The fastest attacks in Avatar allow the characters to deal the first blow with lightning-quick strikes and take their enemies by surprise.

Avatar: The Last Airbender is an action-packed fantasy series where gifted individuals can bend the four classical elements of earth, wind, air, and water, while non-benders can use all kinds of weapons such as throwing knives or bows and arrows to level the playing field. Some attacks are much stronger than others, and some attacks are also much faster, too.

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Strength isn't everything in a bender battle in the Hundred-Year War era. One character can gain a serious advantage over the other if they employ fast-moving attacks that can take the enemy by surprise, or if their ultra-quick attacks are simply too fast to dodge or block. Certain elements or specific attack styles have proven themselves to be among Avatar's fastest of all.

Being an Airbender comes with all sorts of perks, and it helps that this highly flexible element can be found everywhere except underwater. Air is very light and free, meaning any Air Nomad's attack will be fast-moving and difficult to predict in a serious bender battle.

Air may not hit that hard, but it moves fast, unlike heavy water or earth-based attacks. Only benders with the sharpest reflexes could hope to dodge an Air Nomad's basic wind attacks in a fight and land a blow in return.

Conventional waterbending is mostly defensive in nature, and water is also fairly heavy, even in the world of Avatar. This means that waterbending is as slow as earthbending, but if the bender forms ice, they can employ some fairly quick attacks after all.

A Waterbender such as Katara can freeze the water into dozens of icicles, and ice is less dense than water. These narrow, lightweight icicles can be flung right at the enemy like a hail of arrows or bullets, and only the quickest benders could dodge or block such an attack.

Firebenders can also bend lightning if they have sufficient inner calm and discipline, and the brothers Iroh and Ozai are formidable benders of lightning, as is Ozai's talented daughter Azula. A Firebrender may point two fingers and emit a jet of electricity, and it's not easy for the opponent to dodge that.

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Most enemy benders will be hit before they even realize what's happening, and the lightning will knock them right out of the fight. With or without the element of surprise, a bender of lightning will always catch the enemy off-guard with this speedy attack.

Martial artists often employ formidable speed, agility, and precision to take down their foes, and for fighters such as the genki girl Ty Lee, strength is a second priority at most. Ty Lee cannot bend the elements, but she can make sure her opponent cannot bend, either.

Ty Lee is a naturally acrobatic, agile girl who can rapidly strike a bender's chi points with her bare hands to block the flow of energy in her opponents, and she can do this to several foes in rapid succession, too. Not even Katara and trained Earthbenders can fend off Ty Lee's quick attacks.

The bounty hunter known as June is an expert in tracking and capturing her targets, and it's all thanks to her mount, a mighty shirshu. This rare, remarkable creature can sniff out a foe from a continent away, then paralyze the target with one lash of its whip-like tongue.

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June's shirshu demonstrated this when it paralyzed several targets in the episode "Bato of the Water Tribe," and not even Zuko was quick enough to see and avoid the shirshu's tongue attack. Some animals can move much faster than any person, bender or otherwise, ever could.

Earthbending is generally the slowest of the four elements, since giant boulders really can't move that fast, even when a strong bender controls them. However, clever Earthbenders can sacrifice sheer power in favor of speed when they use small, dense projectiles instead.

The best example of that is the hand-shaped handcuffs that the Dai Li use to keep the city of Ba Sing Se safe. These assassin-like Earthbenders can easily take a criminal bender by surprise with their fast-moving attacks and capture them before the fight has even started.

Elite archers in any fictional world can easily strike a target from afar with their precise attacks, and Avatar's Yuyan Archers can pin a housefly to a tree without killing it. These archers once fought for Admiral Zhao and successfully captured Aang, albeit temporarily.

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Aang didn't suffer any serious wounds from these attacks, but even so, even he had a rough time avoiding those arrows and their nets. Most benders would be too slow to avoid those arrows anyway, especially if the attacks come from an unexpected angle.

It's true that a combustionbender needs a couple of seconds to charge up their bending before launching their attack, which can slow them down a bit in a fair fight. But the element of surprise changes that, with a combustionbender charging up their attack before the enemy even knows they're there.

This allows a combustion bender to set off an instantaneous explosion on the target, and not even an agile fighter like Aang, Azula, or Ty Lee could dodge that. Even all of Team Avatar combined struggled against the brutal speed and explosive power of this bending style.

Mai is another non-bender who employs attacks that favor speed over sheer power. In her girlhood, Mai spent many long afternoons throwing knives at the walls and ceilings to entertain herself, and now it's paying off. Mai is one of Avatar's top weapons experts, and it's impressive to watch.

Mai carries a collection of stylish knives into battle, and she can fling them with impressive speed to hit a fast-moving target, such as Katara, with ease. She can even hit the target's clothes to pin them to the wall without killing or injuring them, a technique that calls for speed and precision alike.

Only a select few Waterbenders can perform bloodbending, and this bending style is overpowered in more ways than one. To begin with, it allows the bender to take total control of the target's body by controlling their very blood, and what is more, this technique is pretty fast, too.

Normally, Waterbenders need the time to collect, reshape, and throw their heavy water at the enemy. But in this case, the water is already inside the opponent's body, so the bloodbender can take control of it immediately. There is no distance for bloodbending to travel, setting it apart from most other bending styles.

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Louis Kemner has been a fan of Japanese animation since 1997, when he discovered Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z in elementary school. Now he's a bigger anime/manga fan than ever, and is ready to share what he knows with readers worldwide. He graduated high school in 2009 and received his Bachelor's in creative writing from UMKC in 2013, then put his skills to work in 2019 with CBR.com. He's always looking for a wonderful new anime to watch or manga series to read.

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