Chapter 302

After Toya lunges at the infant Shoto, Enji walls the youngest off from his siblings, hires help to cover his own hours, and orders Rei never to let Toya out of her sight. She argues the boy only wants to be noticed; Enji replies that the hero's world is all he has to show anyone, and she accuses him of running away.

Five years later, Fuyumi and Natsuo call Toya outside to play. Shoto sees them and is pulled away, told that his brother and sisters belong to another world and that output capacity comes first. He asks for one turn and is refused. Toya overhears and curdles with envy. At night he talks at a sleeping Natsuo, granting that attacking a blameless Shoto was his own doing while insisting Enji shares the fault for ignoring three "failed creations," and asking whether this is what heroes do with their children now. Natsuo drowsily suggests Fuyumi is the one for this conversation, which stings. Toya says he picked Natsuo because he thought only his brother grasped him at all, and writes his mother and sister off as useless.

Rei catches him heading for the mountains and asks why he never plays with his classmates. He does not need friends, he says, since his world is not theirs. She asks whether heroics is even his own wish, says that from a mother's vantage Enji is suffocating him, insists other paths exist, and tells him she is certain he can still grow into whoever he chooses. Toya demands to know where she found that advice, then freezes her with the accusation that her poor family sold her off to Enji, making her as guilty as he is for the fact that Toya was born at all.

Winter comes, his body develops, and his fire shifts from red to blue. He works out that its intensity tracks his feelings, thrills at what Enji will see, and cries without understanding why. He asks Enji to spend the coming free day at Sekoto Peak and watch what he can do. Enji lifts his shirt instead, finds scars kept hidden on purpose, and rounds on Rei with a blow for failing to stop him, while Toya tears at his own hair and pleads that his new trick is genuinely impressive, that he might outshine Shoto and beat All Might, and that his father will then have to respect him and be glad he made him. Shoto shouts at Enji to stop bullying his mother and is told to stay out of it as his siblings look on crying. Rei admits inwardly that her options were narrow and that she chose to stay on her feet and keep smiling, and that she cannot anymore. She confesses she is unable to stop the boy. Enji tells her she had better, since he cannot watch him himself.

In the present, Rei asks why he never went to Sekoto Peak. Enji says he thought it would only feed the fire, then corrects himself: he had no idea what to say. Rei admits she did not either. At the villain hideout, Dabi remembers losing hold of his flames until they swallowed him and the mountains both, and still lays it at Enji's feet for teaching him nothing except how to burn hotter.

Enji admits to the room that once Toya was dead by his hand, nothing could stop him pouring everything into Shoto. Rei says he worsened until she could not look at him and began finding his face in her own children. Fuyumi admits she watched it happen and lacked the nerve to intervene, so she patched over things to keep up appearances. Natsuo names his father the root of it all, and says a punch from him might have knocked Enji into an honest conversation with Toya, sparing them Dabi and leaving them a healthy family.

Rei tells Enji that Toya's fate is not his alone, that all of them own whatever comes next, and that they will get his broken heart back on its feet, because fighting Dabi is not optional. Stunned, he asks whether he is really hearing his wife. After a silence, she says Shoto bore more than any of them and could justly hate her, yet the word "mom" came back to his mouth, he found friends at U.A., and he saves people now. She names him the family's hero.

Weakly, Shoto tells Enji he spoke with their mother beforehand because he had assumed his father could not fight and the job would fall to him alone, and that he was wrong. He puts out a hand toward the weeping man and says to get up once the grief has run its course, because stopping Dabi is something they do together. Outside the room, Hawks and Best Jeanist have been listening, and they like the result.

Toya's attack on the newborn Shoto pushes Enji to isolate the youngest child and put Rei on watch duty. From age five, Shoto trains alone while his siblings grow up together, and Toya, replaced and neglected, destabilizes. His mountain training raises his firepower, teaches him that emotion drives his flames, and turns them blue as his body suddenly grows, while his burns spread across him. Enji strikes Rei over it, Shoto shouts him down, and Fuyumi and Natsuo cower. Toya waits at Sekoto Peak for a father who never comes, and his flames ignite hard enough to engulf him and the forest, the event behind his presumed death. Afterward Enji funnels everything into Shoto to salvage his "work." In the present, the family assign themselves shares of the blame alongside him, Rei insists he must fight Dabi, and Hawks and Best Jeanist overhear the whole conversation.

Seventeen pages at magazine release and nineteen in the volume, published February 22, 2021, in issue 12, collected in Volume 31 under the Paranormal Liberation War arc, adapted in Episode 130. The magazine version contained a timeline error: Chapter 250 had Fuyumi place Toya's "death" shortly after Rei was institutionalized and blame it for worsening her condition, while this chapter has Rei's resentment and the boiling water incident follow the death. Volume 31 corrected it with two extra pages ordering the burning and hospitalization ahead of Toya's "death."