Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume14 Afterword
Afterword[edit]
If you picked them up one at a time, welcome back. If you bought them all at once, welcome.
This is Kamachi Kazuma.
This one was Great Demon Coronzon’s escape!! …As you can tell if you’ve read Item Volume 4 or the Zashiki Warashi of Intellectual Village Volume 6, I actually love writing from the perspective of someone isolated and on the run. And this time it was an inhuman demon. I kept imagining different ways for her to get away while making her look like a powerful enemy. It takes a fascinating villain to make the protagonist shine, s-so it’s not like I was siding with the villain or anything!
My favorite part while writing it was at the end of Chapter 2 when it turned out a normal car was the best option since everyone was searching so carefully for magic. “Normal” does not mean harmless or worthless. It refers to the knowledge and techniques that most people have accepted as useful. Because it isn’t necessarily harmless, “normal” is a dangerous tool that can hurt people. Maybe you said it yourself or maybe someone else said it to you, but haven’t you all at some point heard something like “It can normally do this much”.
For the battle against Coronzon, I used the Crowley-style Magick for flavoring and then ended it with a jinx that naturally formed over the course of Kamijou’s battle. She knew that trump card could win. It had been proven effective. …During the tension of the biggest challenge of your life, would you go for the safe option again or would you decide it was too dangerous to keep using it over and over again? Humans have a tendency toward the former. I wrote this manuscript while knowing I would probably do that myself. Now, for Coronzon’s Dakshina Kalika, I based my idea on terms like APS and hard kill. …I don’t know how accurate these things really are of course, but the ability to shoot down tank shells flying at Mach 5 tells me tanks are turning into something truly bizarre in this age of drones. Although they are apparently more meant as an emergency measure they hope they never have to use. As opposed to the way Coronzon makes herself untouchable so she can approach her target head on, tear down their guard with a series of attacks, and kill them.
On the side of Kamijou’s group, they had a lot of trouble just figuring out how to search for Coronzon who is a pain at the best of times and was now on the run. They couldn’t use anyone as bizarre as Coronzon (with the exception of Alice), but they did have everything they had built up to that point. The biggest problem for me was how to get Kanzaki and the others to listen to the opinion of an amateur like Kamijou…so I used the convenient term of Tsujiura. A form of divination using the first casual thing spoken by someone who doesn’t understand the situation seems like the ultimate tool for dragging an amateur high school boy into the world of magic!!
Also, Accelerator had taken major damage from a remote attack, so I had to deal with that too. For that I used Isabella who didn’t get a chance to shine last time. That said, Isabella doesn’t use proper Voodoo, so you have to be careful there. And if anyone was going to revive the #1, I knew who it had to be, so I sent that control tower in.
The idea that Kamijou Touma is cut off from god’s blessings because he was born with Imagine Breaker and that is the cause of his misfortune was presented way back at the beginning of the series, but it’s important that this gave him a similarity to Coronzon this time. What is the difference between those who rot and those who don’t? I hope you gave some thought to that.
And I used Kamijou’s words to provide a response to Hamazura saying last time that the world is rotten and should be destroyed. Some of you readers may have agreed with Hamazura then. Line them up side by side and you should see the difference between Kamijou and Hamazura’s stances. If you were being reborn in another world, would you want to live in a just world or an unjust world?
And speaking of last time, Shokuhou Misaki was mercilessly left behind then, but she made sure to make the most of it. She only appeared in one scene, but she claimed an event that influenced the ending. In fact, I feel like using her as a secret ingredient like that is the best way to use her in the main Index story, but what do you think?
I give my thanks to my illustrators Haimura-san and Itou Tateki-san and my editors Miki-san, Anan-san, Nakajima-san, and Hamamura-san. The pursuing group contained a large variety of people and Coronzon fled all over the place, so the items and backgrounds must have been a lot of work. Like the steam-powered District 19 or the sliced drone carrier! Thank you yet again for putting up with all this.
And I give thanks to the readers. How did you like this pursuit story where magic and science were all jumbled together? Thank you for continuing to read these books!
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.
I suppose Kingsford also made the most of her situation.
-Kamachi Kazuma