Chapter 305

Nana asks whether Izuku can kill Tomura Shigaraki, framing it not as a demand but as a test of resolve. She points to their last exchange: every inheritor is wired into his feelings, so all of them registered that he saw someone worth saving. Daigoro says the rest of them do not share that read. Suffering under All For One does not mean Tomura wants their hand, and even the vestiges could see the hate still sitting in his eyes.

The first user says his brother built Tomura this way on purpose, and now that he has taken the body and mind, this looks like another route to One For All. Daigoro reveals All For One tried to steal the power from him and from his successor En, failing both times, and that overriding One For All's basic principle takes a colossal will and overwhelming emotion, which is what Tomura's hatred provides. The inheritors remind him what the power began as, a will built to stand against All For One and cultivated for the express purpose of destroying him, a job All Might finished, and yet the man came back through Tomura.

Nana tells him the truth of the blood: Tomura is her grandson, and the shape he took traces back to her leaving his father as a boy to go fight All For One. She calls it her doing. She knows what it costs to hand a burden like this to someone young, but if that thing reaches its ceiling and becomes the ultimate evil, nobody will be able to stop it. Forgiveness and understanding will not be enough, she says, because salvation does not reach everyone, and should Tomura fall in that category, a man who looks like he needs rescue yet cannot receive it, can Izuku find the will to end him whatever the price?

The pause runs long. When Tomura's mind forced its way into the power, Izuku says, he caught what stirred in the man at the mention of his ambitions, and further down than that he found Tenko, in tears. He has fought many people already, and those fights were unavoidable because none of them would stand down, but he never once identified what pushed them into villainy. Had he known, he wonders, perhaps some of it could have ended another way.

He knows countless people died and that friends he treasures were hurt because of Tomura. He holds his ground anyway. The power exists to save lives rather than end them, a lesson from All Might, and he and every user who grew the power have saved and given hope to more people than can be counted. Its origin was the destruction of All For One, but because all of them staked their lives on keeping it alive, its purpose has shifted along the way. He accepts that killing Tomura may be the only way it ends, and he cannot say yet how he will handle any of it, yet the wish to reach that little boy stands, and he briefly shrinks into his own child self as he says it.

The first user gladly takes the answer, promising that all of them will stand behind him, and says he is grateful the power passed to Izuku and All Might as he comforts All Might's weeping vestige. He then consoles Nana, who apologizes for putting him through the test, and asks Izuku to pass her regards to Gran Torino once he wakes, admitting their generation chose wrong and that their successors mean to correct it. He turns to the second and third inheritors and tells them to play nice and work with Izuku, whose help they will need to reach the Quirk's full power.

Nana's question about killing Tomura functions as a test of Izuku's will. One For All's anti-theft property can be overridden by strong enough negative emotion, which eats away a would-be inheritor's will, and the users suspect All For One has been cultivating Tomura's hatred and body toward exactly that. Daigoro names the sixth inheritor, En, and reveals two failed attempts by All For One to take the power from them. Nana warns that an unchecked Tomura becomes the ultimate evil and the harm becomes irreversible. Izuku still chooses to try to save him, citing knowledge of Tomura's background and the scared little boy he glimpsed, and argues that One For All is not a killing power. Both Nana and the first user are grateful he held his line, she apologizes for the test, and he asks the second and third users to turn around and cooperate.

Seventeen pages, published March 15, 2021, in issue 15 and collected in Volume 31 as part of the Paranormal Liberation War arc, adapted in Episode 131. The cover gathers Izuku with Nana Shimura, Daigoro Banjo, En, All Might, the first user, and Hikage Shinomori.