Boom!

It worked! The spirit was trapped and from the looks of it in pain. I don't like to cause pain but I'm not going to lie, it satisfied me a little to see the damn creature scream after all that it put me through.

What satisfied me more than finally beating the dark spirit was seeing my device finally work, I was a little worried there that I would become a pile of black goo.

'I think I have started to see where the problem with the devices is. When I get back I'll talk with Varrick about it and maybe we can finally get a version that works how it's supposed to.'

I turn back to see how the others were fairing against their opponents low and behold, I was the last one to finish fighting. I moved my tired body back to them and the snowmobile to take a rest.

The battle didn't last long only a few minutes but I was dog tired, the energy I used to cleanse the wound bought me to a terrible state.

Boom!

An explosion from behind threw me through the air making me land head first in the snow. I snap my head to look back to see what had transpired. The energy cage blew up along with the spirit in a multicolor ball of light. I groaned and got back to my feet to marvel at the firework show I just made.

A whistle came from behind and a hand fell on my shoulder.

"Damn man, remind me to never make you angry."

"Thank Mako but, please help me get back to the snowmobile I'm so tired I feel I could fall any moment."

I put my hand around Mako and lumped over to the snowmobile, I didn't have much time to catch my breath and I was assaulted by Korra.

"Ethan! What did you do!"

I didn't want to deal with this right now. I didn't care about what happened to the spirits, to be honest, I have started to dislike them quite a bit, didn't the first avatar split the spirit and the human world in two so humans don't have to deal with spirits and vice versa? Why do they invade the human world, it's strange there are several spirits in our world but can the same be said about the other place?

"Korra, it was an accident, the traps that I use are still prototype stage so it's not out of the realm of possibility for them to malfunction."

"Then stop using them!"

This pissed me off big time, she's basically saying to me that I should just stay there take the hit and be ready to die.

"Listen Korra, I'm never going to stop using my devices to protect myself, I don't care about the spirits in general, I think what the dark spirit received is what it deserved, we don't intrude on their world but they constantly come to ours. Most of us don't have a way to protect ourselves against them but they can all kill us very easily. Do you think what I did was wrong? Why? Did I kill it? No! Didn't we already establish that they can't be killed? All I did was scatter its energy, a small slap on the wrist for what it tried to do to me! All I did was self-defense! How can you condemn me for doing that! I think you are a little biased towards the spirits. They attacked us, we fought back, they got beaten badly. I think you have an idyllic view of the spirits. At the end of the day, they aren't much different from us. Korra, you are the person that keeps the balance between spirits and humans, all things need to be viewed objectively in those matters. "

"I, I..."

I left her speechless, considering all I said was true and at the same time going against all she knew up until now it wasn't something that surprising.

"We have a problem, our equipment was damaged and a part of our supplies was destroyed! What do we do?!"

"There is only one thing to do, we have to turn back."

"We can't the solstice is tonight!"

I take a look at the supplies left and make a quick calculation.

"If we ration the food we can make it but just to be sure we should send someone back to take another round of resources and meet us halfway."

Korra's father volunteered and we gave him Bolin's snowmobile since his was damaged in the fight, leaving Bolin to ride with me.

We departed a short while after Tonraq. If until now I found it hard to travel now it was near impossible, the closer we were to the spirit forest the more vicious the storm became. It wouldn't have been a problem if I could have used my internal energy on my eyes to see better but the closer we got to our destination the more ambient energy was in the air making it harder to distinguish between what was a person and what was not, I needed to expend a lot of chi just to distinguish the two, I was already low on energy and tired, pushing myself any further would just be pointless.

So I just blindly drove with a thin rope keeping Bolin and me from getting lost. This seemed to take hours but, finally, we managed to get out. The spirit forest was in front of us. What made my jaw drop was the chi concentration around the forest, it was tens if not hundreds of times better than the outside.