Magic Knights Entrance Exam Arc | Dungeon Exploration Arc | Royal Capital Assault Arc | Eye of the Midnight Sun Encounter Arc | Underwater Temple Arc | Forest of Witches Arc | Royal Knights Arc | Elf Reincarnation Arc | Heart Kingdom Joint Struggle Arc | Spade Kingdom Raid Arc
The Royal Knights Selection Test
Asta and Yuno enter the fierce Royal Knights Selection Test to choose various members from among the squads to form the Royal Knights, an elite squad to fight against the Eye of the Midnight Sun. There, they face off against some of the strongest mages of the Clover Kingdom.
Tropes:
- Adaptation Expansion: The fight between Yuno and Rill is greatly expanded in the anime, both in length and scale.
- All Men Are Perverts: Yami and all the Crimson Lions decide to peek on the women at the hot spring. Yuno and Asta decline. It's almost Subverted — nobody even thought of peeking until Yami talked them into it, and his motivation comes off as more For the Lulz than personal perversion.
- Arc Villain: The closest thing the Royal Knights Arc has to one is Langris, whose near-murder of Finral puts him into conflict with the Black Bulls.
- Beam-O-War: Yuno engages in one with Rill using his Spirit Storm against his Scream of the Mystical Dragon Vouivre. Rill emits so much intense magical power from doing so that he breaks his team's crystal, winning Yuno's team the match.
- Big Damn Heroes: When Langris severely injures Finral and is about to kill him, the Black Bulls at the Royal Knights Exam come swooping into the battlefield, with Asta, Magna, and Luck having their weapons pointed at him. The anime has the others, save for Noelle who's checking on Finral, standing nearby ready with their grimoires.
- Breather Episode: After the Forest of Witches Arc, which has the Black Bulls face off against three threats, is the Hot Springs Training Camp mini-arc, focusing on the festival shenanigans and training at the Yultim Volcano.
- Collateral Damage: Fighting Yuno has Rill so excited and emitting so much magic power that he accidentally breaks his team's crystal, causing them to lose the match.
- Dangerous Forbidden Technique: Zora goes as far as inscribing magical trap circles on himself. Observers note that this is extremely risky since it constantly drains his own magic power.
- Hot Springs Episode: Well, DUH for the mini "Hot Springs Training Camp Arc". In fact, the anime narration even calls it the "Obligatory hot springs episode".
- Once More, with Clarity: When Zora is introduced, he is seemingly attacking the Vice Captain of the Purple Orcas for no apparent reason and seems to have an unexplained hate for Magic Knights in general. When his backstory as a vigilante mage is revealed, the scene is shown again from a few minutes prior, where the Vice Captain was just about to attack an old lady who begged him for help to find her granddaughter because he considered her a bother and Zora defended her from his attack.
- Tell Me About My Father: Noelle asks Mereoleona about her deceased mother Acier when she states that she resembles her.
- Tournament Arc: The Wizard King hosts a competition between randomly assigned teams of Magic Knights to decide which among them are worthy to become the Royal Knights, a special task force to deal with the Big Bad's group.
- Training from Hell: Mereoleona makes them travel across a volcano trail to practice their mana usage.
- Wham Episode: Chapter 129 shows that we've just been seeing an island of honesty and kindness within the Magic Knights — outside of the Black Bulls, there's widespread, systemic corruption within the organization in which the Magic Knights would physically assault and sexually abuse citizens for any reason they felt like, and the lack of accountability meant the Knights could always keep these incidents under wraps. These incidents are so common that they turned Zora into the first true anti-hero of the series, and they're so widespread that Asta is the first genuinely good-hearted Magic Knight he met as an adult.
