Afterword

Volume 15. What a milestone! I’ve come this far thanks to all of you. I feel like it’s taken a long time to get this far. Or, well, it’s been five entire years, so yeah, pretty long. Cars don’t fly yet, but first-graders are now sixth-graders! By the seventeenth volume, they might be graduating middle school? This makes me feel kinda old... Wait, my old classmates already have kids?! Why am I single when my cousin XXX has already married?! Aarrrgh! Okay, I admit it, my romance skill is underleveled! Oh, by the way, it suddenly became spring in this volume, but a full year has actually passed in the work since Volume 11. The dungeon assembly went off without a hitch, so I skipped it. I wrote some of it in a bonus short story, which some people may have on hand now.

Anyway, here is this volume’s afterword. I can write four pages for this one. I’m a fan of puzzles, as I’ve mentioned, and in this volume I’m putting in a nonogram puzzle. Those who have never played Picross before should be able to look up the trick to solving them pretty easily. It’s a 30x30 puzzle, and fairly difficult. I might have put a little too much effort into it.

In any case, thanks to all your help, I’ve made it all the way to Volume 15. Spoilers abound from this point on, so those who haven’t read the volume yet should be aware. Okay? Reading further will be taken as consent. Alright, thank you for your consent. Let’s get started.

Volume 15. Looking back, Keima finally had a child. To think the Dungeon Core he got way back when would end up like this... Quite a few people predicted this when I introduced it back at the time. Incidentally, the divine way of making children is something I wrote about in my Narou blog before. It was a short story I wrote to celebrate Takenoko-sensei coming of age (the author of Genocide Online, a LDM fan who sent me fan letters, then became an author himself). It only makes sense to celebrate a coming of age by talking about how to make children.

So, we went right ahead and put the newly born Soto on the cover art! Oh... It was Kinue’s turn, though? Well, Kinue is all about working hard in the shadows. She might end up on Volume 17’s cover art, though I just have it in my head that the final volume will have all the main characters like Rokuko and Keima on the cover, but if she’s not on the next one give up on a Kinue cover. Yep.

As for how this volume differs from the web novel, pretty much everything about how they beat Daide is different. The root cause of this difference goes back to where Leona wandered after Volume 6. After leaving Goren, she lazily traveled to the Demon Realm, messed with Keima’s group in Volume 11 as part of her experiment, then went to Daide for further experimentation. Something like that. That said, in the web novel they used the Divine Alarm to similarly beat Daide in no time like it was a speedrun. How exactly will these differences echo into eternity...? Or perhaps they won’t at all, actually...? Who can say...

Oh, looks like I barely have any space left. Guess that’s it from me this time. May we meet again in the next volume. Please enjoy the puzzle.

Supana Onikage