The Lovely Lady Nagant

All Might's car shrugs off the blast meant to gut it, and while the vehicle slews with two thugs closing on either flank, he reads the plan instantly: separate him from Deku so the boy can be boxed in. He radios the situation to the others and bails out just before two rocket driven lances gut the car and drive it into a wall. The pair recognize him and cannot make themselves move, even knowing full well how far he has fallen since retirement. The former Symbol of Peace simply tells them to get out of the way. He has a promise to Inko to keep, and he tells them the boy carries a heavier weight than he ever did and still looks up to him, so anything reaching his student will have to go through his corpse first.

Deku's half of the fight is going badly. He Floats in a zig-zag to spoil her aim while shaving distance, and Danger Sense still catches a round arriving from behind, in a blind spot. He kicks it away at the last instant while another opens a graze along his torso, and he cannot work out how a shot came from there until he turns and finds her walking down the air toward him. He curses himself for never accounting for All For One handing her a second Quirk.

Recognizing that she is herding him, he drops to street level and pours out a Full Blast of Smokescreen. En's vestige warns again that a cloud that size blinds him too and seals off his own exits, but escape is not the plan. Deku begins squatting rapidly in place, charging the third user's Fa Jin, which banks kinetic energy from repeated motion for later release. The third user's vestige objects: the Quirk is untested, and the boy has not gotten far enough with Endeavor's parallel processing lessons to run it in combat. Deku's answer is that he will learn it right now, because he wants answers out of her.

Above, she fires at movement in the smoke and finds through her scope only a decoy, Gran Torino's scarf slung out on a Blackwhip tendril. Three more follow: his mask, his backpack, a stray tendril. With her attention scattered, Deku bursts from the cloud, punches through a building on stored energy, and gets a hand on her in midair. She extends a rifle barrel from the point of her elbow, knocks him off, and resumes shooting.

He asks why a former hero stands with All For One. Someone dyed in that shade, she says, will never follow her reasoning. Then, through more rounds and the microphones packed inside them, she tells him anyway. As a teenager the Hero Public Safety Commission quietly bought her as an executioner, aiming her at anyone judged a hazard to the order of hero society, hero or villain, whether or not they had actually done the thing they were suspected of planning. The weight of it hollowed her out until she could not stand in front of a crowd of thrilled children without seeing her own arms drenched. Her picture of the profession gone, she killed the Commission's president in a meeting after his answers about the value of her work failed to satisfy her, and the organization, along with the president who replaced him, buried the truth beneath an arrest record about a dispute that left a hero dead.

The world All For One is building holds together better than the one it replaces, she argues, since superhuman society is a brittle fiction that will simply rebuild the same machinery that consumed her. Deku answers with Pinpoint Focus, whipping a tendril into her firing line to haul himself closer as his reads on her shots sharpen. He tells her he does know how gray the world is and how rotten it may be at the center, and that this is precisely why he wants to reach people like her.

Unable to land anything, she reshapes the rifle into something larger and uglier and aims it at Kai, who came along to verify Deku's identity in exchange for a trip to see his Boss. Risking a jam, she fires a round at boosted speed to exploit the boy's instincts and pin him down. Deku crosses to Kai through her fire on Blackwhip and banked Fa Jin, winds One For All to 45 percent, and unleashes Faux 100 Percent to outrun the round and knock the man clear. He drops Kai, anchors to a building, and closes on her at blinding speed, driving Faux 100 Percent: Manchester Smash through the gun barrel.

She drifts down beaten, and he takes hold of the arm she has left. That shot at Kai was off line, he tells her, and if she truly belonged to All For One the very first bullet she sent his way would have ended him. He asks her to come over to their side, certain the heart of a hero is still in there and recognizing that the light she wants is the same darkness she keeps naming. She has just begun calling him the genuine article when her body detonates. All For One had buried a self destruct alongside Air Walk, insurance against exactly this. Hawks and Endeavor arrive, the former and Deku catching what is left of her while Endeavor goes up for Kai.

Critical but conscious, she tells them her orders were to bring the boy to a mansion out in Haibori Woods. Set down, she asks Hawks, who inherited her role, why the job never wore him down the way it did her. He calls himself an optimist and thinks of the Endeavor toy his mother gave him, which has carried him this far. Endeavor lands with Kai, who starts shouting at her for breaking their bargain, and Deku answers flatly that if Kai ever shows for Eri the grief he shows for his Boss, he will honor her end of it himself. He is still staring at the wreckage of the woman he failed to save when All Might rushes in, All For One's name on his lips.

All Might is deliberately separated from Deku and refuses to yield to two villains. Deku manifests and uses Fa Jin for the first time in combat, along with Pinpoint Focus, then saves Kai Chisaki from a boosted round and ends the duel when Faux 100 Percent: Manchester Smash shatters her rifle arm.

Lady Nagant reveals that the Hero Public Safety Commission bought her as a teenage executioner, and that she eventually killed its president, a crime the organization buried. As she begins to accept Deku's plea, a self destruct Quirk planted by All For One detonates inside her. She survives long enough to name the Haibori Woods mansion as her drop point, handing the heroes their next lead.

Covering Chapter 313 through Chapter 316's opening pages, this concludes the Deku versus Lady Nagant fight in the Dark Hero arc. It aired in Japan on February 25, 2023, and in English on March 11.

The adaptation shows Lady Nagant with a shaved head during her flashback, a detail previously confined to a volume extra, and seats All For One on his throne in the cave hideout earlier than the manga did. His orders to the other assassins are not shown. This is also the first episode in which Izuku skips the customary Go Beyond! Plus Ultra! in the next episode preview.