Chapter 144

Lean and packed with borrowed force, Fat Gum winds up everything he has for one punch. Rappa shouts for the barrier to come down; Tengai finally understands that Red Riot's supposedly empty gesture was the setup. Eijiro, barely awake, does not agree. To him the gesture was wrong, and he was terrified the whole time. His mind drifts back to middle school.

Two students there had been forcing an underclassman to turn leaves into money. Eijiro told them off, and one levitated a rock into his face for it, sneering that Hardening was all he had. They walked away with the boy while Eijiro shouted after them, and his friends told him to leave it alone. Remembering a line of Crimson Riot's, that a manly spirit makes Quirks irrelevant, he went after them anyway, only for Mina Ashido to reach the group first and smooth the whole thing over before rejoining her friends. His classmates figured Mina for a future hero, given her athleticism and the strength of her Quirk, and sitting on the U.A. Entrance Exam. They also grumbled that modern heroes only chase ratings and approval, and Eijiro, thinking his own power dull and himself duller, kept training to make a manly heart cover what Hardening could not. When talk turned to schools, his friends named Doroido Technical and Eijiro claimed he had not decided, though the aspiration form folded in his pocket said otherwise.

Walking home he began to wonder whether a flashier Quirk would have let him say U.A. out loud. Across the street, Mina's friends had been cornered by a huge, hulking figure demanding directions to Springer's hero office. Their frightened silence read as an insult, so the man laid a hand on a building and started tearing it apart. Eijiro's body refused to move. Mina ran in, fed the man a false direction, and he thanked her and left, muttering that all of it was for the lord. Once he was gone the girls broke down, and her friends thanked Mina while Eijiro stood there asking himself why he had not moved.

At home the news carried a story about a middle schooler pinned by a powerful villain and, before All Might arrived, another middle schooler who ran in to save him, possibly a friend. Measured against that, Eijiro decided he was neither brave nor manly nor much of anything, scratched U.A. off his report, and gave up.

Eijiro's middle school past is revealed, including that he and Mina Ashido attended the same school.

He doubts his prospects as a hero because Hardening is plain, and he freezes when a large intimidating figure threatens his classmates, leaving Mina to defuse it.

News coverage of the Sludge Villain Incident convinces him he is a coward, and he strikes U.A. from his aspiration report.

Titled Red Riot, Part 1, the chapter was released on July 10, 2017 in issue 32, runs thirteen pages, and belongs to volume 16. It is adapted partly in Episode 68 and again in Episode 72.

Red Riot, Fat Gum, Rappa, and Tengai appear on the cover. Fat Absorption and Barrier feature, and the flashback visits Mustafa Private Middle School.

The imposing stranger in the flashback is Gigantomachia, and the news report ties to All Might's rematch with the Sludge Villain. Horikoshi's comment says good food always cheers him up, lately fillet meat.