He Stole My Girlfriend's Tech To Destroy The City, But He Forgot She's Dating The Avatar

The first light of dawn was just beginning to spill over the horizon, painting the sky in soft shades of rose and gold. It filtered through the wide windows of their apartment on Air Temple Island, casting long shadows across the floor. I was still half-asleep, tangled in the warm sheets, my body heavy and relaxed. A gentle pressure on my hip brought me closer to full consciousness. Asami.

Her fingers were tracing idle patterns on my skin, a touch so familiar it felt like an extension of my own senses. I shifted, turning onto my side to face her. Her dark hair was a beautiful mess against the white pillowcase, and her green eyes, already wide awake, were fixed on me with an expression of soft adoration that still made my heart beat faster.

“Morning,” she whispered, her voice a low murmur in the quiet room. She leaned in, her lips finding mine in a slow, deep kiss that was more about comfort and possession than urgent passion. It was a promise of the day ahead, a reaffirmation of the peace we’d found.

My hand came up to cup her jaw, my thumb stroking the smooth line of her cheek. The kiss deepened, her tongue gently exploring my mouth as her hand slid from my hip down to my thigh, her touch firm and knowing. A familiar heat pooled low in my stomach, a pleasant, insistent ache. I pressed myself against her, my body arching into her touch. Her fingers slipped beneath the waistband of my sleep shorts, gliding over the sensitive skin of my lower back before dipping lower. A sharp breath left my lips as she found the entrance to my vagina, her fingers gently parting the folds of my labia. She was already wet for me, a slick warmth that spoke of her own arousal. My own body responded instantly, a wave of heat spreading through my limbs as a slick wetness gathered between my legs.

Her lips left mine, trailing a line of open-mouthed kisses down my throat, across my collarbone. I tilted my head back, giving her access, my own hands moving to the silk of her nightgown, pushing it up her thighs.

Just as her fingers were about to press inside me, a distant, muffled boom echoed from across the water. The lights in our room flickered once, twice, then went out completely, plunging us into the pre-dawn gloom.

We both froze. Asami pulled back, her expression shifting from sleepy desire to sharp alertness. “What was that?”

I sat up, pushing the hair from my eyes and looking towards the city. A whole district, the newly developed sector on the west side, was dark. A plume of black smoke was beginning to rise against the pale sky. The easy peace of our morning had been completely shattered.

“A power surge,” Asami said, already out of bed and pulling on a robe, her mind instantly shifting into CEO mode. “A big one.”

I stood beside her at the window, my own senses stretching out, reaching for the city. But it wasn't the physical chaos that made a cold dread settle in my gut. It was something else. Beneath the noise and the panic, I could feel a tremor in the spiritual fabric of the world. It was a dissonant, jagged energy, like a wire pulled too tight and humming with a sickly vibration. It felt wrong. Unnatural. And it was coming directly from the heart of the blackout.

“I feel it, too,” I said, my voice low. “But it’s not just the power grid.”

Within the hour, we were on the scene. The air was thick with the acrid smell of burnt wiring and ozone, a smell that clung to the back of my throat. Police barricades held back a crowd of onlookers while firefighters worked to extinguish the last of the electrical fires. It was chaos, but an organized chaos that Republic City had become far too accustomed to.

Asami was all business, her expression sharp and focused. She immediately strode over to a shattered power conduit, pulling a pair of protective goggles from her coat pocket. “The surge was localized, but the feedback cascade… it’s massive,” she murmured, running a gloved hand over the melted slag that was once a state-of-the-art regulator. “These are my latest designs. They have failsafes to prevent exactly this kind of overload.” She pointed to a series of smaller, blackened boxes connected to the main line. “Every single one was targeted. Fried from the inside out. This wasn’t an accident, Korra. It was sabotage.”

I barely heard her. My attention was fixed on the invisible current running through the area. The spiritual energy was nauseating, a discordant thrum that vibrated deep in my bones. It felt like a spirit vine being strangled, its pure life force twisted and corrupted by something cold and artificial. I closed my eyes, trying to get a clearer sense of it, but the feeling was slick and evasive, like trying to catch smoke. It was a violation, a fusion of spirit and technology that felt deeply, fundamentally wrong. A wave of dizziness washed over me, and I put a hand against a nearby wall to steady myself.

“Korra? Asami?”

I opened my eyes to see Mako approaching, his police chief uniform immaculate despite the surrounding mess. He looked tired, the lines around his eyes deeper than I remembered.

“Mako,” Asami greeted him, straightening up. “What have you got?”

“Not much,” he admitted, running a hand through his perfectly styled hair. “No witnesses, no residual explosive markers. The techs are saying it’s the biggest electrical surge they’ve ever seen, but they can’t find a source. It’s like it came from nowhere.” He looked from Asami’s grim face to mine. “You okay, Korra? You look pale.”

“I’m fine,” I said, pushing myself off the wall. “It’s the energy here. It’s… distorted. I’ve never felt anything like it.”

Mako’s brow furrowed. “Spiritual energy? You think this is related to spirits?”

“I don’t know,” I confessed. “It feels like a spirit, but also… not. It’s mixed with something else. Something artificial.”

My gaze met Asami’s over the smoking ruin of her technology. The look that passed between us was one of dawning, grim understanding. Mako saw the technology, the physical evidence. I felt the spiritual corruption. Separately, our findings were just confusing pieces of a puzzle. He had no leads because he could only see one half of the picture. We were the only ones who could see both. The sick feeling in my stomach intensified, but this time it wasn't from the energy. It was the cold realization that whatever this was, it was designed to hit us at our core—Asami’s technological vision for the city, and my duty as the spiritual guardian. And we were the only ones who could fight it.

The day had bled into a long, exhausting evening. We ended up back at Future Industries Tower, in Asami’s private workshop. The space was a perfect reflection of our lives together. Her gleaming tools and complex machinery shared the floor with my worn bending training dummies. Rolled-up schematics for city infrastructure sat on a workbench next to a set of meditation beads I sometimes used. The air smelled of ozone, lubricating oil, and the faint, earthy scent of the clay I’d been practicing with last week.

Asami was hunched over a massive blueprint of the western district’s power grid, spread across her drafting table. The bright lamp above her cast her face in sharp relief, highlighting the deep concentration in her brow and the determined set of her jaw. Her red lipstick was slightly faded from hours of work, and she kept chewing on her bottom lip as her pencil traced the intricate pathways of the energy feedback loop. She muttered to herself, a string of technical terms that were mostly lost on me, but the frustration in her tone was clear. Every theory she had led to a dead end. The sabotage was too precise, too elegant in its destructiveness.

I sat on a meditation mat a few feet away, my legs crossed and my eyes closed, trying to do my own part. I reached out with my senses, trying to find that sickening thread of spiritual energy again. But away from the site, it was faint, a barely-there echo that slithered away whenever I got close. The effort was draining. It felt like trying to grab a fistful of water. Every time I thought I had a hold on its signature, it dissolved, leaving behind a faint, nauseating buzz that made my head ache. The energy was slick, hostile. It didn’t want to be found.

The only thing keeping me grounded was the sound of Asami’s presence in the room—the soft scratch of her pencil against the paper, the quiet rustle of her clothes as she shifted her weight, the low, steady rhythm of her breathing. We worked in silence, two separate forces aimed at the same problem, but the space between us was filled with a quiet, powerful current of its own. It was the solid, unshakeable knowledge that I was not alone in this.

A wave of frustration washed through me, and I let out a sharp breath, my eyes snapping open. It was useless. The energy was too slippery, too foreign. I couldn’t get a clear read on it.

The sound of my sigh cut through the quiet of the workshop. Asami’s pencil stopped moving. I felt her eyes on me, and I turned my head to meet her gaze. The worry in her green eyes was a mirror of my own exhaustion. She didn’t offer any empty words of encouragement. She just pushed back from her table, the chair scraping softly against the concrete floor.

She walked over to me, her movements weary but deliberate. She knelt behind me, and I felt the warmth of her body before she even touched me. Then, her hand came to rest on my shoulder. Her touch was firm, her fingers pressing gently into the muscle there, a silent transfer of strength. It wasn't a romantic caress or a gesture of pity. It was a simple, profound statement: I’m here. We’re in this together.

I closed my eyes again, leaning back slightly into her touch. The tension in my shoulders eased, and the frantic buzzing in my head began to quiet. Her hand was an anchor, holding me steady against the tide of failure and uncertainty. We would figure this out. We had to.