The new chapter 40 giving Miss Miyadeguchi a new title is kinda suspicious since she's already had one before. In universe she's called the Eternal Criminal (not a title), the Jailbreak King (back in her intro chapter), and now Casuality of the Great Barrier. Kinda interesting cuz unlike the Various Kasens, it's not like she's transformed or anything. But at any rate title are either for flavor most of the time, or a bit descriptive of what / who such or such person is : we already know that she's got an issue with the Hakurei Shrine, Reimu, Gensokyo, and is not a super big fan of the Youkai filth, but directly mentioning the Barrier as something related to her surprise early retirement is pretty interesting (like, is the first title for her as a vengeful spirit while the 2nd one is for her as a Hakurei no Miko ?)
Like, what's her relationship towards it ? Is it something she cares about or not ? If yes, then is her grudge towards Reimu due to Reimu not doing a good job towards it, or if no, is it because it actually turned out to benefit the youkai that she's enemies with and she got pushed out of the way despite her good services ? I think it would be interesting and make her grudge more personnal if she turned out to have played a big and direct role in the creation of the Barrier : imagine your creation getting perverted to serve the interests of your mortal enemies : that would be a twist.
At any rate, regarding the chapter 40, dunno how it is for everyone else, but some of the action is not very clear to me : is the black storm thingy spewing oil from which vengeful spirits spawns ? Did Okuu's big attack wipe the black storm plus a respectable chunk of the invaders ? Plus I can't quite understand the scale + effect of the attack : Reimu just had a short chat with Marisa before going back in : did they get far enough for the explosion's aoe damage not to reach Marisa and friends ? Cuz depending on how things went, I feel like the escalation from the previous chapters might have gotten handled right there.
And back to the action, while I MUCH appreciate a shounen-y approach instead of the usual (like, DECADE kind of usual) slice of life approach, we don't really have a power system or a even power scale to base the action around of : in game, the player uses a combination of strategy and skill to get by, but it's a bit different here. We don't see why Utsuho would decide to go for a self-harming attack instead of keeping at Reimu like how she previously did ; we don't know what's Reimu's plan to deal with Okuu instead, she just keeps going at her (what would she have done if Yukari didn't chip in an gave her a barrier ?) ; we can't really be sure about where the girls bottom line lies : how much punishment can they endure or deal. While it's nice that we have proper action sequences, I feel like the lack of instropection or planning from the girls make them not so much clever, and its a lot of flashiness and less substance. I hope Miss Miyadeguchi is gonna be defeated because of something pretty deliberate from the main girls, not just because of getting overpowered by the heroines. I don't want the bad guy to lose because the plot has decided that she loses in order to progress, I want her to lose because of a deliberate set of choices / strategy from the main girls (especially Satori, c'mon you can do it)
And about Miss Miyadeguchi's action, this one kinda weirded me a bit. On a surface level, possessing Okuu gives her a MASSIVE firepower boost and make her a dangerous threat towards Gensokyo, but past that, I think there are some considerations to be made : there WERE more opportunities to go after Reimu (with the element of surprise) before, but she hasn't. So why now, with Okuu ? Was she waiting for her to be weakened ? Or to use her firepower to deal REAL damage to Gensokyo ? Or is there some bigger purpose ? She has already possessed Sakuya and Yukari before, if the main idea was to get a powerful possessed person to fight Reimu with then it's just weird that she'd do so now instead of then.
And still on the topic of possession, in the MoF arc, we've seen Miss Miyadeguchi struggle with electronics cuz possessing Nitori didn't give her Nitori's expertise, while in the UFO arc, one of the main idea was that forcing a fight would allow to check people who don't correctly use their abilities in battle : so, possession clearly doesn't give all the faculties of the possessed : so regarding Okuu's possession, what's the main idea ? Cuz if she's suddenly super proficient with her big boom related abilities, it pretty much take away from established vengeful spirit possession mechanism lore we're told by this manga : I hope ZUN's not gonna throw these away for the sake of a big battle, and that there'll be a bigger meaning behind Okuu's possession.
No real takeaways besides Satori's ability being used to skip dialogue cuz straighforward action chapter, but I've seen some people referring to the Kawaii uguu ~☆ Kappa from before as Fani-chan, how do we feel about this nickname, gentlemen ? Cuz it's been a long time since an unnamed character got a fan nickname so it's something that might be worthy of consideration