Chapter 13 (Vigilantes)

Training with Knuckleduster is going well. Koichi Haimawari has been putting Slide and Glide to smarter tactical use, and the older man says so. Kazuho Haneyama finds the whole racket irritating, which Knuckleduster counters by pointing out that being irritating has its uses, and she turns her back on him. Her mood puzzles him until Koichi explains that she has been like this since Makoto Tsukauchi turned up to investigate vigilantes.

That investigation, Knuckleduster warns, ends with their names exposed and both the Police Force and every villain in reach coming for them. Koichi knows. Kazuho calls him an idiot and turns away again. Knuckleduster volunteers to silence Makoto the direct way, and Koichi bargains instead: leave her alone and he will handle the deception himself. Knuckleduster allows it, with one warning about letting the job and the personal life blur together.

Koichi meets her and promptly loses his train of thought at the sight of her in professional dress, while Kazuho tails them from cover. Makoto has been mining social media to map where vigilantes tend to surface, and what she wants now is the neighborhood's opinion. She circles back to her old question about what really divides heroes from villains and gives her answer: popularity. So the survey exists to measure how far the public has accepted the vigilantes of Naruhata.

Their first stop turns up Ichimoku Samazu and Jube Namimaru, who catch Koichi's signal to keep his identity quiet. They speak warmly of Pop☆Step and coldly of Knuckleduster. The rest of the canvassing produces a portrait: The Cruller is useful but unsettling, an assessment Ichimoku and Jube find hilarious, Pop☆Step registers mainly as cute and as a backside, and Knuckleduster barely registers at all except to the handful who find him terrifying.

Then Emperor Yotsuura snatches Makoto's laptop, a thief known for stealing while keeping a soccer ball in motion at his feet. Ichimoku and Jube give chase while Koichi ducks away to change into his Crawler gear. Pop☆Step turns up and decides to sit this one out, reasoning that a successful theft teaches Makoto something about meddling and might get her to stop hounding them. Koichi cannot stomach that, rides his Quirk into range and tries to sweep the thief's legs, only for Yotsuura to dodge mid-dribble and put the ball through his face. While he reels, a laser from Ichimoku catches Yotsuura in the back and puts him down. The pair work him over and tie him up, Koichi retrieves the laptop, and Makoto thanks the two of them as they head off.

She thanks Koichi as well, offers a handshake and asks to put one last question to him, which he allows. Skin contact is what Polygraph needs, and the Quirk lets her weigh whether what she hears is true. She asks whether he is the Cruller. He tells her she has it wrong, the Quirk registers honesty, and she apologizes.

At home, Makoto is torn. The data she wanted is in hand, but nothing in it amounts to real proof, and she wonders whether her instincts have dulled.

At Koichi's place, he and Kazuho pore over copies of that same data and needle each other about their public images, Koichi stuck on the fact that the neighborhood insists on Cruller when he has always been the Crawler. They bicker on while Knuckleduster reads his newspaper without looking up.

Makoto's vigilante investigation gets underway, built on social media data and street-level interviews, with popularity framed as the real dividing line between heroes and villains.

The neighborhood's verdict emerges: The Cruller is helpful yet creepy, Pop☆Step is cute and famous for her figure, and Knuckleduster is obscure and frightening.

Emperor Yotsuura steals Makoto's laptop and is taken down by Ichimoku and Jube, with Koichi recovering the machine.

Makoto uses Polygraph on Koichi during a handshake and asks if he is the Cruller. His denial reads as truthful, since the name he answers to is the Crawler.

Numbered thirteen in My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, written by Hideyuki Furuhashi and illustrated by Betten Court, this chapter saw print on September 9, 2017. It runs twenty-one pages, and sits in volume 3 as part of the Senpai arc. Makoto fronts the cover, and Episode 7 of the anime adapts it.

Emperor Yotsuura debuts here. All Might, Endeavor, Best Jeanist, Midnight and Ingenium appear only inside a fantasy sequence, and Mario Kugutsu turns up in flashback.

The Japanese title, 真 (Makoto), doubles as both Makoto's name and the word for truth, which the English title renders as Makoto/Truth.