5+2+2+2=11

I really struggled with this metric.  Even getting it this low was a bit of a miracle to me, and I feel incapable of bringing it any lower.

I take 5 cycles making a single earth/air bend, which was the fastest I could manage to find.  Then I use 2 cycles to duplicate from that onto a second one.  I feel like the ideal from there would be to go straight to bonding both earth/air bends to the center water/salt bend, but I just couldn't find geometry that let me do that, so I ended up taking an extra cycle moving the second earth/air bend to the water/salt bend.  This does let me make an extra bond to the first one, making the geometry much more lenient to hit 11 latency than 10. The last two come from moving to the input and dropping it, of course.

It's a bit tragic that i had to spend 20G to avoid a collision, but at least it fit on the track with it's other buddies and didn't cost me any area o:

also hello, it's been a hot minute everybody :3