Episode 25 (Vigilantes)

Toshinori Yagi is losing a quiet battle with a spreadsheet on his tablet when a call interrupts his meeting at Might Tower. Naomasa Tsukauchi almost never uses the phone, so Toshinori steps into the hallway to ask what is wrong. The answer is chaos: the Tokyo Sky Egg has begun to drop after Number 6 supercharged the blast that gutted its support, and fifty thousand guests plus every hero on site are falling with it. Naomasa's voice fails him once he remembers his sister is inside. He and Makoto rarely agree on anything professional, yet she is still family, so he sets his own ethics aside and asks the hero to save her.

The answer comes without a pause. All Might tears out of the building, his suit shredding away to expose the Golden Age costume, and covers the distance in seconds. What follows plays less like a fight than a demonstration. He slows the dome with a punch, strips a nearby park bare with a wall of wind pressure, flattens the exposed soil with a roller, carries the park's animals out of harm's way, gathers the loose debris, then climbs back up to catch the structure and lower it onto the ground he just prepared. Captain Celebrity and Koichi Haimawari are still dropping through the air, so he collects them too. The college student cheerfully bills himself as an ordinary fan and asks for an autograph on the way down.

Number 6 seethes at the live coverage while All Might gives the press credit to the other heroes and to public services. Afterward Naomasa apologizes for losing his composure, but the hero tells him the raw plea is precisely what got him there in time. He admits he cannot wall the job off from the man the way his colleagues do, since any honest cry for help becomes personal, and giving people hope was why he took the power at all. He waves off that last phrase, calling it a misspoken line, and quietly promises himself that the detective will learn about One For All and the Symbol of Peace someday.

Unwilling to let the day close so neatly, Number 6 smashes his binoculars and starts working his phone through Overclock. Scattered Bomber remains along the street pulse, regenerate, and fuse into one enormous creature. Bulk alone would only invite Eraser Head or All Might to flatten it, so the Cluster Bomber is engineered around that: its hide splits and roughly two hundred bat-sized Mini-Bombers spill out toward the crowd. By the villain's math, every hero present could down half of them at best, leaving the rest free to kill attendees, bystanders, and public servants alike. All Might plants his feet, winds his right arm until it holds an enormous stock of wind pressure, and unleashes a Nebraska Smash that becomes a tornado, herding the swarm into itself until it detonates safely far from anyone.

Number 6 can only laugh at being outdone that thoroughly. His employer speaks up through the phone, addressing him by his proper moniker for the first time and calling All Might a genuine superhuman who bends physics on request, a real deus ex machina worth aiming at. The scarred villain refuses the comparison: he intends to be a successor, just not to that man. Before he can finish thanking his Boss, a bullet punches through his collarbone. Knuckleduster is on a nearby rooftop with a sniper rifle, having spent weeks reconstructing the plan and scouting the vantage points a distant attack on the Sky Egg would need. The shot was meant for the head, but a bird crossed the scope at the wrong instant. Number 6 accelerates away, kills the bird, and lands behind the shooter.

Knuckleduster names the Quirk and the body modifications built to accommodate it. Number 6 fills in the rest: bulked muscle, dulled pain receptors, and Overclock itself inherited from O'Clock, the hero who later became this very vigilante. Asked who he really is, the villain admits there is no origin worth telling. He had no name, remembers himself as a featureless blob with limbs, and grew up labeled Test Subject #6. He wants only to matter, and O'Clock is the shape that wanting took. All Might, he argues, is trapped by unmatched power into cleaning up after everyone beneath him; Overclock instead guarantees the first move and a victory the enemy never sees coming. Footage of the battle that stripped his idol's Quirk gave him chills and a purpose, so he carved a matching scar into his own face with a knife. Knuckleduster refuses to christen him as the next O'Clock, since the apprenticeship is already filled by Koichi, and repeats that anyone chasing that Quirk is a villain waiting to be put down.

The rejection lands, and the fight starts. Number 6 stops short when a speaker nearby plays a message addressed to O'Clock that sounds perfectly normal to accelerated ears, meaning the tape was sped up three hundred times. On it, Knuckleduster lays out Overclock's rules: acceleration scales with the user's state of mind, roughly three to ten times for a fight and up to a dozen under real threat, but harder acceleration loads the brain until the Quirk cuts out, exactly as it would while dodging a bullet or straining to follow a recording at that speed. Realizing the trap, Number 6 slides back. Knuckleduster throws the rifle away, hooks a grapple to an antenna, and detonates the top floors, sending both of them down. With no surface to run on there is no escape, and the vigilante empties a shotgun into the villain's shoulder and limbs on the way to the pavement. He is not aiming to kill anymore; since Number 6 wants his attention so badly, he plans to bury him alive and get the Boss's name out of him. Beating the man's face into the concrete stalls Overclock long enough for a capture, but Bomber cells hidden in the villain's clothes crawl onto his arm, swell, and blow, catching both men in the blast as it races up the ruined building.

The twelfth entry of the second season closes out the Sky Egg storyline and opens the confrontation between Knuckleduster and Number 6. It draws on chapters 54 through 57 of the source manga, keeps CATCH!!! as the opening theme, and pairs it with Miss you at the end.

Several changes separate the broadcast from the page. The support column collapses during the phone call in print but has already failed here, and Eraser Head's argument with Naomasa over calling All Might is dropped entirely. All Might no longer pauses for a photograph mid-rescue, and his landing with Captain Celebrity is cut so that Koichi's autograph request happens in the air instead. The news broadcast is trimmed down to the press statement, losing All Might's hurried exit, his reversion to Toshinori, and Kazuho lending him a hoodie. Makoto's aside about donating the crew's merchandise as relief supplies is gone, as are the introductions Naomasa makes on Toshinori's behalf, covering Eraser Head, Monika, and Fat Gum.

Other adjustments favor spectacle. The Nebraska Smash sequence runs longer, the Cluster Bomber is staged farther from the recovering crowd, and flashbacks replace the diagram that explained how Knuckleduster tracked his target. Number 6 loses his line about laying low, gets shot mid-thought, and here explains the experiments and the source of his designation aloud. The imagined version of a selfish All Might is rendered in more detail, extra shots show Number 6 moving through a crowd while accelerated, and the recording scene ends with a simple question rather than the vigilante commenting on the brain drain, followed by the grapple hook and the detonator.