Score: A+

Well that sure escalated! Holy crap! Not often do episodes have me struggling to find a way to express how rattled I am. But that sure did it! My mind was more on smaller and long term issues. Like maybe we’re looking at Nanahoshi’s body suffering from exposure to unfamiliar disease. Kind of thing we’ve seen in history from like the Europeans visiting North America. Nanahoshi is a person of Earth on basically an alien planet. Her immune system could easily have gaps in it. That kind of thing!

STOP!!!

I wasn’t looking ahead to healing magic basically having effects like throwing an Elixir on a zombie! I get the panic from Sylphie in that moment since it didn’t make sense that Nanahoshi was getting worse. But she basically threw a gas can into the middle of a house fire! Complete with explosive and deadly consequences! Bit late, but I’m sorry for wherever my words go from here. But what the fuck was that!? Is Nanahoshi dead!? We are talking about anime. Explosive coughing up of blood isn’t necessarily fatal. But that sure didn’t look good! That was terrifying and horrible. It was well done obviously. But god, that was terrible. Comes in with a persistent cough. Clearly she’s got issues under the surface. But then it just gets worse and then the blood…

My ability to think about what else I want to say about this episode is kind of shot at present. There was obviously a lot to take in with this one. But the ending just swallows it all up! The end result obviously is that Nanahoshi isn’t going to remain with the cast. The ideal result though was that she just gets to go home. She didn’t want to get involved in any of this. I didn’t want the other possibility of her just straight up dying to play out. Having her die on an alien world and never getting to see her home again? That’d be absolutely brutal. And honestly if she dies here the mental state of Sylphie is going to be utterly shot. She didn’t intend this, but that’s never going to matter. She’ll never emotionally recover from that.

Bad signs all around

I guess that I can try to talk about something else. Geeze though…It’s never a comforting thing when the Man God gets mentioned. That guy is the personification of a snake oil salesman. And I don’t think he’s shown up even once since Rudy went against his advice. Again, I think that he made 100% the right choice. Saving Roxy (and his mother) was hugely important. But that guy’s been a ghost and I don’t like people mentioning him when things are a bit tense. I don’t blame Rudy for not saying a thing. The last time that conversation topic came up…a supremely powerful person tried to murder him!

There’s also the red flag of Rudy’s mana being considered similar to Laplace. That’s unlikely to be a coincidence honestly. I think everything is suspicious considering how this episode played out! Rudy and Sylphie got caught by some detector. It put both of them on notice and out of nowhere Perugius was showing interest in their kids. But only in a male one. I can’t say that’s weird, since at this point I have believe he’d have gone to kill that kid if they had a boy. Wild theory is that he’s worried about this Laplace reincarnating through a male child of Rudy. Which might not even be crazy. Why was Rudy reincarnated into this world? Probably due to someone’s objectives.

Everything was better with Roxy around!

Almost nice for Roxy that she got left behind…because this situation has gone to hell in a hurry! Perugius is a terrifying guy in general. If Nanahoshi dies while in his citadel and in a sense under his protection…it’s a living nightmare that’s coming up! He’s not only (presumably) insanely powerful himself, but he’s got a ton of powerful allies on his side. They’ll get wiped out if they consider this an assassination and Sylphie will be in terrible trouble. She probably is even if Nanahoshi miraculously survives. She and Rudy already have this guy’s eyes on them. Either due to Sylphie actually having a connection with the Man God or because her marrying/having sex with Rudy has given her some mystical STD.

I will say…that God did directly point Rudy towards going to school where he would end up meeting Sylphie. He was convinced that Rudy’s ED would be sorted out by that choice and he was right. So we have to consider that Sylphie was an intended wife for Rudy. The same goes for Linia and Pursena. He wanted Rudy to knock one of them up. So we have to presume that having kids from Sylphie and one of those two was part of the plan. In that sense Roxy is a great wrench in those divine plans since the Man God clearly didn’t care if she died.

Might as well get all the Nanahoshi I can now…

Honestly, this episode has wiped me out a bit emotionally. I had a bad feeling and this was even worse than that. This episode had great visuals, great world building, and did give us more of Elinalise’s backstory. Which was interesting since she suffered from the same condition as Zenith. But honestly…it’s tough to work through my thoughts on that when Nanahoshi’s fate really is up in the air. At least Elinalise is happy right now. She’s got her husband and seems to be ok with the mystery of her past. But, the next episode is going to be absolutely insane. At best it’ll be about how Nanahoshi is in critical condition. At worst she’ll be dead and Rudy will be having to desperately try to escape from that place! Here’s hoping Nanahoshi didn’t just have her last meal…