Chapter 71

With the dirt beast in pieces courtesy of Katsuki Bakugo, Shoto Todoroki, Tenya Ida and Izuku Midoriya, Class 1-A starts across the Beast's Forest. The cabin takes them roughly eight hours to reach, and they stagger in at 5:20 in the evening. Pixie-Bob expected worse, and compliments how fast they read her Earth Beasts; the four who moved first, she reckons, have clearly faced villains before. Izuku asks about the boy and whether one of the heroes is his mother. Mandalay identifies Kota Izumi as a nephew of hers, and prompts the boy to greet everyone. Izuku introduces himself.

Kota's answer is a fist to the crotch, after which he walks off. Tenya checks on Izuku and rebukes the boy, who snaps that he wants nothing to do with people chasing a corny hero dream. Once he leaves, Shota Aizawa sends the class to fetch luggage from the bus and stow it, then to dinner, then to the baths, with training starting the next morning.

The Pussycats' cooking goes down well. Afterward the class splits between the men's and women's hot springs, divided by a wooden wall, where Minoru Mineta realizes the schedules overlap and the girls are bathing at the same time. Tenya orders restraint; Minoru climbs anyway. At the top he meets Kota, who shoves him back down while calling out the perversion, earning thanks from the girls below. Catching sight of them, Kota falls in shock into the men's side, and Izuku uses Full Cowl to snatch him mid-air.

Izuku carries the boy, unconscious from the fright of the fall, to the cabin office. Mandalay thanks him. Izuku, having grown up among people who wanted to be heroes, is thrown by such a jaded outlook in a child. Mandalay says some people simply dislike heroes, and that a different upbringing would have left Kota worshipping them like anyone else. Pixie-Bob arrives and reveals that the Water Hose duo, Mandalay's cousins, were his parents.

They died on duty two years earlier, sacrificing themselves against a villain to save civilians, and were honored for a death worthy of true heroes. To Kota it read as abandonment, his parents choosing the job over him, and the loss curdled into contempt for heroism itself. The Pussycats know he resents them for what they are, but with no other family he follows them because there is nothing else. Hearing it, Izuku thinks of Tomura and his parallel grudge, and starts to grasp that not everyone shares his view.

At 5:30 the next morning, Class 1-A gathers outside. Shota explains that reinforcement training will strengthen their Quirks toward provisional licenses, and has Katsuki repeat the Quirk Apprehension Test pitch. It measures 709.6 meters, barely above his old mark, and the class expected far more. Their growth so far has been emotional and technical, Shota says, and the number proves the Quirks themselves have hardly moved. From here, the work is physical: upgrading the Quirks.

Class 1-A takes about eight hours to cross the forest, far beyond the three-hour allowance. Kota punches Izuku on sight and declares his hatred for anyone who wants to be a hero. The class is given a night of food and hot springs before real training begins, and Kota unwittingly foils Minoru's peeping.

Mandalay and Pixie-Bob reveal that Kota's parents were the Water Hoses, killed two years earlier saving civilians from Muscular, and that his grief soured into hatred of heroes and Quirks. Katsuki's 709.6 meter pitch demonstrates how little the class's raw Quirk power has grown, and Eraser Head declares Quirk enhancement the focus of the camp.

Chapter seventy-one of Kohei Horikoshi's My Hero Academia runs seventeen pages in volume eight, published December 14, 2015 in issue 2, 2016. It falls within the Forest Training Camp arc between chapters 70 and 72, with Class 1-A on the cover and a sketch included alongside it.

Episode 40 adapts the chapter. Horikoshi's author comment mentions facing the heaviest workload crisis since serialization began.