This has definitely stretched longer than I necessarily would have liked and while this whole conflict angle is, in theory, interesting, and feels like it has really hit the gas of late… well, that doesn’t necessarily make it a better story.
Two problems - one, the new bad guy has nebulous powers that make sense, but I feel that they should probably have a little explanation behind them. Especially given the shocking conclusion to the volume.
And then said conclusion appears to get possibly walked back because this series is, apparently, crossing over with Dawn of the Arcana. Which is its own problem because I sure haven’t read that and this completely assumes you have because it gives nowhere near enough context for the revelations and characters who crop up.
The reveal of one character is meant to be a huge thing, but it’s like reading a whodunnit to the end and the culprit turns out to be somebody who was neither mentioned nor appeared anywhere else except in a different book.
This definitely lost all its momentum when it resolved the Sogetsu story and has only managed to recover a little bit. This has some good stuff, but it feels like it exists in the long shadow of earlier volumes and it makes an assumption about the reader’s familiarity with a whole other series that really stuck in my craw.