Chapter 270

Present Mic hauls Kyudai Garaki toward the exit, ordering him to call the Nomu off and leaving Tomura to X-Less. X-Less agrees, then spots a machine ringed by tubes positioned to shield it from damage, and decides to wreck it.

As they climb, the doctor talks. Seventy years earlier he presented a thesis on the Quirk Singularity and was mocked as absurd and short on evidence, then ignored outright, in an era too busy dragging an impoverished and warring world back toward peace to entertain talk of a collapsing future. Present Mic connects the dots: this age is now a cult of believers, the scholar vanished after presenting his work, and a living one would be a hundred and twenty years old, exactly Garaki's age. Exiled with nowhere to go, Garaki says a hand reached out to him, and he has seen All For One as a living god ever since. His Quirk, Life Force, grants twice the vitality of an ordinary person at the cost of athleticism, and even that is only a replica, because the original went to his master years ago. Present Mic realizes what he is touching. Garaki adds that All For One, anticipating defeat, handed his own Quirk down to Tomura and kept a copy, then asks whether Present Mic was a friend of Kurogiri, admitting the real target that day had been Aizawa's Erasure.

Inside his mind, Tomura drifts among enormous hands and shards of buildings. His sister says she was always on his side, then apologizes for selling him out, and he tells her it is fine and already forgotten. A towering version of his mother asks whether he wants to be a pro hero and warns that rubbing his eyes raw will only make them itch worse; as Tenko, he insists he is fine. His father looms, demanding to know if he went into the study, and Tomura turns back and erases him with Decay. A shadowed All For One beckons him closer. The family swarms back to hold him exactly where their hands once rested, his father's across his face, his grandmother Nana clamped behind his skull and pleading with him to remember them. He tears every one of them apart, refusing to let them deny what he has become, and Nana's crumbling face watches him walk into the darkness. In the lab, current from the tubes jolts him awake. Out in the city, working the evacuation, Izuku feels something terrible coming.

Life Force is named at last: it grants Garaki double the vitality of an ordinary person and robs him of athleticism. The version he carries is artificial, the genuine article having gone to his master, and he has passed one hundred and twenty years of age.

Seven decades back he authored the Quirk Singularity theory, and his master alone gave it a hearing.

The same arrangement runs one level up. Tomura now holds the authentic All For One, while its former owner kept a facsimile.

Oboro Shirakumo died during an operation whose actual target was Aizawa's Erasure.

Nana Shimura, his father's mother, owned the hand fixed behind his head.

Tomura wipes out every vision of his relatives, walks away from his old life, and stirs from his death-like state just as Izuku feels him coming.

Nineteen pages, released May 11, 2020 in issue 23 and collected in Volume 28. Episode 117 handles the bulk of it while Episode 118 picks up the remainder.

Present Mic, Garaki, X-Less, and Tomura appear on the cover.

The chapter stays at Jaku General Hospital, with Life Force, Wave Motion, and Zero Gravity among the Quirks shown.