Black Torch Episode 5 finally sends Jiro and Reiji chasing the one question the season has been dangling since the premiere. Someone unsealed Rago from centuries of imprisonment, and the episode makes clear that whoever did it wasn’t acting alone.
Rago’s release has been the show’s central mystery since Episode 1, when Jiro found the wounded black cat in the forest with no memory of how he’d escaped his prison. Episode 4 advanced that investigation when Rago recalled fragments of his release, including a mononoke urging him to seek revenge against the Bureau of Espionage.
That episode ended with the Black Torch team locked outside a Bureau shrine built over the death obsidian seal that once held Rago, right as a hostile mononoke attacked. Episode 5, titled “Young Gunz”, picks up from that exact cliffhanger.
Rago’s original imprisonment goes back centuries, tied to a war between mononoke and an early ninja squad during the Edo period. He was sealed away rather than killed, which is part of why the Bureau has spent the entire season treating his release as a security failure rather than a random event.
What Black Torch Episode 5 Actually Reveals
Jiro and Reiji fight their way through the shrine and come face to face with someone connected to the group responsible for Rago’s unsealing. The episode confirms it wasn’t a rescue or an accident, but a calculated act by someone who understood the ancient seal intimately.
What the episode stops short of doing is naming a mastermind. Instead, it deepens the mystery, tying Rago’s release to a broader network rather than to a single culprit acting alone.
That’s a meaningful shift from Episode 4’s framing, in which the culprit was described only as someone who likely knew Rago before his imprisonment. Episode 5 finally puts a face, even a partial one, to that theory.
So, Who Actually Freed Rago? The Manga Already Has The Answer
Black Torch is adapting a manga that finished its run years before the anime existed, which means Episode 5’s mystery already has a confirmed answer in the source material. The mononoke behind Rago’s release is Amagi, revealed later in the story through a shared vision of the Edo period that Jiro and Rago experience together.
In that flashback, Amagi tried to recruit Rago and other mononoke to wage war against the newly formed ninja squads of the era, but Rago refused to join him. That refusal is the root of their conflict, and it’s what eventually pushes Amagi to have Rago unsealed centuries later, not out of mercy, but to finish a fight Rago walked away from.
The anime hasn’t animated that scene yet, so Episode 5’s version of the mystery is a buildup, not the reveal. The manga also ties Amagi to a broader pattern of manipulation, with Rago not the only mononoke he’s tried to recruit or control over the centuries.
That history lines up with Episode 5’s hint that Rago’s release was part of something bigger than a single grudge, and it explains why Reiji’s investigation keeps circling back to the past rather than to a recent motive.
If the anime follows the manga’s pacing, Amagi’s reveal should land once the story reaches its training-arc episodes, where Jiro and Rago are forced to relive memories neither can access willingly. That positions Amagi as Black Torch’s first real antagonist, not just a name Reiji is chasing on a hunch, and it sets up a confrontation that’s less about a stranger’s grudge than an old debt Rago never got to settle.
Black Torch Episode 6 should start closing the gap between what the anime has shown on screen and what the manga has already confirmed.
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