Of Lordships and Dark Spirits 6

Lee walked through the warehouse, his eyes taking in the scuff marks on the floor, the discolored sections of wall, the disturbed dirt, and the red flower that had been left behind. Walking up to a clean section of floor, where crates of rice and other goods used for taxes had been, he knelt down. His fingers trailed along the stone floor, picking up the residue on the floor before he brought it up to his nose and breathed deeply.

Dirt, sawdust, animal fur. Opening his eyes, Lee made his way to the westward wall and ran his palm against it, feeling the stone where it was discolored. It looked like the standard color of stone, the sort of blotches and patterns found in the stone common to this area. But the edges were too sharp in places, too curved in others. It would pass a casual examination, but failed on closer examination.

“This was where you came in,” Lee murmured, leaning close and rapping against it with a knuckle. Hollow. Stepping back, Lee took a breath before channeling a touch of power from Vaatu into his arm and lashing out with a punch that shattered the hollow wall.

Stepping into the tunnel, Lee narrowed his eyes as his gaze easily found tracks and grooves from cart wheels. It seems the Red Lilies had been stealing from this warehouse for some time. The lack of light would make following the tracks difficult for most, but another gift from Vaatu let Lee see even without light.

“Let’s see where this leads,” Lee mused quietly, drawing the twin swords he’d grabbed before going undercover for this mission. There’d be a time to use Vaatu, but if the Red Lilies realized they were fighting someone with a very distinct and recognizable spirit weapon, they’d scatter. As is, they’d send more people to die before they wised up and tried to escape.

The tunnel hooked a short ways in, heading North and down, under the city proper. Following the tunnel, Lee kept a careful mental map of his path. There weren’t any branching paths yet, but he’d had earthbenders try and lose him in mazes before. It never worked, even in times like now when he didn’t have Vaatu out.

After five minutes, Lee came to an opening, leading to a massive cavern. Glancing on either side of the opening, and mentally scoffing at the lack of guards, Lee stepped onto the walkway and looked down into the cavern. Immediately, Lee felt his blood boil. Down below, there were cages filled with people, men, women, and children, in tattered clothes and broken eyes. Earth Kingdom, Fire Nation, even some that looked to be from the Water Tribes.

“Hurry it up ya slackers, the bosses’ll be here soon!” a woman’s voice shouted, pulling Lee’s attention and focus.

In the middle of the cavern, a woman stood atop a pillar of stone, her hands on her hips as she shouted orders to the dozen or so underlings scurrying about back and forth, moving crates and sacks to stacks behind the cages.

The hustle and bustle below gave Lee an idea, sheathing his twin swords, he snuck down to the lower levels. Hiding behind some of the crates, he waited for a single underling to come close before giving a quiet whistle. The underline set down the crate he’d been carrying, before making his way over to where Lee was hiding, a look of confusion on his face. Moving behind the underling, Lee quickly snapped the slaving criminal scum’s neck, before quickly swapping clothes with him.

The rest of Lee’s plan was still a work in progress, but he could move about easier now. A bit of posturing, and the body was hidden in a small alcove that should be hard to find and was positioned so he looked like someone taking a nap. It wouldn’t fool anyone who tried to wake him, but hopefully it would give Lee enough time to figure out who the bosses that the woman had mentioned were. If they were high enough up the chain, then maybe he could decapitate the Red Lilies in a single go.

Glancing around, Lee attached himself to the back of a group of the gangsters hustling across the cavern. As they walked past the woman barking orders, Lee’s eyes quickly took in her features and what she was wearing. She looked like an average woman from deep in the Earth Kingdom, but most curiously, slung over one shoulder and across her chest was a waterskin, the particularly long kind that he’d only ever seen used by waterbenders. Interesting, mixed heritage? Would give her an advantage against those that didn’t know in advance, but now Lee would be prepared for it.

Lee was caught off guard, as was everyone else, when one of the far walls all but exploded. Drawing his procured swords, Lee couldn’t help but stare in shock as a rush of fur clad men and women came rushing in, carrying what looked to be roughly shaped yet fine quality blades. A few of them were earthbenders that used the rocks they’d knocked down in their entrance, but the majority appeared to be nonbenders.

“Badgermoles!” the woman in charge shouted, reaching out and pulling up a whirling slurry of dirt and rock around her.

“That’s right, dipshits!” a voice called out, one that Lee recognized. Once again, he stared in shock at the entrance as the blind earthbending girl he suspected to be his fiance strode in, dressed in brigandine armor, fists on her hips, and a cocky grin on her face.

Slipping to the side, Lee watched with a mixture of frustration and fascination as the two criminal groups clashed. Well, he wasn’t one to look a gift ostrich-horse in the beak. With the unexpected distraction occupying the Red Lilies' attention, Lee found a side tunnel and snuck away. He’d let the Badgermoles handle the Red Lilies, he had a large amount of tax payments to find and recoup.

Making his way deeper into the base, Lee utilized one of the gifts that Vaatu had given him, drifting up into the air, his body hugging the ceiling out of sight. Dozens of gang members raced past under him, but as Lee had come to expect: they didn’t look up.

Coming out of the tunnel and dropping to the floor, Lee found himself in what looked to be a major store room. Nearly the size of the dining hall at Ba Sing Se, the walls were lined with crates as was the middle. It seemed that Lee would have his hands full in getting the goods returned to their proper owners. A walk through the rows of crates showed that at the very least, the Red Lilies were organized. Each and every crate had a label on it, with some sort of code that looked like it belonged to a record keeping system. Now he just needed to find a cipher or book containing the code.

As had happened many times in the past, the lack of subtlety in traditional earthbending alerted Lee in time for him to avoid an attack. The sound of stone cracking was impossible to miss, and Lee was moving the moment the sound reached him. The ground that he’d been standing on shattered under the boulder that had been slammed there like a blacksmith’s hammer, and Lee’s eyes snapped back and forth, trying to spot the attacker.

“Not bad, not bad at all,” a raspy voice chuckled from a walkway above.

The man had the look of a pirate, the loose fitting clothes and heavy tan saying more than his bending. He leapt over the railing, the stone floor rippling like water before lifting him up and smoothing out. Lee rolled his neck and held his blades at the ready. The earthbender chuckled, before he clapped his hands together and held them out, palms open. Having seen (and used) that trick before, Lee rolled to the side, moments before two stone wrapped warhammers flew through the air where his spine would have been, their position shifting so the handles slapped into the criminal’s hands.

“You’ve been around a while, in order to have seen that coming,” the man noted, using the edge of one hammer to scratch at his chin, his eyes considering. “Ya look to be of Fire Nation stock, probably from the ‘Colonies’, most from the Fire Nation Islands join the Navy. The fact that you’re here means you went merc, either before the end of the war or once it ended. Doesn’t matter, you’re here looking for something we took, and are getting paid to retrieve it. Was it the dress? I told Bing hitting that caravan was too risky, not only did we lose a dozen men to that bitch, but now we got more heat than we can afford.”

Lee didn’t say a word, but mentally, he was taking careful note of what was said. The presence of the Badgermoles had already told Lee that he wasn’t the only one that the Red Lilies had hit recently, and from the way that the earthbender was talking there was more going on than just the Badgermoles and himself. Either way, Lee decided to take advantage of his opponent’s monologuing.

Pushing off with his left foot, Lee all but threw himself forwards, right blade leading. The criminal laughed, bringing his hammers around to parry Lee’s blades, before stomping the ground and using his earthbending to create a small pillar under Lee’s right foot. His balance ruined by the unusually subtle use of earthbending, Lee barely managed to avoid having his head pulped by either of the warhammers.

Falling back, Lee’s mind raced. He was still trying to avoid outing himself as the new Lord, but sticking to just martial combat was looking to be a losing prospect. Fortunately, he’d already been made as having Fire Nation heritage, so utilizing his firebending wouldn’t be particularly damning. Taking a deep breath, Lee called upon his flames, making the criminal’s grin stretch even wider.

“That’s it, gimme a real fight!” he crowed in delight before slamming both his warhammers into the ground, using them to focus his bending and create a pillar of rock that he then began sending Lee’s way with swift, spinning twirls of his twin hammers. Bobbing and weaving around the stone projectiles, Lee brought his blades around, sending gouts of carefully controlled fire at the other man.

The earthbender laughed, pulling up stone walls to serve as barriers, blocking the fire sent his way, the flames licking around the wedge-shaped stone defense. Lee smirked, it was a difficult maneuver, requiring an immense amount of control and focus, but clenching his fist as much as possible, he pulled on the flames that had been sent to either side of the man’s attempted defense. The man’s cry of surprise and pain was accompanied by the sizzle of flashed-boiled sweat, the heat converting the results of the man’s physical efforts into steam.

It was a terribly painful thing to experience, and the source of the overwhelming majority of burns caused by firebenders. The sorts of flames created didn’t last long enough to cause burns on their own, unless a firebender manually maintained it, but the water secreted from the body as sweat, turned into steam while it was still on the skin? That was a different story.

The slabs of stone were sent flying away, forcing Lee to drop to the ground in order to avoid decapitation, and the now red-skinned earthbender glared hatefully at Lee.

“I was going to have some fun, play with you a bit. But now you’ve gone and made me mad. Before your death would have been quick, relatively painless, and easy. Now? I’m going to get creative, and I’m not going to let you die any time soon. Think I’ll get Kesha to chip in, see if she wants to top the impalement of the old boss,” the man growled, practically spitting out his words. He stalked towards Lee, spinning his hammers as he did. “Think I’ll start by using those swords of yours to chop off your hands and feet, keep you from running off or picking up a weapon. Maybe cut off a leg at the knee, give it to Shavan to cook up and serve to you after a week of nothing but water.”

Lee tuned out the rest of what the man was saying, hopping to his feet, and utilizing one of the more subtle gifts that Vaatu had given him. It didn’t have a specific name, but it amounted to a curse placed upon a target, making it so that attacks from Lee bit just a bit deeper. It was obvious that the man was more martially skilled than Lee, and at this point, attempting to continue with weapons that he was only passingly familiar with would get him killed. So Lee sheathed his twin dao, and shifted into a firebending stance, his eyes hard as he stared down the man.

The tense moment was shattered, along with the wall, as the brigandine clad form of the Badgermole leader burst through the wall and with two smooth movements had the Red Lily earthbender buried up to just below his nose in the floor.

She turned to Lee, eyebrow quirked and asked, “What’re you doing here, Squatter?”

Blinking in surprise at the mood whiplash, Lee just gestured to the abundant number of crates, “My pay is somewhere in here, I kinda need it. Why are you here?”

She snorted in amusement, walking towards a stack of crates before she answered, “These dickweeds stole something from me. I might not be particularly happy about it, but it’s the one thing you should never steal from a girl, especially if said girl happens to be the greatest earthbender in the world.”

Lee raised an eyebrow, somehow not surprised by her bold claim. It seemed like a fitting part of her, having the ego to claim a title like that. All the same, he’d seen plenty of powerful and skilled earthbenders, spirits; he'd been fortunate enough to survive a battle that managed to draw out King Bumi.

“If you’re a bit more specific, I could probably help you look,” Lee offered as he approached her, his path leading him by the trapped Red Lily earthbender.

Meeting the hateful gaze of the man, Lee infused a greater amount of Vaatu’s power than he normally would into a fire blast, turning the flames a dark purple, before sending it into the man’s head. Flesh rotted from the dark, twisted energies, even as the flames burned away the moisture.

“What the?!” Lee’s probable fiance shouted as she turned around, eyes wide despite her blindness.

Lee raised both hands, “I couldn’t take the risk of you getting distracted and him escaping. Plus from everything he said, I would be surprised if he hasn’t done enough to earn a death sentence in every nation. He was going to be executed regardless, this way it removes the chance of him slipping away to cause trouble down the line.”

Even without sight, her eyes narrowed as she fixed Lee with an intense stare. But, after a minute or two, she relaxed from her bending stance and snapped, “Maybe so, but it wasn’t your place to decide that.” Before she turned away. Despite that, she spoke again, “I’m looking for a fancy dress, I’m told it’s green.”

“Wedding dress?” Lee asked as he made his way to some of the boxes to help her look.

“Unfortunately.”