A tangled web of relationships. Par for the course? At least this episode has a heavier “Japan” section.
In any case, we begin by revealing that the figure was indeed Fiene’s mother, causing a chain of revelations about Fiene’s identity, namely that she is the daughter of Lise’s late uncle, making the two of them cousins. Her mother was born noble as well, and fled with Fiene to avoid being assassinated by her family over that whole “had a kid with her dying true love and original fiancee” thing.
Evidently, this normally is only ever revealed in the epilogue, after Lise is dead, but here we’re getting it long before matters are decided. At Lise’s suggestion and in order to protect Fiene, Lise’s father adopts her properly and even prepares to name her heir (a position currently held by Bal, who will have to man up and woo her properly if he wants to keep it). Though a slip of the tongue from Kobayashi (hoping that, the way things are playing out, Seig and Lise will be alright) worries Sieg, matters are overall looking up, if somewhat soap opera-y.
In the side of things with our announcers, Endo and Kobayashi go on a date at the latter’s suggestion to celebrate their progress. Endo is bad at hiding just how head over heels he is for the girl, and even gets to be a bit of a knight in shining armor when they run into the actor we’ve gotten those brief cuts to.
Said actor accosts Kobayashi in an alley, calling her “Eve”. Endo steps up to tell him to back off before they recognize him, and he apologizes fairly effectively, playing it off as a case of mistaken identity. After he leaves, Kobayashi thanks Endo for being there, but finds it a little odd that it’s that guy in particular, as there’s a secret ending for MagiKoi where Fiene gets summoned to modern japan to romance her “god”, who it’s suspected was modeled off said young actor without his permission. Still, while she finds that weird, neither she nor Endo have all the lines where he’s clearly talking like he knows about the supernatural stuff to dig deeper.
So, the setup seems to be that this guy wants to summon Eve (or Fiene?) out of the game to be with him, but that his efforts may have been foiled by our leads making the mystical connection with MagiKoi’s world first and using it for Fix Fic rather than Reverse Isekai purposes. The show has… an admirable number of episodes left to do something with this, but I’ve got to say I’m hoping for an impressive final arc that actually pays off all of this setup. It would be one thing if the kids were just… able to talk to the game world and it was never explained, but adding Mr. Actor into the lineup means that there are some things that really must be addressed. Not necessarily right away, but before the end. Add the Witch of Yore onto that list and there’s a great deal of material that has to be touched on in a second half, as well as potential for a more dramatic story than the pitch might have indicated.