Apocalypse Witch:Volume5 Afterword
Afterword[edit]
Apocalypse Witch has reached its 5th volume.
This is Kamachi Kazuma.
This ends the story of Utagai Karuta and the others who started out on a quest for revenge and accidentally ended up the world’s strongest. I hope you enjoyed their final battle as well.
With this series, I tasked myself with creating a new magic system, which is different from Blood Sign where I was creating a new mythology. What did you think of Crystal Magic that uses the conflict between two invisible energies, similar to reading a weather map. With supernatural powers, I think the trick is making something people would want to use themselves with enough room for expansion that they can consider how they would use the power differently if it were them. I hope you felt that here.
I made the final boss a character who manages the energy pouring down from space. The Threat’s supply system was touched on in Volume 3, but I’ve always been fascinated with energy supply networks – including the generation, transfer, transformation, and distribution of power – so I included that idea in the systems used by both Crystal Magic and the Threat. I quite like Transline’s absurd strength that makes her accidentally release deadly energy whenever she laughs. I also think one of the scariest things for people is someone who can’t be reasoned with because the more they like you, the more they want to kill you, but what did you think?
I think Transline’s defeat came from the fact that she didn’t see it as a fight. If she had understood how her opponents viewed her actions, the battle might have ended differently.
Also, I ended this with the protagonist team each going their separate ways toward the future. I think that might be a first for the series I’ve worked on. One defining trait of this series is how Karuta, Marika, and Kyouka each have their own separate world they live in, which I think gave things a unique tension. Because they had somewhere else they could go, you never knew when the strongest team might break apart. You might be able to use that in a death game or gambling series where the characters are placed in the same location but they each have their own unique goals to bet their survival on.
Their growth can really be seen if you compare the extreme tension of Volume 1 to Volume 5. At the very least, they’ve reached a point where they can crack jokes while fighting. That seems like a positive change at first, but take that far enough, and they could end up including inappropriate “games” in their battles like the Problem Solvers did.
Through all his fighting, Karuta settled on the idea that they were only the world’s strongest when all four of them were together. That is why their group never broke apart due to arguments during their battles and why they chose to go their separate ways when they needed to eliminate the strongest from the now peaceful world. I think that ability to freely switch their strongest status on and off is their biggest difference from the Problem Solvers and the Threat. That term “strongest” had been plaguing them like a curse, so they separated themselves from it and found a way to control it. I hope that acts as one possible answer to the series-wide question of what it means to be the world’s strongest.
I give my thanks to my illustrator Mika Pikazo-san and to my editors Anan-san, Nakajima-san, and Hamamura-san. I can never thank you enough for giving such visual color and beauty to such a harsh story. I hope we have a chance to work together again in the future.
And I give my thanks to the readers. This series was meant to dig into the idea of the world’s strongest magicians from the negative side of humanity and I am truly grateful you stuck with it to the end. The series demonstrated the strongest from a number of angles: those taking revenge, those being targeted for revenge, those trying to protect the world, and those trying to destroy the world. What did you think of all that? I hope they will continue to live on your hearts forevermore.
And I will end this here.
…I actually kind of like the fantasy ending too (ha ha).
-Kamachi Kazuma
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