Book 1 Afterword
Afterword
With that, this is Kamachi Kazuma!!
The theme this time was a disaster environment simulator. Where do the hundreds of thousands of people in a city escape to when disaster strikes? Where does the congestion and confusion occur? And will the damage grow while they are stalled? There are apparently supercomputer projects made to answer those questions. The small rice grains representing people run all around over the map on the screen. It’s kind of interesting and kind of scary and it makes me wonder what I would do if I was really a piece of data placed in an unwinnable situation with no escape.
When I was thinking about how to make an exciting story out of that mechanical grim reaper’s prophecy, I ended up twisting it into a great war between zombies and vampires.
They’re both seen as horror monsters that bite people to expand their ranks and eventually swallow up an entire city, but as you saw in the story, they are quite different when you look at it rationally.
The zombies focus on increasing their numbers and create a blatantly abnormal situation, but cannot be stopped as they use their overwhelming majority of violence to destroy the city’s infrastructure. They’re a lot like a tough crowd of rioters.
The vampires look beautiful, so they can blend into human society and increase their numbers little by little until they’ve taken over all the important parts of the city’s infrastructure. And their secret biting ritual is extremely bloody. They’re a lot like a cult taking over.
This is a question without a definite right answer, but which one do you all find more frightening?
To focus on the simulator aspect, I made the protagonist Satori and his partner Maxwell behave in a silly manner while they viewed things from a detached perspective. I think that probably gave this a different feel than an actual horror story. I was trying to make the first volume a lighter entrance to the series that you could read through easily despite the gruesome things going on, but what did you think?
I think these horror stories can be fun in a different way if you think about the “what ifs” of what you would do in those situations. I worked to have the characters’ dialogue and actions help with that. I hope you enjoyed your own adventure in a city overrun by zombies and vampires.
I give my thanks to the image illustrator Mahaya-san and my editors Miki-san, Onodera-san, and Anan-san. I probably shouldn’t say this when I was the one to write it, but due to the disaster environment simulator gimmick, I think it must have been hard to grasp the exact “color” of this one. It isn’t pure horror, but it isn’t bright enough to be a comedy either. It was a somewhat complicated structure, so thank you for sticking with me.
And I also give my thanks to the readers. The situation and conditions obviously matter a lot, but do you think a group of vampires or a group of zombies would win? I hope you liked those girls who were kind at heart even if their abilities and actions were quite gruesome.
And I will end this here.
…Isn’t the protagonist something of a monster himself for building that simulator on his own?
-Kamachi Kazuma
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