TDBB: Tuff Wars 2.21
Toph ran through the tunnels, following the map she had memorized during the weeks underground.
She leaped a gap where a sewer channel cut through the bedrock, landed on the far side with her knees bending, and kept moving. Water rushed below, spread thin by the city's drainage.
A root pressed through the wall to her left, and she felt it expanding, pushing against stone. She did not slow. Her hand found the root as she passed and she pulled, tearing it free from the mortar, feeling the sap wet against her palm before she threw it behind her.
More roots threaded the ceiling ahead, fine as hair, reaching down in curtains that brushed her shoulders as she ran through them. She tore through them without breaking stride, her fingers shredding the fibers, her feet finding the clearest path through the tangle.
The tunnel opened into a wider chamber she remembered. She stopped long enough to breathe, her chest rising, her hands on her knees, and the memory came without invitation.
Ivy in the dark, sitting against the tunnel wall with her arms folded across her chest, complaining about the damp while Toph picked something from her ear and pretended not to hear. The sound of her voice. The exasperation that meant she was staying despite herself.
Toph straightened and drove her fist into the wall. Stone cracked and the pain ran up her arm and into her shoulder, bright and clean.
"Get it together," she said, and her voice echoed in the chamber, flat and hard. "You abandoned two kids for a swamp. She's a stranger you met in a different world. A speck of memory that disappears when you get back to the Foggy Swamp."
She ran again, her feet finding the passage that carried air from the city's edge. The truth serum in her blood made her thoughts run clear and fast, stripping away the defenses she had built against herself.
She did feel bad for leaving Ivy behind.
She had left her in the stone cone and walked away, had torn down their shared work without looking back, had forgotten her entirely while the Parliament's influence faded and her own clarity returned. Ivy had been a tool, a student, a convenience, and then she had been nothing, discarded when Toph's conscience demanded a different target.
She ran faster, energized, aware now that the drug Batman had given her was working despite its hidden contents, or perhaps because of them.
She thought of his heart, beating slow and steady while he told her to drink. No flutter, no skip, no tremor in the rhythm that would have warned her. He had been calm, his body speaking the truth his words concealed.
Almost like Azula. But not as cruel. Batman's cruelty was instrumental, not recreational, which made it harder to hate and impossible to trust.
She was not going to let him near her again.
The tunnel narrowed, the walls closing in until her shoulders brushed both sides, and she felt the roots thickening, the wood and fiber pressing through cracks in the stone, seeking the moisture that ran in thin sheets down the walls. Ivy's garden had reached deep, deeper than Toph had mapped, and the passage ahead was choked with growth that pulsed.
She bent the stone, pulling walls apart, carving a path through the living obstruction, her hands tearing roots as fast as they regrew. The work was slow, each step earned, and she felt the edge of the city approaching through her feet, the bedrock changing its song as the urban compression gave way to earth that had not been poured and shaped by human hands.
The roots behind her moved.
The vibration started as a whisper and built to a roar, the cellular explosion of growth accelerated beyond anything natural, beyond anything Ivy had shown her in the tunnels. They came from all directions, collapsing the passages she had cleared, filling the spaces with fiber and sap that hardened as it spread, sealing her route of retreat.
Toph ran harder, her feet striking stone, her hands pulling earth aside to open gaps she could squeeze through. The roots kept pace, kept ahead, anticipating her path with a precision that spoke of intelligence distributed through the network, a mind grown large enough to think in vines.
The tunnel ahead ended in a wall of green, roots woven so dense they had become wood, a plug of living matter that blocked the passage from floor to ceiling. Toph did not slow. She drove her shoulder into it, her hands tearing, her feet pushing against the stone behind her, and she broke through into open air, the roots shredding around her as she rolled onto the surface and came up running.
The city stretched around her, or what remained of it. Buildings leaned against each other, held up by vines that wrapped them in grips of green, their windows dark, their walls cracked. People ran past her, silent or screaming, their footsteps chaotic on the stone she could not read properly through the root mat that covered everything.
A woman clutched a child and stared at Toph with eyes that held no recognition, only the blankness of someone who had seen too much to process more.
Toph cleared a path, metal rising from the collapsed structures to cut the vines in her way, earth opening to swallow the growth that reached for her ankles. She did not stop for the people. She could not save them and herself.
The ground ahead erupted, vines rising in a wall that blocked the street from edge to edge, from building to building. She turned, found another route, and the wall followed, growing ahead of her.
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, carried through the root network, resonating in the cavities where walls had collapsed and left chambers of trapped air.
"Where do you think you are going, Toph?"
The sound was huge, rolling through the stone and into her feet, vibrating in her chest. It came from a giant's throat, from a body larger than anything human. Toph felt her shoulders drop, her spine curving forward. She had hoped to avoid this and she knew that hope was dead.
She turned, her feet reading the stone, and she found the source. Roots converged from every direction, thick trunks of green that moved through the streets like serpents, crushing cars and pushing through walls, their tips dividing into finer tendrils that searched and tasted and grew. They weaved together, building upward, and she felt the shape they made, the mass of it, the heartbeat at the center that was small and fast.
Ivy's pulse, buried inside a body of vines, a core of flesh wrapped in a shell of green that rose taller than the buildings around it. The giant turned, the movement sending tremors through the bedrock, and Toph felt its weight, the tons of vegetable matter compressed into a form that walked on root-legs and reached with branch-arms.
"She's really lost it," Toph muttered, and she turned fully, her feet finding their stance, her hands rising.
The giant lunged, a branch-arm sweeping through the air with force that cracked the face of a nearby building. Toph jumped, metal rising from the wreckage to carry her up and over the swing, and she landed on the arm as it passed, her feet finding the fibers, her hands pulling metal shards from the debris around her.
"Must we do this, Ivy?"
The giant roared, the sound carrying Ivy's voice distorted through the root-chamber that served as its throat. "Must we? Must we?" The words rose into laughter, high and wild, and the arm she stood on bucked, throwing her into the air as another branch swept toward her.
Toph twisted, metal gathering around her fists in a shell that caught the impact and deflected it, sending her spinning toward a building face where she caught a ledge, bent it into a hook, and swung herself back toward the giant's center of mass.
"You betrayed me," the voice boomed, and the giant's other arm rose, fist closing around a mass of vines that hardened into a club. "Stabbed me in the back!"
Toph found the ground as she landed on a root that snaked across the street. She ran along it as it bucked beneath her, and leaped toward the giant's knee. Metal formed around her foot, a blade that she drove into the joint, severing the main root-trunk that connected the lower leg.
Sap sprayed and the giant stumbled, the knee buckling, but the roots reconnected before she could press the advantage, the wound closing with a speed that matched her own earthbending.
"But you were right," the voice echoed with glee. "Nothing can possibly stop me now."
She threw herself sideways as the club-arm descended, the impact shattering the street where she had stood, and she gathered more metal, pulling it from the collapsed buildings, from the cars crushed against walls, from the infrastructure buried beneath the root mat.
It came to her in a cloud of shards and rods and twisted beams, orbiting her body in a swarm.
"You were always a knucklehead," she called out, and her voice carried over the giant's roar. She stomped her foot and the earth answered, a wave of stone rising to meet the giant's next step, unbalancing it, sending the mass of green lurching toward a building that groaned and gave way under the impact.
The giant righted itself, roots tearing free from the wreckage, and Toph threw her hands forward. The metal swarm shot toward it, blades rotating, rods spinning, a storm of iron that slashed through the outer layers of vines and exposed the denser core beneath. The giant raised its arms, roots weaving a shield, and the metal struck and stuck, embedded in the fibers, quivering.
"I never said nothing could stop you."
Toph pulled the metal back, reformed it, sent it again in a different pattern, harrying the giant's flanks while she moved through the earth, rising on pillars, dropping into troughs, always in motion, always striking and retreating before the responding limb could find her.
She felt the building to her left. She found the steel in its bones and she pulled, twisted, sent the whole mass of stone and glass and iron toppling toward the giant. It struck the shoulder, buried the arm in wreckage, and the giant staggered, roots tearing at the debris, trying to free itself.
"I only asked a question."
Toph landed on the giant's chest, where the root-density was thickest, where the heartbeat pulsed strongest. She drove her hands into the fibers, metal following her will, cutting, tearing, opening a path through the green toward the warmth at the center. The giant thrashed, limbs flailing, roots rising from the street to wrap her legs, her waist, her arms, but she bent them into blades that severed the grips before they could tighten.
The metal found Ivy's body, wrapped around her torso, pulled her free from the root-chamber that had become her shell. Toph held her in the air, suspended by bands of iron, and felt her breathing, her heartbeat, the heat of her skin through the metal.
"The answer was always me."
Ivy hung in the metal bonds, her hair tangled with root-fibers, her eyes closed, her chest rising and falling in shallow pulls. For a moment she was still, and Toph felt the weight of her, the smallness of the human body inside the giant she had built, and she waited for the words that would come next, the surrender or the fury or the grief.
Ivy laughed.
The sound was almost breathless, and built, echoing off the buildings, carrying through the root network until the remaining vines stirred in response, awakening from the dormancy that had followed the giant's collapse.
Toph felt them moving, rising, converging on her position from every direction, and she tightened the metal bonds, pulling Ivy closer, using her as a shield against the approaching growth.
"You were always so smug," Ivy said, and her voice was clear, lucid, carrying none of the distortion of the giant's roar. She opened her eyes, and Toph felt it as she raised her head.
Vines erupted from the street, their fibers dense with stored energy. They wrapped the metal bonds, crushed them, tore Ivy free in a burst of force that sent Toph stumbling backward. The vines caught Ivy's falling body, lowered her to the street, and rose around her in a new shell, smaller, tighter, more armored than the giant had been.
"I hated that about you most," Ivy said, and the vines moved with her, becoming extensions of her limbs, her fingers, her will.
She threw a punch, a thick root shooting toward Toph's chest, and Toph raised metal to block. Another root came from the left, and she dodged, barely.
The roots rained down, a storm of punches and grabs and sweeps that filled the air with moving wood. Toph moved through them, bending metal, bending stone, against Ivy's fury.
Thanks for reading! I have one advance chapter if you'd like to read ahead.