Thank you very much for picking up volume 8 of A Wild Last Boss Appeared! I am the author, Firehead. How was the volume this time?
This is all about what comes before the very last battle, and they’ve all made quite a show, so it’d be great if all of you liked it. But would it surprise you to know that, in RPG terms, things haven’t actually inflated that wildly?
Take, for example, the seventh work in a certain famous series of RPGs. The final boss in that work plotted behind the scenes to drop a meteor on Earth, but in the final battle, he suddenly pulled out an attack that could wipe out the entire solar system like it was nothing. Not to mention that the protagonist’s party easily withstood such an attack. In the eighth game, a giant sword of light big enough to bisect the planet was created and swung down, and they also shot down giant beam attacks from space at their enemies. RPGs are just the sorts of things that sometimes grow to an incredible scale.
In a certain famous game where robots fight each other, each time a unit attacks, the game plays an animation where many planets are razed, or sometimes even entire galaxies are erased. Of course, it’s usually all just there to add enjoyment, and no matter how many stars or planets are destroyed, it won’t affect the actual story. Even though the units on the protagonist’s side would also have destroyed the Earth several times over, they get away scot-free.
The story replaces all that extra flashiness with completely serious writing. So, all that’s happened here is stuff that any RPG does. It’s all fine. There’s still room to go even bigger. Don’t worry.
This time, the main enemies rampaging around were the ouroboroses, and as I expected, the biggest problem I had while I was writing them was that they’d become a little too big in the end. The protagonist’s side had a bunch of monsters already, so I wanted the enemies to have even bigger ones. Such a simple idea translated into these joke-like sizes, and as I was writing this volume, I even worried about whether or not Aries and the others would even be able to see an ouroboros properly, since the size difference was so big. However, if I ended up making them half-baked enemies, then it would weaken the sense that they were formidable forces, so I ended up just accepting them as they were initially written.
Their biggest skills all had the same name, but each one had a different effect. The thing all the skills had in common was that they required the ouroboros to bite onto their tail and start spinning. Seeing it in action would be kind of comical. The Moon ouroboros, Orm, could reverse the time of the victims trapped within him, and his skill is fundamentally unblockable, though Lufas did manage to defend against it. The Earth ouroboros was able to become a black hole and suck everything in. In terms of scale, his is probably the biggest.
These were the only two who showed their skills in the main volume, but I have, in fact, fully noted the other three’s skills in order to complete world-building. The Ouroboros of Heaven’s skill turns him into a sun to burn everything away, and if he’d ever used it, even his allies would have taken a huge amount of damage, though they might not have lost their lives. The Ouroboros of Fire overlaps a bit with the Ouroboros of Heaven, and he would use his long body to trap his victims inside and start spinning, creating an ultrahigh-temperature incinerator. In the main volume, he successfully trapped Benetnasch inside and was about to activate the skill, but before he could, Alioth and his group interfered. In the end, the Fire ouroboros was unable to use his skill. Lastly, the Wood ouroboros’s ability is to ball up and grow life all over his body, becoming a new planet himself. This skill is completely useless in battle.
The ouroboroses’ stats are all basically the same, but if I had to rank them by strength, it would be Earth > Heaven = Moon > Fire > Wood, taking their unique abilities into account
The Earth ouroboros was kind of the most plain in character, but he was actually the strongest. He ended up being beaten black-and-blue by Libra and had the most gruesome death, but even so, he was the strongest. He’s able to manipulate gravitic pressure, attraction, and repulsion in all directions around him, which he can use to form gravity bullets and waves. He can even turn himself into a black hole. There’s no way he’s weak. However, he’s still plain, the most plain among all the ouroboroses. That was why he lost to Libra. So we can say here that the reason for his loss was because, meta-wise, his character was so thin.
Now, the fight with the ouroboroses is basically over, and finally, the only enemy left is Alovenus herself. Of course, the creator of the world and leader of the five ouroboroses is the strongest in this world with a completely broken sense of power balance. Though she has no majesty befitting a goddess or the feeling of a strong character, I can promise you that I’ve made her so crazy powerful you won’t be able to keep up.
So, this next volume will be the last in this long story that you have been keeping up with. In truth, it was supposed to end with this volume 8, but the book had become something so thick it was hard to read. We instead decided to split the book and make volume 9 the last one. However, I also have to revise volume 9 quite a bit to fit that, so I still feel a little depressed.
Also, volume 3 of the comic version of this series is supposed to go on sale before volume 8. Hazuki-sensei’s beautiful illustrations depict Lufas and the others going wild this time as well, so please check that out too. The comics have gotten into the Gjallarhorn arc, so you can see the vistas of the town of Gjallarhorn recreated here, even the parts that were kind of hard to describe in prose. The battle scenes are also quite impactful, so I can confidently recommend this volume to all of you.
Huh? Of course you’d be able to confidently recommend it with such a talented artist drawing volumes that would put your original novels to shame, you say? Ah— Ah— I can’t heeaarrr yooouuuu...
Well then, let us meet again in the final volume.
-Firehead