After being unable to for so long, Naofumi finally gets to upgrade his party’s classes in The Rising of the Shield Hero Episode 22. Despite Rapthalia and Filo upgrading, they couldn’t choose the upgrade that they wanted thanks to Filo’s crown. He then takes part in a meeting of the Four Cardinal Heroes, held under the guise of a celebratory banquet, which actually revealed a lot about their abilities.
Essentially, we learned of the existence of a bonus stage, with increased XP earnings. This will be a great way for them to catch up on XP before the next wave. Now, since I haven’t read the manga, I’m not sure if this part of the story is canon or not. It has that filler vibe to it, but we’ll see soon enough. There was a lot of information that was revealed about how things worked in their world.
All of the three heroes revealed various information about how they got by in the world, from teleportation to crafting items instantly from their cardinal weapons. However, the most interesting part was the revelation that with trust and sharing information among the heroes, they can grow 10x faster than if they continued on alone. This was evident when Naofumi decided that he’d trust them a little after checking for the copy skills, which wasn’t active at the time. The moment he allowed himself to trust them, the weapon copy skill was unlocked. That’s pretty cool gimmick to this world I guess.
Oh and let’s not forget Slut and her attempt to poison the team. You gotta love that new name of hers. The last segment of the episode was pretty much Rapthalia saying her goodbyes to her friend and family who passed away. In a not so shocking twist, it seems that Naofumi has all the intentions of going home, but he still vowed to himself that he’ll make sure Rapthalia and Filo find happiness before he goes.
Now, I get the feeling that he may actually go through with it. So how he’ll accomplish that feat of making them happy before leaving will be interesting. One easy guess is that he’ll rebuild Rapthalia’s home town to some capacity. That’s probably what we saw when Naofumi was looking up at that in the previous episode flag. Filo seems to be more capable of handling Naofumi’s departure, well that the vibe that I’m getting.
We did get introduced to a new character named L’arc, who may be another hero, to which capacity has yet to be revealed. Overall, this is clearly leading up to a interesting arc, one that I welcome with open arms.
