Featuring one of my favourite girls of the series, this volume easily earns a 5-star for me purely on personal bias :P
Arifureta's greatest strengths for me is the dedication of the author to character development and it's why I am so in love with this series, even if it has a lot of rough spots. This volume really showcases the author's talents with creating really lovely characters, although one can easily summarize this volume as the protagonist adding another girl to his harem. The big difference here is the execution and the way that Shirakome-sensei weaves the dungeon-crawling parts with the blossoming of Shizuku's love to Hajime is one of the parts that makes Arifureta a great read, amongst its peers.
The author also successfully juggles the cast's screentime, writing in a way that really makes you easily imagine all of them together tackling the challenges they face. The action writing is yet another great showcase of his strengths as they are a mix of unpredictable, funny and cool at the same time.
I pretty much blew through this book in 2 sittings under 4 hours, so I'd guess my only problem with this series is how fast I finish each new volume, *sigh*. That said, props to the publisher J-Novel Club for finally catching up with the original Japanese releases. Hopefully when the latest book comes out over there, there won't be too long a wait to see the conclusion to this volume's arc.