Director: Takaaki Ishiyama
Writer: Shōgo Yasukawa
First Aired: 8 September 2023
Adapts: Volume 2, Chapter 3
The morning after the Sword Roses claim their base, Oliver, Nanao, and Katie get up early. Oliver and Nanao go to practice her spellcasting, while Katie surprises Guy by bringing back the troll, whom she's adopted and named Marco. Pete gets an even bigger surprise when he wakes up looking for his glasses, and has them handed to him by a disembodied hand! Turns out, the hand belongs to Miligan, who's been helping Katie to try to make up for her actions in the first several episodes, and reanimated the hand Nanao cut off as a familiar, which she dubbed Milihand. After showing them the nearest labyrinth exit back to the school, she takes her leave and the Sword Roses set off on their second day of labyrinth exploration.
Soon enough, as they near the entrance to the second layer of the labyrinth, they're waylaid by Stacy and Fay, who challenge Chela to a two-on-two match. Oliver is initially prepared to let the ever-enthusiastic Nanao be her second, but then the man who challenged Tullio Rossi in The Stinger of "Rivals" steps out of the shadows. This is Joseph Albright, a young man from a well-known family of battlemages, and he suggests making it more interesting: a three-on-three match between himself, Stacy, and Fay, and Chela, Nanao, and "that nobody over there"—meaning Oliver.
Albright brings them down to the second layer of the labyrinth, the "Bustling Forest": an underground forest lit by a Weird Sun that never sets. The two sides set their dulling spells to half-strength and square off: Chela opposite Stacy, Oliver opposite Fay, and Nanao opposite Albright, with the latter warning his erstwhile teammates not to expect any support—he wants the glory of beating the samurai. He tosses a medallion into the air as the starting gun and—
"Flash Wisp!" Oliver momentarily blinds the other side and goes for Albright, obviously pissed at the larger man's dismissal and drawing him out of the battle. Stacy and Fay consider this development, and Fay lures Nanao off into the woods while Stacy goes straight for Chela.
Oliver's initial efforts against Albright are defeated at every turn, and the other man mocks his Lanoff Style as rote practice from the textbook. In answer, Oliver steps up his game, driving in close. Albright blocks his sword stroke—and is overpowered by an unexpectedly heavy blow.
Meanwhile, Fay can't shake Nanao, and Chela is more than a match for Stacy. Time for them to step things up, too: Stacy asks Fay if he'll win for her at any cost, sparking a flashback to their first meeting, when Stacy saved him from being killed by her father and adopted him as her servant. The Fay of the present tells his master to order her "guard dog" to tear out her enemies' throats, and Stacy raises her athame aloft. "Luna Plena!"
A full moon appears in the sky, and Fay roars aloud and transforms. He's a werewolf, and Stacy jumps onto his shoulders and they charge, upending the battle they had been losing. After a couple inconclusive clashes, Chela tells Stacy to have Fay transform back: since he was allowed to attend Kimberly, he must only be a half-werewolf, which means taking his lupine form causes him excruciating pain. In reply, Stacy has another flashback, this time recalling a conversation with Fay where she sees her father playing with her other siblings and wonders aloud if he neglects her because she isn't his real daughter. In the present, she screams at Chela that she doesn't know a thing about their pain.
Nanao agrees, and tells Chela that Stacy and Fay are putting everything on the line in this duel, and that effort deserves their respect. Chela apologizes for disrespecting them, and swears she'll win.
While her friends duke it out with their classmates, something has caught Katie's attention: she's noticed that something is wrong with the area's ceiling. Roll credits.
This episode provides examples of the following tropes:
- Achievements in Ignorance: Oliver asks Nanao if she's managed to reproduce the Seventh Spellblade, but Nanao says she wasn't consciously aware she had even done so the first time and has no idea how, either.
- Berserk Button: Oliver obviously takes an irrational level of offense at being called a "nobody" by Albright. (According to the original novels, his late mother Chloe Halford was quite famous and it's implied Oliver took offense on her behalf, but nobody present knows they're related.)
- Blinded by the Light: Oliver's Flash Wisp spell creates a momentary blinding flash to cover him attacking Albright.
- Call-Back:
- Oliver and Nanao recall her creation of the Seventh Spellblade in "Arise".
- Joseph Albright is the young man who challenged Tullio Rossi in The Stinger of "Rivals" and defeated him offscreen. He similarly mocks Oliver's swordplay as boring, saying Rossi at least had some uniqueness.
- Defeat Means Friendship: Downplayed. Miligan is trying to make up for her actions in the first six episodes by offering the Sword Roses, especially Katie, her patronage as a friendly upperclassmen. The Sword Roses are clearly still wary of her, though: Oliver is half-convinced she must have an angle she isn't telling them about.
- Foreign Language Title: "マスターアンドナイト", "Master and Knight" in katakana, with the definitional kanji 主従 referring to a lord (Stacy) and their loyal retainer (Fay).
- Foreshadowing: The "sky" of the second layer is overcast, but the flashes from Oliver's spells inadvertently give Katie a glimpse of the ceiling, and she spots something unsettling about it...
- Half-Human Hybrid: Fay is a half-blooded werewolf, which is the only reason he's allowed into Kimberly and explains his bestial looks.
- Handshake Substitute: Because Marco is so much bigger than a human, when Oliver agrees that he's the troll's friend, they fist-bump instead of trying to shake hands.
- Healing Factor: As a half-werewolf, Fay heals fast enough that a sword wound from Nanao that would have incapacitated a human even with the dulling spells at half-strength, heals so fast that he barely notices it. He also No Sells a lightning spell from Chela, who realizes they won't be able to beat him this way.
- Helping Hands: After Nanao cut Miligan's left hand off, rather than having it reattached, Miligan chose to reanimate it as a familiar, which she calls "Milihand". It scares the heck out of Pete when he first sees it, but it's actually kind of cute the way it scuttles around and clambers over the characters like a bizarre kitten.
- Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: In one of her Troubled Backstory Flashbacks, Stacy alludes to Mr. Cornwallis not being her real father...
- Mercy Rewarded: Katie's efforts to save the troll that attacked her have now begun to pay off: the school gave her permission to adopt him as a familiar, and she's made him her bodyguard and named him Marco. When Chela is worried about taking the weaker members of the Sword Roses down to the second layer, Marco promises her he'll protect them. Also Played for Laughs when Katie has to hold him back from charging Stacy and Fay when they show up.
- Painful Transformation: Transforming into wolf form causes half-werewolves like Fay excruciating pain.
- Portal Pool: The nearest entrance to the school building to the Sword Roses' base is a pool of water that leads to a second-floor classroom in the school building.
- Royal Rapier: Stacy and Chela, as befitting ojous, both use athames modeled after smallswords. They both practice the Rizett Style, explained in the novels to be an aggressive, thrust-centric Fantastic Fighting Style (patterned after sport fencing).
- Set Swords to "Stun": Like the Oliver-Rossi duel in "Rivals", the two teams set their dulling spells to half-strength, allowing them to draw blood but not inflict lethal injuries. This backfires when Fay transforms: his Healing Factor is sufficient that what would be an incapacitating wound in his human form gets No-Sold.
- Simple Solution Won't Work: When asked by the Sword Roses why they didn't just use the Portal Pool to get to the laboratory and save the trip in the previous episode, Miligan reminds them that the labyrinth has a mind of its own: that entrance isn't always accessible, and if they can't reach the laboratory by other paths, then it's probably too dangerous for them to be down here in the first place.
- Super-Strength: Justified: Oliver's spatial magic spell "Heavy Feather", which he uses to overpower Albright and injure him through a block, is said to alter his center of gravity to make a sword blow that is much heavier than it appears to be.
- Title Drop: Chela says Stacy and Fay are "like master and knight" while explaining their relationship to Oliver after he asks how well they know each other.
- Underestimating Badassery: Like Rossi, whom he defeated previously, Albright disparages Oliver's fighting style as nothing more than book-learning: Rossi's fighting style at least had some novelty to it. And of course, just like Rossi, he's underestimated just how much book-learning Oliver has.
- Voluntary Shapeshifting: Downplayed: Fay doesn't have direct control of his werewolf transformations, but Stacy is able to make him transform with the Luna Plena spell, which simulates moonlight, and she asks for his consent beforehand.
