The Sunday anime experience is a fun ride this season. You just sort of relax and let those venerable (no insult intended) engineers, Rumiko and Arakawa, drive the train. Master storytellers both, confident and exhilaratingly imaginative. The ride is very different between this show and Mao, but that’s a feature and not a bug. They both deliver the benefits of a veteran mangaka without enough overlap for anything to feel repetitive. Serious writers who don’t take themselves too seriously are a treasure that should never be taken for granted.

Both series are getting strong anime treatments too. But this is an area where Yomi no Tsugai really is on another level. Andou Masahiro is almost like Arakawa – he could do this in his sleep at this point. But when he gets a big action set piece to play with he knows how to deliver the mail. The two-way four-way fight between daemons was a nice synergy of writing and direction. Obviously Bones is going to nail the animation, and they did. The battle choreography was stylish and clever. And the whole thing played out almost in staccato form, with each side trying to think their way through it.

Both series had a story about a monk at their center today. This time it was the one who – along with the wielder of “Seal” – locked away Tenaga/Ashinaga 1200 years ago. We don’t know who the monk was, or is – Dera says he’s heard he’s on Mount Koya, which suggests it could be Kobo Daishi (and the timing is perfect). That would have made it three cycles of Seal/Break ago, more or less. We also don’t know who Tenaga/Ashinaga’s master is – Yuru and the Granny go hunting for them at one point, but only turn up the corpses of those who’ve found their way into the Tadera’s lost house but not their way out.

Granny? She’s the last survivor of the trio of tails Asama stuck on Yuru and Dera after they left the Kagemori compound. I doubt Asama will be too worried about losing the others – they were fodder, mainly there to throw Migi and Hidari off the scent of the butterfly tsugai who was actually showing him what was happening. So at this point we can pretty much confirm Asama is hostile and a troublemaker, but he still seems a little too obvious to be the big bad. And we know he wasn’t behind Long Arm and Long Leg. Having multiple opposing forces is definitely a feature of the plot.

As noted, while this battle is full of spectacular combat, most of it comes down to strategy. For starters Dera convinces the enemy that he’s Right and Left’s master, Yuru’s safety being the top priority. He then has to try and find ways to effectively use modern weaponry (which the enemy has no knowledge of). Granny is pressed into reluctant service as an ally, though she doesn’t have her own daemons with her. And she does sell out Yuru when she’s snagged and about to be eaten. He saves her anyway – that’s the sort of boy he is – and that’s the moment when he lays all his cards on the table.

Here’s the thing, though – even when you’ve played your hand you can still bluff if the opponent (kudos to Mayama Ako and Chiba Shigeru for their work as Tenaga and Ashinaga, BTW) thinks you have another hole card. Seemingly down and out, Yuru acts as if he’s acquired Seal, though Granny spilled the beans that he hadn’t. And because he observed how Asa activated “Break” and made a good guess about how it would work for Seal, he fools Long-Leg and Long-Arm for the instant it takes for Migi and Hidari to be all over them. And then for Dera to finish the job, having broken out the really big guns from his (now wrecked) house.

Asama is a problem, to be sure. But whoever was behind Tenaga and Ashinaga and able to access the lost house is a much bigger one, seemingly. It’s logical to speculate that they might be the ones behind the twins’ parents’ disappearance, too. But who knows how many camps there are in this fight? The Kagemori and Higashi Village don’t bother trying to hide their presence and hostility towards each other – it’s not like they could anyway. But the ones who do are clearly a more pressing threat, and possibly the final boss (or bosses).