Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon

Volume 8A, Afterword

Okay, that was Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon 8-A. An 8th volume officially makes this series longer than my last one. Thank you so much, all of you.

It was all of your support that allowed me to also put out the Girl’s Talk side story last November. It was well received and I hope I can give people the sequel they’re asking for.

Now, the main story has finally reached summer break. When I think back to my own summer breaks, I remember making a business simulator on my X68K, riding my bike to Atami, and, during my middle school years, getting extremely frustrated as I tried and failed to write the story that would eventually become Horizon. So really, it wasn’t that much different from what I do now.

Anyway, the main story continues where 7 left off. International history recreations are banned and a time of domestic affairs and plotting has begun, but looking at the historical time period, this is when everyone was wondering if Hashiba would manage to conquer Japan or not. Most groups were approaching a place where they could settle down, but there was actually a lot of hidden anarchy in the Matsudaira ranks as they approached Sekigahara and laid out the groundwork for their various plots. Given the infrastructure at the time, the regional powers would have been hard to get at, so they would have been winning over their neighbors and most of them ended up accepting their current position after Hashiba’s death. All in all, it had to have been a pretty crazy time.

Anyway, the usual chat.

“So, did anything happen during your school days? Got any crimes or injuries you want to brag about?”

“Well, when I was in college, I was doing some research deep in the mountains and there wasn’t even a dorm there. I was staying at a local apartment, but the person who lived above me made a lot of noise doing something...maybe dancing?”

“If they lived next to you, you could have slammed your hand against the wall and confessed your love to the wall. Then they would’ve run away in a hurry. Anyway, you were saying?”

“I went to the landlord and that didn’t solve anything, but I found a really nice log up in the mountains. So whenever the person above me was being noisy, I would use that to hit the ceiling below them to basically fuck the ceiling.”

“So you were getting metal with a log? Sounds like a good way to break a hole in the ceiling.”

“No, I looked into it and made sure I fucked it where there was a...do you call it a joist? Anyway, after three days of that, the person from upstairs came down looking mad as hell and asked me what I was doing, so I looked over, holding the log, and calmly said I was doing yoga.”

“So you’re a yoga fucker, huh?”

Anyway, my background music this time was Like a Byrd by Danny Byrd. Is that what it’s like to run along the roofs during the summer? Anyway, here’s your question:

“Who earned the most points?”

Wait a little bit longer until the next one.

November 2014. Another rainy morning.

-Kawakami Minoru