Episode 3 (Vigilantes)

Koichi Haimawari comes home from class to find a stranger eating his food, drinking his beer, and watching his television. The mask goes on and the panic subsides: it is Knuckleduster, who finished work early and let himself in by punching through the window and reaching for the lock. A knock brings the second intruder, a shy pink-haired high schooler who breezes past without a greeting and starts on her makeup. Kazuho Haneyama is prepping for a show, and she and the old man are soon squabbling over whose half of the room his coat belongs on while the apartment's actual tenant watches his home get colonized.

Koichi leaves for a shift that starts right as Pop☆Step's set does. She invites the crowd to line up for handshakes, and one fan, Teruo Unagisawa, tries to crawl to the front and gets shoved back for cutting. Ichimoku Samazu and Jube Namimaru check on him and advise him to wait like everyone else instead of hoarding an idol they all share, advice Ichimoku promptly ignores by firing a Meganetic Blaster skyward for a compliment from the stage, much to Jube's disgust. Teruo, out of patience, jams a vial of Trigger into his neck and becomes a huge, slick, eel-like thing that chases Pop with a fan's single-minded craving.

Koichi's shift ends just in time to catch the commotion, and The Crawler joins the pursuit alongside Knuckleduster, Ichimoku, and Jube. Grabbing the creature's lower half and dropping a punch from above both fail; the slime coating him makes contact useless and lands the vigilantes in a heap of garbage. Working the problem, Knuckleduster spots an udon shop nearby. The Crawler phones Pop and asks her to steer the Instant Villain into an alley for the handshake he came for, betting it will settle him down. It nearly does, until Teruo coils around her and goes for a kiss with a mouth built like a lamprey's. An avalanche of borrowed flour buries them both, drying the slime off his skin, and Knuckleduster finishes him with a few punches and ties him up. Identifying him proves difficult, since Trigger users tend to destroy their clothing and lose their possessions when the drug takes hold.

Back at the penthouse, a freshly bathed Pop complains about Koichi's shampoo, Knuckleduster complains about the beer he personally drank, and Pop moves on to his smoking and his underwear. Koichi slips outside to get the costumes dried. The bustling college life he imagined never materialized, and his days amount to a dull job with nobody from class to call a friend, but he finds himself grateful for the two people currently arguing in his living room.

At the station, Naomasa Tsukauchi walks Eizo Tanuma through the Instant Villain cases stacking up, all of them clustered in two places, the shopping district in Naruhata and the ward's eastern half. Eizo is unsurprised given the area's reputation and expects leads to come easily from so tight a radius. Naomasa is less certain: every user claims the same anonymous source handed them the vial. He suspects free samples meant to build paying addicts, but Eizo doubts it given what Trigger costs on the street and floats the alternative, that the giveaway is an investment toward something larger, political or anarchic or otherwise.

The next day, Jube and Ichimoku report that Teruo has been released and that they are befriending him in hopes he will name whoever supplied him. Pop vetoes calling Knuckleduster, certain he would just assault the boy again, so she and Koichi go to the meetup themselves, with Pop clinging to his arm to stay upright in her platform shoes. An excited fan named Kuin Hachisuka stops them for a photo. At the cafe they find Ichimoku waiting and Knuckleduster already sitting there, asking to join over everyone's objections.

Still gushing about her photo, Kuin is walking with classmates when a hornet with an abdomen like a syringe full of Trigger crawls under her eyepatch. She begs off with a story about being called in to work and ducks into an alley, where she pulls the patch away and lets the swarm pour out of the socket. Her part-time job is villainy, and Queen Bee sends the insects into the shopping district to sting civilians full of Trigger, throwing their Quirks out of control and separating Jube from Teruo in the chaos. Sansa Tamagawa takes the reports and Naomasa calls out every available hero, and by the time the vigilantes notice the disturbance, a wave of professionals including Airjet, All Might, Endeavor, and Ingenium has already cleaned it up.

Knuckleduster spots a lone bee, chases it down, and catches it, then asks Jube whether he has seen anyone with a Bee Quirk. The boy has not, and the frustrated vigilante crushes the insect, which gives Kuin a splitting headache and sends blood running from her hidden eye. She swears at the vigilante over what he just did to her girls, evidently knowing exactly who he is. Teruo, who caught up to her amid the chaos, asks whether she is all right; she assures him she is fine, takes him by the hand, and trades on their mutual devotion to Pop☆Step to lead him away into a dark alley. Knuckleduster returns to the cafe and broods over failing to find whoever was responsible.

The third entry adapts chapters 4 and 5 of the source manga, sits inside the Vigilantes Beginnings storyline, and runs under Kekka Alright with Speed as its ending. It introduces Kuin Hachisuka and her Queen Bee Quirk.

Present Mic's explanation of what vigilantes are is dropped and replaced by a scene of Koichi in a college lecture on the subject. Cut too are the spare key Koichi leaves for Knuckleduster, his offer of the bath to Pop, and his directions to the bathroom, which in print prompt her suspicion and send him spiraling into a bad memory of his classmates. That flashback, covering his move into the penthouse and the ostracism that followed his attempt to invite people over, is repurposed as the opening of the fifth entry, and a vision of a typical college life stands in its place here.

Pop☆Step's set is performed in full, and rather than shaking hands from nearby buildings as her opening number winds down, she crowd surfs while the audience tosses her overhead. Teruo's interrogation is shown instead of only heard, and the Instant Villains' profiles appear on screen rather than being read aloud by Naomasa. The silhouetted figure handing Mario his Trigger is gone. Teruo's release, his reunion with the two middle schoolers, and Naomasa tailing him are all omitted, which is why the detective issues the emergency call from the station alongside Sansa. Koichi's teasing about the formality of the boys' message is excluded, and his spoken guess about how the old man would handle Teruo becomes a silent daydream shared between him and Pop. Kuin's swarm release runs longer, All Might's nondescript finishing blow becomes a Texas Smash, and Teruo still has his Pop☆Step jinbei on while he sits with Kuin afterward.