Chapter 301

Years earlier, a young Enji Todoroki sits with Rei's relatives, the Himura family. They treat an approach from the man tipped as the next No. 1 hero as an honor, remarking that their own standing makes a Himura woman a fitting match for his record. Rei knew this was a Quirk Marriage, Enji notes, and agreed anyway for her family's sake. Walking together afterward, he watches her linger on some flowers, and she tells him she likes how pretty they are. He reads her as ice given a body, strong to look at yet seemingly a touch away from melting. In the present he asks whether she is all right. She says she is not, and that is why she came.

Elsewhere, Dabi lies on a couch studying burned skin that reports nothing back. He never expected the fight to finish Enji, and he knows the man's position forces a public statement soon. The thought of that face delights him after so long a wait, and he invites his family to look at him from the bottom of Hell.

In flashback, a small Toya asks why his father dropped their training on a day off. Enji calls the decision a kindness, which pleases nobody. At the hospital, a doctor lays out the mismatch: Toya carries an unusually ferocious strain of Hellflame paired with his mother's constitution, a body built to shrug off freezing rather than fire. Making children to specification is taboo in Quirk society, the doctor adds, so he cannot advise it. Enji hears none of it, still convinced this son could pass All Might, the man he is desperate to reach.

Toya tells Fuyumi that burns are his to manage since nobody knows his body better. She says watching him hurt is unbearable; she snaps that a girl could not understand and walks off, saying the fire under him was his father's doing. That night Rei calls the choice cruel, especially with Toya aware of what Enji wants from his children. Enji answers that the boy comes home freshly scorched no matter what he says, having inherited the same stubbornness, and that refusal is the only thing that will make him quit, because All Might will always be out of reach.

Natsuo is conceived, Toya slides toward despair, and Enji's fixation only swells. Then Shoto is born, and Toya cannot swallow being passed over. Alone in a forest, he trains through tears, shouting at an absent father to look at how strong his flames already are.

Enji finds him scorched head to foot and orders him to quit, to look past the hero's world, to spend time with his brother and sisters or find friends in class, promising all of it will fade into a distant memory. Toya, weeping, says his classmates all want to be heroes too, and that a man with a father like his has no standing to lecture anyone about giving up. The fire is burning and nothing will smother it. He uses the hero name in place of "father," demands that he look, and charges with flames live at Rei as she holds the infant Shoto.

In the present, Rei tells Enji he cannot claim the deepest wound, and that he was not the only one who failed to see their son.

Rei's origins in the Himura family, who brokered the Quirk Marriage, are laid out. Enji cut off Toya's training after learning the boy carried his mother's cold resistance and could not survive his own fire, but Toya kept at it alone despite warnings from both his father and Fuyumi, hoping to be valued again. Natsuo and then Shoto were conceived as replacements meant to break the obsession, which wrecked Toya emotionally. Once Shoto's Quirk surfaced, Toya broke down and tried to attack him. In the present, Dabi takes stock of the fresh scars he burned into himself during the Paranormal Liberation War from a forest manor the League of Villains emptied by slaughtering its former occupants, the Creature Rejection Clan.

Seventeen pages, published February 15, 2021, in issue 11 and collected in Volume 31 under the Paranormal Liberation War arc. Episode 130 adapts it. Horikoshi's author comment apologized for the storyline's sustained humidity and suggested reading it alongside a dehumidifier.