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“Hold still.” Shouto ordered, flames crackling at his fingertips, too-hot against the prickling cold of the demon’s ice which surrounded them all.
“Yessir.” Tenya mumbled, and Shouto gritted his teeth against his own aches and pains as he focused his magic down to one fingertip and pressed the flame hotter than he’d ever tried before. Touya had shown him this trick when he was little, before he went missing. Get your flame hot enough, and it could stop a wound from bleeding. It had nothing on proper healing magic, but for paper cuts and scraped knees it was a quicker fix than visiting the palace healers. And now, trapped Gods knew how far below ground in a dome of demon-magicked ice, it was Tenya's best chance for survival.
“This is going to hurt.” he warned. Midoriya's hands tightened on Tenya's shoulders, a flicker of gold over his skin promising that he would keep Tenya from bucking at the pain. Shouto let out a low hiss of breath, and brought his fire to the deep gash down Tenya's leg. Uraraka yelped from her seat on Tenya's knee, but her magically-increased weight kept it flat to the ground.
“I've got all the shrapnel out of his middle that I can see.” Kacchan announced as Shouto finished searing Tenya's leg wound. “Seal him up.”
“You're a lucky guy, Tenya.” Midoriya said, in what was probably the understatement of the millennium. Had he been even half a step closer, the Great Evil's attack would've cut into his organs, and even healing magic could only do so much for those injuries, unless they got immediate attention. It was sheer luck that the worst they had to fear was infection, that the greatest damage was to his armour, the solid plates shattered at his waist despite the layers of protective enchantments laid over the metal.
“Hey, split-hair.” Kacchan said, once it became clear Tenya had passed out and wasn't about to start flailing. “Think you can dispel your ice dome? It's giving me the creeps.”
“And it's starting to get a little stuffy in here.” Midoriya tugged at his collar, then grimaced as a chunk of the charred fabric crumbled away in his hand.
“If I dispel it, the debris above us may all collapse on our heads.” he pointed out, and Uraraka beamed as she rose her her feet, giving her staff a showy twirl.
“Did you forget who you’ve got with you?” she asked, hair floating around her head. “Take away the dome, and anything that starts to fall I’ll just make float.”
“Oh, yeah.” Shouto forced himself to his feet, though leaving Tenya’s side felt like slicing his ribcage open, and walked over to the edge of the dome. He hadn’t even done it consciously, his hands had moved on their own, the demon using its magic autonomously to protect them all. He wondered why it had made such a large dome, why it had saved their whole team instead of just him. If the demon which had plagued his mother’s bloodline since the sealing of the Great Evil had perhaps, in the ages in between, become something more than a force of destruction.
He lifted a hand, brushed his fingers against the thick ice which had shielded them from the Great Evil’s explosive death, and gasped as he felt the demon zap back into him, like frigid lightning in his blood. The prickle faded from his skin as he stumbled backwards, away from the icy shell now rapidly dissolving into crystalline flakes, a powdery snow which looked utterly unlike anything a demon could create.
Uraraka grunted with effort, the pink glow of her magic filling their small enclosure, and Shouto sat back down heavily at Tenya’s side. The Great Evil was defeated, the battle was won. Now they just had to figure out what came next.
