Remember that incredibly sudden attack at the end of the last episode that came too fast to really process? Well, let’s let a little time have passed.
Thus, Kamitsubaki City Under Construction picks up with the chief who guided the Witchlings dead (or as dead as an AI can be, there is some hope of a restoration teased) and the city struggling more and more because of it. People are vanishing, the heroes are arriving on scene too late, and no one seems to know how to pick up the pieces.
What’s more, if you’re slow like me and didn’t quite catch whodunnit in the flash of action at the end of the previous episode, it’s confirmed to be Koko’s familiar, Kugel. Yeah, apparently the stone-cold sniper decided to go for the melee gank.
We spend a good deal of time angsting and expositing about that. I may put it that way, but it’s not bad scenes. I especially liked Koko thinking back over her life together with Kugel while grappling with how she could have known or what she could have done to prevent this.
As of the end of the episode, Kugel’s goal and master plan remain unknown. He seems to be involved with a non-familiar humanoid Tesseractor, but we don’t know what that entity’s game is either. I appreciate the ontological mystery of Kamitsubaki City, and so I’m being gentle with it not explaining very much, but by the end of the show we are due quite a few answers. The show is running up something of a debt and the payoff had better be good.
Speaking of payoffs, we get a hint of Kugel in a Tesseractor scenario that the girls manage to catch, as it seems to erupt in a chain of madness with a mother losing one daughter and then having to watch the other get offed by monsters before bugging out herself because of it. The Witchlings arrive to lay her to rest in this bizarre scenario, but the crowd begins to panic at their appearance as it’s implied that Kugel has been spreading seeds of fear and resentment at the “witches”. Thus our episode ends with Kugel not yet engaged and the girls in something of a strange bind.
I could speculate about motives, but I feel like some of them will have to be revealed soon enough. I would normally speculate that Kugel would have some noble end goal and would be brought back into the fold (especially with it being established that yes, the familiars all were Tesseractors who ate humans to survive before bonding with their witchlings, and Kugel in particular hated that existence), but this show has repeatedly proved itself to be bleak and miserable enough to not have redemption be in the cards for a main character’s important partner if they don’t want to go that route.
As such, all I can really say at this juncture is “on with the show.”