Two Sides of the Same Coin

Turning the failed assassination over in his mind, Kawaki walks Himawari to the Academy even though he has been pulled from guarding Kae. Hana returns to teaching and talks the attack over with Anko and Shino, having heard Kae may have been the intended victim, while Osuka rallies the class to welcome her back with a petal-shower Kawaki fumbles. Hana thanks the children and apologises for falling short as their teacher. Once the day ends, she revisits the spots she occupied during the festival and cannot shake her guilt at having sensed no danger, unable to recall how she was caught in the blast. When Kawaki appears, buried memories surge back, showing her fighting him as the assassin who came for Kae.

Searching her apartment, Hana uncovers a concealed room stocked with the assassin's gear and grasps the terrible truth, but as she resolves to surrender herself, an alter speaking through her reflection forbids it. That other self reminds her she is a Land of Bamboo orphan, raised by the region's minister as a personal killer and the sole survivor of some fifty children forced to slay one another in training. Her will to live warred so fiercely with her refusal to kill that her mind fractured. Operating as the surviving half, she was dispatched abroad like the minister's other agents, and even her wish to teach was a command planted through the alter. The alter engineered the kidnapping to test Kawaki's strength and staged the assassin's death using an associate's corpse. With the case now considered closed and Hana firmly established as a beloved teacher, the alter refuses to let her come forward, then seizes control entirely.

Over dinner, Kawaki tells Himawari he intends to keep investigating, unsettled that so skilled a fighter would rig explosive tags on themselves as if expecting to lose. The next day the alter passes for Hana, quietly discarding the students' petals along with a passing butterfly, a detail Kawaki catches, and Hana wrestles her other self back from striking Kae as the girl is walked home. Episode 270 of the Boruto anime belongs to the Kawaki and Himawari Academy Arc, an anime-original story with no manga chapters. It aired 9 October 2022 in Japan and 26 March 2024 in English, opening with Kirarirari and ending with Ladder.