Chapter 314

Rain keeps Smokescreen from spreading, so Nagant reads through his decoys with ease, though Deku's speed unsettles her. He demands everything she knows about All For One. She retracts her Rifle, extends it again into his chest to break his grip, and tells him not to assume the fight is won.

Bragging that everything she knows came out of the Hero Public Safety Commission, she is asked why a former hero serves a man bent on owning everything. What he has seen, she answers, is manufactured order, nothing close to the truth. Deku's parallel processing then falters exactly as the third user cautioned, the price of a first run with Fa Jin, and he has to recalibrate while still dodging.

Her voice reaches him through a grazing round. She was tired, she says, and she killed to protect a counterfeit peace: terrorists plotting against heroes, and heroes who cozied up to villains for money and fame. She describes an earlier period when vigilantes were celebrated and the country blessed their work, and says the whole profession was built on that trust. She called herself a component keeping the trust intact, obeying without exception, convinced that labor in the light and labor in the dark were both required.

The obedience cost her. Public praise sat badly against the killings until some children came running up for a handshake, and she pulled back at the sight of the blood on her palm, seeing the society around her as brittle and staged. Later, the sitting President named two heroes who had been goading civilians into crime so they could collect the bounties, and said he wanted them gone. She asked whether killing improved anything, and whether hiding all of it from the public differed much from brainwashing. He insisted it was necessary, then warned her that walking away was not an option. She shot him.

The news had reported that she killed a hero during a quarrel, so the truth stuns Deku, and she explains the Commission buried it to preserve the illusion. Restore that status quo, she argues, and history simply repeats, which makes even a world ruled by All For One the more transparent option.

All that talking gives her away. Deku pins her position and drives toward her with a new Ultimate Move built on Blackwhip, Pinpoint Focus. He concedes he may have been blind to what she describes, says the world runs on grays rather than black and white, on tangles of fear and anger, and that this is precisely why a hand has to be extended to those who need one.

She dismisses it as more phony schooling, all while noting how cleanly he reads her patterns. So she tries one last disruption, swinging her rifle toward a nearby building where Kai Chisaki is shouting to know whether she is finished, because he wants his Boss. Deku's attention snaps to him, and Nagant lines up her shot.

More of the years Lady Nagant spent serving the Hero Public Safety Commission comes out: she killed on assignment, hitting villains and crooked heroes alike.

The strain of killing while maintaining a public face as a hero drove her to question the society she served.

She shot the former Commission President after he threatened her over her wish to resign.

The hero she was reported to have murdered never existed as such, the story being a Commission fabrication.

Deku learns that Kai Chisaki has come along with her.

Seventeen pages, published in issue 26 of 2021 on May 31 and collected in Volume 32 during the Dark Hero arc. Deku and Lady Nagant share the cover, and Episode 134 adapts the material.

Her flashback pose echoes All Might's in Chapter 2.

Kohei Horikoshi's author comment celebrates reconnecting with an old acquaintance on Twitter and plugs the June 4 release of Toratsugumi.