Chapter 302

The Wrong Way to Put Out a Fire, Part 2 (の) is the three hundred and second chapter of Kohei Horikoshi's My Hero Academia.

Summary
After Toya's attempted attack on the young Shoto, Enji choses to seclude Shoto from his siblings, and since he was going to be busy with work he chose to hire some help. He also tells Rei to keep her eyes on Toya at all times. Rei tells him that Toya just wants him to notice him, but Enji says that all he can show anyone is the world of heroes. Rei, however, accuses Enji of merely running away.

Five years later, Fuyumi and Natsuo ask Toya to play with them outside. Shoto sees them but Enji pulls him away, telling him that his siblings live in a different world than him. Shoto asks to play with them just once, but Enji refuses, telling him they will work on his output capacity. Outside, Toya heard them and started to grow jealous. One night, he talks to a sleeping Natsuo, telling him that he acknowledges it was his fault for attacking Shoto, who did nothing wrong, but he adds that Enji is to blame as well by not paying attention to the three of them because they are "failed creations" and asking if this is what modern day Heroes do with their kids. Natsuo drowsily tells Toya to bother Fuyumi about this stuff, causing Toya to become upset that Natsuo is ignoring him. He tells Natsuo that he chose to talk to him because he believed he was the only one who understood him, calling his mother and sister useless.

One day, Rei catches Toya preparing to go out into the mountain and she asks why he won't play with his classmates. Toya declares he doesn't need friends because he lives in a different world than them. Rei asks Toya if he even wants to be a Hero, and as his mother, it looks like to her that he is suffocating because of Enji. She tells him that there are other paths and options for him and to look beyond his father, positive he will become the man he wants to become. Toya angrily asks what she knows and where she got that advice, causing Rei to freeze in shock at his intensity. He tells her that her family was poor, which is why they sold her off to Enji, so to him, she is just as guilty as him for why he was born too.

During the winter season, Toya's body developed, and his fire's color changed from red to blue. He realized his fire is linked to his feelings and gets excited at the thought of Enji seeing him. He starts crying saying he doesn't know why he does when he gets worked up. Shortly afterwards, Toya approaches Enji and tells him to come to Sekoto Peak on his next day off so he can show off his progress to him. Enji lifts up his shirt and sees his burn scars, angry that he had been hiding them on purpose. Toya starts tearing up and pulling out his hair, telling Enji that what he can do now is really cool and perhaps he will be as awesome as Shoto and stronger than All Might one day, and then he will have to give him respect and be happy he made him. Frustrated, Enji hits Rei and yells at her for not stopping Toya, causing Shoto to yell at him to not bully her while his siblings listen on crying while Enji tells Shoto to stay out of it. Rei admits internally that she had limited options but she chose to live on her feet and as much as she wanted to keep smiling, she couldn't, and she confesses to Enji that she can't stop him. Which Enji respond that she better because he can't keep a eye on him.

In the present, Rei asks Enji why he didn't go to Sekoto Peak, and Enji answers that he thought it would only throw fuel onto his fire, then corrects himself and says he didn't know what to say to him. Rei confesses that she didn't know what to say to him either. In the Villain hideout, Dabi thinks back to when he lost control of his fire, engulfing the entirety of himself and the mountains in flames, but he still blames Enji since he only ever taught him how to increase his output.

Enji tells his family that after he killed Toya, he couldn't stop obsessing with Shoto. Rei reveals that he got worse to the point where she couldn't look at him anymore and started to see his face in her children. Fuyumi confesses she knew of their problems but she was too scared to intervene, which is why she tried to fix things just to keep up appearances. Natsuo says Enji is the root of all their problems, but says that if he'd hit him, he could have knocked some sense into Enji to talk with Toya seriously and then Dabi would never have been born and they could have had a more healthy familiar relationship.

Rei tells Enji that he isn't the only one responsible for Toya's fate, that all of them need to take responsibility for what comes next, and even though his heart is broken, they will help him get back on his feet, then tells him he has no choice but to fight Dabi. A stunned Enji asks if he is talking to his wife right now, and after a moment of silence, Rei says Shoto had suffered more than them and had every right to resent her, yet he called her "mom" again. She also says he made friends at U.A. and is saving them. She then calls Shoto their family's hero.

Shoto weakly tells Enji that he talked with his mother before they came to see him because he initially thought he wouldn't be able to fight and that he'd have to do it himself, but he was wrong. He extends his hand to his crying father and tells him to stand up after he finishes grieving because all of them need to stop Dabi together.

Outside the room, Hawks and Best Jeanist are revealed to be listening, and are pleased by the results.

Chapter Notes

 * After Shoto was born and started showing signs of manifesting a hybridized-Quirk, Toya tried to attack him but Enji stopped him and made the decision to keep his son isolated from his siblings. He also asks Rei to keep a close eye on Toya.
 * Once Shoto turned five years old, Enji started training him in isolation while his brothers and sister grew up together.
 * Toya, noticing this, grew jealous of the fact that his father stopped training with him in favor of Shoto.
 * He seemed to be unbalanced as a result of being neglected by Enji and being replaced by Shoto.
 * Attempting to win back his father's attention, Toya started training in the mountains to increase his firepower, and started isolating himself from his friends and other family members. Rei tries to tell him that he doesn't have to force himself to become a hero, but he responds by mentioning her Quirk Marriage.
 * During his training, Toya learns that the intensity of his flames can be influenced by his emotional state. His physical state also changed, suddenly growing a lot taller after being born premature. His fire soon changed from red to blue.
 * As a result of change in his firepower, Toya's burns became much more intense, and started coating entire portions of his body. Enji hits Rei and yells at her for not keeping an eye on Toya's behavior, Shoto shouts at his dad for hurting his mom, and Natsuo and Fuyumi silently cower in fear.
 * Some time after that incident, Toya waits for Enji to show up at Sekoto Peak as he asked him to, and when he doesn't, he starts crying. Eventually, his flames ignite so intensely that it engulfs his body and lights the surrounding forest on fire, starting the event that caused the boy's presumed death. In the present, Rei asks her husband why he didn't chase after Toya. Enji says that at the time, he didn't know how to respond to him, with Rei saying she felt the same.
 * After Toya's disappearance, Enji continued to put all his energy into Shoto as a way to salvage his "work." While Enji was the root of his family's issues, the rest of the family claim they played a part in Toya's turn to villainy. Rei, for her deteriorating mental state, Fuyumi, for being too scared to intervene, and Natsuo, for not being more upfront to his father about his behavior.
 * Rei says that she and her family need to make an effort into what happens going forward, and says that her husband has to fight Dabi.
 * Prior to leaving the hospital, Hawks and Best Jeanist listened in on the Todoroki Family's conversation.

Trivia

 * The initial magazine release of this chapter includes an error in the Todoroki family's timeline. In Chapter 250, Fuyumi stated that Toya's "death" occurred shortly after Rei had been sent to the mental institution and is what made her mental condition worse, but according to this chapter, it was after Toya's death that Rei began to resent Endeavor due to his increasingly horrid behavior towards Shoto and caused her to pour boiling water on Shoto's face due to the resemblance to Endeavor.
 * This was fixed in the volume release, with two additional pages added, showing that the events of Rei burning Shoto and her hospitalization are subsequently followed by Toya's "death".

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