Chapter 86 (Vigilantes)

Detective Eizo Tanuma finds Sansa working at his desk and asks after Naomasa, who has gone back to the hospital. Sansa has the information Eizo requested about that hospital: for two years before the secure ward went up, it took generous donations from a man named Takeshi Kuroiwa, a benefactor holding positions across various companies and non-profits with almost nothing public attached to his name. Eizo knows exactly who that is, and thanks him. Asked about the envelope under his arm, Eizo says it holds an old case he once worked, and something in it he wants to check. Out come photographs of O'Clock, and with them a piece of advice the hero once gave him.

Seven years earlier, in Osaka, an illegal fighting circuit called the Underground Masquerade operates out of a hidden parking structure. Every spectator wears a mask. In the cage, anything goes, weapons and Quirks alike, so fighters routinely need medical attention afterward, and some are known to simply disappear.

Eizo waits outside with a small Police Force detachment and offers to raid the place, but O'Clock sees no value in it. The event itself is not the target; the drug trade running through it is. Fighters are dosing on Quirk-boosting substances, and he intends to walk out with proof. Eizo works out that his officers are really there to hold an escape route open. Asked whether he has further questions, the detective admits to exactly one, about the five o'clock shadow, and gets only a smile and a line about looking the part. Resigned, he passes along the new orders.

Down in the Masquerade, the announcer presents The Ripper, a knife fighter carrying five wins and no defeats, who is O'Clock wearing a mask. His opponent enters with twenty wins and no losses: the Rapper. The Rapper opens with two complaints, first that their ring names sound alike, and second about the blade, since he holds that fights belong to bare hands. The Ripper asks whether the knife frightens him. It does not, and the Rapper invites him to bring it anyway, code intact. The bell rings and the Rapper is on him instantly, Strongarm driving a barrage of punches that flings The Ripper into the barriers and strips away both his knife and his mask. The announcer wonders whether it is already finished, but The Ripper gets up, says he is not done, and grins that since his opponent is such a nice guy, he will fight by his rules and drop the weapon. That answer thrills Rappa, who charges back in.

Eizo Tanuma is revealed to have worked alongside Iwao Oguro during his career as the Pro Hero O'Clock. Kendo Rappa's past is filled in: he fought as a pit fighter in the Underground Masquerade under the name The Rapper, and one of his opponents was Iwao, disguised as a knife fighter called The Ripper in order to expose the ring's traffic in illegal Quirk-boosting drugs.

The eighty-sixth chapter of My Hero Academia: Vigilantes by Hideyuki Furuhashi and Betten Court, nineteen pages published September 26, 2020, and collected in volume 11. It opens the Underground Masquerade arc. Drunk Lee, Master Beast, and The Rapper all debut here, and O'Clock appears on the cover.