Avatar: Mage of All Elements

Six hours. That was how long I endured moving upstream. I remembered from the cartoon series how a girl who was an earth magician moved. The point was to move the earth under her feet to speed up.

I was doing something similar. Just lift myself up with the water and move like a giant water ski. I swam a breezy 200 kilometers. Since it was my first time, it was not very good, but I still had a decent speed. But I was exhausted and at four o'clock in the morning I fell into a sleeping bag to sleep and tied it to a tree. Still, there are various predators here.

I fell asleep quickly enough, and my fatigue helped a lot. Nothing happened to me during the night, and in the morning (well, almost noon) I had breakfast and walked up the same river. About noon I came to a small village. There were ten houses here, no more. And judging by the look of the villagers, they would probably not welcome me. So I quietly and stealthily walked around the village in a decent arc.

The thing is, this village is inhabited by ordinary Fire Nation warriors. Their government is not stupid either. So those who serve a year at the front get housing and land. And usually that land is as close as possible to the border of the Earth Kingdom. But since the front line is constantly moving deep into the territory of the Earth Kingdom, no one has any objections.

Ordinary people can get a big piece of land, good, and the Fire Land gets a steady stream of people willing to fight for the land, and there are also people to develop that land. Everybody's happy.

I don't really like fighting. I don't like senseless brutality anymore. But death has left a deep impression on me. So I am not averse to killing, but I try to kill as quickly as possible so that the person does not suffer.

As an excuse, I haven't killed people yet, only wild animals. Although I'm sure my hand won't waver in a pinch. And since I know what happens after death, I won't have any doubts about killing someone else. Heh, for a highly organized mind, death is a new adventure.

After calmly bypassing this village, I went further up the river. Now I want to go to the earth realm and learn earth magic. However, I believe that my second core is exactly the earth core. I can't check it myself, so I need to find someone who can. And this, in a special state, can be felt by a strong enough earth magician.

They're usually only found in big cities. It's not very safe to evolve on your own. Nor is it practical. It's much harder to retrain than to learn something from scratch. So if I want to master an element well, I need a mentor. And preferably a qualified one.

It's pretty boring to just go along. But since I don't have much choice, I make the most of it by trying to control the blood of the fish that swim by. This skill is very useful. When I was learning blood magic, at a certain point, I began to sense other people's blood. Whether it was an animal or an insect, I could sense it.

The distance wasn't great, twenty meters in diameter, but I could sense them. And judging by the village I passed, I could sense humans as well. A hundred meters away. I don't know why.

Besides, blood magic has one important thing, it's very difficult to learn how to control. But if you can break through that barrier and learn, blood is much easier to control than water.

***

The closer I got to the front lines, the more my surroundings changed. Black earth, absurd figures rising from the ground, blood-soaked earth, human remains visible in some places, and not a single tree for the next hundred kilometers. The sight is depressing and somewhat frightening.

As I walked, I kept wondering why I wasn't meeting anyone. After all, the front line is not far away, and spies with saboteurs can really spoil life in such situations. The answer came to me as soon as I got within a hundred meters of the front line. It was a fiery hell.

The sun was at its zenith, and this was the time of day when fire mages had the most power. From what I could see, I could guess that there would be a major breakthrough today. I'm not good at this, but the Firebenders were trying to break through the Earthbenders. And given the time of day, they had a good chance.

Which begs the question. To be or not to be? To intervene in this fight or not? On the one hand, I don't care about the outcome of the battle. Tens of thousands of people are dying every day. Children, old men, women. Well, many times that many will die today. On a whole planet, that's no big deal.

On the other hand, I have to live in this country soon. I mean, it's huge and all that. But I'm a realist and I realize that you can't completely rely on a cartoon in this matter. So it could be some kind of turning point in the whole history of war that could affect all future warfare. Or it could be an everyday mess that happens several times a day.

Although, who am I kidding, I can see perfectly well that all available troops have been thrown into the battle and no one expects to lose. And when you put all the facts together and draw conclusions, it turns out that this is some kind of large-scale but desperate attempt to capture an important point, and given the approximate number of inhabitants of the country under fire and the entire length of the front, it turns out not to be a very good situation for this country. It's all or nothing.

Even if I go in, I'm alone. There are forty thousand on one side. What can I do alone? It follows that my intervention won't be significant. Yes, I'm well trained and have a few tricks up my sleeve, but there's a whole army here! So there's no point in getting involved. We can either go around them or wait for things to calm down and then sneak in quietly.

On the other hand, I can admit that I want to test myself. I've studied magic for five years. I'm itching to put it to the test. It might be bloody, but it's a chance. And a teenager's body is pushing on my brain, making me want to move all the time. And if I'm going to intervene, I have to do it as suddenly and as quickly as possible.