Toaru Majutsu no Index: Genesis Testament

Volume 2, Afterword

If you’ve been buying one volume at a time, welcome back. If you bought them all at once, welcome.

This is Kamachi Kazuma.

It’s Christmas day! In GT1, I got a lot of ordinary people involved to take a look back at the scale of the city and how its law enforcement works, so for GT2, I had the powerful characters push away the ordinary people to focus on a battle between the elites.

The #3 joined the battle in the previous volume too, but once the #5 shows up, you really see more political power and concern for their surroundings, don’t you? I had her repeatedly change clothing between her school uniform, the nurse uniform, the Santa costume, and the Mitsuari Suit(?), but that was to lighten the overall mood that could have been pretty heavy when done straight, especially as a continuation of the last volume. Lighten up! The one flaw is that using Shokuhou a lot doesn’t leave Shirai Kuroko any room to appear. Hopefully I can find some way to let them coexist.

Shokuhou shines most when Kamijou is around. She might think he ruined everything and she might be angry with him, but that queen’s body still rejoices. I am still learning more about how to use Shokuhou who is basically visiting semi-permanently from Railgun, but I think her cutest point is how she might seem to be cleverly manipulating everyone else, but she fails to notice how she herself is being manipulated. (We never made a joint rule about this or anything, but thinking back, the original novels, the various manga, and the anime all have a lot of scenes of that queen being beaten up and losing badly, don’t they?) She can satisfy both the doms and the subs depending on which side of her you’re looking at, so we’ve really raised one hell of a girl here.

Mikoto and Shokuhou can never seem to get along, but I think their biggest difference in the original novels is whether or not they’re willing to get help from an enemy without any reconciliation. (When it comes to controlling your allies without any explanation, Mikoto is actually in a gray zone herself since she has a tendency to not tell anyone what’s happening and run off to fight on her own, meaning she decides for her allies that they will not participate. It seems to me that she’s so sensitive to having her friends controlled because she subconsciously fears that will boomerang back and criticize her own actions.) In that sense, the rules of the battle change when Shokuhou is around. You might be able to see their distinct fighting styles if you compare GT1 and GT2.

Also, Kamijou’s way of fighting by tearing down the barriers between enemy and ally is different again from both Mikoto and Shokuhou’s styles. He rushes to the scene on his own much like Mikoto, but he’s been doing that for ages without feeling the slightest twinge of guilt about it, so that might be where the difference comes in.

The setting this time was that District 7 hospital.

This may be the first time that place has been the primary setting in the main series. It isn’t the same as his dorm or school, but I wrote the manuscript while hoping it could feel like a place where Kamijou could relax. Did you notice how weird Kamijou is for feeling like the hospital is his home away from home?

And this time I had her use her right hand and him use magic. You could call it the shocking “Wait, did he just use magic!?” counterattack. When I looked back, I realized St. Germain was one of the few magicians who had left the story without being saved, so I made sure to mercilessly save him this time.

What remains at Kamijou Touma’s core once everything else has been stripped away?

In a city where your esper power determines your worth and in a world where everyone focuses entirely on his right hand’s special power, I thought it would be most astonishing for him to display the ordinary power to bring people together. That just seems like who Kamijou Touma has to be. …And being so sure about that is another upside to being able to write this series for so long.

I give my thanks to my illustrator Haimura-san and to my editors Miki-san, Anan-san, Nakajima-san, and Hamamura-san. Christmas ended up lasting more than one volume, so I probably used up a lot of what had been stockpiled for the occasion. Thank you so much for going along with my nonsense every single time.

And I give my thanks to the readers. It is up to all of you to decide whether Kamijou Touma was successful or unsuccessful this time. It took some doing to work out a way to explain the fragmentary information on that era-hopping magician St. Germain, but I ended up really liking him. I hope he will remain somewhere in your hearts. Thank you so much for reading this far!

It is time to close the pages for now while praying that the pages of the next book will be opened.

And I lay my pen down for now.

Writing about flavors is hard too, but it’s so easy to forget about the winter cold if you aren’t careful.

-Kamachi Kazuma

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