AN: Realised that I never posted this chapter here. Enjoy!

Izuku shivered.

Was it… was it over?

He landed on the hard floor of Crota's platform, his body screaming out in pain that he was too shocked to experience. His vision was blurry and he felt cold.

He could hear voices, panicked voices screaming, muffled and reverberating in his head like he was underwater.

Who was talking again? He rolled over and stared up at the sky, a bright green orb cracking and falling towards the void behind the platforms. Wasn't there something he needed to…

He jumped to his feet as the sounds of the world rushed back into his ears, and everything was clear again. His arm, Crota, Mikumo. "Mikumo!"

Spinning, he saw Yuura with an unconscious Mikumo in her arms, and he saw Katsuki's head snap towards Izuku. Izuku was about to say something when Katsuki jumped over to him.

Izuku felt his knees buckle and Katsuki grabbed him, holding him up on his feet. "Kid, HEY KID. Stay with me now. Eyes on me. What's your name."

Izuku didn't know why Katsuki was asking that. He knew that already. "I'm Izuku Midoriya."

Izuku felt his eyes starting to close a little bit, but was shocked open when Katsuki slapped his cheek softly. "Nope, none of that shit. What's your name, and how old are you?"

Izuku opened his mouth to answer but was interrupted when pain shot through his back muscles and abdomen, and he threw up. Katsuki swiftly stepped out of the way but grimaced. "Kid, what's your name, and how old are you?"

Izuku coughed and was slapped softly again as his eyes started to droop. "Answer me, kid. You gotta stay awake, so keep talking."

"My name is Izuku Midoriya. I think I'm 14 years old. It's hard to tell time down here."

Katsuki nodded and glanced over Izuku's shoulder as Mina helped Katsuki hold Izuku up. "Good work, kid. Now, I know you wanted to do something to Crota after we won. What was that again?"

Izuku let the words register in his head. He shook his head to clear some of the fuzziness in his thoughts. There was something he wanted to do… his eyes landed on his sword, laying on the ground a few meters away.

His sword… he made that too…

He pulled out of Katsuki and Mina's grasp as his brain finally caught up and he remembered what he wanted to do. "Shit, Shit! I'm wasting it!"

He dove down and grabbed his sword with his good arm, walking over to Crota's corpse, the torso of which was caved in and weirdly covered in a thin layer of ice. He only got a few steps away when Katsuki grabbed his shoulder. "Kid, hold up. What the fuck do you mean?"

Izuku pulled away and stabbed his sword forward, sinking it in the exposed muscle of Crota's leg. "Crota's strength! I can't let it—I can't waste it—I need it!"

He activated the sword's ability and felt his head clearing up slightly as power flowed into him. He could feel the pool he drew his power from not only filling but growing in size to accommodate the new energy.

Izuku had never felt anything like it. He felt warm, his body filling with this power so far above his own.

Hotter.

He was heating up. So much power. Not as much as he had hoped for, but still so much power!

Even hotter.

Izuku panted as sweat dripped down his body, the heat from inside him growing and growing with every second.

To hot! Too—

"AAARRRGGGH!"

Katsuki didn't know what to think.

Logically, he knew how the hive became stronger, by absorbing the power of those they killed. But he had never seen it in action. Was this really what it was supposed to look like?

Then the kid screamed.

His hand clutched around the hilt of his sword, Katsuki watched as dark green fire ignited over the kid's entire body. It took Katsuki a moment to realise this wasn't the same fire that the kid had used to fight with.

The smell of burning skin filled the air and before he really knew what he was doing, Katsuki's own hands filled with Solar energy, his hammer appearing in them. With a swing, it hit the body of the Fallen Hive Prince, and the fire around Izuku stopped as the corpse disintegrated from the Solar Light.

"Shit! Shit! Kid!"

The kid was kneeling on the ground, sobbing as he held his hands in front of himself. "Kid, are you good enough to walk? We need to get out of here so we can get you a docto—"

Katsuki's sentence tapered off as he saw the kid's skin regrowing before his eyes. But even healed, the kid still sobbed. He was about to kneel down and ask the kid if he was all right when Mina did it for him.

She wrapped her arms around the boy and pulled his head onto her shoulder, obviously not caring about the tears staining her shoulder pads. "It's ok now, you're fine. Crota's dead. You got him."

The kid's sobbing stopped for a moment as he mumbled something, but Katsuki couldn't hear what it was. Mina didn't seem to catch it either, sending a confused glance over to Katsuki. "What was that, sweety?"

"TI TSIN UNOHEG!"

Katsuki would call you a liar if you said he flinched at the noise that escaped the kid's mouth, but he did take a step back as his one one hand started to glow. The kid looked at the slowly disintegrating body of Crota and dove towards one of the arms.

Katsuki wasn't able to stop him before the sword swung down and severed one of Crota's fingers clean off. The Hive Prince had been so big that even one of the fingers was almost as long as Izuku's torso… oh shit.

Katsuki took a step forward, reaching out for the kid, and he could hear his fireteam yell out behind him as Izuku dropped his sword and grabbed the finger, bringing it up to the stump of his left arm.

"MEDN! ENRRUT TEH MAR UYO KOTO OFRM ME!"

Izuku's stump burned.

The bright green blood on the end of Crota's finger was like lava against his skin, but Izuku didn't care. It wasn't enough. The power he had gotten from Crota was… intoxicating, but Izuku could tell that it still wasn't enough to push through to his old world.

Tears ran down his face as he grabbed onto the pain that the skin contact with Crota's finger created, as well as all of the pain in the chamber. He tried to ignore how much of it was coming from Mikumo.

"MEND! RETURN THE ARM YOU TOOK FROM ME!"

Izuku yelled as human flesh and Hive latched onto each other. Fire filled his veins as Crota's finger merged with the stump of his arm, shifting slightly as Izuku's magic forced it into a replacement arm.

He cried out as his senses suddenly spread through the arm as well, letting him feel the bones shifting, the skin shrinking and growing. His throat was too hoarse to do much more than croak in pain by the time the very tip of the finger split into four sections, clawed fingers of its own sprouting from the end.

Izuku looked down at the arm and released his magic once he felt it settle. His body was in agony, lava ran through his veins, and he felt like throwing up. But he had done it.

So while his body was ready to drop from sheer exhaustion and overuse, Izuku did one last thing. Moving to the head, he reached down with his new arm and grabbed the middle of Crota's three eyes.

He ripped it out of the hive prince's head and summoned a portal wth the other hand back to the inside of a protective container in his study. And then he collapsed, utterly spent.

Crota was dead, and Izuku had regained the arm the bastard had taken from him.

And even still, Izuku cried, denied the power necessary to return home just yet.