10 new acquisitions:

I spent $165 for 10 new SS Memoria -- base Risa, base Mion, eyes Seira, ninja Adelheid, spanish dress Yuki, maid Hisame, santa Misato, ninja Mari, plus two more SS Memoria guaranteed tickets that I'll be getting next week.

The offer was too good to refuse.  If you use sufficient paid quartz, you can have any SS Memoria you desire, with a twist.  You have to choose the 10 you desire most, and you're only guaranteed two of them.  The two I got out of that pool of ten were base Risa and eyes Seira, which certainly isn't bad, but wasn't ideal either.  One of my strategies to beat Apophis is to overwhelm it with healers, but that requires Risa to have her base form's abilities, including Resupply, to serve as one of those healers.

I'll actually fight Apophis with rocket Risa, but the abilities from base Risa are fully transferable.  With this I would have Tama, Risa, Mion and Muua, four healers out of the twelve total seraphs I'm allowed to wield against Apophis.

I'm not sure this plan will actually work, but it's worth a shot.  I need some way to do slow and steady damage to Apophis' nigh-infinite health while maintaining my own dp bars.

As for eyes Seira, I wanted it to inherit base Seira's skill evolved ability.  Base Seira had already received its introjection so it would have been a waste to not pair it with a 2nd exclusive ability like my other skill evolved characters.  Base Seira's ability, Stardust Trajectory, gives up to crit and crit damage to all characters for 5 turns, and it can be used as many times as I want -- which is again perfect for Apophis' infinite health.  If all my attacks crit, maybe I can slowly whittle even Apophis' health down.

These are all long term plans so don't expect any movement on Apophis for months.  All the other SS Memoria I got were also useful, because they were all in various elemental squads already -- ice, light, and dark.  My weaker squads, but still part of my standing army.  Ninja Mari is now at 3.5 limit breaks.  Ten more protean shards and she'll be at max level and ready to rock.  The only problem with Ninja Mari is her ability also adds plus to crit, so it doesn't mesh well with eyes Seira, who can do that better.  And eyes Seira is also ice-element, so I can't just put them in different squads.  *sigh*.

Well, my next protean shards are dedicated to fox Miya, who is also at 3.5 limit breaks, so the issue is currently irrelevant anyway.

Base Mion reaching limit break 1 is basically worthless, but if I somehow were lucky enough to get base Mion up to max limit break, that would give motorcycle Mion +10% to her stats, so conceivably it was useful.

The clock tower expanded a few more floors, so I got the skill evolutions for Adelheid and Karen.  I immediately put both their evolved skills to use, they're pretty good.  With their powerup, I replaced Magicat Tenne with ninja Adelheid in my ice squad and white shirt Megumi with tuxedo Karen in my light squad.  In both cases it was blasters replacing debuffers.  I get the feeling blasters are just plain better than debuffers.  At least in any fights where time is a concern.

As for the event itself, this time it was about Isuzu, who we haven't heard much from until now.  I always liked Isuzu, she was one of my main characters I used for everything at the beginning of the game when I had fewer choices, and she's still a respectable level 3 limit break option even now.  But I didn't know how awful she felt behind her mischievous personality mask.  She'd been carrying this completely unearned guilt with her since she was a child -- that she was there when her imouto Muua was kidnapped but did nothing to stop it, not even make a sound, because she was too afraid of the kidnapper.  Of course she'd be afraid!  She was a little girl and he could have targeted her next.  But from her point of view she'd betrayed her family and no longer deserved their love.  What an awful thing to live with all this time.  Like usual, the event drove me to tears, when she finally confessed her 'sin' and was forgiven by everyone involved, including the kidnapped Muua.

There's no game like Heaven Burns Red.  It makes me cry and cry and cry.  Every character is so lovable.  Isuzu was always beautiful on the outside but now I just want to hug her forever.  But she didn't stay depressed for long.  Once the matter was settled, and the family spent some quality time together looking at a photo album their deceased mother had made of them when they were kids, she immediately began her next project, uncovering the mystery of the narbies.  Squad 31-A already knows the answer, but Squad 31-E doesn't, and Isuzu is getting closer to the truth alongside her partner in 'crime' phantom thief Jamie.  I see a lot of drama forthcoming.

Speaking of Jamie, I used her, Hisame and Inori in my new critical pierce squad against the new score challenge boss and got a new high score of over 600k.  The boss was weak to light, but my light squad only managed a score of 420k.  Critical Pierce -- particularly Inori's critical pierce, is just that strong a mechanic.  Inori did an 8 million damage attack.  It was unbelievable.  If you look at the base damage the ability is said to do and the various buffs I gave her, I wasn't expecting that kind of output at all.  But wow, she really comes through.

It's because new characters keep impressing me like this that I can't settle on a single squadron of six seraphs and call it a day.  I only got Jamie a bit ago, and I only got Inori's first limit break a bit before that, and now look how useful they've become.  Jamie is still at level 0 limit break!

I'm still working on getting Jamie's skills to max.  I only finished leveling all of Yingxia's skills earlier today.  Yingxia was also an instrumental part of my new critical pierce party.  She's as strong as advertised.  There are plenty of skills I need to level and plenty of seraphs I need to level.  Even if Chapter 5 Part 2 really does come out in the summer of 2026, I'll find a way to grind HBR that entire time, because there are still so many ways to get stronger -- and I still need to get stronger if I ever want to beat that side boss in that one event, or Apophis.  Until both those bosses are down I won't be satisfied.