Chapter 98 (Vigilantes)

Eraser Head catches up with Koichi, who keeps talking and keeps his distance at the same time. The Pro chews him out for making every dispatched Hero chase him when they are supposedly fighting for the same thing, mocking him as the kid from the Sky Egg business, though he concedes the lecture is pointless: people like this never reconsider anything until someone is already bleeding. Koichi, reading the threats as pressure to surrender, bolts. Slide and Glide dies under Erasure, but he catches himself and simply sprints, which genuinely surprises the Hero pursuing him overhead. Civilians look up at the chase, then look sideways as trench-coated figures without faces begin drifting into the streets in growing numbers.

Remembering what the Hotta brothers explained about how Erasure works, Koichi ducks into back alleys to break line of sight. It fails; Eraser Head finds him and cancels the Quirk a second time, and Koichi realizes his old patrol routes were never as private as he assumed. He answers with Knuckleduster's grappling hook, swings clear, and later launches himself skyward. Watching the switch from Quirk work to purely Quirkless movement, and how little his Erasure rattled the boy either time, Eraser Head concedes he is dealing with a difficult customer.

At the hospital, Naomasa gets word from Team Idaten that the Heroes are tightening around Koichi's position. Midnight then passes him a call from Soga, who apologizes for slipping away and explains he had only meant to negotiate once Koichi was clear, never expecting an entire Hero deployment. Soga asks him to recall them: the chase is pointless, the group only wants the hospital guarded, and they will accept whatever punishment follows. Naomasa refuses, so Soga points to Eizo Tanuma as someone who would look for middle ground, and warns that two sides tearing at each other is exactly what their real enemy wants.

That enemy is listening. Number 6 delights in Heroes, police, and Vigilantes burning themselves out on one another when they should be allies. His hallucination of O'Clock tells him the lesson is teamwork: keep your opposition fractured and your own side aligned. With so many Heroes packed into one district, it makes an ideal proving ground, and 6 is only too glad to demonstrate. He fires a charge of electricity into the sky, his scar blooming across every faceless figure below, and the power dies across the whole city. The night will be remembered as Nightmare Night, the Naruhata Lockdown.

Koichi keeps slipping Eraser Head's grasp, switching fluidly to Quirkless tactics and Knuckleduster's grappling hook whenever Erasure strips Slide and Glide from him, which the Hero finds unexpectedly impressive.

Soga makes a second attempt to talk Naomasa into standing the Heroes down, arguing that the infighting only serves whoever is really behind the trouble.

Number 6 seizes the distraction, plunges Naruhata into a citywide blackout, and reveals control over a crowd of faceless figures spreading through the streets.

This is the ninety-eighth chapter of My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, written by Hideyuki Furuhashi and drawn by Betten Court. It runs twenty-one pages, was published on March 27, 2021, and belongs to the Naruhata Lockdown Arc; the volume release collects it in Volume 12.

The Crawler and Eraser Head appear together on the cover.

Serialization carried the chapter under a different name, rendered as Irrational, before the title was revised for the collected edition.

The O'Clock seen advising Number 6 is an illusion, part of All For One's disguise rather than the real Iwao Oguro.