#sorry this is such a weird vague workaround to 'i feel really really bad right now and need to get this out of my system but none of my

[flockofdoves]

ugh. usually on the internet nowadays i have curated my spaces enough that i'm just fine and don't get randomly mad or upset or anything and i dont go out of my way to dwell on or write posts about personal stuff that will make me upset because i'm just in a much better place than when i was younger and theres no point in ruining my mood to think about that stuff when thats not really what the internet is for me anymore.

but there's like one singular situation that in the past couple years keeps coming up with more frequency of a sort of subtle rhetorical shift among some people i follow that i actually feel like it would be good for my health in the long run to express why i disagree with that growing rhetorical trend because its much more entwined with very specific mechanisms that can easily harm specific vulnerable people than i think a lot of people realize. so if i was able to effectively write something out and express my point in a way that stays cool and collected and understanding of why people have come to those positions then that would probably be helpful for me to have out there to push back against that rhetorical trend in my own spaces and if anyone really disagrees with me then just knowing that and blocking each other.

(i have been conflict avoidant in my past and this type of thing isn't entirely separate from that but also like. i don't necessarily think that when its something happening with a large amount of people i like but hardly have an interpersonal relationship beyond reblogging posts from, that private unprompted discussions of my personal upset would be more sensible than just doing the admittedly kinda goofy thing of making a general post and reblogging myself throughout a week so people see it..)

but since talking about this stuff is so wrapped up in my personal trauma, for the past couple years i keep cycling online between long periods of time of 'yayyy everything is nice and curated on my social media nowadays [unless i purposefully go out of my way and look at main tags or subreddits] this is relatively healthy!!' to then seeing this sort of rhetoric and it making me feel super super awful and then caastrophizing about this lurking under the surfaces at all times. so the only time i have motivation to write something about this stuff is when i'm fucking having trauma flashbacks. but i will never express myself well in a way that's understandable, to the point, and kind to other people if i write from that emotion. but also i just do not ever feel like putting myself in the place of thinking about that stuff when i haven't seen anything upsetting for a while even if thats when i'd be at my most effective at expressing what i really want to get around to expressing.

[chemicalmagecraft]

Taiyuu OCT Round 1

@taiyuu-oct

Yukino stretched, appraising her teammate for the hero vs. villain exercise they were doing. She guessed that they had some sort of slime body Quirk. Mostly because their body appeared to be made entirely out of blue slime. "So I'm guessing your Quirk is being made out of slime, Rimuru-chan?"

"Yup!" they said, despite the fact that they didn't seem to have a mouth. Or lungs. "I can basically turn myself into a liquid, or make myself super sticky. I'm weak to water and fire, so look out for those. What's your Quirk."

"Cryomancy." Yukino showed off with a small puff of white mist that didn't really do much aside from look cool. "I can freeze things, and then I get psychokinetic control over whatever I freeze. I can actually absorb fire, though I also don't like getting wet."

"Good to know. What should we do for the exercise, then?"

Yukino knelt down and started giving the Lumin they were supposed to escort to the other side of the forest pets. "Right, I'm... kinda acrophobic, so it's probably for the best if we go for the low route. That cool with you?"

"That's fine," they nodded.

"Thanks. I should probably stay with Inu-chan because my Quirk is great for defense. What do you think?"

"Sounds good, I can scout out ahead, try to see if I can find who we're supposed to be fighting."

"Sounds like a plan."

As they waited for the okay to start, Yukino pulled out her staff with a twirling flourish. Unlike the entrance exam, this time they let the students bring some basic equipment with them. Yukino had also tried to ask for a bow, but the teachers denied it when she explained that she could make arrows from ice... Though to be fair, that probably could've gotten pretty dangerous if she didn't have practice with it. Like the entrance exam, she was wearing a nice, warm hoodie, though this time she had her P.E. uniform under it.

"You two can start now," Aura-sensei told them. Rimuru-chan melted into a puddle of blue ooze, then flowed ahead of Yukino.

"C'mon," Yukino told the plant wolf. She started walking, and the wolf followed her. Yukino hummed to herself as she walked down the dirt path in the middle of the forest. One hand was on Inu-chan's head, both rubbing behind his ears and making sure neither of the villains pulled some sort of teleport surprise. She didn't think anyone in Taiyuu had a teleporting Quirk, but better to be safe than sorry, right? Her other hand was holding her staff, obviously. Yukino tried to act like she wasn't paying attention to her surroundings, but in truth she was scanning the forest. She glanced around the trees. Occasionally she heard some rustling leaves in the distance, but nothing closer. Still, she didn't let her guard down.

Some time down the path, Yukino saw a rope in the middle of the path. It looked like it might have been a snare or something. Of course, the rope was almost the same color as the dirt path, so if her eyes weren't so good. "Stop," Yukino said, pushing down on Inu-chan to make him stop. She calmly held out her hand. A small blade of ice condensed from the air in front of her hand amid a puff of mist. The clear knife floated over to the rope, then dropped, propelled by her Quirk as well as gravity. The blade went clean through the rope and sunk into the ground. Half of the rope zipped off, and a second later a large rock tied to a rope fell by the side of the path.

"Right, let's go," she told the dog. Just in case, she cleaved the half of the ice knife that was still sticking out of the ground off of the rest of the knife, then shot it forward in a bit of a sweeping motion. It didn't hit anything, so she figured the path was clear for a bit. A little bit later, she heard a loud popping noise. Ball bearings spilled from a tree above the two. Yukino managed to react in time to make a hexagonal shield of ice above them. Her shield prevented them from getting hailed on by the small metal pellets, but there was still the problem of there now being ball bearings scattered on all sides of them.

Yukino growled. "That's annoying..." She snapped her fingers, and as she did her ice shield snapped into long, thin segments. Yukino floated the segments down to the ground and used them to brush the ball bearings off the path. "Is this all it's going to be?" she asked as she started walking again.

It didn't take long for Yukino to get accosted again. This time, Rimuru-chan jumped out of the foliage. "They're coming!" they shouted, then hid back in the bushes. "The girl who uses balloons and another girl with space hair! I'll try to surprise them, you hold them off!"

Yukino got into a ready stance, but couldn't help but snicker. "Balloons, huh? What's she gonna do, amuse me to death?"

"You'd be surprised," a voice said from the treetops. A spherical object fell in front of Yukino, and before she could smack it away a plume of thick smoke erupted from it.

"Smoke bomb!" Yukino shouted, then swung her staff. Frost crept along it as she swung, and as she hit the smoke bomb she generated more wind than should have been possible by swinging a staff. The smoke bomb was launched into the woods and the smoke it released was dispersed. Just in time for Yukino to see a purplish balloon heading straight for Inu-chan, as well as the clown-looking girl that threw it. Acting quickly, she swung her staff in front of Inu-chan, using telekinesis to speed it up a little. An ice shield condensed just off the staff, between Inu-chan and the balloon. The balloon hit the shield with a dull thump. Yukino snorted.

And then the balloon exploded. Technically it was probably just the balloon popping, but it exploded with so much force that it shattered the shield. Luckily Yukino regained control over the large shards before they hit Inu-chan, though it was close... Yukino threw the shards at the girl as she threw another balloon. The shards hit the balloon, exploding it with enough force to pulverize most of the ice.

"Okay, so 'balloons' is a much better power than I gave it credit for, that's on me," Yukino conceded as the diamond dust settled. She saw some blue ooze move behind the clown girl, but kept a neutral face. "Doesn't mean you're gonna win, Makku-chan."

Makku-chan giggled. "Like MacDonald's! You're funny, but I've gotta run now. Toodle-loo!" She turned and ran.

Right into Rimuru-chan. "What the heck?" she shouted as her shoes got stuck.

Rimuru-chan rose up, wrapping around her legs. "Now!" they shouted.

"You activated our trap card!" Yukino quipped as she dropped to one knee, slamming her hand into the ground. White vapor spread from her hand as a line of frost streaked to Makku-chan and Rimuru-chan. The line split just before them, flowing past them and converging on the other side as a circle. Ice froze up from the circle as it formed, forming itself into a clear dome of thick ice. The dome wasn't quite solid, though. There were small airholes out of the bottom, though rather flat and not nearly large enough for a person to squeeze through.

A normal person, anyway. Rimuru-chan seeped out from one of the holes easily. "Good," Yukino said. "I was hoping I made the holes big enough."

"Hey, you've got a dog on you," Rimuru-chan said.

"Well yeah, isn't that kinda the thing of this excercise?" Yukino said.

"No, another one." They made a pseudopod to point at something below Yukino's waist, then made an annoyed sound and changed their aim slightly.

Yukino looked down to see a dog circling around her. Not a wolf like Inu-chan; wolves are, usually, larger than dogs. Still, it was kind of on the big side. And weirdly enough, it was almost like... like the dog wasn't entirely there. Whenever Yukino tried to concentrate on where the dog was it was like it shifted and was suddenly a little to the left, or to the right. The dog walked over to Inu-chan, and Yukino decided that was probably a bad thing. She swung her staff, using her Quirk through it. The dog dodged, but Yukino was satisfied to note that it was only just barely. Yukino felt... something off when she nearly hit the dog, but she just chalked it up to whatever weird effect was around the dog. And as for where the dog came from...

Yukino looked up and saw the starry-haired girl. Except... logically she knew the girl was there somewhere, but for whatever reason Yukino couldn't tell where she was. It reminded her of the dog, just several times worse. The girl was trying to sneak up on her. Maybe. "I'm guessing the dog is yours, then?" Yukino asked.

"I suppose it's pretty obvious," she said, still walking in a direction that Yukino was only mostly sure was towards Inu-chan.

Yukino didn't bother trying to break through the effect through willpower alone. She planted her staff in the ground, letting go of it and making it stay upright with her telekinesis. She held her hands out in what she felt might be the girl's general direction, white vapor pouring from them as the air around them started to cool. The air she cooled, just barely cold enough for her telekinesis to work on it, was pulled to a point in front of her palms. A ball of white mist quickly formed from the compressed air. "That's a pretty annoying power you've got there, Lucy-chan, but I think I've got a workaround!"

Lucy-chan just barely had time to let out a confused "Wha-" before Yukino fired. The ball of compressed air decompressed in Lucy-chan's general direction. Violently. The annoying part of air control was how much Yukino had to concentrate on her air just to keep it from spreading out and becoming useless quickly even if she made it really cold. Her air blast didn't solve that problem at all, but by making it only barely below freezing she ended up with very little "cost" for what was effectively a one-use attack anyway. Of course, being just at the point where her bond broke with it also made it harder for her to feel the air with her bond, so that combined with Lucy-chan's aura of "vagueness" meant that Yukino only had a general idea of where she was.

Still, it was enough that she hopefully had her. Yukino didn't waste time as Lucy-chan reeled from the gale-force winds. She grabbed her staff and channeled her Quirk through it. She made another ice dome, this one a little bigger to make up for the fact that she wasn't entirely sure where Lucy-chan was. As soon as she saw that Lucy-chan was inside the dome, she turned back around to see Rimuru-chan grappling with Lucy-chan's dog.

"Run, I'll hold the dog off!" they said.

Yukino followed their order without complaining. "Inu-chan, come on!" she shouted. She ran as fast as she could... which admittedly wasn't that fast... Even aside from how short her strides were, Yukino was never the fastest runner. And she assumed Inu-chan was under orders to not to too fast, so when she noticed he was lagging behind she had to slow down and let him catch up. Still, she went as fast as Lumin would allow her to. Between Makku-chan's balloon having broken her ice shield and the fact that she thought she'd seen Lucy-chan summon things that weren't a disorienting dog at some point in the past month, Yukino wasn't entirely sure how long those ice domes would hold...

Speaking of... Yukino shook out her numb hands. "Ah, cold hands, cold hands!" She shoved them in her hoodie pocket to try and warm them up. "Still... I'm starting to get the feeling that I'll be getting a lot of mileage out of those ice domes."

"What are you doing, go faster!" Yukino heard Rimuru-chan shout behind her.

"Inu-chan won't go any faster!" she said.

"Can't you pick him up with your ice?"

"Oh yeah, good point." Yukino created a platform out of ice and set it down in front of Inu-chan. "C'mon, Inu-chan, get on!"

The plant wolf hesitated for a second, then got on. "Good boy!" Yukino said, petting him. "Now you get on Inu-chan," she told Rimuru-chan.

"What? Shouldn't I walk with you?"

"I have to focus on floating the platform if I want to go fast, so you should watch our backs. Now get on."

"Okay, if you say so." Rimuru-chan got on the wolf.

"Good slime!" Yukino said, petting them.

"Okay, now go!"

Yukino nodded and started running, having the ice platform float next to her. She was a little slower than she could've been because she still had to concentrate on the floating platform, but she still went a lot faster than she would've if she was just walking with Inu-chan.

They were already out of range of Yukino's ice, which was both a good thing and a bad thing. The good part was that that meant they were putting distance between themselves and the villains. The bad part was that Yukino couldn't tell if her ice was broken if she wasn't within range of it, so unless one of the villains picked up some of her ice after breaking their way out she had no way of telling if they were free...

"So I'm guessing I should work on restraining them so you can do that ice dome thing if they get to us again?" Rimuru-chan said after a bit.

"Yeah, that'd be great," Yukino agreed. "The only real problem with the ice domes is that they take a few seconds to form, unless I'm dealing with someone like you."

"Heh, we make a surprisingly good team, then!"

"I gues-"

"Behind us!" Rimuru-chan warned.

Yukino turned around, readying her staff. The villains were sneaking around the trees, but their stealth was pretty much ruined by the weird burning table floating near Lucy-chan... They jumped out of the bushes when Yukino turned around, ditching stealth. Yukino jammed her staff into the ground, activating her Quirk. Vapor rolled off her hands and horns as a line of frost extended from her staff in front of her, freezing up into a giant wall of ice.

"Ow, cold," Yukino said, shaking out her hands. She turned back around and started running. Hopefully that wall would...

Something weird happened to the wall. It felt like it was melting, but... not melting? Yukino looked back at the wall, seeing the remains of a giant ball of fire that had pretty much instantly melted a large hole through the wall. But... Yukino could still feel her control over... something. It was... cold air? Yukino didn't get it, but she didn't complain. She grabbed as much of the air as she could and compressed it into a ball of misty air floating in the middle of the hole. Yukino let the air loose as the villains approached the hole, blasting them back.

As they reeled from the blast Yukino flung her hands to the side, forming ice crystals with her Quirk. She noticed that that one weird table had disappeared. Maybe it had limited charges or something? Good. Though Yukino didn't like that cloud of green fog starting to grow around Lucy-chan... By the time the duo had recovered Yukino threw the two chunks of ice at them. Two icosahedrons of pure, perfect ice with numbers carved in them hurtled at the two villains. "Roll for initiative!" Yukino yelled.

The green fog around Lucy-chan formed into claws around her hands. "Draco!" she yelled, then smashed both with her claws.

"Nat 20, crud..." Yukino muttered.

"Get them!" Rimuru-chan shouted, jumping off Inu-chan.

Yukino grinned and made the large shards of ice left from the giant dice fly at the villains. "Ice knife!"

Lucy-chan deflected the shards with more speed and force than Yukino thought she was capable of. Yukino winced, forming more chunks of ice to throw. Makku-chan darted out from behind Lucy-chan, carrying a rather large balloon, and threw it at Yukino. Yukino quickly splintered a needle of ice off of one of her crystals and shot it at the balloon. The balloon popped, and even from a few meters away Yukino had to brace herself from the force of the explosion. Rimuru-chan, who was a little closer at that point, was flung back.

Yukino growled and threw her ice at Makku-chan. Like before, Lucy-chan deflected it all with clearly enhanced speed, smashing the ice into shards. Yukino just barely suppressed the urge to grin as she made more ice, and only then because of the sting of the cold on her hands. The shards from the ice that Lucy-chan broke hadn't fallen. Instead, they started to fly at Makku-chan as Yukino drew Lucy-chan's attention with more ice.

Makku-chan shouted as the ice flew towards her. Lucy-chan turned on a dime, swinging at the ice that was now dangerously close to Makku-chan.

Just as Yukino planned. She snapped her fingers, the ice darting away from Makku-chan. Unable to fully stop herself in time, Lucy-chan accidentally punched Makku-chan in the chest. She had greater control than Yukino thought, because her hit didn't look like it hurt Makku-chan too much. Of course, the next few would hopefully throw them off a bit...

The ice shards that Yukino had feinted Lucy-chan with looped around and slammed into her back, blunt sides first. Just for good measure, she threw the ice she'd just made at the villains too. It didn't look like it hit Lucy-chan too bad, but the heavy hits in rapid succession still knocked Lucy-chan and Makku-chan over into the puddle that was made when Lucy-chan melted Yukino's ice wall. Yukino grinned. While they were still trying to disentangle themselves and get up, Yukino drove her staff into the line of frost Cryomancy had already made when she made the ice wall. Her Quirk's freezing effect chained through the frost, letting her create an ice dome anchored to her existing ice wall just a bit faster and for less "cost."

"Okay, back on the dog, Rimuru-chan," Yukino said. "Before they bust out of that again." Yukino thought it'd probably take them a bit, what with how whatever power Lucy-chan was using actually seemed to be more defense-oriented, but Yukino wasn't taking any chances.

"Dang, that was awesome!" the slime cheered.

Yukino gave them a toothy grin. "You know it. Now, let's go!"

Rimuru-chan nodded and hopped on Inu-chan. Yukino picked the floating disk of ice back up and went as fast as she could. She let her staff go, keeping it from falling with her telekinesis, and started rubbing her hands together. Those attacks might've been awesome, but it was cold, too...

SLAM!

There wasn't even enough time to get out of range, this time. If Yukino had to guess, it was less than a minute before she felt a heavy blow put cracks in her ice dome. Yukino turned around to see a giant green snake slamming its head into her ice a second time.

SLAM!

"Oh, come on!" she shouted. The ice wasn't going to take more than a hit or two, even if she put everything she could into reinforcing it.

"That's a big snake!" Rimuru-chan said, pointing out the obvious.

"I know!" Yukino said, picking up her pace as much as she could.

SLAM!

That was the last hit the dome could take, next one would burst a hole right through it. "RUN!" Rimuru-chan screamed.

"I KNOW!" Yukino screamed back.

SLACRASH!

The dome broke. Yukino grabbed her staff back and sent Rimuru-chan and Inu-chan up above the trees and away from her. There was no way she was outrunning that thing, so she could at least try to make sure those two got away. Then she turned around and readied herself to at least try to defend herself from the giant snake. It slithered toward her, though Yukino noted that it looked like it floated just a bit over the ground. She gritted her teeth and readied her Quirk, white vapor curling from her fingers and frost starting to spread on her staff.

The serpent roared and lunged at Yukino. She held her ground, forming a shield of ice in front of her with her staff. The snake bit down on the shield. It tried to throw the ice away, but Yukino resisted telekinetically. She took a few steps to the side and swung at the snake with her Quirk-affected staff. Instead of frost blooming from the blow, though, the serpent roared as part of its body dissolved into some form of luminous green fog.

Yukino blinked. "Huh." That did not taste like normal body heat. It was... weirdly fruity?

"What did you just do to Ophiuchus?" Lucy-chan asked, a mix of curiosity and horror tinging her voice.

Yukino noticed that the two villains were running over to her, Makku-chan already making another balloon. Yukino sighed and drove the butt of her staff into the dirt. A small wall of ice erupted from the ground between herself and the villains, circling around to trap the snake with her. Unless it could float over the wall, anyway...

Her hands were starting to get cold again, but if she was right about what just happened that wouldn't be too much of a problem. She bared her teeth at the serpent, a predatory grin that showed off her sharpened teeth. The snake certainly looked unnerved, at least, as Yukino lashed out at the snake with a Quirk-enhanced palm strike. Instead of bouncing ineffectually off of the snake's thick hide, her hand passed through the snake with little resistance and a roar of pain and terror from the serpent. As with before, the summon's body deformed into a luminous lime green cloud that her Quirk sucked up as greedily as it did anything else it deemed thermal energy.

Yukino dropped her staff and plunged her other hand into the snake. It roared in terror. Yukino winced, but continued eating the snake with her Quirk. The mixed fruity taste it left on her Quirk's metaphorical tongue reminded her of... "Rainbow sorbet," she realized. "I could go for some of the real stuff, actually..." The serpent spat out the chunk of ice it was gripping and tried to escape, but Yukino managed to block it with the ice before it could. "I guess my name for Lucy-chan was pretty spot-on, then..." Yukino muttered to herself, moving her arms around to suck up more of the snake. "I've never tasted a star Quirk before, but between the combination of flavors and the fact that Lucy-chan called you Ophiuchus earlier... You're a constellation, aren't you?" she asked the snake. It was just scraps and green starfog at that point, and just a few moments later it dissipated entirely.

Yukino sighed like she'd just eaten a big meal, her arms feeling nice and hot. While using her Quirk to chill objects to below her body temperature made her body just a bit colder due to the fact that she wasn't completely immune to her own Quirk, sucking up an excess of heat, like a fireball or, apparently, a giant snake made of star matter(?), always left her feeling pleasantly warm. And because of that, Yukino felt almost as good as she did before they'd started the exercise. Maybe a little tired, still, but she felt like she could do something really big with her Quirk. And she knew just what.

Yukino idly noted that Makku-chan had cracked her ice wall a little, though she wasn't too worried. She grinned at the two. "Hey, wanna see something cool?" Yukino dropped to all fours, digging her claws into the dirt a little. Her horns and claws seemed to turn to ice as she readied her Quirk for something big, white vapor streaming from her arms. "Special move!" she shouted as the villains panicked and started to run away. Not that it'd help them...

Frost spread from the ground beneath Yukino's hands, permeating even below the surface of the ground. The frost expanded in a wave, going under Yukino's ice wall and spreading across the forest. It even climbed up the trees. "SUNDERING CLAWS OF THE ICE DRAGON!" The frost quickly overtook her opponents, but they blinked in surprise as nothing bad happened to them. No ice spread up from the ground to trap them, their feet didn't even freeze to the ground. It wasn't even slippery.

"That was anticlimactic..." Makku-chan said, turning back around. She started blowing up another balloon.

Yukino hissed in discomfort. She hadn't cooled the ground as much as she normally cooled things, but her arms were still starting to go numb from the cold... She planted her staff into the dirt and used to to pull herself onto her feet.

"Oh, and look at that," Makku-chan rolled her eyes at Yukino. "All that bluster, and in the end all she accomplished was frosting the ground over and taking herself out. Should we even bother with her?"

Lucy-chan frowned. "I... don't think she's done quite yet."

Yukino laughed as she shook her hands off, trying to return some semblance of feeling to them. "Yeah, she's right." She wasn't freezing again anytime soon, but the thing about Yukino's Quirk was that it was two-step. Even though she could feel the drawback of the first part of her Quirk in full force, the warm, full feeling in the pit of her stomach told her that the energy pool her telekinesis drew from was filled to the brim, almost demanding to be released.

She obliged, spreading out her legs into a wide stance and dropping her clawed hands into a position like she was about to throw something underhanded. Yukino never really needed to physically move to use her telekinesis, but sometimes for bigger things like this it felt like it helped. "Know what 'sundering' means?" She made a slow clawing motion, her hands shaking from the cold as she brought them upwards. As she clawed at the air, the ground started to rip itself apart. Small chunks of ground rose at first, but they slowly grew in size.

Makku-chan and Lucy-chan, quickly realizing that this was not a good sign, scrambled for the sides of the frost-covered ground. Yukino snapped the ground up, blocking them from fleeing with walls of earth.

"Cryokinesis, air blasts, energy absorption, and now geokinesis?" Makku-chan listed... incorrectly. "What kind of Quirk does she have?"

Yukino smirked, drawing more on her telekinetic energy. The ground cracked apart, lifting up in giant chunks. The villains slipped down the suddenly-uneven ground, though Yukino took care that they didn't get too battered from the fall. Once they were stuck in the bottom of a steep-walled crater, Yukino stacked the earth she'd pulled from the ground into a makeshift wall around the hole, trying her best to compact it into something that they'd have trouble climbing or breaking through.

The problem with having a general telekinesis-type Quirk instead of one of its more specialized cousins, Yukino was well aware of, was the fact that it was harder to perform the same sort of fine manipulation that was usually easier with specialization. Yukino could only make her perfect ice because she shaped the water as it was freezing, and even then it took a lot of practice and concentration. Still, Yukino was hopeful that her patch job would make do until her team won. It didn't feel like it'd collapse and bury the villains in dirt, at least.

She hissed again, shivering and rubbing her hands together. Her arms were still super cold, and she was starting to notice that her Quirk's energy reserves were already pretty low just from that one special move. Yyyeah, it was probably back to the drawing board for that one... Yukino almost fell as her legs turned to jelly, only just barely managing to grab her staff before she did. She winced, it was still freezing cold. "Well, at leas' they're probably not gettin' out of there anytime soon..." Yukino muttered to herself. She turned around to walk away and hopefully rejoin with Inu-chan and Rimuru-chan-

And banged her head into something cold and hard. "Ah, what the-" Yukino rubbed her head and looked in front her her face. Oh. Right. Ice wall. "Been a long time since I ran into my own ice..." she muttered to herself. It'd be hard to break out with her energy so low, and forget about climbing over. Yukino sighed, then remembered the part of the wall that Makku-chan cracked. Probably the best place to try...

Yukino walked over to the cracks in the wall. She leaned on her staff and kicked at the crack, trying to enhance her weakened telekinetic force with her weakened physical force.

Crack!

The ice cracked under her foot, but didn't break. Yukino sighed and kicked it again.

Snap!

It broke. Good, Yukino didn't think she had enough energy in her for a third one... She used her staff to knock out a few bits of ice that were only just hanging in there. The hole still wasn't that big, but it looked wide enough for her to climb through, at least. She pushed her staff through, then carefully pulled herself through. She tried not to touch the sides; without enough energy for finer telekinesis, she hadn't been able to smooth out the jagged edges of her hole. She managed, though her hoodie was torn up a little. Shame, Yukino liked that hoodie...

Yukino sighed in relief once she was out of her accidental trap. She slowly picked herself back up and dusted herself off. She looked back at the earth wall, thinking. Should she wait by the wall, in case the villains managed to get out?

She heard a pop, then a voice shouting, "Oh, come on!"

Yeah, they probably weren't getting out of there anytime soon. Not that Yukino would put up much of a fight if they did, come to think of it. Lucy-chan probably wouldn't put any more of her summons in a position where she could eat them again, and without her Quirk Makku-chan would probably take her out easily. Accepting that, Yukino turned around and started walking down the path to where she threw Rimuru-chan and Inu-chan. She was starting to feel pretty sluggish, though... She always felt really tired when her energy reserves dipped too low. The fact that it made her feel colder as well didn't help.

Yukino felt herself nodding off as she walked down the path. She shook herself off, trying to keep herself awake and get her blood pumping. She slapped her cheeks lightly, balancing her staff in the crook of her arm. Just for extra measure she pinched her cheeks, accidentally drawing a little blood because her claws were sharp. At least it woke her up a little.

After what felt like an hour, Yukino managed to shamble over to Inu-chan and Rimuru-chan. Rimuru-chan, who was currently in their more humanoid form, was trying to push Inu-chan faster than he was willing to go, but it didn't look like it was going that good. "Hey," Yukino said.

"You're back!" They harrumphed at her, making cheeks just to puff them up. "You're lucky I managed to catch Lumin, that could've gone a lot worse!"

"Yeah, yeah, let's jus' get to the finish line before the villains get back out again," Yukino waved them off. "Unless you can set things on fire I'm probably not gonna be much use if they fight us again."

"Wow, that snake must've really done a number on you, huh?"

Yukino shrugged. "Th' snake was actually the easy part, I kinda wiped m'self out dealin' with the villains. Shouldn' be too easy for 'em to get outta the hole I dug for 'em without some help, though."

They nodded. "Well that's good, at least. I think we're almost done, hang in there."

True to what they said, Wolfy-sensei was waiting for them at the other side of the next turn in the path. "You two won, good job," he told them. "Take a break, we'll have to get Laccadaisy to repair the course anyway." He was definitely glaring at Yukino when he said that. "Speaking of which, Takeda-chan." Yukino sighed to herself. She knew that stern tone of voice, Ryuji just loved using it on her. Lecture time... "I don't want to see you doing something like that again. It doesn't matter how many villains you take out if it takes you out with it."

Yukino sighed, but nodded. "Yeah, I know, I know. Won' do it again."

He nodded. "Good. Now do you need anything?"

Yukino shivered again. She dropped her staff and leaned against one of the trees. "Need to warm up."

Wolfy-sensei nodded again. "I'll call Laccadaisy, then see about setting up a bonfire or something. You gonna be fine if I leave you here for a bit?"

"Yeah, thanks."