Welcome to the Volume Two Checkpoint! This is Stella Procella! ☆

I'm glad to see you made it here!

Unlike the first volume, I hope this one was a much different experience. While the first one focused more on introducing characters and the overall setting, I guess you could say it was a little all over the place. I believe I said something similar last time, but if you were to go back to the first volume now, I'm sure the experience will be different, and the more the story progresses, the more it might change! That's the kind of experience that I was aiming for.

That said, let's talk about volume two! I wanted to focus on re-introducing some characters that were only briefly touched upon before, like Elizabelle and Estelle.

This time, I went deeper into the supernatural elements that Scarlet Finale! has to offer.

Something that I'd like to point out is that instead of having a single power system, Finale! has multiple ones that may widely differ. Glint City is the kind of place where all that different supernatural phenomena encounters each other. The first supernatural phenomena that was properly named in the story was Alchemy. I wonder if at the time anyone thought that this would be a series that would focus exclusively on alchemists.

And while Science might be something that we have all normalized as part of everyday lives, I wanted to make the point that if Alchemy or Magic might be seen as normal in other worlds but still be supernatural to us, then Science is just the supernatural that we have developed and integrated into our world.

With the world of Finale! closely resembling ours, it's obvious that Science has taken over. If so, where are these other supernatural phenomena coming from? I hope you look forward to seeing different kinds of phenomena appear and integrate themselves into this world.

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

Since Noa is learning Alchemy from Elizabelle, that means she isn't an alchemist yet, right? I wonder what is she actually capable of.

Unlike the first volume, I wanted this volume to focus more on Wish and her side of the story. I can't deny that Mirage stole the spotlight quite a bit as well, and even though Wish and Faith are supposed to be the protagonists, Mirage can fit that role just as well. The "dual-protagonist" bit is starting to feel like false advertisement now haha, but that's just the kind of thing the existence of an irregular does, and maybe one day, she can shine as a proper hero.

Introducing Mirage was especially fun since there have been faint traces of her presence from the very start. In the end, however, Wish and Mirage's stories are deeply connected, so doing it this way felt like it was for the best. I hope you liked learning more about both of them.

I think it's easy to get the impression that Wish is a super strong person who can do anything, but she is far from perfect, and she really wouldn't have been able to make it this far on her own. From World End to Starlight Burst, a really important key element to Wish's character is connections, and I wanted that to be reflected in this volume as she built up connections with others or fought to desperately stop one from falling apart.

With Mirage's introduction, I was also able to introduce what you could call the main ability that is the bigger focus of this story, standing above all other supernatural phenomena, the Velvet Burst.

At first, I was a little nervous and thought I was making all the mechanics behind Velvet Burst too complicated, and that's why I may have dropped quite a bit of exposition or explanation more than once. I hope you can forgive me if the explanations felt too repetitive and oversaturated. Still, while I'm sure some people can grasp the ability right away, I wanted to make sure no one would get lost along the way. You can definitely look forward to seeing way more depth to this ability as well!

Ah, but you know? If Mirage's Phantasmagoria doesn't create illusions and instead reveals different aspects of the world, was everything we saw a real part of the world after all? If so, I wonder what the world really is.

As for the events of the epilogue, while the Organization of Hope was a big threat, that's just the surface of the malevolence lurking in the city. After all, sins aren't the only impurities that corrupted humanity.

-Stella Procella