After the Storm

Coverage of the attack saturates the news, with reporters measuring the damage against the Kaiju Attack of three years earlier. Footage rolls of a girl laughing and dancing amid the blasts as though she were conducting them, and anchors explain that wireless signals were seized to blast music over the rampage. Bystanders give their accounts, some stunned, some braced for the next one. Newscaster Daikaku Miyagi reports that the police have named Pop☆Step, the Naruhata idol, as the one behind the bombings, and that she has been entered into the villain designation registry. The move is unusual: that listing is normally kept for repeat Quirk offenders, not for a minor with no prior record.

In New York, Makoto Tsukauchi and her brother Naomasa argue over the phone. She calls the labeling and the publication of Kazuho's name a plain violation of her rights; he replies that she is a wanted suspect in a large-scale Quirk attack and that the villain designation strips away the protections she would get as a minor. Makoto keeps hunting for a flaw in his reasoning until he tells her to stop arguing for its own sake, and she breaks down. Naomasa understands the guilt driving her, but warns her to stay put rather than fly home and do something that would make her an accomplice. Her chance to help will come once the coverage stops shaping itself however it likes. She asks him where Koichi is, because nobody else can reach Kazuho now.

Koichi's friends are asking the same question. Soga Kugisaki walks the streets with a Bluetooth earpiece, listening to a report that the missing vigilante is a known associate of Pop☆Step and may be tied to the incident. He turns into an auto shop where Rapt Tokage and Moyuru Tochi are tending a bruised Koichi, only just awake after a long blackout. Everything from that night comes back at once, and the moment the television goes on he fixes on the reports about the Naruhata Bombings. He suggests going to the police and telling them about himself, Kazuho, and all of it. Soga allows that this is one choice, if he is content to hand the problem to the heroes and the officers.

Then Soga gives him a letter, and Koichi recognizes it as Knuckleduster's. His master writes that if the letter has been opened, Koichi is tangled in trouble that traces back to him, and he is sorry his private business came around to bite the boy. Then comes the part that stops him: the promise made the day they met, that Knuckleduster would turn him into a true-blue hero, was a lie.

The authorities publicly identify Pop☆Step as the bomber and register Kazuho as a villain, a rare designation for a minor's first offense.

Naomasa refuses Makoto's protests and orders her to stay in New York rather than risk being charged as an accomplice.

Koichi regains consciousness in Soga's care and begins reading Knuckleduster's letter, which opens by admitting the promise to make him a hero was untrue.

Bee☆Pop and The Crawler appear on the cover. The chapter ran nineteen pages and is collected in Volume 10.

Its serialized title was Suspect, 容疑者, changed to After the Storm for the volume release.