WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Platinum End Episode 5, "Death Sentence," now streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation.
The heavenly battle royale continues, and the God candidates explore the limits of their divine powers. It's mainly the armored Metropoliman who aims to maximize the potential of these heavenly gifts and turn them into the ultimate weapons, and in the latest episode, he makes an astonishing breakthrough.
Metropoliman has proven himself to be an ambitious and cunning God candidate in this contest, and he has already dispatched several rivals in the Jinbo baseball stadium. Now, he continues to innovate with his accumulated powers, and as he prepares himself for the next battle, his new secret weapon gives him a significant advantage.
Metropoliman still has a life outside of his role as a God candidate, and he appears the next day at an elite academy, where he is a student. After class, Metropoliman, or Kanade Uryu, joins a friend outside the archery range where several girls are practicing their sport. Kanade asks his friend a few pointed questions about wishes and ambition before testing his new powers; he manifests a red arrow and aims it at a target 60 meters away, well outside the red arrow's normal range. Then, Kanade adds a white arrow to the red one and fires them as a single projectile. The combined arrows strike the target, and Kanade confirms that arrows fired this way can combine their range.
Kanade can now easily outrange any other God candidate, striking them with either arrow type while remaining too far away to take any return fire. This new trick is relatively straightforward, but Mirai Kakehashi has both arrow types too, and he doesn't even mention the idea of combining them to form a single projectile with superior range.
Mirai, who has a humble dream and a somewhat pacifistic attitude, gives no thought to the true potential of these divine powers. In contrast, Kanade has a ruthless and creative mind, which he demonstrates with his newest trick. To him, these divine gifts are more like toys than a responsibility, and he uses them to surge ahead in the race. If Kanade keeps this up, he can snowball his powers into something truly unstoppable, and even if they teamed up, the other God candidates would stand no chance against him.
On his own, Metropolimanan can defeat any other God candidate with his new arrow trick and his willingness to use absolutely any power he can get his hands on. However, his resourceful attitude goes beyond doubling his arrows' range. Metropoliman isn't conceited enough to think he can do everything on his own -- he wants allies, and he finds one in the newest Platinum End episode.
Off-screen, Metropoliman grants a spare set of wings to a vicious girl known on the news as "Girl A," who begins acting on Metropoliman's behalf. She commits murder not with white arrows, but an ordinary knife, and this draws Mirai's team's attention away. Mirai and his allies correctly estimate that Metropoliman has given Girl A a spare set of wings to elude the police.
Metropoliman continues to test the absolute limits of the battle royale's rules, which is highly informative not just for himself, but also for viewers. There's a lot about angels and the heavens that the main characters still don't know, and not every rule of the battle royale has been spelled out. Much more than Mirai and his allies, Metropoliman explores and exploits every rule he can, sometimes going by trial and error to get a clear idea of how his powers do and don't work. He will even grant his powers to ordinary people to turn them into loyal pseudo-candidates with divine abilities -- a move Mirai has never even considered. All this is what makes Metropoliman/Kanade Uryu Mirai's ultimate nemesis.
