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Volume 15, Afterword

That was the milestone 15th volume! And it was the first direct sequel!!

This is Kamachi Kazuma.

Part 1 traveled all around the world and ended with the attack on Piranirie Martini Smokey and the Manhattan’s appearance, but Part 2 was Manhattan from start to finish. After Part 1 pursued the secrets of the Martini Series, I tried to shift up to the secrets of the Information Alliance as a whole, but I hope you enjoyed that increase in scale. This time, I started with killing Quenser to take the relationships built up in Part 1 and flip them on their head. I wrote it with the intention to send cute Wraith on a journey while kicking her down into a bottomless ravine, but how did you like it?

I wanted to make sure her salvation happened without her knowledge and on a much greater scale than before. And instead of just the Capulet AI Network, I want to direct a bit of focus on the “true representative” who put together that unofficial priority task instead of ignoring Anastasia Webster’s final request. This was an experiment to show that you can write an emotional resolution without bringing Wraith to the forefront to cry. After all, she knew what her situation would be when she accepted it, so it wouldn’t fit to give her some extra external comfort. I think Wraith is beautiful when she is alone. Let’s hope she grows into a wonderful young woman.

Skuld Silent-Third had just as much focus as Wraith. To be blunt, she is a character from an anime bonus novel, so it was extremely difficult to work her into what you could call the “main series”, but I used that fact to treat her story as a serial killer case that was sealed and thus can’t be found in the normal records (i.e. the books lined up at the bookstore). I wanted it to be enjoyable for people seeing her for the first time while the people who did follow the bonus novel could be something like historical witnesses. Of course, as the author, I’m “in the know”, so it is hard to tell what the exact effect will be, but I hope the people not “in the know” can accept it like the fictional legends seen on message boards. You know, those stories with an odd presence to them, like the Samejima Incident.

Compared to Wraith, she is a true serial killer with no chance of being saved, but serial killer characters have an odd charm that makes the pure dedication to their motive look beautiful. Plus, I added in the shiny image of being a murder fairy. I bet she will continue to be Quenser’s fan in prison.

On that note, I think Venerable Elder Tyrfing Boilermaker was a different sort of character than we have seen in Heavy Object so far. He is polite but violent. He does awful things, but he has an oddly pleasant atmosphere. Since people in the Faith Organization worship him while he is still alive, I pictured him as a transcendent person who is detached from worldly desires. He is quite different from the villains who conspire to earn immediate benefits, but which of those has less hope of salvation? To those of you who were shocked to see his name was Tyrfing: yes, that’s right. I doubt even you expected me to go with something so direct. If you want a sword of destruction linked to Ragnarok, Dáinsleif might seem like the better option, but I couldn’t resist going with the sword that is held by human hands yet cut Odin. And unlike Dáinsleif which is purely a sword of destruction, Tyrfing can grant your wish. Although any dream that can be granted by swinging around a sword probably isn’t going to end well.

I used the word module with him. As you would know if you’ve been closely following my interviews, before deciding on Heavy Object, the tentative title included the word module and that was the name of the colossal weapons. Since this technology could easily uproot the series’ entire worldview, I decided to use the word module again. Motion capture suits that have machines mimic human movements aren’t too unusual these days, but I was wondering if you could reverse that idea and use a movement-assistance suit to have a human perform a godly super dance programmed into the machine. With the wrinkly old man using serial killer techniques and acting like a twintailed little sister heroine, I hope you found the Venerable Elder, who says he has no maturity whatsoever, to be cute. (Of course, even if all the values are correct, the person’s muscles and organs are unchanged, so that old man must be really out of breath and is going to be really sore.) ...Once that technology advances a bit further and becomes mass-produced, it might really end the age of Objects...

By the way, it might be fun to compare the top group of the human-focused Faith Organization with the machine-focused Information Alliance or to compare the old man’s talk of esper research misunderstandings with an example like Putana Highball.

With the top group of the Information Alliance and Faith Organization showing up, the Legitimacy Kingdom and Capitalist Corporations may have looked relatively obedient. But that is only an issue of what part of the world you are focused on. Those two are usually depicted doing awful things, so this just shows that the Information Alliance and Faith Organization are just as bad.

I also focused on Oh Ho Ho. Her identity is top secret, so she had to just barely not directly meet the other characters. I hope you enjoyed seeing the Legitimacy Kingdom and Information Alliance joining forces.

If you compare the Princess and Oh Ho Ho, you might be able to see the difference in their respective psychological maturities as Elites. Of course, given Oh Ho Ho’s actual age, that’s probably about right...

I moved Quenser out of the picture right away this time, so did the type of action seem different from usual?

You should have seen the atmosphere completely change when they regrouped with Frolaytia at the start of Chapter 3 and near the end when that boy appeared again. Just by changing which characters appear, the same world can look very different. The story usually looks so happy because Quenser is an unreasonably positive person, so if you view the world through a more standard fighter like Heivia, he has a more negative understanding of his limits and the world might look like a gray hell. It is fairly important to note that the Anastasia Processor was viewing Quenser with the unaltered viewpoint of a machine when he cheerfully returned to that hell instead of running away.

With Tyrfing, Skuld, and the Anastasia Processor, the breadth of freedom in the setting grew quite a lot toward the end there. It was all to throw Wraith onto an oppressive bed of nails, so I hope you experienced the thrilling and liberating feeling of releasing your hand from the fully drawn bowstring.

I give my thanks to my illustrator Nagi Ryou-san and my editors Miki-san, Anan-san, Nakajima-san, Yamamoto-san, and Mitera-san. To start with, it was 20,000 meters! That’s easy enough to write in text form, but as an illustration it must be a huge pain in the butt and a very costly example. Anyway, sorry about the trouble I cause all of you!!

I also give my thanks to the readers. This was a selfish story structure since you can’t judge this book without having first read the previous one. Thank you very much for enjoying the books so far. I hope you can smile and continue reading through many more experiments to come.

And I will leave it at that.

I just can’t stop making my AI characters so playful...!!

-Kamachi Kazuma