Disappointingly, finding the culprits once they reached Hai Sin was effortlessly easy. Despite the blasted wreck of Zuko's cruiser being left there for a while already, the saboteurs didn't think about returning to clean it of evidence. Which meant that Azula had quickly spotted a burnt piece of wood sporting the seared brand of its manufacturer.
The barrel of blasting jelly was not the product of any of the hundreds of Fire Nation military war factories - which would otherwise require tediously searching for further information like factory of origin and such - but had been made locally within the continent.
That narrowed things down significantly.
Azula only needed to threaten her less than a dozen people from the governor's office down to the docks before she found the production site. And then it was a quick trip with a small colonial army down to the Seedy Merchant's Pier, with Admiral Daeyang so helpfully lending her a few squadrons of battleships to enforce a blockade.
With the army locking down its land borders and its waterways shut down, Azula decided to wait for a day before entering the smuggler's port. Instead, she sent over a messenger ahead of her to deliver the terms. Hopefully it'd let the thieves and looters stew for a bit towards making the right decision.
"You're treating this like a battle," Mai had remarked in her usual flat tone, and the princess shrugged.
"A message has to be sent. Even disgraced, Zuzu is a member of the royal family. Useful or not, this town is not invaluable."
"So why do you need us for, when you have all these soldiers to order around?"
Azula rolled her eyes at her dour friend. "Because I hadn't expected the perpetrators to be so inept. And I could use both of your help bringing them down when they inevitably try to flee." While Mai made a bored sound in reply, Ty Lee seemed…unsatisfied with the answer.
The princess bit back a sigh. "Plus, I thought it'd be nice to have a bonding session with old friends."
There. As expected, the noble circus performer brightened up immensely. "Well, I was hoping for maybe a trip to the markets or something, but this works too!"
"There's a market down there, you know," Azula replied, suppressing a smirk. "Supposedly stocked with stuff outside of the Fire Nation."
That caught Ty Lee's interest, who then proceeded to ponder at the potential exotic souvenirs she could buy.
Morning came with little incident; a small boat had tried to break through the blockade, but the marines, hardened from the fighting in the North Pole, had easily boarded it and apprehended its water tribe crew. Another group of Earth Kingdom soldiers tried to sneak through the jungle surrounding the port town, but the colonial patrols hunted them down with ease.
Azula ordered all of the prisoners' release with a wave of her hand. It'd serve a decent enough message of the new management in the colonies.
Along with Mai, Ty Lee, and her ever dutiful bodyguards, Azula disembarked onto the largest dock of the town, and was met immediately by a party of cowering traders. The mob tossed several bound and bruised men forward, as if offering sacrifices to a dark spirit. Azula almost grinned at the description she conjured in her head.
"And who are they?" she asked in an unamused tone.
One of the better dressed members of the mob answered. "That's the blasting jelly manufacturer and his people…err, your highness!"
"How…efficient of you." Azula glanced down at the trussed up men, and they stopped writhing and begging for mercy under her gaze. "Now then, none of you strike me as the kind to be stupid enough to try assassinating my brother. And I'm not so unreasonable to blame the spearmaker for a spearman's kills, so…do any of you have any notion of who I can focus my attention on?"
The crowd went into silent murmuring, and the bound men shared looks with each other, clearly terrified but also clearly clueless.
Idiots.
"Surely you have a ledger to track your transactions?" Azula asked patiently.
Azula and her landing party followed the unbound staff back to their factory. Ty Lee thankfully remained on the job and didn't let the stalls along the way distract her, and Mai for all her bored expression was keeping as keen an eye at their surroundings as the bodyguards.
Rather boringly, there was no ambush at all along the way, not even a hint of resistance or deception. Well, Xing did say that the boring operations were the successful ones. Azula got a hold of the books, and it didn't take long for her to notice one particular name standing out with an obscenely large order.
"Zhao?" Her head snapped up to lock onto the trembling factory owner.
"The admiral-"
"Former admiral."
"Y-Yes. He came by to place a b-big order…" the man said in a hurry. "He asked us to d-deliver it to his intermediaries."
So, this might be interesting after all. "And who exactly are these intermediaries?" Azula asked very politely.
The party marched towards the still anchored 'boutique' ship with some haste. There was little worry that the wooden junk ship could escape the blockade, but it was better to get this over with quickly. Fortunately, Azula saw some of the crew still scampering up the boarding ramp, as if their little vessel could offer them sanctuary. As they drew closer, she could even spot spears and other weapons poking out from behind the ship's railings.
"They don't seem to be willing to cooperate. Guards, disable the craft." The princess then turned to her friends with a thin smile. "Come on girls, I heard bonding through combat is a thing."
The bodyguards took a page out of the 11th and blasted onwards with bursts of fire from their feet, hurling fireballs at the sails as they soared towards the back end of the ship. In the meantime, Azula led Ty Lee and Mai straight for the boarding ramp.
Flashes of steel from Mai persuaded the ship's crew to let go of the ramp and seek cover, the throwing knives embedded deep into the wood. Ty Lee closed the distance with a series of leaps, and landed feet first onto a sailor's face. While she began dancing between the ship's crew, Azula propelled herself to join her, catching a preoccupied man with a flying kick to the back of his head.
A pair of bolas flew from somewhere, but a throwing blade intercepted it, cutting through the cord and rendering the balls spinning uselessly away.
One of the larger sailors was prepared to launch a net from some contraption, which Azula promptly dealt with with a burst of blue fire that burnt through the net and knocked the man back. In the meantime Ty Lee darted between armed men, delivering a flurry of well-aimed punches that sent her victims slumping helplessly to the ground.
Between Mai's precise throwing knives, Ty Lee's paralyzing attacks, and Azula's careful application of fire (with how varied these ruffians were she couldn't tell who was the leader), they cleared the deck in under a couple of minutes. Qi Song and the bodyguards arrived just seconds later, reporting that the rudder had been successfully burnt away.
Well, the boring operations were the successful ones.
Azula grinned at her newly secured captives. "Now then, who here wants to make life easy for me and tell me about Zhao?"
It took only some force before they spilled the beans, and Azula had to restrain herself and Mai from lashing out when the simpering captain revealed the pirates' involvement in almost killing Zuko. The princess sent an order to confiscate the ship, allowing her friends to take their pick of souvenirs before whatever's left was turned over to the royal coffers.
As for the captives, she had them brought back for further questioning, and then they were marked to be sent back to the 11th's training ground as training aids. Maybe Zuko would appreciate the gesture.
*****
News filtered in of the Fire Nation's failure at the North Pole. While it was a good piece of news indeed, Hakoda hadn't expected its effect to be quite immediate. Thanks to that siege, the waterlanes had been steadily left vulnerable for months, allowing the warriors of the Southern Water Tribe to harass supply ships and even sink isolated patrol boats.
Hakoda had thought that his warriors would have a few more weeks of such easy pickings, but the Fire Nation had reorganized and recovered itself a bit too quickly, and their fleets returned to the southern half of the seas in vengeful force.
Fuelled by their humiliating defeat, the Fire Nation squadrons were far more aggressive now in their pursuit of Earth Kingdom and Water Tribe raiders. Hakoda's marauders learned it at a high cost when they ran into their first warship in a long time. The ship not only hounded the raiding flotilla with stubborn persistence, but it also sent out a signal flare that called in other squadrons, and soon Hakoda and his men found themselves fleeing from an enemy force four times their number in watercraft, nevermind weight or manpower.
Katjuk's boat was blasted apart by a lucky trebuchet hit, and he and his crew suffered an agonizing death as the waters around him were boiled by firebenders' constant barrage. Tarkuq, Lutak and their vessel were broken by an oversized harpoon.
Other boats were shattered or burnt, but skillfully weaving between the metal monstrosities the remaining Water Tribe warriors were able to eventually wait for the winds to change and slip away from the chase.
It was a miracle that only nearly half their number was lost from that, but Hakoda and his raiders were left stranded on the Earth Kingdom continent for the time being. Thankfully, the southern states were very generous with their aid, and thanks to the farsighted plans laid by the captured King Bumi, the warriors of the Southern Water Tribe were not only rearmed and resupplied, but would soon have steam-powered boats of their own.
"King Bumi had initially had construction underway to hand these ships over to your people as soon as he could, but we had to restart production from scratch when the Fire Nation took over Omashu," Baron Yoru explained as he hosted the warriors in his spacious manor. "There're shipyards established across various realms. The ships would still take a while to finish, unfortunately."
Baron Yoru's news was comforting, and Hakoda was glad that the states of the southern Earth Kingdom were still actively resisting the Fire Nation's conquest. Better than the laconic reaction of those in the east, at least. From all he heard about it, Ba Sing Se remained aloof and barely involved in the long war, only sending out their armies to rebuff advances towards the city and nothing else. The states around the Impenetrable City were only safe because of their accidental proximity.
In contrast, Baron Yoru and the other rulers of the southern states were in constant communication with one another, cooperating under the missing leadership of King Bumi who had managed to not only rally them, but keep their support even after his capture.
"Our forces are being marshaled at Duke Nhung's and Count Tsou's lands, which borders captured Omashu. While they fight in the front lines, other states are channeling their resources towards ensuring the men are properly equipped and have enough to eat."
Baron Yoru huffed a bit as he boasted of his own contributions. "I've opened up mines in my land to feed the smelters. At the same time, the refugees have settled in to farm more land. With some more time, I'm sure that we can retake Omashu and free King Bumi."
"My warriors have been greatly diminished, but we can still fight, if you'll have us." Hakoda offered the baron, more than happy to join such an active coalition. His men were also eager to avenge the fallen, so the Water Tribe fighters took their raiding onto land.
They had no benders, but hardened from fighting whale walruses and packs of polar bear hounds, the warriors held their own as they clashed with Fire Nation patrols behind enemy lines. Now armed with metal weapons and armor, Hakoda's raiders quickly became a force to be reckoned with. Fire resistant lacquered shields allowed them to charge right at firebenders, while metal lamellar armor allowed them to fight through spear lines and hails of arrows.
Hakoda was particular with his targets; his men only went after patrols or outposts, and kept away from the settlements. The border towns and villages were all conquered Earth Kingdom people, after all, and liberating a town would be a short-lived thing.
"Until we can push them back, freeing a town in the middle of enemy territory might just see its inhabitants slaughtered when the Fire Nation returns in force." The baron's reasoning was depressingly sound, so Hakoda did all that he could to keep the enemy's ruthless attention away from the innocent.
Unfortunately, he realized too late that his force became too successful. For all their mobility and cunning, Hakoda awoke in the middle of one night to urgent news.
"Hakoda, we have to move!" Bato said as he returned from his scouting in a panic. "Fire Nation forces are headed this way!"
A night march? That sounded desperate. Yet…
"How big?"
"Enough," his old friend answered with a gasp of air. "They bear the scorpion on their standard."
The raiders immediately broke camp, knowing better than to seek a futile last stand. They were about to move out, but muted bursts from faraway made Hakoda turn to the forest canopy. He didn't see anything but the movement of leaves, but that was enough for his warriors' instincts.
"Everyone, ready yourselves for attack." Thankfully, that order was redundant, as his warriors were already rushing to arm themselves.
The raiders of the Southern Water Tribe were just about to enter formation when shadows fell from the night sky and landed amongst them. The campfires gave the armored forms a menacing, blood red appearance. Their faces were masked under chainmail veils, adding to their air of dread.
"Surrender, raiders." The voice was young. Hakoda was briefly reminded of Sokka, and then his heart almost froze as he realized who was speaking.
"Never, Scorpion." The chieftain grimly lowered his blade, and his warriors quickly closed into formation, shields forming a protective shell. The Scorpion shifted into a bending stance in response…
…and the expected barrage of fire did not appear. Instead, Hakoda gasped in surprise as the air around him turned colder than his home, snuffing out the campfire and causing his nose, mouth and lungs to burn from the rush of cold air. The raiders staggered, reduced to shivering under their metal armor. Their formation faltered, and only then did the shadowy figures pounce.
Calling it a fight would be too generous. Hakoda and his men were wrangled up with barely any resistance.
"Never say never," came the Scorpion's voice as the faceless monster loomed over him.