Vigilantes Beginnings Arc

The opening arc of My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, covering Chapters 1 through 8 and Episodes 1 to 5, followed by the Stendhal Arc. The setting is Naruhata, several years ahead of the day a certain boy first meets All Might in person.

The arc establishes the vigilantes themselves, people who use Quirks illegally to protect the defenseless, and the drug Trigger, which amplifies a Quirk while eroding the judgment behind it. Koichi Haimawari, Kazuho Haneyama, and Iwao Oguro come together and start working the streets as the Naruhata Vigilantes.

Koichi is nineteen, works at a convenience store, worships All Might, and gets lectured by police for sliding to work on his Slide and Glide Quirk. He also runs afoul of Soga Kugisaki and his friends, who beat him behind the shop. Frustrated that nobody handles thugs like that, he pulls on an All Might hoodie and a mask and does small good deeds around the ward, earning the nickname Nice Guy.

The freelance idol Pop☆Step thanks him for a warning about the police and mocks him for being weak. When Soga's group corners her, Koichi's plan to trip them fails badly, and a muscular old man crashes out of a garbage pile and puts the leader down with one punch. Knuckleduster checks their tongues for the discoloration Trigger leaves, finds nothing, and tells Koichi that licenses and powerful Quirks have nothing to do with justice. Koichi refuses to be his disciple and helps him anyway. Afterward, a shadowed salesman offers the beaten thugs exactly the medicine they want.

Knuckleduster installs himself in Koichi's penthouse and explains the mission: find Trigger users and their dealers, and choke off the supply. His investigative technique is to punch first. Kazuho suggests searching online for sudden villain appearances instead, which actually works. Their pursuit of the salesman Mario Kugutsu is interrupted when Eraser Head, off duty, mistakes Knuckleduster for the source of the outbreaks and fights him. Shota Aizawa realizes mid-fight that the old man is Quirkless and therefore outside hero jurisdiction, and stops. Meanwhile Soga, Moyuru, and Rapt inject Trigger and transform, Mario doses himself into a four-armed giant, and it takes Erasure and a garbage pile to end it.

Koichi accepts the training. He takes the name The Crawler, learns to fall safely in motorcycle gear, and the trio begins patrolling. They stop Akira Iwako's rampage, save a baby from a collapsing carriage, and leave the police to find a villain nobody dispatched a hero to fight. Naomasa Tsukauchi works out that unapproved heroes did it and reminds his partner that vigilantism remains a crime.

Kuin Hachisuka, a high schooler and part-time villain, releases Trigger-loaded bees across town and turns dozens of citizens into Instant Villains at once, drawing out Ingenium, Endeavor, Midnight, Eraser Head, and All Might himself. Knuckleduster crushes one bee and misses the girl behind it. Her employer wants people with explosive potential and a strong will, and finds the vigilantes useful precisely because they generate data without involving heroes or police.

A separate meeting at the police station has Eizo Tanuma asking heroes to hesitate before hitting an Instant Villain, since most are victims. Endeavor calls that absurd and would treat all of them as villains, and Naomasa returns with All Might's answer, which is the opposite: assess carefully and keep the innocent out of harm's way. Along the way, Naomasa's first meeting with Toshinori Yagi ends with the secret of the weakened form out and an agreement to help file the number one hero's endless unlogged rescues. Midnight also badgers Eraser Head about teaching, submits a recommendation to Nezu, and gets him hired at U.A. against his own stated judgment.

Tensei Ida, chasing a Trigger-boosted speedster, meets Koichi jogging, fixes his braking problem in one conversation, and offers him a support role at Team Idaten. After the vigilantes take the bat villain down for him, Tensei asks for his business card back, having decided Koichi has already found where he belongs, and races him instead.

The arc closes on the hoodie. Koichi missed his hero course entrance exam because he stopped to pull a drowning kid out of a river, then handed over his silver age All Might hoodie to warm them. He still hopes the kid grew up inspired. Kazuho, alone in her room, takes that same hoodie out of the drawer. She was the child, she has spent every year since trying to find him, and the words still will not come.