Volume 1, Afterword

Welcome, everyone. This is Kamachi Kazuma.

Ninjas! I have actually included them on occasion in A Certain Magical Index and the Zashiki Warashi of Intellectual Village that I wrote for another publisher. If you read Index’s SS2 in particular, you should be able to grasp my image of fictional ninjas.

Since I was writing about ninjas, I placed the main focus squarely on the desire to protect the heroine students while making everything else be a series of deceptions. That is different from a police story where you can focus on solving the case once all the surrounding information has been established. I just hope it was enjoyable enough to create a solid foundation for doing what I wanted to do.

The protagonist possessed a great power but was too kind to soak himself in the darkness and lost everything as a result. He can tell standing back up is only going to cause him to crash and burn like he once did, but he still struggles to save those girls regardless of what side they belong to. I hope you enjoyed it.

I give my thanks to my illustrator Tajima Ryuushi-san, to my editors Miki-san, Nakajima-san, Yamamoto-san, and Mitera-san, and to someone deserving special thanks. Giving them all unique kunoichi outfits instead of a standardized school uniform may have been a cruel request that emptied out the drawer of ideas all at once, so I am truly grateful you went along with it.

And I give my thanks to the readers. I love using this genre for minor characters, but I was honestly pretty nervous about using it as a main theme. I have nothing but thanks for all of you who still picked up this book. Thank you very much.

And I will end this here.

You’ve gotta go with kunais over shurikens, right!?

-Kamachi Kazuma