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Given I've written about a quarter of my story so far, which defines my characters and world and sets them up for their journey, what is the best way to proceed?
Ask your characters what happens next.
You know where your foreground characters are. You know them well enough to know how they'd react to certain situations. So: set up the characters who haven't turned up yet.
The hero's dad: where is he? Why?
If you want them to meet, set up a situation where that's likely to occur – perhaps put him somewhere where he can hear about the rag-tag team and decide to try to meet them, or where they end up trying to solve the same subplot. (If there's some kind of prophetic destiny thing going on, perhaps have multiple ways they might end up meeting up.)
The former friend: how do they get from "best mates" to "trying to end the world"?
If this is going on in the background while the protagonist's plot is going on – which is sounds like it is – make sure you can follow what the ex-friend was doing during the first quarter of the story.
The strong, unknown enemy "arises"?
Don't just have this enemy pop out of nowhere. Everyone starts somewhere, and the enemy is no exception. How did they start off? How did they attract the former friend's attention (or was it the other way around)? What were those interactions like – did they affect how they see each other? How did they interact with the heroes' wake (and how do the heroes interact with theirs)?
Once you know where everyone is and what they're doing, and know them well enough to predict how they'll behave, sketch out their stories. Don't go for grand narrative arcs; go for "what's this character thinking? What's their plan? What will they do next?". With any luck, your plot will go completely off the rails and start to get interesting.
I say "sketch out" because it doesn't have to be well-written; most of this will just be behind the scenes, unstated character history. And if you want your characters to make different decisions, or meet at exactly the right time, you're still allowed to go back and edit the entire history of the world, or nudge a couple of character decisions slightly (if it doesn't make them act uncharacteristically), or even tweak the characters themselves. You are telling a story, after all; all the world and characters exist solely for that story.
Your Big Bad has goals and values, just as much as your protagonists. Everybody has a price: everybody can be swayed from their plans if they're convinced that something else is better for them.¹ Everybody makes the best decisions they can, given the options they think of at the time and how good they think those options will be. If you write all your characters like this, even when the "camera" isn't focused on them, your plot might end up more likeable.
A downside of writing like this is that it can be hard to get your characters to actually do something you want to write about, without doing so much interesting stuff "off-camera" that all the conflict looks like a big "deus ex machina" / "deus ex diabolica" fight. I haven't figured out how not to do this, other than pushing the characters in appropriate directions (or setting up a rich, creative world and jumping between multiple viewpoints, which I personally don't have the skills to do well), so YMMV.
¹: I don't mean "all your characters have to be selfish straw Vulcans"; by "better for them" I mean "better according to them" – this includes deals like "yourself to die, and the child to live".
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