Sora sat on the edge of the uncharted island, his eyes tracking the rhythmic rise and fall of the tide.
Small crabs darted between the damp grains of sand, and a refreshing breeze swept across the shore.
But he hadn’t isolated himself here just for rest or distraction.
His next move demanded a brutal level of strength; if he didn’t push his limits now, the probability of his death would skyrocket.
Pulling a map from his pack, Sora unrolled it across his lap.
His current location put him on a tiny island just outside the northwestern border of the Earth Kingdom.
Before he could venture into that unforgiving territory—a region dominated by towering, ice-covered mountains—he needed to train relentlessly and stock up on provisions at a nearby port city.
His ultimate destination was Mount Yahoo.
Mount Yahoo was the frozen prison of Tagaka, an ancient airbender who had been sealed away, trapped in a forced slumber for nearly five thousand years.
Sora intended to find and free him, seeking an ally to help tear down the Fire Nation and the other kingdoms.
In truth, Sora’s vision wasn’t entirely different from Tagaka’s old ambitions to rule over the Air Nomads.
Standing up, Sora packed the map away and took a deep, centering breath to clear his mind.
With a sudden burst of momentum, Sora launched himself off the sand and rocketed into the sky.
He soared low over the dark, open ocean.
The water here looked deeper, heavy and ominous compared to the shallows of the shore.
He had set a strict condition for himself: if he couldn’t reach the absolute depths of this sea while maintaining his vortex shield, he would not go after Tagaka.
He knew that the skies surrounding Mount Yahoo were plagued by violent, razor-sharp gales—the lingering scars of the past Avatar, Sunam.
Channeling his bending, Sora gathered a furious torrent of air around his body, spinning it into a high-velocity sphere that violently repelled everything in its path.
He plunged into the dark water, anchoring the shield and bracing against the immediate, crushing weight of the sea.
As he descended into the abyss, the sunlight withered away, swallowing him in pitch-black darkness.
The local marine life instantly sensed the violent shift in the currents.
Out of the shadows, a shark darted toward Sora, jaw agape, looking to snap him in half.
The moment it breached the outer layer of the spinning vortex, the hyper-compressed wind tore through its flesh and shattered its skeleton, reducing the predator to a shower of minced meat.
The sheer rotational speed of the shield acted like a brutal meat grinder to anything that touched it.
Within seconds, the water inside the vortex’s orbit stained a deep, murky crimson.
The thick scent of blood rippled through the abyss, triggering a feeding frenzy among the deeper predators.
Driven mad by the scent, they swarmed him, entirely blind to the danger.
Shhhf!
Shhhf!
The muffled, horrific sound of tearing flesh echoed through the dark water.
The cloud of blood grew denser, attracting larger, far more lethal monsters from the deep.
Inside his pocket of air, Sora watched the ocean around him turn into a cloud of red.
He pushed his bending further, increasing the spin and tightening the air molecules until the outer edge became a screeching buzzsaw.
Yet, the predators kept coming, completely intoxicated by the carnage.
Then, the true titans arrived—massive sharks, nearly nine meters long and heavy enough to crush bone by weight alone.
Among them was a colossal great white, moving through the dark at a terrifying attack speed of nearly fifty kilometers per hour.
Shhheeq!
The massive great white slammed directly into Sora’s wind barrier.
The sheer force of the impact rattled the shield, throwing Sora backward through the water.
Gritting his teeth, he fought to hold his ground, pushing his gale forward to resist the rows of serrated, triangular teeth designed to tear through whale blubber.
Shhheeq!
The screeching friction of dense wind grinding against the shark’s massive teeth was deafening.
“Damn it!
The sound is going to kill me!” Sora snarled.
Even with the ocean dampening the noise, the horrific, metallic grating echoed inside the sphere, sounding like a iron blade sawing through a rusty sheet of metal.
Veins bulged along Sora’s arms and forehead as exhaustion began to take its toll.
He was fighting a war on two fronts: holding back the crushing hydrostatic pressure of the ocean while simultaneously repelling the heavy, relentless assaults of the frenzy.
The massive weight of the great white pressed down on his barrier, pushing his endurance to its absolute limit.
“This isn’t working!
I need to shift to offense!” Sora shouted inside his dome.
Taking a sharp breath, he opened his mouth and fired a succession of hyper-compressed air bullets directly at the shark’s massive body.
Ping!
The air bullets pierced the creature’s thick hide, but they did little to slow it down, leaving only small, bleeding punctures that barely registerd as pain to a beast of that scale.
Sora tried to maneuver his sphere away from the shark’s massive jaws, but the creature was far too fast in its own element.
He attempted to launch himself upward to escape, but in the blink of an eye, the cavernous jaw intercepted him from above.
“How are you this damn fast?!” Sora threw his hands up, reinforcing the top of his shield to block the oncoming teeth.
Boom!
The full weight of the massive shark slammed down on him from above, driving his sphere deeper into the dark trenches.
As he sank further into the freezing blackness, Sora realized he had played with fire and finally got burned.
“Aaaagh!” A sickening crack echoed inside the bubble.
The crushing downward momentum of the massive shark had placed the entire burden on Sora’s left arm, snapping the bone under the immense pressure.
The darkness of the trenches grew absolute, leaving him blind.
His muscles were completely spent, bruised and battered from the feedback of his own violent winds, and his left arm hung uselessly at his side.
This was, without a doubt, the most perilous position he had found himself in since waking up in this world.
His mind buzzed with a dull roar, and his nervous system flared with blinding agony every second.
He couldn’t afford to panic.
He needed a solution immediately, because an even greater threat was settling in: his oxygen supply was rapidly dwindling, and his breathing grew shallow.
The deep ocean was becoming a suffocating tomb.
The colossal shark showed no signs of stopping, turning around to deliver a final, crushing blow to finish its meal.
Sora dragged his broken body through the water, trying to maneuver away, but escaping a apex predator in the pitch black was impossible.
But just as the massive jaws opened wide to snap him in half, Sora caught a sudden flash of movement right behind the beast.