AFTERWORD

The Irregular at Magic High School has made it to Volume 13. Did you enjoy the Steeplechase arc?

I indirectly touched on this in the story as well, but a steeplechase is a word for an obstacle course. It isn’t just about the event on the Nine School Competition’s final day. The initial concept was that the main character would have to overcome all sorts of obstacles to uncover the conspiracy against them, almost like running through an obstacle course. But once it was all finished, it ended up feeling more like going back and forth in a labyrinth with a lot of dead ends than it did an obstacle course. Maybe having this volume’s subtitle be “Wandering Arc” would have fit the story better. Although then it would have seemed like even the runners would have been wandering aimlessly through the Cross-Country Steeplechase course.

The story this time wasn’t about the Nine School Competition itself but the conspiracy surrounding the Parasidolls. The focus of that is on the Cross-Country Steeplechase, so I cut out most of the other athletes’ competitions. All kinds of little stories developed not only during the matches but in the off-time between them, offering some glimpses of it, but loading the story up with those sub-episodes would have been compositionally impossible.

To that end, I’ve gotten approval to write about the smaller episodes happening alongside the Steeplechase arc as a short story. We haven’t currently decided how many there will be or what kind of form they’ll take, but I believe we’ll be able to announce it on the official Twitter in the coming days.

Speaking of the coming days, by the time this book reaches the readers’ hands, I think the anime will have started its broadcast. Please go and enjoy that as well. The anime Blu-rays will come with extras where I write about magic high school characters never before introduced, so please look forward to that.

Now then, I hope we’ll meet again for the next volume—the Ancient City Civil War arc. I ask for your humble patronage not only in that regard but with the comics and anime as well.

I hope you’ll continue to read The Irregular at Magic High School in the future.

Tsutomu Sato