This volume ran 120 chapters...
It really was a little long.
But the school arc was only this one volume, and I crammed in everything I wanted to include, so if it ended up long, then long it was.
I was pretty tired writing this volume. I don't really like following the plot, but I also had to rely on the original plot to lock in the timing. That's one of the reasons this volume ended up so long.
In this volume, the protagonist's role was actually the same as Dumbledore's. Both of them were chess players. Neither personally entered the board when it came to the Philosopher's Stone; instead, they indirectly manipulated their respective pieces through other means and played against each other.
It's just that Dumbledore didn't take the protagonist as an enemy or opponent too proactively. His moves were closer to defensive ones, which also meant he didn't put much pressure on the protagonist. It was very hard for me to suddenly have the protagonist jump up and kill him off—that would have made the emotional rhythm wrong.
As a result, the emotional tone of this volume was on the flatter side. However, as the author, I tried to handle a larger plot, tied up Tom's storyline fairly well, and also wrapped the original plot in a shell to create a reversal that looked roughly the same as the original, but was fundamentally completely different. I hope everyone was able to get some enjoyment out of that.
At the same time, because the protagonist was behind the scenes, he appeared too little in this volume. A lot of the page time went to Murphy's chess piece—Tom. Readers who like seeing the original characters would find it interesting, but readers who wanted to see the protagonist would feel