They came out of wind into weight.
The Earth Zone took their momentum and buried it ankle-deep. Air that had been quick and playful in the sky thickened into warmth that pressed on shoulders and lungs. The ground was a living continent of terraces and ribs, cliffs folded like sleeping beasts. Pebble-falls whispered down slopes; somewhere far off, something huge shifted its back and shed a mountain.
"Welcome to the slow part," Korra said, hands on hips, blades resting against her back.
Lenia rolled her shoulders once, steady as ever. "Slow doesn't mean safe."
Zhen flicked a talisman; the ash it left behind blew sideways and settled. "Wind's still here, just… buried. The currents run under the rock."
Toba crouched, palm to stone. Huo slid down his arm, sniffed a seam, and gave a tiny sneeze that came out as a spark. "Veins everywhere," Toba said. "Don't step where the sand looks glassy. That's a sink."
Aeros listened the way he'd learned to listen under Claudia's hand—first to breath, then to space. Solar Radiance hummed in his bones, hotter where open sun touched skin, quieter where the earth's own Qi pushed back. Fire had loved him; wind had tried to teach him. Earth ignored him unless he earned its ear.
"We need one more banner," he said. "Earth will have a shrine, same as Wind. The path won't be straight."
"Time?" Lenia asked.
Zhen closed his eyes, counting the pulses in his wrist and the faint beats coming through his talisman ring. "Three hours," he said. "Maybe a little more."
"Plenty," Korra said. "For people who don't trip."
They moved.
The Earth Zone had its own vocabulary of threats. Twice, what looked like hardpan bucked under them in a rolling stone-tide, a wave of pebbles that turned footing to marbles. Lenia's staff sketched a moonlit guardrail from nothing; Aeros flashed Solar Qi through his soles and glassed a path in a heartbeat—narrow, ugly, but enough to keep them upright.
At a gorge that breathed like a lung, they waited for the inhale to finish, then crossed in three long leaps as exhale took the weight out of the far ledge. Zhen tagged the lip with a binding, and the ledge held when it wanted to crumble.
"Your paper keeps saving our ankles," Korra said, and she meant it.
Zhen ducked his head, pleased.
They climbed a buttress where sunlight pooled thickest, and Aeros felt the day turn. His midline warmed; the hum in his bones brightened, the parts of him that were solar aligning with noon. He didn't grin—he wasn't that kind of person—but something in his steps lengthened. The others noticed.
"Stronger?" Toba asked without judgment.
"For a while," Aeros said. "I'll burn through it fast if I get stupid."
"Don't," Lenia said.
He didn't.
They were angling along a saddle of rock when the ground ahead of them trembled, pebbles dancing. Huo's ears flattened. Toba planted his guandao; Lenia lowered her staff; Korra rolled her wrists; Zhen's fingers already had talisman corners between them.
A head the size of a cartwheel pushed up through stone. It wasn't flesh. It wasn't precisely stone either. It was stone that had learned to be flesh—a basalt mask with eyes like furnace pores and a jaw jointed in plates. A second head rose six paces to its right, then a shoulder, then more mass behind it, until the whole thing shook itself free: a Basalt Colossus, shoulders as high as the trees they'd left in the Fire Zone, seams glowing faintly orange.
"It's listening to something below us," Zhen said quickly. "Maybe the shrine."
"Means we're near," Korra replied. She flashed a grin at Aeros. "No freezing it solid this time?"
"Different problem," Aeros said, and set his feet.
The Colossus took a step. The ground answered with a groan. It swung an arm, and the air made the sound of millstones kissing. The first blow wasn't aimed to kill; it was meant to move them—send them sliding down the saddle into a chute that would grind them like pepper.
Aeros met the forearm with a palm, but not the way he had with the previous Behemoth. He didn't try to stop the limb. He heated it in a sheet and pulled his heat away in a pattern, rapid-cooling the joints as they flexed. Rock hated sudden changes. Hairline fractures bloomed like frost.
"Now!" he snapped.
Korra darted in, blades stabbing not into stone but into seams—the little mouths of those fractures. She pried and rolled, steel ringing. The Colossus's hand shuddered; a finger of rock snapped off and spun away, smashing into gravel.
Toba bellowed once—not loud, but as if to anchor his breath—and slammed the guandao's butt into the ground. The blow rebounded up his arms; he redirected it into a swing that cut the Colossus's calf seam. Huo leapt, swallowed a puff of seam-heat, and spat cool mist that flowed like oil along the crack, turning brittle into breakable.
Lenia never stopped moving. Where the Colossus's heel would have crushed Zhen, a moonlit wedge slid under it and shifted the weight a handspan aside. Where a rolling boulder broke free, her staff flicked, and the boulder rolled around them as if they were a post.
Zhen didn't aim at the Colossus at all. He drew in air and exhaled a binding sigil onto the ground in front of it: four characters in ash that meant Wait. The Colossus stepped into it, and the sigil didn't hold that weight the way it would hold a man—but it stuttered it for a blink. A blink was plenty for Korra to be gone and back, for Toba to cut, for Lenia to turn a kill-line into a bruise.
"Don't let it fall this way," Lenia called. "Chute."
Aeros heard her even with heat singing in his ears. He slid under the Colossus's arm, slapped its flank in three places, heating, cooling, heating—drawing a fault like ink through stone. The giant reached down in a swat that would have turned a wagon into splinters. Aeros wasn't there. He flashed sideways, not running but tilting—letting Earth's slow Qi shutter him from one angle to the next.
"Left knee!" he called.
Toba's guandao howled into the marked seam. The knee buckled. The Colossus pitched—then stopped its fall with an elbow half-buried in stone, muscle memory older than the sects. It pushed to rise, and sank. Zhen's new sigil glowed under its palm: Remember. Weight found the old crack that had been a river bed once; the Colossus's elbow slid into it like it had been waiting for a thousand years.
Korra vaulted onto its back, heel drumming into a joint behind its neck. Lenia's staff drew an arc of light over Korra's head just in time to turn a flying shard aside.
Aeros stepped onto the giant's shoulder and laid his hand along one last seam. He didn't push heat this time. He listened to flow of earth under him, then flicked a hair of Solar Qi into it—just enough to sharpen the line his team had cut.
The Colossus sagged. Its head dropped to the side. It didn't break into rubble; it settled like a collapsed wall. The light went out of its seams.
"Everybody intact?" Lenia asked, already scanning for the second problem that always followed the first.
"Still pretty," Korra said, breathless and satisfied. "Also sweaty."
Toba rolled his shoulder. "Alive."
Zhen kept his hands still, waiting for aftershocks that didn't come. "Good," he said to no one in particular, softly.
Aeros hopped down and shook fire dust from his fingers. He was grinning now, boyish for a heartbeat. "We're close," he said. "It was guarding the entrance."
"How close?" Korra asked.
Huo's ears ticked. He padded to the edge of the saddle and peered over. The slope fell into a wide fan of stone—like scales—ending in a circular plaza sunk a few dozen feet below. At its center rose a low dome of root-stone, veined and knotted, with an open ring at the top where light fell straight down. In that pool of light hung a banner: Earth's Standard, a strip of cloth that looked rough until you noticed its weave was impossibly fine, like compacted soil made flexible.
"Shrine," Lenia said. She exhaled once, slow. "Expect company."
They didn't have to expect long. On the far lip of the plaza, five figures moved like a shadow in a shadow. Vaen at point, the others fanned to his sides in a tidy fan. Squad Six had come the other way around the ridge and arrived within half a breath.
Mai's eyes brightened when she saw the banner. "Oh, that's pretty."
Vaen didn't bother a greeting. "You took Wind under our feet," he said to Aeros. It wasn't accusation; it was a fact set on a table. "You won't do it twice."