Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon

Volume 6A, Afterword

That was Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon 6-A.

This one was all about strategizing from where the last volume left off, so it supported the topics advanced last time and discussed what they would do about the next war.

Actual war also follows international rules and is supported by them when a justification is given and a declaration of war is made, so this can't be easy for any nation.

Winning isn't everything and it's pretty important that you also show how the war was justified, but they struggled with that a lot in the age discussed here.

The lack of fast and reliable communications in particular led to a general belief that you only had to utterly destroy your enemy to win, but I also think you had to have a really positive outlook to get by in that world. So in that age, it was very important to maintain diplomatic relations with other clans. Things like political marriages were used as a form of hostage insurance by having a close relative in another clan, but that relative also had to act as a diplomat who could communicate with the other clan right away. Being a woman back then could not have been easy.

Anyway, the chat.

"Got any painful stories from your school days?"

"I remembered one a few days ago, but I forget what it was."

"I've been doing this for a while, but that answer is a new one!!"

"Yeah, I tried to come up with another one, but I couldn't come up with much. Only this one time my friend and I were riding our bikes back from school. We held each other's handlebars for something akin to a three-legged race, but then we couldn't avoid the cliff and my friend fell off."

"Why didn't you fall off?"

"That's the weird part. On the corner before the cliff, I shouted 'watch out!!' and kicked my friend's bike away so I wouldn't fall too."

"Sounds like you're the one he had to watch out for. So what happened to him?"

"There was a rice paddy below. The bike and my friend were embedded in it like something out of a manga. He just washed off in the waterway and went home. I really miss those times."

"These days, that would have been all over the online news..."

And elsewhere. Now, my work background music this time was Sanagi by Possibility. It has some nice lyrics for this kind of preparation and smoldering. Anyway...

"Who most hopes for the future?"

I'll leave you with that. Wait just a bit for the next part.

March 2013. A pollen-y morning.

-Kawakami Minoru