TDBB: Tuff Wars 2.12
The manhole cover shot upward and clattered against the road. Toph rose after it with her bare feet finding the tar and her shoulders rolling under the weight of the noise that hit her the moment she broke the surface.
Every building shrieked through her soles with a frequency that made her teeth grind. Vines spilled out behind her in a green flood that coiled around the lampposts and found the cracks in the walls.
People saw the green and started screaming. A woman dropped her bag and ran. A man shouted that it was her, the poison Ivy, and the panic spread in a wave that rippled down the block. Ivy stepped out of the tunnel and smiled at the sound of it, her head tilting as she drank in the fear.
Then she looked at Toph.
Toph had gone still. Her knees bent and her hands came up to her head and she swayed on her feet like the ground beneath her was tilting. Ivy moved toward her and the concern cut through the pleasure in her voice.
"You okay, Toph?"
Toph threw her arms out and planted her feet and brought her heel down in a stomp that sent a shock through the bedrock and shook every building on the street. Dust jumped from the ledges and glass rattled in the frames and she threw her head back and shouted at the sky.
"Stop screaming at my feet!"
She stomped again and threw her hands to the sides and the buildings groaned. "These buildings are too loud."
She closed her hands into fists and the concrete along the walls began to crack. She pulled her elbows in and the cracks widened and ran across the road, connecting both sides in a jagged web that split the ground open. She widened her stance and brought her hands down and said it again.
"I'll bring them down."
The concrete crumbled. The walls folded and the buildings came down in a roar of dust and stone that rolled through the street in a wave of debris.
"All of them."
Toph stood in the middle of it with her arms loose and her chest rising and falling while people ran around her in a chaos of screams and falling glass.
A man yelled that it was an earthquake. A woman shouted for someone to call the police. From somewhere deeper in the panic a voice rose in anguish about cabbages.
Toph listened to it all and turned her head toward the sound of the running feet. "I'm here for the stone and the steel. The rest of you can keep your panic."
Ivy laughed and her vines spread across the ruined ground and found the ankles of a man who had fallen. She lifted him and another tendril found a woman by the wrist. "Maybe you are, but I've got better things planned."
A man screamed for someone to save the little girl. Another voice broke and cried out for the bat.
Toph sank deeper into her stance and the remaining buildings on the block began to tilt. She turned the ground beneath them into silt and let them drop, their frames twisting as they fell.
"I want a forest here when I'm done," she told Ivy. "Don't get distracted."
The road surface split and the buried pipes tore open. Water burst from the iron at the curb and mixed with the sparks from a broken transformer that hung from a leaning pole.
Signs exploded in showers of glass and metal. Toph felt the water coming and she pushed the ground up in a ridge that kept the spray away from her feet, her lip curling at the wetness that tried to reach her.
She felt the people through the stone. She pushed boulders and slabs of broken wall across their paths and sent them sliding into the gaps where the street had opened, herding the crowds away from the collapsing facades while the stone slid between them and the walls.
She split the earth and made channels that carried the screaming masses toward the open side streets.
Ivy's vines found another target and Toph felt the snap of a neck through the vibration in the root. She clenched her teeth and sliced the vine with a blade of stone that shot from the ground and pushed the body away with a sweep of her arm. She sent another rock into Ivy's next tendril and knocked it aside before it could close around a firefighter's throat.
"Can I at least have fun with them?" Ivy asked, her voice honeyed with pleasure as she watched the red lights approaching.
Toph turned toward the sirens and felt the heavy trucks and the cars full of armed men. She kicked the earth and a wave of stone lifted a fire truck and threw it into the side of a building that was coming down. She kicked again and a police car sailed over the block and crashed into the empty space beyond.
The officers who came on foot raised their weapons and she bent the guns before they could fire, the barrels twisting into knots and the magazines spilling onto the ground. She kicked the air in front of her and the stone answered, lifting the remaining officers and tossing them in a high arc that carried them over the wreckage and deposited them far beyond the block.
Ivy sighed. "You're no fun."
Toph looked at her. "There's no fun fighting weaklings." She kicked the ground and another stone wave caught the last of the firefighters and carried them into the distance.
Toph stood in the center of the ruined street and felt the weight of what she had done. The buildings were gone. The road was a field of broken stone and twisted metal. Through the gap she had opened she could feel the river running on the other side, and the next street over had taken the tremor and folded into itself.
She pressed her foot into the earth and found the soil beneath the wreckage. "Start growing."
Ivy raised her hands and the vines rose from the ground in a rush that covered the entire block. They climbed the ruins and wove a canopy overhead that blotted out the sun and Toph felt the green life closing around her until the world went quiet and soft.
"Planting my seedlings underneath Gotham was clever," Ivy's voice came through the leaves.
Toph moved her hands and the stone shifted, clearing a space where she could stand with her bare feet in the dirt. The earth beneath her was warm and slow and for the first time since she had come to this city she felt her shoulders drop. "The earth is calming down."
She stood there and let the soil read her weight. "We need to keep moving."
Ivy opened the vines and made a path through the green tunnel that led toward the next set of towers. Those buildings were leaning from the tremors and Toph walked ahead with her feet finding the bedrock through the ruin.
She stopped before they reached the clearing. She went quiet and her head turned and a smirk pulled at her mouth.
"He's here," she said.
Ivy came up beside her and looked through the leaves at the light beyond. "He won't be happy with us."
Toph stepped forward and the vines parted around her. "Him, you can have all the fun you want."
They walked out of the green and into the daylight.