10 Second Anime - Kyoukai no Kanata - Episode 10

Kyoukai no Kanata - Episode 10

Dream monsters battle in dreams once again. Flashbacks fill in the missing details of Mirai's story. The real battle against the One Beyond the Boundary has only just started.

This episode throws us for a loop at first, because we see Akihito recovering from a long hospital stay and only regaining consciousness in the summer. The next moment we see the school in winter, and Mirai trying to put on a brave face for an emotionless Akihito. In the summer scenes, Mirai is wearing her usual red glasses. In the winter scenes, Mirai has on the black glasses Akihito wanted to give her for her birthday. As with the Hollow Shadow, the One Beyond the Boundary is also fighting in dreams, and giving the two involved different dreams. The one thing that's the same in both is a youmu stone in the club room. Could be significant.

As Akihito realizes he is in a dream, those scenes are interspersed with flashbacks of Izumi bringing Mirai to her town, meeting the patriarch, and assigning her the task of killing the One Beyond the Boundary. These flashbacks explain why she was trying to kill Akihito without any explanations in the first episode, why she was reluctant to get close to him, and why Izumi intervened during the Calm to force Mirai into needing to kill him again. They were already aware of how close the Society was of suspecting Akihito was the One Beyond the Boundary, and had made contingency plans around them. Which all brings us right up to now, two people caught in the dreamland of the world's most powerful youmu.

However, Akihito's dream version of Mirai reveals that she is just a bit of her blood still in him, showing him in images how she took the youmu out of his body and into her own to defeat it. He awakens again, to an empty hospital room with Mirai's red glasses where she was sitting before. It is now autumn.

Here's where the next episode should clarify things, since you can't trust the images a dream monster gives you, on whether Mirai actually did draw the One Beyond the Boundary into her own body, and is battling it there, or if the two are still connected by her blood sword, and Akihito has a chance to join her. That he's moved from Summer to Fall, while she is in Winter, could be a clue as to where the story will go. I'm hoping for that happy end, where they both win out, and the last few episodes have the Society trying to turn the Hollow Shadow into the next One Beyond the Boundary. That's the hopeless romantic route, right?