Dandadan's Dragon Knights Arc Is Getting Bigger — Chapter 245 Breakdown and What It Means for the Endgame

Dandadan has spent the last stretch of chapters deep in one of its most sustained action sequences yet, and Chapter 245 — released Monday, August 24, 2026, a week after Chapter 244's August 17 release — pushes that fight further by throwing an entirely new piece of hardware into the battlefield. According to chapter recaps from Soap Central and AOL, cross-referenced against discussion on AniList and the Dandadan Fandom wiki, Chapter 245 is the point where Kinta's new mech officially enters the fray, and it's worth breaking down exactly what happened, what it means structurally, and how it lines up with the much bigger news that dropped around the same stretch of the series: an official Season 3 confirmation for the anime.

A quick refresher on where the story stands

Dandadan is written by Yukinobu Tatsu and runs weekly in Weekly Shonen Jump, publishing new chapters every Monday simultaneously on Shueisha's Manga Plus and Viz Media's Shonen Jump platform, according to Popverse and Viz's own release schedule. The series has built its identity on smashing genre conventions together — alien abduction horror, yokai folklore, slapstick comedy, and increasingly elaborate action set pieces — around its core trio of Momo Ayase, Ken "Okarun" Takakura, and the mechanically-minded Rokuro Sakata, better known as Kinta. The current fight against the antagonist faction fans have taken to calling the Dragon Knights has been running long enough now that it's become one of the manga's most drawn-out combat sequences, and Chapter 245 is where that fight widens considerably.

What actually happens in Chapter 245

Per the Soap Central and AOL recaps, Chapter 245 opens with Rokuro (Kinta), Bamora, Mantisian, and Chiquitita arriving at the battlefield aboard a newly built vehicle Kinta calls the "Kinta Top Cannon" — a nanoskin-based mech that marks a clear escalation in the kind of hardware the story's supporting cast can now bring to a fight. Their arrival immediately draws the attention of a porcupine-themed Dragon Knight, who questions what happened to her party's advance squad — a detail suggesting that whatever force she was expecting to meet the new arrivals has already been dealt with off-panel, though the specifics of that aren't spelled out in the confirmed recap coverage.

From there, Kinta ejects the cannon section of his mech to dodge an incoming attack from a character named Hase, then transforms the remaining structure into an aerial combat form. That transformation puts him in a position to reinforce Momo and Okarun, who are already fighting the Dragon Knights when the new arrivals show up. It's a fairly clean piece of action choreography on paper — a support character arriving late to a fight, immediately having to defend himself, and then repositioning to back up the leads — but it's also a meaningful structural beat for how the manga has been building out its ensemble.

Why Kinta getting his own mech matters

Kinta has functioned for most of the series as the group's resident engineer and support character, someone whose contributions tend to come through gadgets, vehicles, and technical solutions rather than direct combat. Giving him a purpose-built mech that can eject components mid-fight and reconfigure into an aerial form is a significant expansion of his role in the story's action beats — it's the kind of upgrade that signals Tatsu wants Kinta to be a more active combatant in whatever fights are still coming, not just a support presence standing off to the side while Momo and Okarun carry the fighting.

It also fits a pattern Dandadan has leaned on throughout its run: escalating threats get met with escalating tools, whether that's Momo's psychic abilities scaling up, Okarun's Turbo Granny-derived powers evolving, or now Kinta building genuinely elaborate mechanized hardware rather than the more scrappy, improvised gadgets he's relied on earlier in the series. The Kinta Top Cannon reads as the next step in that arms race, and its arrival mid-battle — rather than being unveiled in a quieter moment — puts it under immediate pressure, which is a strong way to test a new piece of equipment narratively without slowing the fight down to explain it.

The Dragon Knights and the "Six Curses" label — a fan-terminology caveat worth flagging

It's worth pausing on some terminology here. Fan communities, including contributors to the Dandadan Fandom wiki, have informally started referring to the current stretch of the story — centered on the Dragon Knights faction — as part of a "Six Curses" arc. That label is not something Shueisha or Tatsu has published or confirmed; Weekly Shonen Jump doesn't typically release official arc names for its ongoing series the way some other publishers do, and Dandadan is no exception. Readers will likely see "Six Curses" used across recap sites and fan discussion as a convenient shorthand, but it should be treated strictly as unofficial fan terminology rather than an in-universe or publisher-sanctioned arc title. This piece uses "Dragon Knights arc" instead, since that's descriptive of the actual antagonist faction rather than a fan label layered on top of it.

The porcupine Dragon Knight's question is a small but pointed detail

One detail worth sitting with from Chapter 245 is the porcupine Dragon Knight's reaction to Kinta's group arriving — specifically her question about what happened to her side's advance squad. It's a small beat, but it's the kind of line that implies consequences happening just outside the panels readers are shown, which is a technique Tatsu has used before to suggest a bigger, more chaotic battlefield than any single sequence can fully depict. Without confirmed follow-up chapters clarifying exactly what she's referring to, it's not something this piece is going to speculate further on — but it's a loose thread worth watching as the fight continues.

What's still unconfirmed about how this fight resolves

To be clear about the limits of what's confirmed here: Chapter 245's recap coverage establishes Kinta's mech arriving, the ejection-and-transformation sequence against Hase, and the reinforcement of Momo and Okarun's fight. It does not establish how that fight actually resolves, whether the Dragon Knights are pushed back, or what happens to Hase after being dodged. Any of those beats would require direct confirmation from the chapter itself or from more detailed recap coverage than what's currently available, and this piece isn't going to guess at outcomes that haven't been reported.

The bigger news: Season 3 is officially coming in 2027

Layered on top of the manga's current arc is a much larger piece of franchise news. The Dandadan anime has been officially confirmed for a Season 3 premiere in 2027, according to IMDb's news coverage and Crunchyroll's official announcement post, with CBR also covering the confirmation. The announcement came with a new key visual, alongside comments from the Japanese voice cast, and Science Saru — the studio behind the anime's first two seasons — is confirmed to return for Season 3 as well.

What makes the timing notable is how quickly this confirmation landed. Season 3 was announced roughly three months after Season 2 finished airing, which is an unusually fast turnaround for a franchise of this scale. Most anime adaptations of ongoing manga tend to leave a longer gap between seasons while a studio figures out scheduling, sourcing enough manga material to adapt, and production logistics. A three-month gap between "season just ended" and "next season officially confirmed" suggests either that Science Saru and the production committee had this planned well in advance of Season 2's finale, or that Dandadan's performance made the decision straightforward enough not to need a longer evaluation window. Either way, it's a strong signal of confidence in the franchise's momentum.

It's also worth being precise about what hasn't been confirmed here: there have been unverified claims floating around suggesting a specific release-date graphic for Season 3, but that detail hasn't been independently confirmed and shouldn't be treated as fact. The only confirmed windows right now are the 2027 premiere year and the returning creative team — anything more specific than that is currently speculation.

Why the manga's current arc and the anime news are worth reading together

There's a practical reason to pay attention to both stories at once. With Season 3 confirmed for 2027 and Science Saru returning, the anime is going to need manga source material to adapt, and the Dragon Knights arc — running now, in real time, through chapters like 244 and 245 — is exactly the kind of large-scale, high-stakes material that tends to get adapted for anime seasons rather than skipped over. Readers who stay caught up on the manga now are effectively watching the raw material for whatever Season 3 eventually covers, which adds a bit of extra weight to chapters like this one beyond their immediate plot content.

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What to watch for going into Chapter 246

Chapter 245 leaves the Dragon Knights fight in an active, escalating state — Kinta newly airborne and reinforcing the fight, the porcupine Dragon Knight's unanswered question about her missing advance squad, and Hase's attack having just been dodged rather than resolved. None of that points to a clean resolution arriving immediately; if anything, the arrival of new characters and new hardware mid-battle tends to widen a fight before it narrows toward a conclusion. Expect Chapter 246 to pick up directly from Hase's response to being dodged and to give some indication of how the newly reinforced fight is actually going for Momo and Okarun, though — as with everything else in this breakdown — that's a reasonable expectation based on structure rather than a confirmed plot detail. With Season 3 now looming in 2027 and this arc still very much in motion, Dandadan is in one of its more consequential stretches for both the page and the eventual screen.