Chapter 343

All For One reflects on why falsehood never gets past him. The credit belongs to a Quirk he took during the earliest era of Quirks, since strengthened by everything else he carries. Its first owner disappointed him, though the descendant has turned out far more formidable, joining forces with All Might against him. Either way, he expects that power to deliver his victory.

He phones the Aoyama family and asks for a forty year Macallan. They answer that it will be aged sixteen years and that their son will handle delivery. He requests the boy's contact details and they agree. Reading no malice, no lie and no trickery in them, he concludes the coded exchange is honest, and readies himself for a meeting the next day.

In the ruined city outside U.A., Izuku Midoriya meets Yuga Aoyama, who summoned him there. Asked why he is not still in custody, Yuga says his parents' lawyer arranged his release. Izuku wants to tell the others so the search can resume, but Yuga asks him to wait and listen.

After a remark about the courts somehow still functioning in a country lying in pieces, Yuga sets out what All For One truly wants. With Japan collapsed, the yen has cratered, companies are folding, and coordinated villain attacks are running worldwide. The planet is sliding toward a crisis on the scale of the Great Depression, or of the dawn of Quirks itself, and the chaos has already started. Izuku grows uneasy.

Other nations, Yuga continues, have written Japan off to protect themselves, and will soon be desperate for anything that restores lasting order. Suppose the water runs out, he asks, and a man appears who can produce water. Or electricity, or gas, or raw strength. Where nothing holds together without control, one individual is positioned to seize the initiative, and All For One rises as the demon lord of that world.

Izuku insists that cannot happen while the heroes still stand. Yuga apologises, nervously saying it has to end here so he can protect his mother and father, and All For One emerges behind him. He thanks Yuga for handing Izuku over exactly as arranged, asks how frightening it felt to betray a friend, compliments the speech about his ambitions, and reminds him that a blessed place in the new world was promised to his family. Izuku shouts that he believed in him. Yuga says through tears that his pain can no longer be measured, then turns and fires a Navel Laser into All For One.

The blast catches him completely off guard while Yuga slips into Izuku's Smokescreen. The two congratulate each other on the performance, and Yuga declares he will fight All For One for his parents and for everyone. Their target is disappointed and baffled, having sensed no dishonesty at all, and cannot work out how it was done.

Irritated, he notes that One For All is right here regardless, and that Search can track the location and weaknesses of anyone it has already been used on, so every hero Tomura Shigaraki laid eyes on in the last battle is far too distant to intervene. Using Warping he calls up an army stitched together from Paranormal Liberation Front members, League of Villains and escaped convicts, and pronounces it too late.

Then Kurogiri's Warp Gate begins opening behind them, and All For One is thrown again, baffled that anyone managed to activate him. He decides it saves him the trouble of retrieval, until Neito Monoma steps out of one of the portals. As heroes stream through the gates, Yuga names the thing All For One fears most: that the world will see Japan is not finished, and that if they lead, everyone else follows. Today is the day he falls.

A lie detector Quirk, stolen from an ancestor of Naomasa Tsukauchi back in the earliest era of Quirks, is revealed to be what makes All For One impossible to deceive, and he uses it to vet the Aoyamas while ordering them to deliver Izuku.

Yuga appears to hand Izuku over, then reveals the whole thing was staged, and exposes his master's ultimate goal of drowning the world in chaos so that his arsenal of Quirks lets him take command of everything. His villain army is warped in while the heroes arrive through Kurogiri's Warp Gate, wielded by Neito Monoma. The final battle between heroes and villains begins.

Neito calling a hero army in through a spread of portals strongly resembles the climax of Avengers: Endgame.

The chapter starts both the Final War and Operation Troy. Seventeen pages in Volume 35, adapted in Episode 143, and the first instalment of the Final War arc.