Afterword

Hullo, light novelist Sakaki here, bringing you Volume 13 of Outbreak Company: The Power of Moe.

.........

Mecha girls, amirite? That contrast between soft skin and hard metal. The armor is supposedly there to protect her, and yet it’s as if she’s bound by the metal, and it only makes the girl herself look even softer! Wonderful, right?! (Note: the opinions of the author represent only those of a single, trash human being.)

...Uh, I think I wrote something similar in the afterword to another magazine from a company that shall not be named, but I swear I’m not obsessed with this or anything. I mean, I’ve always liked mecha girls, but I was never blessed with an excuse to do a story about them (grin).

You do light novels for fifteen years, and then you realize the trends have taken a decisive turn away from you.

I never imagined at first that Outbreak Company would be my chance to do a mecha/armored girls storyline, but as a hallowed otaku genre, maybe it was only a matter of time until they showed up. We did already have a transformer in these pages, after all. (I’m talking about the Faldra.)

So anyway, this volume ended up being about mecha girls, or armored girls if you like, and they turned out to have a real battle. You know. War is hell.

I guess in a harem comedy, where the whole point is to have a bunch of beautiful girls surrounding the MC, a battle like this is technically forbidden (if you will), but even I, the very author of the series, was starting to get pretty tired of Shinichi’s obliviousness, so I decided to allow this.

By the way, I worked in some subtle foreshadowing (or maybe not-so-subtle, if you’re alert to these sorts of things), so I’m very curious how my readers will react.

I’m thinking the next volume is finally time for that short story collection, before we get properly started on the final phase of the series, but, well... let’s see what happens. Hope to catch you in the next volume!

Ichiro Sakaki
1 Jun 2015