Chapter 425

June brings the third-year class the ceremony it was owed months earlier. Present Mic hosts, apologizes for the delay now that the blossoms have already come and gone, and compensates with sheer volume, pulling the graduates into a roar that leaves the youngest students staring. Tamaki Amajiki and Nejire Hado collect their diplomas, and Nejire admits her wounds still ache even as her mood soars, credit she hands to Mirio Togata for guarding them both while they lay unconscious. Behind the whole recovery sits Nezu, whose international standing pried loose foreign resources, funding, and medical aid under a plan he had been shaping since before the fighting stopped.

Mawata Fuwa speaks for the student body, then Mirio takes the podium as the graduates' representative and unsettles the room by opening sincerely rather than with a joke. His argument is blunt. The fighting cost enormous amounts and returned nothing, because heroes only ever drag a negative situation back toward zero, and the country has not reached zero yet. He credits every other track at the school, general education and support and management alike, for pulling in one direction, frames their three years as fuel for the work still ahead, and insists that a future without laughter is no future at all. Asking Nighteye to watch, he snaps and rockets skyward on Permeation, right as Bibimi Kenranzaki turns a giant robot loose into the crowd of cheering students.

Class 1-A reassembles in a borrowed Class 2-A room, where Shota Aizawa explains that circumstances have handed him the same students for at least another year, news that delights them and reduces Mina to happy tears. Katsuki turns up despite orders to take it easy, and Yuga Aoyama arrives to say goodbye. He enrolled only as a piece of All For One's design, so he refuses a diploma he feels he never earned, promising instead to make amends and walk back toward heroism on his own road. He sets a piece of cheese at Izuku's mouth, fires his Navel Laser around the room out of pure emotion, and reveals Hitoshi Shinso as his replacement in Class A. Toru Hagakure flickers visible under all that light, drawing compliments on a face nobody had ever seen, until Aizawa herds everyone back to business.

Mawata returns with assignments. Hero course second and third years will join the reconstruction she coordinates plus a nationwide push to hold the peace. History books, she warns, skip the chaos that follows every famous battle, and Shoto notes that All For One grew out of exactly that kind of vacuum. She then addresses Aizawa by an old nickname, revealing she once sat in his classroom before being expelled, and thanks him for the brush with death that clarified why she wanted this job. Later talk turns to the incoming first years, to Izuku's shaved scalp and Fumikage's altered hairstyle, and to Ochaco's smile, which Izuku cannot quite trust. Elsewhere a weeping figure covered in stitches snips at something on their own body and wanders a ruined city, while Shoto braces himself and Endeavor stands over a restrained Dabi.

The postponed graduation puts the scale of the recovery on display, and Mirio's address reframes the entire war as damage control rather than triumph. Nezu is revealed as the architect of the international relief effort. Class 1-A keeps Aizawa as homeroom teacher for a second straight year, an arrangement U.A. would normally never permit.

Yuga steps away from the school to answer for his part in All For One's scheme, and Hitoshi joins Class A in his place. Mawata, a former student of Aizawa's, drafts the hero course into the restoration and the effort to keep order nationwide. A scarred stranger surfaces in an abandoned city, and Shoto prepares to join Endeavor at Dabi's side.

Numbered 425 in Kohei Horikoshi's run, the chapter belongs to the Epilogue arc and fills 15 pages, published in issue 28 of 2024 on June 10 and later collected in volume 42. Its cover gathers Izuku, Nezu, Tamaki, Nejire, Tsutsutaka Agoyamato, Chikuchi Togeike, and Present Mic.

The stitched wanderer debuts here without a name, later identified as Koki Terumoto. Anime adaptation splits the material between episode 168 and a short stretch of episode 169. Horikoshi's margin comment celebrates buying a whole watermelon and eating it across all three meals of the day.