TDBB: Earth's Guardian #7.
Ivy moved like weather.
Toph felt her cross the chamber in three long strides. The imported soil compressed differently under each step than stone would have.
She planted her feet and waited.
"You think you're better than everyone." The voice dropped out of its cold precision and went lower.
"I am better than everyone," Toph said. "Let me demonstrate."
She dropped into her stance.
Vines sprouted from the soil itself, thick root-stock erupting upward through the layered earth in columns. They came up under Toph's feet and around her legs before she had finished reading their approach.
Toph let them close around her ankles.
Then she stamped.
The stone beneath the soil rose through the imported earth in a single sharp plane, a shelf of bedrock lifting the whole soil layer six inches and cracking it apart along the root lines. The upheaval snapped the base of every erupting vine at its thickest point.
The grip on her ankles went slack, the severed ends falling away, and she was already moving through the collapse of the soil into a forward drive that brought both palms together and pushed.
A wave of stone rolled through the chamber floor from her hands outward, the bedrock peeling the soil layer back like a page, and Ivy had to move or be lifted off her feet by it.
She moved up.
Toph felt her leave the ground, and heard the rustle of something extending from the chamber walls at height. She had anchored to the ceiling. Vines running along the vaulted stone above, holding her suspended.
"I can still feel you," Toph said, to the ceiling.
A vine dropped at her from above, thick and fast, and she felt its air displacement and stepped aside and grabbed it with her right hand as it passed, her fingers closing around the organic mass, and she pulled.
She used the vine's own momentum to swing its free end in a wide lateral arc that drove it back toward the wall, the tip cracking against the stone like a whip. She heard Ivy shift her aerial anchor to compensate for the pull on her line.
She let the vine go and bent.
She called the metal in the ceiling all at once, pulling them free from the stone in a shriek of displaced rock, and they came toward her in a spinning arc, a dozen rods rotating in the air above her head like a slow, dangerous wheel.
She felt her opponent swing to a new position on her vine anchor.
Toph rotated the wheel to follow her.
"I could pin you to the ceiling with these," Toph said, tracking her through the air displacement and the vine anchor points she was reading through the stone. "But it's more fun if I spare you."
She let the wheel slow, the rods hovering.
"I don't need your charity." A vine lashed down from a new angle, coming from behind and to the left.
Toph raised a metal rod to intercept it without turning, the rod rising to horizontal and catching the vine across its width, stopping it dead.
"Your vines. What are they?" Toph asked. "Poison-ivy?"
"If you're looking for a botanical lecture, you are in the wrong cave," she replied.
"The poison-ivy vine moves against anything that tries to hold it." She crouched and pressed her fingers to the cracked soil. "It's stubborn. Doesn't like being directed."
"You are forcing it when it prefers being asked," she tilted her head.
The vine retracted and the chamber went quiet for a moment. Toph felt her weight shift on her aerial anchors, redistributing, and underneath that the faint mechanical quality of someone who was, despite everything, listening.
The vine moved. Different from everything that had come before. The tendril curved, following an arc that read the air rather than cutting through it, and it came around her left side in a sweep that bent at the last moment and grazed her injured shoulder before she could redirect her raised shield to cover.
She took a step back and reset.
"Smart move," Toph said, when she had her breath back.
"I thought you were a knucklehead," Toph continued. "But you listened and asked."
Toph breathed in and felt something strange in the air. A warm, disarming scent entered through her nose and moved in the blood fast. A tickling sensation spread up through the back of her skull, her sense softening at the edges in a way that had nothing to do with fatigue.
She breathed out.
Ivy's heartbeat above had steadied. For the first time in the whole fight her rhythm had slowed into something close to satisfaction.
Plant-poison (pheromones). The word arrived from some corner of memory and Toph understood what had happened with a clarity that was at odds with the loosening in her skull and was fading even as she reached for it.
She moved on instinct.
Her right hand found the armor at her chest and she bent it upward, a fast and graceless pull that drew the metal over her nose and mouth and sealed it against her face.
The steel pressed uncomfortably against the bridge of her nose and the corners of her jaw. She bent the edges inward to hold it.
The loosening in her skull continued for a count of several seconds -- whatever she had already breathed finding its path -- and she kept her stance, feet wide, her sense narrowing as the compound moved through her and then, as the sealed metal cut off the source, beginning to clear.
The clearing was slow.
She worked with what she had. She was blind in the ordinary sense, and the seismic sense narrowing was a different thing but not an insurmountable one. She still had the floor.
She built the picture from what remained and held her stance and waited for the compound to thin in her blood.
"That's a foul trick," she said, her voice muffled by the steel over her face.
"I thought you said I had no art." The satisfaction in Ivy's voice was real and Toph let her have it because she had earned it.
Then the compound cleared enough and she moved.
She called the rods back into their wheel and drove them toward the anchor points in the ceiling simultaneously.
The vine connections Ivy was suspended from severed, the rods finding each anchor in sequence and cutting through the vine at its base. She felt Ivy drop, felt her catch herself on a new vine from somewhere in the wall, and she was already rotating the wheel toward the new anchor and severing that too.
Ivy hit the soil.
The moment her weight came back into the floor Toph had her completely. She felt every shift of balance, every micro-adjustment of stance and every intention before it became movement.
Toph was at Ivy's position before Ivy had finished landing. She grabbed the nearest vine with both hands and pulled.
Using the vine's own root connection as a lever, she bent the metal of her shoulder plate into a hook that caught the vine's base and let her use it as a handle, and she pivoted from the hips in a wide, committed rotation.
The momentum of her whole body drove the vine's root stock upward through the soil in a spiral arc that flung Ivy sideways and up and into the chamber wall.
She heard her hit. Felt the impact through the stone.
Ivy's heartbeat elevated from the hit.
The chamber went quiet.
Toph dropped out of her stance and stood with her hands loose at her sides and her feet reading the floor where Ivy was sitting against the wall.
The heartbeat slowed from its peak into a rhythm of fury and exhaustion.
Toph bent the steel away from her face and breathed the tunnel air, chemical and old and welcome.
"You can't defeat a little girl with an injury on her shoulder," Toph said. "What makes you think you can take a city?"
Nothing.
"You have a problem," Toph said. "And it's not a lack of knowledge."
Toph walked over the cracked bedrock and pressed her foot to the floor, reading the root remnants still threading through the stone beneath the disrupted soil.
"The soil shows it." She said. "You understand what the earth needs. You just don't trust it to meet you halfway."
"Save your breath," Ivy shifted and let out a soft groan. "I have no interest in becoming one of your dolls."
"Ha."
"I just put you down easily and you're belittling me because of my size," Toph smirked. "You're stubborn."
"I am none of your business," Ivy said.
"Oh, you are my business," Toph said. "I am planning on leveling this city. And in its place, I would like a forest."
"Forget it," Ivy said. "I'm not helping you."
"I don't take 'no' for an answer." Toph grinned.