Director: Kōzō Kaihō
Writer: Shinsuke Ōnishi
First Aired: 1 September 2023
Adapts: Volume 2, Chapter 2
Oliver returns to the dorm room to find Pete groaning in pain. Pete's in his female form again, and having trouble with a Painful Transformation. Oliver assists him with healing magic, commenting that mana disruptions like this are a common side-effect of changes in the body, sometimes caused by puberty or illness, or, as Oliver cryptically recalls, pregnancy. Before he goes to bed, he tells Pete that they probably won't be able to keep his sex shifting a secret from the rest of the group.
The next morning, Pete does come out as a reversi to their friends, who are just as happy for him as Oliver was. Chela instructs him that his womb has a practical use: it can serve as an emergency mana battery. While they're carrying on, they're interrupted by Tullio Rossi, who lost a second time after The Stinger of the last episode and needs to vent a bit. He now understands that he was never as good at fighting as he thought he was, and is withdrawing from his own tournament.
In Sword Arts class, Pete is pitted against Stacy Cornwallis, who disliked her uncle Theodore snubbing her in favor of Pete, Chela, and Nanao back in "Reversi" and wants to get even. While she easily wins, Pete manages to surprise her at the end with a Rizett Style Hero's Charge he learned from Chela, which just pisses her off even more.
That afternoon, Katie gets a peace offering from Miligan: one of her old laboratories for her use. With a little cajoling, she persuades the rest of the group to come with her into the labyrinth that weekend to check it out. After an amusing Travel Montage and a painful encounter with a nest of bowshells, the group runs across the Labyrinth Gourmet Club led by Kevin Walker, which is having a barbecue to welcome new members, then finds a shop run by Pamela Gorton to buy food for the night.
After reaching the laboratory, and making plans for how to use their new secret base, the group has a cookout, and after dinner, they're sitting around the fire chatting when Chela decides that their group needs a name. The others have no ideas... except for Nanao, who gets up and asks the others stand in a circle and cross their athames over each other in the center. She explains that in her homeland, the flower-like shape formed by the overlapping points is referred to as a "sword rose", which symbolizes the bonds between warriors.
The others are thrilled with the new name, and Guy and Pete start teasing each other for blushing over the moment, while Oliver looks on his friends and promises himself he'll never forget this sight, no matter what happens.
After the credits, we rejoin the ever-haughty Stacy at the end of a Wizard Duel with some redshirt. Fay tells her that he's heard that Chela is in the labyrinth...
This episode provides examples of the following tropes:
- Adaptation Deviation: In the novel, Katie proposed the shared laboratory in Pete's coming-out scene, after Rossi's appearance; the episode moves it to after the Sword Arts class, which itself takes place an entire episode after the alchemy class with Theodore McFarlane instead of the next class period. The scene where Pete duels Stacy is also slightly expanded: Rossi comforting Pete after his loss to Stacy is original.
- Adaptation Distillation: The Travel Montage compresses the trip to the base, and the scene indoors cuts Katie and Guy's bet over which of them is a better cook.
- Affectionate Gesture to the Head: Oliver gives Pete an affectionate pat on the head after he gets done healing him, to the other boy's embarrassment.
- Amusing Injuries:
- Guy's stabbed butt demands justice!
- The one guy in the Labyrinth Gourmet Club who starts to feel sick after eating a mushroom. Kevin cheerfully hands him an antidote.
- Beat Them at Their Own Game: Tullio Rossi started the Tournament Arc to show off his self-taught fighting skills, but has now lost two duels in a row and decides to forfeit and start taking formal sword arts training more seriously.
- Big Eater: Implied: Pamela Gorton supplies the nascent Sword Roses with several heaping crates of food for only 3,000 belc. When the group cuts to after their meal, they've cleaned it out.
- Bowdlerization: Pete's coming-out scene cuts a line from Chela in the novel suggesting that Pete could take advantage of his reversi transformations to experiment sexually.
- Break the Haughty: Two losses in a row in his own tournament have clearly knocked the cocky Tullio Rossi down a peg or three.
- Call-Back:
- Stacy Cornwallis took Theodore McFarlane showering Pete with attention and ignoring her quite personally "Reversi" and takes their sparring match in Sword Arts as a chance to get even.
- Tullio Rossi's second duel in The Stinger of "Rivals" ended in another defeat, and he quits his own tournament.
- Coming-Out Story: The Internal Reveal to the other Sword Roses that Pete is a reversi is framed as one, in keeping with the previous treatment of Sex Magic as a fantasy form of queerness.
- Extreme Omnivore: The group encounters the Labyrinth Gourmet Club, led by Kevin Walker, which cooks and eats the flora and fauna of the labyrinth: they're shown barbecuing reptiles and Big Creepy-Crawlies on stakes, and one student comes back to the fire with a giant leech which Walker tells him to try cooking.
- Fantastic Slurs: Stacy Cornwallis insults Pete as an "ordinary", another name in the series for nonmagicals.
- Fictional Currency: The yen equivalent in this series is apparently the "belc".
- Forced Out of the Closet: Downplayed: Oliver doesn't make Pete come out to the other Sword Roses as a reversi, he just notes that it's going to come out sooner or later. The next morning, Pete does come out.
- Foreshadowing: Oliver has a Flashback Echo of helping a pregnant woman with mana disruptions induced by her condition. The woman calls him "Noll", Shannon Sherwood's Affectionate Nickname for him, and is voiced by Shannon's VA, suggesting his cousin/sister has had a Teen Pregnancy at some point, but no explanation is given beyond that. (There's no payoff for this in the anime series: it wasn't fully explained in the novels until volume 10.)
- Friend to All Living Things: Katie, as per usual, is excited by every critter they come across, even grossing Guy out when she picks up a large slug. The others eventually figure out that she picked this route to the lab hoping to see lots of animals; cue eyerolls. That said, she came prepared for the more dangerous critters, such as the bowshells lurking in one passage: she lays down a pot of incense to put them to sleep (though a sudden outbreak of Deadly Gas forces them to run through before it's ready).
- Gender-Restricted Ability: Discussed: we learn that female mages are able to use their wombs as emergency mana batteries. Chela comments that the uterus is sometimes nicknamed a witch's "second heart".
- Hand-or-Object Underwear: Pete is shown topless in the opening scene in his female form while Oliver is healing him, but keeps his arms across his chest the whole time.
- Homage: In another Harry Potter reference, Katie has to figure out what the password is to get into their new base, figuring out from a couple of clues that it's "caput allec" ("herring head").
- I'm a Humanitarian: Played for laughs by shopkeeper Pamela Gorton, who jokes that if the group doesn't survive their dungeon delves, she'll have more stock for her shelves. (She isn't actually selling human meat: the episode leaves out Guy identifying the meat they buy from her as mutton.)
- Innocent Fanservice Girl: Nanao again. After Chela explains the utility of a witch's womb, Nanao wonders if she can do the same thing, and Oliver has to hurriedly stop her from pulling her skirt up to take a look.
- Internal Reformist: Katie still wants to improve how mages treat other beings, but recognizes now that she won't be listened to just by appealing to people's better nature, so she plans to make a name for herself as a researcher first.
- It's Personal: Stacy Cornwallis cruelly humiliates Pete in their duel for (so she perceived) humiliating her in Theodore's alchemy class.
- Meaningful Name: Nanao coins the name "Sword Roses" (剣花団 Kenka-dan) for the group, after a warriors' custom from her homeland: the shape made by overlapping the points of a group of swords is called a "sword rose", symbolizing that a warrior cannot know what the future will bring, so they must treasure every moment they spend with their friends and loved ones, like the temporary blooming of a flower.
- Noodle Incident: Kevin Walker apparently once got lost in the labyrinth for over six months and was declared Legally Dead, only to show up no worse for wear after his funeral had been held.
- Pain to the Ass: Guy gets a bunch of bowshell spikes in the rear when they have to run through their nest to escape Deadly Gas. He angrily Rubber Faces Katie, but the others can't help being amused by the event: Pete even suggests that Guy's proposal to set traps around their base include ones that stab you in the butt.
- Second Place Is for Losers: The other Sword Roses try to reassure Pete after his loss to Stacy, but Rossi says aloud what Pete's thinking: he never stood a chance and Stacy was actively trying to humiliate him. He isn't unkind about it, though, and reassures Pete that he still did better than most would have.
- The Stinger: Stacy and Fay are topside taking part in the dueling tournament, when Fay tells her Chela is in the labyrinth and they head to the school building to try to catch her.
- Symbolic Distance: There's an overhead shot while the Sword Roses are discussing the relative merits of Miligan's offer to give them one of her old laboratories, where Oliver is separated from the rest of the group by a couple of paces, and standing in the shadow of a column while they're in full sunlight, while he mulls over the offer. It's symbolism for how his secrets and wildly divergent Series Goal subtly separate him from the others.
- Travel Montage: The Sword Roses cross a long path of the labyrinth in several clips, catching sight of a number of magical creatures to Katie's delight.
- Tsundere: Pete remains standoffish as usual but is clearly more pleased with Oliver's attention than he wants to admit.
