Manga: SAO Progressive 7

Sword Art Online Progressive Vol 7 
Rating: 4/5
Buy or Borrow: Buy
Source: Copy courtesy of the publisher! 

The mysterious player Morte has manipulated the human guilds into fighting on BOTH sides of the Elf War! While Kirito challenges him to a duel, Asuna has an important task of her own: steal the battle plans from the Forest Elves so she can end this quest before it turns deadly. They need to stop the war before anyone loses their life--permanently! 

I can't begin to describe to you how sad I was to discover this is the final volume in the Progressive manga, as I've mentioned before, I love this series because it's doing over Aincrad and fleshing it out more like it should have been the first time. I was anticipating this going for a while and I was so ready for that...but nope. This is the final volume. *ugly sobbing* 

There's tension from the start of the volume because Kirito is facing down Morte while Asuna and Kizmel are finishing off a fight of their own. This volume is actually pretty action heavy with a lot of excellently drawn fight scenes throughout from the two different battles. 

To alleviate some of the tension, we do have some humour thrown in too thanks to the humans from the two guilds who get involved but are on opposing sides to each other, and have no idea what's happening. 

Volume 7 goes by quite quickly, and wraps up this particular story arc involving the elf quest and completing Floor 3 of Aincrad, nicely. While it's wrapped up satisfyingly, it's also an open ended finale, as you'd expect because while the manga series ends here, the story obviously didn't.