Have a Merry Christmas!

Fissures race through Deika City until the whole place folds into dust. Standing in the middle of the wreckage, battered and bloodied, is Tomura Shigaraki, his hair drained from pale blue to white, laughing. Nine days later the disaster leads the news: twenty people, roughly fifty minutes, an entire city gone. Tenya Ida notes the destruction outstripped Kamino even with fewer dead. What surprises the commentators is the public reaction, which leans toward encouragement rather than blame, a shift Ochaco Uraraka and Mina Ashido credit to the boy who cheered Endeavor on.

Mt. Lady and Midnight arrive to run the class through media training, on the grounds that heroes now need substance behind the showmanship. Shoto Todoroki goes first and misreads roughly every compliment aimed at him. Mt. Lady defends showing off Ultimate Moves as a form of self-introduction, useful for team-ups, for warning villains, and for reassuring civilians. Katsuki Bakugo interviews surprisingly well alone, a fact Mt. Lady attributes to his poor chemistry with humanity in general. Izuku freezes solid until the subject turns to All Might, at which point he cannot be stopped. Asked to demonstrate his progress with Blackwhip, he produces a single thread. He is delighted. Nobody else is.

Behind the scenes, Nezu tells All Might, busy compiling notes on the previous One For All wielders, that the Hero Work-Studies are restarting. The staff find the Commission's timing and vagueness suspicious, guessing it connects to Deika City and the League of Villains. Nezu concludes that they have learned something they intend to keep quiet. By month's end Naomasa reports the dormitory system has turned up no spies among the students. Christmas brings a feast, Eri in a Santa outfit garbling every custom she attempts, and a gift exchange that hands Eri a buster sword. Afterward, Shoto quietly invites Izuku and Katsuki to spend their work-study at his father's agency.

The episode opens on the ruins of Deika City with Tomura Shigaraki alive at the center and visibly transformed, his hair now white. The incident is reported publicly as a tragedy of unknown cause and becomes the unspoken reason for everything the adults do afterward.

Class 1-A undergoes Hero Interview Training under Mt. Lady and Midnight. Izuku demonstrates that two weeks of visualization work have restored partial access to Blackwhip, though only a wisp of it. The Hero Public Safety Commission orders the Work-Studies restarted for all Hero Course students, and Nezu reads the vagueness of the request as deliberate concealment. Nezu also raises a second Commission program with Eraser Head.

Naomasa confirms no student has behaved suspiciously in the four months of dormitory living, clearing them of being League informants. Katsuki dodges the question of returning to Best Jeanist, having read that the hero has gone missing, and recalls Best Jeanist's challenge to bring him a hero name. At the party's end, Shoto asks Izuku and Katsuki to join him at Endeavor's agency.

Adapted from two chapters and broadcast in Japan on June 19, 2021, with the dub following on July 3. No.1 opens the episode and Footprints closes it. This is the only occasion on which the main anime reorders the source material, placing the Endeavor Agency Arc ahead of the Meta Liberation Army Arc.

A remark Nezu makes about the Commission's other program leads straight into the film My Hero Academia: Heroes: Rising. The adaptation adds a prologue of Tomura amid the ruins, extra shots of the Christmas party, and narration of Izuku's thoughts about the future, while cutting remarks about Katsuki's interview performance.

Each student's Santa hat swaps the pom for an object themed to their Quirk or appearance, and each contributed a matching ornament to the dorm tree. In the English dub, Eri shouts a wedding phrase while throwing salt, which reframes a Shinto purification custom as something closer to a celebration.