Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt vol. 25

Io and Darryl’s battle continues – inside the Solar Ray!  One fights to destroy it, the other fights to protect it and they’re going to do their best to take out the other guy in the process.  It seems that this conflict has all come down to them.  Until it hasn’t.  With the Federation forces decimated by the Nanyang Alliance, Anaheim Electronics has decided to take matters into their own hands.  The weapons manufacturer has been holding a trump card – five of them, in fact – up its sleeve along with a new declaration that threatens to further upend this conflict.  The stakes have never been higher, and it’s never been less clear who’s going to win in the end.

Most of the first third of this volume is focused on the Io/Darryl fight, which comes off well enough but also feels like mangaka Yasuo Ohtagaki is playing for time before he breaks out its big twist.  Part of me feels like I should’ve seen Anaheim’s move coming, yet it still makes sense as what they do here isn’t inconsistent with their president’s high-minded speech to Io earlier in the series and their new means of seeing it through.  This does add even more chaos to the battle at hand which now has even more factions fighting against each other for their own agendas.

Not that any of this isn’t hard to follow as Ohtagaki does a good job of keeping all the threads straight with proper development between all of them.  “Thunderbolt” has really found its groove as it heads into its final stretch and leaves off on a note indicating that as bad as they are, Chekhov’s Nuke is still around to ensure that they’re only going to get a lot worse.  In September.  When vol. 26 is set to come out.  Which means that it probably won’t be until next March that we find out whether there are any winners at all in this conflict, or just survivors.