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Shouta leaned back against a convenient tree, eyes drifting over the young Warriors as they sparred with each other. With magic off the table for this last round, the shifters had a clear physical advantage. Tetsutetsu and Bakugo, at least, weren’t letting that bother them. Tetsutetsu had Fumikage on the defensive, and Bakugo was as evenly matched with Kirishima as ever, though Aizawa suspected the dragon shifter was going easy on his partner. He scanned over the children again, and a proud smile tugged at his lips but his heart sank in his chest like a stone.
The rise of the Great Evil was truly the worst thing to have happened in living memory, and not half because of the sheer destruction it had wrought on the land where it clawed its way up through the ancient seals. So many had died, that terrible day they attempted to re-seal the Great Evil. And so many had died since, as its influence spread. They were safe, their ancestral lands only touched at one edge by the Great Evil’s grasping darkness, but for how long? With the Sword of Inheritance lost, along with their best warriors, it wasn’t like they could properly fend off the Great Evil’s forces should they target the tribe.
“Ha!” Bakugo’s triumphant crow pulled Shouta from his dark thoughts, and he sighed at the sight of the blond pinning Kirishima facedown in the dirt with a foot on his back, both hands locked around one of the dragon shifter’s wrists to pull his arm almost far enough back to dislocate. “Yield, shitty hair.”
“You wish.” Kirishima growled, and Shouta smirked as the shifter finally utilised his full draconic strength. Good, he needed to learn not to hold back quite so much. Holding back in a real fight was liable to get him killed. Or perhaps worse, captured again. Shouta’s resting frown deepened slightly as he looked over Kirishima and Bakugo again. None of the children were free of scars, Shuzenji didn’t waste her time or magic healing every little childhood injury, but the pair they’d adopted a few years back bore more than most. Kirishima’s smiling face was was cut across the cheeks and nose by a dark divot, his wrists and ankles textured with thick pebbled bands, and when Kirishima’s dancing around Bakugo turned his bare back to Shouta he barely suppressed a wince at the pair of thick lines running parallel down his shoulder blades.
There was a damn good reason he never used his magic on shifters if he could help it.
Bakugo’s scars, in comparison, were quite minor. Scattered burns typical of a flame affinity as strong as his, a slight bend to his nose where he’d probably set it himself after a fight, a gash down one shoulder where he’d been caught by a guard’s blade in his first proper raid. Most prominent though was the set of three wide stripes on his other arm, the mark of a battle he shouldn’t’ve had to fight. Not just because they should’ve returned for Kirishima sooner, but because Kirishima shouldn’t’ve been in that raid in the first place. None of them should have. They were children, barely of age for training raids let alone the real deal.
“Aizawa!” Tetsutetsu called, and Shouta tore his eyes from the grappling pair. They wouldn’t have a clear victor by the time training was up. They never did. The rest of the kids though, he did still have to keep an eye on.
“What is it?” he asked, turning fully towards Tetsutetsu. He may not like that they had to send children into battle, but he’d be damned if he didn’t make sure they went armed with as much knowledge as he could cram into their heads.