Toaru Majutsu no Index: New Testament-Volume 9, Afterword

To those of you who bought one volume at a time, welcome back. To those of you who bought them all at once, welcome.

This is Kamachi Kazuma.

Ideally, every incident would end in a single volume and the only exception would be the occasional two-parter, but here we are at the middle of a three-parter. As you know if you have read the volume through to the end, the next volume will be a boss rush of all the monsters Kamijou has dealt with thus far!! You can look forward to seeing a high school boy’s actions after he carelessly makes an enemy of the world for the sake of the troublesome circumstances of a single girl!!

Anyway, this volume was completely focused on the battle with Othinus. I was wondering what a battle with a god would be like. The simplest and flashiest method would have been to have her call in an army of the monsters and gods from her mythology, but then I wondered if keeping things simple was the way to go if it’s supposed a battle against an existence known as a god.

As a result, I decided to smash both the chronology and understanding of the protagonist to pieces. I will be deeply moved if you felt you could never win against that.

On the other hand, simply writing a battle that leaves no hope is not enough, so I gave Kamijou a strategy that is based in a familiar concept. That is why I used RPGs and retro shooting games as examples. ...After all, this is a story of a lowly human challenging a god. Rather than a head-to-head competition of tricky logic, I thought having Kamijou bring out this “common” sort of thing with a serious expression would create a contrast between them that shows his high school boy side.

After repeating the loop for thousands or even tens of thousands of times, Kamijou has quickly reached the position of a martial arts master in a kung fu movie or an ancient little girl that speaks like an old woman. But I figure Kamijou’s personality and manner of speech would stay the same even as an old man, so I had him make it through the entire thing with no real change there. Of course, if he was an old man and still acted so energetically, that might give him the position of a martial arts master in its own way.

And just as the Will said in the novel, this truly became the story of Kamijou fighting for his own sake. f𝚛e𝚎𝘄𝒆𝚋𝚗𝚘ѵ𝑒𝚕.𝑐𝘰𝑚

Can Kamijou Touma never make any selfish demands?

He had to ask that question after being driven into quite an extreme situation. I thought I would show his human side in a story like this and I felt it was fine to finally show him crying, but what did you think?

I must thank my illustrator, Haimura-san, and my editors, Miki-san, Onodera-san, and Anan-san. I used many different methods to destroy Kamijou’s sense of good and evil and his comprehension, so the illustrations had to be really difficult. I am thankful that they stuck with me.

And I must thank all the readers. I was finally going to have a Magic God going all out, so I wanted to have a type of battle you couldn’t see otherwise. What did you think? I just hope you enjoyed it.

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.

Okay, everyone. It’s time to see a truly lovestruck blonde-haired, green-eyed goddess.

-Kamachi Kazuma𝐟𝙧ee𝔀e𝐛𝓃𝐨𝚟𝑒𝗹.c𝗼𝚖