Chapter 74 – Hybrid Bending
+30k LEE, Total: 1299k LEE
Azula took pity on Nuwa’s utterly exhausted countenance just four days after not having sex by fucking her nice and deep several times that night. Nuwa’s moans spread through most of the encampment. The children whispered about cooties while Toph was tempted to jump Gunner right then and there, but she had a method to her madness.
Toph wakes up Gunner early that morning, before anyone else can wake up, with a splash of water. Gunner grunts, hems, and haws as he reaches for his axe and gets up. He’s fairly used to being woken up like this during his recent days of banditry. By the time he walks out of the tent, he sees that Toph is the only one awake waiting for him with an excited smile on her face.
Toph says, “It’s time to test your worth. If you can beat me, then you’ll be my first husband. If not, then you’ll be my concubine.”
Gunner huffs in alarm and his beard shakes in fury, “Whazza? Yer dare te relegatin me te de lowly statufs?”
Toph laughs and doesn’t understand, but replies, “There’s no shame in being the concubine of I, Toph Beifong! I already have one inside the tent.”
Gunner coughs and grunts in alarm, “Eowh, me be rekkinin he waz yer knave. By ther gods! I been bamboozled by a wench!”
Toph narrows her eyes as she stops picking her ear, “What did you just call me, Midget!?”
Azula wakes up from all the racket and yells at them to take whatever they are doing out of the encampment. People are trying to sleep after all. She follows them though, since she figures that if Toph actually hurt that captain guy, they might have some problems with the crewmen later. Azula passes by Aang and Iroh doing burpees and gives them a wave. They wave back and continue.
Gunner snorts in disdain and follows Toph out of the camp saying stuff like, “Ye cannae spect me ter be yer swabby!” and “Lass gonna git wuts comin. Dis be me first timin edjumacatin a strumpet.”
Toph fumes harder as she senses the disdain in Gunner’s tone. ‘This Midget dares to call me names to my face. He dares to malign me, the great Toph Beifong?! That’s it. I’m gonna tie an impossible knotted string around his cock and leave him blue-balled for days while he watches Haru and I get it on! That’ll teach him!’
Toph and Gunner finally reach a deserted area 1 km away from the encampment. Far enough that the sounds of battle will be muffled. Azula hangs out at a distance. She’ll stop them if they go too far. They’re both so mad that they don’t bother with the courtesies, then again, neither of them are the type to care about courtesies.
Toph starts with a basic earth dance to get warmed up, she also just woke up after all. She takes a horse stance, does a stomp to force a rock to float in front of her, and pushes with her palm to fling the rock at Gunner.
Gunner splits the rock right down the middle with a wide downward swing of his axe and follows through on the movement so that his axe slams the ground and dislodges some small rocks near him to float. He uses the flat side of his axe to bat them at Toph a few at a time.
This move is hard to counter because the axe launches rocks faster than normal earthbender punches and at deceptive angles. The downside is that some of the smaller rocks are entirely shattered to dust due to impact with the axe. Indeed, the rocks that land on Toph are so small she can ignore their impact. They make the pitter-patter sounds of rain as they land on her.
Gunner’s eyes slightly widen at the fact that she can ignore damage from his move. He would have thought she needed muscle to be able to do that. He starts using his stout legs to kick up two larger rocks and bats them at Toph with his axe.
The first small boulder spins rapidly at Toph and she palms at it with two hands. The boulder continues spinning on her hands as her two hands immediately halt the forward progress of the boulder. She pushes the still spinning first boulder at the second boulder and they both fall down harmlessly.
From this exchange, Gunner knows that Toph is a far better earthbender than him. Her technical control over her chi is much higher than his to be able to keep that first boulder intact while stopping it. He finally gets serious. Gunner slams his axe into the earth in front of him causing cracks to spread out towards Toph. He closes his eyes and infuses chi through his axe into the earth, causing it to change states into a molten form.
Fumes and bright light rise from the cracks as Gunner begins lavabending! Lavabenders can temporarily ignore the melting point of any rock and only input the chi necessary to change a rock from solid to liquid as if that rock was already at its melting point and only needs some energy to change to liquid.
It’s a form of bending that’s in total defiance of the laws of physics, but most things involving chi tend to be against physics in some regard. An important thing to keep in mind is that it is not possible to become a lavabender through training. One must be born compatible with the ability to lavabend.
Later scholars would learn that lavabenders are a sort of freak combination of firebender and earthbender after hybrid benders such as steambenders (fire and air), mistbenders (water and air), and swampbenders (water and earth) were all categorized. Hybrid benders either hit the genetic jackpot while being born to two benders of non-opposing elements, or are descended from another hybrid bender. Gunner is the first hybrid bender in his line, because his dad was a firebender and his mother was an earthbender.
Lavabending is an exceedingly dangerous type of bending with high chi demand. It combines the two deadliest forms of bending together! Gunner manipulated the initially melted rock to spread its range to the rock around it, forming a lava pit in a semicircle around him.
Toph looks at this with some incredulity. She can sense through the vibrations in the earth and air that whatever Gunner did made the earth superhot! She can still sense the earth, but she can’t manipulate it when it’s that hot. The earth loses its stubborn quality when it’s melted! It’s no longer compatible with her bending.
Feeling the glee of fighting a new kind of opponent, Toph prepares herself and doesn’t disturb Gunner’s preparations.
Gunner holds the axe with one hand to maintain the lava and makes a bicep curl with the other hand to levitate a dripping ball of lava up. He pushes it with his other hand, leaving his axe in the ground.
Toph puts up a rock wall, but just to be safe, puts up four more after it. She chose right because the lava ball melted through the first few walls before sputtering out of momentum and heat on the penultimate wall.
Gunner grins and continues levitating lavaballs and thrusting them at her. Although maintaining lava takes plenty of chi, his huge body mass means he also has large chi reserves.
Toph continues to put up rock walls and starts to return fire with her own boulders. They land in the vicinity of Gunner, sometimes splashing lava at him, but he’s able to easily redirect the lava splashes away from his body with a simple dance. When the boulders are heading straight at him, he pulls a large swath of lava out of his pool and intercepts the rock’s trajectory towards him.
The lava is heavy enough to push the rock off course. Moreover, the fact that portions of the boulder are melted means that Toph’s chi-intent is partially purged, so if Toph had smushed together some smaller rock into a big boulder with her chi, the boulder would start to fall back apart into smaller rocks again.
Soon, however, Toph’s boulders are too many and it takes too much chi for Gunner to deflect them with either earthbending or lavabending. He rushes forward into melee range and pulls out his trump card. The lava parts as he runs forward with most of it cooling and a small amount of it spins rapidly in a circle above his palm. He takes his axe, but only to use it for defense because he has a feeling that Toph can easily take and counter his big axe swings. Gunner decides he’ll try to beat her with speed and have her surrender upon seeing the might of his lava disc!
Toph excitedly watches the lava disc as she feels the whistling sound of its rotation. ‘.. So Beautiful.. It sounds like it can cut anything..’
Azula is also dumbfounded upon the display of lavabending. She senses that the lava is as hot as her blue fire and she has no connection to it. It’s not the first time she felt ‘fire’ that she had no connection to.
Iroh’s tea spark and now this lava. They both infuse some other concepts into their fire, making it entirely foreign to her, but she senses intuitively that they both can be considered as a form of fire! She wonders if she has to come up with some concept to combine into her fire to make it more powerful.
From about a dozen meters away, Gunner flings the lava disc to Toph’s right just as a threat. The lava disc is too deadly and he doesn’t actually want to kill her. Toph puts up earth walls to obstruct it as it moves, but it slices through them without losing much energy, mainly because the disc itself is so thin. The disc goes wide behind her and comes back towards Gunner from her other side. By the time it’s back above his palm, it has slowed in rotation and most of the lava has been resolidified.
Toph has sweat on her forehead at the power of that disc and she’s fully fired up. She rushes forwards slightly to also get serious with her metalbending. First she stomps the ground and multiple rock spires pierce through the ground between them to obstruct their sight. Toph doesn’t rely on sight the same way that Gunner does, so this is her home ground.
Then she raises her arms correspondingly to fire metal links in various directions with an intricate dance. As Gunner is confused and starts slashing the closest spires to him, Toph grins and pulls her forearms together. All the metal links she fired earlier in random directions pause in midair and immediately rush at Gunner all at once.
Gunner only manages to slash one with his lava disc before his eyes, hands, and legs are tied up by the swarming metal links. The lava disc loses its chi source because Gunner can’t do chi infusion from his current position. It drops to the ground, melts a few inches down into the ground as it stops spinning, and solidifies.
Toph swaggers up to his tied up form and Gunner is about to complain that he showed mercy, before she sends a metal link at his mouth too. By now, he realizes that Toph somehow knows metalbending, which is equally as unheard of as his lavabending (for now). His eyes fill with appreciation and slight helplessness.
Toph boasts, “HahaHAHA, so you recognize my power now? Anyway, that lavabending is incredible. Very good. I’ve decided to take pity on you and make you first husband even though I won! I still get to keep concubines though. Be grateful, Midget! Hahaha! What a great fight.”
Retrieving her metal links, Toph heads back to the encampment. Meanwhile, Azula is still deep in thought about her understanding of fire.
Gunner lays on the ground defeated before sighing and saying, “Aye, dat lass be a doozy.” Then he gets up and heads back to the camp.
Aang had also come to see the fight and was impressed, especially the metalbending at the end. He won’t have time before the war ends, but he plans to learn metalbending from Toph and redirection from Iroh to expand the nonviolent options in his arsenal of abilities.
One thing he has to learn before his fight with Ozai is energybending like what Dan did to Long Feng. Ozai’s bending must be removed and they’ve all agreed that Aang should be the one to do it on behalf of the Air Nation. ‘Nuwa told me to find a Lion Turtle to teach me energybending in the Spirit Realm, how do I find one of those?’
(A/N: What should Azula’s next power up be?!)