Even with his fancy niello wings, Genau still has to get up close and personal against a demon armed with four swords. Sure, the mage starts the fight off with a few projectiles, but what happened to the rest of his spells? Didn’t he nuke a demon a couple of episodes ago with a ranged attack? Meanwhile, Stark can’t keep up with Revolte, so he falls back on a familiar strategy: taking a direct hit to distract his opponent. In fact, he later invokes the same exact lesson that helped him overcome Linie back in season one. The more things change, the more things stay the same. There’s always a bigger fish out there, though. At some point, he’s going to meet someone who can take him down in a single blow. You can’t meat-tank everything. But I guess in that scenario, he’d probably just run.

Genau’s former partner apparently died, because he prioritized protecting a child in battle. Genau’s take is that although this made his former partner a good person, it also made him a fool. Sure, I suppose the utilitarian calculus shakes out if you assume that you would’ve defeated the demon.

The episode opens with demons slaughtering an entire village and its inhabitants. A man cowers in hiding. A child probably cries his or her last cry. A woman attaches a message to a carrier pigeon, but it isn’t for help. It’s too late for that. All she can do is seek vengeance for the fallen, hence the episode’s title: “A Demon-Slaying Request.” Seeing all of this, I can’t help but wonder about the nature of this world and where demons even come from. I don’t like how demons are portrayed in this series, but fine, let’s grant that they are absolute evil, no questions asked. Why are they surging in power again? And why now? Why did humans sit idly by and allow this to happen to themselves again? After Himmel defeated the Demon Lord, why wasn’t there a campaign to expand northward and completely annihilate demonkind? They, the demons, were presumably at their weakest point, no? Unless, of course, demons just spawn in like a video game. There’s so little that we know about this world and how it works.

In the first half of the episode, our trio takes a pit stop in a city in order to help old man Fass fulfill a lifelong dream. For two hundred years, the dwarf has been on a quest to locate the Boshaft, an alcohol that is legendary for its supposedly exquisite taste. It has become an obsession; this alcohol is his white whale. As it turns out, Boshaft is terrible. It’s not exquisite. It’s not divine. It is cheap swill that they produced and served en masse for big events like coronations. So where and how did the alcohol even get its legendary reputation? Apparently, from a particularly prankish elf.

Fern is carefully choosing her outfit and making sure her bangs are in tip-top shape, ’cause that’s what you do when you prepare for dates. You want to look your best. You want the person you’re dating to find you attractive. But that leads to a natural follow-up question: does Stark even care how she looks? I’m not asking whether or not he finds Fern attractive, because in order for him to answer that question, he needs to know that it exists in the first place! Fern’s probably thinking, “I hope he thinks I look cute in this dress.” Meanwhile, Stark looks slightly concerned as he waits for Fern to arrive for their date. He’s probably dreading the fallout if the date is unsuccessful.