Chapter 8 (Vigilantes)

Kazuho Haneyama lets herself into Koichi Haimawari's apartment and finds him stitching up a torn hoodie. She helps herself to a pudding cup and asks why he does not simply buy a replacement. Because it is official All Might merchandise, he says. The pudding turns out to be one he had been saving, which flusters her into blaming him for failing to label it, though he does not much mind.

Her jab about the lame hoodie touches a nerve. Koichi will not have it insulted, since the thing means a great deal to him, and he lays out every limited edition he owns. One is absent: the silver age release, given away.

Through middle school he took heroics seriously and applied to a hero course at a Tokyo high school. On the morning of the entrance exam he spotted a child drowning, tried to walk on, and found his instincts would not let him. He hauled the kid from the water, handed over the silver age hoodie against the cold, and ran for the school, arriving too late to sit the examination. He still occasionally pictures the career that might have followed had the incident never happened, and hopes the child grew up inspired by the rescue, with his ideals carried along in the jacket. Kazuho, unimpressed that he traded a hero career for some nameless kid, leaves in a bad mood.

At her own place she takes out that same hoodie. She was the boy. Her Leap Quirk had been meant to carry her across a river as a shortcut, but overnight rain had left the ground slick and the water high; she slipped in and started to drown, and Koichi came for her. She has been searching for him since, and now that she has finally found him she cannot work out how to thank him properly, which annoys her all over again.

Grateful and regretful that she cost him his exam, certain that he could have been a great hero because he has always been a real one to her, she buys more pudding and goes back to tell him. Knuckleduster is there eating it, and the moment evaporates. She heads home once more, pulls the silver age hoodie on, and admits privately that Koichi's claim about courage overflowing from it may hold some truth after all.

Koichi's abandoned hero career is explained: he missed the entrance exam because he stopped to save a drowning child.

Kazuho is revealed as that child. She still keeps the limited edition silver age All Might hoodie he wrapped around her.

Knuckleduster's arrival ruins her attempt to confess the truth, and she puts the hoodie on alone instead.

The eighth chapter of My Hero Academia: Vigilantes belongs to the Vigilantes Beginnings arc and comes from writer Hideyuki Furuhashi and artist Betten Court. It runs nineteen pages in volume 2, with Pop☆Step on the cover.

Serialization used the shorter title Ano Hito before the volume release amended it. The anime adapted this material as Episode 5.