*BANG!!!*
Alex didn't even get to lower his hand before he was swept off his feet by the pressure that suddenly found an outlet, and he was thrown out of the plane and into the air, behind the door that had flown off. He faced the plane, his grin turning into a loud laugh that was torn apart even faster than his previous exhilarated shout, as the wind made a mess out of his hair, and the sun shone into his eyes to make them look, for an instant, like deep, unsettling pools of bloody lava.
He spread his hands, looking free in the wide sky and enjoying it with a wide grin for a moment, before he donned the goggles he had kept in his hand, pulled up his mask, and spun around to plunge toward the ground, arms tight against the body like a bird of prey, with his target being the spinning dot between him and the white land below.
Parting the air like an arrow cast from the sky, the wind chaotically blew in his ear, pressing his chest tight as it tried to derail him from his chosen path. But the challenge only made things more exhilarating. It took covering half of the distance to the surface for him to see the details of the door that had gone before him.
Cutting his own corridor beside the one carved by the wildly dancing door, he continued the chase. But looking at the ground that was getting closer and closer, he could only shake his head and take the snowboard off his back, crouch in the sky, and snap it at his feet with a click.
He could only adjust his posture after that to share the draft with the snowboard and keep his balance amidst the blasting currents of wind. His speed slowed down further, making his loss in the one-sided race a certainty. He shook his head with a light laugh.
Still, gravity remained his staunchest ally, and his arms, his stabilizing wings. His snowboard pointed downward as he rode on the wind this time instead of cutting through it, its feeling against his palms so tangible that he seemed to be able to catch it with a single clench of his gloved hands. The sky belonged not to man, but precisely because of that, it appealed to hearts wild with a desire of conquest.
The grin behind the mask took on a wolfish hue, while the eyes behind the goggles burned with untamed excitement. The heartbeat behind the scarred chest picked up as the ground became more and more real, its mostly white splendor fully 3D, without any more illusion of 2D. And as that notion took hold, another had to be faced, that of anything crashing down against the hardness below having only one fate.
*BOOM!!!*
The first thing to crash down was the winner of the previous race. It hit the snowy surface with a loud noise, raising a shower of white that most probably included broken parts of itself. Alex held his breath for a second, then let it out at the same time as he triggered his parachute.
The draft stopped his descent and pulled him back for a second, cutting short his free fall, before, with a sharp pull on the toggles, he plummeted again at a speed too high for a soft landing. But his focus didn't waver, even as the ground was already close enough, as an adrenaline-induced sharpness shone through his reckless appearance.
He cut through the last bit of falling snow dust raised by the unfortunate airplane door, his eyes sweeping over the crater it had created, before landing hard himself, raising another shower amidst a dull resounding reverberation.
*BAM!!!*
He bent his knees, crouching low to absorb the rebound that travelled through his muscles and his bones, and relieved himself of the burden behind him by unbuckling the last harness around his chest. The wind took the opportunity to drag away the canopy and the bag of the parachute while he leaned forward, and with the shift of his weight, converted all the energy from the fall and the impact into a downward drive.
The world seemed to stop for a moment, before he exploded out of the snowy curtain like lightning, his hair dancing wildly in the wind, and cut through the resistance of the air down the wild slope. Under the pure accelerating drive, his frictionless board could rival any sports car on a race track, and there was no better track than the white world at his feet.
A world of white with nothing to taint it, only a wide sky to drape over it.
As he slid down the slope, he pulled no air jump, no trick, but as he swerved around, brushing the powdery ground with his fingers, he seemed to be touching the world, to be holding it. There was no shout nor any loud laughter, but his silence felt more exhilarated than any sound he had let out before, and his heart, pure, in how it beat for nothing else than the path forward.
At hundreds of kilometers per hour, he soon cut through hundreds of meters of snow. At that moment, a thunderous sound rang out behind him, and the ground shook, like an angry burst whose momentum had been gathered for a while. His eyebrows flew up, before his grin came back, and he almost laughed out loud.
This thunder was on the ground, not in the clear sky. It was cold, not hot. But it seemed to have ignited a fire inside him, the last domino at the end of the collapse, a dark taint in the white world.
He didn't look back. There was no need to look back. His grin turned wild, an overt challenge against nature and its might. Even as the avalanche grew just as wild, if not more, even as it ate the distance between them with the relentlessness of an unstoppable calamity, his eyes remained riveted to the front, to the natural obstacles along the way.
The vibrations underneath his board grew. He was hit by the air displaced by the beast galloping down the white battlefield. His eyes flashed, and he swerved to the left to dance through a patch of dark dry trees that had held on in the cold environment for who-knew-how-long. They took the wave like iron bulwarks, then got swallowed up.
Alex burst out from the other side, and the world opened wide, with a natural ramp at the side like a wolf lying down after howling at the moon. At that moment, he could almost taste the snow chasing him. Even without looking back, he knew he had lost, again. Though that did nothing to his grin, he was never one to shy away from defeat, so he swerved in a shower of snow to face the ramp that seemed to have been made for him, for that moment, and climbed it to fly off the slope.
He let the momentum turn him upside down in the air, and spun around to face the approaching calamity. As the unleashed white beast jumped after him, he welcomed it with arms spread wide, his grin wild, untamed, untameable.
The avalanche swallowed him, then slammed him down with one final high note that shook the white expanse.
*BROOOMMMM!!!*