(Word Count: 2,346)
It wasn't just a straight shot to Ba Sing Se. Even flying on Appa, it took us several days of flying to reach it. This was because we were human, and Appa wasn't a machine. We had to take several stops throughout the day for bathroom breaks, eating meals, and we had to stop before sundown to set up camp.
It was during these times when I would spar with the Gaang. Mostly to get all of their excess energy out of their systems so we didn't all go crazy in the hours of flying on Appa.
With Sokka, I focused on Chi Blocking training. Both because I wanted to level up that skill for myself, and to help Sokka learn it. But as soon as he saw the 100+ different points he had to memorize, he immediately gave up on learning the skill and instead focused on how to best defend against a Chi Blocker. Sticking to his strengths, I guess.
I was more than happy to be the attacker, Chi Blocking him into a paralyzed puddle. There were some far more dangerous effects that a trained Chi Blocker could apply, such as throwing the target's energy out of balance, giving them the shakes and a delirious fever. It was like brute forcing acupuncture on someone, and intentionally getting it wrong in the worst way possible. I didn't want to try those moves on Sokka.
As for Aang and Katara, they were busy learning the techniques from the scrolls I gave them.
Besides Sokka, I spent the most time with Toph, since she had a lot to teach me on actual earthbending techniques and her own personal style. Reading about the techniques from scrolls by myself was good enough for me to get the basic Hung Gar forms down, but Toph helped me learn some good tricks to them.
What I was most happy about was getting the new skill.
[Chow Gar LVL 1/100
The martial arts style that forms the basis of Toph's unique earthbending. Also known as the Southern Praying Mantis Style. A more active version of Hung Gar.
Increases effect of Earthbending by 1%/LVL
This was actually more in line with my style. Most earthbenders used their bodies and muscles to power their earthbending, it's why they're all jacked. They forced the boulders and rocks to move as they wished. But Toph's style was more in tune with the earth, and relied more on her Qi. Which might be why it gives more of a buff towards Earthbending.
We spared everytime we could. It was on our third time sparring that I decided to show off the Earth Softened Steps skill. To her Seismic Sense, I wasn't there.
"What! Where'd you go?" Toph asked in surprise. "How're you doing this?"
"A little earthbending trick," I said behind her. She whirled around to face towards me, startled. With my Stealth, she couldn't hear me either.
"I didn't feel you move!"
"I counteract the small seismic waves I would usually be sending out with a little bit of earthbending to keep the earth still. Try it out, it'll probably be really easy for you." Even as I said that, Toph disappeared from my own Seismic Sense. I had gotten so used to feeling the people around me, that it was kind of trippy to see someone with my sight, but not sense them through the earth.
If it was like that for me, who could still see, it must be unnerving for her, who completely relied on it. I canceled the skill. But my concern wasn't needed.
"Why didn't you use this before, when we were fighting? Were you taking it easy on me?" Toph demanded angrily. "You looking down on me because I'm blind!? Huh!?"
"Wha—No! I'm not looking down on you, I just wanted to properly test my skills in earthbending, that's all."
"This is an earthbending skill! Now come on, fight me for real!" Toph shouted.
"Alright, I see your point," I said. "Come on, let's move a bit aways from the group."
By now, we knew each other's strength pretty well, so there was no need to do any probing strikes the past few times we spared, but this time I was invisible to her. I didn't want to immediately start off with a big strike and hurt her. Maybe she was right. Was I taking it easy on her?
As we spared, the difference this skill made was obvious. She could feel the earth move if I controlled the earth from a distance, but if I dipped my hand into the stone to fling a rock at her, she couldn't see it. She also couldn't see what forms I was using to anticipate what kind of strike I was going to do, so even the moves she could "see" coming, it gave her far less time to react.
She took a rock to the side and went down. "Ah!"
I won, but I didn't feel very good about it. She sat up, and I could see some tears in her eyes. "Toph, I—" But she cut me off.
"Shut up! I don't need any of your pity! Leave me alone!" She said angrily, and she stormed off before I could say another word. I felt bad. Toph took great pride in her skills as an earthbender despite being blind. Now I came along suddenly, able to subvert her senses. Making her blind to my attacks. It must have reminded her of her parents' misconception that she was a fragile girl because of her blindness.
Katara, who had been watching, came up to me. "Don't worry, Callan, I'll go and talk to her."
"Thank you, Katara," I said softly.
About an hour later, Toph came up to me, looking sullen. "Sorry for yelling at you."
I ruffled her hair, making her smack my hand away. "It's all right, Toph. You know, I could teach you a different way to 'see,' if you'd like. I call it Chi Sense. Using this, you can see people's Chi directly. I can also use it to find anyone, anywhere in the world."
Toph perked back up, "you can do that?"
"Yep, anyone can, if they know how. First, you have to learn how to sense your Chi and manipulate it. We can start now, if you want," I suggested.
It shouldn't have been a surprise, because Toph is a master of "neutral jing" but Toph was the best at learning meditation, even better than Katara. Aang didn't count, because he was already an Airbending Master, and they lived off meditation. She quickly picked up on her own Chi, and from there she took to Chi Manipulation and Chi Sensing like a fish to water. Like a badger-mole to ground. Like a—whatever. You get it. Strangely though, she couldn't follow connections to scry on people. Neither could anyone else. Maybe it had something to do with having all my chakras open, so I didn't need to be next to some sort of spiritual site.
She had the most Chi out of anyone else that I've seen, including the old masters Iroh and Pakku, so using Chi Enhancement, she could easily lift boulders over her head without earthbending. I suppressed some evil laughter at the thought of the little earthbending monster I was helping create.
"Wait a second, were you using these Chi skills in our fights before?" Toph asked.
"No. Like I said, I had wanted to only use my earthbending against you to test my skills," I answered.
Toph's eye twitched in anger, but she pushed it down. "Well, now that I know them too, we can go all out!"
"Tomorrow then, it's getting late and we should get some sleep."
The next evening when we stopped for camp, Toph and I had another spar. So things didn't go as far as they did the first time, we had a three strike rule. The first to get 3 hits in won. This time, even using the Earth Softened Steps, she could still sense me clearly through my Chi. Now that we were both using Chi Enhancement, the spar became extremely fast paced. Toph may have a lot more Chi than I did, but I had several skills and some class bonuses that enhanced my earthbending and Chi abilities, putting me on par with her.
We were zipping around the sparring ground, even as the earth churned around us. One moment, I even got in close to try to Chi Block her, but she wrapped herself in some stone armor. I reached out to see if I could seize control of the stone armor to lock her in, but she was actively bending it, so I couldn't.
In the end, I managed to squeak out a win with some quick sandbending strikes, only to be hit a second later with Toph's own strike.
Toph growled in frustration. "You and your sandbending. Enjoy it while you can, I've been practicing it too!" I had felt her practicing both sandbending and metalbending on her own while I sparred with the others.
Sure enough, the next day Toph brought out her sandbending. There wasn't a lot of metal around us, besides what was a part of Appa's saddle, my swords, and a cheep chunk of ore we bought from a small town we passed—which is what Toph had been using to practice her metalbending with—so metalbending wasn't really worth including into our fast-paced sparring right now.
But that wasn't the only surprise she had for me. At the height of our fight, Toph turned the ground around me into lava.
"Lavabending!" I gasped in surprise, and nearly got crushed from a falling boulder. I punched through it, and used an earth pillar to jump out of the ring of lava. "How'd you manage to get lava? I've been trying, but I can't heat up the rocks enough!"
"It's not about heating the rocks! I've been talking to Katara. When a waterbender melts ice, they don't think about heating up the water. They just melt it! Solid to liquid. It's the same with rock! Just melt it!" Toph shouted, shooting globs of Lava at me.
I dove out of the way of the lava. "Woah, hey! I think lava might be a little too lethal for a direct attack. Let's leave Lavabending for terrain control only, okay?"
"Okay," Toph grumbled.
That being said, I tried to follow her advice. Don't think about temperature and all that, just change the stone from solid to liquid. It took a lot of Chi, but the ground between us turned to Lava. "Haha! This is so cool! Thanks, Toph!"
"Don't mention it."
Toph won that round. I didn't mind though, and pulled up my Status Screen to see the description of my new skill.
STATUS SCREEN
NAME: Callan Stone
TIER: 1
GLOBAL LEVEL: 14 31,866/35,347 Exp
CLASS: Swordsman 4 => 5 1,485/1,841 Exp
CLASS HISTORY: Street Rat 10/10, Brawler 10/10, Monk 10/10
STATS:
Str: 34 => 35
End: 59 => 60
Dex: 30 => 31
Int: 15
Wis: 51
Cha: 15
Free Stats:
SKILLS:
Skill Points: 0
[Deception LVL 100/100]
[Forestry LVL 100/100]
[Axe Handling LVL 100/100]
[Wood Chopping LVL 100/100]
[Persuasion LVL 100/100]
[Hammer Handling LVL 100/100]
[Blacksmithing LVL 100/100]
[Sword Handling LVL 100/100]
[Knife Handling LVL 60/100]
[Sewing LVL 42/100]
[Cooking LVL 100/100]
[Leatherworking LVL 23/100]
[Running LVL 100/100]
[Sprinting LVL 100/100]
[Jumping LVL 100/100]
[Leap LVL 60/100]
[Acrobatics LVL 100/100]
[Sneak LVL 100/100]
[Muted Steps LVL 100/100]
[Hide LVL 70/100]
[Meditation LVL 100/100]
[Archery LVL 51/100]
[Carpentry LVL 100/100]
[Sailing LVL 90/100]
[Baguazhang LVL 100/100]
[Chi Manipulation LVL 100/100]
[Chi Sensing LVL 100/100]
[Low Cosmic Connection LVL 29/100]
[Horse Riding LVL 52/100]
[Fishing LVL 100/100]
[Wood Carving LVL 100/100]
[Swimming LVL 73/100]
[Drawing LVL 100/100]
[Haggling LVL 42/100]
[Chi Enhancement LVL 100/100]
[Parry LVL 100/100]
[Dodge LVL 100/100]
[Counter LVL 100/100]
[First Aid LVL 100/100]
[Intimidation LVL 40/100]
[Earthbending LVL 100/100]
[Seismic Sense LVL 100/100]
[Earth Softened Steps LVL 100/100]
[Chi Enhanced Senses LVL 100/100]
[Northern Shaolin LVL 100/100]
[Language(Hanzi) LVL 100/100]
[Calligraphy LVL 100/100]
[Situational Awareness LVL 100/100]
[Painting LVL 32/100]
[Sunder LVL 56/100]
[Pickpocket LVL 1/100]
[Discombobulate LVL 9/100]
[Tai Chi LVL 100/100]
[Singular Attention LVL 100/100]
[Divided Attention LVL 100/100]
[Teaching LVL 100/100]
[Chi Healing LVL 50 => 55/100]
[Pain Tolerance LVL 56 => 59/100]
[Precise Striking LVL 26 => 33/100]
[Sandbending LVL 12 => 65/100]
[Hung Gar LVL 40 => 47/100]
[Metalbending LVL 10 => 14/100]
[Chi Blocking LVL 22 => 54/100]
[Chow Gar LVL 1 => 32/100]
[Lavabending LVL 1 => 5/100]
WP: 3,900 => 4,250
[Lavabending LVL 5/100]
You can bend lava to your will. A sub-bending style of the earthbenders.
Reduces Chi cost of lavabending by 0.1%/LVL
Increases the control over lava by 0.1%/LVL
Increases the amount of lava you can move by 1%/LVL]
I couldn't wait to pull out waterbending moves using lava instead. When I shared this thought with Toph, she began cackling evil laughter. Yeah. Earthbender's rule.
~ CatAR ~
It was when we were in sight of the Serpent's Pass that I remembered an important little detail. There was a family with a pregnant mother that was denied access to the ferry. They only made it to Ba Sing Se because the Gaang was there to escort them across the Serpent's Pass. I wanted to help them. Just to make sure they were there, I used Chi Sense. Sure enough, they were there at the ferry already.
There was also Suki there, and I kind of wanted to meet the full cast. I brought the port to the Gaang's attention.