Chapter 3: The Perfect Time to Help Out

Out in the wooded hills, several members of Class 3-E try to catch Korosensei off guard while he is out crushing polar ice to make himself a snow cone. Wearing wide, deliberately cheerful grins, the pupils jog up as though they simply want to share the treat. Their teacher is moved to happy tears, then instantly reads through the act, plucking away their blades and pointing out that the smiles looked strained.

The knives he confiscates are quietly swapped for the tulips the class had been raising, which sends Megu Kataoka and Toka Yada into a scolding lecture on how to properly bed the replacement bulbs. Hiroto Maehara and Yuma Isogai puzzle over a teacher who wants to wipe out the planet yet spares the flower garden, while Ryoma Terasaka grumbles that the whole gesture is just for show. Nearby, Nagisa Shiota keeps a private notebook, jotting down his teacher's flaws in the hope that the record will one day help the class land a fatal blow.

Inside the principal's office, Tadaomi Karasuma announces that he will take over physical education, giving him a reason to shadow Korosensei and prop up the students. To his aide he explains that the well-paid headmaster is simply tolerating the Ministry of Defense's operation, and admits he cannot fathom why a creature able to level the world would choose to stand at a chalkboard.

Passing a pair of ordinary students, Karasuma overhears their dread of slipping into the lowly Class E and realizes the headmaster runs the whole school on that fear, driving the mainstream pupils to study harder while feeling superior to the outcasts below. He judges the arrangement coldly effective and well suited to the covert mission. Climbing the mountain, he finds the class using Korosensei as a living piñata, the teacher roped to a branch and squirming clear of knife-tipped poles as thanks for wrecking their flowerbed.

Even hobbled, Korosensei cannot be touched, and his taunting only sharpens the students' frustration. Nagisa, consulting his notes, predicts a slip the moment his teacher starts gloating, and sure enough the boasting brings a color change, a snapped branch, and a hard landing that leaves Korosensei momentarily exposed. Three flaws surface across the scene: he blunders while showing off, he panics when cornered, and he sulks like a poor loser, dishing out double homework after the class nearly catches him on the rooftop.

Korosensei escapes at Mach speed, leaving the class buzzing about their best attempt yet and Hinata Okano daydreaming about the ten-billion bounty. Karasuma privately observes that the cheeriest teenagers in the entire school are the ones cheerfully plotting a murder. The closing pages cut to a hidden briefing, where an agent warns a suspended pupil, Karma Akabane, to keep silent under threat of having his memory wiped, then explains that the anti-teacher knife is useless against people but lethal to the target. Karma stabs a wanted poster of Korosensei and lets it fall, relishing the chance to kill an instructor. The installment runs nineteen pages, opened the first collected volume, and reached print in the thirty-third 2012 issue.