Project Necro is an official initiative by Re:Library.

There are two main reasons why we devoted the past eight months or so to establishing overseas branches.

One was due to the relocation project.
The members of Amaterasu, the secret organization that fights the World Shadow, are based out of the underground bar Ama-no-Iwato beneath Tokyo. However, due to land readjustment associated with the Tokyo Olympics, they were forced to vacate, and the bar had to close temporarily.
The closed shop would be relocated and reopened on the first floor of the Magical Castle inside the Great Underground Cavern in Antarctica, so it wasn’t going out of business. Still, Shiori and I had just gotten married. Since we had the chance, we took advantage of the store relocation to take time off—combining a vacation and honeymoon—traveling around the world and establishing branches wherever we went.

The other reason was to reinforce the setup in preparation for the final battle.
The World Shadow, the enemy fought by the secret organization that battles it, is said to be a manifestation of humanity’s violent urges, existing all over the world, lurking in the shadows and attacking people.
The esper secret organization Amaterasu, with its headquarters in Japan, is supposed to be secretly fighting the World Shadow across the globe. And yet, despite supposedly fighting worldwide, all of its members were in Japan.
That’s strange! So, to make the lie into truth, we establish secret organization branches around the world. Extremely logical and reasonable.

And finally—yes.
Now that the establishment of overseas branches is more or less complete, the next step is finally the final battle.
The secret organization Amaterasu must engage in a final showdown with its sworn enemy, the World Shadow.

To begin with, the very purpose of a secret organization is to forcibly turn a longed-for adolescence into reality. It’s about making real those fantasies you had as a student—being attacked by a monster one day, saved by a cute girl, and drawn into the extraordinary; or being an ordinary person who awakens to hidden powers and secretly fights fierce battles to save the world.
You read manga, watch anime, and desperately think, “I want to have a youth like that!” You let your fantasies swell. Then everyone learns what reality is, gets beaten down, disappointed, compromises, and becomes an adult. You’re made to realize: ah, fantasy doesn’t exist; there’s no heart-pounding, mysterious, thrilling youth.
Shiori and I are people who became adults that way. Once you’ve become an adult, you can’t go back to your youth. That’s why we give boys and girls who are living their youth right now a paranormal adolescence full of suspense, excitement, tears, and laughter—and have them fulfill, in our stead, the dreams we never could.
Our old wounds are soothed, and it’s fun. It’s surely fun for them too. Everyone’s happy—a complete happy set.

Becoming an esper and spending your youth packed with events is fun!
…but the problem is that youth always comes to an end.

In the end, it’s all staged. A make-believe play set up by me, Shiori, and Baba, inside a cage. If someone called us adults who got too serious in playing a children’s play, we wouldn’t have a word in response.
As long as society is run by adults, children who are protected, nurtured, and raised will eventually become adults and take over running society. They fly out of the cage and live as working adults, carrying their shining memories of youth in their hearts.

Takahashi Shouta, who was once a completely ordinary middle schooler with nothing particularly distinctive about him, now plans to get a job at a thermal power plant after graduating high school. To that end, he’s been taking related certification exams since last year, and over the summer he participated in an internship at the Kawasaki Thermal Power Plant.
Hasumi Touka, who until middle school had been cowed and caught between her constantly fighting parents, has decided to study Buddhism abroad in India after graduating high school. She’s studying hard to earn grades good enough to convince her reluctant parents.
Ig, the monkey, eats energetically every day.

They’re all living seriously. They have visions for the future. They have lives ahead of them.
I want them to properly put a period on their turbulent youth, and then, with the confidence and pride of espers who fought and defeated the World Shadow in their hearts, move on to a new stage of life.
No matter how hard things get, if they can think, “But I saved the world once,” or “But I’m an esper,” then they can surely overcome it.
…If only I’d had memories of saving the world with psychic powers honed alongside cute girls in a secret organization during high school, maybe I wouldn’t have slowly rotted away at a black company…

…Now then. As for the final battle that will serve as one milestone for the secret organization, since we’re a secret organization that fights the World Shadow, we should end by fighting the World Shadow. We prepare a special, custom-made, super-strong Shadow-kun suitable for a final battle, make it so that defeating him brings peace to the world, defeat him, and that’s a happy ending. A perfect plan. The groundwork for this has been underway for quite some time.

The endlessly spawning World Shadow is connected to the strongest telekinetic, Kinemitsu Sago. As long as Sago exists, the World Shadow will not disappear, and as long as the World Shadow does not disappear, Sago will not disappear either—a kind of symbiotic relationship bound by a certain bond. That’s the setup.
And in this world, there are artifacts left behind by espers of the past, and theoretically there is also an artifact somewhere that can somehow deal with the loathsome bond between Sago and the World Shadow. That’s also part of the setup. That’s why we’d been doing things like artifact scrambles now and then, to plant the idea of such an artifact.

And the artifact we seized from Baba, who is manipulating the remnants of the Lunar Wisdom Order from behind the scenes, is precisely that “Deus-ex-Artifact.”
All that remains is to activate the artifact, head to a specially prepared battlefield suitable for a decisive battle, fight a powerful enemy, and win. Amaterasu won’t be alone, too—Tsukuyomi will also be involved.
The stage is set. In a sense, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that everything we’ve ever done, we’re doing it for this moment.

As I watched the three who had recovered the artifact and begun their retreat through telekinetic clairvoyance, I tightened my resolve.

Now then—let the final curtain rise.