Search

Tomoko Shiretoko held this Emitter Quirk first, until All For One tore it out of her. It eventually came to rest with Tomura Shigaraki. It is target-based rather than area-based, and it gets a passing mention in Chapter 72 and Episode 41 well before its full showing in Chapter 274 and Episode 119.

Its practical importance outstrips its flashiness. Nothing about Search damages anyone directly, yet it reshapes the entire back half of the story by making concealment nearly impossible for the people it has already logged.

A single user can hold up to one hundred individuals under observation simultaneously. The Quirk reports not just where each person is, even across a span of miles, but where their vulnerabilities lie. Those under watch register as star-like traces in the user's perception, and the anime marks activation by washing the wielder's eyes in rainbow light.

What makes it so dangerous is memory. Anything Search learns stays learned, filed away permanently once the ability has swept someone. It locks on by reading a person's Quirk Factor and DNA, which means anyone carrying several of those in one body registers as a set of distinct entries rather than a single blur.

The flaw is trust. A user who leans on Search completely can be fed a lie. When the Final War opened, the heroes exploited All For One's confidence in Tomura's readings to convince him they were nowhere close, then arrived through a warp gate on top of him. The same weakness cost Tomura directly: he struck at what he read as Izuku Midoriya and hit blood carrying Kudo's vestige instead, a false positive created by having swept the One For All holders. In short, anything that fools the wielder's sense of distance and placement fools the Quirk.

Tomoko Shiretoko used it during the Quirk Training Camp to keep watch over the Class 1-A students and their Class 1-B counterparts, an apparently harmless act that later proved catastrophic. Once the power passed to Tomura Shigaraki, he opened the Paranormal Liberation War by hunting for One For All and its holder, working from readings she had taken on the boy and his classmates years earlier.

The consequences drove Izuku out of U.A. entirely, since Tomura could pinpoint him at any hour. All For One later disclosed that Tomura had also swept every hero he fought during the war, which handed both villains that intelligence. All For One then watched Izuku and the assembled heroes from his hidden cave using Tomura's readings, not realizing the heroes had counted on exactly that and were staging exhaustion to lure him into the open.

Izuku turned the Quirk against its holder one final time. Aiming to force the remaining One For All users into Tomura, he baited Search into locking onto his blood and the trace of Kudo inside it, then used Smokescreen to close the gap and land an ambush.