Afterword

Hello, hello. Your humble author, Sakaki, here.

Welcome to Bluesteel Blasphemer, my first work for Hobby Japan in a while.

This book is what you might call an “Other-world Chea-rem,” as in “an average guy gets transported to some other world with a cheat that makes him the strongest character around while all the girls who show up instantly fall in love with him and he winds up with a harem.” This is a kind of story that first really came into its own with web novels.

Now, typically in these stories, convention demands that the main character be the strongest thing in sight. And you need some excuse for that. So the protagonist is incarnated as a hero, or occasionally a villain, or sometimes a leader in the army despite having no physical capabilities. There are lots of variations.

You might be tempted to classify this work of mine, which I’m writing from my usual undisclosed location, in this “Other-world Chea-rem” genre. Such stories, however, typically feature characters who have no real fighting ability and forge ahead based entirely on an abundance of nerd knowledge. There are even ones where bar cooks or members of a high school cooking club aggravate the people in this other world with their food.

The whole “strongest” routine might be an innovation, but the enjoyment of this type of story can be traced back to books like G.I. Samurai, although that doesn’t focus as much on individual capabilities. In terms of movies, you could look to things like The Final Countdown, which features F-14 Tomcats shooting down Zero fighter planes.

In light of all that, I thought, How fun would it be to fight monsters or sword-wielding knights with modern weapons like guns?

But here we run into a problem. Guns need gunpowder to be anything more than a bludgeon, and you would expect gunpowder to be awfully difficult to come by in these other worlds. Even the Self-Defense Force unit in G.I. Samurai finds itself unable to keep up supplies; at the end of the movie, they have to abandon their tank, while in the novel, an inability to get fuel forces them to limit the use of their generator.

So, then, how to have a main character who achieves his position as the strongest by using guns? I mulled over a number of possibilities, and the outcome was Bluesteel Blasphemer. You might notice that the term “blue steel” can also refer to the results of protecting the steel (not stainless steel or wood) parts of a gun from rust through a process known as “bluing.”

Since I had gone to the trouble of setting up this world, I wanted the heroine to have a gun, too. The orthodox approach to a girl with a gun says you must give her a huge rifle. (This provides a nice contrast between the cuteness of the little girl and the bad-assery of her firepower.) I had been doing that until recently in a certain work of mine, and I decided to give things a twist this time.

She wears glasses, but she’s a sniper. She’s a sniper, but she uses a pistol. And not just any pistol—she sticks a scope and a bipod on a revolver!

Yes! That’s it! Sniper girl with glasses and a scope-ready custom revolver!

Incidentally, you may think a revolver with a bipod and scope, intended for sniper use, is a pretty poor excuse for a custom weapon. That maybe it was just made of whatever parts were lying around, or that the person who put it together was not thinking very hard. But while real-world examples aren’t common, some such guns actually are used by the French special forces.

I do have a specific reason in mind for having the main character use a lever-action carbine and the heroine a single-action revolver—but forget about that for now. I’m not normally that into guns, so to write this book I went out and bought a bunch of air guns and model guns. That’s right: it’s all research. Not a flimsy excuse to... No... Really...

Well, anyway.

I tried to basically re-create the heroine’s “Red Chili” using an air gun, thinking it would be good reference material for my illustrator, but to my surprise Tera Akai-sensei created 3D models of Durandall and the various other weapons. I can’t thank him enough.

And while this book doesn’t exactly conform to the standard blueprint, it’s true that the guns are pretty cool and the heroine is pretty cute, and I can’t wait to see it in published form.

I can’t wait for you to read it, either. I will be thrilled if you enjoy it.

3/31/2015