Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item Afterword
Afterword[edit]
This is Kamachi Kazuma.
When I wrote the A Certain Scientific Railgun novel, I believe I mentioned in the afterword that I hoped to do that again if I had the chance, but it looks like I got my wish in a somewhat different form. So now we’re still on the science side but with a dark side focus. This is a story about the 4 girls of Item + 1, starring Level 5 Mugino Shizuri!
Any readers who have read my novels or that thing on my official site should be aware that I’ve gotten weirdly hooked on writing four-girl groups. I find Item is just as easy to make use of as Lessar and the rest of New Light on the magic side. This time, I turned back time to about a year prior to Volume 1 of the original novels and focused on the story of Item’s formation. As a side note, that is about when Past Kamijou and Past Shokuhou were having their adventure in NT11, so they’re somewhat linked through the seasonal event.
I hope you will notice the many ways I had fun with the past setting, like showing Fremea before she learned to say “nyah”, showing where Mugino learned to use her scattershot attack, and the mentions of Aneri and the Dragon Motor.
Mugino Shizuri, our protagonist this time, is a difficult girl to work with, but I believe she is a kind person who cares deeply for her teammates as long as no one betrays her and as long as she is not in a crisis situation. She really is the wicked demon lord, isn’t she? She is also like a tiger or bear in that her excessive self-defense instincts can have disastrous results for ordinary people. If you reread OT15 knowing what she originally wanted to protect and where it all went wrong, you might find something new about how she goes on a rampage and bares her fangs against her own team.
And Item was also the enemy this time.
A girl who seeks out impurity because she can’t stand how her pure upbringing has left her out of sync with the world.
A devil-like girl who wants to watch people ruin themselves through the contracts they make.
A girl who cried wolf who is a perfect liar.
A girl who makes sure she is always the one attacking because she is afraid of being attacked.
All four of them were about as terrible as someone can be, but while Mugino’s Item were all facing and charging in the same direction, the Enemy Item all belonged to different genres of crime, so whichever one you found most frightening might say something about your personality.
I give my thanks to my illustrator Nilitsu-san, to my editors Miki-san, Anan-san, Nakajima-san, Hamamura-san, and Matsuura-san, and to Fuyukawa-san and the Daioh editorial department. I am deeply moved that I received permission to write an entire novel about not just the science side but the dark side. Grasping the unique atmosphere of high-tech Academy City’s delinquent girls couldn’t have been easy. Thank you for going along with that and all the other gimmicks I included.
And I give my thanks to the readers. What did you think about this story focused on the dark side, which normally remains hidden but definitely exists somewhere in Academy City? Not one of the people in this book could be one of the good guys, but they still risked their lives and fought with all their might. I could not ask for anything more than for you to have found one of them who you sympathized with. Thank you.
It is time to close the pages for now while praying (once again even harder than usual) that the pages of the next book will be opened.
And I lay my pen down for now.
Wow, when you list it out, there really aren’t many Level 5s not involved in the dark side…
-Kamachi Kazuma
