The crackling hiss of fireballs whizzed towards her.
Toph could see the way Katara's body arched gracefully through her waterbending stances, noted the direction she was facing, and listened for the sharp hiss as a whip of water shot forwards to slice through a few of the fireballs. A few, but not all.
She quickly stomped her foot, and a wall of stone sharply grated upwards in front of her moments before the remaining fireballs crashed into it. Even then the impact was stronger than she'd anticipated, and she flinched as her wall chipped and shattered, allowing a few licks of flame to slip through and peck her cheek.
Though she'd been blind all her life, Toph could never recall feeling of being truly unable to see until now. Her earthbending sense was a great substitute for regular eyesight, and made her uncannily perceptive in ways that few expected, but one of its major flaws was that she could not actually see any attack coming towards her that was not connected to the ground.
Even against other earthbenders she couldn't see boulders that were lifted up and separated from the ground, as the vibrations she sensed through her feet no longer reached them.
She'd learned to surpass that flaw by instead learning to read her opponent's body language. Benders relied on stances and katas to guide the energy within themselves in the proper way to create the effect they desired, and though each nation's forms differed in style they all shared the same key rules. To channel your energy in one particular direction, and thus launch an attack in that direction, some part of your body also had to move in that direction.
To make attacks that twisted, spun or did other fancy tricks, you had to emulate those tricks yourself. Weaker attacks needed smaller movements, whereas strong attacks required you to really settle into your footwork and move with your entire body.
By using her unparalleled abilities at reading an opponent's body, and through a lot of trial and error at Earth Rumble, Toph had learnt to predict the exact size, speed and form of an attack coming her way before her opponent had even unleashed it. Building a solid defence was so much easier when you knew exactly what kind of attack was coming your way.
She'd used to think herself invincible. Then Aang had come along and knocked her off her high horse, and Toph had been forced to realise that the world was much wider than the Earth Rumble ring.
She wasn't the only one to develop powerful and unusual skills, and against someone who could walk on air her greatest strength had meant nothing. It was a humbling yet exciting experience. Toph had realised that joining the Avatar and travelling with him would broaden her world-view, and fighting other unusual people would teach her how to become even stronger.
Just her luck then that the very first enemy she met could not only fly as well, but seemed hellbent on slaughtering each and everyone one of them on the spot.
Tanya really was every bit the demon people said she was. Not only had she figured out the trick behind Toph's sight from a single skirmish, but she was ruthlessly exploiting it. For the most part she focused her fire on Katara, but the moment Katara tried to counterattack she would suddenly change target to Toph, forcing Katara to check her own moves and move to assist her teammate.
It is humiliating being reduced from a master earthbender to a complete liability through a single trick, but the worst part was that Toph couldn't even ask Katara to stop. If Katara didn't move to defend her, she'd have literally no way of knowing where an attack was coming from before it was too late.
And it was exhausting Katara. Each sudden change in step, each half-completed attack, was wasting her energy. If this continued Katara would collapse eventually, and somehow she doubted that Tanya would be merciful.
"I must say I'm surprised. I thought The Avatar would be searching for a master earthbender to learn from." Tanya mocked, her taunts punctuated by the hiss of a second round of fireball. "Standards must really be slipping in the Earth Kingdom if this is the best a master can do. Or perhaps what they say about earth being the inferior element is true?"
Katara was moving again, and the crack of water colliding with fire signalled that she had intercepted whatever Tanya had thrown at them. With a frustrated growl, Toph stomped her foot hard and sent a wave of sharp shards of stone arcing into the air in the rough direction she'd heard Tanya talking from. She would not stand around while that demon mocked her element! She would not be useless!
"Yikes. Not even close." Tanya's voice rang out again from far to the right. By the spirits she was fast! "And here I'd hoped for something more challenging than your typical rock-chucking brute. Guess it's my fault for raising my expectations."
Something touched the ground. It was not a person, not even a solid, but it was powerful, and spread quickly along the ground and rushed towards them like a wave, incinerating every blade of grass in its path. A flame wave! Toph stomped her foot again, raising a thick wall of dirt in front of her and Katara a second before the fire washed over them. Even if she couldn't see it, she could feel the intense heat baking the air around them.
Katara crouched down against the wall besides her. From her gasping breaths and the thumping of her heartbeat, Toph was reminded how punishing this fight had been on Katara so far.
"Here I thought we'd be getting the easy fight, what with it being two-on-one after all." Toph griped, shrinking hunched closer into herself as the edges of her dirt wall began to crack and fracture under the heat.
Katara ground her teeth together in frustration. "She's exploiting your blindness. It's what she does: find a person's weakness and use it to break them."
A few hours ago, Toph would have kicked off a rampage at the implication that she was the weakness. But after her not-chat with Blue, Toph took a moment to consider that Katara wasn't really saying that. She wasn't slandering her; just pointing out that the circumstances of this fight left her unable to fight at her best, and that Tanya was cunning enough to take advantage of that.
When faced with that humbling realisation, there was only one option left to take.
"I… am holding you back." Toph admitted reluctantly. Ugh! She hated admitting vulnerability. Earthbenders were supposed to be tough damn it! "Until Tanya can be brought down to the ground, I'm doing you more harm than help."
To her credit, Katara didn't take the opportunity to be all sanctimonious. She was in warrior mode right now, and just nodded sharply to show her understanding. "Tanya won't let you escape."
A toothy grin spread across Toph's face. "Don't worry, I have a way around that."
...
Tanya liked to think that she was an intellectual. Someone who let logic, not emotion, guide their thoughts. Yet even she couldn't deny that crushing Katara so utterly was turning out to be a therapeutic experience.
Perhaps she was carrying a bit of a chip on her shoulder from Omashu, or perhaps the stress of recent events had wound her up tighter than she'd care to admit to herself, but having the opportunity to chuck fire at someone she could admit she genuinely hated at this point was cathartic.
What good fortune it was that The Avatar had picked up the worst possible ally to face her. Tanya had fought hundreds of earthbenders already throughout this war, and in her experience their styles rarely varied. The rigid, inflexible movements needed to create the solid defences they prized were a poor matchup to the agility and manoeuvrability of her propulsion style firebending.
The blind girl had demonstrated an immense skill at earthbending in their little skirmish earlier, but once Tanya had questioned how a blind person could even fight at that level and reviewed the memory of the encounter, she'd quickly figured out that the girl could sense movement across the earth.
Being able to twist the weaknesses of that ability to hinder Katara had been a gamble, but she'd been right that the Avatar and his companions had bleeding hearts for anyone not from the Fire Nation, and could never bring themselves to leave even a new teammate unprotected.
Deciding that she'd let them sizzle long enough, Tanya stopped the stream of flames she was firing at the dirt wall and began to circle around it, prepping a new fireball to launch at them from an unblocked angle. The moment she caught a flash of blue clothing she threw it, twisting the shot so that it'd curve around the corner of the wall and hit Katara dead in the centre of mass.
It wasn't surprising when a whip of water lashed out at the last minute, slapping into the fireball and causing them both to erupt into a burst of mist.
Tanya continued to circle around, launching volley after volley of fireballs through the mist. With her vision obscured by the mist surrounding her, Katara would struggle to see the fireballs coming and would be hard pressed to react in time to defend both herself and her new friend. The orange flames sunk hungrily into the mist, and Tanya strained her ears to pick up the cries of the girls as her projectiles found their targets.
Yet no cries came. Just the hiss of water spearing through fire, followed by the thickening of the mist.
She'd intercepted them all in such poor visibility? Despite herself, Tanya had to admit to being a little impressed. Katara really was growing stronger at an alarming rate. If she wasn't taken out as soon as possible, she would become a considerable threat to the Fire Nation one day.
All the more reason to kill her here and now.
...
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