Chapter 417

Izuku's fist tears into the clumped fingers, and the shock of it carries through the broadcast until everyone watching flinches at once. The blow nearly finishes off the leaden soul at Tomura Shigaraki's center. Looking around the mindscape afterward, Nana Shimura finds every other vestige already gone: Yoichi, Bruce, Daigoro Banjo, All Might, all transferred, with only her repelled. Tomura once said he hated her too, and she remembers Kotaro sobbing for her not to go, and understands at last that the rejection was never his hatred but her own weakness.

Izuku stands on the doorstep of the Shimura house. Before his hand reaches the bell, a voice comes out of his own mouth asking whether dragging a past into the light changes anything. He recognizes it as Tomura borrowing him to speak, and answers that he does not know, but he cannot let it end unanswered. Die instead, the voice says. Izuku tells it he is coming in anyway.

A passing car nearly flattens him, clipping his backpack, and the shock of being able to touch this world at all brings Nana out. They are far down in Tomura's subconscious, she explains, and because Izuku is a successor his thoughts take solid shape here and can push against everything else. She is sorry to be the one who got thrown back; Izuku tells her he is glad she stayed. This place is the core, she says, the origin, where Tomura is at his most fragile, and Izuku will have to reach in and strike it directly.

Stain pins him before he can charge the door, telling him that is precisely why he is about to die, then shifts into Re-Destro, demanding to know what he carries and what he means to build, then into Overhaul, asking whether he has a plan. Izuku says flatly that he does not, and to move. He shoves past the apparition, opens the door, and is met by the photograph Hana once showed Tenko, Nana and Kotaro together in it, the memory replaying in front of both of them.

Inside, Kotaro is slapping a silhouetted Tenko. Izuku lunges and is stopped by a force field, terrified of being pushed away again with the answer this close. Nana collapses in tears as Kotaro calls her a monster who abandoned her own child; the photo was never kept out of longing but as a wound he could not stop reopening. Heroes, he says, are people who hurt their families for the sake of strangers. Nana realizes the damage she left in him was handed straight down to Tomura, and wonders what would have changed had she brought All For One down and come home. She apologizes for being a weak mother, and at Izuku's call the two of them lunge together, Nana taking hold of Kotaro while Izuku reaches Tenko. The leaden soul breaks. Nana tells her son she never made it back to him and tells her grandson the blame was hers as she fades out. Tenko surfaces in his own body, and Izuku looks down at a small boy cradling his dog Mon, at the exact moment Decay wakes.

Izuku shatters the finger barrier and lands in the deepest layer of Tomura's mind.

Every vestige but Nana transfers cleanly and wrecks most of the leaden soul; her regrets over Kotaro leave her the one pushed back.

Apparitions wearing Stain's face, then Re-Destro's, then Overhaul's, try to block Izuku before he and Nana find young Tenko under his father's hand.

Nana grasps how deeply her absence wounded her son and how that wound reached her grandson.

The two of them reach both Shimuras, and Nana's apology accompanies her transfer, finishing the leaden core.

Izuku is left at the instant Decay awakens in Tenko.

"Shimura" runs fifteen pages, published in issue 16 of 2024 on March 18 and collected in volume 41 as part of the Final War arc. The anime split it across Episode 165 for the first ten pages and Episode 166 for the rest. The cover pairs Nana and Kotaro Shimura with Tomura Shigaraki and Izuku Midoriya.

Float and Decay join One For All and All For One as the Quirks featured. The three apparitions Izuku faces point back to earlier chapters: Stain to Chapter 49, Re-Destro to Chapter 234, and Overhaul to Chapter 125. Kohei Horikoshi's author's comment celebrates the arrival of his Kaoru Mitoma towel and wishes the footballer a fast recovery from surgery.