Von Stroheim's Revenge

His clash with Esidisi behind him, Joseph returns to the manor unaware that the Pillar Man's brain has fastened itself to his back. Inside, Lisa Lisa readies a bath while Suzi Q frets over which blouse to lay out. Suzi Q fails to recognize the maskless Joseph downstairs and passes along that Lisa Lisa wants to see him. After she departs, Esidisi's brain leaves Joseph's body. Joseph then spots Suzi Q handing a parcel to a mail boat at the docks, yet also glimpses her through a keyhole inside Lisa Lisa's bath, which leaves him baffled. The Suzi Q indoors is Esidisi, wearing her body, and he has already shipped the Red Stone of Aja off toward Kars.

Holding Suzi Q hostage buys Esidisi a shield, since striking him means striking her. Caesar arrives and is dispatched to intercept the mail boat before Venice, but Esidisi bars the exit. Joseph and Caesar channel their combined Ripple to drive the Pillar Man out of Suzi Q without harming her, and sunlight reduces Esidisi to nothing. Learning the Stone now rides a train bound for Switzerland, the group races after it. Meanwhile Kars, puzzled by Esidisi's silence, cuts down a pair of reckless drivers with his Light Blades after they nearly hit a dog.

Joseph wakes to find customs has halted the train and Nazi soldiers have seized the package for research. A soldier who addresses Joseph like an old acquaintance directs the group to a cabin ahead. That night Kars approaches the same cabin, killing the men inside by their body heat, then attacks one figure whose warmth he cannot sense. The strike rips a glove to expose machinery beneath, and when Joseph enters he recognizes the soldier as Stroheim, now rebuilt as a cyborg.

Esidisi's severed brain hijacks Suzi Q's body to smuggle the Red Stone of Aja toward Kars. Joseph and Caesar use combined Ripple to expel him and finish him under sunlight, ending the second Pillar Man. The Stone's trail leads to a Switzerland-bound train, which Nazi forces intercept. Kars quietly stalks the group and slaughters soldiers at a mountain cabin, where he encounters a heat-less opponent. The confrontation reveals that Rudol von Stroheim has survived his earlier defeat as a mechanical cyborg.

The eighteenth episode overall adapts Chapters 81 through 84 and sits in the first season. The adaptation drops a manga sequence at a post office and instead emphasizes the hypnosis Lisa Lisa used on Suzi Q to locate the Stone. It also removes the reveal that the thief who tried to take the Red Stone was one of Stroheim's disguised men, and cuts a shot of Hitler while rewriting references to him. In his Blu-ray commentary, Naokatsu Tsuda highlighted the deliberately extended bath scene and the red filter applied to the possessed Suzi Q to build tension in a daylit action beat.