Chapter 412

Locked up from defending himself internally, Deku turns Blackwhip inward to flex and extend his own muscles by hand, builds Fa Jin, and swings a massive Delaware Smash that flattens the ground around Tomura. The villain laughs at the read, seeing that the wind blast scattered the land ahead of his Decay and delayed its advance. Treating it as a stopgap and nothing more, he uses Accelerator Rings to reorient himself toward the earth and keep touching it as often as it takes.

Danger Sense fires as Blackchains close around him through Smokescreen that has not thinned. Deku bursts through fast enough to tear an arm off and withdraw, having slowed the smoke with Gearshift's Low Gear and thrown out whips to keep the stolen warning system screaming, knowing what over-reliance on it costs.

En works out that the whole sequence was charging Fa Jin, then warns that Search still marks Deku's position, and a volley of Rivet Stab follows. Arm regrown, Tomura lists everything he sees: a boy who cannot breathe now that Gearshift has expired and the recoil has arrived, whose charged attacks were never built to fire in sequence, with black coils showing through the skin bracing his tendons.

Tomura observes that one clean head-on hit might leave him unable to put himself back together, and that Deku has far too much to protect to risk it. Deku answers that he will not abandon that crying boy. People read the world through narrow windows, Tomura counters, inventing comfortable explanations for whatever will not fit, and Deku is only cramming him into one. He can look inside himself as easily as Deku reads his own vestiges, and what he finds is a fused mass of collapsing buildings. The weeping child was overcome and buried long ago, he says; his worldview won, only Tomura Shigaraki remains, and he is doing fine.

Seeing that deadly smile, Nana urges Deku to give up, calling him a wall his heroic ideals need not climb and some people simply unsavable, and demands a single strike that leaves nothing behind. He refuses, turning Tomura's own image around: the pain was never swept away, only lidded, and until the lid shatters he will keep hammering at it.

Kudo tells the other users this is exactly why he objected, calling the wish to save an archenemy a delusional madness born of naivety and arrogance that threatens their destined path. Watching from inside, though, he grants the truth of what drives Deku: a conviction that every heart, the vilest among them and the Quirkless alike, is innately human, and he finds himself wanting to believe it too.

A hand crested with a star then points through the vestige realm, noticed by both All Might and Kudo. Kudo turns to Deku, betting everything on him, and says the moment has arrived to let One For All go.

Fifteen pages, published January 22, 2024 in issue 8 of 2024, collected in volume 41 of the Final War arc and adapted in Episode 164. Horikoshi's comment sends his thoughts to everyone affected by the disaster.