Episode 31

While her city hall coworkers toast her imagined luxury back in a Berlint pub, Yor sits rigid through a first-class dinner, too tense to taste anything until Matthew kicks her chair and reminds her that selling the cover matters as much as fighting. Escorting Olka and Gram back afterward, she predicts the enemy will strike at the final possible moment. Below decks, Anya devours a buffet and remarks how odd dinner feels without Yor, a sentiment Loid sheepishly shares.

The prediction proves optimistic. Matthew peels away from the group to trap a man shadowing them, breaks his limbs during interrogation, and extracts the truth: a crowd of freelance assassins is aboard, racing each other for the bounty, all fed intel by an informant who knows Olka's cover identity and room number. He executes the man and dumps him overboard. Minutes later a killer posing as room service empties a gun through Olka's cabin door; Yor drags her clear, and after Matthew and Zeb dart the attacker's hands, her thrown stiletto punches through the door and nails him to the wall. The party dons masks and relocates through a masquerade ball, where Yor silently neutralizes two hitmen, one with a flicked suit button to the neck, another by crushing his hand mid-dance. Meanwhile the remaining assassins agree to pool their efforts under a composed leader who executes one member for proposing to murder every mother on the ship, insisting they are professionals rather than psychopaths.

At the shopping promenade, Loid refuses Anya a skeleton keychain while cataloguing the listening devices and undercover SSS agents he has spotted everywhere. Anya then picks up the thoughts of Sickle-and-Chain Barnaby, a hitman who has just decided to eliminate Yor first. Terrified that a public fight could expose her mother and shatter the family, Anya manipulates Loid into a marathon fitting-room session by challenging him to dress like a properly fun father. Barnaby's blade flashes out at Yor's group without a flicker of bloodlust to warn her; she evades at the last instant, and the two killers square off, each recognizing the other as dangerous.

Matthew's interrogation reveals a fleet of independent assassins aboard, all supplied by an informant selling Olka's identity and location. The Knockman's room-service ambush fails when Yor kills him through the cabin door. The scattered hitmen unite under the Assassin Leader with an even bounty split and a shared intelligence line. Yor covertly drops two attackers during the masquerade ball without alerting the crowd. Anya learns of Barnaby's plan through telepathy and stalls Loid in a souvenir shop to keep him from witnessing the fight, and Barnaby's opening strike on Yor begins the arc's first major duel.

The episode covers Chapters 46 and 47 plus the first nine pages of Chapter 48, making it the first episode to stop partway through a chapter. Its key visual forms the middle panel of the combined three-episode artwork. Yor's heels gain a strap detail absent from the manga design, and the unnamed swordsman appears here well before his manga debut in Chapter 51.