The Hitman Team

A brief recap replays Formaggio cornering Narancia. Coming to his senses, Narancia realizes his dropped shoe and knife have swollen in size, and so has everything around him, while Formaggio hides inside his clothing. Far off, Fugo frets that Narancia is running late. Grasping that he is steadily shrinking, Narancia bolts for a nearby building to reach a payphone, and though his tiny weight nearly leaves him stuck at the automatic doors, Aerosmith blasts through and cracks the phones open for coins. Formaggio calls out Little Feet to sever the phone line, but Narancia senses him close, plucks him from hiding, and offers him up to Aerosmith's guns. The assassin bursts free by restoring a shrunken pen to full size, the recoil flinging him clear, yet Aerosmith keeps tracking him even after he drops into a sewer.

The story then rewinds to a job Formaggio pulled with his comrades in La Squadra Esecuzioni, killing a mark by slipping a miniaturized car into his drink and letting it grow inside him. When the crew met to divide their thin pay, two of them, Sorbet and Gelato, were nowhere to be found. Resentful that assassination work earned far less than the drug and gambling operations other teams ran, the pair had begun digging into the boss's identity. The search turned up nothing until Formaggio discovered Gelato strangled with a rag. Soon the group received body parts sealed in formalin; reassembling them, the horrified members understood the boss had carved Sorbet apart and mailed him back as a warning, while Gelato had been forced to choke on his own gag. They buried their friends and lost hope of toppling the boss, until word of Trish reached them.

Back in the present, Formaggio notices Aerosmith wasting shots on rats and deduces the Stand hunts by the carbon dioxide living things exhale. He scatters a pack of rats to mask himself and even wounds Aerosmith, but Narancia reasons that whichever rodent breathes hardest must be carrying his enemy, and fires. Formaggio is hit, yet the timing saves him: he swells back to normal size while Narancia, shrunk along with his Stand, is left too small and too weak to press the advantage.

Narancia works out that Little Feet's wound on him triggers the shrinking effect and that Aerosmith locates targets through exhaled carbon dioxide. The extended flashback reveals the full La Squadra Esecuzioni roster, including Prosciutto, Pesci, Melone, Illuso, Ghiaccio, and Risotto Nero, and the murders of Sorbet and Gelato that drove the team to hunt the boss. Formaggio hides inside a swarm of rats to fool Aerosmith's radar, but Narancia identifies him by a single rat's heavy breathing and lands a shot. The assassin survives and returns to normal size, leaving the shrunken Narancia badly outmatched.

The episode draws from chapters 472 through 474 of the Vento Aureo manga, with portions of chapter 475. The adaptation greatly expands La Squadra's backstory, relocating the flashback to the sewer sequence and adding scenes that establish each member's personality and the gruesome dismemberment of Sorbet by silhouetted figures. Original touches include Team Bucciarati waiting anxiously for Narancia, and Little Feet's damage now igniting Aerosmith's wing rather than drawing blood, making the Stand behave more like a real aircraft. A pair of grammar quirks in the Italian dialogue, Prosciutto calling Pesci a childish name and Melone's mistyped message, appear as small trivia points. The opening is Fighting Gold, the ending is Freek'n You, and Aerosmith headlines the eyecatch.