This show still has a leisurely approach to story telling, but when the action finally starts, they don't waste time.

And it turns out that there is magic in this world. The princess is a top mage.

Queen takes Kaguya out to the battleship, and Kaguya tries to surrender. The controlling mentality there (talking through some sort of black portal) says that without the pendant, she's useless to them. (Queen had left the pendant with XiaoMei.)

Kaguya ends up captured, pulled through the black whatever-it-was. Queen fought the fleet after that but it was a stalemate.

Good thing; it bought time for yet another bout of angst by Rick. Rick and the four girls are summoned to the palace. The prince asks Rick to fight for the town, and Rick refuses. He goes back to the bakery and tries to make bread, but it still doesn't taste good. So he goes to a lookout point, and the three girls are there. They pretty much tell him, "You must do what you feel you have to do."

So he seeks out the Princess, who was to cast a spell on him to help him out. The sword he had with him is given back to him, and it turns out that using it he can fire energy blasts. The princess's spell gives him the power of flight.

His energy blasts are nothing to sneer at. He starts sinking smaller enemy ships with one blast each.

The pirate ship had sortied, and was trying to engage the battleship, as uneven a fight as that turned out to be. Rick ends up saving them. But a gun battery behind him fires on him. Queen jumps in the way and takes the shot. Maybe she recognized him, but she didn't last long enough to tell us that; her last words to him were, "Save the master."

And so he jumps into a magical circle and disappears. Presumably he has gone to where Kaguya was taken. He's wearing the pendant that they seek, so even if he isn't where she has gone, the enemy will come for him.

And that'll be next episode.

There was an interesting flashback at one point. Rick had a brief memory of the three girls. He had a ferocious look on his face, and had tears flowing down his cheeks. A building was burning.

Was is them he was hating? Or were they on his side? I came away with the impression that they were his enemies, but the director may have been trying to fake me out. We already know that Amil can fight, and it wouldn't really be much of a surprise to learn the other two can, too.

It's going to be a long week.

UPDATE: Oh, yeah. Nick and XiaoMei did actually escape this time, and went to Nick's shop. He tears up the floorboards, and it looks like he's got a tank or an armored car down there. Last thing we saw, the two of them were loading ammunition into it. Presumably they're going to drive it down to the beach, and help defend against a landing by the enemy force.

The island is going to need something. Rick is through the portal, and Queen is no longer fighting. And I don't think the three girls are suddenly going to turn into a squad of Marines.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 12:13 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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