Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon-Volume 7B, Afterword

Okay, that was Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon VII-B.

I believe a book came out recently that said the next part would be the “final part” in the first part’s Afterword, but who wrote that again? Oh, right. It was meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Sorry. I thought I might try being Ujiteru for a moment since that’s so close to my hometown. Anyway, I write the afterword for each book when the first manuscript is done, but I had already finished writing Part B and was thinking about starting on the final part at the time, so I ended up writing that. If anyone overlooked there being a Part B and skipped straight to Part C, I’m really sorry. Not that they’d be reading this here.

Anyway, Part B takes place in the middle of the Kantou Liberation and it has the debut battles for a lot of people, but my image for this “just before summer break to the end of summer break” period is when all the upperclassmen retire from the sports teams and the younger players start rising to the forefront and learning how hard that can be.

Like I’ve said before, there’s a different feel to the Warring States period commanders between the early stages and the late stages. If you think of Nobunaga as from the early stages and Ieyasu as from the late stages, then Hashiba’s era falls in the middle and I think you can kind of see that as the summer break created by the absence of Nobunaga as a teacher to show them how to fight in the Warring States period.

If this is a time for sports, clubs, and free time for Hashiba and the others, then I think this would be the time when people retire and when Ieyasu comes forward to sweep aside the old generation and create a new one.

Anyway, the chat.

“Okay, let’s keep bragging about crimes like before. Last time was pretty bloody, so let’s not do that this time. Keep it cheerful.”

“Hmm. There’s a huge theme park in Tokyo’s colony, right? That one where a beast lives.”

“Yes, there is.”

“Right? Well during high school, we went there not for a field trip but for our third year orientation and I was at the age where I liked to make a show of how boring I found everything.”

“Is there any point in showing off your boredom in a beast’s kingdom?”

“Well, that aside, I was wandering around with the unpopular group when we saw a dancing dog, right? So we all captured it, did the butterfly with it, and threw it in the lake. Long story short, the school stopped taking people to the beast’s kingdom after that.”

“How can you describe something so shocking in so few words?”

He never does anything good. Now, my background music this time was DJ Noriken’s Neonlights. It feels like forever since I’ve listened to Beatmania music. My friend and I used to slap that thing like a couple of monkeys. But this time, I’ll ask this:

“Who was holding themselves the most?”

Next time it really is the last part, so wait just a little longer.

February 2014. A morning of melting snow.

-Kawakami Minoru