Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume16 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 time I shined the spotlight on Kamijou Touma’s school life. With the Transcendents, CRC, Alice, and Coronzon, he fought a great many battles, but it was all for this. After returning from the dead and being faced with the threat of being held back, it’s about time that pointy-haired boy was rewarded at least once, right!? So I stuck with his school life the whole time. This time it really was a reward with nothing going on behind the scenes! So I let him enjoy a dream-like life with everyone in the girls dorm.
Now, the novels always focus on the serious battles, but this school life is what he should be experiencing every single day. It felt like Kamijou had been fighting for so long he could forget what he was fighting for, so I actually put the most effort into writing the normal, everyday life parts of this one. What is normal? Isn’t the everyday actually the most difficult thing!? It was a trial and error process. That dream-like world shines so bright…
It seems right for Kamijou to have a chance to reconfirm the importance of the things he risked his life to protect, doesn’t it? So much had been going on he needed this time to sort things out.
And while it looked like a normal school life, it also highlighted again the misfortune that has been around since Volume 1.
And since Kamijou had to be living a stress free life, I had Accelerator organize the ominous information related to SYSTEM hinted at in the previous volume. That term appeared frequently way back at the beginning but hasn’t appeared recently, but you did still remember it, didn’t you? Everyone knows about Kamijou Touma’s misfortune, but why does he have so much misfortune? When looking more closely into that, something spanning the entire world may came into view.
Then there was the Hamazura part. He’s the third protagonist who isn’t Kamijou Touma or Accelerator. …So doesn’t this seem like a good path for him? That’s why I had him unleash a roar at the end. He already used magic once to save manipulated Takitsubo and shattered Dion Fortune. I had a lot of ideas for his magic name, but I ended up going with her name. Hamazura doesn’t seem like he would have a wide vocabulary, so I thought something simple would be best.
One idea was for him to go through a flashy awakening last volume and use magic against Kamijou, but Kamijou himself used magic with St. Germain… It didn’t seem like it would have much of an impact there. If I was going to do this, I wanted to do it where it would shine brightest! So I had him use it against the eleven, who had confused the means with the ends, and with Narthex, who was being manipulated by Coronzon’s power.
In the last volume, I described the source of Hamazura’s sharpened senses as a power bringing him closer to death.
Hamazura can’t partially regenerate himself the way Tsuchimikado can. Acting cool and using magic as a secret trick is great and all, but he will have to face the cost of his actions, so you can look forward to that.
Then there’s Aleister. Yay, I finally did a German language supernatural battle! …I knew this had to happen eventually when I introduced Anna Sprengel. The Girls come from a variety of different languages, so I went with a German one for the third. This one tramples over all forms of numbers-based violence. If you think of the power wielded by the Roman Catholic Church in the latter part of the old series, it should give you a good idea of how irregular she is.
On the other hand, Index actually directly boosts her strength through the large numbers with her 103,000 grimoires. It might be a fun mental exercise to consider the pros and cons of The Girls who have been revealed so far: Index, Narthex, and Reflex.
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. Draw an enjoyable and uneventful school life. That seems like a difficult task in and of itself. Thank you for sticking with me again.
And I give my thanks to the readers. Turning the stomachache-inducing entrance exams into a sort of festival seems very Academy City, don’t you think? So I wrote that super busy mid-January time in my own way, but what did you think? Thank you so much for reading this far.
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.
Remember, everyone! This series is supposed to be a school story!!
-Kamachi Kazuma