Toaru Majutsu no Index: New Testament

Volume 16, 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.

New Testament has reached Volume 16!! In the Old Testament, this was around where they fought Acqua, wasn’t it? I hope I’ve been able to make even bigger waves than that, but what did you think of the story this time?

The standard form of an Index series story is to have a magician or esper attack the completed stage of Academy City, so it’s pretty rare to have the entire city conquered by the violence of numbers like with the Elements.

As a combination of translucent crystal and mimicry life forms, the Elements use “invisibility” which is quite difficult to use in manga or anime. But when I researched mimicry, I learned that what looks like it to us is oftentimes entirely useless when it comes to bugs hunting each other or is actually sending some kind of signal between the bugs. You sometimes find the world is a much deeper place when you research something.

The method of dealing with them differed between chapters. Sometimes the characters ran around on the rooftops and other times they slaughtered them with great firepower. By switching between schools and shelters between chapters while remaining in Academy City, I was trying to present the problems and tasks in stages while also showing different faces of the same city, but which chapter’s school and shelter spoke to you the most?

The idea that the holder of the right hand rules over the girls has been spoken of since Kamisato appeared, but it finally rose to the surface at the ending.

And of course we also have Kamijou’s response.

You could say something similar about New Testament 9, but I wrote this while thinking that Kamijou Touma’s courage to say these things (even when he has no realistic basis for it) points to the real meaning in and reason for having him as the protagonist. “I’ll show this piece of shit world just who Kamijou Touma is.” That’s a line he wouldn’t have been able to say so easily in Volume 1. Now, what did you think?

I give my thanks to my illustrator Haimura-san and my editors Miki-san, Onodera-san, and Anan-san. And to continue from last volume, I need to thank Kasai Shin-san for the A.A.A. design. Anyway...Elements! A city full of barricades and wires!! But then there’s the girl’s swimsuits and the A.A.A. variations!! This was probably a difficult volume for the illustrations. I am truly grateful they all went along with my ridiculous demands.

And I give my thanks to the readers. This one was divided about half and half between the characters and the situations (and not the locations so much), but what did you think? Thank you for reading this far.

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.

Hmm. If you let your desire for revenge waver, I guess you’re doomed to “disappear”.

-Kamachi Kazuma

A perfect miniature garden exists to be utterly destroyed.

The world is now faced with a certain problem: Go save Kamisato Kakeru.

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