Last week’s chapter of My Hero Academia in Weekly Shonen Jump left fans eager for more, especially after seeing Bakugo apparently take the ultimate one for the team.

Warning: major spoiler for My Hero Academia. If you have any plans to read the manga, stop here now.

Katsuki Bakugo after his fight with Deku.
Trust me, he looks to be worse even compared to here.

The very end of Ch. 285 of My Hero Academia brought us a shocking conclusion. In the last panel, we see Katsuki Bakugo shove Izuku Midoriya out of the way of Shigaraki’s attack with an explosion. Thus, instead of Deku, Shigaraki’s dark blades stab through his former bully. The blades went right into Bakugo’s gut and left shoulder, stabbing right through them actually.

Only a Flesh Wound Works Only in Fantasy

Both of those stab wounds are definitely lethal for Bakugo if left unattended. The gut is home to a lot of the microbes the body uses to help digest its food. Getting those intestines perforated allow those microbes to go where they’re not supposed to be, leading to infection. The shoulder may not seem like a lethal place to shoot for the average layperson. Bear in mind though that several major blood vessels run though the shoulders, delivering blood to and from the arms.

A diagram of the major arteries in the human shoulder.
So many ways to bleed out here for poor Bakugo.

Yeah, stabbing someone in the shoulder is most definitely not a nonlethal wound. If Bakugo doesn’t get medical help soon, he’ll bleed out before he’d even have a chance to worry about the infection from his gut wound. Fortunately, Shoto Todoroki is right there on the scene to deliver critical first aid. As a U.A. High student and thus training to be a hero, Todoroki would almost certainly have been trained in stabilizing patients to keep them alive long enough for trained medical personnel to arrive and take over from there. With that kind of help, there’s a good chance that Bakugo will pull through his wounds.

Of course, there’s one more thing to consider here: Shigaraki and his All for One power. Shigaraki was preparing to absorb Midoriya’s One for All power with his attack. If Bakugo took it instead, there’s a possibility that he now no longer has his Quirk. To Bakugo, whose very identity depends on his explosion Quirk, it’d be a huge blow to his psyche. Only time will tell how he’d try to live his life without his Quirk, assuming that it is gone. At the very least though, Bakugo will likely be alive to wonder about it.

Conclusion

Bakugo taking a hit meant for Midoriya like that shows just how much he cares about his once-bullying target. It’s a really good indicator of just how much Bakugo has grown since his early days. Let’s hope he survives the incident as we read on through the My Hero Academia manga, eh? It’ll be really interesting to see how the anime will handle this once it gets around to this arc.

Source: ComicBook