Cooking with Wild Game (LN) - Volume 14 - Chapter Aft

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Afterword

You have my deepest thanks for picking up this book, the fourteenth volume of Cooking with Wild Game.

If you looked at the table of contents then you must already be aware, but the composition of this volume is a bit different than usual. The back portion compiles something called the Group Performance. In other words, it is a collection of bonus chapters written from the perspective of characters other than Asuta.

Unlike with the usual Intermezzo or Aperitif chapters though, these ones are significantly related to the contents of the main story. If I had to say, I would explain it as them being a portion of the main chapters, just from a different point of view.

As to how things ended up this way, when this portion of the web version was being published, the majority of the new chapters were considered bonus stories. Having finally finished the long Cyclaeus arc, I wanted to try writing some sections like this for a little while before beginning a new part of the story.

With that in mind, this volume would have been almost entirely bonus stories, but for a variety of reasons I also wanted to begin the new arc right away, which is how I ended up with this composition of continuing both simultaneously.

On top of that, this Group Performance section ended up being quite long. All together it totals up to thirteen stories, which would be enough text for 1.6 volumes.

In terms of the contents, the core ended up being about the period of time not written about in the main story.

In the story itself, around a month and a half passes between last volume’s epilogue and the prologue this time around, so it’s a variety of stories told from the perspectives of other characters during that blank period.

However, a number of other stories outside of those were also included. For example, the story The Youngest Ruu Son’s Little Adventure takes place just before the last volume’s epilogue.

On top of that, this time the newly commissioned text also took a different form than usual.

Generally, the extra stuff I write for the light novel version takes the form of Intermezzos written from the perspective of characters other than Asuta, but this volume was full of content like that already. If the new part of the story was more of the same, then the main body of the novel would have been a little too thin, so this time I added something to the core part of the story instead.

Chapter 2: Woven Bonds from the main story was entirely new content. Since there was a one-day gap between chapters one and three in the web version, I went ahead and inserted a new story into that gap. In terms of size, I believe it amounted to around thirty-eight pages.

At any rate, I was thinking of using the same structure for the next volume, and then inserting the remaining Group Performance chapters where appropriate after that.

Included among them are some that don’t have much to do with the main story’s contents, so I hope you’ll look forward to those like normal bonus chapters.

I ended up spending this whole afterword explaining the Group Performance... I believe that the first volumes of the manga version should also be on sale alongside this release. I would be truly glad if you all look forward to that version, which is also handled by this work’s illustrator, Kochimo.

As always, let me finish by giving thanks to my editor at Hobby Japan, my illustrator Kochimo, everyone else involved with the production of this book, and of course all of you who purchased it.