Young Caesar

Lisa Lisa recounts Caesar's youth to Joseph. As a boy Caesar idolized his father Mario, until Mario abruptly left his children and grasping relatives seized the money he had provided. Convinced he had been abandoned, Caesar cast off the family pride prized by Italian men and turned to crime, stopping short only of murder. At sixteen he saw his father again and shadowed him meaning to kill him, but at the wall of the Pillar Men, booby-trapped by Kars, Mario pushed Caesar clear and was absorbed into the stone. Before dying he urged his son to seek out Lisa Lisa and learn the Ripple, and Caesar finally understood everything, restoring his pride in his bloodline.

Moved by the tale, Joseph changes his mind and travels with Lisa Lisa to the hotel. Caesar reaches it first and is ambushed by an unseen Wamuu, who wraps himself in streams of moist air to fend off sunlight and bend it around himself. Messina comes to help but is quickly taken down and hauled inside. Caesar, however, has sharpened his Soap Cutters, hurling tougher bubbles that force Wamuu to retreat into the main hall. Trading wind blasts for soap, Caesar seizes the upper hand and even bends sunlight indoors through refractive bubble lenses to pin Wamuu down. Yet at the moment of the finishing blow, Wamuu exploits the split second the sun is blotted out to land a devastating counter.

Mortally hurt, Caesar recalls how his father and grandfather turned death into a fighting chance and spends his last strength stealing the piercing that holds the antidote to the ring around Joseph's heart. With a final Ripple he seals it inside a blood bubble along with his bandana and sends it to Joseph before the collapsing ceiling crushes him. Impressed by his loyalty, Wamuu lets the bubble stand. Drawn to the wrecked hotel when Messina fails to return, Joseph and Lisa Lisa find the bubble and scarf, realize Caesar is dead, and weep for their fallen friend.

A flashback reveals Caesar's estrangement from his father Mario and the sacrifice at the Pillar Men's wall that renewed his family pride and set him on the path of the Ripple. In the present, Caesar fights Wamuu alone, refining his Soap Cutters and using bubble lenses to redirect sunlight, before Wamuu lands a fatal counterblow. Caesar dies delivering the antidote piercing and his bandana to Joseph through a final Ripple blood bubble, a loss that devastates Joseph and Lisa Lisa.

The twentieth episode overall, and the eleventh of Battle Tendency, adapts Chapters 89 through 93. Caesar's opening flashback is delivered by the narrator rather than Lisa Lisa, and the entire stretch from his entry into the hotel to the bubble lens is original to the anime. The adaptation also skips the wounded Messina scene so Joseph and Lisa Lisa spot the crimson bubble immediately. Widely regarded by fans and staff as one of the series' most moving installments, its voice actors for Joseph and Caesar exchanged an in-character message after it aired.