When conducting human sacrifice, there’s an upper limit on how “ethical” you can be.
So, while Kafu looked like our main character in 0/1, perhaps this is more of an ensemble, as this episode all belongs to the witchiest witchling (in that she gets the pointy hat), Sekai. For those not following along, Sekai appears to have an ability beyond the standard Witchling “Song of Purification”, in the gift of future sight, which we saw briefly in Episode 1.
Here, Sekai gets a premonition that a group of survivors huddled at a certain church are about to be slaughtered, and so she runs off to save them while the others hold the fort and/or work to retrieve a new power cell for the barrier. It turns out that Sekai has quite a bit of history with this church, however: it was, formerly, her home, and the parishioners took her in and cared for her deeply, only to force her to shoulder more responsibility than she was really ready for when their previous “witch” died, leaving Sekai as the successor thanks to her powers.
Most of the episode, in terms of meat if not running time, is dedicated to the extended flashback of Sekai’s life. There’s enough fighting the incoming Tesseractor swarm and of course musical numbers that it’s not just this weird juxtaposition of a slightly needy but still loving community and their kind of weaksauce betrayal, but there is a lot of that.
Sekai saves the church members, including a girl who seems to have been her former second in line, from the incoming and tries to get them evacuated. They’re a bus short but that’s okay, because one of the weird bird-person-tesseractor-beings from the organization handling the Witchlings shows up with another bus, willing to ferry them at least to the eye of the storm where all the other Witchlings are.
When the bus gets there, it’s only a hair after the power cell’s delivery and, wouldn’t you know it, Sekai’s bus has brought just the power source to charge it. Given the human-shaped phantom in the old cell, that would be church girl, whose level of power is at least sufficient to be a battery.
To the boss’s credit, it at least asks the church girl to please step into the tank of no return and power the barrier. Per my intro line, there’s only a limited degree to which you can do these things in any kind of just manner, and the powers that be here are clearly trying… even as it’s also totally understandable that this horrifies the Witchlings when they realize what’s going down.
The needs of the many being what they are, both Sekai and Kafu try to offer themselves up, but as they argue (including the authority figure noting that it would be worse to lose a fully-fledged witchling), church girl takes matters into her own hands and goes into the tank. This dissolves her body into light, restores power to the barrier that protects the city, ending the nightmare of a mass invasion at least for now.
I will say, much as in Yuki Yuna is a Hero, there’s a good question here of when and how you justify the suffering or even sacrifice of a few in the name of the greater good. It’s clearly not an awesome thing to do but when there is no other known way and the alternative seems to be that all of humanity that’s left dies, anyone more pragmatic than Ernst Zimmerman is ultimately going to pull that trigger no matter how horrible they may feel about the situation.
All the same, it’s a powerful incentive for rebellion, and for those who are protecting this order to question whether or not it deserves to be protected. It’s usually seen as one thing to risk lives, even knowing that some level of death may be inevitable, and another to take a course of action that strictly requires friendly casualties.
If Kamitsubaki City Under Construction is clever, it has the vast majority of its run time to reckon with a frankly difficult ethical debate, which could underscore a lot of action and character growth, making a major theme of when and where sacrifice is appropriate and what it means to act in the interests of a greater good, ideally largely under the surface of battle and intrigue. If it’s competent, it will do the same but more directly, or let it kind of fall by the wayside except when we need a climax. If it’s incompetent, it will forget this entirely or force it to take over the show in a ham-fisted way. It’s far too early to say where the writing really falls on a macro issue like this.
On the micro, I do think the show may be a little too dedicated to telling. Sekai’s backstory could have been shorter or more immersive and less narrated without costing it any emotional impact. In fact, some of that impact may actually have been improved by experiencing the scenes without present Sekai telling us what to feel about them. But this is potentially a fairly minor matter, because for this very episode we really needed to understand where Sekai stood with the church and her junior, especially when it’s implied that she knew or at least suspected what was going to happen to the church girl. I can understand not wanting to risk going too subtle with this one big deal incident we’re getting right out of the gate, and Episode 0 did a better job with Kafu growing up so the writers can at least do it. The question is what strategy they’re going to take for the rest of the show.