The bodyguard mission continues, but Kinji starts doubting Aria’s belief in Durandal. This leads to Aria leaving the case and Kinji assuming solo bodyguard duty. With that time he goes to the beach with Shirayuki who receives a suspicious phone call. While doing his job for the school event first, Shirayuki goes missing. Kinji eventually tracks Shirayuki down thanks to Reki, but needs help. Aria’s arrival at the end signals a chance for the group to rebound.

Opinions:

To be fair Kinji really didn’t have a misunderstanding card to play about the stripping incident. Shirayuki was quite literally stripping herself for a reason that’s pretty easily understood. Now could say he wasn’t stripping her, but the truth hardly sounds better. “Oh Shirayuki just walked in on me and decided to strip” :D. While Aria did go overboard by the end I still feel bad for her. When dealing with a male lead being blunt is always best. She should have outright said it was her who left the medicine. Of course blame goes back to the other two in this situation. Shirayuki while not saying she did it, didn’t say anything to the contrary. Letting Kinji stay with his assumption is about the same result. Too bad that Kinji didn’t bother asking who left the bottle either. It might have fit with Shirayuki’s personality to care for him, but I’d expect meals and personal nursing from her instead.

But really for now Kinji really does deserve to be E-Rank. I mean a complete failure as a bodyguard. He didn’t really take it seriously since he didn’t believe in there being a threat. He cut off part of the protection team and took her somewhere away from the school. If that wasn’t enough he left her alone to get the fireworks and then at the school event. Sure he had a job to do, but then maybe he shouldn’t have removed his partner from the guard duty. Plus I think that a job would superseed a role at the event. Can toss in him not checking the cellphone as a bad move too. It’s fine to believe in Shirayuki, but if he thought about it he’d realize she wouldn’t want to expose him to danger. Not telling him would prevent him from doing something reckless that might get him hurt or bring Aria back into the equation and ruin their alone time.

Oh well things worked out in the end. I’m sure after Aria cooled down she saw a chance in this situation. Might as well use Kinji’s incompetence as a bodyguard to help lure Durandal out. With the situation like that there wasn’t going to be any action. It would be too risky to try and grab Shirayuki from under Aria’s guard. Using that phone call helped apparently separate Aria from the scene and make Durandal bolder once observation proved it wouldn’t be hard to separate Shirayuki from Kinji. While I don’t think it is right to hide things from friends, it was somewhat necessary here. Kinji wasn’t going to listen to Aria and she knew that danger was coming for Shirayuki. The best way to protect her is to arrest the one who is targeting her. Still there is no doubt that those two need to resolve things if this partnership is going to work.

Not a bad episode for Shirayuki. She got to go on pretty much a date with a guy she likes and thanks to Aria being gone she got alone time with him. Of course can see how Aria’s arrival has shaken Shirayuki’s hopes of getting together with Kinji. That easily leading into her not admitting that she didn’t give him anything to recover and trying to get that kiss to even the playing field. It’s kind of sad that nothing has really changed from her past since she is still so restricted in terms of moving around. There is a similarity with Kinji in that neither of them being used to talking alone with the opposite gender. Though with Kinji it’s more about him being worried about Hysteria Mode and avoiding girls based on that principle.

I’m curious about this Durandal person. Seems to be another interesting ability user like Riko and of course connected to EU. Certainly a cautious person luring girls away and trying to avoid major incidents. Should be good to see Aria and Shirayuki going at this person and maybe Kinji’s Hysteria Mode being triggered at some point. I can’t imagine Aria did all that sword catching training and it won’t play any role at all in the last episodes of this arc.

This episode did a good job at creating some issues between Kinji and Aria. I’m looing forward to seeing some of those be resolved and figure out where Shirayuki is going to stand going forward. It’s easy to just say she’ll be a rank below Aria in the harem, but will wait to see what the series decides to do.

Score: B+