Nana Shimura

A small mole sits just below her lower lip, off to the right, and her dull purple eyes are sharp, intelligent, and long-lashed. Black hair reaches her shoulders, usually gathered half up into a bun, with a short clump of bangs left hanging over her forehead. She stands tall and fair-skinned, keeping a curved figure over the solid build that One For All demands, and the descriptions of her settle on beauty paired with a tough bearing.

Her costume was a black bodysuit, sleeveless, its collar standing high, worn with yellow gloves and knee-high boots in white. An angular gold buckle fastened the belt at her waist, a short red cape hung from the back of it to her knees, and a longer white cape clipped to her shoulders on a fine gold chain.

Her creed was the smile. Nana held that anybody who needs rescuing is already frightened, and that a hero owes them their heart as well as their life, so she kept calm on her face regardless of the situation and told Toshinori that the people who can still smile are the strongest ones alive. All Might's grin traces directly back to that lesson.

The empathy did not make her soft. She met Toshinori by mocking him for planning to take on a pack of villains armed with a lead pipe, and she refused him as a student outright because he was Quirkless. What changed her mind was his reason for wanting power: he meant to become something people living in fear could stand under. She thought the ambition faintly insane coming from a Quirkless boy, took it to her trusted friend Gran Torino anyway, and then took the boy as her successor, which says a great deal about her willingness to bet on someone the world had already dismissed. Like the student who followed her, her heroism ran all the way to self-sacrifice; she faced All For One without fear, smiling as she handed her will forward.

Kotaro complicates all of it. She was loving, nurturing, and supportive toward her son, and then she put him in foster care because her work made her presence lethal to him. She left him a letter explaining herself and promising her love would outlast her death, and she wept once she forced the tie shut. He read the whole thing as abandonment, grew to despise her and heroes with her, and passed that damage down to his own children. Learning that her decision put Tenko in All For One's hands and produced Tomura Shigaraki broke something in her. She owned the mistake and carried the remorse, and still asked Izuku Midoriya whether he had it in him to finish her grandson even if that meant killing him, then broke down when he answered that he had heard a child crying inside the villain and intended to save him first, because the power was built to save rather than to kill.

Deep inside Tomura's mind she met the grown Kotaro, watched him strike his son and heard herself named a monster for walking out on her child, and turned no anger on him at all. She blamed herself, ran to him, and apologized for never coming home, and to her grandson for everything she had set in motion. In the end she shielded Tomura's vestige from destruction, and he stood with her and the other holders against All For One.

Her original Quirk was Float, which let her suspend herself in midair; whether she could steer while levitating was never established. It was enough to fly beside Gran Torino, reckoned the fastest hero of his generation with Jet. One For All reached her from En, and stockpiled power layered onto Float turned her into something else: strength, speed, agility, and durability all pushed well past human limits. Both All Might and Gran Torino counted her among the great heroes.

She carried the muscle the Quirk requires, since a body too weak for One For All is torn apart by its own raw output, and she was strong enough to put down a villain twice her size along with the group around him. That is exactly what the young Toshinori watched her do, clearing a crowd of villains in moments and pulling him out of it. She trained him afterward and named him her successor.

Against All For One she was outmatched, and she died in the fight. Her parting words were a promise that All Might would bring him down, because Toshinori was more unhinged than he was. All For One kept a trophy: the remaining hand Tomura wore over his face after the Revival Celebration was hers. She remains the only woman ever to hold One For All, and the only wielder known to have married and had children, dying at roughly thirty-five.