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NEWS: Sword Art Online Author's Demons' Crest Novels Get TV Anime

Only 4 volumes? Oh well, there will be a few more written by the time it's airing.

Anyway, surprised it's Kadokawa and not Aniplex.

The oldest note I have on hand with ideas for Demons’ Crest is time-stamped November 2016. […] It was about three years ago, in 2019, when the idea finally took on a more recognizable shape. Back then, however, I was getting busy with more and more nonwriting work […] Before I knew it, however, three years had already passed. Even now, in 2022, those existing series show no sign of coming to an end anytime soon. At first I thought another three years might pass before Demons’ Crest would see the light of day… That is, until Kazuma Miki, who has been my editor since my debut, and also happens to be the current CEO of Straight Edge Inc., mentioned that they were planning on starting a webtoons business and proposed turning Demons’ Crest into a webtoon. I’d been interested in webtoons as a new form of expression for some time, and I was delighted by the prospect of having one of my works used as the basis for one, so I gave the okay immediately. But there was a second part to Miki’s proposal…publishing a light novel through Dengeki Bunko at the same time as the webtoon. To be honest, I hesitated at first. As I mentioned earlier, I worried that if I started a new series while my three existing ones were still ongoing, I would exceed my capacity in all sorts of ways. But the best time to release the first volume would be when the webtoon began running. With everything that needed to be done, a decision needed to be made quickly. What finally made up my mind, however, were several concept sketches created by the webtoon team. They depicted Yuuma and the other characters, set against dynamic backdrops from the two worlds that serve as settings for this work—the VRMMORPG Actual Magic and the large-scale amusement center Althea. When I saw their work, it made me want to create depictions with my own pen as well! Naturally, that didn’t dispel my fears of taking on too much, but now that Yuuma, Sawa, and the others had gotten into my head, there was no way I was going to get them out again. Urged on by the boisterous energy of the elementary-school-age characters themselves, I decided that I would release the first volume of Demons’ Crest in November 2022. There were tough days ahead, to be sure. Volume 27 of Sword Art Online was already scheduled for release that October. My plan was to finish that manuscript early so that I would have plenty of time to hunker down with Volume 1 of Demons’ Crest… But one task after another piled up, and before I knew it, my schedule was in shambles. As usual, my submission of SAO, Volume 27, came right down to the wire. But somehow I managed to submit it and to finish the Demons’ Crest manuscript by the seat of my pants, so now here I sit, writing this afterword.