Chapter 413

Across both vestige realms, the All Might vestige witnesses how Star and Stripe fell to the two villains. Fading out, she looks past the wall of hands to Tenko Shimura at the core, and in the here and now she indicates a crack in the crumbling structure and tells her Master there is a forlorn boy inside.

Edgeshot warns the real All Might that drifting off may kill him, and without an earpiece they can only guess that the fight goes on. All Might recognizes the sensation from an earlier moment when his vestige self's sight bled into his own, which ought to be impossible at this distance from One For All, and he understands that the strength each user layered on over generations is starting to come apart.

Tomura cannot explain sensing Star and Stripe at all, certain she was wiped out completely. Her parting promise, that her heroic will would pass to somebody, follows him like embers. Deku, hurled miles across the forest and barely able to breathe or move under Gearshift's recoil, remembers the day All Might told him heroism lay within his reach, and asks Kudo what parting with One For All is supposed to mean.

Kudo warns him to keep steady so their enemy overhears nothing, then describes the darkness inside the villain as dense as a ball of lead, every scrap of anger and frustration drawn into one mass of unshakable resolve hardened by raw hatred. All Might spotted a rift in it, a wound from Star and Stripe that lives in the mind rather than the body, which Super Regeneration cannot close. Since Tomura has absorbed All For One and cannot be beaten from outside, the answer is to attack inward: transfer One For All and hammer the scar until his soul gives.

Deku and En object, since Hikage's theft showed what happens when a user reaches him. Kudo widens the meaning of transfer, borrowing All Might's old advice about visualization and the memory of Katsuki shoving something into Deku's hands, arguing that a handoff can be rough enough to wound or break whatever is passed.

He volunteers to go first. Because only Hikage was taken, they can send one user at a time, and their Factors are both components of the whole and powered-up abilities in their own right. He wants Deku to hurl him hard enough to shatter him into nothing, damage delivered without surrendering control. En offers his own useless Smokescreen instead and worries aloud that Gearshift underpins the entire fight, but Kudo notes Deku dies now if nothing changes, that losing Gearshift also sheds the recoil, and that any backlash would follow the Quirk to Tomura.

Bruce, loyal as ever, calls the gamble too dangerous. Kudo answers that living through the cruelest of times forced plenty of judgment calls on him, and with Deku refusing to throw in the towel, he chooses to believe the boy has it right.

Nana observes that Deku hesitates over neither power nor death, however daunting the mission, and balks only at releasing an irreplaceable gift from the hero he admires most. As Tomura rushes in demanding to know what they are muttering about, Kudo tells Daigoro to stay close so Blackwhip keeps Deku alive and asks Yoichi to watch over him, and Yoichi calls him his hero. Deku agrees, shears off Tomura's hands with a horde of Blackwhips, and wraps his body in them to move again, drawing a jab that he looks nothing like a hero.

Fifteen pages, published January 29, 2024 in issue 9, collected in volume 41 and adapted in Episode 164. Trivia notes the Blackwhip-covered look resembles the Marvel character Carnage, and that Tomura's insult calls back to Chapter 317, where civilians said the same of Izuku's filthy, exhausted state.