The episode before Solo Leveling Ep. 9 “You’ve Been Hiding Your Skills” made us think the plot was going a certain way with those prisoners. Then comes this episode, which throws us for a loop via a most unexpected development.

Solo Leveling Ep. 9 “You’ve Been Hiding Your Skills”: Details

Solo Leveling textless key visual.
There’s a reason why there’s a person in that pile of bodies.

Solo Leveling Ep. 9 “You’ve Been Hiding Your Skills” is the ninth true episode (you can read reviews for Ep. 1, Ep. 2, Ep. 3, Ep. 4, Ep. 5, Ep. 6, Ep. 7, Ep. 7.5, and Ep. 8 here) of the first season of this kinda sorta urban fantasy action anime. Said anime is the anime adaptation of the South Korean web novel and webtoon series of the same name by Chugong. A-1 Pictures (Black Butler, Blue Exorcist, Sword Art Online) is the animation studio behind this anime.

Hirotaka Tokuda is the director and storyboarder behind Solo Leveling Ep. 9 “You’ve Been Hiding Your Skills”, with Shingo Irie as the writer, and Hirotaka Tokuda being the chief animation director as well alongside Tomoko Sudo. Shunsuke Nakashige is the director of Solo Leveling overall, with Noboru Kimura also being the writer for the same. Hiroyuki Sawano is the composer of the music you hear in the anime.

Speaking of music, the opening theme music for Solo Leveling as a whole is “Level” by Sawano and Tomorrow X Together. Meanwhile, “Request” by Krage is the ending theme music.

Voice Cast

Solo Leveling Ep. 9 “You’ve Been Hiding Your Skills” features the voices of Taito Ban (Aleks Le in English dub) as Sung Jin-woo and Rina Hon’izumi (Dani Chambers in English dub) as Lee Joo-hee. Everyone else is apparently unlisted in the credits for the English version.

When and Where to Watch

Solo Leveling Ep. 9 “You’ve Been Hiding Your Skills” made its airing and streaming debut on March 9, 2024. You can watch this episode only on Crunchyroll at the moment. In fact, you can watch this entire anime only on Crunchyroll for the moment, due to this anime being a Crunchyroll exclusive at the time of this writing.

Solo Leveling Ep. 9 “You’ve Been Hiding Your Skills”: Synopsis

This version of Jin-woo in the thumb just keeps showing up.

As you might’ve been able to guess from my previous reviews, Solo Leveling is an ongoing anime. In fact, Solo Leveling Ep. 9 “You’ve Been Hiding Your Skills” only just made its debut two days ago as of this writing. Thus, instead of a spoiler-filled plot summary, you will all get the official synopsis Crunchyroll made for this episode. You can read that below:

At the D-Rank raid, Jinwoo is reunited with four of the Cartenon Temple survivors. Together, they explore the dungeon with Kang Taeshik and his men. After splitting up, they hear a scream, and then…

Solo Leveling Ep. 9 “You’ve Been Hiding Your Skills”: The Good

Solo Leveling Ep. 9 "You've Been Hiding Your Skills" screenshot showing Chi-Yul, Joo-hee, and Jin-woo in the dungeon.
Our plucky band of good guys here…or it would be, if Jin-woo wasn’t the only character who matters in this anime.

Honestly, one of the best parts of Solo Leveling Ep. 9 “You’ve Been Hiding Your Skills” is the story for once. All the previous episodes have given us pretty simple plots so far. Thus, this plot twist is practically a master of story development. Seriously, if you had watched the previous episode, this particular plot twist involving those prisoners would have you gaping in shock, since the anime was telegraphing something completely different then.

However, I can’t deny that the story still seems to play second fiddle to the action. Admittedly, it’s very good action here. There’s a reason why people are praising this anime‘s action sequences. This episode doesn’t disappoint in that regard. The fight between Jin-woo and his enemy here has just as fluid choreography and animation as in Jin-woo’s previous fights. There’s just a big difference in this fight compared to all of Jin-woo’s previous fights though. That difference is that this enemy is a human enemy who’s on par with Jin-woo in terms of base stats. A more even fight gives us a much more entertaining fight than the one from before, in which Jin-woo basically crushed his human enemies without a sweat. Hopefully, we’ll get more fights like these in the future.

Solo Leveling Ep. 9 “You’ve Been Hiding Your Skills”: The Bad

Solo Leveling Ep. 9 "You've Been Hiding Your Skills" screenshot showing Jin-woo interfering in an attempt to murder Joo-hee.
Only bad guys and combat pragmatists target the medic first.

Honestly, my one issue with this episode doesn’t have much to do with Solo Leveling Ep. 9 “You’ve Been Hiding Your Skills” itself. Rather, my issue is the in-universe Hunters’ Association. This episode reveals that we have at least two confirmed cases in which registered hunters or groups of hunters turn out to be psychopathic murderers. I’m honestly wondering just what is the point of this organization if psychotic serial killers can just pass their tests at will like this?

And it also raises another issue. The anime regularly stresses that a lot of the practices we see in Solo Leveling overall are due to a lack of Hunters. However, we see that Hunters are organized in such a way that Hunters regularly die in these dungeons with alarming regularity. So regularly that entire groups of Hunters can die off, and this is considered to be an acceptable losses within the norm. Clearly, it looks like something is very wrong with their very structure that’s resulting in their present-day situation. It makes me wonder if future episodes of Solo Leveling will address this issue somehow. Well, we’ll just have to see.