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Volume 1 to Current
GT1 = With that, it’s time to introduce myself anew. This is Kamachi Kazuma.

A numbering reset!! This marks the start of the Genesis Testament series. We start with a shaken world now that the old leaders of Lola and Aleister are gone, and since the numbering has been reset, we might as well make it so you can enjoy the story starting from here.

The special event here is Christmas Eve!! I hear it can be overshadowed by Halloween these days, but you still want to do something fun then, don’t you? The time of year puts it during winter break, but I still included his homeroom teacher and his awful classmate to give it more of a school life feel.

This doubles as a Volume 1 that has to explain the series as a whole, so I included a dynamic esper powers battle and went on to include magic as well. You have to have both science and magic for this series, right?

And the focus was on angels, which are actually focused on a fair bit in this series.

I-I finally used German words in a battle, but don’t laugh! Since they once had their No. 1 Temple in Germany, I thought that would be the simplest hint. Not to mention the R&C name that doesn’t even try to hide it. Although that uses the English spelling. I imagine a lot of people saw it coming from the moment they saw the Table of Contents.

In the battle against Maidono Hoshimi, I think summoning a high-speed unmanned freight train to throw at her enemy stands out above even moving the ground and skyscrapers around. And I thought I could show off her complex by having her insist that her power is stronger than the Railgun in terms of pure destructive power.

Also, I especially like how you can see just how twisted Academy City is in how Kamijou saying that he “certainly wouldn’t want your power” so thoroughly shattered Maidono’s pride. Yes, no one is going to look up to you if you only have destructive power. Who children admire can become a piercing attack when it works against you. And no matter how much money is moving behind the scenes and no matter how much risk of death there is, that admiration is what matters most to the people on the front line. Level 5 and 6 are no more than a standard used to gather admiration based on a common set of values, so they do not always seem like a necessary goal to the people who have seen a wider variety of viewpoints after fighting so many deadly battles in the past.

She cannot use chopsticks.

She cannot do what she had always taken for granted.

That was a bombshell that threatened to eliminate the value of all the pride that Maidono (who was once the class rep who could do everything impeccably) had stored up.

To put it another way, no matter what your official Level is, you win in the end as long as you become someone people admire. Take that into account, and you should have an easier time seeing what Kamijou Touma and Accelerator are trying to accomplish no matter how much it harms them and their everyday lives. There is no reason to push themselves so hard and they could safely retire, but they choose not to. It’s a simple thing, but I think the way they risk everything to have their way is the most entertaining part of the children’s society.

Online fortunetelling and online stores for magic goods might seem absurd, but there are actually some sites just like that. Sending not just your own information but information on your crush seems really dangerous to me, but I guess everyone has different values. Partially because the setting has almost always been in Academy City or London, I thought it would be fun to have a magic cabal run amok using the internet as their base and keeping the location of the headquarters a mystery. This is an age full of dangerous toys like herb mixing and 3D printers. …Just like VR goggles, 3D printers are interesting from a technical standpoint but seem to still be a step away from really taking off.

About Accelerator, this was the answer that naturally came to me when I was wondering what he would want to do first if he gained the absolute authority of Board Chairman. If he had no one standing in his way, he would obviously want to crush the dark side and lower that burden from his shoulders. In NT22 Reverse, he regretted that he could not be the kind of #1 who made a good example for everyone, but that is all the more reason why I think he would do exactly that once he had the freedom to do what he wanted. How did you like it?

And then there was the sticky little girl who came in for the attack. I debated with myself on whether to have her do that last part while still small or in her proper form. To be honest, she would not have appeared in the Prologue if this were NT23. I think it would have been enough of a surprise for her to show up at the end to reveal that the villain who had made a move on him outside of Academy City had now made her way inside the city. But with the numbering reset, I tried to make it work as a single closed loop within this one volume. As far as playfulness goes, she is on the same level or even greater than Aleister and Othinus in their prime, so I do think this was the right answer. It seems wrong for Anna to be seriously scheming in the shadows. But unlike Leivinia who has a playful side but also makes her authority known as her organization’s boss, I wanted to make Anna more decadent and “sticky”. …But in that sense, Fiamma of the Right was more the serious schemer type. Maybe his life went off the rails because he did not have enough playfulness in his heart.

I give my thanks to my illustrators Haimura-san and Itou Tateki-san and to my editors Miki-san, Anan-san, Nakajima-san, and Hamamura-san. This day only comes once a year. Yes, it is Christmas Eve, which has to be a real pain for drawing backgrounds!! …I really am sorry for all the trouble I cause you. I do hope you stick with me, though.

And I give my thanks to the readers. How did you enjoy Christmas Eve in Academy City? On this special day, I do hope you were turning the pages while wishing happiness for the characters. I am truly grateful you continue to read these books after all this time.

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.

You and junk food really are a perfect match, Kamijou Touma.

-Kamachi Kazuma

GT2 = 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 GT3 =