Afterword

Nice to meet you everyone, I’m Ajigozen. Thank you so much for picking up this book of mine.

Incidentally, I had worked under the name “Iwashidukushi” in the past (iwashi meaning sardine), but a lot of people got the kanji wrong. A number of people mistakenly used the kanji for Tai (sea bream) or Maguro (Tuna) instead. It taught me a lot about what people think, like how maybe people are just bad at fish names or how people automatically assume I would use the kanji for a more auspicious or expensive fish instead of a cheap one.

Like, no, they weren’t just being mean, they were serious.

But by the time I regretted it, it was already too late, and I’d already done too much work under that pen name to change it now, which is why the pen name I’m using this time is one that’s harder to get wrong.

Anyway, this novel, written by someone like me who’d had an easily mistakable pen name, is one of my debuts. Yes, one of them. The truth is that I’ve got another one releasing through another publisher next month. Both of them got offers for a novel release around the same time, so in my heart, they’re both my debut works... Thinking about it that way, I’ve got a pretty luxurious professional debut, huh?

By the way, the protagonist of my other story is a knight with the rank of viscount. The heroine is a princess from another country that is skilled, but was mistreated.

Yes, the protagonist of this novel...is a knight with the rank of viscount. The heroine is also (omitted).

I’m sure that some people might say I reused the same idea, but there’s a reason for this! I had an idea for the short story that would be the basis of this work, wrote it, and then somehow it hit number one on the daily ranking. I got cocky, thought of another idea that’d work well with the same type of character, wrote it as a short story, and it hit number one on the daily ranking too!

After that, while they had minor differences in the details, I was lucky enough to get book offers for both stories. Honestly, I want to ask “How could that even happen?!” too.

But it did, and they’ve both ended up like this, so you never know where life’ll take you. And even though the details were the same, both works ended up completely different. Stories are so strange.

Oh yeah, another thing that’s luxurious about my debut is the cover and insert images. I’m so grateful that Yura Chujo-sensei made Nia look so adorable and Ark so cool. I went around showing off the cover to people, and everyone called it cute! Ark’s armor and weapon also had proper designs, and Ark was super Ark-like. (My vocabulary has vanished.)

This novel was super luxurious to me, and by being blessed with the luck that you’ve all picked it up makes it even moreso. I thank you all from the bottom of my heart. And if possible, I pray that we’ll meet in the next volume too.