When we last left off, we added yet another new face to the cast: Dera’s half-brother. So now what?

— Oh right, Yuru can just make his own ammo.

— Watching one of the former mercs introduce herself (her name is Makoto, by the way) as well as her Daemons, I’m left wondering how long this show is going to be. Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood wasn’t that long for a shounen. It was about 64 episodes, right? Or exactly that. I dunno, it’s been a while. On the other hand, I feel like we’ve gotten nowhere in Daemons of the Shadow Realm. Like… she’s talking about her tanuki’s balls and how they can stretch out to capture people. C’mon.

— Okay, so there’s a “backdoor” into the estate. Still probably more secure than anything Microslop puts out. Sorry, off topic. I have it on the brain, because I saw yet another story about Windows’ enshittification in the news recently.

— With some characters, you can tell from a glance that they’re a bad guy.

— Hmm, foreshadowing? Not that I think Asuma would kill his own father, but I could see the old man dying in a major conflict. The irony — the twist in the knife — is that maybe Asuma would also be injured so he can’t take over. After all, the story is trying to portray him as morally gray. He’s not the unscrupulous villain that you might expect from a big bad. His uncle tells him to “sweet talk” Asa in order to get closer to Yuru, but Asuma instantly counters that it would be a crime to go after a minor. Yes, yes, it would.

— When Asuma leaves, he tries to leave a butterfly behind to spy on his uncle. In enters some dude with a katana. He cleaves the butterfly in two, but we never learn his name. How ominous. Also, get a bigger shirt, bro.

— Back in the Dera household, Hana says if they can handle raising two boys instead of one. Dera assures her that they’ll be fine, because Ken is a good kid! Bro, you just met him. Plus, I suspect Hana is going to do a lot of the work. Dera doesn’t seem all that reliable to me, and dads are stereotypically hands-off anyway.

— They dig up information about Nagisa, the twins’ mother, which prompts Yuru to come rushing in from another room. Elsewhere, an old woman coincidentally calls Asa around this same time and lays the guilt-trip on her. Oh, how I wish I could meet my granddaughter! I mean, that’s a legitimate desire for a grandmother to have, but that’s assuming she is who she says she is.

— Ah, the story reveals its hand already: we see the old woman being puppeted by some freaky looking Daemon. Sure, it’s fairly reasonable to assume that whoever got to the twins’ parents would also have dug their claws into the rest of the family. Even so, I think the show could’ve held us in suspense for a little longer here.

— Back with the Deras, they rightfully point out that there could be a trap lying in wait for the twins in Okinawa. Nevertheless, Yuru is kinda reckless, so he might run off to try and meet his mother’s family. I guess you’ll have to excuse him for lacking street smarts because he’s been living up on a mountain this whole time. Still, if no one ever fucks up, nothing might ever happen in this anime.

— For now, Dera tries to locate his missing father, so he pays a visit to a shaman. What… uniquely dressed Daemons he has…

— This sure is one slow, talky episode. The shaman reveals how he crossed paths with that katana guy in the streets, and how this encounter left him unconscious on the ground. Okay… so that’s it?

— All episode long, we’ve been hopping from scene to scene — checking in on Yuru, seeing what the shady Asuma is up to, now checking in on Asa, now Dera is doing a little investigation, so on and so forth. The scenery changes, the people change, but nothing is actually happening. Nothing of consequence to be found so far in this episode. This is why I wondered about the show’s length, but it feels like we’re going to be spinning our wheels for a while.

— Oh good, now we’re checking up on Yuru’s former village.

— I guess I sorta get my wish? Because the next thing we see is the katana guy somehow emerge from the shaman’s chest. Buuuut the shaman’s not dead despite the gaping… would you even consider that a wound? Well, he has a hole in his chest, but there is no blood or even guts to see. Katana guy can simply carve a space into you and hitch a ride or something? Either way, nameless villagers die but only them for now. You can argue whether or not this counts as something “happening,” but it doesn’t change the fact that the rest of the episode was just a meandering setup for this scant payoff.

— Perhaps news of his attack will get back to Yuru, which will prompt the kid to rush off to Higashi Village’s defense. I could see us getting a long ass battle scene between him and katana guy (now identified as Ivan).

— For brevity’s sake, could we have left a few of these scenes on the cutting room floor? Hm, it’s hard to say, because later events might do a callback to what we saw this week. But even if this happens, that doesn’t automatically mean that they’ll be satisfying. Sometimes, the payoff isn’t all that sweet.

— But for sure, we could’ve left out the part about the tanuki’s giant, honey trap balls.