It was long. Farewell to this truly long battle!
Okay, sorry for suddenly dropping that famous line from the last episode of the old Kinnikuman. Thank you for buying the final volume of How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom. This is Dojyomaru, currently overjoyed about the new Kinnikuman anime and burning with Kinnikuman fever for the who-knows-how-manieth time.
With this volume, Realist Hero finally concludes its run of just over ten years. The story wrapped up a bit earlier on Pixiv, and while I felt a huge sense of relief, I also found myself spacing out and building model kits.
First, let me talk about the structure of this final volume. I intentionally played with the timeline a bit. “Why?” you might ask. Because I wanted to move the story of Naden’s daughter, Nowa, towards the front.
During the Pixiv serialization and from feedback on the print edition, I received a lot of comments asking about Aisha’s and Naden’s children—just about as many as those asking for a partner for Carla. I’d always planned for Carla’s partner and Aisha’s baby to be the final emotional highlights of the series, so I saved them for the end. But if I’d told Ruby’s childbirth story in chronological order, before showing whether Naden could have a child, it would’ve felt unfair to Naden.
The story with Nowa is actually the latest chronologically in this volume, but I didn’t want readers to feel uneasy about Naden until the end. So I brought it forward to Chapter 1, so that when readers later reached Ruby’s story, they could think, “It’s okay. Naden will have her child too.” And if Naden was fine, they could safely assume Aisha would be as well.
Since the larger story already wrapped up back in volume 19, all that remained was to resolve the lingering issue of Saint Anne and the Orthodox Papal State, and to depict what became of the various characters and new nations afterwards.
Like I said at the start...it really was long.
I spent nearly a decade aspiring to become a writer, entering contests and failing over and over, until I finally began this web serialization as “practice.” That practice project somehow turned into Realist Hero, and I’ve been writing it ever since.
It was supposed to be just a practice project, so I started by following the usual template. But I soon realized, “If I keep going like this, it’ll get lost among the countless similar works, and I’ll never finish it.” To set it apart, I drew inspiration from Machiavelli, had Souma rely on his companions instead of growing superhuman himself, and gave defeated enemies chances to return instead of discarding them as villains of the week.
The only named character who truly exited early was Gaius VIII, but even he continued to influence events long after his death, with his name popping up here and there.
By giving every opponent a reason for their actions, I created situations where a total victory for Souma wasn’t necessarily the best outcome. Come to think of it, in a story that ran twenty volumes, Souma never actually had a “clean” victory. (Even in the Amidonia War, his closest thing to a win, Roroa flipped the outcome on its head.) There were times when he won by default, came out ahead through compromise, or simply removed a dangerous beast(?) from the board, I suppose.
You must be an awfully unique individual to have stuck with such a strange, pragmatic story all the way to the end. Really, thank you so much.
Now, before wrapping up, I want to express my deepest thanks to everyone involved in bringing this series to life, and to all of you readers who supported it along the way. Ueda-sensei’s manga adaptation is still ongoing, so please continue to support him just as warmly.
Oh, and by the way, there’s also a short story collection being released. It’s a compilation of all the extra stories written over the years, resulting in a massive volume of over five hundred pages. I hope you’ll check that out too.
Goodbye for now, and I hope we’ll meet again somewhere down the road.
This has been Dojyomaru.