What Is Slayers VS Orphen?

In 2001, Dragon Magazine's special edition Fantasia Battle Royale ran a story that the magazine's readers had wanted for a decade: Lina Inverse and Orphen in the same adventure, written by both of their creators. Hajime Kanzaka and Yoshinobu Akita co-wrote it; Rui Araizumi and Yuuya Kusaka, the two series' illustrators, shared the art. It reached book form on 30 June 2005 as Slayers VS Orphen, a single Fujimi Fantasia Bunko volume bundled with a radio drama, and it sold out in shop after shop.

Scarcity made it famous. Japanese fans called it a phantom book, and it stayed one until Fantasia Bunko's twenty-fifth anniversary brought a full reprint on 20 September 2013, expanded with previously unpublished short stories. The crossover is the label's era in miniature: Slayers and Orphen were published as rivals and remembered as siblings, and the family resemblance runs back to Record of Lodoss War, the prestige fantasy both houses measured themselves against. The question of how the two series relate is taken up on the Slayers side of this Library as well.