The show is good, but what’s happening in it, that’s a train wreck in slow motion.
We start by getting Amrou’s perspective of last episode: spending seven and a half years watching over Akira and Yuugure, clearly establishing her devotion and how she basically sacrificed some of the most important formative years of her life (we still don’t know how old, exactly, she started, but I’d guess she was somewhere between 14 and 16 and is thus now between 21 and 24. That’s a lot of growing up.)
The first half of the episode is basically intentionally and unintentionally stomping on Amrou’s heart since, after all, while Akira still clearly cares pretty deeply about Amrou as a person he really fell in love with Yuugure and they pretty much tied off their own emotional loose ends while they were in flashback land. Thus, in the present, they’re a unit that has no room for a third wheel even if there wasn’t the pretty big imposition of the fact that Amrou is a mortal who will age and die (or, more generously, who deserves to live her life with other mortals).
Naturally, Amrou fixates on the technical problem. It seems pretty insurmountable, but remember the sketchy ex-OWEL guy? It turns out that per his demeanor and despite his former helpfulness, he is in fact fairly sketchy, as he makes an offer that he can, in fact, turn Amrou into a robot so she can be with Akira and Yuugure. We get some hang time, but the happy couple don’t manage to defuse this brewing bomb before they go off to meet the original Akira (evidently a beneficiary of life extension tech) and Amrou goes off with our sketchy guy to get roboticized.
Sketchy guy hacks Amrou, uses her to capture one of Yuugure’s sisters (the angry swordmistress), and prepares to transfer Amrou’s mind into the Outside Series body. The other sister we’ve seen (the nun-styled Hakubo) shows up but holds the fellow at gunpoint a wee bit too long: she learns that he’s actually one of the “six sages” who worked with Towasa and Akira (around presumably due to the same tech that’s why the original Akira is still alive), that he’s obsessed with Towasa and doing everything to find her, before the merged Amrou wakes up and takes off her head for getting in the way (she can regenerate, but not too quickly), both halves of the fusion seemingly agreeing on having some bones to pick with Yuugure.
Meanwhile, Yuugure and Akira have had a nice visit with that one guy who kept showing up at odd jobs along their journey, who turns out to be the current OWEL commissioner. He expresses some regret for OWEL’s psychopath-hiring ways and with a little history lesson conducts them to Akira’s old home in the ruins of Tokyo, beneath which is the lab where Prime Akira and his AI buddy await.
Akira and Yuugure go underground and begin to pass through a wide open yet creatively terrain-strewn area Yuugure identifies as a combat training ground for the Outside Series. Before you can say “boss room”, Amrou shows up, acting exceptionally loopy in her stolen body and menacingly proposing to the two of them.
Presumably, we will next week have to deal with this undead robot yandere and her Dr. Robotnik puppetmaster as well as whatever we’re going to do with the preserved Akira and missing Towasa. Even if you never particularly liked Amrou, it’s probably going to hurt too.