Chapter 179

Present Mic's announcement opens the festival to applause at nine in the morning, while Hound Dog picks up traces of a scuffle happening beyond the school grounds. In the forest, Izuku Midoriya lands a Delaware Smash Air Force that hurls both Gentle Criminal and La Brava backward. Neither villain expected their combined effort to leave the student upright. Izuku charges again, pleading with the pair to abandon the plan, and La Brava, tossed clear by her partner, tearfully blames her own Love for coming up short. Gentle rejects that reading and answers with a lattice of springy aerial platforms, then drives them down on Izuku with Gently Sandwich. He will not surrender the ambition he has carried since middle school: to be remembered as a man whose way of living moved people, something he assumes a U.A. student can appreciate.

Pinned flat, Izuku claws at the dirt and drags himself free, slipping around behind his opponent. He wants to know how a man who clearly understands passion can justify trampling everyone else's. Gentle's stretching cloak reels the boy back in as he replies that any ambition worth having demands sacrifices, and he throws up another barrier. Izuku reads it, vaults over, and comes down refusing to let the students of U.A. be robbed. Gentle bounces off a trampoline of his own making to land behind him, resolving to drop his restraint and use real violence for the sake of the dream. He roars at Izuku to laugh if he likes, because none of it matters next to knowing what he values. The two collide, Izuku meeting the enhanced punch with his own strength, and he answers that mockery was never on his mind, while La Brava begs for her partner to win.

Between the exchanges the fight opens onto Gentle's younger life. At eighteen he was Tobita, a repeating second-year at an unremarkable hero course who dreamed of a name printed in textbooks, though his marks were dismal and the Provisional Hero License Exam had already rejected him four times. A counselor advised him to withdraw, reducing his mother to tears, yet he left the meeting still determined to keep trying. His attempt to cushion a falling window cleaner with an elastic barrier instead blocked a Pro Hero's rescue, and the man hit the ground badly hurt. Expulsion followed, then his parents' door closing behind him, then four years of rented rooms and freeter work. At twenty-two he cheerfully greeted a former classmate, Takeshita, who had no memory of him at all. That blankness, and the pitiful old age it seemed to promise, is what turned him toward life as a celebrity criminal online.

U.A.'s School Festival formally gets underway. Gentle's history surfaces in full: his real surname is Tobita, his repeated failures at the licensing exam and poor academic record led a counselor to urge him out of the hero course, and a botched rescue of a civilian left both the victim and a Pro Hero hurt. He was thrown out of school and out of his home, subsisting as a freeter, until an old classmate's failure to recognize him convinced him that villainy was the only route to being remembered.

The chapter is titled School Festival Start!!, rendered in Japanese as Kaisai Bunkasai!!, and ran on April 16, 2018 in issue 20 of that year. It spans seventeen pages, sits in Volume 20 of the U.A. School Festival arc, and puts Izuku and Gentle on its cover. Takeshita debuts here. The anime adapts the material as Episode 85. Kohei Horikoshi's author comment expresses surprise and delight at hearing that some readers had married thanks to the series.