It was around midday the following day, the sky still overcast. The rain had persevered through much of the night and part of the morning. It had made packing camp a tedious chore considering the clouds had even blocked the light of the moon. All the same, we were packed by sunup. The cloud wasn't an inch over the horizon before we set out, tanks taking the front and the infantry following the rear.
The sky had stopped pouring down on us, but the clouds persisted, giving the day a dark and bleak tone that opposed how I was feeling at the moment. We were set to reach the wall today. We had been riding for two weeks and today was supposed to be the day we got there. I had heard so many things about the walls of that city that I found myself looking over the horizon every few hours, expecting to see it there, right in front of me. I had to admit, I was excited, on the other, I was nervous and scared out of my mind.
The city ahead meant a few things for me. It meant that I would be viewing what was probably the greatest marvel of mankind in the world, but it also meant that the war would be starting for me tonight. What this had been. This leisure ride across the countryside of the Earth Kingdom was just that, a ride to the real war. If the turf war in the slums was even a portion of what to expect from real war, then I knew that things were about to get a lot harder, to the dismay of the kids I would hear bragging about how "This war is nothing." They would get a bitter taste of war soon enough.
I reached down under my elevated gunner's seat, feeling around for the canteen I had stored by my bag. It was light, but I gave it a shot anyway. Turns out, it was light for a reason. I was out of water. "Shit." I murmured to myself, tucking the canteen back where it belonged. We had left the river behind a week ago and had been relying on the rain ever since. It was getting to the point where I was starting to like the rain. In the slums, the rain would do no good. If it wasn't polluted from the smoke of the military district's industry, then it had flowed down the sides of the sandcrete buildings, carrying shit and dirt with it wherever it went. I knew a few people who had died from that water. LightHead was among them, one of the Hornets back in the slums. He had gone for whatever water he could find whenever he got the chance. He was always thirsty. If he hadn't died from that flu, I wondered if he would have changed his drinking habits. Probably not.
I had my seat raised all the way up, leaning against the side of the tank, hatch open, letting the breeze of the day blow at my face. We were riding with 4 other tanks. 3 of them were occupied by other new graduates from citadel and one, the leading tank, Iron Gauntlet, was occupied by soldiers from the original 15th armored. When I saw the gunner of their tank rise out of the hatch, turning around to face our tanks and giving a hand signal to stop, I ducked my head down back into the tank with an atmosphere thick with heat and sweat, yelling "stop!"
The tank came to a stop too sudden to allow me to brace myself. My head clanged against the same spot where it would clang every time Gan pushed down the breaks. "You have to fucking ease the pedal!" I yelled at him, my head still ringing.
"It's too damn sensitive. The slightest touch stops us in place.
"Are you pushing the brake pedal or the foot break?" Gi Gu asked.
"They're different?"
"Fucking idiot." I murmured, half smiling as I raised my head back into the noon sky, ready to receive orders and relay them to my crew. My crew. It was weird starting to refer to them as that. For the longest time, 'my crew' had been the Hornets and the people that came with it, but that was a long time ago. That crew was dead even if not everyone from it was. I was starting to see Danev adopt the same mentality as me. It had taken him longer to adopt his new brethren, but Aden's death had pushed that process along quicker than expected. He was Fire Nation now. We were Fire Nation now.
The tanks engine had ceased, and our squad leader, Captain Zaedra was ready to make his orders heard audibly, sticking his own head out of the hatch to make himself clear. The man now barking orders was a veteran of the war from what I had heard. He had fought in the 5th Siege of Ba Sing Se before the 15th Armored had been formed. He was part of what the Fire Nation had called the "Iron Gauntlet", a division of tanks only, each with a master firebender as gunner. I remembered reading about the division back in the Citadel school. The Iron Gauntlet had seen much success throughout the Earth Kingdom, taking city after fortress after town, raiding, destroying, and leaving before reinforcements could arrive. During the battle for the impenetrable city, however, the Iron Gauntlet had been assigned an impossible task: to scale the walls of Ba Sing Se. 100 tanks started the ascent and only 1 made it back down in one piece, only after losing its gunner. It was described as onlookers as though the wall itself was fighting, breaking off pieces left and right to take down the tanks with it. The crew of the surviving tank was disgraced and retired until the Fire Nation had decided to lower recruitment standards. The crew was re-enlisted and sent off to the 15th and here he was, a disgraced soldier trying to win back his renown.
"There's a farm house up ahead by the crossroads. It's burned out, so it looks like our boys have already passed though here a while back. All the same, I want Units 347, 348, and 349 to form a perimeter. Unit 350 will come with me to secure the house and form a lookout point."
"Shit." I whispered. "What are we?"
"We're 350, right?" Gi Gu responded.
"Yeah." I responded. "I think so."
When I looked back outside, waiting to see if the three over tanks began their tasks, it occurred to me that they were as lost as we were.
"Well?!"
"Fuck it." I heard Gan say. "Let's find out who we are."
I felt the tank accelerate forward, toward Iron Gauntlet, desperate to find out if we were where we were supposed to be. In the end, it didn't matter. The other three tanks, piloted by kids just as clueless as us, went to their own tasks, splitting up in three different ways, plowing through dead fields of failed harvests, forming a perimeter around the farm house, taking our movement forward as indication of their standing.
Our tank moved parallel to the Iron Gauntlet, so I was face to face to the veteran himself and by some act of bravery or stupidity, I asked "Are we unit 350, sir?"
"You are now." He responded, ducking back into his tank, the gunner replacing him, and we rode to the charred farmhouse ahead that I could now start to see through the mist of the day.
Sure enough, we had passed through already. Not us particularly, but the Fire Nation for a certainty. It was hard to say how long it had been. There was no smoke and no bodies to inspect. It was abandoned.
Zaedra had ordered the gunners of both tanks to go out and inspect the structure, leaving me and the gunner of the Iron Gauntlet. He, over 10 years my elder by the looks of him, took point. It was obvious he wasn't a firebender, demonstrating just how low Zaedra had fallen, going from manning one of the most dangerous firebending tanks in the world to having a youth of no more than 24 as his gunner.
I was half his size, but in terms of experience, I didn't feel that far off from him. He had the look of somebody who had been trained for war but had never seen it. I had no doubt he knew how to use his weapon, and use it well at that, but I had my suspicions of whether he had ever fired it something standing on two legs before.
We approached the house, crouching to the entrance, stopping at the door that led inside. It was closed and locked judging by the fact it didn't budge when the crossbowman tried the door. "It's locked." He said. "Think someone's inside?"
"It could just be stuck."
"Maybe so."
"All the same," I started. "Let's be ready if someone's in there. I doubt they'd be friendly to us considering what came of their home."
"If they understand who it was that did this to their home, they'd be smart to be as friendly as humanly possible."
"Good point." I replied.
"Break that door down?"
"With what? My 12-year-old brute strength? You're twice my size. Kick it down and I'll cover you."
"Thanks, but I don't want an inexperienced, finger happy firebender standing right behind me. Shoot that door down with you firebending shit or whatever and I'll cover you with my bow."
"This entire house is a box of kindling. If I sneeze within a mile of this house, it's gonna go up like a nice big bonfire."
"Fair point. That's not how I intend on going out." He walked out in front of the door from where he had been in cover, raised his crossbow so it was aiming straight at the center of the door, took two steps back, and charged forward, placing a nice kick right on the center of the door, kicking it in half rather than in, and sending a portion of the ceiling coming crashing down on the porch we were entering from."
When we were done coughing and sneezing from the cloud of dust that had washed over us, we proceeded with our check. "Check the downstairs" he ordered. "I'll checkup."
I wasn't disobedient. I followed orders when they made sense. If they didn't make sense, I didn't follow them. Having faith in a supervisor was an important part of war. You had to have faith in those leading you in order to follow orders. Therefore, war a two-sided affair. A soldier had to show loyalty and obedience to those above them just as an officer needed to command respect. If one failed their job, then the system was compromised. I remembered reading about what had been called a "social contract", the mutual respect and trust between a master and his subjects and as little as I liked to consider myself a subject, I knew where I stood. If an order make sense, or I saw nothing wrong with it, or I had faith in my leader to not put me to waste, then I'd follow it to the letter, but if it didn't make sense, or came from someone who had no qualms with wasting the lives of his men, then I wouldn't. That's just how it worked. And checking the downstairs of this house, that was fine. No harm would come from that. Busting this house open with fire, however, that I wouldn't do as it would likely get both me and him killed so therefore, I didn't do it. It's common sense than a definable system.
The home's interior was no less depressing than it's exterior. It was burnt to its foundations and it was a miracle the house hadn't collapsed in on itself considering it was made of what appeared to be rather poor-quality wood.
I ventured to what appeared to be the living room first. The cloth of the furniture had of course been burned off and the wooden foundations of the furniture were in pieces too. I wandered to a pair of bookcases by the far wall of the living room, but any books that had been there had been burned as well. Sad thing too, I doubted the Earth Kingdom was able to print books as quickly or efficiently as the Fire Nation and any books they had were gone for good. What a waste of good writing. Somebody would have put months into a single on of those books and now there were dozens of them, burnt to a crisp. There was only one, lying on the floor that was still somewhat legible. I picked it up and blew off the smoke. The History of the Houses of the Earth Kingdom Great and Small.
I went to the kitchen next. It was empty. Either taken by looters or by whoever had lived here before they fled, assuming they had fled, and their ashes weren't scattered on the floor around me.
I could hear the crossbowman above me, scouting the upstairs. Dirt would fall wherever he took a step to the extent I feared any second he would come crashes through the floor right on top of me. As I went through the house, I noticed a trap door that led to a cellar. He told me to check the downstairs. That was about as downstairs as it went. Unsurprisingly, it was locked. Being on the floor however, I had good leverage to break it open. I gave it a good kick or two, but it refused to budge. It was probably being help by a padlock or a chain. I stepped onto the trap door, giving it a good feel, and jumped. Sure enough, it broke open. The wooden door was gone, and I was able to drag the chain that had held the door together along with the splinters that had previously guarded the basement.
The moment I took a step into that cellar, I felt a cold air embrace me, leading me further away from the stuffiness of that burned home. The second I was in, however, I wanted to step out. There was an obvious smell of rot that hung in the air. The room I stepped into in the cellar was empty save the barrels of what I assumed was alcohol lining the walls. I knew that wasn't where the smell was coming from, however. The barrels were actually empty from what I observed when I lifted their lids. The cellar didn't end there, however. Another room led off from the main room and I followed.
The smell got worse as I approached, and I saw what I believed to be the source. It was a distillation still. Whoever was living here was probably growing wheat to sell to merchants or caravans going to Ba Sing Se. Good way to make a living. Until it's not. The still, however, was not the source of the smell, no. That honor belonged to the corpses in the corner. Three of the, one smaller than me, a kid. I forgot the smell was there then. As the rats raced passed me, I saw the marks that littered the bodies of the dead. They had been dead for months now, but all the same, the way they died was apparent. The biggest among them held a knife in his dead hands, the two next to him bearing cut throats. They were trapped down here. They had no food, their house was burning, it must have been winter. They had nowhere to go. He killed his own family rather than let them starve. I saw the whole in his forehead and the dried blood the marked the tip of his knife. Then he killed himself.
I didn't even hear the crossbowman's steps behind me. "Luke, for Spirits' sake, the fuck is that smell." Then he saw what I had. "Oh. Shit. That's. That's uh."
He moved to the corner of the room opposite of the still and vomited into the corner. I was still looking at the bodies, wondering how the man had felt. Did he believe he was doing the right thing? He was saving them from a worse death. They would've burnt or starved, and he chose to make it quick, but, did he see it that way? Or did he curse himself and die crying?
The archer was finished puking. I heard the splashing against the wall come to an end. I tried to remember the first time I had seen death. It wasn't Mini. Mini wasn't even close to the first, just one of the more gruesome deaths. I wasn't sure if I had a first sight of death. I think it was just part of life. You never remember what the first thing was you saw or the first thing you ate. Mostly because you're too young for it, but it's just something that happens all the time.
Eventually, we left. And hours later, when I was reading the book held in my right hand with a flame in my left while seated inside Unit 350, reading of the slaughters that had occurred and the thousands of families that had suffered fates identical to that of that family, I attempted to convince myself that once the Fire Nation won, there would be some semblance of order and peace in the world and that such killing would see an end, but there would always be obstacles blocking the way to peace and order.
That night moon high in the sky, I saw that obstacle. It didn't stand out as I had imagined it would. It took me putting out my reading flame and allowing my eyes to adjust before I saw it. The tanks stopped in unison, our squad now reunited with the rest of the 5th Corps, and I knew it was there. On the horizon ahead of me, to the East, I saw it, where the stars and sky ended, and darkness began. Hat was the obstacle in the way: The Black Wall of the Great City of Ba Sing Se.
And we were going to bring it down.