“So as it turns out, Ouri isn’t Keisei’s real brother after all, but I guess that probably explains why the guy moved out of the house so early.”

Sorry but, this has been know since the first episode. The monks runs the Orphanage that Ouri was living in and the lady with the apron (don¨t remember her name) is the caretaker of the orphanage while Keisei is just this laidback monk who visits when he feels like it. Keisei also says outright in the first episode “そうだな。。。お前もここで育ったなんだからな”

“My theory is that she needs Keisei to regenerate her limbs. That’s why she kept running around without an arm around episode six, because he was unconscious. I believe that I spotted her arm getting ripped off again by the monster of this episode.”

You don’t need to theorize about that! :) It was stated in earlier episodes that the monk who binds a contract with a shikabanehime can heal her wounds but will in return get some of those wounds himself. Also the shikabane don’t regenerate themselves. They need their contractor to heal there wounds. This was also displayed in one of the previous episodes.

And yeah, interesting episode. The fight and monster design at the beginning was interesting (You can see the theme of people’s attachment to life is getting much more exaggerated as the series goes on - it kinda works, though)
And what’s up with Makina’s arm? It seems to be damaged somehow ever since episode 6, so I thought it was permanently gone, but she seems to have it when there’s no action going on.

Otherwise, a great episode, and good to see some backstory on Ouri and the reason for the cat - in a roundabout way, I guess the show relates to ‘attachments’, Ouri’s attachment to normal life becomes an avatar of something about him in the form of the cat, and it’s similar with the way Shikabane manifest into something they were attached to. Or maybe that’s a bit too deep.

This series just gets better, i’m hoping it continues like this til the end of the series and hopefully in the second as well.