Enemy resistance was sluggish and disorganized. The dirt-diggers had plenty of soldiers and benders, but seeing our forces breach the hitherto unbreakable wall had simply been too much of a shock for its defenders. Some groups fought with desperate tenacity, but most threw down their weapons at the first real push accompanied by a promise that their lives would be spared.
There were also those who tried to burrow underground and lie low so they could strike at our rear, but Toph was the one who sniffed those out, after which she forcibly hauled them out and restrained them with the help of the Kyoshi Warriors.
Housing and organizing the prisoners also became one of the most difficult parts of the operation, forcing me to personally run all over the occupied bridgehead while making liberal use of Blast as a living illustration of why causing trouble was a bad idea. Azula was running headquarters in the meantime, with Zuko acting as her right hand... and, really, we found something for everyone to do, even Ty Lee, who seemingly had nothing whatsoever to do with command duties, never mind Mai, Iroh, and Suki.
And yet the excited tension of those first few hours—that feeling, heavily laced with exhilaration, when you plunge headfirst into the final stage of some enormous undertaking, greeting every new report with anticipation and rushing to be everywhere at once in hopes of squeezing out the best possible result and then just a little more on top of it—had begun to recede by the end of the first day of the offensive, worn down both by natural exhaustion and by... some rather strange facts.
The thing was, while the shock and passivity of the enemy troops had been understandable immediately after the Avatar fled and the drill broke through, the more time passed, the stranger their behavior became.
Five hours into the offensive, no one was even trying to resist us anymore—they were running. Along the wall in both directions and beyond it. Not even running—fleeing, throwing away their weapons and armor as they went. No one tried to counterattack us, drive us back, tunnel beneath the drill to bury it...
The command of Ba Sing Se's defensive forces wasn't doing anything!
Not immediately after the breach, and not later, when any initial shock should have worn off and it should have been time to bring up the reserves. And that was both strange and unsettling.
By morning, my congenital paranoia was screaming bloody murder that something was going on here! Surely this had to be some kind of elaborate scheme! A provocation! The Earth King was Cunning! They'd been under siege for a hundred years! They obviously had a Plan! And some kind of strategy. They had to!
But interrogating the prisoners shattered every last one of my expectations. And not just mine. We all... How should I put this... We were all a little... completely fucking dumbfounded by what we learned!
Then we verified it.
And double-checked it.
And then we ordered several civilians rounded up from completely different settlements and questioned them too...
"I don't understand any of this," Mai admitted, staring blankly at the ground. "I... don't even know what to call it."
"This is some kind of... disgrace," Blast, normally a man of very few words, muttered with much the same expression, but... he was right. I couldn't bring myself to describe the situation any other way either.
"Maybe it really is some kind of trick? A provocation meant to lure us into a trap?" Zuko's voice sounded almost plaintive. And hopeful.
"Unfortunately," Iroh said, nervously sipping his tea, "I have to admit that seems unlikely. We have officers, enlisted men, and civilians in our custody. I could believe the soldiers had been instructed on what to say and how to say it, although even that is already stretching credulity, but... we've questioned several dozen ordinary people from completely different villages. And every one of them says the same thing."
"So, to summarize..." Azula rubbed the bridge of her nose. "According to them, the Earth Kingdom isn't at war. There is no war. At all. Everything is peace, tranquility, and happy ostrich horses... Even the refugees eventually 'forget' entirely that our troops are out there beyond the wall... And everyone is convinced that the walls of their city are unbreakable, so the fact that we broke through one of them caused a full-blown panic. 'General Sung was last seen fleeing the Wall, hysterically screaming, "We're all going to die!"'" she quoted from our interrogators' report.
"How is this even possible?!" She finally abandoned any attempt at maintaining a calm tone and let her emotions loose, looking up at us in the fervent hope that someone could provide a rational explanation as she planted both hands firmly on the tabletop.
"Well... let's say the government doesn't want to cause panic among the population by reporting the actual battlefield situation..." I scratched the scar above my eyebrow. "But... I think they may have taken that a little too far."
"Yeah, just a liiittle," Toph drawled. She was slightly bleary after spending an entire day on her feet, but the news had left her looking every bit as stunned and a little goofy as the rest of us.
"What kind of idiot king sits under siege and, instead of preparing everyone to fight, pretends everything is fine?!" That was Suki, and her eyes likewise reflected complete and utter disbelief at what we'd just learned…
***
Meanwhile, at the Royal Palace of Ba Sing Se.
"So you weren't able to do anything?" asked a sturdily built man dressed in the traditional, even somewhat archaic, clothing of the Earth Kingdom.
"No." Aang lowered his head dejectedly. "That thing is too big. Maybe I could've found some way to break it, but the Herald is guarding it! And Prince Zuko is with him, along with some strange girl with blue fire, another guy like her, the Kyoshi Warriors, and a scary old man who shoots lightning!"
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The story is steadily approaching its conclusion. Over the coming weeks, the final chapters will continue to be released on my P@treon at the usual pace, and the complete story will soon be available there. Updates here, however, will become considerably less frequent.
P@treon: /SadRaven