TDBB: Earth's Guardian #10.
Batman's knee came up as the floor moved -- his body rising when the wall of earth came through the tunnel in a single solid plane.
It filled the entire cross-section from floor to ceiling and wall to wall, moving at a speed meant to finish something before that hadn't even begun.
He pulled the charge from his belt and fired it into the center of the block and threw himself sideways through the hole it tore in the stone, rolling through the gap and coming up on the other side in a crouch, his lenses reading the tunnel ahead.
She was standing ten feet away, already in her stance, her weight settled low and her feet spread wide on the tunnel floor, and she was smiling.
"Hello again, Grumpy."
His lenses read the details he needed in the half-second he gave them: bare feet digging into the tunnel floor, ears turning fractionally toward his position, the whole posture of someone pouring attention through the soles of their feet and gathering everything the stone sent back. She was listening hard. Working to find him.
His approach had been silent. The ceramic soles, the insulated gloves, the ground-contact minimization -- all of it was working to his advantage. She hadn't placed him yet. The smile was performance, the ear-turn was real, and the gap between them was information he could use.
He waited, remaining still.
Her hands opened wide at her sides, palms out, and her right foot slid against the floor in a slow, searching arc, and she was still smiling when she said, "Are you that afraid of fighting a blind girl that you came prepared?"
Her hands drew together into a guard position in front of her chest, the stance snapping into something formal and grounded that spoke volumes of her martial arts expertise.
He shot the restraint coil at her center mass.
"Gotcha," she said, at the same moment, and her feet planted and her hands came up and the floor around his boots rose, coating them in a fast ring of compressed earth that locked his feet to the ground.
He felt the pull on his legs as the coil hit her -- not her body, a stone shield she had raised in the half-second between his firing and the coil arriving -- and he was already triggering the release charge on his boots, the ceramic-composite housing shattering the earth ring, and he was free before the shield had finished cracking.
She felt the ring break. He could tell from the way her head moved -- a fractional tilt, recalibrating -- and then she lifted both arms and the tunnel floor heaved upward in a wide, uneven wave that sent stone in every direction at once.
The chaotic spread covered the whole tunnel and had no clean aim, chunks of old brick and compressed earth flying at angles that overlapped and contradicted each other.
He went to the ceiling.
The grapple caught a pipe bracket above him and he swung up and pressed himself flat against the vaulted stone, letting the chaos pass below, his lenses tracking the debris field and finding the gaps.
She was still in her stance below, both arms extended, throwing earth at a spread that covered every ground-level angle she had -- which was impressive and completely ineffective against a target that was no longer on the ground.
She had lost him.
He could see it in the slight uncertainty that had entered her feet, the searching quality of the stance, the way her head was moving in small arcs trying to catch something through the air that would give him a position.
Then a vine dropped from the ceiling to his left, moving fast, and he had to release the grapple and drop before it caught him, hitting the floor and rolling, and as he came up he heard a voice from somewhere above and to his left that had not been in the tunnel before.
"Are you really that blind that you can't see him advancing from the ceiling?"
He heard Toph below him, her arms still extended, her stone still flying, and the sound she made was not embarrassment -- it was something closer to a laugh that she had abbreviated before it finished.
"Knucklehead," she said. "Good, you're here. I almost took him down before you learned something."
"You don't say," Ivy said, from the ceiling anchor.
He drew the ceramic blade and cut the vine in two clean strokes, felt it retract, and landed back on the tunnel floor, his weight distributed across the insulated soles, his position already shifting before his feet had finished settling.
"Ivy." He let the name sit. "Don't tell me you're working with her."
The echo of his voice traveled through the tunnel and the small blind girl below him tilted her head toward the sound with the speed of something that had been waiting for exactly that, and a block of stone came at him from his left before he had finished moving. He took it on his forearm and deflected and moved right.
"Don't say it like we're equals," Toph said, to the space where his voice had been.
He was already two steps from it.
"Really," Ivy said, from a new ceiling position he hadn't tracked. "We haven't even started and you're already assuming leadership."
"I'm teaching you," Toph said. "Of course I'm superior."
"First of all--"
The ground beneath Ivy's position shifted, and he watched through his lenses as the tunnel floor extended upward in two angled platforms that caught her feet and pulled them apart into a stance he recognized -- wide, low, the weight dropped into the hips, every principle of the earthbending martial art rendered in Ivy's body whether she had consented to it or not.
"Ow," Ivy said.
"Quit whining. Your first lesson is form." Toph locked both hands behind her back and lifted her chin, the posture of someone who had done this many times before and expected results. "A widened stance commands control and awareness. Your vines should reach him with sharpened confidence."
Ivy looked at him from her forced position. He could see the calculation running -- the distance, the ceiling route, whether the stance the floor had put her in was something she could work with or needed to fight.
She hesitated.
Toph tilted her head toward her, slow, and said nothing.
Ivy sent the vines.
They went wide. He stepped through them without breaking stride, the tendrils passing on both sides of him, and from the sound Toph made below -- a short, open laugh -- she had felt them miss through the air displacement.
"You missed," she said.
"I noticed," Ivy said.
"Your adapted fighting style sacrifices discipline for intuitive fluidity when you move." Toph's voice had shifted into something he had not heard from her before -- flattened of mockery, focused, the voice of someone transmitting information they considered important. "It's your biggest flaw."
"It works," Ivy said.
"Because you've learned to settle for less." The floor beneath Ivy's feet shifted again, rotating the angle of the platforms slightly, turning her body a few degrees so that her vine reach would cover a different sector of the tunnel. "Try again."
He moved before the vines came this time, going left and up, the grapple finding the ceiling bracket again, and the vines tracked the arc of his movement with a delay.
He released the grapple at the apex and came down at an angle that put him behind her forced stance, and he raised the restraint coil.
"Wrong direction," Ivy said, to the ceiling, and he couldn't tell if she was talking to him or to Toph.
The earth under her feet compressed and pushed, a sudden angled shove that moved her two steps sideways without warning, and the coil fired into the tunnel wall instead.
He looked at Toph, who had both hands still locked behind her back.
"Don't thank me," she said. "I'm adjusting for poor aim."
Ivy made a sound that might have been offense.
The fight found a rhythm after that, and the rhythm was nothing he had planned for. Ivy moved in the stance the floor kept resetting her to, and the stance was wrong for her in ways he could read -- she was a fluid fighter, always had been, her vine work dependent on the freedom to shift and flow and follow instinct -- and the forced form should have been a liability.
It wasn't becoming one.
The vines were changing. He marked the difference somewhere in the fourth exchange -- the reach was cleaner, less predictable, the tendrils moving with a sharpening precision. She was adapting to the form rather than fighting it.
"Keep your back straight," Toph said, from somewhere behind them.
He spun. She was standing fifteen feet away with her hands still behind her back, her feet reading the floor, her head turned slightly away from him as though she were listening to something in the middle distance.
She had been tracking him through the vine displacements.
"Arms lowered," she said, to Ivy.
He went for Toph. She was the variable he couldn't control -- Ivy he knew, could map, had fought before, but Toph standing still in the center of the tunnel with her feet on the stone was more dangerous than Ivy moving on the ceiling.
He closed the distance fast, the ceramic soles giving him less feedback than he was used to, his body adjusting for the reduced ground response as he moved.
She heard him at five feet.
The floor rose between them, a sharp angled plane that would have caught him across the shins, and he vaulted it and came down inside her guard range and she was already spinning away, earth rising where she had been standing as though her feet had left instructions for it before she moved.
The vine caught him across the chest.
He felt the force of it -- more than he expected, the impact carrying a weight and precision that Ivy's vines hadn't had in any of their previous encounters.
It wrapped before he could cut it, a second tendril joining the first, and he felt her pulling, not just holding but actively pulling, the vine contracting at his arms and torso in a way that functioned less like a snare and more like--
"I've never felt this before," Ivy said, with measured awe in her voice. "I'm more connected. They're starting to feel like extensions to my hands."
She pulled Batman off his feet.
He hit the tunnel floor on his side and rolled and came up and the vines came again, and this time he saw what she meant -- Ivy was driving them like limbs, extension of her own body, multiple tendrils moving in coordination, closing and opening, and feinting.
"Stop with the distraction," Toph said, and then the floor under Ivy shifted again, pulling her into a new stance mid-vine-extension, and Ivy stumbled and the vine coordination broke.
He went for the opening.
He crossed the distance and came in low, inside Ivy's vine reach, and he got his hand on her vine anchor at the wrist and pulled, breaking the root connection, and the vines went slack, and he was already pivoting to use her momentum--
The earth rose under him.
A single angled plane that hit him precisely at his center of gravity and lifted him sideways and off his feet, and he had a half-second of being aerial before the second plane hit him from above and drove him down.
He hit the tunnel floor and the breath went out of him and the ceramic sole shattered against the impact and his left foot came down on raw stone.
She had him.
He had the release charge ready and his hand was moving for his belt when the floor under his left foot opened and swallowed it to the ankle and locked closed.
He was pinned.
He looked up.
Toph stood with her hands still behind her back, her feet wide, her chin up, and her head tilted toward him with an expression that he was fairly certain was the same one she had been wearing since she had ambushed him in the dark.
Ivy was three steps behind her, the forced stance gone now, her vine anchors retracted, her breathing audible in the quiet of the tunnel, and she was looking at him with something on her face that wasn't the expression she usually wore when she had him at a disadvantage.
It looked, he thought, like she had surprised herself.
"You got ahead of yourself," Toph said to Ivy. "You can't get excited for unlocking just one-percent of your potential. You've got a mountain to climb, and it's not going to be easy."
He triggered the release charge.
The floor cracked around his ankle and he pulled free and was on his feet and moving before either of them could respond, the retreat route already planned, the ceiling bracket already identified, and he was up and gone before Toph's next wave of stone reached the space where he had been.
He went through a maintenance access and into a higher tunnel and didn't stop until he had two levels and a ventilation shaft between himself and the tunnel below.
Toph clicked.
"I was planning to toss him around like a ragdoll," she said with her genuine voice.
"He'll be back," Ivy said. "He's stubborn like that."
"He's going to be a problem," Toph said, her voice flattening.
"Why does that make you smile?" Ivy was observing.
"Because it's going to be so much fun tormenting him," Toph's grin widened.
Ivy smirked.