NOVEL NEXT Volume 18, Afterword
Volume 18, Afterword
If you’ve been buying one volume at a time, welcome back. If you bought them all at once, welcome.
This is Kamachi Kazuma.
This will be the 18th volume since New Testament began. After biding his time, it’s Aleister Crowley’s time to shine. But instead of the straightforward power of a Magic God, I focused on the strength he had built up “as a human”. After all, he’s the leader of Academy City, so of course he’ll have some largescale gimmicks and I wanted to build up the one large stage that has been present throughout the series.
Crowley is treated very differently depending on the book you are reading and some of them highlighted the more mischievous (can you really call it that?) stories introduced in this novel. People having a variety of facets depending on what part of them you look at is an important pillar of thought in this series, but I think Crowley is the greatest example of that.
Whether he succeeds or fails, the result is always pointed in a single direction. Without letting his surface emotions get the better of him, he is always looking to his Thelema, the will hidden deep in his soul. Simply put, whether he wins or loses, his emotions remain unmoved and he continues calmly toward his goal at the exact same speed. That makes him a truly cruel enemy for a battle series and I also wanted to show the strength that symbolizes his life of setbacks. But what did you think?
...The Battle of Blythe Road that appeared in this book was an internal conflict in which the leaders of the world’s largest magic cabal fought for supremacy in the foggy city of London. It sounds full of romance when you look at that explanation, but the actual events and result were apparently a complete mess, so I changed things a bit to push it more toward the fictional side. (Not to mention that the “real” magic they used was not the kind that let them shoot fire or fly around on a broom.) I thought it would be best to shift the timeline and make the daughter the cause. If you’re interested, it might be fun to look into the details for yourself, but I will say you might feel disillusioned after learning about that struggle for power.
I give my thanks to my illustrator Haimura-san, to my editors Miki-san and Anan-san, and to Itou Tateki who I had work hard creating the overall image of the stage this time. With the stage and the enemies, I think there were a lot of fairly amorphous things in this one. That must have been extremely difficult to illustrate. Thank you for sticking with me.
And I give my thanks to the readers. In a way, this volume returned to the basics and I tried to give it a structure that summed everything up with a battle in the end. I hope you enjoyed it.
As reference material for the magic in this volume, Magick in Theory and Practice (by Aleister Crowley, translated by Shima Hiroyuki, Uematsu Yasuo, and Eguchi Koretaka) and Liber 777 (by Aleister Crowley, translated by Eguchi Koretaka) were very useful. Thank you for the excellent reference material.
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’ve taken a liking to the double high-class ladies. Combining is the romance of men. Learn to appreciate it.
-Kamachi Kazuma