Chapter 307

Now third years, Grand and Turtle Neck comb an abandoned city hunting the civilians still unaccounted for, meaning to push them toward the evacuation zones. Reports place a villain called Jailbreaker tearing through the south ward. Turtle Neck expects hard-liners who will not budge; Grand thinks he can talk them around.

They find the holdouts inside a big indoor gym, the Taguchi Building. Grand pitches lodging at Ketsubutsu Academy High School and gets turned down. Their leader calls the offer useless if villains simply target the school, and points out that his people handled an earlier attack fine using black market support items. Grand counters that mindless heavyweights like Jailbreaker and the Nomu are past what civilians can manage, but with public trust in heroes as thin as it is, the man dismisses the point and sends them away. Leaving disappointed, Grand admits he would have vibrated the building and hauled them out bodily if the rules allowed it.

An alert comes through to Turtle Neck from their classmate Shikkui Makabe, shouting that Jailbreaker is closing on them after Itejiro Toteki spotted him. The villain lands on a nearby building and turns out to be Muscular. Grand moves to fight and asks Turtle Neck to clear the civilians out of the Taguchi Building.

They rush out anyway, against her warnings, hoping to help Grand, whom Muscular has already pinned under his muscle fibers. As the escapee squeezes the boy toward death, Grand fires off a Tremoring Earth to rattle him loose, but Muscular grows more fibers and steadies himself, leaving Turtle Neck and the civilians watching a killing about to happen.

A shout of "SMASH!" lands instead, and Muscular is thrown onto a rooftop. Through the settling dust, Deku stands holding a badly hurt Grand, crediting the warning to a gift from the fourth. Recognizing the voice, Muscular's face bends into a hungry grin.

Grand and Turtle Neck of Ketsubutsu Academy draw the job of walking the last civilians to evacuation points while watching for villains, and the holdouts refuse, trusting their own self-defense over the heroes. Muscular surfaces looking for more wreckage, and Grand takes him on alone. A hooded Deku pulls Grand out and squares up with Muscular, who knows the voice at once.

Seventeen pages, published March 29, 2021, in issue 17 and collected in Volume 32 as the first chapter of the Dark Hero arc, adapted in Episode 132. Grand versus Muscular begins and ends here, while the Deku versus Muscular rematch starts. The cover features Grand and Turtle Neck.