Chapter 38 (Vigilantes)

The Mazinger High karate club is busy demanding group dates from their female classmates when the Crawler turns up to talk them out of it. All he achieves is provoking them, and Rocket Thrust comes at him in a barrage. Guarding as best he can, Koichi deflects one of the blows and notices something odd in how his Slide and Glide behaved, which he has no time to examine before he is knocked out cold.

Over at the station, security footage of a botched Osaka arrest goes under the microscope, Naomasa Tsukauchi studying it alongside Eizo Tanuma, their target a speedster villain. The suspect flattened an entire squad of officers in roughly a second, exactly as Naomasa suspected. Eizo offers a theory: an acceleration Quirk of that grade would let its user see, hear, and think at absurd speed, leaving the rest of the world effectively frozen. It gives Naomasa an idea.

He meets Shota Aizawa at the Hotta brothers' shop to talk about O'Clock, a speed-type hero from the previous generation whose Quirk closely resembles the Osaka criminal's. Asked directly whether O'Clock went bad, Naomasa doubts it, since the ages do not line up, but he is confident the two are connected somehow, whether by blood or by teaching. The trouble is that O'Clock cannot be found. The Hotta brothers suggest he went to ground on purpose, which is ordinary enough for retired heroes, especially ones who made a lot of enemies.

In an apartment, the Osaka criminal drills his Quirk to its limits. A voice in his earpiece tells him the effort is pointless and that guns worked fine last time, and he replies he prefers his fists. The voice tells him to please himself, since the training at least yields data on his body under acceleration. Once the call ends, he mutters that firearms are for corners because guns are not heroic, staring up at a large poster of O'Clock, a man he calls master.

Home at his penthouse, Koichi tells Kazuho he has worked out what happened: Slide and Glide can fire off repulsion blasts. He names it Scrappy Thrust Style, walks her through the technique, and demonstrates until he puts a blast through a windowpane, which gets him a reminder that some things are simply off limits.

Koichi discovers a new application of Slide and Glide while defending against the karate club's Rocket Thrust, and later names the repulsion blast Scrappy Thrust Style.

Naomasa and Eizo confirm from footage that the Osaka villain uses an acceleration Quirk capable of hyper-speed perception and thought.

Naomasa connects the villain to the retired speedster hero O'Clock and theorizes a family or master-and-student link, but cannot locate him.

The scarred speedster is shown training under instruction from a voice on an earpiece, and is revealed to regard O'Clock as his master.

Number 38 in the Vigilantes spin-off, the installment is written by Hideyuki Furuhashi and drawn by Betten Court. It runs twenty-one pages, arrived on September 22, 2018, and sits in Volume 6 under the Team Ups arc. Episode 16 adapts it.

The Mazinger Brothers debut here, and Number 6 fronts the cover.

The chapter was first titled "High-Speed Hero" and shortened for the volume release.