TDBB: Earth's Guardian #6.
The vine pulled back through the crack.
Toph felt it go -- the shift in air pressure, the withdrawal of the organic weight that had been touching her armor -- and then the wall in front of her came alive.
The stone stayed exactly where it was. But the cracked and root-threaded mortar between the old brickwork suddenly had something moving through it with intention. Root tendrils threaded the gaps and widened them in a fast, deliberate push that sent hairline fractures spiderwebbing outward from the sealed section in every direction.
The ceiling above her groaned.
Toph planted both feet and felt the tunnel's structural load redistribute. Three ceiling blocks shifted under the root pressure, the old stone finding new angles. She reached up through the floor and caught the load before it could cascade, running stone buttresses up the tunnel walls in a motion that took her less than a second. The new supports locked the ceiling in place as cleanly as if they'd been there for centuries.
The groaning stopped.
"Terrible first attack," Toph said to the wall. "And I've been attacked by a boy holding a boomerang."
The sealed section of wall exploded inward.
Vines, a mass of them, thick as her arm at the base, branched into dozens of smaller tendrils as they came through the gap. They moved with a speed that would have been impressive if she hadn't been reading their root structure through the floor for the last ten seconds and already known which direction they were going to come from.
She dropped under the first sweep, planted her left hand on the tunnel floor, and came back up inside the vine mass with a stone column rising from the floor beneath her that lifted her to the ceiling and let the tendrils pass under her feet.
She balanced on top of the column, her right hand touching the ceiling, and looked down at the vines reorienting below her.
"You have roots deeply woven into this place's structure," Toph called through the gap in the wall. "Love gardening much? Or are you trying to bring down these tunnels?"
A pause. The vines slowed but didn't retract.
"Finding out won't buy you more time." The voice came from close behind the wall now.
"What's there to learn? Both scenarios are a failure," Toph said. "Plants don't survive in dark places, and if you had any real understanding of this place's structure, you wouldn't waste your time trying to collapse it."
"I didn't ask for your advice."
Two vines sprung at Toph. She dodged the one aimed for her torso first and pulled back the one hissing at her feet with a chunk of earth.
"You're not a water bender," Toph said. "You're not showing their skills and discipline." She tilted her head. "Plant bender?"
"Is that even a thing?"
Silence.
The vines came back in three separate lines moving in a coordinated spread designed to cover high, middle, and low simultaneously. Toph felt all three through the air pressure they displaced and the floor vibration of the root mass driving them.
She stepped off her column, let it drop, and caught the floor on both feet in her wide stance, and moved into the pattern, inside the reach of the vines before they could close. Her right elbow drove through the middle tendril.
Pain shot from the bullet wound as her left hand grabbed the low one. She swallowed hard and redirected the tendril upward so it tangled with the high one in a knot of its own growth.
She stepped out the other side and turned to face the gap in the wall.
"I assumed wrong." Toph shrugged her armored shoulder. "In my experience the world makes up new bending styles every few decades whether anyone's ready or not."
"But if plant-bending were to exist, it wouldn't be this sloppy," Toph said. "There's no art to it. You are just an amateur."
"Are you calling me weak?" The voice was steady, but Toph could feel the anger vibrating in her vocal cords.
More vines hunted her, trying to capture, constrict, or lash her body.
Toph stepped on the floor and swung her fists repeatedly, blocking her blindspot with earth shields and slashing the vines with metal plates and debris scattered in the tunnel.
More vines moved from the walls. Eight or ten separate tendrils drew from the roots already threaded through the mortar, spreading through the tunnel in a reach that covered the entire space from wall to wall, floor to ceiling.
Toph felt the architecture of the attack -- where the roots were anchored, where they were strongest, where the leverage points were.
"Your tricks won't last," the voice said.
"You sound green," Toph said, "Why is your scent red?"
"I will feed you to my flowers for that."
"How stupid." A sound escaped Toph that wasn't quite a laugh -- dry, short, turned inward. "I have never seen either color."
She snorted.
The vines hissed as they struck at her from all directions.
Toph drove both palms down and called the stone under the root system. The tunnel floor raised in a fast rolling motion that lifted the root anchors out of the mortar and flipped them upward. The entire root network in the tunnel floor suddenly went aerial and tangled in itself.
She followed it with a snap of both hands that drove stone wedges between the vines and the walls, sealing the gaps the roots had been threaded through, and the whole network went slack at once, a dozen tendrils dropping to the tunnel floor like cut rope.
"No." The word came out like something tearing. "No, no, no--"
"That's the end of that," Toph said plainly.
The silence that followed was not empty. Toph felt it -- the specific stillness of someone who had gone somewhere cold inside themselves.
"Three months," the voice said finally. Each word precise. Controlled. "That network took three months."
"Your plan was never going to work," Toph said. "I saved you the embarrassment."
"You saved me." The voice didn't waver. It went quieter. "A little girl saved me. From my own work." A pause. "You have no idea what I was building."
"I mapped it from the other side of your wall," Toph said. "I have a pretty good idea."
"Those plants were remediating the water table," the voice rose. "And you've ruined everything!"
A single vine whipped through the gap and caught Toph's left hand.
Toph never showed weakness. She clenched her jaw and held the pain within.
Then she closed her left fist and bent the metal of her shoulder plate outward in a single sharp expansion, a bloom of steel that shredded the vine's grip and left it recoiling through the gap.
She was through the wall two seconds later.
The chamber was larger than she had mapped from the outside, the stone ceiling high and vaulted, the floor deep with imported soil that her feet read as rich and dense and deliberately layered, different soil types at different depths.
The plants growing in it were not small -- she could feel their mass through the floor, root systems already complex and reaching, the whole chamber arranged in a pattern her sense built as something between a garden and a weapon.
The figure stood at the chamber's far end.
Her stance had changed -- weight shifted back, but not defensive.
"I lost before I even started," the voice was breaking. "Because of you. You little--" She held herself. "Who are you even?"
"Someone who can see through lies," Toph said. "Admit it. Your plants were doing more than being eco-friendly."
The voice went silent. Then rose a beat into a low, cruel, twisted laugh.
"I was going to strangle Gotham," the voice gravelled. "For days. And no one, no one would know how to stop me." Her voice wavered at the end.
"Your heart skipped when you said that," Toph said, reading her body. "If you approached this correctly, who could possibly stop you?"
Toph heard her jaw clench.
"I've seen vines strangle an entire city endlessly and no one could stop them," Toph said. "The people were left with no choice but to cohabit with them."
"That's the vision" the voice said. "The dream you just destroyed."
"Sounds like an excuse," Toph said. "Something you've told yourself many times over because losing has become your identity."
She crouched at the edge of the soil and pressed her fingers into it, reading the layering. "It's a shame, for someone with your talents to be this pathetic."
"You don't know anything about me," the voice ached. "All the times I've tried. Every moment I came close, just for--"
"I have had students like you," Toph interrupted. "All with limits, but none aware of their potential." She paused. "Until they met me."
"Your dolls didn't have to deal with Batman," the voice was condescending.
"Grumpy-gull?" Toph asked. "That's who you're scared of?"
"I'm not afraid of anyone," the voice snapped.
"He's got fancy gadgets, true," Toph went on. "But no real talent."
"I fought him last night," Toph said. "Nothing impressive about him if you asked me."
"You're looking at me like that too," the voice rose. "Like I am unimpressive just because you cut a few of my vines?"
The temperature in the room dropped. Toph felt the figure's presence start to loom.
"No," Toph said. "You're worse."
She smirked. "You are a pathetic waste of talent."
That did it.