Boku no Hero Academia 16 Review: Escalation

Boku no Hero Academia: Know Your Enemies

Well, that escalated quickly! Some of the things I expected would happen did happen -- a lot of the villains that showed up are just fodder, and the strong ones are the ones battling Eraserhead and No. 13, and I expected one or both to be taken out... but not quite this quickly.

We get a couple of pages showing Midoriya, Tsuyu and Mineta recovering from their little heroic stint last chapter. Apparently Midoriya has a habit of mumbling his monologues to himself audibly, and the stickiness of Mineta's balls depends on how good of a dump he takes in the morning. Yeeeeah. Anyway, Midoriya finds out that they can get to the exit relatively unscathed, but decides to help out Aizawa-sensei, who's fighting near the Central Plaza. The narration disagrees, however, saying that the mere idea of them helping out was a 'costly misapprehension'.

We get a little intro-page thing showing the locations (and names) of everyone. There are six locations: the flood zone (where Team Midoriya is), the downpour storm zone (Tokoyami the crow-man and another dude), conflagration zone (some dude named Ojiro), mountain zone (Team Momo), landslide zone (Todoroki the ice-fire dude) and ruins zone (Bakugou and another dude). There's a large group with No. 13 at the entrance, while Aizawa/Eraserhead is fighting at the central fountain. Also, apparently the locations of Aoyama (the navel cannon dude) and Hagakure (invisible girl) are unknown.

We get a brief scene with Todoroki, who's done his ice thing and frozen every single one of the bad guys sent after him. He points out that a lot of the villains are just mooks rounded up by the real threats, of which there are only four or five. We get some nice cold dialogue from him going 'I could let you all die from necrosis, but I'm supposed to be a hero' before he does this interrogation.

In the mountain zone, Momo and two other students whose names we learn now (though I recognize them fro previous scenes) are fighting. This boy Kaminari can apparently generate lightning, though he has some limitations. He can only 'wear' it, so he can only electrocute those directly in contact with him, or unleash it all indiscriminately. This goth-ish girl with short hair and weird tentacles out of her ears is named Jirou Kyouka, and her power, Earring Jacks, can apparently amplify the sounds of her heartbeat. Which is relatively odd, and a lot more useful because when I first saw her I thought 'oh, Audino stethoscope ears. How stupid.' She does take out a couple of villains, but her best usage is to snark around which is fun.

We get some funny scenes of Kyouka kicking Kaminari and calling him a 'human stungun'. There's a moment where the action's not exactly clear, when this villain with a rock surrounding his weird arm punches Kaminari... and then the rock shatters, revealing his hand, and he gets electrocuted. The next panel shows this boar-headed villain engulfed by the net... it's not exactly clear, but I think Momo took out the rock and created the net to take down the boar.

Momo then reveals her ability, 'Creation', which we saw a bit of a couple chapters ago. She can create stuff from her body as long as she knows the chemical compositions (and her being like an overachiever it's not too hard to imagine she has the entire periodic table memorized), but it appears to take time. And when she makes something gigantic like an insulator, which she can eject right out of her body, it tears right through her costume. We get a nice little combo of Momo insulating herself and Kyouka, and Kaminari just doing a big zappy thing, which is cool. Also apparently Kaminari becomes a bit of a retard after doing the big zappy thing.

A rocky hand comes out of the ground behind them before we cut away, so I'm going to assume that's one of the 4-5 strong people, since at least three are already accounted for: evil darkness shadow portal man, freaky horror-show hands all over man, and big scary shark-mouthed exposed brain dude. We... kind of need to learn these dudes' names. For, now, I'm calling them Shadow, Handy and Brains for convenience's sake.

We cut to Handy McHands fighting Aizawa, and he's counting the seconds, presumably the interval between Aizawa's usage of his Eraserhead quirks. Handy gloats over figuring out Aizawa's quirk or something as he catches his elbow... and then completely crushes it. There might be some corrosion or whatever kind of ability going on as Aizawa's shirt disappears, but Aizawa punches Handy with his free hand, and that seems to knock the wind out of Handy for a moment before other villains ambush Aizawa, though Handy still trash-talks Aizawa's lack of suitability for something like this. Then Sharky von Brains shows up from behind Aizawa looking all scary and shit

Meanwhile, while No. 13 seems to going to do something cool last chapter, Shadow goes all 'you're not used to actual combat because you're a rescue hero', and apparently opens a portal behind No. 13 and causes his black hole ability to tear apart the back side of his body instead via the warp holes. And I do like how none of this is explained and it really requires you to think to figure out what's going on, which is a nice, fresh break from normal manga convention of having to explain each cool action with a panel or two.

No. 13 seems to be dead or incapacitated unless his black hole ability can do more than that. Ida apparently hasn't ran and just started to do so now, and Shadow goes right for him because all they want is All Might and not all the teachers, but the dude with Aizen butterfly wings, Shouji, gets in the way of the attack. I mean, I'm not sure how extra hands or mouths are going to fare against teleportation warp gates, but you go, Shouji. There's still Uraraka, plus three other dudes (Satou, Sero and Ashido) whose quirks we have yet to know, so maybe they can put up a fight until Ida reaches the school proper? We get extra glimpses of the others, and apparently whatever was in the rock has ambushed Team Momo.

The last page is Midoriya, Tsuyu and Mineta peeking out of the river, seeing Sharky von Brains standing over the broken body of Aizawa. His hand is definitely mangled, and from the looks of it he seems to be roughed up -- badly damaged if he doesn't die from this. And, man, Brains-dude is quite a large... thing, whatever the heck he is. Handy McHands slips back into that creepy-ass horror manga art style, and goes 'tell the symbol of peace he's wanted by the Artificial Human Noumu!' Just what is an artificial human? Is it Handy? Brains? Shadow? Something else? Handy certainly looks the most human among the three, but still, look at him. There's definitely something totally fucked up about him.

So the students don't seem to be able to put up a decent fight against the ones that actually matter. Team Uraraka might be able to slow down Shadow since there's a lot of them, and I'm sure Momo, Kaminari and Kyouka can take out the rock-dude... but we haven't seen what is going on in the other three zones yet. Interesting, really, because there's so much we haven't known about the whole setting and all the players involved. Interested to see the next chapter.