TDBB: Tuff Wars 2.17
Toph pressed her foot into the riverbank and felt the last of the green die beneath her will, the root system tearing free from the poisoned soil and falling into the brown water. She straightened and rolled her shoulders, the adult frame settling into alignment, and she turned her face toward the ruin she had made.
The district lay open behind her, a wound of collapsed stone and twisted steel where towers had stood, where streets had carried the weight of thousands. She felt it all through her feet, the broken foundations and the hollows where buildings had folded into themselves, the scattered heartbeats of survivors huddled in the shelters she had raised from the wreckage.
The river moved slow and thick past her toes, contaminated with the sap of dead vines.
She exhaled and the air left her chest in a long stream that carried some of the tension with it.
"That's the end of that," she said, and her voice came from a chest that held enough air to make it carry.
Then she heard them, the blades rotating in the sky, a sound she had learned to read in this world as something other than the sky bison or war balloons she had known in another life. These were smaller, more refined, their metal bodies shaped with a precision that spoke of a technology she had not yet learned to name. She tilted her head and felt their vibration through the air, the displacement of their rotors cutting patterns she could almost trace.
"Help is here," she muttered.
She felt them coming next, three sets of footsteps moving through the ruin. Batman led them, the two boys flanking him. They were coming for her and she understood why, she was the primary cause of all this, the hand that had torn the city open and the mind that had directed the green to swallow what remained.
Toph bent her knees and felt the bedrock answer, a pillar of stone rising beneath her feet that lifted her toward the river's edge, the jump that would carry her across and into the open ground beyond where she could run, where she could find her way back to the swamp before they made her life more difficult than it already was.
She stopped.
The pillar held her above the water and she turned her head back toward the ruin, her brow drawing down, her jaw tightening as the vibration reached her feet. Something moved through the earth beneath the broken streets, a rapid pulse that ran in a thousand directions at once, the signature of roots growing faster than any plant should grow, faster than she had seen even in the best of Ivy's focus.
"Ivy," she breathed, and the name came out with a twist of guilt she had not prepared for, the recognition that she had forgotten her entirely, that the stone cone had held her and then it had not and Toph had not felt it happen.
She reached down with her mind, searching for the shape of the cage she had built, the packed earth and the bedrock she had shaped around Ivy's tower, and found nothing. The shelters she had raised for the civilians, the walls she had curved to deflect sound, the hearths of warm stone -- all of it had vanished from her sense, erased from the map she carried in her body as cleanly as if she had never built it.
"Can't find it," she said, and the words were foreign in her mouth because Toph Beifong did not lose track of her own earth, did not misplace the stone she had spoken to and shaped with her own hands.
The ground beneath the ruin erupted.
Vines tore through the broken foundations, rising from the soil where she had cut them down, growing with a vigor that spoke of something beyond botanical rage. They came thick and fast, their tips hardening as they rose, and she felt the intent in their growth, the malice that drove them toward the three figures moving through the wreckage toward her position. The vines did not spread at random. They converged, focusing, hunting.
Toph dropped from the pillar and hit the ground running, her bare feet finding the bedrock through the shattered stone, her arms pumping as she drove herself toward the Bat-family with a speed that the younger body had never held. She felt the vines behind her, a wall of green rising higher than the pillars she could raise, blocking the paths she would have taken, and she cursed under her breath as she closed the distance.
The youngest turned toward her, his weapon snapping up, and she did not slow.
"Come on, you dimwits," she shouted, and her voice cracked across the ruin, "you really think you can survive that?"
She stomped and the earth answered, a pillar rising beneath the three of them that threw them into the air with a force that carried them higher than the initial vine surge. She did not wait to see them land. She ran, throwing pillars ahead of her, each one rising and falling in sequence like steps she carved from the bedrock itself, each toss of her hands sending the three figures forward toward the river's edge while the vines rose behind her in a wave that grew faster with every beat of her heart.
The momentum of the green accelerated, learning, the root mat sensing her path and growing to cut it off before she could take it. Toph felt the gap closing, the vines rising higher than her pillars, and she made her choice. She stopped running and turned, both palms driving into the stone beneath her feet, and she sent a tremor through the bedrock that tore the root mat apart in a line that ran back toward its source.
The vines collapsed. For a moment the ruin held its breath.
Then they rose again, fiercer, hungrier, the whole mass of green converging on her position with a focus that stripped away any pretense of random growth. They were coming for her and her alone, a mountain of vine and thorn that blocked every direction she could have run, that rose higher than any pillar she could raise in the time she had left.
Toph turned in a slow circle, her feet reading the walls of green that surrounded her, and she felt the vibration in the earth beneath them, the rapid pulse of something driving them from below. She reached for the metal in the collapsed buildings around her, the rebar and the pipes and the structural steel she had shaped and unshaped, and felt the vines grip it, hinder it, root systems wrapping around the iron and holding it in place with a strength that matched her own.
She was trapped.
The vibration shifted and she felt them parting, a path opening through the green from the direction of the deepest growth, and she heard the sound carried through the stone, a voice screaming her name with a rage that painted colors across the darkness of her mind.
Toph had never seen color, had never needed to, but her seismic sense translated Ivy's fury into something her brain could only process as red, the red of blood and open wounds, the chaotic mass of her hair and the twisted shape of her mouth and the light that burned behind her eyes.
The image held her for a heartbeat too long.
A line cut the air beside her ear, close enough to feel the displacement, and she moved on instinct, her body twisting away from the path of the projectile as it struck the pillar behind her and held. She felt its vibration through the metal, the signature of the grapple line she had come to know, and she traced it upward with her sense to the shape hovering in the sky, the metal bird that carried the man she had called Grumpy-Gull.
He had not aimed to hit her. The angle was wrong for a killing shot, the line placed where she could reach it, where she could grab and hold.
Toph did not waste the moment. She leaped and her fingers closed around the line, the motor above whining as it took her weight, and she felt herself rising, pulling free of the vine mountain as it surged upward to meet her.
The green reached for her feet, tendrils sharpening to points that cut the air where she had been, and one found her ankle, wrapping with a pressure that broke skin and sent blood running down into her boot.
She groaned, the sound tearing from her throat, and she kicked with her other foot, finding the vine with her cut sole and driving herself upward from it, using the pressure of its own grip to launch herself higher as the motor pulled and the line sang with tension. The vine snapped and she rose, free, the wind catching her hair and the blood running warm against her skin.
Below, Ivy screamed, the sound carrying all the betrayal and fury that Toph had earned, the demand that she come back and face what she had made.
Toph held the line and felt herself drawn into the sky, the ruin falling away beneath her, the green reaching and failing as the metal bird carried her beyond its reach. She closed her eyes and let the wind take her, the vibration of the rotors filling her ears, the pain in her ankle a bright pulse that kept her anchored to her body.
Ivy's voice followed her, fading into the distance, the last word hanging in the air like a promise.
Toph did not answer. She held the line and let herself be pulled into the sky, away from the garden of ruin she had left behind.
A/N:
Hey everyone, I've dropped 17 chapters over the last week to get this story off the ground. I noticed our rating is sitting at a 3.6 with no feedback yet. If you've been reading, I'd honestly love to know what's working for you and what isn't. Constructive feedback helps me make the next 17 chapters even better.
Early Access in Pa.treon.com/mimiclord
Check out my plan for this story in post - TDBB: Full Summaries and Overviews