Chapter 297

Roughly five kilometers offshore sits Tartarus, less a prison than a place to discard anyone judged a standing threat, sentence length aside. Inmates live under constant watch, sorted into six blocks by how dangerous they are, the worst of them buried deepest. It is the underside of a society built on Quirks.

At night the Bronze Gate calls the Mainland Gate for a status check. Gyges answers that Briareos, his brother, is dead, killed in an assault by the Near High-End Nomu and a Tomura Shigaraki piloted by All For One, and a code red goes out. All For One finds the whole thing dull. Deep inside, two guards discuss Gigantomachia's expected arrival the next day, noting that bullets will not kill him and that his technically human status raises awkward questions about missiles. One of them, apparently Seiji Shishikura's father, dismisses the concern: every inmate here is a beast that only a Quirk society would have tolerated this long. His colleague points at the cameras and warns that talk like this would have been ammunition even for the disbanded Hearts and Mind Party. He shrugs it off.

The alert seals the floors, drops the gate, and sends drones after the Nomu. Above the chaos, riding a flying Nomu, Tomura wakes and grabs at his own body. He is told to lie still until Super Regeneration finishes its work, and throws the same instruction straight back. The reply is that this power is precisely what his successor wanted so he could spit at a world that never helped him, so the ownership hardly matters. Told he refuses to be a pawn, Tomura is corrected: he is turning into the next All For One. Decay wrecks the guard tower and Search locates the original body five hundred meters beneath the sea, where sheer water pressure makes brute demolition suicide, and Tomura's body is deteriorating faster besides. Even Gigantomachia and a finished vessel would not be enough against the facility's resources, so the answer is coordination from both sides at once. An EMP kills the monitoring system, and before it recovers, the original All For One fries his own cell door and springs nearly every lock on the level. Suppression squads are torn apart by a freed Goto Imasuji and Moonfish. A female prisoner, noticing the collapse, opens a manually operated door and releases Kai Chisaki, who bolts off shouting for his boss. The escapees realize the bridge is their only route out, and All For One's terms are simple: freedom is available to those who submit. As his true body and Tomura's stand before them, he declares that the coming void era will produce a more perfect demon lord, and that this is the story of how he becomes the greatest of them all.

The Near High-Ends and the Tomura-piloted body storm Tartarus at All For One's order so he can reclaim his real flesh, and the staff fight back while master and successor wrestle mentally for control. An EMP shuts down security and springs most cell doors, freeing Muscular, Moonfish, and Overhaul among others, and the inmates turn on the guards. Moonfish's face is fully shown for the first time with his teeth regrown, and Overhaul's manually opened cell reveals that Tartarus uses more than one lock system. Outside, All For One gathers the escaped convicts and offers them a place beside him on the road to the demon lordship he means to claim.

Horikoshi's author comment admits his excitement for the second season of The Mandalorian got somewhat out of hand. The gate guards are named for Greek myth: Gyges and Briareos are two of the Hecatoncheires, the hundred-handed brothers with fifty heads apiece who stood watch at the gates of Tartarus. The chapter introduces Gyges, Briareos, and Lady Nagant, and its action, the Assault on Tartarus, both begins and ends here, drawing on Decay, Radio Waves, Muscle Augmentation, Blade-Tooth, and All For One itself.