Editing Sorcery Hacker:Volume1 Afterword

==Afterword==

And with that, welcome, everyone. This is Kamachi Kazuma.

There are a lot of different kinds of magic, but this story came about when I was wondering if I could come up with a lot of magic ideas based on guns. For example, what would be the difference between handguns and rifles if they were loaded with the same magic? And how would I set up the magical setting to demonstrate the different effects between a shotgun and a grenade launcher? It was fun thinking up the effects like self-replication and amplification.

Then I wondered what kind of irregular power I could give the main character and that was how I came up with the idea of a Sorcery Hacker who can hijack any kind of magical product.

The focus on those two things may have given this story a strange cyber feel despite being fantasy. I just hope it gets as popular as the mistaken ideas foreigners have about ninjas and geishas.

There are a lot of ways to make a setting feel like a different world, but I thought I could give it a natural environment with ordinary horses and cows but invent my own units for anything using numbers. I hoped that would give it the confusing feeling of traveling overseas and seeing everything measured in miles or pounds. And by adding magical terminology into the familiar concept of the internet, I hoped to give it a strange lived-in feel.

Instead of using wheels, I gave the sorcery vehicles an insect or arthropod motif, but that is just my usual tastes showing through. Maybe this is a continuation of what you can see in my works published by a different label: A Certain Magical Index’s Five Overs, Heavy Object’s Water Strider, The Zashiki Warashi of Intellectual Village’s Tselika-possessed mech, Unexplored Summon://Blood-Sign’s Repliglass, and so on.


And the aforementioned Sorcery Hackers are the ones who wreak havoc in this world. By giving them crystal tarot cards, dice, and other fortunetelling tools instead of a computer or phone, I was hoping to show them staring at a screen and “manipulating a language only specialists can read” while also giving it a fantasy feel.

Hackers freely take control of devices and data without revealing their identity, so they hold a strange position a lot like the privileged class structure most commonly represented by prisoners and jailers where information only moves in one direction. I wrote Ayato while hoping everyone would sympathize with his obsession with the truth despite having an ability based on deception. And while the protagonist has taken on an illegal job while still treating the truth with care, Teleria has an honest and kind nature and yet is forced to hide her identity and true form. I would like nothing more than for you to have felt some exhilaration while reading about that boy and girl relying on each other in combat despite the awkwardness between them.


I give my thanks to my illustrator HIMA-san, to my editors Miki-san, Nakajima-san, Yamamoto-san, and Mitera-san, and to someone deserving of special thanks. They were a huge help with a certain social game and I never thought we would be brought together again like this. A cool boy, a cute girl, magic, guns, humans, demons, knights, thugs, dragons, and sorcery devices. As usual, this included a huge mix of things, so I imagine it took a lot of work. Thank you very much!

And I give my thanks to the readers. The cheap protagonist (the strongest human ranker) works from behind the scenes despite using a sword and the orthodox heroine (the daughter of one of the strongest demons) does not kill despite using a gun. This was a fantasy story, but with a lot of twists in places. How did you like this first taste? I hope it stimulated your love of fantasy even a little bit.


And I will end this here.


I had a lot of trouble deciding between a mermaid or an echidna.

-Kamachi Kazuma

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