Chapter 326

All Might comes back to Kamino after Izuku's clash with Class 1-A, meaning to check on the anti-hero holdouts refusing evacuation while his failure to help the boy gnaws at him. Standing before his own statue, he condemns himself for accomplishing nothing and dragging everyone down. Stain drops in above him with a blade at his throat, demanding he retract the insult against All Might.

The old hero remarks that Stain never came for him during his active years and that their meeting waited until now. The confusion on the Hero Killer's face prompts All Might to identify himself, which Stain flatly disbelieves until the muscle form appears. Even then he recoils, refusing to accept that the shrunken man was ever the same person, branding him a fraud and demanding to know how he dares use the word hero.

All Might agrees with him. He could not bear how uneasy the world felt, and though he had no strength of his own, he wanted to improve it. Now, at the end of the line, with society in this shape and the student he swore to protect beyond his reach, he feels further from heroism than anybody.

Stain suddenly hauls him behind a block of ice and points him toward the statue. A girl is peeling an "I Am Not Here" tag off it, and Stain says she comes daily to scrub away the vandalism. All Might cannot fathom why she would risk herself for that, until Stain identifies her as the final person he ever pulled out of danger, rescued back during the Kamino Incident.

Stain argues that none of All Might's work as a hero ever depended on a Quirk. He kept smiling and did everything within reach for people, and the embers of inspiration he scattered still smolder inside those who came after, gathering now into a real blaze that must be fed rather than left to die. Revealing that he already knew the truth about his condition, Stain tells him that a genuine hero would use what he carries out of Tartarus, and throws him a knife along with several sheets of paper. Finish the man who murdered forty heroes, he says, and society can be repaired, then walks off. All Might weeps, and above the girl the rain begins to ease.

The two men cross paths for the first time, Stain having never hunted All Might during his active career.

Stain argues that the inspiration All Might left behind still burns inside the people who followed him.

Stain throws him a knife along with papers carrying information out of Tartarus, urging him to finish All For One.

The girl cleaning the statue turns out to be the last person All Might rescued, back during the Kamino Incident.

The figure of forty murdered heroes that Stain cites combines the seventeen he actually killed with the twenty-three he crippled beyond recovery.

Fifteen pages at serialization and seventeen in Volume 33, the chapter ran in issue 42 of 2021 with Toshinori Yagi on the cover. The anime splits it, with the first page landing in Episode 137 and the remainder in Episode 138.

Events unfold at Ground Zero in Kamino and feature the item Hercules. Horikoshi's author comment simply apologizes for the previous week's break.