This is one of those: "keep flipping through the pages until something happens, because there's really nothing to get invested over in here".
A whole chapter about fighting grunts? Meh.
What happened to at least trying to doing some set-up and pay-off author...you were doing decently well at that before. At least we had some implication every time before.
Have we seen Cross repeatedly fail at casting or using something as of late, to try and justify this? I'm coming up blank NGL.