Star and Stripe Arc

The twentieth arc of My Hero Academia and the second within the Final Act Saga, covering Chapters 329 to 334 and Episodes 139 to 140. It sits between the Dark Hero Arc and the U.A. Traitor Arc.

With Tomura Shigaraki's body almost fully merged with the villain riding inside it, Toshinori Yagi calls for foreign reinforcement. The answer is Cathleen Bate, billed as the world's strongest woman, whose Quirk New Order can rewrite reality by naming a thing and declaring a rule for it. All For One has already decided that power belongs to him, and sends his half-completed successor to take it.

Hidden in a cave, All For One explains his position to Spinner. Escaped convicts keep Japan's heroes and police busy, and allies abroad will keep other nations occupied choosing between their own citizens and someone else's. One For All remains the short-term prize. The genuine threat, and the genuine opportunity, is the American hero now crossing the ocean.

Cathleen meets "Tomura" above the sea, perched on a flying Nomu, and asks whether he is All For One. His answer is a question about his own nature. Her fighter escort takes formation, and the fight opens with her stripping the air from a hundred metres in front of her, then reserving her second rule for herself to sustain All Might's kind of strength. She lands a punch, tells him she copied her hair from the man who saved her family as a child, and then declares that if he so much as moves, his heart stops.

The rule fails. Inside the vestige realm, the merge has already reached ninety-eight percent, accelerated by hatred beyond anything All For One projected. From the outside, "Tomura" simply resists and grows. He works out the mechanism while she attacks: New Order needs the target to recognize its own name, and a man who cannot say which of three names, Tenko Shimura or Tomura Shigaraki or the one he stole, truly belongs to him offers nothing to grip. Objects, having no self, are helpless before it.

Cathleen escalates. She sculpts the air into a thousand-times replica of herself, crushes him between its hands, fuses the squadron's lasers into one beam to pin him to the seabed, then catches the incoming Tiamat cruise missiles and redirects them into him. He survives by burying himself with Decay and leaving the Nomu as a decoy, then closes the distance and takes hold of her face.

He begins to Decay her and pull New Order out. She spends her last rule not on saving herself but on a command that the Quirk revolt against every other Quirk in whoever holds it. It works. "Tomura" detonates from within as her vestige tears through his collection, destroying Reflect among others, while she crumbles thinking of All Might and the dream he let her have. Fleeing on wings taken from the Nomu, he tries to dump the poisoned Quirk into an escaped convict, Kashiko Kashi, but her vestige mocks him first: heroism outlives its carriers. Unnoticed by everyone, Tenko Shimura calls out from the core toward Izuku Midoriya.

The hunt resumes with nothing to show for it. Kashiko's hideout bears signs of a struggle and no trail, putting the search back where it started. Word of the American number one's death travels fast, and the nations that had offered support to Japan withdraw it, reasoning that if she could not survive this, no one they send will.

The fighter pilots meet All Might, who wanted only to see her again, and hand over the data their X-66 jets recorded: bio-signatures and a catalogue of the Quirks used against her, material for the researchers working out of Central Hospital.

A day later, All Might lays the arithmetic out for Class 1-A. The enemy's body should have reached completion within twenty-four hours. Her final command bought them a week instead. He calls it her parting gift and tells them to spend it getting ready.