before the war expanded beyond the northern ridgelines. His exercises were simple and he would often say comment to other teachers: If you want them to move like you, then let them see you move.
At the time, Aiku had thought it an overstatement. Now, watching Lin shift her weight to avoid another flicker of firelight with less motion than it took most soldiers to blink, he reconsidered. The company had grown stronger, more efficient, and less volatile under her command.
Part of that was because her presence made them unwilling to disappoint her, even when she spoke no words. She simply made effort seem logical, without demanding anything. There was this strange allure in trying to do right by her.
Aiku turned his gaze toward the southern horizon, where the thin line of morning light began to separate the sky from the distant curve of the sea. Their course held steady. The naval officers had reported no irregularities, and they were scheduled to reach a coal-loading station near a mining village by nightfall.
If all went well, the stop would last less than a day.
----0000----
The ship creaked faintly as it shifted across the waves, the sound of wood flexing under weight layered beneath the distant rhythm of water slapping against the hull. Lin sat cross-legged on the floor of her cabin, arms resting loosely on her knees, back pressed against the exposed support beam, eyes fixed on nothing in particular.
The candlelight wavered slightly in the stale air of the enclosed room, casting long shadows across the steel seams along her prosthetic forearms and the dark lacquered wall behind her. She had not spoken since the door closed; the silence was peaceful yet she felt conflicted.
She had just been informed of updates regarding the war, and the plans for her company once they can secure a foothold on the southern peninsula of the continent. Suffice to say, they were garbage and strategic command had no clue what they were doing. No wonder the war kept going even after almost a hundred years.
Her lips parted slowly, her voice low and tight as though forcing its way past a layer of restraint held too long.
"This world is so backwards it makes my head ache." she muttered, each word clipped by fatigue more than anger, although both were clearly present. "We are being shipped across the world for a war that hasn't stopped for almost a century as if it were the next great thing. Then they expect us to just throw ourselves into the enemies walls and win somehow."
She was tired of coming up with strategies herself that would give them victory.
"Seriously what is wrong with this nation. They think just because they throw fire from their hands, that alone is supposed to work. Almost all firebenders throw fire at the same speed like mindless brutes. Just raw bending, flung in arcs, with no thought behind it whatsoever."
She stood abruptly, pacing from one side of the room to the other, the reinforced floor groaning faintly beneath the weight of her metal steps. Her arms flexed at the elbows, heat venting softly from the seams of her shoulders where the plating had begun to warm.
She knew she shouldn't have let herself get this agitated, but the spiral had begun hours ago, and her mood had only worsened with each passing thought.
"There are no inventive solutions. With the amount of energy each firebender possesses, we could have made better weapons. I miss rifles; I miss artillery. There are almost no siege weapons! We could have something that could combine three or four firebenders to produce more destruction. All research is focus in the next wonder of transportation but not on the next weapon each soldier can use. Nothing but sabers, spears, arrows and bending. The latter is treated as if it were some divine solution to every military problem as if it were even remotely efficient. They fight like it's still the age of castles."
Her voice had risen, not quite a shout, but far louder than usual. The candles around the perimeter of the cabin flickered in response, the flames reacting unconsciously to the heat spike in the room.
She stopped near her desk and leaned over it, both palms planted on the surface as her breath deepened, not ragged, but forceful and restrained by willpower alone. Her knuckles tightened, and the faint glow beneath the surface of her arms brightened.
"And coal." she hissed, the word thick with disdain, "They run ships off coal. Not only it's highly inefficient, it's like marching into battle with a bomb in our backs. Steam engines… against people who could control the water inside of them… ugh, we are lucky the Water tribes are useless."
She closed her eyes, forcing a long, controlled exhale through her nose. The room did not cool, but her posture began to return to composure. The flames steadied slowly, no longer dancing in their holders with each fluctuation of her frustration. Her jaw tightened as she rolled her shoulders back and straightened fully.
"I miss you, brother." she said quietly, the words slipping past her defenses in a tone that carried more fatigue than sadness. "You'd be laughing yourself breathless in a place like this."
The admission surprised her even as she said it, but the room offered no judgment. She sat back down, hands pressed together in her lap, staring at the line of candlelight cast across the metal plate of her right thigh.
It was still strange to remember how quiet everything could become when there were no circuits to monitor, no alerts pinging in the background, no soft hum of filtered ventilation through alloy ducts. The world she had been forced into was silent in many ways, as slow and old as it was.
Her breathing slowed gradually as she tried to center herself, finding the patterns that had once grounded her through hours of internal recalibration. She no longer relied on external meditative forms; those had been meaningless even in her previous life, but she had refined something similar, a stillness made of repetition and balance, a mental posture.
Her fingers tapped lightly against the edge of her thigh, a quiet rhythm repeating with perfect spacing as she focused on silencing the last of her spiraling thoughts. Of course, that was precisely the moment the knock came.
Three sharp taps, spaced evenly, a code that meant they were not urgent news, implemented by her to offer officers the freedom to accept the interruption or not. But the timing broke her internal calm. Her brow tensed, her fingers taps halted, and the room's temperature rose perceptibly in an instant.
She stood slowly, letting the silence thicken behind her steps as she reached the door, opening it with the controlled lethality of someone prepared to deliver a very brief conversation. The officer standing on the other side, a young logistics aide, froze mid-sentence as soon as he met her eyes. Any words he had prepared withered before they reached his mouth.
"C-Captain." he stammered, posture snapping upright so quickly it nearly made him stumble, "we're… we're approaching the mining village. Orders said to, ah, to notify you once we were within sight of the coastline."
Lin said nothing. He offered a strangled bow, stepped backward with a visible tremor in his shoulders, nearly colliding into the wall as he tried to retreat without breaking into a run. She shut the door behind him with a low click, the gesture calm, controlled, and expressionless.
She returned to her place in the room, adjusted a candle that had burned slightly unevenly from the earlier spike, and muttered under her breath with no audience to hear her.
"Damn this world."
There was no anger in the words, only resignation. The moment passed, and with it the room cooled. Her posture reset to its usual precision, and the next hour returned to the silence she preferred.
----0000----
The first signs that something was wrong appeared as soon as the ship anchored just offshore from the designated stop point. Zhou stood near the bow, reviewing the approach markers with a midship officer, and noticed the conspicuous absence of any visible supply party waiting on the beach.
No signal flags, no coal runners, not even the usual cart trails etched into the sand. A garrison depot this size, tied to a mining village, should have shown signs of recent activity, yet the shoreline looked abandoned, as if the people who were supposed to receive them had either forgotten or simply never been informed that they were coming.
By the time the small boat team rowed them ashore, the details only worsened. The village was intact and showed no signs of recent attack, but the atmosphere felt brittle and thin. Smoke rose from a few scattered chimneys, but many houses showed signs of disuse. Their clotheslines untied, their tools left rusting near front steps, and their windows dark even in daylight.
The villagers who did appear carried themselves with a blend of suspicion and weariness, glancing at the Red Company insignias with an almost visible calculation, as if weighing how much to reveal before it could be held against them.
Zhou disembarked with a group of non-commissioned officers and a pair of supply handlers. They were met not by the local garrison commander, as protocol dictated, but by a junior infantry corporal who introduced himself quickly, offered no salute, and led them to a cluttered storehouse, where the few remaining coal sacks had been piled into one corner like an afterthought.
When Zhou pressed for inventory records, the corporal fumbled through a half-burned logbook, gesturing vaguely toward the western ridge where the mines lay.
"The shipment's gone." the corporal finally admitted, his voice barely above a mutter. "Loaded and sent eastward to a shipping rig last week. Took most of the able workers, too. Anyone who could earth-bend was sent as forced labor."
Zhou processed the information in silence, turning it over in his mind as if inspecting the seams of a fractured structure. The mining village had been listed on their itinerary as a coal resupply point, a confirmed source of energy to fuel the final leg of the naval journey toward Chin Village.
The timing had been calculated down to the day. That the fuel had been relocated without updating the shipment schedule, and without sufficient reserves in place, meant someone, somewhere, had made a decision without regard for downstream consequences.
It also meant they were stuck for the time being. Zhou looked around the interior of the storehouse and noted the complete absence of loading crews, drivers, or even spare tools. The village, it seemed, had been drained dry to support operations far beyond its limits.
The few remaining civilians were either overaged or underfed, barely capable of sustaining daily routines, let alone hauling carts of raw ore to a military dock. There was no chance they could deliver the required volume of coal within a single day. Without intervention, the delay could extend into multiple days, possibly a full week.
Zhou stepped back into the open air, motioned for the nearest sergeant, and gave the order to convene an officer's meeting at the village square. Within minutes, the lieutenants and platoon sergeants had gathered in a tight arc beneath the old arch tree at the center of the main road, their formation practiced and orderly even in the absence of their captain.
"We've got a logistics failure here." Zhou began without a preamble. "The coal is gone, sent to an offshore rig. The garrison command failed to update the central deployment schedule, and the records here are either incomplete or falsified. The fuel needed to complete the journey south is no longer at this location."
Murmurs passed among the officers, but none were surprised. Zhou delivered the news with the same steady tone he used during patrol reports, and they followed his example with silent nods. Emotion held no value here.
"The ship can't make it to Chin Village with what's in its hold. We have two options: wait here for a resupply reroute, or head to the rig in the opposite direction, which will take at least five days, or gather and haul enough ore to keep the boilers running at reduced speed and recover time en route."
Lieutenant Aiku, who had just arrived from speaking to the quartermaster, joined the circle and gave a slight nod. "There's a side shaft near the ridge that hasn't collapsed. The mine's structurally sound, and the tools are intact. What's missing are the workers."
Zhou nodded once. "Then we become the workers."
He issued a series of instructions to divide labor. Half the company would assist the remaining villagers with repairs and civilian logistics, while the other half would begin hauling operations immediately.
Runners were dispatched to the docked ship to retrieve reinforced gloves, support carts, and spare ration packs. Firebenders were tasked with using small bursts to soften stubborn coal seams, and engineers were ordered to begin testing the structure of the tunnels to ensure they wouldn't collapse on them. No one questioned the assignments, which spoke volumes about their recently acquired discipline.
Only after the first wave of soldiers had been dispatched to the mine and the square emptied did Zhou take a quiet breath, checking the sun´s position and calculating the remaining work window. The day was already slipping into its latter half. He would need to relay the situation to the captain soon.
He looked up toward the path leading to the dock, where the ship sat motionless in the bay, then back toward the ridge where dust now rose faintly from the reactivated mine entrance. This was not what they had planned.
But, as always, they would make the best of it.
----0000----
The sun had passed its peak by the time Lin arrived at the mine entrance, its light filtered through the dust rising from the trail and the faint haze of coal drifting down from the ridge. Her arrival caused an initial disruption, but as soon as she ordered them back to work, the flow continued.
The soldiers of the Red Company were already deep in labor, stripped down to their base uniforms, backs bent under the weight of reinforced hauling baskets, sleeves and boots smeared with soot. She did not speak as she passed the first relay point.
A platoon sergeant gave her a quick nod and returned to coordinating a firebender's controlled blast at a stubborn section of seam. Lin moved past them, stepping over a half-cleared rail and into the shade of the mine itself, the interior flickering with reflected torchlight and the quiet hiss of breath behind cloth masks.
The heat was building steadily. Not just from the summer air or the depth of the shaft, but from the sheer volume of effort being poured into extraction. Her boots echoed differently in the tunnels than those of her soldiers.
Their steps were soft with fatigue, carried by muscle and discipline. Hers fell heavier, her limbs compensating with internal bursts of chi to maintain smooth articulation. The metal groaned faintly in the confined space, steam venting in low, sharp exhalations from the seams in her backplate to keep her body from overheating.
She passed teams in rotation, carrying baskets toward the entrance, where coal would be loaded into carts and wheeled down toward the shore. She paused briefly at the edge of one loading site, studying the wall being worked on and noting the stress fractures already forming along the upper section of the tunnel. The work was efficient but not ideal; She didn't offer corrections though.
Instead, she removed her outer coat and draped it over a rusted support beam, the fabric streaked with fine powder where it had settled. The black undershirt beneath clung to her frame, streaked in places by the steam that radiated through the heat-conductive plating over her shoulders.
She adjusted the clasps of her gloves, checked the pressure of her palm vents, and stepped up beside the two soldiers currently digging. Neither asked what she was doing; the captain was known for stepping in to handle most jobs herself if needed.
One of them instinctively shifted position to give her room. Lin planted her hand against the rock wall, closed her eyes, and channeled her fire through the gauntlet until it began to glow, slowly shifting from dull orange to white-hot.
The stone hissed and cracked, dark lines forming through the coal like veins of ink. With a steady, grounded exhale, she punched through the softened section and pulled back, leaving behind a fractured core that could now be cleared by hand.
The younger of the two soldiers reached for a pry bar, pausing only when she gave him the faintest nod.
They worked for another hour before she finally stepped back. Her gloves were blackened, the vents at her shoulders releasing thicker bursts as her core temperature edged higher. A few of the runners began glancing toward her at intervals, more out of concern than curiosity.
On her way out of the mine, she paused near the command team which had been keeping count of load weights and calculating how much more they were going to need. With the now clear picture, he issued three clear instructions.
They had to shift two teams to the northeast vein, where the ore was shallower, rotate out anyone past the two-hour threshold, and begin sorting coal grades into three piles for more efficient burn planning. The engines of the ships were a delicate machine after all. The officers acknowledged her at once, some already turning to deliver orders as she exited.
Outside, the light struck her harder than expected. Dust had thickened with activity, and her outer layer remained draped where she had left it, untouched except for a slight wrinkle where someone had carefully moved it aside to clear a path. She retrieved it, shook the coal dust from its surface, and slung it over her shoulder without ceremony.
Rather than returning to the ship, she descended toward the village itself. Word had reached her during the mining rotation of problems on the civilian side, a suggestion that the local garrison had interpreted the arrival of the Red Company as an opportunity for reprisal rather than relief.
The village's energy was different now. Children no longer lingered near the soldiers distributing rations and elderly men and women remained inside their homes even as supplies were being organized in the square. She could clearly see the signs of abuse of power on full display.
She passed a merchant stall recently visited by one of their sergeants, who had purchased dried fruit for the squads resting near the dock. Civilians offered nods but spoke little. At the end of the main road, beyond a narrow bend, she heard raised voices.
They did not belong to her men. A woman's protest echoed sharply against the wall of one of the houses, followed by the deeper bark of a soldier's threat. When Lin rounded the corner, she assessed the scene with a single glance.
A garrison officer, broad-shouldered and heavyset, held a fireball in one hand while shouting into the face of a civilian woman while two other soldiers restrained a younger man who was struggling against their grip. Bystanders froze at the edges, no doubt wanting to intervene but fearing the worst if they did.
She approached without raising her voice.
"You will step away from her, soldier." she said, tone flat, eyes focused on the firebender with the lit palm, "And you will offer your apology immediately."
The officer turned, irritated more than startled, and giving her a half-snarl of dismissal before barking out his reply. "Who the hell do you think you are? This doesn't concern-"
He apparently realized who he was talking to late, with her coat on her shoulders, he could see now her insignia displaying her rank. As his mouth remained partly opened, she could see the surprise slowly turn to fear on his face.
Lieutenant Zhou arrived at the corner just in time to hear the words. His eyes widened in silence. Lin thought this was the perfect opportunity; she was confident this firebender was a weak excuse for a man. Her voice came again, quieter now, almost formal.
"You have insulted and threatened a superior officer, corporal." The fireball in the man's hand wavered.