Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume7 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 focused on Academy City at New Year’s. I hope you enjoyed the strange scene of everyone visiting a shrine in a city of science. And once you were tired of that Japanese meal, I supplied a Western meal with the Bridge Builders Cabal Consulate.
Come to think of it, it might be unusual for me to have three days pass in a single novel.
I used Aradia, the Bologna Succubus, and Good, Old Mary in Volume 6 to give you a baseline for how strong Transcendents are, but here in Volume 7, I feel like I focused more on what makes them unusual. Their idea of mechanically deciding to save anyone who meets conditions A, B, and C is actually the complete opposite of Kamijou who will reach out his hand even without a reason to do so. …I also had Kamijou himself shift up a gear by saying he would find a reason if he didn’t already have one.
I felt like Good, Old Mary could seem too much like the frog-faced doctor if I didn’t use her right, so I made sure to mention in the novel how they differ. The frog doctor fights only to save lives, which I feel makes him something Good, Old Mary couldn’t be even if she tried since she is also a powerful fighter. Think of it like a multitool being convenient, but it can never be treated like a simple corkscrew or screwdriver when one of its tools is a knife.
Also, the Bridge Builders Cabal is a gathering of Transcendents who carry tremendous destructive power but whose bodies aren’t necessarily sturdy enough to survive that power, so I think they would have more accidents than a normal magic cabal. Like someone blowing themselves up by failing to sufficiently restrict the backlash of their spell or someone’s head getting caved in during a boke and tsukkomi routine. In that sense, mama might just be one of the most valuable people in the organization. …Would that make her more like the Dagda even though she’s a mama character?
I think another important point this time was the Accelerator family and the Aleister family. One of them is having a normal heartwarming time, but the other is growing more and more bizarre. Not one of that group is a normal human, not even Aleister since he’s borrowing the body of a great demon! But maybe it’s a testament to Aleister Crowley’s broadmindedness that he fits right in there. I mean, can you imagine him getting along with a normal person?
I give my thanks to my illustrators Haimura-san and Itou Tateki-san and my editors Miki-san, Anan-san, Nakajima-san, Hamamura-san, and Matsuura-san. January 1 is a day for dressing up!! That and all the Sisters walking around in Academy City couldn’t have made it easy. Thank you again.
And I give my thanks to the readers. Happy New Year! It’s January 1!! Now, the shrine visit is a standard event, but it’s surprisingly hard to make it cute. Kamijou ended up buried in identical girls begging for New Year’s money and the Tokiwadai girls were dressed in furisodes, so I hope you felt an enjoyable atmosphere there. Anyway, thank you.
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 love how easy it was to get Tessou to show her true colors.
-Kamachi Kazuma
