Director: Kouzou Kaihou
Writer: Masato Matsune
First Aired: 28 July 2023
Adapts: Volume 1, Chapters 2-3
While Oliver and Nanao prepare for their duel with Richard Andrews, Katie and her new friend Vera Miligan start trying to carry out Katie's wish to tame the troll so his life will be spared. This proves a bone of contention: several students from the school conservative faction, opposed to the demihuman rights activists, starts mocking Katie behind her back, irritating Guy and Oliver. Then they escalate to doing it to her face, and... "FRAGOR!" The ensuing one-sided classroom brawl lands Oliver, Nanao, and Guy in detention, where they get chewed out by Chela, who notes the row with their classmates over the troll is now likely impossible to mend.
That night, a couple second-years bring the group to a colosseum in the labyrinth; Oliver and Nanao go to meet Andrews on the floor, while the others are escorted to the stands. Richard reveals he's not there to duel them: rather, he's prepared a "kobold hunt", a game of mage noblemen where the wolf-like demihumans are released into a hunting ground and the competitors try to kill the most.
Nanao is having none of that crap: she angrily calls Andrews and the audience out for their cowardice and makes to leave, considering a canned hunt
unworthy of her blade. She's in the midst of arguing with the door guards when all hell breaks loose: something else comes out of the monster room, and it's no kobold. Somebody smuggled a garuda into the arena and locked them in with it—and that somebody makes the slogan "See how it feels to be the prey" appear on the ceiling.
The powerful beast makes quick work of the second-years before they can recover and then goes for Andrews—only to be intercepted by the ever-fearless Nanao, who would much rather battle a garuda than a pack of terrified kobolds. Andrews goes for cover, while Oliver tries to back Nanao up but receives a bad stomach wound. He retreats to where Andrews is hiding to heal himself, and Andrews asks how he can fight something so frightening. Oliver replies he has to: Nanao has the heart of a hero, and if he does nothing, that hero will die.
Oliver returns to the fight, and tries to disrupt the garuda's wind magic so that Nanao can get in a decisive blow. Unfortunately, he's not strong enough, and fails.
Andrews doesn't. A much more powerful blast of wind strips the garuda of its protection, and Nanao decapitates it. In the aftermath, the group speaks with Andrews, who seems to realize what an ass he's been all this time and accepts their offer of reconciliation.
After the credits, though, a figure with a distinctive hairstyle appears in the now-vacant arena, looking on the aftermath of their handiwork...
This episode provides examples of the following tropes:
- Adaptation Deviation: In the novels, Andrews issued his challenge to Oliver and Nanao after the classroom brawl, but it got moved to the end of the previous episode.
- Adaptation Distillation: Like Sakae Esuno's manga, "Hell's Greatest Comedy Hour", the sequence where the group try to get information out of the pride plants by getting them to laugh, is cut completely along with the subsequent interrogation of Mackley.
- Battle Discretion Shot: The classroom brawl cuts away right as Oliver casts his second spell. We catch up with Oliver, Guy, and Nanao in detention—consisting of literal jail cells—and Guy has a black eye, but we should see the other guys.
- Beware the Quiet Ones: As long as Katie is out of the room, Oliver is merely annoyed by the conservatives' insults and restrains the hotter-headed Guy from retaliating. Once they start bullying Katie to her face, though, he's the first to lose his temper and throw down.
- Blow You Away: Andrews abundantly demonstrates his affinity for wind magic, first with a Razor Wind spell he unleashes against a kobold, then by overpowering the wind generated by the garuda for propulsion and protection with his own magic.
- Bring It: Richard's cronies try to stop Nanao from leaving the arena. In reply, she clicks her katana loose from its scabbard and tells them she'd rather fight them than the kobolds.
- Cowardly Lion: A terrified Andrews begs to know how Oliver can just dive in against enemies so much stronger than him. Oliver tells Andrews he isn't a hero like Nanao, he's just ordinary. But if he does nothing, that hero will die, and he has to somehow teach her to be a little more ordinary so that she'll survive Kimberly. This inspires Andrews to swallow his fear and rejoin the fight in the nick of time.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: The second-years are supposed to adjudicate the match, but get swiftly taken out by the powerful garuda before they can marshal a defense.
- Do Wrong, Right: It seems there's a right way and a wrong way at Kimberly to fight out your differences. The "right" way is to set up a public duel adjudicated by upperclassmen, such as Richard challenged Oliver and Nanao to in the previous episode. The "wrong" way, evidently, is to skip the formalities and just beat the stuffing out of each other in a lecture hall.
- Foreign Language Title: "コロシアム", phonetically "colosseum", with the definitional kanji 円形闘技場 enkei tōgi-ba which is literally just "colosseum" or "amphitheater" in Japanese.
- Gratuitous English: The slogan displayed on the ceiling is written in English, though Oliver reads it in the dub language.
- Hard Head: Nanao takes a glass drink bottle in the head (thrown by somebody in the stands after she calls BS on the kobold hunt), and doesn't even seem to notice.
- Healing Hands: Oliver gets gashed pretty badly by the garuda and has to retreat and heal himself with the spell Sanavulnera.
- The Hunter Becomes the Hunted: Invoked by whomever snuck the garuda in with the kobolds: as per the slogan, "See how it feels to be the prey", they clearly planned to teach Andrews and his hangers-on a lesson.
- Hypocritical Heartwarming: Guy is raring to throw down against the conservatives for badmouthing Katie, even though Pete points out (referencing "Ceremony") that he has much the same opinion of trolls that they do. Guy retorts that friendship is more important than his opinion.
- Major Injury Underreaction: Played for laughs. After killing the garuda, Nanao comments that they only took a few minor wounds! Then the camera pulls back to show her spurting High-Pressure Blood out of a sizable chunk missing from the right side of her torso, with her still crowing about their victory while the others are all panicking. (She was similarly wounded in the novel but this joke wasn't used.)
- Manly Tears: As Chela believed in "Soldier", it turns out all Andrews's bravado was just him overcompensating for an inferiority complex. After the garuda is slain, the stress of the fight, combined with Oliver, Nanao, and Chela thanking him for rejoining the fight and offering to reconcile, causes him to just start bawling.
- Mass "Oh, Crap!": Everyone in the entire arena collectively shit themselves when the garuda shows up.
- Not Me This Time: Oliver demands of Andrews what the hell he's thinking, bringing a garuda in here, but Andrews is just as terrified as everyone else and has no earthly idea how it got here.
- Off with His Head!: Nanao's final blow sends the garuda's head flying, and it topples with blood fountaining from its decapitated trunk.
- Our Kobolds Are Different: The kobolds resemble wolf-men with gray fur and canine heads, able to run on all fours or walk erect.
- Set Swords to "Stun": Inverted: the group casts the opposite spell, Acutus, before entering the labyrinth, setting their swords to "kill".
- The Stinger: Somebody with a familiar hairstyle appears in the vacant arena after the credits, looking on the chaos they wrought. Clearly whatever's going on is not over yet.
- Taking the Bullet: After his wind spell fails to Counter Spell the garuda's wind, Oliver dives in front of the beast, hoping to take the blow for Nanao to give her the opening she needs. Fortunately, Andrews finds his courage and makes it so he doesn't have to.
- What the Hell, Hero?:
- Chela says she might have expected Nanao or Guy to pick a fight with the conservatives, but not the normally more level-headed Oliver. Oliver is just as embarrassed as she is.
- Nanao takes umbrage at being expected to kill a bunch of terrified kobolds and calls Andrews and the entire arena out as completely despicable.
- Winged Humanoid: The garuda is portrayed with a humanoid torso with the legs, wings, and head of a bird of prey, plus an extra pair of arms.
