Volume 15, Afterword
If you’ve been reading the volumes one at a time, welcome back. If you had the courage to buy them all at once, welcome.
This is Kazuma Kamachi.
New Testament is already at Volume 15! As I mentioned in Volume 14’s afterword, I think this was another volume of Kamisato Kakeru and those around him destroying the “sanctuaries” that had settled into place in this series. I think I placed most of the main characters in a position where they couldn’t maintain the usual look on their face. The only exceptions are the girls of the Kamisato Faction who (should have) looked most suspect at first glance.
The Kamisato Faction first appeared in Volume 14, so they are quite shallow and I expect a lot of readers thought they were mostly just a symbol. But what they’re doing isn’t that much different what the people on Kamijou’s side do. My experiment for Volumes 14 and 15 was to see how different a character looks if you’ve seen them gradually built up as a protagonist or if you haven’t.
So now that you’ve seen Kamisato Kakeru’s character over the course of two volumes, your impression of his environment may have changed. But as the writer, I didn’t do anything special. The main point is that he “looks” different just by having his character built up like that. ...In other words, this is something that can influence people’s impression of a series as a whole, yet it’s something the writer can’t do intentionally. By building things up, the characters become more appealing and you can dig deeper into the world building. All of that is great, but it also works against you when you’ve built up certain expectations and have “sanctuaries” you can’t move even if you want to. They all start piling up like a falling block puzzle game. This has strengthened my desire to work toward opening up some breathing room in that sense.
This story was set in Academy City and involved a variety of technology, but the overall theme was more related to magic. To be more specific, I took my material from the concept of “sacrifice”. It was touched on in the novel, but people often have a grim view of sacrifices since the idea of living sacrifices has become so prominent. But since we have to specify “living” sacrifices, there are of course non-living sacrifices. I focused more on those.
The most obvious one was Salome, the naked raincoat girl(!?), but I also added in some other characters, gimmicks, and situations that included the symbolism of sacrifice. Combine that with my focus on destroying “sanctuaries”, and this volume may have had an overall ominous atmosphere or unstable image.
For the Kamisato Faction, I tried to use a naming system I hadn’t used in the series before, but...hm. I think I may have gone a little overboard there. Yet when I look in baby name dictionaries, I find them recommending even crazier names as if it’s normal. Is this what they call the flow of time? I try to give my protagonists relatively easy to read names since their names appear the most often, but I’ve started worrying over what qualifies as “easy to read” with some of these modern names I’m seeing.
I give my thanks to my illustrator Haimura-san and to my editors Miki-san, Onodera-san, and Anan-san. This threw in a ton of characters instead of focusing on a single point, so it must have been hard to adjust for that. Thank you very much for sticking with me.
Also, Kasai Shin-san designed the A.A.A. Mikoto Version. He has helped here and there with mecha-related stuff. I get the feeling that none of the illustrators that work with me are your average person, and he is no exception. Anyway, thank you very much!
I also give my thanks to the readers. This story involved drawing on a bunch of past characters and parts of the setting, so it might have been harder to read through than normal. I was trying to create something enjoyable by having everything build up in a positive direction even as the sanctuaries were destroyed. I leave it to you to judge how I did. Thank you yet again.
It is time to close the pages for now while praying that the pages of the next book will be opened.
And I lay my pen down for now.
Is it just me or did Salome actually have the strongest mind?
-Kamachi Kazuma
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