This may not exactly be standard, but here we are at afterword number two.
Kazuma Kamachi here.
The reason for the earlier afterword was because chapters seven to nine are supposed to form a complete story. Chapter ten, on the other hand, was deliberately written to be a little different. I thought it would make for a more thrilling tale if I broke with convention and opened the story back up again after the pages had been closed. For example, the information presented in the last scene was meant to evoke a range of possible endings, from the standard to the depressing. You can imagine which choices might lead to a normal ending, a tragic ending, etc.
…What will happen to Tselika and Midori? What will Kaname choose? This was the answer I came up with. Whether you’d like to imagine a happy ending or an edgy, gritty one is up to you.
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The idea for Money (Game) Master came to me when I thought about how interesting it would be if money took the place of the magical keys you get in fantasy RPGs. Money opens doors, it extends your range of options, but cling too tightly to it and it can engulf and enslave you. Kaname using money to slip in and out of a high-class world felt a bit like using a hidden key to enter the castle through a secret back door.
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I had a lot of fun working on this series, primarily because I’m a sucker for guns and bikinis, and also because Mahaya helped me come up with such a rich variety of characters who were a delight to write about. The story may have revolved primarily around Kaname and Takamasa, but I feel like things could have gone very differently if we’d focused on one of the side characters instead. I hope I managed to create a world like an online game where no one is a supporting character and everyone is the protagonist of their own story.
Kaname’s weapon was intentionally a bit strange, like the cocktails in Heavy Object or the billiards in Blood-Sign. I must be drawn to things that seem near and far at the same time. Perhaps demons and the occult also fall into that category?
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When I looked up the definition of AI, I found it wasn’t all that clear-cut, and I thought how strange it was that we were letting such an ambiguous existence into our society. So many people discard their own thought processes and say that certain things must be true because “it’s what the AI says,” even though they have no idea how it works. To me that sounds pretty similar to a form of religious belief.
Perhaps with the Magistelli I was imagining a sort of Ouija board, a supernatural force outside the realm of gods and angels. It will answer your questions, but only if you accept some unknown risk, similar to how an urban legend works.
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My deepest thanks go out to Mahaya, the illustrator, and Anan, my editor. This series was a difficult one: Themes of real and virtual, human and Magistellus, gunfights and car chases spread over such long distances that it was hard to wrangle them onto the page. Thank you for bringing out the color in my writing. Each and every illustration and setting detail you provided is far more than I deserve. I dearly hope that the future permits us to work together again someday.
And finally, a thank-you to all my readers. This is the end! Thank you for sticking with me the whole way. Guns and cars, money and violence, AI and succubi. All I can do is thank you for finding even one of them interesting enough to keep turning the pages. Thank you very much for making it this far.