Izuku vs. Nagant, ready? FIGHT!
Last time on My Hero Academia,
Izuku had his first run in with a villain in his vigilante era. Working with
All Might, Hawks, Best Jeanist, and Endeavor, and with the blessing (and scarf)
of Gran Torino, Izuku ran off to use himself as bait for the League of
Villains. Knowing that neither Shigaraki would let him run free so long as he
has One-For-All, Izuku made himself as visible as possible. He did his best to draw
attention to himself while still trying to help others in his spiffy, edgy new
costume. They’d been working on this plan for a few weeks without any bites.
The pro heroes assume All-For-One is resting and waiting for Tomura’s
modifications to settle so he can fully possess his student and come at Izuku with
his full power. That time wasn’t completely wasted, though, as the Vestiges of his
predecessors have helped train him in the new Quirks he’d been manifesting. He
finally got a hit when, on a rainy day with his help far away, a purple haired
woman started taking shots at him. This is Lady Nagant, a former wet-works hero
that served as an assassin for the Public Safety Commission. Her Quirk allows
her to manifest a full sniper rifle from one of her arms, and to mold her hair
into bullets of any type she needs. She’s an amazing shot, according to another
gun-based hero Snipe, and it’s all skill, no power. She was hired by AFO as the
elder Shigaraki freed himself from Tartarus, and was paid with an additional Quirk,
Air Walking, that does what it says. So Izuku has to dodge bullets while
chasing a woman that can effectively fly. That’s not going to be fun for him. Also
Overhaul is there, Nagant having dragged him with her for some reason. Enough recapping.
Let’s get to it, shall we?
We open with All Might’s car getting
hit with a grenade that causes him to skid out. He realizes that this is a
planned hit, trying to keep him from helping Izuku. A pair of thugs attack him,
causing his car to crash, but the retired hero rolls out at the last moment.
The thugs recognize him, but prepare to fight him anyway as that was what they
were paid to do. All Might remembers the promise he made to Inko Midoriya to protect
her son and all the growth Izuku has had since he met the boy. He gets the thugs
to back down based on sheer force of will as he says that he will
protect Izuku however he can. Izuku has been carrying a burden that All might
gave him, and he’ll be damned if Izuku will have to carry it alone.
Izuku uses his agility to run
around the empty skyscrapers to make himself a harder target to hit. He’s
confident that he’ll be able to outmanuever Nagant’s shots, and plans to
capture her and force her to tell her where Shigaraki and the league are hiding.
He’s thrown off when his Danger Sense kicks in and has just enough time to
dodge a bullet coming at him from behind. He kicks the bullet away, but is hit by
a second bullet from his blind spot. Izuku is flabbergasted by her being able
to sneak behind him and hit him without a search type Quirk. As he falls, he
sees Nagant running on air and realizes that she’s been given additional
quirks. She’s closed the distance to make it easier for herself to predict
where he’s going, and to give Izuku less time to react to each shot. She’s
basically trying to attack with enough speed that Danger Sense can’t trigger
fast enough to warn him of multiple shots. Izuku lands and uses the Sixth’s Quirk,
Smokescreen. He creates a cloud of smoke around himself, obscuring him
completely and much of the city block around him. En Tayutai (6th) manifests
and scolds Izuku for not using his Quirk properly. He reminds Izuku that it’s dangerous
to put out this much smoke, and that it won’t even be much help. Nagant is
basically a mobile rifle, she’ll tag and shoot him the second he leaves the
smoke cloud. Izuku says that he’s not running and starts… doing squats in
place? Bruce Lee manifests and says this plan is stupid, that its beyond Izuku’s
current abilities. Izuku remembers Endeavor telling him during his work study that
Izuku needs to learn how to do multiple tasks at once. Lee reminds Izuku that parallel
processing like that takes practice, and he’s not very experienced with Lee’s Quirk.
Izuku says that doesn’t matter, Nagant has info he needs, so he’s going at her
with full force. He says he’ll learn how to use this quirk on the fly. He
announces that he’s using the 3rd, Fa Jin as he finishes his squats.
Nagant is watching Izuku’s smoke cloud.
She sees something dart from the cloud and fires, but it was just Izuku’s
scarf. He throws out a few more decoys, which distracts Nagant long enough for
him to rocket over her (through a build) and attack her from behind. He
explains in a quick flashback that he used Black Whip to send out his decoys,
tricking Nagant into firing on them so he could figure out where she was based
on her shots. Izuku announces that a sniper is useless at close range, so she
should surrender and spill what she knows. She retracts her rifle into her body
and then whips it out again at high speed, using it as a club to knock Izuku
aside. She tells him that the Safety Commission trained her well. As Izuku
falls he asks why she’s helping AFO, as he’s a petty tyrant trying to control
the world, and she used to be a hero. Nagant tells him that the world he’s
living in, a world of justice, is a fantasy as she falls back to line up
another shot. Izuku admits that Lee was right and that using multiple Quirks at
once is much more difficult than he’d thought, right before Nagant hits him
again. This grazes his hip and destroys one of his pouches.
The bullets Nagant fires have speakers
built into them and she pontificates about her job for the Public Safety Commission.
She says she killed dozens for them, just to keep people in the dark about how
the world really works. She fires more shots, making Izuku dance around. She
says that her job was to take out problematic elements, Heroes that go rogue,
terrorists that target heroes, the sort of people that need to be removed for
their hero system to work. She calls herself a ‘cog in the machine’ of hero
society, that it has a ‘public’ face and a ‘secret’ face. Three guesses as to
which face she was part of. We see her take out several targets and how it
started to chip away at her mental health. We’re shown a bunch of kids running up
to her wanting to get her autograph, and when she goes to offer her hand to
them, she sees it absolutely soaked with blood. She pulls back but tries to put
a brave face on it. We cut to another mission, she’s told a pair of heroes are
secretly convincing people to commit crimes, only for the heroes to eventually
stop them, and turn their victims in for clout. Her handler tells her to take
them out. Nagant points out that covering up this kind of thing doesn’t
actually fix anything, that if they want to stamp out corruption in the system,
they have to acknowledge it exists. Her handler tells her to follow orders.
Nagant pulls her rifle on him, reveals that this guy was the former commissioner
and executes him.
In the present Izuku points out
that contradicts what he’d read about Nagant, as it was reported she killed
fellow heroes, not the PSC Commissioner. She says that they shifted the narrative
to her killing other heroes to hide their shame and to hide that she’d rebelled
against orders. She calls the hero world as nothing but an illusion. She thinks
that if the world goes back to what it was, someone else will get pulled in and
have to do the dirty work again. We see a flashback to Nagant when she was a high
schooler no older than Izuku getting her job with the PSC and how happy she was
at getting to do her part. She says that AFO’s future just makes more sense and
fires another shot at Izuku. He fires a Black Whip tendril at her. She dodges,
but he uses it to yank himself towards her. He admits that he knows the real
world is shades of grey, not black and white, and that is exactly why he has to
reach out to help. Nagant fires on him, but Izuku dodges in midair. Realizing
that she has to change tactics, she turns her gun to her right. Izuku follows
the barrel and sees Overhaul standing on a roof and shouting. Nagant, I guess,
powers up her rifle and prepares it to fire. She makes her gun arm swell, and
it looks really gross.
We flashback to Nagant stealing some
new clothes for herself and Overhaul. Overhaul tells her that he met the boy once,
and that he’s got an overinflated sense of ideals. Nagant says that this makes
it feel like fate. She says that she’ll keep bringing Overhaul along so he can
confirm the target to her. Overhaul agrees on the condition that she take him
to his former boss and tell him he’s sorry. … Bro, you used his granddaughter
in horrible experiments AND put him in a coma… if he wakes up I’m not sure
sorry is going to cut it!
Back in the present, Overhaul is
demanding Nagant hold her end of the bargain and take him to the boss, not
realizing she’s about to shoot him in the face. Nagant has Izuku pegged,
realizing that him failing to save someone, regardless of who it is, will eat
at him. She’s going to give him too much to process at once, and when he breaks
from the stress, she’ll take him down. Izuku dodges her shot with Fa Jinn. He
explains the power this time, it allows him to build up kinetic energy by
repeating movements. So those squats earlier, combined with him constantly
bending and stretching his legs while dodging Nagant’s shots built up a handy
stockpile of kinetic energy. That, plus OFA Full Cowling at 45%, and good
ol’ fashion physics allowed Izuku to do what All Might used to do. (And a
certain Big Blue Boy Scout still does) Move faster than a speeding bullet. He knocks
Overhaul aside at the last moment. Nagant is astonished that Izuku is able to
move faster than a bullet. Izuku is able to swing around in the time it took
her to line up another shot. Lee narrates that Izuku had trouble using all of
his powers at once, but he narrowed his focus down to Fa Jinn, Float, and Black
Whip which greatly improved his ability. He used the last bit of Fa Jinn
gathered force and OFA Full Cowling to do a full power Manchester Smash and
shatter Nagant’s rifle arm as he rockets past her. Nagant slips in the air and
starts to drop. She analyzes herself, thinking that she doesn’t hesitate, she
identifies a target and fights like it was predestined to be. She asks herself
when she started to feel sick when she heard empty sentiment. She remembers the
PSC Chairman saying that she’ll save a lot of people with her right arm. As she
drops, Izuku grabs her by the hand. Izuku says that he understands her, she
shot towards Overhaul but not at him, and if she was as ruthless as she
says, her first shot would have hit his spine and paralyzed him. He thinks that
there’s still the heart of a hero in Nagant and begs her to help him stop the
dark world AFO is planning to make. Izuku’s earnestness seems to reach her,
Nagant saying that Izuku Midoriya is a real hero. Unfortunately, her skin
starts to crack and then she explodes.
We cut to AFO, the eldest Shigaraki
says that a hero’s heart is a fickle thing, and because of that he put a few
contingency plans in play. He obviously implanted a quirk that would cause her
to self-destruct if she ‘breached’ her contract. He says that she lived a truly
pathetic life, being used to the very end. Izuku can only scream impotently as
Nagant drops, but Hawks flies in and catches his senior. Endeavor also flies in
and apologizes for being slow. Izuku tells him about Overhaul on the roof. He
goes to grab the crime boss. Hawks starts to drop because his feathers aren’t fully
recovered. Izuku grabs him with Black Whip and tries to slow their fall, telling
Hawks that he thinks she didn’t do that on purpose. Hawks tries to talk to her,
saying that he was kind of her replacement and that he understands her and begs
her to remember that she’s a hero. Nagant hears this and is confused how both
these boys still have such hope and optimism in their eyes. She tells them what
she knows; that AFO told her and several other hunters to meet him at a mansion
in the woods in two months with Izuku. She tells her replacement that she fell
apart after all the things she did and asks how he can keep going. Hawks says
that someone helped him out, remembering his Endeavor doll, and that he’s an
optimistic guy. Endeavor flies in with Overhaul, and the crime boss is furious
that she failed. Izuku tells the psycho that if he apologizes to Eri, he’ll
hold up Nagant’s bargain, which stuns him. All Might comes running up and asks
what happened. Hawks and Endeavor give him the summary and add that Izuku was
roughed up by all this too. The episode ends with Izuku angrily saying All For
One before the credits roll.
Well, that was an emotional
rollercoaster. I think Nagant was an excellent mini boss for Izuku to come up against
in this dark period. She represents the corruption within the old hero system;
the sort of people that must dirty their hands over and over again to hide the
cracks and broken places that their system has. It is sad to see the younger
version of Nagant, who seemed to be a very bright and optimistic person as
compared to the cold nihilistic person she became from years of having to do
bloody work. The system broke her, it used her up and then covered it up when
she crashed out to hide that breaking. And I like that Izuku has grown to the
point where he understands that the world isn’t a simple black and white
binary, but rather than reject morality like Nagant seems to, he takes it as a
reason to keep trying to protect others. If the world is shades of gray, be the
one that adds more light than dark sort of thing. And I like that Izuku added
that bit about how Nagant isn’t fully into the worldview she’s espousing, with
the example that she was clearly not going for lethal or maiming shots. She was
less broken than even she thought, it seems. AFO sticking a self-destruct quirk
in her along with air walk is classic villain stuff. And screw Overhaul. You don’t
get to apologize to the old man when you tortured his grandchild. I think I’d
have told him to shut his mouth and enjoy prison, but he’s a kinder man than I.
Next time, Izuku pushes himself harder than before and seems to refuse to
accept he’s cracking under the pressure. Fun times. Have a god night and stay
safe.
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Bluesky: @basicssuperhero.bsky.social
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