Rokujouma no Shinryakusha!? - Volume 21 - Chapter Aft

Hint: To Play after pausing the player, use this button

Add to favorites

Afterword

Long time no see. It’s the author, Takehaya. This time we’re back for volume 21. As “The Golden Princess and the Blue Knight” subtitle suggests, the story this time is centered on Theia. But while she’s the center of the story, there’s lots more going on around her. As fate begins to converge, I think everyone should get their time to shine. As such, the scale of this arc is probably going to be the biggest yet. I’ll do my best to live up to all your expectations.

As for the contents of this volume, the Corona House crew is leaving Earth and heading for the Forthorthian solar system. Since the stage is set in space, it’s going to be a bit of a different story than usual. As Forthorthe is over ten million lightyears away from Earth, just getting there is going to be an adventure.

But the real star of this volume, as I mentioned, is Theia. I really wanted to give her her time to shine before everything gets too chaotic, so this time around, we have Theia playing lots of roles—from comedy to combat to politics. This volume also marks the debut of two new accessories: Guardian Yellow and Star Purple. In short, I hope it’s a satisfying entry to the series for all you Theia fans out there.

Another important development for Theia this volume is learning that she could have a family with an Earthling after all. The genetic makeup of Earthlings and Forthorthians is close enough to facilitate that. As Clan and Kiriha point out, that should really be impossible. But just like that strange sense of disbelief you might have felt in the first volume when a ghost, a magical girl, an underground dweller, and two aliens all showed up in the same place—something like that doesn’t happen without a reason. I know this is something a lot of readers actually didn’t spend too much time dwelling on, however. It’s “normal” in light novels for a lot of unique characters to come together like that, so it didn’t necessarily warrant any deeper thought. This was a help to me, actually, considering the story wasn’t guaranteed to get far enough to explain everything. If you all had asked too many questions at the start, I might have been in trouble!

Another highlight of this volume is the appearance of Lord Vandarion and Director General Granado, who look just like Maxfern and Grevanas respectively. Because Elexis resembles Dextro, I think some of you may have expected this development. It’s almost like these men have reappeared after two thousand years to make another play for Forthorthe... Will Koutarou really be able to settle the score from back then this time around? I hope you enjoy reading to find out.

Now, moving on, as the story this time involves travelling to Forthorthe, I need to clear up how hyperspace travel over extremely long distances works. I mean the so-called warp navigation being used, where space is bent to create a shortcut via a space-time distortion. It poses something of a technical problem.

Earth is approximately ten million lightyears away from Forthorthe—that’s a 1 followed by seven 0s. And one lightyear is about ten trillion kilometers—that’s a 1 followed by thirteen 0s. So if you’re following, in kilometers, ten million lightyears would be a 1 followed by twenty 0s. In other words, it would look like this...

10 million lightyears = 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers

Looking at that number should make it clear that even a slight miscalculation in the warp would land a ship wildly off course. Hashing it out based on the accuracy of Forthorthian navigational equipment and the warp drive, we’d get a margin of error of about 0.01 percent—which is about a thousand lightyears. So even when aiming for Forthorthe, they could end up in a totally different solar system.

As a result, it’s unreasonable to assume that they’d be able to reach their destination with a single warp. It makes much more sense if warps are used repeatedly. For example, if we pick up from our first hypothetical warp, a second warp would only have a margin of error of 0.1 lightyears, or about a trillion kilometers. And if we try and warp again from there, the margin of error is only ten thousand kilometers, which is perfectly navigable by normal means in a spaceship. In other words, with a margin of error of 0.01 percent, at least three warps are required.

However, that number doesn’t take into account any safety measures. And since you never know exactly where you’ll be exiting with a warp, you definitely want those in place. You wouldn’t want to end up inside of a star or sucked into a black hole or stuck in a storm of comets, after all. So in order to prevent that, you would need to intentionally target a nice, big, empty area that factored in the margin of error. Fortunately, space is so vast that there are countless such areas. That would mean taking indirect detours, however, which would only add to the number of warps needed to get to the intended destination.

On top of that, you need to consider the downtime between warps. I imagine warp drives are delicate pieces of machinery that require cooling, maintenance, recharging, and more—all of which would take time. A car is ready to go again after being refueled, but I think a spaceship would be able to warp once or twice a day at most. Maybe more in an emergency, but it wouldn’t be as safe or reliable.

With that in mind, I decided that it would take about ten days for Theia’s Blue Knight to reach Forthorthe from Earth. With that as my basis, I decided that a normal space battleship would take about fifteen days and a civilian ship about thirty.

Once I had those specs, I started realizing that Forthorthian space travel is measured more so in time than it is distance. Or, at the very least, in number of warps. In short, Blue Knight’s trip home takes ten days, or ten warps. Thinking about all this, I’m reminded that traveling through space is a lot of work.

I’ve been given some more space for the afterward this time, so let’s keep the ball rolling. Apparently, due to technical issues, the total number of pages in the book has increased by sixteen because of the length of the manuscript and where it ended. That means we have to fill the extra space with this afterword and advertisements (ha!).

Anyway, let’s talk about the next volume a little. The crew has arrived in the Forthorthian solar system, but Koutarou, Theia, and Yurika have fallen to the surface of the sixth planet from the sun, Alaia. And where they land isn’t great—it’s a region where the coup d’etat army has a lot of influence. So, to meet back up with their friends, the three of them head for the Pardomshiha territory in hopes of finding allies.

That’s right, this should sound somewhat familiar but also a little new. The plot will continue developing like this, which is why the past Forthorthe arc had to end where it did. Really, you’re getting the real ending to that story here. So for now, just kick back and look forward to the next volume—the adventures of the Blue Knight, the Golden Princess, and the horse’s rear.

Oh, I almost forgot to report on something important! A drama CD was included as a bundled bonus with physical copies of this book, but not digital ones. BOOKWALKER has come to the rescue, however, and extracted the sound data from the CD to add as a downloadable bonus with the digital version. So, for a limited time, this volume comes with the first half of volume 7.5’s drama CD. Since it’s only for a limited time, however, those of you who are interested should hurry.

The offer is limited because this a very experimental trial. This is apparently the first time BOOKWALKER is offering a drama CD for download with book purchases like this. In fact, it might be the first time anyone’s done it ever. Since they’re unsure of the demand and a hundred other complicated things, they’ve decided that permanently hosting the download would be difficult. As a compromise, they’re offering it for a month to try and test the waters.

How things go will determine how things work for future drama CDs. As I’m writing this afterword at the end of November, I personally have no idea what’s going to happen yet. Based on the situation, the limited distribution might not even last the full month. By the time this book is published, more detailed information should be available on HJ Bunko’s and BOOKWALKER’s websites.

But still, BOOKWALKER really has done us a huge service. And not just with the drama CD, either. They tried selling Empress Alaia goods for the first time through the digital version last time. Something like it might come up again, so if you’re interested, keep an eye out.

All right, surely I’ve covered enough pages by now (ha!), so I’d like to sign off with the usual acknowledgements.

As always, I would like to extend my thanks to the editorial department for their help; to my illustrator Poco-san for always coming up with such wonderful illustrations without a whole lot of pointers; and finally, to the readers for always supporting me.