Chapter 235

Re-Destro cannot account for Tomura Shigaraki standing untouched after Stress Output Burden until he works out that Tomura reached the attack and destroyed it before it landed. Losing his strongest move leaves him so rattled that he ignores Skeptic's warning about Gigantomachia.

Tomura pulls his father's preserved hand from a pocket and tells Re-Destro he had it right, that destruction is the only thing he exists for. The Army's commander answers that this means he must die, since no future exists without creation, and swells further so he can end him. Tomura only asks who needs a future, and the answer sends Re-Destro at him in a rage.

The memory takes over. He was Tenko Shimura, five years old, sharing a house his father Kotaro built with his sister Hana, their parents, and their mother's parents. One rule governed the place, single and absolute: heroes were not to be discussed.

It starts with a stranger walking him home after a small incident during a game of heroes with his friends. Learning why, Kotaro punishes him by banishing him to the backyard, deaf to the boy's crying and to his wife's pleas about his allergies. Re-entry requires an apology for breaking the rule. His in-laws ask whether the punishment is too harsh, and Kotaro answers that the rule stands and the heroes get forgotten.

Later, in the living room, Nao asks about the itching around his eyes. Tenko tells her it only happens at home. She asks whether he wants to be a hero; he says yes, and mentions that he plays heroes with his friends. He asks whether his father hates him for it. She says no, only that Kotaro knows how hard the job is.

Another day, Hana takes him into their father's office and shows him an old photo of Kotaro beside his mother. She tells Tenko their grandmother was a hero, which delights him, and says she wants to chase the dream herself.

Mon, the family dog, has Tenko's attention later, the boy still buoyed by the news, when an unpleasant discomfort runs through his hand. He gets no time to think about it, because Kotaro has discovered his children broke into the office and looked at the picture of Nana. Enraged, he wants a name. Hana breaks down sobbing and puts it on Tenko, and Kotaro beats his son, telling him the woman in the photo is no grandmother but a demon who threw her own child away, and that heroes are people who hurt their families for the sake of strangers. Nobody in the house intervenes, however much the boy pleads.

That night Kotaro sits in the office reading his mother's letter. She apologizes for abandoning him to a bad man, accepts that the choice may make him hate her, explains it was done so the villain could not reach him, and promises to love him no matter what. Kotaro's only response is that everything would have been easier had she simply hated him.

Nao and her parents confront him over the beating. Kotaro concedes he took it too far. Nao tells him his rules are finished with her if violence is what enforces them, and asks whether a happy family was not the whole point. He says it was not supposed to go this way.

Out in the backyard, Tenko sobs inconsolably into Mon's fur, having decided he hates everyone. As he cries, a sensation comes over the dog.

Tomura Shigaraki's father is named: Kotaro Shimura.

The boy's upbringing fills in considerably. His hair was black to begin with. Kotaro's loathing of heroes traced back to his own upbringing, and any interest in them earned the child a punishment. The Quirk itself was slow to form, and its awakening racked his body with pain and stress. When nobody stepped in to stop the beating, that abuse curdled into the hatred he now carries for everyone.

Re-Destro is too rattled by his losses to take in the warnings about Gigantomachia.

Re-Destro proves able to fire his Stress off as an attack.

The chapter ran on July 13, 2019 in issue 33, spans nineteen pages, and is collected in Volume 24 under the Japanese title 志村転弧：オリジン, read Shimura Tenko: Orijin. Tenko, Kotaro and Nao share the cover, and Episode 111 adapts it.

Horikoshi noted in his author comment that this was the fifth anniversary chapter and that it was still entirely about the villains. The present day scenes stay in Deika City while the flashback runs at the Shimura Residence, with Stress and Decay in play alongside 80% Liberation and Stress Output Burden.