The Warrior of Wind

Bound and choked to the central pyre by Wamuu's severed arms, Joseph confronts the Pillar Man's Final Mode technique, the Atmospheric Rift, which draws in air through special tubes and expels it as a blade-thin gust meant to behead him, though the flames obscure his exact spot. The tremendous inhalation begins tearing at Wamuu's own body. Joseph flings a firebomb, and when Wamuu slices it, Joseph ignites Caesar's headband on the pyre and hurls that too. Wamuu unwittingly breathes in the embers and firebomb oil and detonates, handing Joseph the win.

Left as only a head, Wamuu accepts a drop of Joseph's blood as a mark of respect. When vampires rush in to finish Joseph, the dying warrior shields him in kind, then asks Joseph to swallow the antidote in front of him before crumbling to ash on the wind as Joseph offers a final salute. Kars, moved by the loss of so worthy a servant, executes vampires who try to defame Wamuu's memory, yet still advances on Lisa Lisa. He leads her and Joseph to a strange structure called the temple of Piz Bernina, where the two agree to fight with their chosen weapons, his Light Blades against her Ripple-conducting scarf.

Kars vanishes in a burst of light while giving off no killing intent. Lisa Lisa senses him and crushes his face, but the genuine Kars stabs her from behind, having fielded a body double despite his talk of honorable combat, since only the final victory matters to him. Claiming the Red Stone of Aja, he unleashes his vampire army on the weakened Joseph. Stroheim and his men arrive alongside Speedwagon, Smokey, and the Speedwagon Foundation Special Forces, wielding ultraviolet lamps to hold off the vampires while Joseph goes after Kars. As Kars uses Lisa Lisa to leave Joseph exposed, Smokey blurts out the truth: Lisa Lisa is Joseph's mother.

Joseph kills Wamuu by feeding him burning embers and firebomb oil, and the two exchange gestures of respect as Wamuu turns to ash. Kars breaks his own claim of honor by using a body double to stab Lisa Lisa and seizes the Red Stone of Aja. Stroheim, Speedwagon, and the Foundation forces arrive with ultraviolet weapons, and Smokey reveals that Lisa Lisa is Joseph's mother.

The twenty-third episode of the anime and the fourteenth of Battle Tendency, it covers chapters 103 through 106. The adaptation omits Lisa Lisa dispatching vampires after Wamuu's defeat and reorders her explanation of the snake muffler before she kicks the fake Kars. Tsuda's commentary singled out Wamuu's theatrical death and Kars' infamous line while stroking Lisa Lisa's legs, praising the deliberate, redone shots that gave the sequence its finale-level polish.