Chapter 304

All Might strains to feel One For All stirring inside Izuku, while Izuku himself runs through everyone who fought Tomura, wondering whether they made it. He surfaces among the vestiges, where the users occupy chairs and wait, though the second and third sit facing the wall behind them.

The first user, All For One's brother, explains that contact with Izuku used to be limited to particular moments in his consciousness. Over the past four months the power has swelled at a rate that now lets the vestiges speak freely among themselves, all the more so since All For One tried to rip One For All away.

Daigoro assures Izuku his privacy is intact, then remembers the boy has no mouth here. To his delight, Izuku finds his voice has been slowly forming and manages muffled speech. Asked what the users want, Izuku is met by the fourth, Hikage Shinomori, who admits the sudden arrival of Danger Sense caught him off guard. Daigoro ribs him for being a hermit who abandoned society, after which Hikage asks how old he was and what killed him. Forty, Izuku recalls, with a cause the notebook had blacked out at All Might's hand: old age.

Through All Might's research, Hikage says, it became clear One For All can no longer sit inside an ordinary person. He held it the second longest of anyone, eighteen years spent evading All For One and quietly nurturing a power he knew he could never win with, waiting for a worthier vessel. In his last years it started tearing his body apart. He took it for illness until All Might dug up his medical history and autopsy and found the truth: carrying multiple Quirks was eating his life.

Izuku balks, since All Might held it far longer and grew it far larger. The first user notes All Might reached the same wall, and with no comparison beyond himself, every other user having died young in battle, he wrongly assumed the Quirk carried some hidden lifespan cap. The gap made Hikage wonder what All Might had that he lacked, and Izuku lands on it: All Might had no Quirk at all.

Because the man still breathes, the first user says, whatever All Might learns reaches the rest of them by way of his vestige, and meeting All For One proved the theories out. They had assumed the predecessors' spirits lived inside the power; what actually persists are Quirk Factors belonging to the second through seventh successors. All Might is the exception, One For All having settled into him as a genuine piece of his consciousness because it was his only Quirk.

A vessel with a Quirk already in place cannot absorb the inheritance; the power distorts and runs over the edges, and forcing the issue shortens the life, as Hikage's did. All Might carried it forty years because it slotted perfectly into an empty vessel and became his own Quirk. The conclusion follows: the power's real worth belongs only to those who began with none, and Izuku adds that with the previous users' Quirks now surfacing, passing it on demands care. The first user notes Quirkless people thin out with each generation, making Izuku's inheritance a matter of fate, and says that reaching him sooner might have kept people from dying. Daigoro puts the last piece in place: Izuku may be the final successor.

As Izuku sits with that, Nana turns to him and asks whether he can kill Tomura Shigaraki.

Izuku enters the vestige world to speak with the predecessors, and the second and third users appear without silhouettes for the first time, faces still concealed. One For All's growth now lets the users speak among themselves. Danger Sense's original owner, fourth in the line, is named as Hikage Shinomori, who held the power eighteen years, lived in isolation from All For One, and died at forty of the "old age" All Might struck from the notebook, in truth his body giving out under One For All. The users conclude the power is too much for anyone who already has a Quirk, and that All Might's Quirklessness is what let him hold it forty years and use it fully. All Might's vestige has been relaying what the living man learns. With Quirkless people growing rare, Izuku may be the last successor. Nana then asks whether he can kill Tomura Shigaraki.

Seventeen pages, published March 8, 2021, in issue 14 and collected in Volume 31 under the Paranormal Liberation War arc, adapted in Episode 131. The cover lines up every One For All bearer from the first user through Toshinori Yagi.