Chapter 69

Minutes before the encounter, Tomura Shigaraki is puzzling over why Stain's philosophy took root in so many people while his own approach, which he sees as much the same, drew nothing.

In the present his fingers are on Izuku Midoriya's neck and he tells the boy to relax. He only wants a conversation, he says, with disintegration as the alternative. Izuku warns that any attack will bring a hero out of the crowd, and Tomura counters by threatening the crowd itself. Beaten, Izuku asks what he wants to discuss.

They sit together in a plaza. Tomura lists his hatreds and names the Hero Killer above all of them. When Izuku calls Stain one of his own, Tomura corrects him: Stain never belonged to the League of Villains, and the connection was invented by the press and swallowed by the public. Everything Tomura has done has been buried under Stain's reputation. Both of them, as he sees it, tore down what they disliked in order to remake the world, yet one got famous and the other got ignored. What, he asks, is the difference.

Elsewhere Ochaco Uraraka has stopped running. Guilt over leaving Izuku confused pushes her to go back and apologize, and she reassures herself that a friendship as good as theirs is not turning into love.

Izuku answers. Tomura's actions he neither accepts nor comprehends; Stain he also rejects, but does understand. The reason is that All Might set both of them on their paths. Stain did not wreck things for pleasure, Izuku argues, he wrecked them trying to bend the world toward his own ideals, and while the methods are indefensible, living by those ideals without ever abandoning them earns respect. Something clicks. Tomura feels a rush as he sees why Stain and this boy grate on him so badly, and why the answer sat at his fingertips unnoticed: All Might. Society galls him for the same reason, all of it grinning happily like the man himself. He thanks Izuku for the talk.

Ochaco arrives and asks who Izuku is speaking with. He tries to tell her to run, but Tomura releases him and apologizes for interrupting the shopping. Walking off, he warns against pursuit. Izuku calls after him to ask what All For One is ultimately after, and gets an honest reply: he does not know and does not care. Vanishing into the crowd, Tomura tells him to stay well, because their next meeting ends with his death. Ochaco phones the police.

Leaving the mall, Tomura is delighted to realize he has held a creed all along. He settles on its renewed form: every act he commits will serve a world stripped of All Might, and expose what justice really amounts to. He goes happy, understanding at last that all of his hatred traces back to one man.

Tomura and Izuku sit down for a conversation centered on Tomura's contempt for Stain, during which Tomura confirms that Stain was never a member of the League of Villains and that the association was public speculation.

Izuku explains that he understands Stain without accepting him, because both of them were set in motion by All Might, and that conviction held to the end commands respect even when the methods do not.

Tomura recognizes that violence without conviction is empty and that he has carried his own ideal since the beginning: erasing All Might from the world. He leaves promising to kill Izuku at their next meeting, and Ochaco calls the police.

Running nineteen pages, the chapter appeared in issue 53 of 2015 on November 30 and belongs to volume 8 in the Final Exams arc. Mina Ashido, Denki Kaminari, Tenya Ida and Toru Hagakure appear on the cover.

Episode 38 of the anime adapts the material. The Kiyashi Ward Shopping Mall is the sole location used.

Kohei Horikoshi's author comment describes a punishing end-of-year workload, saying he is drawing furiously under the impression that this is the peak of his life.