Episode 9

Revived by a stray hand from the dead Ghost Devil, Denji transforms and trades blows with the Katana Man, the two proving evenly matched until reinforcements arrive. After Denji takes a gunman hostage, the swordsman drops into his stance and cleaves both captive and captor apart, then carries the unconscious Chainsaw Man off as a trophy. Far away, the gunmen who riddled Makima's train car prepare to vanish into the crowd, only for Makima to rise from her seat unharmed, her attackers left dead behind her.

Met at Kyoto station by hunters Yutaro Kurose and Michiko Tendo, Makima learns Tokyo's divisions have been gutted and chooses to act from a distance. She requisitions thirty condemned convicts and a hilltop shrine, then has everyone blindfolded before working her power. Speaking the names of the kidnappers through the prisoners, she crushes the abductors one by one across the city, sacrificing a convict with each kill until only the Katana Man and Akane remain alive.

Kobeni, meanwhile, mounts her own counterattack, having already turned an assassin's gun against her after watching Hirokazu die shielding her. She severs the Katana Man's arm and shoots him before Akane drags him into a van and retreats. Cradling Denji, Kobeni apologizes for once trying to kill him and resolves to quit the job that is breaking her. Back in Tokyo, Madoka informs Makima that the four decimated divisions will merge under her command, hands in his resignation, and asks how much of the carnage she foresaw before she deflects the question entirely.

The Katana Man captures Denji after a stalemate fight, while Makima's survival is confirmed in spectacular fashion. Her shrine ritual introduces a devastating, secretive contract that lets her kill the kidnappers remotely at the cost of convict lives, and it debuts the Kyoto hunters Kurose and Tendo. Kobeni's rampage frees Denji and reveals Hirokazu's death, pushing her to resign. The episode closes on Division 4's reorganization under Makima and Madoka's pointed, unanswered question about how much she planned.

Carrying the title Kyōto Yori, or "From Kyoto," the ninth episode continues the Katana Man arc and adapts chapters twenty-five through twenty-eight. "Kick Back" opens the episode, with "Deep Down" as the ending theme. The anime adds original footage of the convicts eating in transit and of the Katana Man's panicked subordinates, and it alters the elderly assassin's death, depicting Kobeni driving the woman to turn her own gun on herself instead of shooting her through the chest as the manga implies. The clash between Kobeni, Akane, and the Katana Man is also lengthened.