Toaru

AFTERWORD For those of you who have been reading every volume, I’m glad to see you again. For those of you who bought all nine volumes at once, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Kazuma Kamachi. I get the feeling I’ve been throwing curveballs at you every time, and this one’s another curveball. You’ll have to read the book to find out what makes it one. The occult keyword of this book is an attack on some pretty fundamental concepts. Everything that showed up was something that has already shown up in past volumes, like grimoires and magic circles. The Daihasei Festival sets the stage. It’s basically a super-giant athletic meet. How did you like it? I personally had completely forgotten about athletic meets. What kinds of games did they play again? Is there a difference between what kids play now and what they used to? Those were some of my concerns as I wrote the book. I do hope the athletic festival feel got through all right. I’d like to thank Mr. Haimura for his illustrations and Ms....

They’d probably filled in the remaining height and width with something else to keep the Stab Sword looking rectangular. You could wrap it in cloth all you wanted; if the sword’s shape stuck out, everyone would pay attention to it. He knew using the Imagine Breaker’s power would destroy the sword. First he decided to unwrap the cloth. He needed to have visual confirmation that he had destroyed what was inside. “Urgh…! What is this? It’s really…hard.” It was camouflaged as professional packing, so the white cloth was wrapped very tightly around it. The knots looked complex and technical; he couldn’t begin to imagine how to undo them. It wasn’t made out of string, either, so he also couldn’t rip it apart with his hands. With no other option, he tugged on the fabric. After a little while, he could feel the wrapping start to loosen. Once the one part got loose, the entire white cloth lost its firmness. He began to peel off layer after layer. Whatever was inside, it was coming more and mor...

CHAPTER 4 Shall the Battle End In VictoryBeing_Unsettled. 1 Stiyl Magnus sat on the ground in the automatic bus service facility. Periodically and for a while now, technicians checking on the maintenance machines had been coming and going, but Stiyl seemed to be right in a blind spot for them. No one had noticed him there. Normally he wouldn’t have to worry about this if he’d been able to use an Opila rune, but at the moment, he couldn’t. My trump card gone, and this is how I end up? I just never learn… He exhaled bitterly. Thinking back, the same thing had happened when he used Innocentius to attack Touma Kamijou at the end of July. Immediately after losing his trump card, he would get weaker. He’d put in a lot of effort to reflect on that, but basically all he’d come up with were methods to prevent his trump card from being lost—like using illusion-based evasion magic tactics or laminating his rune cards. He felt now like he’d neglected to consider the more fundamental issues. Can yo...

CHAPTER 3 Tactics of the Hunter and the HuntedWorst_Counter. 1 Seiri Fukiyose was a member of the Daihasei Festival administrative committee. She had no special privileges like officers of Anti-Skill or Judgment, but being in charge of event setup and judging was still a position demanding respect. To the world this was just a big sports festival, but it was also an easy way to rate the ability development progression of the schools. The results would even affect school budgets. Of course, the committee members participated in the events themselves. Therefore, they had to attend to their work as committee members as it was convenient for their schedules. Easy to say, but Academy City took up a third of the Tokyo metropolitan area. The next stadium could be pretty far away. You couldn’t be on this committee without the flexibility to improvise for the slight changes in start and end times for events—and a penchant for planning out the puzzle presented by scheduling. Everything was a rac...