Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku - Volume 4 - Chapter Aft

Afterword

Heya, hello, hello. It’s been a long time. This is Endooou.

I’ve switched things up this time by doing some short stories. Yes, this is my first collection of short stories. It’s fifteen treats for the price of one. There have been some edits and such made, so it’s different from the stories that were posted online. Comparing the two might be a little entertaining for you. I hope you enjoy the exploits of these thirty-three magical girls.

Yes, thirty-three. That’s the number of people you need for a tournament, if you count one as a reserve player or have her barge in halfway through the games. Or you could make her a commentator or a judge, or depending on the character, perhaps first aid responder or ring girl would work. But anyway, when you have this many characters, you start off with, “Starring the whole cast of magical girls!!” and add in the fun tagline, “You don’t need a huuuge novel for this!” as you bring out all the characters within your allotted page count.

The idea of making all thirty-three magical girls appear was suggested to me as I was close to the final stages of writing these short stories. I was feeling casual about it at first, thinking, It’ll be a blast! Lots of fun! Yeah, let’s do this! But it was actually really hard. Thirty-three characters is basically twice the normal number. Even if I didn’t have to kill anyone, it’s not an insubstantial number of people. It’s so many, even the great samurai Mataemon Araki would collapse with exhaustion before he could finish.

So I asked my editor, S-mura-san, “Um, can I cut out the afterword? I don’t think I can fit all thirty-three in there.”

“Please don’t cut out the afterword.”

“But I don’t have enough pages.”

“So then just put them in the afterword (lol).”

S-mura-san granted me the rare honor of most distinctly feeling the (lol) in a real-life conversation. S-mura-san, thank you very much (monotone).

Fortunately, it turned out that no poor magical girl was forced into the afterword for the sake of meeting a quota. Thank you, magical girls.

I have one announcement. Aside from the short stories in this book, I have a short story called “Short Story in Commemoration of the Short Story Collection Release,” which seems like it would cause the term “short story” to lose all meaning, and the plan is for it to be published on the “Monthly KonoRano” section of the official site of KonoRano Publishing soon after this is released. Unfortunately, due to circumstances with page count, this story, which stars Ripple and Snow White, has been pushed out. It’s long, compared with these other short stories, so I hope that makes it just that much more substantial reading! Please do read it.

To everyone at the editing department who’s given me guidance and to S-mura-san, who even showed concern over my stomach and throat because I got myself sick somehow (perhaps reading this afterword will make that seem less believable, but seriously—really!), thank you so much.

Marui-no-sensei, thank you very much. I know I placed a particularly unusual burden on you this time around. But the illustration of Detec Bell and Lapis Lazuline switching costumes made me pump a fist. And it’s got Cherna Mouse, too, so the whole party is there, huh? I think the other girl has gone transparent and is hanging around the center of the illustration.

And finally, to all my readers: Thank you very much for buying this book. Please wait just a little while for further developments.