Accel World - Volume 13 - Chapter Aft

AFTERWORD

Thank you for reading Accel World 13: Signal Fire at the Water’s Edge.

I gave this book that subtitle with the meaning of a signal fire going up on the very edge of the border. In other words, the sign of the counteroffensive has been shot up and will pull on into the next volume. Since the Armor of Catastrophe arc took several books, from six to nine, I think the Metatron arc will take at least three, but it might just end up being the same four volumes long. I’m not planning to go all the way to five volumes…No, I definitely won’t! I swear it on the ISS kit shining in my chest!

All of which means that this volume is one in which problems aren’t really resolved (and in fact, they increase in number), but Aqua Current, one of the Four Elements—and who first appeared in the story “The Sound of Water on a Distant Day,” collected in Volume 10—was able to come back to the Legion, so I’m relieved at the long-awaited increase in battle power. And, well, I won’t deny that it’s unfortunate that one element of the character, the fact that she is level one, will be so quickly reversed, although this is an inevitable development given the course of the story (lol). But I would like to be able to tell the story of why she continued to work as a bodyguard and stay at level one for such a long time and her motivations for that in the next volume.

And one other thing in this volume I finally got to write about was the Umesato Junior High school festival, which had been foretold by just its date a fair while back. For the festival, I tried to write in a style of depicting the details of an event one after another, something I don’t really do, but I was a little unsure about it, so I put the question, “How does this style of writing work…?” to my editor, and she replied, “Actually, this is the usual in a light novel,” and I thought, “Oh, I get it!” Since basically all the AW heroines are together (for some reason, Kuroyukihime alone isn’t there…), I do hope you had fun with it.

In the Territories in the middle again, as the rival team members, I had the pleasure of introducing avatars that I received during the campaign for duel avatar proposals. Thank you so much to Uda, who designed Blaze Heart, Yuno for Ochre Prison, and Uraomote Yamaneko for Peach Parasol! In putting them into the story, I took the liberty of doing some fine-tuning of the avatar names and abilities. I appreciate your understanding.

When Volume 13 is published, more than a month of 2013 will have passed, and I suppose it will be the time when all kinds of things start to settle down. I’m writing this afterword in December 2012, so I’m looking back on a tumultuous year as I tap at the keyboard.

The Accel World anime started airing in April and finished in September, but with all the preparation, meetings, and writing of small additional pieces, I was involved with the anime version for nearly two years. The hard parts were hard, but I gained so much from the experience. I’d like to make use of all of that to continue to write with the aim of even more interesting stories. I do hope you will continue to have the same unwavering support for Haruyuki and Kuroyukihime and all their friends in 2013 as well!

Reki Kawahara

On a certain day in December 2012