Flirty ninja girl, Bandit Kamina, and well more than your RDA of blood, as per expectation.
So, this episode starts with catching us back up to the end of last episode, leading into Gabimaru and Sagiri taking on some of the giants… sorry, I mean Gabimaru takes on some of the giants while Sagiri watches, until she gets placed in distress and Gabimaru has to rescue her.
The end of the fight is brought with the arrival of the kunoichi of the criminals, Yuzuriha, and two executioners attached to her, her own nerdy assignment and the weak-to-women warden of another criminal she took out along the way. Yuzuriha proposes that she and Gabimaru work together to claim the Elixir. True, only one of them can get the pardon, but backstabbery can be done later when the island is as dangerous as it is. Though he needs to tell her off with a twisted arm a few times when she tries to get too friendly, there’s ultimately agreement to fight together and share information about the island’s threats (many of which she discovered by testing them on her previous victim).
After all of this, Sagiri passes out from existential angst about not being terribly useful… and probably from magic butterfly poison too, I will grant.
We then get a separate vignette focused on the Bandit King and his executioner, who is actually his brother who infiltrated the Asaemon clan. The two of them work together to make their way through the weird giants (who talk, babbling about sin), ending with the criminal in question declaring that they’ll find the elixir and take it for themselves so not even Death can tell them what to do any more. Their section includes a fairly long backstory of how they were the children of a samurai clan, cast into poverty when their lord was disgraced, and ultimately survived because of the flagged-as-a-criminal brother’s resourcefulness.
Add in a brief moment at the start with the guy who cut off his own hand at the end of last week’s episode, and we have three distinct groups: him, looking to wipe out all rivals and return the elixir for a pardon; the bandit brothers looking to wipe out all rivals and take the elixir for themselves, and team ninja looking to get the elixir and then maybe betray each other to be the one to return it. As of our last scene, Sagiri is still unconscious as all the teams make their ways deeper into the island.
I know Gabimaru is supposed to be our main lead and is the one who has “can kick all the ass” as the main qualification on his resume, but I hope to see more competence out of Ms. Executioner in the future; the first couple of episodes spent a lot of effort getting us invested in her as a character and even in the third episode she could at least hold her own while she grappled with her doubt and weakness, so hopefully there will be an upward trend back towards her being a functional and capable person.
At least Yuzuriha is fun.
Other than that… the story is progressing about as it wants to progress. There are some beautifully messed up visuals, especially for the various monsters, and the action while not literally the most hardcore I’ve seen spares no spatter… but between the fights and the character backstories the opening episodes have left little time for making progress or introducing too many new curveballs. I honestly expect, with the players more or less in position, that things are going to pick up.