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With Life quite literally on my ass about how she wanted to restore the balance of things and my memory fully restored, I decided it was time to move forward with my plans of eliminating Ozai once and for all, at least while I waited for Life and the other spirits to state the terms of her challenge.
In other terms I had to act fast, because I had no idea how quickly the primordials were going to decide what challenge was fair under their peculiar perspective of things for me to take on, and considering my luck so far, it wasn't going to be something easy for me, probably life threatening, if not down right suicidal. So with that in mind I started to move the pieces I had laid on the board so far, with the power I had amassed taking down Ozai was going to be super easy, barely an inconvenience or so I thought… Hours after returning to the camp, and introducing Azula to Yue, Agni, and Sakura… the spirit laid their terms.
The terms of the challenge were, simple… yet, they put me at a great disadvantage, so much for them making it fair… then again, their challenge was considerably better than facing Life a primordial that would stomp me to another universe, so in a way, they had helped me. As for the challenge… Well. They would take away the bending elements I had mastered, and to add… more difficulty as it was needed they also took away any abilities Vaatu had given me, my task? face Ozai with nothing but my wits and physical might, alone. If I won, Life would leave me be, if I lost… Well, I rather not think about it.
This meant I could not use any of the spirits I had brought into the living world, in fact, one of the conditions Life had put was for them to remain in the spirit realm until I finished the challenge.
So… Now, here I was with nothing, I seriously doubted my sword skills or wits were going to be enough to face the big bad idiot, whose power now thanks to Life towered over mine, and the worst part was… they expected me to win… alone.
I suppose it's time for some ingenuity, because any other way, I would die at the hands of the biggest egomaniac in this world. I no longer had the power to take on the guy like he was a fly… so I had to consider every element around this challenge and how to tackle it in, effectively.
Ozai was a bender, and benders were heavily reliant to mid range combat, with a spice of hand to hand combat to balance things out, which normally leaves them at their weakest when their enemy is too close, so if I took that little fact and Ozai's overconfidence… I maybe had a chance to win this challenge. But unfortunately that was a chance that I had ruined by revealing myself as the new avatar the last time I saw the Firelord.
If the man had a single functional brain cell, he would take my little stunt as a warning… meaning that because of me… he would now be more wary of the threats around his throne, taking things and threats more to their real value, instead of diminishing them with his pride ….meaning… milking his pride was not as profitable, as it would've been.
Fortunately for me, there were other emotions I could exploit on the man, among them his anger, the man was easy to anger, prone to it. While his fire bending was explosive and quite lethal, and his anger would only increase his fire output and therefore it's lethality, it would also make it easier to read his movements and have thanks to that it would give me more control of the fight. Of course this strategy was borderline suicidal, one wrong step, and I would be a goner, so if I were to try and capitalize on his anger I would have to have a well planned strategy, and a few contingency plans in case I failed to control the situation as I wanted it to go.
As for my weaponry, now that I had no bending, I had to resort to plebian methods of combat that if handled well, were as lethal if not more than bending, things like poisons, explosives, traps and more, were the weapons I would have at my disposal to deal with Ozai, meaning in knight terms, I would have to fight as dirty as possible, by using misdirection and lies to trick the Firelord.
So for this fight, I would have to be hundreds of steps ahead of Ozai, in every single possible angle, from where we would fight so that I could booby trap the entire area, to how the fight should play out, from beginning to end, counting every little detail, from my hits, to my fails, all leading to his demise. I had to foresee it all, and act accordingly, and with Vaatu by my side, I had a chance, it's as they say… two heads think better than one. And while the primordial spirits made for the duration of this challenge nothing more than a voice inside my head, his thousands of years of experience, and his access to my mind would help me out more than anything.
Why? Well, Vaatu not only had access to every single thing I had seen in my previous life but to information I don't think I ever saw, making my head a never ending library of bizarre information, full and complete for Vaatu's access, maybe this was part of the gift the being that brought me here had given me, a head full of knowledge, that needed someone like Vaatu to decipher, and if the knowledge in my head wasn't enough… there was always the spirit library, after all, right now… knowledge was my weapon, and patience was my poison.