Episode 32

Facing Barnaby's chain-and-sickle style, Yor sends Olka's party ahead and probes for a way inside his mid-range guard. A crowd gathers, and to her horror Anya stands among the spectators, though her daughter feigns ignorance and loudly frames the brawl as circus entertainment. Yor catches herself pulling punches, afraid that visible wounds could unravel her cover and her family, but when Barnaby eyes the onlookers as future victims, her expression alone freezes him. She threads his attacks, pins the chain with her stiletto, trusses him up, paralyzes his pressure points, and takes a bow to applause. Loid finally emerges from the fitting room in a gaudy ensemble he believes embodies the fun father, and Anya flatly declares it lame.

The enemy regroups. Breaking into Olka's abandoned cabin, the Assassin Leader reads the room by scent, cataloguing each occupant's perfume and noting that one guard, Yor, carries no smell at all. The informant, overhearing two clients scheme to claw back their fee, quietly arranges contingencies of his own. In the new hideout, Zeb drops his Furseal act long enough to explain his loyalty: as a starving child after the war he survived on the Gretcher black market's charity, and a young Olka once slipped him bread. Matthew assigns watches and heads out to thin the enemy's numbers, leaving Yor staring at a telephone she cannot use, asking herself what she is doing on this ship while her family sails the same waters.

Morning brings quieter battles. Franky gripes his way through dog-sitting Bond back in Berlint. Loid, admitting to himself that he fears what he cannot analyze, resolves to decode his daughter instead of controlling her, and spends the second day observing Anya as she repeatedly tries to ditch him to help Yor, only to get absorbed in each activity herself. Over dinner they agree to watch the evening fireworks together. The ready signal for the rendezvous finally arrives, four hours out, but the informant intercepts the transmission and the Assassin Leader positions his people for an ambush just as Yor's party moves.

Yor defeats Sickle-and-Chain Barnaby in public while Anya's circus cover story keeps the crowd, and Loid, unaware. The Assassin Leader identifies Yor as scentless from her old cabin, and the informant begins hedging against his own clients. Zeb's flashback reveals his childhood debt to the Gretcher family. Yor privately confronts her fading justification for staying an assassin now that Yuri is grown. Loid resolves to understand rather than manage Anya. The rendezvous signal is set, then compromised, with the assassins moving into ambush positions as the episode ends.

The episode adapts the remainder of Chapter 48 along with Chapters 49 and 50. Its release date was announced before the previous episode aired, a first for the series, and it premiered fifteen minutes later than the usual slot. The key visual completes the three-episode combined artwork begun with Episode 30. Small adaptation changes include the perfume name Blue Lace No. 89 in place of the manga's No. 88, and the anime identifying the voice on the phone in Zeb's flashback as Olka's late father.