Terakoya

Set on Oku Island, Terakoya operates privately and aims its curriculum at children young enough to still be learning what their Quirks do. Control comes first, with a hero career held out as the goal past it.

That age bracket makes the place unusual. Leaving aside Masegaki Primary School, every other hero school in the series teaches at the high school level, so Terakoya stands alone as an elementary version of the idea.

The name carries real history behind it. A terakoya, literally a temple school, was the sort of private institution that taught Japanese children reading and writing throughout the Edo period, well before any compulsory schooling system existed.

Mashirao Ojiro and Toru Hagakure draw the school as a Team-Up Mission, sent out to lecture the students. They barely reach the gate before a rope across the path snares Mashirao in a net, the work of a boy named Ikkaku who announces himself as a hero to be. The teacher arrives apologizing, but Mashirao waves it off and Toru simply asks the kid to teach her the trap.

Inside, the children are busy testing their Quirks on each other. Mashirao introduces himself as Tailman and gets an immediate question about his power, which the class assumes will be spectacular. His answer, a tail, deflates them. They quiz him instead on rumors that U.A. splices Quirk Factors together in hidden genetic laboratories, and he tells them none of it is real. Asked for the trick to becoming a hero, he offers daily training and hard study, which bores the room. Ikkaku writes him off as painfully plain.

Toru takes over and turns her Invisibility into a burst of light, which wins the class instantly. They crowd her for photos while Ikkaku shares the island's rumor: a treasure hidden somewhere nearby that will make its finder respected by everybody. He invites Toru onto his future treasure hunting team and refuses to include Mashirao.

After class, Ikkaku shows off on a fence, senses something with his horn, and tumbles into the island's ruins. His friends raise the alarm when his phone goes unanswered, and the two U.A. students go in after him. Mashirao threads a gauntlet of traps to reach the boy, who admits that his constant grandstanding covers for a Quirk that amounts to a horn with limited sensing. A graverobber hunting the treasure attacks them, and Mashirao puts him down, which forces Ikkaku to reckon with how dangerous a man with only a tail can be. Back at the school, the boy brags about finding the ruins, but the lesson lands: skill honed by work, not the power a person was born with, is what makes the hero.

Ikkaku is the only student identified by name. His Quirk gives him a horn capable of picking up on certain things around him, an ability plain enough that he compensates with loud stunts, until Mashirao's example gives him a reason to stop.

An unnamed teacher runs the classroom, apologizes for his student's ambush, and hosts the visiting pair afterward, noting that most of the children are only excited by dramatic Quirks.

Mashirao Ojiro and Toru Hagakure attend as guests rather than staff, arriving from U.A. High School to give the presentation and staying long enough to pull a student out of the ruins.