The collision was imminent as the world held its breath.
The collision was not a single event, but a symphony of destruction. The first wave of boulders, some as large as village huts, met the swirling corona of Kai's miniature sun. They did not simply shatter or melt—they flash-vaporized. One moment they were solid rock, carved from the bones of the earth; the next, they were incandescent gas and superheated dust, flaring into brief, silent novas before being ripped away by the fiery vortex.
A deeper, heavier tremor followed as the true heart of the barrage,the aggregated work of a thousand earthbenders, slammed home. This was no longer a rain of stones, but a continuous, moving cliff-face of solid earth, an avalanche given direction and hate. Against this, the prince's sun-shield flared blindingly white, its outer layers compressing under the impossible pressure. The sound was not an explosion, but a deep, tectonic groan, a roar of straining elements: the immovable, ancient weight of the earth against the boundless, star-forged fury of the sun.
From within his self-made inferno, Kai felt the strain. His grin, once one of arrogant menace, tightened into a rictus of focused will. He was not a boulder; he was a drill. He was not a shield; he was a forge. The earth sought to smother and crush. His fire sought to consume and transmute. He poured more power into the vortex, not to push back, but to digest. The leading edge of the earthen avalanche began to glow, not with reflected light, but from within, turning molten at its surface, becoming slag, then vapor, fuel for his own conflagration.
Yet the sheer, dumb mass of it was staggering. For a moment, the glowing white sphere was eclipsed, buried under a mountain of dark, grinding rock. From the ground, a ragged cheer began to rise from the Earth Kingdom ranks, had they done it? Had they smothered the sun?
Then, a spear of white fire, hotter and brighter than any before, lanced vertically from the heart of the mound, piercing through hundreds of tons of stone. Another followed, then another, like the rays of a dawn breaking through a colossal tomb. The mountain of rubble shuddered. Cracks of brilliant light spiderwebbed across its surface.
With a final, cataclysmic detonation, the entire mass exploded outward, not from impact, but from a contained, expanding stellar ignition. Kai erupted from the destruction, not as a man, but as a vengeful comet, his Cinder Guard armor flaring to life around him. He had not blocked their attack. He had not survived it.
He had overwhelmed it, using their own weapon as the anvil against which he hammered his power to a new, terrifying edge. The sky was now filled not with projectiles, but with the shimmering, deadly fallout of a mountain turned to ash and glittering, molten rain. He hovered once more, wreathed in tendrils of white smoke and lingering flame, and looked down upon the army. Their greatest collective effort had just been rendered into a harmless, settling cloud.
The message was silent, but deafening: I'm a god and you are mear ants in front of me.
One old master whispered as shimmering lava and magma rained upon them "May the gods be with us"
The old master's whispered prayer was swallowed by a silence more profound than any cheer. The shimmering, incandescent rain of their own mountain, now reduced to superheated slag and magma, began to fall upon the Earth Kingdom ranks.
It was not the fire they had feared. It was something more intimate, more violating. Their element, the very bones of their kingdom, had been turned against them, weeping from the sky in burning tears. Soldiers screamed not from direct attack, but from the sizzling kiss of molten stone on armor, the sudden, agonizing weight of a cooling globule searing through cloth and flesh. The air filled with the acrid stench of scorched earth and ozone, undercut by the horror of their own disintegrated hope.
High above, wreathed in the dissipating energy of his cataclysmic defense, Kai observed the chaos. The menacing grin was gone, replaced by an expression of cold, analytical assessment. He had dissected their collective strength and found it structurally unsound. Now, it was time to apply precise pressure.
His gaze swept across the panicked formations, his enhanced sight—honed by years of dragon-taught perception—locking onto the sources of lingering order: the earthbending masters. They were the pillars holding up the army's crumbling will. They were his true objectives.
With a thought, the Cinder Guard around him flared. Instead of a massive, draining construct, the white fire condensed into sleek, predatory contours along his limbs and back, enhancing his natural form. He didn't rocket forward. He dropped.
He fell like a meteor, but not toward the mass of infantry. He angled his descent, a controlled, silent bullet aimed at the left flank of the formation. Just before impact, jets of white flame roared from his feet and one palm, arresting his velocity with a thunderclap that flattened the soldiers nearby. He landed in a shallow crater of his own making, not with a tremor of earth, but with a whoosh of displaced, superheated air.
He was now among them.
For a heartbeat, there was only stunned paralysis. Then, the nearest earthbenders reacted on instinct, stomping the ground to impale him on stone spikes. Kai didn't move from the spot. A single, fluid rotation of his body, arms extended, and a ring of white fire erupted from him in a perfect, expanding circle. The emerging stone spikes vaporized before they could fully form. The fire ring washed over the first two ranks of soldiers. There were no explosions, just a terrible, silent flash. Where soldiers had stood, there were now only outlines of ash on the ground, their forms disintegrated in an instant.
The path to his target was now clear. Thirty yards away stood Master Lo, a venerable earthbender known for his defensive bastions. Seeing the prince's gaze upon him, Lo slammed his palms to the earth. A wall five feet thick and twenty feet high erupted from the ground, curving to shield himself and a cluster of archers.
Kai took three running steps and leaped, not over the wall, but directly at its center. His right fist, sheathed in the concentrated white fire of the Cinder Guard, drew back. There was no battle cry, only a sharp exhale. He punched.
The stone did not crack. It did not shatter. At the point of impact, it liquefied, a brief fountain of molten rock spraying inward. Kai followed his fist through the newly-made hole in the fortification. Before the stunned Master Lo could reform his stance, Kai's left hand was already extended, fingertips barely an inch from the old master's chest.
A searing, pencil-thin beam of white fire, hotter than a forge's heart, lanced from his fingertips. It pierced clean through Lo's stone armor, his tunic, and his body in the space between heartbeats. There was no visible wound, only a small, smoking hole. A look of profound shock froze on Lo's face before he crumpled, the smell of ozone and cauterized flesh briefly cutting through the dust.
Kai did not pause to look. He was already moving, a ghost of black and white flame flowing through the ranks. He was not fighting an army. He was conducting a grim harvest, and the masters were the ripe stalks. Each engagement lasted seconds: a blade of white fire severing a stone wave; a localized burst immolating a squad; a focused bolt of lightning, smaller and faster than the first, arcing from his free hand to detonate a catapult crew before another master could use it for cover.
He was a scalpel, and the Earth Kingdom army was laid bare upon the table. The old master's prayer hung in the air, unanswered, as the gods, it seemed, were watching from a distant sky, silent spectators to a prince's brutal, efficient art of war.
Twenty minutes later, it was over.
The silence that fell upon the field was absolute and oppressive. Where tens of thousands had stood, now only the dead remained, their forms littering the churned and scorched earth in a grotesque tapestry of defeat. The only soldiers left to bear witness were those who had heeded the primal instinct of survival, fleeing into the hills after the cataclysmic opening bolt. They would carry the story, not of a battle, but of an extermination.
At the center of the devastation, where the command standard lay broken, General Boqin stirred. His magnificent armor was blackened and buckled, one pauldron fused to his scorched flesh beneath. The ground around him was a glassy crater, and the air stank of ozone and cooked meat. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, his massive frame shaking not from weakness, but from a seismic, soul-deep tremor. Through blurred vision, he saw a figure approaching.
Kai walked slowly across the wasteland, the soles of his boots whispering through the fine ash that coated everything. The furious corona of his power was gone, banked to embers. His black armor was unmarred, the red dragon on his shoulder seeming to swim in the hazy air. He stopped a few paces from the broken general. There was no triumph in his golden eyes, only a cold, perfect clarity.
General Boqin looked up, his face a mask of soot and despair. "Monster," he rasped, the word tearing from his throat. "You... are not a soldier. You are a plague."
Kai tilted his head, considering the man before him as he might a interesting but shattered artifact. "A soldier follows strategy," he said, his voice calm, devoid of mockery. It was a simple statement of fact. "A weapon is strategy. You built an army to fight a war. My father built me to end them."
He took a final step closer, looking down at the defeated general. "Your error was in believing you were fighting an army. You were not." Kai raised his hand, not in a fist, but with his palm open and facing downward. A small, beautiful, deadly orb of pure white flame bloomed above it, humming with contained power. "You were merely the proving ground."
Boqin's eyes fixed on the miniature sun hovering above his prince's palm. He did not plead. He had seen the limits of hope evaporate along with his men. He closed his eyes, awaiting the final, merciful negation.
But the searing heat did not come.
After a long moment, Boqin opened his eyes. Kai was watching him, the white flame extinguished. A different, more unsettling calculation had entered his gaze.
"Tell me, General," Kai said, his voice lower now, meant only for the two of them. "The Earth King's court in Ba Sing Se. The generals who whisper in his ear... you know their names. Their dispositions. Their fears."
A flicker of confused defiance sparked in Boqin's pain-clouded eyes. "I will give you nothing, Fire Nation dog."
"You already have," Kai replied, unperturbed. "You have shown me that the Earth Kingdom's strength is a brittle shell. That its greatest army can be reduced to ash by a single will. I do not need you to break. I need you to carry a message."
Kai knelt, bringing himself to eye level with the broken man. His voice was soft, yet every word was as precise and sharp as a surgeon's blade.
"You will live. You will return to Ba Sing Se. You will tell your king, and every general who will listen, exactly what you saw here today. Not as a boast, but as a simple report. Tell them of the white fire. Tell them of the lightning that broke your lines before the battle even began. Tell them how their masters fell not in glorious combat, but in swift, silent eradication."
He paused, letting the horrifying imagery solidify.
"And you will tell them this: The next time I come, it will not be to a field at the edge of your kingdom. It will be to the walls of your great city itself. And I will not be alone. I will bring with me the very fear you feel now, amplified in the hearts of every man, woman, and child within those walls. The choice is simple: hollow defiance followed by annihilation... or an orderly surrender that preserves what remains of your people."
Kai stood, looking down at the general one last time. "That is your strategic objective now, General. Ensure the message is delivered. It is the only service to your kingdom you have left to perform."
Without another word, Kai turned and began to walk away, leaving the defeated general amid the ruins of his command and the ashes of his army. The message was more valuable than any martyrdom. Terror, seeded by a survivor, would spread through the Earth Kingdom's heart far faster and more efficiently than any army could march. The true conquest of the Garsai Field had only just begun.