Episode 25

Twice a year, Eden Academy hosts a gathering restricted to Imperial Scholars along with their parents and chosen alumni, effectively a summit of Ostania's ruling class, ringed by soldiers and agents. Surveying the security in a professor disguise, Twilight discards every infiltration option; storming the Tower of Wisdom would work exactly once, useful only for an assassination, while Operation Strix demands repeated contact. The approach must come as Loid Forger. His opening arrives through Damian, who has asked his brother Demetrius to pass their father a request: meet in the courtyard by Library 2 once the mixer ends. Anya lifts the plan from Damian's thoughts, and Loid overhears it while shadowing the boys.

Watching the parade of dignitaries, Damian loses his nerve, deciding a man that important has no time for him. Anya blocks his retreat and needles him for cowardice, nearly exposing her telepathy by citing his 50-point language test. Covering with a stalker excuse, she confesses her own 17-point disaster, admits she never knows what her father thinks of her, and declares she will scrape together every bit of courage and admit her failure to him, because she loves and believes in him. Nobody quite follows the speech, but it puts Damian back on course. Meanwhile Loid produces a handmade duplicate of Anya's sheep keychain, built from cheap materials, and has it planted for the boys to find. Asking after the lost trinket gives him a natural reason to kneel before Damian in apology, and at that exact moment Donovan Desmond arrives.

The chairman proves unsettling: he deflects Loid's offers of amends with sudden bright smiles, sighs at his own son's plea for acknowledgment, and expounds a bleak creed, that children are strangers who happen to share your blood and that human beings can never truly understand one another. Loid wonders if this belief drives the man toward controlling nations through force. Aloud, he grants that full understanding may be arrogance, yet argues for meeting others halfway and creating chances for dialogue regardless of the outcome. He flatters Donovan through Damian's school report on his father's work, hints at attending a National Unity Party seminar, and withdraws having achieved something rare: Donovan remembers his name and admits he enjoyed the conversation. The two men part exchanging quiet, measuring stares. Emboldened, Damian blurts his achievements at his father, the Stella, the improved test score, the prize-winning art griffin, and receives brief congratulations plus an order not to shame the family name. At a WISE safehouse, Sylvia refuses a rookie's suggestion to send Twilight backup, calling Eden the front line of the cold war. Loid comes home to find Anya asleep, mumbling about fighting the superboss at his side.

Donovan Desmond makes his first on-screen appearance, and Loid achieves the initial in-person contact that Operation Strix has pursued since its inception.

Anya's clumsy but heartfelt speech about trusting her father restores Damian's resolve to meet Donovan.

Loid's replica keychain scheme manufactures the pretext for approaching the Desmonds without a disguise.

Damian voices his accomplishments to his father for the first time, closing the season on a fragile step forward between them.

The season one finale adapts Chapters 37 and 38 of the Imperial Scholars Mixer Arc and aired in Japan on December 24, 2022. The anime renames the event the "Eden College Social Gathering."

One shot of Donovan during Loid's assassination musings mimics the gun barrel opening of the James Bond films. Melinda Desmond's darkened silhouette stands beside Donovan long before her manga debut in Chapter 65, and several graduate portraits are lifted from Chapter 64. Sylvia still wears the rings given to her in Episode 23, which her manga counterpart had already stopped wearing, and multiple characters received coloring changes from the source material.