Chapter 5
? Ruined’s Raking
It’s another skill name! This one won’t take half a dozen paragraphs to explain, fortunately, though it does deserve a cursory explanation since it’s also an instance of Kota Nozomi being insufferably clever in the most chuuni way possible. In Japanese, this skill is written as “斬黒” in kanji—with 斬 broadly meaning “kill” (though with a bunch of contextual nuance) and 黒 meaning “black”—with the provided ruby text reading ザクロ (“zakuro”), meaning pomegranate. It doesn’t take too much creative interpretation to read 斬 as “za,” and “kuro” is a standard reading for 黒, so the pronunciation basically checks out this time.
The logic behind the attack in its original form is that it makes the blood of its victims spurt into the air in a manner that resembles kernels from a pomegranate. The complicating factor that prevented us from carrying this image over as is, however, is the fact that there’s another layer to the “zakuro” name, that being its intended double meaning: it could be read as “zakuro” (“pomegranate”), or “za kuro” (“the claw,” with an extremely heavy katakana accent).
So, once again, we had to get our priorities in order! We knew that our skill name would have to tie into a blood spray image, and we knew that it needed to sound pretty cool at a glance, but have a double meaning that wouldn’t be immediately obvious and would kind of make the whole thing feel a little silly once you finally figure it out. Using the word “rake” to approximate the clawing feel, swapping in autumn leaves for pomegranate kernels, and tying the whole thing together with a raking leaves joke was an absolute masterstroke of an idea on my editor’s part that I can claim precisely zero credit for.
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