Director: Shigeki Awai
Writer: Shinsuke Ōnishi
First Aired: 21 July 2023
Adapts: Volume 1, Chapter 2
When we last left our heroes, they were caught between two renegade upperclassmen: The Vamp Ophelia Salvadori, and necromancer Cyrus Rivermoore. It turns out, though, that these two are old rivals: Cyrus provokes Ophelia with a judicious bit of Slut-Shaming and she draws on him, prompting a Behemoth Battle between his Walking Ossuary and her chimera. Oliver, Pete, and Chela try to escape in the confusion but are blocked by Cyrus again.
At that moment, Nanao appears, thinking to join the fray and confuse things even further by laying down her life so that her friends can escape—and saying, to Oliver's horror, that her long-delayed death has now found her. Oliver turns back to get her—
—and with a sudden cry of "IGNIS!", both behemoths are consumed in a gigantic fireball and the battle comes to an abrupt halt. This is Alvin "Purgatory" Godfrey, the Student Council President, who together with school prefect Carlos Whitrow gives Ophelia and Cyrus a tongue-lashing before escorting the four freshmen to the surface.
Oliver furiously demands to know what the hell Nanao thought she was doing, and it all comes tumbling out: Nanao fell in love with Oliver's blade when they dueled the previous morning, and when he rejected her wish for a rematch, it crushed her, and she began to wonder if everything since her last battle was really a Dying Dream, one that might end if she found a place to die here. Chela and Oliver turn the conversation into an intervention: Chela points out that if she can't tell the difference between the man and his blade, she should try to relate to the man, and Oliver gets her to promise them that from now on, she'll fight to live.
The next day of class brings further trouble: Oliver gets into it with Richard Andrews in Sword Arts again, while Katie hears that the school intends to euthanize the troll that attacked her and rushes out to stop it—bringing the cast face to face with resident Sadist Teacher Darius Grenville, who casts an Agony Beam on Katie for defying him. They're rescued in the nick of time by Professor Garland, and by a sympathetic fourth-year named Vera Miligan with a very peculiar Hiding Behind Your Bangs hairstyle.
Just before the credits roll, a familiar delivers a formal duel challenge from Andrews addressed to Oliver and Nanao.
This episode provides examples of the following tropes:
- Adaptation Distillation: The episode cuts about half of the runtime out of Nanao's recollection of her Last Stand in Yamatsu, including the Worthy Opponent commentary from General Souma Yoshihisa, but keeps the important bits of her battlefield duel with Souma Yasutsuna and near-death experience. Also removed are her sparring session with Professor Garland and subsequent conversation with Oliver explaining that her attraction to him isn't merely about his skill with the sword. In their place, we get the Infodump explaining the nature of a spellblade that was Adapted Out of the previous episode.
- Arc Words: "Enjoy not the sword of vengeance, but the sword of mutual love." This is the core philosophical tenet of Nanao's sword style, which she quotes to explain her behavior for the past two episodes: the spiritual connection she made with Oliver is the shiawase ("happiness") she hoped to find as a warrior in a no-holds-barred Duel to the Death with an opponent with whom she held mutual respect. She thought she would find this in Yamatsu, perhaps by dueling Souma Yasutsuna, but to her surprise, she instead felt it in her Deadly Sparring match with Oliver.
- Behemoth Battle: Between a Walking Ossuary conjured by Cyrus and a chimera birthed by Ophelia, both of which tower over everyone present.
- Dramatic Irony: Nanao cuts down an enemy samurai who tried to intercept her charge into the enemy camp, then once surrounded, asks General Souma Yoshihisa for the honor of a duel against his son-in-law Yasutsuna, reputedly the best warrior of his clan. With Manly Tears streaming down his cheeks, an infuriated Yoshihisa tells Nanao that Yasutsuna was the man she just killed.
- Dude, Not Funny!: Katie brightly sums up Nanao's dejection over Oliver rejecting her wish for a rematch as, "Oliver rejected you, and you got all weird about it!" A chagrined Oliver asks Katie to please shut up, though Nanao agrees that the summation is basically accurate.
- Dying Dream: Discussed by Nanao, who wonders aloud if anything she's experienced for the past six months was even real or if she's having a pre-mortem hallucination and is still on the battlefield in Yamatsu.
- Dynamic Entry: "IGNIS!" Alvin Godfrey's first appearance in the series is certainly a memorable one.
- Early-Bird Cameo: Chela's father Theodore gets his first lines in the series in Nanao's Troubled Backstory Flashback, though he isn't credited this time.
- Establishing Character Moment:
- Godfrey's first scene establishes both his firepower and his personality as Kimberly's Big Good.
- Darius Grenville mocks Katie's family for their demihuman rights activism, calling them fools, then hits her with an Agony Beam for continuing to defy him over the troll, establishing his credentials as an even bigger Sadist Teacher than Vanessa Aldiss was.
- Foreign Language Title: "ソルジャー", 'soldier' spelled phonetically, using the kanji 死兵 shi-hei meaning "dead soldier".
- Foreshadowing: A sharp-eyed viewer will note that, contrary to the title of the series, Garland says there are six spellblades known to exist...
- The Glomp: Played for laughs: Nanao takes Oliver's arm the morning after their misadventure in the labyrinth, with Oliver half-heartedly trying to tell her that when Chela suggested she get to know him better instead of trying to fight him, she didn't mean from literally inches away. Katie also jealously tries to get Nanao to back off, much to Pete and Guy's amusement.
- Last Stand: Nanao was leading the rearguard of a defeated army and was about to die at the end of suicide charge against the enemy camp in a failed attempt to take the head of the enemy general, when she was suddenly plucked from the battlefield by Theodore McFarlane.
- Mother of a Thousand Young: Ophelia shows off her ability to store chimeras in her own womb and magically give birth to them through a cut-out in her gown that shows off her navel.
- Once More, with Clarity: We heard a bit about how Nanao came to be in Yelgland back in "Ceremony", but she lays it out in much greater detail this time.
- One-Hit Polykill: Godfrey blows away both Cyrus and Ophelia's creatures with a single fireball.
- Open Mouth, Insert Foot: Oliver accepts a sparring request from Richard Andrews, thinking to lose on purpose to assuage the aristocrat's wounded pride, only for Nanao to grab his sleeve and tell him that if he's going to fight, he should fight for real: she doesn't want to see him Throwing the Fight. Richard overhears, and is infuriated that Oliver seemingly thinks so little of him, leading him to formally challenge the two of them to a duel.
- Restrained Revenge: Souma Yoshihisa has sufficient respect for a warrior who bravely fights to the end that he promises to kill Nanao quickly, but refuses to ask her name so that she will die unremembered, as a measure of revenge for the death of his beloved son-in-law on the end of her sword.
- Slut-Shaming: Cyrus mocks Ophelia over being a practitioner of Sex Magic, saying that "what you do to men in the pursuit of your carnal urges is far more disgusting", calling her "Succubus Salvadori". She replies with an Implied Death Threat, he tells her to Bring It, cue Wizard Duel.
- Talking Down the Suicidal: The cast basically holds an intervention for Nanao, making her tell them why she sought out death, and once they get the explanation, convincing her that she needs to let her old life go and start living for herself in her new one.
- A Thicket of Spears: Souma Yoshihisa's ashigaru present a completely ineffective spear-wall to stop a cavalry charge led by Nanao: she jumps the first rank completely on horseback and then cuts her way through the second, penetrating through to Souma's camp.
- Troubled Backstory Flashback: We get the full story of Nanao's last battle as a samurai and her sudden rescue moments from death by Theodore McFarlane.
- Unblockable Attack: Discussed by Luther Garland, who explains precisely what a spellblade is: an attack executed within the one-step, one-spell distance that can neither be dodged nor blocked, guaranteeing the wielder's victory. We don't actually get to see one, since their wielders traditionally keep them secret: Garland specifically refuses to either confirm or deny whether he can use one.
- Walking Ossuary: Ophelia mockingly notes that the spine of Cyrus's latest beastie is new and wonders aloud what corpse he pillaged it from.
