Chapter 290

At Fujitani Hospital, staff hurry toward Rei Todoroki's room to kill the broadcast, worried that coverage of Jaku City will do damage. Inside, she is already watching when the signal is seized and replaced. The channel shows Dabi, stripped to the waist, his burns on display.

In Jaku City, All For One notes the giant's timing, given that Tomura could drop at any moment after what Deku and Endeavor put him through. Rivet Stab, triggered along his spine with auto-tracking, absorbed most of it; all that remains is issuing the order to withdraw. Shoto tells Nejire Chan that taking on Gigantomachia and Tomura at once is not possible, so Tomura it is. Their Ultimate Moves land, and Gigantomachia bats them out of the air with a hand. Ingenium sees it happen. Katsuki, barely conscious, wants to be set down; Ingenium refuses on account of his injuries; Katsuki keeps insisting on a clean win.

Gigantomachia gathers Tomura toward his back and waits for orders, and Spinner takes in how badly he is hurt. Endeavor reaches Shoto, checking that his son is unhurt, silently apologizing to Hawks that the giant is moving at all. He knows the thing has to be stopped and that he needs its weak point, but his lungs are burned out and every step costs him. He keeps going anyway. Dabi spots the two of them and offers a greeting. Endeavor says his name. Dabi asks him not to use it, tips liquid over his head, and washes the black out of his hair. There is a better name, he says. Toya.

Shoto and Endeavor are left speechless. Dabi remarks that he had expected his own family to know him regardless. Watching from a distance, Deku recalls what Shoto and Fuyumi told him about an older brother and puts the two together. In her room, Rei watches her son name himself Toya Todoroki, Endeavor's firstborn. He admits to more than thirty killings and says he wants the country to understand why. Endeavor, he tells them, spent years hungry for power, and in his despair at never catching All Might he forced a marriage that would produce a child with a stronger Quirk. Toya was that ambition's first product, judged a failure and discarded.

He kept watching from the outside, he says, and only he was ever meant to be clean. The confession is pre-recorded and already saturating the airwaves and the internet, which Skeptic regards as the card up their sleeve, and Dabi finds the beginning of this fall from grace exhilarating. He tells Endeavor he thought daily about the best way to wreck him, that he went to Natsuo in tears asking why he was alive, and that the plan had been to wait for Shoto to get famous and then kill him, though nobody expected the man to actually take the top spot.

Hood in Kyushu was his doing, he confesses, and Starservant and Ending afterward. He asks whether the number one slot is heavy, whether the applause has scrubbed him clean, whether the new fatherly warmth feels like a real bond. Endeavor was wrong, he says, to imagine that walking forward would let the past forget him. The past does not die. Dabi invites him to dance down to hell together. Somewhere in the distance, a plane keeps closing.

Dabi rinses the dye from his hair and identifies himself to Shoto and Endeavor as family. He is Toya Todoroki, Enji's eldest and Shoto's oldest brother, presumed dead for years. He also admits that Hood, Starservant, and Ending were all thrown at Endeavor deliberately, as part of a campaign to discredit him.

Skeptic pushes Dabi's pre-recorded message out nationwide. It reaches Rei Todoroki, to the alarm of her hospital staff, and Hiroshi Tameda, the boy who idolizes Endeavor, watches it with a friend in horror. The recording lays out Endeavor's ambition, his depression at the gap between himself and All Might, the Quirk Marriage he forced on Rei to engineer a superior child, and the abuse he inflicted in service of that goal. Dabi lays his villainy, his view of heroes, and his crimes at his father's feet.

Shoto and Nejire Chan strike at the weakened Tomura, but Gigantomachia intercepts and saves him, hurting both heroes. Each debuts an Ultimate Move: Nejire Flood for her, Jet Kindling for him, marking the first occasion he has reached for a technique his father made famous, and revealing that his Quirk's fire half can shape a single jet-like sole beneath his left foot.

Dabi's Dance occupies seventeen pages as chapter 290, published November 9, 2020 in issue 49 and collected in volume 30 under the Paranormal Liberation War arc. Episode 124 adapts it.

Rei Todoroki has the cover to herself, a pointed choice for the chapter that exposes what was done to her. Horikoshi's author comment describes shaking a tea container without checking the lid.