Why does Nioh 2 freeze for 0.6s before intense combat encounters?

Before combat, the loading screen froze for 0.6 seconds, which is an absolute nightmare in a game this fast. I tried installing the game on a SATA HDD, but loading times tripled to 45 seconds and the stutters persisted. I used the GamePP NVMe Queue Depth Config to set the depth to 2048. CrystalDiskMark confirmed 4K random reads rose to 60-68MB/s, while HWiNFO measured temps at 40-45℃ and CrystalDiskMark tracked fan speeds stable at 1200-1400RPM.