"How is holding hands supposed to help us breathe underwater?" Lith had considered several options to solve that problem, but had been forced to discard them after careful thinking.
Creating an air bubble around their heads would be idiotic. The mana required to hold it together under high pressure and high-speed conditions would be enormous and the bubble wouldn't last long.
Store air inside a dimensional item would have been dumb as well. Taking out the air and bringing it to the nose or mouth required fine tuning. With such a method, every time they had to take a breath they would also need to stop, making it a hassle.
Shapeshifting would give them gills, but they wouldn't work. Lith had no idea how to extract oxygen from water and then move it to his lungs without giving himself an embolus.
On top of that, his body had never learned how to breathe from gills so he would just die the moment he instinctively used his nose by mistake.