Chapter 332

Years earlier, a younger Cathleen Bate sits with her fellow soldiers and complains about the ceiling New Order puts on her own strength, half wondering whether being a girl is the reason. They tell her it is simply the shape of her Quirk, and that leaning on them for the rest is what they are there for. Measuring herself against All Might is pointless when she already has a real chance of catching him. Hearing that, she reflects, felt wonderful.

Back in the present, Tiamat closes on the battlefield. She tells the pilots to keep their lasers on the villain while she goes to meet the payload. Scorched and pinned, Tomura recognizes the lasers as a holding action and senses the finishing blow rushing toward him.

As the missiles arrive she springs up and taps one, which is all New Order requires to redirect the entire flight. The laser rule lapses, Tomura moves to slip away, and the pilots hammer him back into place while her towering construct gathers the missiles and drives them home as the State-of-the-Art Hypersonic Intercontinental Cruise Punch. Far off on the mainland, Endeavor catches the flash.

She looks down into the crater and finds a cracked hole at the bottom, out of which Tomura climbs, delighted with himself. Having guessed that something lethal was coming, he had used Decay to dive underground in time, and reckons a second's delay would have killed him. The Nomu, it turns out, had been parked there to keep the pilots busy. He says he was only humoring their game, and that anyone other than him would have been finished. Ordering the Nomu to Burst, he leaps from jet to jet toward her, gloating that me and myself will put her resources to far better use.

One of the pilots begs her to end it by crushing them both inside an explosion of her air construct. She knows Super Regeneration makes it futile, and she cannot bring herself to do it in any case, and only smiles to herself as Tomura lands and closes a hand over her face.

New Order is confirmed to carry a hard ceiling on how far it can strengthen its own user, a limit Star and Stripe has lived with since her soldier days.

A single touch turns the incoming Tiamat flight around, and she drives the whole salvo into the villain as a finishing blow.

Reading the danger, he leaves the Nomu behind as bait and Decays himself underground, which spares him the worst of the blast.

A pilot urges her to spend her own life to guarantee the kill. She cannot, and the villain takes hold of her face.

Part of the Star and Stripe arc, the chapter runs seventeen pages in Volume 34, published November 8, 2021 in issue 49, with Star and Stripe on the cover, and is adapted in Episode 140.

Japanese airspace is the sole setting. Hellflame, New Order, Decay, Springlike Limbs, Super Regeneration, and All For One all appear, Tiamat is the featured item, and the chapter's title move is the only super move shown.

Kohei Horikoshi's author comment congratulates a colleague, Kawaguchi, proposes dinner once things calm down, and looks ahead to that artist's next series.