"What the hell is going on?"
That's my line.
This felt like we skipped 2 or 3 chapters to get here, then the author said "screw it, I don't want to spend another 4 chapters going through all these plot points" and crammed them all into one here. Gudal escapes and somehow in an insignificant amount of time gets to Noel's village. Sara and Gudal have a whole fight inside like 30% of this chapter, a mystery new woman shows up and gets killed/turned into a massive evil god dragon thing, hints at a larger conspiracy that hadn't really been properly set up before, makes some comment about the sword that was sort of alluded to in the bluntest/sloppiest way, and now it's like there's a big new threat that doesn't feel built up to or earned.
This was "then some stuff happened. <scene missing> and here we are." the chapter.