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The wait for Spy x Family season three has been excruciating, but there is good news for fans. Not just that new episodes are on their way in October 2025, but also that the Spy x Family manga continues to deliver some incredible moments. The latest arc of Spy x Family, which includes the most recent Chapter 117, has once again given Yor fans exactly what we’ve been waiting for. If you loved the Cruise Arc in season two of Spy x Family, you have to check out the latest arc in the manga.

It isn’t that the Spy x Family manga hasn’t had some great moments recently. The Love and War arc was the perfect example of how Spy x Family is the M.A.S.H. of anime, but it didn’t really give Yor a chance to shine. The most recent chapters have seen her sent out on a mission to a forest to protect a group of endangered elk from poachers. Of course, since The Garden is a group of assassins, that means killing all the poachers.

This isn’t a solo mission, though. Yor is accompanied by Hemlock, a clearly deranged young man who is desperate to prove that Yor has gone soft thanks to her time with a family and cover story. While she was joining the Forger family and becoming a wonderful mother to Anya, Hemlock was making himself lonely and miserable to make himself a better killer. He has shunned friends and coworkers and trained obsessively, believing Yor had gone soft because she spent time with others.

I’m not going to argue that Hemlock isn’t a very good stand-in for every incel you’ve been forced to interact with over the years (he is toxically angry that Yor might have been making out with Loid this whole time) and I won’t say that it isn’t deeply satisfying to see Yor beat the snot out of him. However, that pummelling only really works because the action is so on point throughout the arc.

Chapters 116 and 117 are basically one long fight and Tatsuya Endo is on the top of his game here. He’s quickly becoming a master at knowing how to switch art styles on the fly and he does such a great job of laying out the action that, even when Yor and Hemlock are at their most frantic, you can still follow their motion. It is not an easy skill to master.

Okay, so I’m also a huge fan of the short hairdo that Yor is rocking in this chapter and I’m a sucker for anytime she goes full Mama Bear because someone has threatened her family, so this Spy x Family chapter was specifically engineered with me in mind. It is a chance for Yor to shine and ponder the work-life balance that the series has always been about. She is once again choosing to be both an assassin and a mother, to have both a professional life and a family life. Rather than being held back by her family, she is empowered by them. She is stronger because of them.

Also, she catches a knife in her mouth and spits it back out at Hemlock, which is up there with the most ridiculously badass things you can do.

Chapters like this are why I can’t stop reading Spy x Family. Do I wish we would get a little more romance between Yor and Loid? Absolutely. Do I desperately need Loid to finally accept that he loves Anya and loves being a dad? Like I need air, my friends. I’m just as eager for Endo to progress the story, but as long as the chapters we get look like this and give my girl Yor the love she deserves, I’m on board.

Each week, Popverse's resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say "greatest," in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included... 

• Why the finales of My Hero Academia, Jujutsu Kaisen, and One Piece feel like the end of an era in manga
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• Why One Piece's Monkey D. Luffy is the perfect anime hero for the dark times ahead
• 40 years after its debut, Dragon Ball is a pop culture force like few others
• Dan Da Dan's most emotionally devastating sequence proves that sometimes words aren't necessary
• Gnosia, the "Among Us meets Everything Everywhere All at Once" visual novel is getting an anime adaptation that needs to be as weird as possible
• Assassination Classroom is a Shonen anime well worth revisiting, ten years on
• Sony is making big moves to own the anime industry by buying Kadokawa, publisher of Oshi no Ko, Sword Art Online, and Konosuba
• 2025 is the year One Punch Man season 3 finally adapts the cosmically weird Monster Association Arc and I can't wait