The Ones Within Us

Bakugo takes the Rivet Stab meant for Deku and tells him to stop trying to win alone. The thing wearing Tomura's face dismisses the attack, and All For One's voice calls the blood spilled wasteful, Bakugo's most of all. Remembering Banjo's warning that the Quirks inside One For All answer to the holder's feelings, Deku loses his grip anyway, snapping and biting through the incoming stabs. The villain reaches his face and begins to pull, and both minds drop out of the world.

Inside, All For One is visibly fusing with Tomura, who snarls at him to keep away. Nana Shimura steadies Deku, telling him this place will not let him move yet. All For One explains what he calls transference: like transplanted organs said to carry a donor's habits, a Quirk's factor houses its owner's consciousness, and his ability to handle Quirks directly let him perceive them. His brother's bestowal Quirk had the same reach, and when it merged with stockpiling it built a line running between every successor.

The realm starts corroding under Tomura's hatred, and All For One welcomes even his own erosion until it halts. The first user, All For One's younger sibling, takes a place beside Izuku and refuses to yield. All For One sneers that the boy is weak, protected rather than protecting, ruled by rage like his master before him. His brother answers that a man who only manipulates others cannot read what Izuku bleeds for: fury on his friends' behalf, and an obsession with rescue that goes past anything reasonable. Izuku drags himself forward and lunges, and reality returns with the two blown apart. The theft failed because the body is unfinished, and All For One orders a retreat.

Elsewhere, the giant tears through Nabato at a hundred kilometers an hour with the hospital ruins minutes away. On his back, Himiko asks Mr. Compress where the line sits between hero and villain, and what that makes Twice. Spinner tells her she is not alone in her grief and asks only that she come back. She drops into the evacuation zone disguised as a frantic old woman, lures Ochaco into an empty house, pins her under a blade, and wants to know what Ochaco intends to do about her. Ochaco throws her off and answers that anyone standing between her and the people who need saving gets stopped here.

The vestige world is explained in full: consciousness rides inside a Quirk's factor, which is why the previous holders persist and why All For One can perceive them. Nana Shimura meets her grandson, and the first user, sibling to All For One, stands with Izuku and refuses to abandon him. The attempted theft of One For All fails because Tomura's remodeling is incomplete, and All For One orders him to withdraw and finish the process.

Ida joins the heroes racing to intercept Gigantomachia, whose rampage has cut communications with Tomura's battlefield. Himiko leaves the League with Spinner's blessing and ambushes Uravity, opening their rematch.

The episode adapts chapters 286 and 287, most of 288, and the first page of 289. It premiered 3 December 2022 in Japan with the dub following on 17 December.

An original Police Force HQ sequence covers how the authorities plan around the rampage. Ochaco throwing Himiko off after her first question is new, Nejire and Ida's exchange plays out in the present rather than as a flashback, and the first user's defense of Izuku is illustrated with added flashbacks to his rescues.