Chapter 63

Izuku Midoriya pulls the pin and unloads a colossal Explosion into All Might from point-blank range, then breaks for the exit with Katsuki Bakugo. The blast barely registers: All Might shrugs it off with a little blood and superficial damage, impressed all the same. He judges that the two working in concert here, whatever their relationship does or does not become, will matter enormously to them later. Then he takes off after them, promising to hold nothing back.

Across the city, Momo Yaoyorozu turns out a set of Russian dolls, narrating the work for Shoto Todoroki as she goes. She admires him for producing a plan against Shota Aizawa and for having the judgment to pick the best line of action on the fly. Shoto calls it ordinary. Momo confesses that despite entering on recommendation she is the only one in the class with nothing to show for herself in practical work.

Shoto senses their teacher close by and Momo apologizes for talking too much. Shota drops in from the telephone wires overhead. Shoto's counterattack misses, he tells Momo to run, and the Capturing Weapon wraps him and strings him up from the wires, bound off to a pole. Shota admits capturing Shoto was always the plan. Shoto notes the flaw, that fire or ice will free him, and Shota agrees while warning him to mind the landing, scattering caltrops below as a deterrent. Shoto compliments the nastiness of the counter. His teacher then delivers the real point: the strategy loaded all the responsibility onto one person, and while considering Momo was decent of him, he should have talked it through with her far more.

Momo, fleeing, cannot settle on whether to keep running or turn back for Shoto. Shota drops in and pins her arm with a launched cloth. Testing it, she finds that Erasure never touched her power, produces a bracelet out of the wrapped arm to slip loose, and runs on. Shota reads her exactly: she keeps measuring herself against Shoto because he has the thing she does not, confidence.

Hanging there, Shoto turns his teacher's words over. Momo returns and apologizes, still unable to choose between rescue and escape. Shoto apologizes in turn for ignoring her ideas and sees she has something. She does, she says, but it only works if his plan has already failed. He tells her to run it, and adds that he voted for her in the Class President election. That does it. As Shota moves in above her, Momo tells Shoto to shut his eyes and throws her Russian dolls skyward. They split open into flash grenades whose glare forces Shota to look away, which halts his advance and simultaneously shuts off his Quirk. In that window she cuts Shoto down and he lands clean. Momo declares that she has a plan to beat their opponent, and Shota smirks.

The chapter confirms that Eraser Head is deliberately holding back to let Momo rebuild her belief in herself, and that Izuku and Katsuki found a middle path between fleeing and fighting. Its 19 pages ran in issue 47, 2015 on October 19, 2015 and were collected in Volume 8. The anime split it, with pages 6 to 19 in Episode 35 and pages 1 to 6 in Episode 37. Erasure, Half-Cold Half-Hot, Creation and Explosion all feature, along with Explosive Speed and Binding Cloth. Horikoshi's comment cheers on his former assistant Watanabe, who was starting his first serialization with Mag Garden.