Well, at least the show doesn’t try to pretend like things aren’t obvious when they are.
In this episode, we follow up with an attempted assassination of the Shinsengumi. One assassin, a Choshu man, is captured and interrogated, with Ichibanboshi standing against Sakuya’s interest in or willingness to torture him. This leads to discovering that the wicked magic swords are being distributed to troublemakers through intermediaries, which turn out to be a group of orphans that Gyatarou knows well. He makes contact with them (Ichibanboshi and Bou with him) and ends up arranging a double cross to catch the sword supplier.
In the mean time, Akira meats up with the Geisha/Choshu lord again, finding out that while extremists from that domain are part of the problem, the man himself is interested in stopping them from doing something as ‘stupid’ as working with the Masked Demons. This seems to be mostly setup for later, as she doesn’t yet agree to the crossdresser’s bargain.
In the sting against the Masked Demons, Ichibanboshi and team do some good heroing, but the boss of the Masked Demons arrives. Ichibanboshi initially takes him (given his gear and weird sword) to be the man who slaughtered his family, but when he manages to knock his foe’s mask off, he realizes he’s fighting his own brother. The episode ends before we see how the conflict goes, since this show takes the “Every episode a cliffhanger” sort of approach.
Honestly, while I feel like most of my character estimations were spot on, with Akira carrying her own subplot and Sakuya having, along with Ichibanboshi, a lot of screen presence, I underestimated how much use would be gotten out of Gyatarou; he’s certainly one of the more interesting characters at this point. True, he is the “Crime collector” but they’ve been going with a portrayal where he both has something of a heart of gold and also more intelligence than he might initially be credited for.
All in all, I’m still going with “Perhaps more competent than it looked at first, but nothing special” with this one. I do at least like, as I indicated at the start, that they don’t drag out the whole “Villain is the hero’s brother” twist that was blindingly obvious from the character models.