Afterword

Greetings readers, Hyougetsu here. I can’t believe I’ve already made it to volume 8. Around the time volume 7 released my second daughter was born, so I was busy changing diapers and buying clothes. I was worried I wouldn’t have time to work on my novels, but fortunately my wife and my first daughter helped out enough that I could fit in time for work.

I realize it’s a bit late to be bringing this up, but Der Werwolf is meant to be a lighthearted story depicting the tumultuous events of Veight’s life. When I first came up with the idea for this story, I’d only planned up to where Veight created a home for demons in Meraldia and forged alliances with the neighboring nations. Meaning—volume 8 would be where this series was originally meant to end. In fact, one of the endings I’d been toying around with was Veight giving up his power and status, and going on a journey around the world.

Volumes 9 and onward are mostly going to be small episodic stories that I decided I wanted to include if Der Werwolf managed to stay serialized for long enough. I just finished the web version recently so if you want to know how Veight’s story ends, you can check it out, or you can just wait for volume 9. (I’m pretty sure it’ll get published, at least.) All the subsequent stories will still be about a Japanese werewolf changing the world through mostly peaceful means, so you don’t need to worry about any sudden genre shifts or anything.

On another note, I’d like to thank Nishi(E)da-sensei for his wonderful illustrations this time around as well. We’ve built up a pretty good rapport now, and I just have to give him the general gist of what I want and he figures it out perfectly. (Though I suspect the real reason for that is because my saint of an editor is putting in even more effort to convey my thoughts coherently.) On that note, I’d also like to thank my editor Fusanon, aka Saitou-sama. I’d been planning on revising the nue fight from the very start, but he was the one who gave me the idea to base it off a raijuu instead. Thanks to him, I was able to make a much more interesting showdown.

I’d also like to thank Koichi Yuuchi-sensei for drawing the reboot manga, which is now on its third volume. His depictions of Veight are perfect. He really captures the essence of a werewolf using overwhelming might and diplomacy to bring peace and order to a war-torn world. Honestly, I feel like the manga does a better job than the source material. Of course, I’m doing my best to write exclusive extras and stuff for it to make it better as well, so I hope you’ll all check it out.

There’s a lot of setting elements and minor stories that I wasn’t able to include in the web version, so I’m hoping I get a chance to fit them all into the published novels. Thank you very much for sticking with me this long, and may we meet again in the next volume!