Armored All Might

By the Final War, All Might had nothing left to fight with. One For All had passed to Izuku Midoriya, and the retired Symbol of Peace still intended to face All For One in person. This suit is how he managed it.

Melissa Shield drafted the build from specifications All Might supplied. He paid for it with almost his entire fortune, and the job was rushed so badly that the armor and its gadgets were delivered without ever going through proper testing. What arrived is a shell of scale-shaped robotic segments that lock on and detach as needed, wired to Hercules, the car that carries and supplies it.

The naming scheme is a tribute. Each tool, gadget and weapon aboard borrows the hero name of a student from Class 1-A, or the Quirk that student uses.

Defense runs first. Red Riot calls plating over from Hercules to sheathe him, enough to turn aside All For One's Impure Beam, though the effort ruined two thirds of the shielding and left it unusable afterward. The Utility Cape Auto-Guard, credited to Dark Shadow and Tsukuyomi, is a mechanical cape that deploys and rearranges itself across his body unprompted; it swallowed a barrage stitched together from Dark Ball, Rivet Stab, Air Cannon, Brawn Boost, Spring-ify and Impure Beam, leaving both cape and wearer damaged. Tailman grows a mechanical tail that blocked a punch aimed squarely at his old chest wound, while Invisible Girl is an optic resin coating that keeps searing heat off the plating.

Restraint and reach fill the middle of the kit. Blackwhip throws cables from both arms and pins a target by anchoring them to nearby buildings, holding All For One in place for a stretch; Chargebolt then runs current down those same lines, and the shocks upset the villain's regeneration badly enough that he could not knit himself back together. Cellophane reverses the pull, winching a target in close. Tentacole extends mechanical arms tipped with Froppy suction pads that cling to surfaces, and they held All For One still long enough for Shoto to freeze him before being cut loose. Morphing Armor: Creati peels segments off the suit and reshapes them into other objects, which is where the Binding Rounds: Grape Juice come from, spheres that stuck the villain's arms to the ground.

Mobility comes from thrusters named for Uravity and Ingenium, firing from his back and legs. Sugarman clamps a rocket to one leg to put weight behind a kick, which is what makes Shoot Style Smash possible. Shoto mounts cannons on his arms that fire ice. Anima commands bird-shaped drones that can hoist his motorcycle into position as a weapon and siphon current from power plants to charge his other gear.

The heavy hitters did the real damage. Superacid Injection: Pinky has Hercules launch a rocket carrying a syringe, which All Might snatches from the air and drives home; the acid turned All For One's skin purple and forced him to burn Quirks expelling it, which only hurried his de-aging along. Can't Stop Twinkling fires an enormous beam from a rig mounted on the motorcycle, strong enough to saw a building in half and a deliberate nod to Star and Stripe's Keraunos, though All Might could not solidify the shot the way she could; its engines overheated, the battery failed, and the device blew apart mid-attack. Soundwave Vibration: Earphone Jack pushes sonic waves out of his chest, used to keep All For One from slipping clear of that beam. Last comes the gauntlet called Great Explosion Murder God Dynamight, which detonates on command.

All Might is the suit's only true operator. Wearing it, a powerless man well past his prime traded blows with All For One at the peak of a body restored by the Rewind Drug, and every strike that landed sped the drug's reversal, eating into what little lifespan the villain had left.

It cost him. Beneath the plating he was being torn apart, and the armor came to pieces across his final battle with All For One, taking Hercules down with it. He held out long enough for Great Explosion Murder God Dynamight to step in and carry the fight. He had tried to end things himself first, planning to set the explosive gauntlet off as a suicide bomb, only for All For One to run Spearlike Bones through his arm and stop it. The gauntlet went to Dynamight instead, who wore it as a splint for his wrecked arm; it was destroyed when he spent one last blast to finish the villain for good.

The wreckage was not wasted. Data pulled from the fight fed the development of a second armored suit, handed to Deku, which let him return to hero work after One For All left him Quirkless again.

Comparisons to Iron Man's armor are unavoidable, and the tentacles arching off the back invite thoughts of Doctor Octopus. Two names break the Class 1-A pattern: Blackwhip, taken from one of Deku's One For All Quirks, and Dark Shadow, which points at the Quirk instead of at Tsukuyomi. Kohei Horikoshi later called the second one an error and said Tsukuyomi was the name he should have used, and the anime corrected it. Hercules supplies the suit's A.I. voice, performed in Japanese by Mirai Shida and in English by Erica Mendez, both of them Melissa Shield's actresses, cast to echo the woman who built it.