The following contains minor spoilers for Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Dawn of Yangchen, available now.

There is a neverending variety to the bending arts of Avatar: The Last Airbender, and that trend continues in the latest novel, The Dawn of Yangchen. At the start of the franchise, the elemental martial arts involved straightforward attacks and defenses involving throwing or blocking with a bender's element. However, with each new installment, there are more and more sub-skills, applications and techniques never dreamed of previously.

The new Chronicles of the Avatar novel takes place centuries prior to the original series. Nonetheless, even in those early days, benders proved capable of producing effects unseen in the shows, comics and novels that take place after the Era of Yangchen. One technique in particular does not even come from Avatar Yangchen herself but from her companion, the waterbender Kavik.

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Hama Waterbending

Each bending style in Avatar is unique not only depending on the element of its user but on the user themselves. While the differences between a firebender's offense style may stand out from that of an airbender who favors evasiveness, there are subtler differences between each individual character. Even though waterbending favors redirection and a seamless mixture of offense and defense, it is hard to look at the brutish style of Tonraq and the sleek agility of Ming-Hua and not notice the differences in martial technique.

Not all techniques in Avatar are martial, however. Throughout the original series, bending was seen to do everything from opening city gates and filling canals to serving soup around a table. In fact, outside of combat may be where bending proves the most versatile, and an early scene in The Dawn of Yangchen showcases this cleverly as the thief Kavik endeavors a mission with a skill unseen before.

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The young waterbender is hired to retrieve secretive documents from a wealthy estate on the northern edge of the continent. Kavik's own combat abilities prove to be little to write home about throughout the story, but his clever and precise usage of waterbending to infiltrate the estate stands out as truly exceptional. Faced with a palace built of ice, Kavik manages to waterbend himself into the walls of the fortress. He then proceeds to navigate through the icy walls by melting the water above him while refreezing it beneath.

The technique proves dangerous, constantly threatening Kavik with frostbite if the unfrozen portions of the wall cool down his body for too long. He also struggles to maintain his pocket of air, as well as to remain deep enough in the walls and between the floors he ascends that passing guards will not notice him through the opaque ice. The sum result creates a clever and nail-biting scene as the reader follows Kavik through his journey.

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Pakku, Waterbending Master of the Northern Water Tribe

Such novel explorations of a Bender's ability prove to be one of the appeals that keep Avatar fans ravenously consuming new content. The previous installments in Chronicles of the Avatar saw such singular techniques as dust-stepping, which granted earthbenders a semblance of flight, and a combination of healing and freezing by a waterbender to perform one of the series' most lethal finishing moves.

What stands out most about Kavik's technique is just how removed from combat it is. It creates the opportunity for a challenge unlike any in the franchise before, and it's so particularized to the bending arts that it is difficult to imagine it taking place in another world. With a sequel to The Dawn of Yangchen already promised, it's hard to tell what new inventions the bending arts may see as Kavik and Yangchen continue their adventure.