Chapter 104 – Zata Boss Fight

[Short Flashback - 5 days ago]

Lord Zata awoke to blinding, excruciating pain. The last of Lo and Li’s dragon blood essence flowing through him had returned to him his intelligence. He soon discovered in the days that followed that as a reanimated familiar of Li, he wasn’t allowed to go against her orders and attack them, or he would. He found himself with irrational impulses to kill humans and destroy civilization, but Li wouldn’t let him.

What the twins did do was explain to him that the reason for his fate was all because of the schemes of Stella, aka Nuwa Ty Lee Pea. They said she long had plans of betraying the Fire Nation at the crucial moment, gathering the armies and providing the rebels the news of the timing of the Day of the Black Sun. If it weren’t for her, he wouldn’t have had to escape and he would still be by Ozai’s side perfectly fine!

Lo and Li easily poison the not fully intelligent Lord Zata to hate Nuwa with a passion. Still, they emphasize to him that she’s very smart, and he shouldn’t hold back out of arrogance from his newfound power when trying to kill her or he will lose. Lord Zata rationalizes that he has to play along with these two milfs for now while coming up with some way to escape from their influence. He’s not sure how strong they are, but he refuses to be their hunting dog forever.

Anyway, he really wants to kill that bitch, Nuwa. He wants to drink her blood for playing a part in ruining him. With his new power, he doesn’t have anyone to fear other than these two witches. They killed all his people and family to retrieve the dragon blood essence, but Lord Zata doesn’t care. In his perspective, they gave him power and the moment he figures out how to break the bond, he’ll go back and kill them for making him suffer the incessant agony of the constantly boiling blood in his veins.

[Returning to paused fight scene on the day of the Comet]

Lord Zata felt smug. Princess Azula had powerful enough firebending that it could get past his fire resistance, but he could mitigate the worst of the effects with his thick scaly armor and special Zata family firebending technique. Nuwa seemed weak overall, other than her inexplicable ability to bend water and fire.

He felt there was a specific reason for Lo and Li to target Nuwa. Perhaps they’ve long known each other and she had stolen some knowledge or technique from them without permission. He could make light work of these two bitches and maybe even torture a way to escape the clutches of Lo and Li from out of Nuwa. Even though he is still only going for crippling or killing blows on both of them, he has subconsciously begun to underestimate them, opting not to tire them out with his large chi reserves.

When they boost at him, Lord Zata doesn’t make any motion to evade. Since they want to approach, he decides to give them a feel of how strong his scales and muscles are! In fact, simply due to his hatred, he aims a punch directly at Nuwa. His tail snakes around and lashes at Azula more as a means to interrupt her attack or slap her away to let him focus all of the rest of his energy on punching Nuwa.

Nuwa is slightly thrown off by how insistent the creature is on attacking her instead of Azula. Her combat style has always suited an assassin or backline support role. She developed her close combat reflexes from a young age through spars with Azula, so she can handle it, but it’s not where she excels.

Therefore, a mishap occurs. The creature boosts again directly at Nuwa, who isn’t expecting him to recover from the flip in such an agile manner. Azula is pushed away uninjured at a slight angle from the melee by the creature’s tail. Her angry Phoenix fire manages to take out a full layer of plates from the area of the tail that came in contact with her, but it only leads to light bleeding.

Before Azula can fire thruster back into the midair fight, the creature’s fist connects with Nuwa’s baby bump. What better way for Lord Zata to get revenge than to kill his enemy’s baby? Nuwa’s own fist flubs it’s fake attack to the creature’s shoulder as she momentarily is filled with blinding pain from the impact to her womb. Her plan was to work with Azula to skirt around the creature’s body using her hookblade and eventually summon her [Hidden Blade] upon a prime opportunity.

She instinctively summons her hookblade and latches onto Lord Zata’s body with the poisoned appendage digging into his shoulder. Earlier this morning, she had imbued the neurotoxin into her breastmilk and poured it into the poison compartment of her [Hidden Blade]. Nevertheless, Nuwa is sent flying like a cannonball at a horizontal direction in midair with her ears ringing and her body convulsing from the force of the blow to her belly. Her only consolation is a piece of flesh she pulled right off of the creature’s shoulder indicating that the poison should take.

Instinctively, she knows that her baby is fine. Somehow, her body is able to absorb all the damage that should go to the baby, paradoxically making her womb the safest place to suffer a body blow, since it’s incredibly hard and provides cushioning for her to deal with the force of the blow.

Azula is unaware of these details. When she sees Nuwa go flying from taking a full force fire boosted punch to the womb, she explodes with rage. She screams and relapses into a cold-hearted killer as she does a midair fire dance with blue fire thrusters to prepare a barrage of lightning.

Lord Zata does not know lightning bending and he feels fear for the first time seeing Azula’s merciless eyes and lightning begin to crackle around her. The reason he never had the balls to rebel was because he feared Ozai’s lightning bending. Of course, even Ozai’s firebending outclassed him back then. Soon, however, he remembers his new firebending-resistant body should be able to handle a few lightning blasts if he can’t dodge them all.

Azula points at the creature with a twisted face as she finishes building enough of a charge imbalance to fire three large bolts in succession. Lord Zata dodges the first one barely with a fire thruster, takes the next one with his tail, and the third one with his chest. The second one that snags his tail stunned him in midair enough for Azula to land the final one on his chest.

“Grraaah!” Lord Zata takes the bolt to his chest and falls a short distance onto the ground as he makes the first sound of pain since he began the fight. Even the earlier scrape of his shoulder and partial disintegration of his tail scales are barely felt in comparison to the blinding pain of the lightning flowing and sustaining itself inside his own body wreaking havoc. Azula picks up on the fact that he seems to be weak to lightning!

Lightning is a means for which electrical charge violently rebalances itself. When lightning enters the creature’s body, there’s a dampening effect on the electricity’s ability to rebalance because the creature itself is a being of imbalance and destruction. Lightning has a harder time discharging itself within. Through this odd quirk, lightning becomes super effective on the creature!

However, the lightning also eliminates Nuwa's neurotoxin that helped Azula land the hit in the first place. The creature gets up from the ground as Azula begins to charge another set of lightning and maintains utmost vigilance this time.

Nuwa manages to regain the mental faculties to use fire thrusters before she can be injured by the impact to the ground. Her whole body aches. She bounces in the air periodically thrusting trying to regain her aerial balance while vomiting out her breakfast due to the earlier blow. Even with her womb shielding her, the creature’s blow landed on her like a tank. She’s not built to take hits like that.

Nuwa reaches up to her ear and sees blood on her fingers. “Ughh, fighting sucks.” She hears herself say in a distorted voice while wiping her mouth of vomit. She pulls out one of her boobs and sucks her nipple for some healing-imbued breast milk, which restores her hearing and balance sufficiently to land and get her bearings. The only reason she can spend so much time recovering is because she noticed that Azula has the creature preoccupied.

Nuwa once again analyzes the battle strategy, but she has to be fast. Azula can’t keep shooting lightning forever or else she’ll run out of chi. The creature is dodging most of them by now while returning fire blasts of its own, which Azula has to take the effort to dodge while continuing to imbalance her internal charge. If she keeps it up long enough, the prolonged imbalance might lead to a chakra injury like back in Ba Sing Se.

Nuwa vaguely remembers that the vibranium of her hookblade was effective in penetrating its scales. The creature also doesn’t know about the [Hidden Blade] aspect of the tool as of yet. That part of her weapon was kept secret from Ozai and the military. These are the only two advantages she has. The creature outclasses them in firebending, pure strength, and chi. If she can’t sneak up to it and land a devastating stab while Azula keeps it occupied with lightning, she’s prepared to use Nuwavatar as a last resort.

Preparing herself mentally, Nuwa transforms her [E-Vibe] into nunchuck-dildos, jumps up, and twirls them around using airbending to create Aang’s signature air scooter underneath her. Even though fire would be faster and more efficient on chi usage, Nuwa knows that the creature can sense fire chi much better than she can. That’s why she hopes the air scooter, despite not being stealthy at all, can help her evade the creature’s senses and dodge its blows long enough for her to strike even if it sees her coming.

Nuwa swings her nunchuck-dildo behind her like a propeller to steer the scooter onward towards the creature. With all the air and sound coming from the scooter the creature sees her and divides its focus between throwing fire blasts at Azula in the air and Nuwa approaching on the ground.

Lord Zata doesn’t rise up into the air to avoid Nuwa, because if he takes a hit from lightning, it would be harder to discharge the electricity in the air. He figured this out when he hit the ground after taking the hit to his chest in midair. The lightning left his body and went into the ground, mitigating further damage. Azula doesn’t realize this and thinks her lightning is just as effective as it was up in the air.

Nuwa veers around three large fire blasts fired at her from the creature. The air scooter maximizes her dodging ability as she dashes towards him.

Lord Zata only later realizes that he should have been destroying the floor with his fire blasts to disrupt Nuwa’s movement instead of firing horizontally to the ground. By the time he comes to this realization, Nuwa is already nearby. He boosts away from her to put some distance between them. He doesn’t want to be under attack from two directions. Azula lets up in her attack to charge more lightning while Nuwa closes in on him again.

Lord Zata smiles viciously at his chance to beat Nuwa even worse this time. He pulls up his fists into a stance and shows off his trump card and the reason that he is able to land such hard blows. He has fire thrusters coming out of his elbows and shoulders with all of his punches!

This is unfeasible for a human firebender to pull off. Even if they could train themselves to discharge chi from their elbows and shoulders, the force of the fire thrusters and the impact on surfaces would break and dislocate their bones. The dragonified body can handle it though.

Lord Zata begins jabbing even faster than Toph as he throws small fire blasts nonstop at the ground between and directly at the approaching Nuwa. He smiles viciously when he sees Nuwa’s alarm, but takes a bolt of lightning directly on his back from Azula. He was too eager to put Nuwa down and got distracted. He’s dazed for a moment and immediately dives to the left as soon as the lightning discharges into the ground, avoiding Azula’s follow-up bolt. He turns around with a growl to face Azula.

Nuwa is alarmed by the creature’s array of fire blasts coming towards her. There’s no way she can dodge them with her air scooter, but her momentum is carrying her towards them. She furrows her brows and changes styles.

Her [E-Vibe] transforms into a staff-dildo, which she rotates like a drill towards the ground she’s floating and falling upon now that her air scooter cannot sustain itself. When the rotating staff touches the ground, earth immediately gives way and lets Nuwa continue falling in a slanted angle towards the creature. Now safely underground, but moving slower due to earthbending requiring contact before it can be done, Nuwa continues earthbending deeper to avoid the shockwaves from the fire blasts that the creature sent into the ground to disrupt her air scooter’s movements.

Azula is relieved when she sees Nuwa dive underground. The creature misses it. Due to the angle with which Nuwa drilled a hole underground, the hole is not visible to the creature. To maintain the element of surprise, Azula acts even angrier and starts throwing fire and lightning wantonly despite being low on chi. The creature laughs loudly, which reveals to Azula that it might be capable of speech. That gives her an opportunity to stall. Azula screams, “WHY!? WHY ARE YOU AFTER US?” while throwing fire.

Lord Zata laughs loudly and after dodging a fire blast, checks to see if Nuwa is still after him. He doesn’t see her in the short time he looks over, which gives him the impression that she was blasted away by one of his fire blasts since she’s not on his tail anymore and might be buried in the rubble of the destruction he left. He smiles viciously and says in a deep, growling voice, “She’s the reason I became this way! She ruined me! That’s why SHE HAS TO DIE. I have no qualms against you, Princess! Unfortunately, heh heh, she happens to be your lover. Stay out of my way and you won’t have to follow her to the grave!”

Azula narrows her eyes, almost forgetting to act out of curiosity, “WHO ArE YoU?”

“Heh, the tables have turned on the Fire Nation. You all will regret fucking with me, Follero Zata! You two and those witches when I’m done with you!” Lord Zata says while dodging the diminishing amount of fire blasts coming his way.

Azula coughs trying to contain the laughter threatening to bubble up, “Fool Lero Zata is your full name?”

If Lord Zata’s face wasn’t black, it would be red and purple with rage right about now. He shouts, “IMPUDENCE!” and fires a massive two-handed stream of continuous fire at Azula. She dodges the stream of fire, but keeps her distance to make sure Nuwa will be fine. This makes dodging his jet of fire harder considering her low chi, but temporarily manageable.

Nuwa manages to find Lord Zata’s location, despite not practicing her earth sense, because the earth is slightly hotter near him and he shouted so loudly. She drills a hole in the earth behind him while he’s using his jet and uses earthbending to raise the earth below her to push her slowly up the hole nearer to the surface. Then she slams the earth to force the pillar up, launching her like a springboard. She latches directly onto his back.

Lord Zata realizes the surprise attack the moment Nuwa slams the earth with her dildo-staff and begins to turn around. Nuwa lands on the left side of his back clinging to his abnormally large body. He sprays the fire thrusters on his shoulders to try to dislodge her and wraps his tail around her throat. The fire thrusters miss because she’s not grabbing onto him at that angle. The portion of the tail around her throat cannot immediately get the leverage it needs to squeeze her hard enough to choke her off since it’s the same part of the tail that Azula disintegrated the armor plating on.

Nuwa flexes all her muscles as she roars, summons her [Hidden Blade], activates the blade mechanism, and tries to stab it into Lord Zata’s spine.

*chink*

It doesn’t work! There’s a deep incision on the plating, but she doesn’t have enough strength to push it through the rest of the armor. She roars again and tries again at the least armored spot she sees!

This time she stabs it straight at the flailing Lord Zata’s neck. It works! The stab is clean and seamless with the blade horizontal along his body. His windpipe, along with several arteries, are definitely cut. Azula had long stopped attacking and boosts herself closer.

Lord Zata opens his eyes wide upon feeling the blade through his neck. He has a terrible deja vu of the moment that Li stabbed him through his Heart chakra. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go! He’s the strongest now!

Lord Zata tightens his tail enough to pull Nuwa off him, which pulls her [Hidden Blade] out and slams her headfirst into the ground with his tail. He turns around and looks at her maniacally as he bleeds out. He remembers not to breathe, since his windpipe is out of commission, because he has one more thing to do. With his death assured, Lord Zata fully intends to take this bitch with him!

(A/N: Fire and Brimstone!)

(A/N: https://discord.gg/VD3C2BFPAu)