Chapter 427

A broadcast poses its title question to the public and collects the answers. An office worker is glad he was put down. College students list the friends and the home he cost them. A housewife wonders whether he could have been stopped earlier. A restaurant owner remembers writing him off as a punk nobody expected to become a national threat. The program notes that volunteers have pushed reconstruction along briskly while whole regions remain untouched, then turns back to the man whose campaign of terror upended countless lives.

At Central Hospital, Izuku sits with Spinner. A doctor explains that carrying Body Bulk and Scalemail on top of his own body was converting him into a full Nomu, and that recent Nomu research let them stop the process just short of completion. Spinner calls his visitor a murderer with no shame, an accusation Izuku does not argue, saying only that he came to pass along what Tomura left behind. Told he is being kicked while down, Spinner hears the message anyway: to the very last, Tomura Shigaraki never stopped fighting to destroy.

That it was addressed to him specifically, and not to Himiko Toga, Dabi, or Mr. Compress, breaks him open. Spinner remembers a smiling man promising to tear down everything, remembers the crater that used to be Deika City, and remembers finally having a voice. Oppressed for what he was and ready to quit living, he was handed a dream and the notion that he might amount to something. His body swells as the anger takes over, even while some part of him insists he had sworn off revisiting any of it. The doctor offers to sedate him, but Izuku waves him off and lets the enlarged Spinner seize him while he roars that Tomura had been his hero.

The commentators keep talking. One dismisses the destruction as a tantrum with no reasoning behind it. Another raises the investigation into his childhood. A third warns that explaining the root cause is worthwhile but must not become a sob story that recruits fresh sympathizers. A fourth simply calls him garbage. Spinner, crying now, remembers something the panel never will: Tomura was a gamer, a shut-in whose only company was the same titles Spinner loved, and the first friend he ever had. Izuku tells him that Tomura had to be a hero for the League, that they mattered to him, and that the message exists because the feeling ran both directions.

Spinner replays how far the frenzy carried him and how slow he always was to catch on, wondering whether one more step might have saved his hero and his friend. As the broadcast signs off promising to watch for the next figure like Tomura or All For One, Spinner tells Izuku that the world will move on smiling and forget the League entirely. So he intends to author a book on the Symbol of Fear and the people who lived to destroy, one built to needle heroes forever, because the past refuses to die. Izuku suggests he draw it as a comic, adds that he himself will never forget, and takes a message back for the octopus, Mezo Shoji, to give life everything he has.

Rejoining Naomasa and Toshinori, Izuku learns his request about Kai Chisaki has gone through. In another prison, Kai receives the Shie Hassaikai Boss, awake at last thanks to advances in support equipment, who tells him to drop the title because the organization is finished. The old man catalogs the guiding hand Kai ignored, guesses Hari Kurono never once talked back, and refuses the sobbing apology. Eri is owed a lifetime of them, he says, and she will eventually forget Kai entirely, while he himself never will, and he intends to hold Kai to account until the day he dies. Izuku thanks Naomasa, who counts it better than forcing Eri to face him and answers the question of how to end all this with the flat truth that it will not end, plus a joke about Hawks raising an army of heroes. Toshinori tells Izuku to lighten up for the incoming first years, and Izuku doubts he will see much of them, right up until he reaches school and finds Shoto and Katsuki mobbed by fangirls.

Izuku visits Spinner at Central Hospital and delivers Tomura's last words to him. Spinner is revealed to have nearly completed a transformation into a Nomu, halted by hospital research. Confronted with the message, he breaks down and gives the fullest account yet of what Tomura meant to him, intercut with a news program dissecting the same man from the outside.

Spinner resolves to author a book preserving Tomura and the League of Villains and their beliefs. The Shie Hassaikai Boss is shown awake after improved support items pulled him from his coma, and he confronts Kai Chisaki in prison. Izuku returns to U.A. to find first-year fans chasing Shoto and Katsuki.

Chapter 427 runs 15 pages within the Epilogue arc, released July 8, 2024 in issue 32 and collected in volume 42. The full chapter is adapted in episode 169.

Series trivia identifies the housewife interviewed on the broadcast as the same woman who paused to speak with a young Tenko decades earlier before his appearance unsettled her, an irony sharpened by her excuse at the time that she was running late for work. Horikoshi's author comment notes that YouTube now recommends him nothing but horror content, and that he is pleased about it.