I admit my statement is completely subjective, but if you listed the major events/things that progressed the arc it would look like this:
- Kara states they lost the "vessel"
- Old dude gets barbecued
- Naruto reveals his new ninja tool hand
- Konohamaru finds the "vessel"
The pacing itself was fine, as I said I thought this was a solid chapter through and through, but I'm more so talking about progression rather than pacing. 4 major events within 45 pages seems a few too low for me when the wait is 4 weeks per chapter. By comparison, Naruto was weekly and had roughly 15 pages per chapter, yet 1 major event was the bare minimum for each chapter but the wait was significantly shorter. It may seem logical at first that if the weekly chapters had 1 major event then a monthly chapter having 4 seems fine, but at the end of the day you are still waiting 4 weeks per chapter and when the wait is that long it can begin to feel like the story is progressing at a snails pace.
To put it in context, the first dozen pages or so of this chapter is Kara essentially having small talk among themselves. The only thing of relevance that we learn is the fact they lost their "vessel", everything else is either too cryptic or essentially nonsense. Likewise, the chapter also spends roughly a dozen pages or so to show us Naruto and Boruto fight. I'm not going to say I want the fights to be shorter or anything, but if the whole point of that fight was simply to show us Naruto's new hand I think there could have been other more efficient ways to show us that.
