Slayers - Volume 16 - Chapter Aft

Afterword

Scene: Author (Hajime Kanzaka) and L

L: I told you! As long as that chuni soul lives inside people’s hearts, Slayers will always return!

Au: You did say that! In the afterword of the anthology!

L: Humanity and chuni soul are inscrutable things! Even if the “past life” and “special ability” strains die out and it mutates, the chuni disease itself prevails!

Au: Well, I’m not sure that’s what we should be talking about here... But it really has been a while, huh, everyone? This was the special Slayers volume, “A Chance Encounter in Atessa”!

L: A special volume, huh? Isn’t it just volume 16?

Au: Well, I meant it to be a special volume to show gratitude to our longstanding supporters for the thirtieth anniversary of Fantasia Bunko and Dragon Magazine, but... we realized it would be kind of weird if you read it out of context, so chronology-wise, we decided it really had to be volume 16.

L: It definitely has a “class reunion” feel. And you titled it “A Chance Encounter.”

Au: I wanted it to feel like a chance encounter on the street between the old fans and the Slayers story.

L: Do you know if you’ll keep going with it after this?

Au: Frankly, it depends on the reaction to it and the author’s feelings and momentum and whether or not there’s a good video game out at the time and the weather!

L: Those are some very soft standards!

Au: You bet they’re soft! Like pancakes with tons of merengue! There’s been no moment in my life I haven’t lived soft!

L: Blegh! Hearing an old man describe his life like a pancake kind of ticks me off!

Au: You say that, but there’re some nice things that have that old man softness to them.

L: That old man softness? Hmm... Oh! Like pilling on a sweater that hasn’t been cleaned!

Au: I guess that is old-man-like... Anyway, I really am serious about the weather part. I feel like we’ve had nothing but major hurricanes for the last thirty-five years. I’ve been ordered to take walks for my health, but I really need fewer consecutive days when I’ll die if I go outside due to what’s going on in the environment.

L: Ah. That’s right, Author, you take the train to a place with underground malls and walk around there. But the trains don’t run during hurricanes.

Au: I always find myself making excuses not to walk at night, or I’ll walk during the day when it’s not too hot, but... when the walk is over, I get that “whew, that was a full day’s work” feeling.

L: But you didn’t work! Not even a little bit!

Au: Well, obviously.

L: So get to work! One page every day!

Au: Don’t be ridiculous! Maybe faster writers than me can write at that pace, but I’m the same age as Namihei Is*n*!

L: Don’t be silly! Namihei-san put together millions of deals by doing a little each day!

Au: That’s way too much! Of course, he can afford a single-family home in Setagaya, so maybe he does do that much...

L: And so can you.

Au: Have mercy! That said, I do hope to do more. With any luck, the weather will calm down again.

L: Yeah, just be grateful that the temperature differentials aren’t as bad as the surface of the moon. Anyway, I hope you all take care! Look forward to seeing you again!

Afterword: Over

Bonus Translator/Editor Chat!

[Meg/ED]

So... we last left off with the once-finale, huh? As the author mentions in the afterword this time, volume 16 was originally written as sort of a stand-alone quite some time later, so it’s a bit of a fun romp-slash-throwback story.

[Liz/TL]

Yeah, it’s definitely here to give you all the nostalgia, although this being Kanzaka, he can’t quite be satisfied with being completely straightforward in that regard.

[Meg/ED]

Nope, this is far from a victory lap. In fact, the central plot is cleaning up loose ends from over ten volumes ago!

[Liz/TL]

Going back to the Zanaffar from the first arc, with what we know about the Zenafa Armor from the second arc, was a clever way of tying the two arcs together. Like, he sets up elves with transforming armor, so your immediate assumption is that it’ll be a bad guy redux of Mephy. That’s scary enough! But the reveal is that these guys have no idea what Mephy’s village is up to; they bought Zanaffars from the Shabranigdu cult.

Then, when you hear that, your first assumption is “oh hell, they’re all gonna turn into berserker monsters.” But that’s not the case either! The elves have fixed that flaw. So it’s sort of a double fake out, and a nice expansion on the setting—and like with the demon fusion stories, it shows Kanzaka’s dedication to the idea that the world doesn’t just throw out tech or ideas just because they got foiled once.

[Meg/ED]

The idea of a villain Mephy or anything approximate to that is utterly terrifying, so the double fake out is pretty incredible. And it really is an interesting peek into the world to see how another group of elves managed to 1) get their hands on the technology and 2) figure out how to make it work for them. It was fun to go back and think about how this has been in motion since volume 5, not to mention everything else that’s been unfolding outside of our field of vision. Even though this is functionally a one-off story, it fills in a lot of blanks for us...

Including what two of our favorite pals have been up to! I mean, we hypothetically knew as much as Lina did about what Zel and Amelia have been doing. She presumed they were both still continuing their personal quests, and as it turns out, she pretty much hit the nail on the head! But actually getting to see them (namely, that they’re still alive and well) is so, so gratifying. It’s like running into old friends, which I suppose is how the volume got its subtitle!

Amelia is an especially warm and fuzzy case since it’s evident how much she’s grown in the time since we’ve seen her. Lina remarks on this a handful of times, noting her cool new spell and the simple fact that she’s not scaling buildings anymore to yell at bad guys. Zel is arguably more... wistful since he hasn’t made, well, tangible progress in regaining his humanity. This volume is essentially blowing up his best lead at present. But, hey, he’s still kicking and hasn’t given up yet! He also hasn’t lost his edge.

[Liz/TL]

Zelgadis’s part in the story is honestly a little tragic when you think about it. He’s once again stuck playing the villain in pursuit of a total dead end. And it’s not even a new dead end! But it’s at least clear that he’s not the “Mad Swordsman” anymore, as he’s doing his best to mitigate the harm caused by the group he’s thrown in with.

[Meg/ED]

That’s true! He also speaks to some of the big-ticket themes we’ve been working with lately toward the end when he tells us he’s going to stay in town and make right for everything that he’s done, even though it was all in pursuit of a not-evil goal.

[Liz/TL]

Yeah, that sense of taking it one day at a time. Which we also get with Randa. Poor, naive Randa.

[Meg/ED]

My man... We’ve seen some volume-specific side characters get done dirty, but this guy practically does it to himself. You spend the whole volume going, “He can’t be that dumb... can he?” And the answer every time is yes. Yes, he can. Hard not to feel for the dude.

[Liz/TL]

The lack of a twist there is almost what’s shocking. He’s just a completely guileless ordinary guy, making the kinds of decisions you’d expect a guileless ordinary guy to make. On the other hand, he doesn’t die, which I guess is how we know this is a fluffy fanservice story (kidding!)... That said, I was pretty surprised by some of the gruesome fates of the Forest Hounds elves.

[Meg/ED]

There’s a lot of “it gets worse the more you think about it” re: the fates of the Forest Hounds. I have to say, though, I thoroughly enjoyed Lina chewing out Sagan in the end. Nice to see her back in top form after being so rattled for a couple of volumes! (But don’t get me wrong! I like pensive Lina too.)

[Liz/TL]

As a general life philosophy, “don’t get so caught up in anger that you lose sight of your actual goal, which is restoring lost happiness” is probably a pretty good one. But there’s some interesting moral grayness dangled here and there in the volume—the fact that there are people in the city who don’t adhere to even the elves’ compromise agreement, for instance. It’s an aspect that the Forest Hounds don’t seem to care about at all (since they reject even a fully-adhered-to compromise) and that the humans sweep under the rug. So it’s not really dealt with, because nobody in the story has any motivation to deal with it. But it’s still there, even though it didn’t have to be, and I’m honestly a little obsessed with that.

[Meg/ED]

Absolutely. I love that the series plots an axis of “selfish” to “selfless” over the typical flat spectrum of good to evil, then goes a step further by suggesting the sweet spot is really somewhere in the middle. Slayers never really lets you forget that all of those facets exist, and they’re always going to, no matter how you chose to govern yourself.

It never comes off as preachy either, since we see it in practice more than we have it explained to us. But I guess that’s why I like Lina telling off Sagan so much! It’s the closest we ever get to a lecture.

[Liz/TL]

Yeah, I think it just goes back to Kanzaka’s apparent philosophy of wanting the world to feel large and actually organic. And it’s kind of interesting in light of the fact that, although he was writing the original stories mostly back in the 90s and early 2000s, he wrote this one in 2016, where LNs about protagonists completely fixing all structural inequalities in the entire world are at their peak.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that form of power fantasy, of course, but it makes Lina and the Slayers world an even more striking contrast. For all that Lina’s been involved in killing or vanquishing god-level beings, she perceives the world and its structures as too big to fix, or just as not a good fit for her power scheme. That’s maybe why her lecture to Sagan comes off as pretty in-character.

[Meg/ED]

It’s lovely to see Zel and Amelia, and it’s fun to see all the callbacks to previous storylines, but I think my favorite thing about this volume was simply seeing that the heart of the series hasn’t changed.

[Liz/TL]

Yeah. Kanzaka’s still writing his way, and I think we’ll see that continuing on in volume 17.

[Meg/ED]

I think I’ve signed off of the last few volumes on some note of trepidation, but I’m looking forward to the next one. I hear it’s time to take a trip?

[Liz/TL]

It is! Although the trepidation now is now entirely mine... As of this writing, volume 17 is the last published volume in the series. It starts off a new arc, and I have no idea where it’s going!

[Meg/ED]

Wherever it is, we’re along for the ride!