Chapter 328

Rewinding to the night Tartarus fell, Chizome Akaguro breaks out of his cell, kills an inmate on the way, and reads the collapse around him as proof that something struck from outside. Hunting for information, he reaches the control room and finds every guard dead except one, who clutches a box of stored data and begs for it to reach the right hands. Stain takes it, promising the dying man that his conviction will find the right person. Asked which he is, man or beast, Stain answers that he serves the world as it ought to be while remaining a beast regardless.

While All For One and the fused Tomura Shigaraki survey the rubble above the escaping prisoners, Stain swims to shore and catches up on how far the country has slipped during his imprisonment. Whatever the data is worth, he decides to carry the guard's dying conviction to the one man who ever earned his trust, the same man who set every piece of this in motion.

After his reunion with Izuku Midoriya at U.A., All Might reports to Detective Naomasa Tsukauchi, who is less than thrilled that a killer supplied the break. Tartarus systems were sealed off from outside networks, so the disk is the only route to the truth, and what it holds is the cause of the shutdown: the two All For Ones saturating the place with Radio Waves from within and without.

Sansa Tamakawa floats the idea that the vestige inside Tomura was running in sync with All For One, but All Might explains that the link runs one way. His own vestige within One For All follows his present thoughts, yet he cannot reach back into it, at least not until direct contact with Izuku at the hospital made it possible. On that logic, remote control of a vestige should be beyond even All For One. Naomasa counters that the pair spoke through Radio Waves, and the waveforms recorded on the disk decode into an instruction to have him finished inside thirty-eight days. Sansa is stunned, since the Central Hospital findings pointed to two months. All Might suspects the research was salted as a bluff, and taking the villains at their word means Tomura finishes in three days.

At the United Nations, national leaders weigh the appeal All Might sent them directly. The timing looks impossible, several fear stripping their own borders of heroes, and one delegate blames the unease spreading worldwide on All For One's underground reach. Salaam, Big Red Dot, and other foreign heroes insist on going anyway. One delegate points out that his country's hero is already gone, as Cathleen Bate, the top hero of the United States, flies for Japan, intent on helping the man she calls her master.

Stain's disk is identified as a record of the Tartarus attack, capturing the Radio Waves the two villains flooded the facility with.

Decoding those waveforms exposes an exchange between the pair of All For Ones that sets a thirty-eight day deadline for finishing the body, collapsing the heroes' one-month cushion down to three days.

All Might explains that a vestige can read its host's thoughts without the host answering back, a channel that opened for him only through physical contact with Izuku, and he expects the same asymmetry constrains All For One.

World leaders debate the appeal for immediate aid, and it emerges that unrest abroad mirrors Japan's own. Star and Stripe leaves for Japan without waiting on a vote.

Star and Stripe debuts here. The chapter runs fifteen pages in Volume 33 as part of the Dark Hero arc, published October 4, 2021 in issue 44, and is adapted in Episode 138.

Salaam and Big Red Dot become the earliest film-original characters to appear on the page under their own names. Nine technically beat them there, though only as an unnamed cameo back in Chapter 222.

Tartarus, Central Hospital, and United Nations headquarters all feature, with All For One and Radio Waves the Quirks on display. Kohei Horikoshi's author comment describes taking vinegar to his bathroom and defeating years of accumulated filth.