There's some elements of this latest episode that smell fishy to me. And I'm not talking about Kiroumaru's grins (although that is somewhat suggestive given everything else).
Kiroumaru's survival story is a bit hard to swallow. He jumped right by the fiend, and into a ditch, and somehow survived? When everybody else in his tribe were killed?
That seems very uncharacteristically sloppy of Yakomaru to me. To allow an enemy commander to get away like that. Nobody is perfect, of course, but still...
The Psychobuster is designed to wipe out cantus-using humans in general, not just fiends. And it's very contagious. It's not hard to see how this could backfire horribly on Saki, Satoru et al if it's not used wisely...
Consider the following possibility - Yakomaru and Kiroumaru came up with this complex plot for freeing their people from the yoke of humanity. They make sure to make it look like they hate each other - Kiroumaru in particular goes out of his way to look seriously pissed when both he and Yakomaru were questioned by the humans several episodes back.
Kiroumaru and Yakomaru then set up a bunch of semi-fake wars to make it look to the humans that the Queerats are in a massive all-encompassing civil war. Kiroumaru's side is wiped out, but Kiroumaru still has an important role to play, so Yakomaru lets him go.
Kiroumaru helps save a human to make it look like he's still loyal to humans. He backs that up by what he says.
Kiroumaru's job is to have the humans bring him to the one remaining piece of the puzzle for his and Yakomaru's master plan - The Psychobuster.
Who needs fiends when you have a Psychobuster? Fiends are risky, as various commentators have stated on previous episode threads and elsewhere. Some have argued that Yakomaru is overreaching in planning to make an army of fiends to take over the world with. That this will backfire on him. What if Yakomaru himself knows it's too risky? What if he's just making it
seem like that's his plan by taking captive all those baby humans? For all we know, he could have had all those human babies killed and disposed of shortly after he kidnapped them. It could have been a pure ruse to make it
look like he plans to raise an army of fiends... when Yakomaru's real goal is gaining the Psychobuster.
Yakomaru and Kiroumaru push the humans up against the wall, to the point where the Psychobuster is their last resort, forcing them to turn to it. The humans play right into their ploy, and give Yakomaru a much more reliable WMD than an army of fiends.
And
is Maria's child a fiend? They say there's no coincidences in fiction. Red herrings are rare for much the same reason. Saki raising the possibility that the fiend is not really a fiend strikes me as a truly pointless bit of dialogue to bother with unless the author is in fact aiming for red herrings. Which is possible, but I find it somewhat doubtful. This narrative has plenty of good plot twists without needing to use red herrings.
If the fiend isn't a fiend, then perhaps he's simply a cantus-using human that Yakomaru has removed Death Feedback from. Maybe Yakomaru has discovered a way to do that.
And Kiroumaru's a smart guy, but even so, he's rather quick on the uptake and he seems to know a lot of things easily, a bit
too easily. The way he helped Saki et al escape from Queerat patrols gave me a strange impression of being a little bit of stagecraft just to make the humans think that nothing fishy is going on here. In other words, Yakomaru puts on a show of just enough resistance and "border patrols" to make it seem like he really doesn't want Saki et al to get away... even though he does want them to.
When I put all of the above together, it really,
really looks quite suspicious.
I'm not sure how I feel about it though. On the one hand, it would make Yakomaru and Kiroumaru one of the very best antagonist duos of all-time. Just deliciously brilliant and cunning antagonists if I'm right (or close to right) here. Yakomaru is already an impressive antagonist, but this would truly put him over the top, and Kiroumaru would join him.
On the other hand, I admit I am fond of Kiroumaru's established "noble beast" characterization to date. A queerat that is loyal to humans to the very end is also an interesting notion.
But the good news here is that I could see either approach working well if executed decently. I agree with ThereminVox that the narrative has done a good job of setting things up so that it could believably go either way with Kiroumaru, which adds great suspense going forward.
Overall, an excellent episode. I do find the pacing a bit slow, but that might mostly be due to how the suspense is killing me.
This is one climax I can't wait to see.