Wortenia Senki (LN) - Volume 20 - Chapter Aft

Afterword

I doubt many such are readers left, but I welcome any new readers who picked up the series with this volume. To those of you who have kept up with the series since volume 1, it’s been four months since the last volume in March. This is Ryota Hori, the author.

In July, we released volume 19. Four months have since passed, and to my relief, we were able to release this one in a timely manner. We have finally reached the monumental twentieth volume.

Twenty volumes... Honestly, I didn’t expect we’d last this far. I had a general outline of the entire story, but if I were to calculate the road there, I’d say we’re about halfway through? If this were mountain climbing, we wouldn’t be at the peak yet, but if you look down, you’d be surprised by how far we’ve traveled.

As poets often say, it’s amazing how far we’ve come. After the initial failures of Wortenia’s first publication, I seriously believed I’d only see this series to its conclusion in the web novel version! I was very worried then, so I’m truly grateful to the fellow author who introduced me to the publishers at Hobby Japan. In fact, I still see that author fairly often, so one could say we’re still on good terms.

Luck is a strange thing in how it brings both good and bad to us. In the four months since volume 19, good and bad things happened. The controversial Tokyo Olympics, the explosive rise in COVID cases. Truly, there was no end of things to talk about.

But what shocked me the most was the case of the Moderna vaccine vials that had foreign substances mixed into them, which I only heard of after I took my second shot of the vaccine. It turned out the vaccine I got was among the ones with the substances in them.

When I saw the news, I felt all the color drain from my face! The news didn’t go into what those substances were, and since we got the vaccine in our workplace, our company had to send a heads-up email.

Maybe because it was my second shot, the spot where I took the vaccine turned red, and I got a fever, which only made me more concerned! There wasn’t much I could do, and a few days later, it all passed. I was back to normal, and it turned out the dose I took didn’t have foreign substances in it. So that was a relief.

Do look after your health, everyone. Really.

But let’s put such dark topics behind us and review the volume’s highlights, as always. In this volume, Queen Lupis’s northern subjugation army is cornered. A large army means more work to worry about, and just gathering soldiers doesn’t mean they’ll function properly. In other words, a large army can be much more fragile. But our trusty protagonist set things up that way, the schemer that he is.

Also, the dark elves played a major role in this volume. They got to fight on the front lines and show their worth, but they flourish when working behind the scenes. Expect to see the dark elves take center stage in the future too. Ryoma’s country can’t exist without them, after all.

The last point of interest in this volume was Rodney and his decision. His choice lays the groundwork for the next volume, undoubtedly becoming a turning point in the story. Do look forward to seeing how it pans out.

Finally, I’d like to extend my thanks to everyone involved in the writing of this volume, and to all the readers who picked it up. In the next volume, the long-running rivalry with Queen Lupis will finally reach its conclusion...

Probably... Surely... I believe.

Vague promises aside, I intend to continue working hard for this series, so please continue supporting Record of Wortenia War.