Chapter 63 (Vigilantes)

Hizashi Yamada and Sensoji ride four-rotor drones above the city beside the Buster Union, the Pro Hero team hosting their Hero Work-Studies, heading for an enormous villain wrecking the streets. Sensoji shows off his new goggles and gets called a copycat, along with a reminder of the way he talked to Shota the last time around. The mention of Shota annoys him, since he rates the boy a weakling. Hizashi defends his friend: Shota overthinks and starts slow, but once he digs down and finds his nerve he is a hard opponent. Sensoji's retort is that losing the nerve at all is the problem, a point Hizashi concedes before writing him off as simple minded.

The Buster Union's leader shuts down the chatter and orders the team to open up with everything. They do, and the villain absorbs all of it, lumps swelling across his back with each hit. Elsewhere Shota and Oboro patrol and run into a pack of nursery children, who recognize Oboro instantly and clamor to climb on his cloud. He lets them, cheerfully buried under toddlers while Shota watches to see nobody falls. Oboro tells him he is good with kids and could hold down a daycare job, or a classroom. Shota doubts he has anything children would like, then a child stops to say goodbye to him and proves him wrong.

Oboro argues that Shota's habit of overthinking is what breeds the self-doubt, and that he could do anything if he committed to it. Shota mulls it over, then advises him to do some thinking before he opens his mouth. Right then Nemuri calls with a warning to start evacuating, because a villain is destroying the neighborhood. Garvey then pops one of the swellings riding his spine, and a wave of energy sweeps a wide area. Midnight runs him through the Hero Network and reports to His Purple Highness: the man is Garvey, with prior crimes including murder, and his Stock Quirk absorbs, stores and redirects his enemies' attacks. Nothing in the file suggests the destructive scale he is displaying now, the scale that flattened the Buster Union. Purple orders her to call for backup and evacuate while he stalls the villain himself.

Shota and Oboro rush back to the children, but Garvey reaches them far sooner than expected. Purple appears and attacks while ordering the two to get the kids clear. Shota watches in shock as Garvey releases a lump loaded with Hizashi's Voice and fires it at Purple, slamming him into a building, then follows up with Sensoji's Blast. The building starts collapsing onto the children. Oboro throws up a cloud cushion and saves them, and a piece of falling debris cracks him in the head. He goes down, and before Shota can reach him he vanishes completely beneath the rubble.

With Oboro and Purple both out of the fight, Shota alone stands between Garvey and the children, and he has no idea how to stop him. He has just watched the villain shatter everyone who tried, and the Quirk is not only lethal but impossible to predict. His nerve starts going as he cycles frantically through options, none of which look survivable. Then Oboro's gourd-speaker lands near him and his partner's voice comes through the device, telling him he can do this. The words return his confidence, and he sets himself against the villain, remembering what Oboro always said, that Erasure can drag a villain down to an even fight.

The 19-page chapter released October 12, 2019 and was collected in Volume 9, part of the School Days Arc, adapted as Episode 21 of the Vigilantes anime. Buster Union and Garvey debut, with Cangunnon, Boobs, Bukkomi, Mellorine and Tech Magic making up the hero team. Serialization titled it Decisive, or Jōkyō handan, before the volume release revised it.