The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 15

by Satoshi Wagahara

  “Right. That was Satanael Noie, a talented scientist and Ignora’s partner of sorts. A strong sorcerer…and I’m sorry, dear, but a chief researcher I really looked up to at the time.”

  “Ahh,” an unoffended Nord replied as he continued with Alas Ramus’s piggyback ride, “I’m sure it happens if you live as long as you have.”

  Emi worried this could touch off some jealousy, as much as they both enjoyed rambling on without end about their love for each other. Both of them, reassuringly, were too mature for that.

  “Ignora was a scientific genius, and she knew it. Satanael, on the other hand, was more about hard work and undaunting effort. He knew full well he wasn’t as much of a natural talent as Ignora, and that’s why he loved her and her ability so much. He wasn’t the kind of person to let that turn into envy and hostility. That made him popular among everybody there, man and woman. I was the new girl in the medical department, so I’d be at Ignora’s place all the time delivering medicine and medical equipment, and I got to speak with him a lot. That’s a lot of why I felt so much for him.”

  “If I could just ask, what kind of person was he like?”

  “Father…”

  Emi shot a look at Nord, who, it turned out, was a lot more interested in bending the subject this way than she thought. Surprisingly, Laila accepted it.

  “Oh, that’s actually pretty important. He was a very fair person. A vastly talented sorcerer. He wasn’t completely separated from the real world the way theoretical researchers can often be—he was firmly rooted in reality. But that didn’t mean he was this gruff professor type, either. Sometimes, he’d be up all night drinking with friends and looking like a mess the next day at work. And he was strong, too! One time, he engaged in a little battle training with Gabriel in the lab’s recreation room. Gabriel was head of security, handpicked from the military ranks, and you wouldn’t believe how handily Satanael whipped him. They had ten matches, and Gabriel didn’t win one of them. He was livid about it, of course, but you know what Satanael said? He said, ‘All I can do is take care of myself, but you protect everyone here. You being here puts people’s minds at ease. Me showing that I’m stronger than you would just rock the boat.’ That’s the kind of person he was.”

  If Laila—a woman who normally made no effort at all to hide her love for Nord—painted him in such rosy terms, he must have been an incredibly charismatic person indeed. Nord still looked a little unconvinced, but for now he relented.

  “But you know, I couldn’t help but find it a little strange, too. By which I mean, a while after Caiel and Sikeena joined us, Satanael started arguing with Ignora a great deal more often. For the most part, it was about Caiel and Sikeena, and I think Satanael wanted to keep them away from Ignora. It was funny—he defended them so much at first, too. I asked why later on, and I guess the gene they discovered hadn’t been examined by anyone before. There wasn’t any literature on it at all. No nation in our world even had the tech to observe this gene before now, he said, and them of all people finding it was a bit…odd.”

  At the time, Laila assumed it was the result of Ignora’s talents combined with that duo’s strength. That assumption was shared by everyone else Satanael voiced his concerns with.

  “So it ended there, for the most part, and it was then that Ignora’s research really began to take off. It was hard even for Satanael to keep up, but Caiel and Sikeena were still right there, next to her. Now everyone was getting a little suspicious. Yes, maybe Ignora could spearhead research too advanced for anyone else to understand, but why were these kids out of college keeping pace with her? Satanael backed off on his complaints—given the urgency, the research always needed to take precedent—but he still had these vague concerns about their origins, their minds, you know. Then one day, he managed to convince Sariel to find out where they came from.”

  Pretending to take some time off, Satanael went back down to their home planet to learn about Caiel and Sikeena, only to find that their birth records had likely been forged. No accurate records of their origin existed, and every other document related to them—their parents, their dependents, anything that could be used for identification—was forged as well. According to Sariel’s investigation, the two of them all but popped into existence under the wing of the powerful government leader who sent them to the moon.

  “Can you trust Sariel on this?”

  “He may not act like it much, but he takes his work seriously. A pity his…other habits cost him so much.”

  By that, Emi felt it safe to assume the way Sariel acted around women wasn’t much different before reaching Earth.

  Regardless, Satanael, now fully suspicious of Caiel and Sikeena, returned to the moon lab—only to find something completely unexpected up there.

  “Apparently, even Ignora was starting to question the talents of her two assistants. So she gave them a full-body scan, pretending it was just a regular physical. I guess she tried to track the DNA records in their family register, and she discovered it contained genes normally never found in the human race. In fact, those genes included the ‘immortality’ gene, the one found in the mouse experiments that they assumed also existed in humans. I was a licensed doctor at the time, but I didn’t know much about genetic engineering, so the details were a bit over my head. But apparently, the genes in Caiel’s and Sikeena’s body cells that defined the limits of their metabolism simply didn’t function at all.”

  All living creatures had a given limit to how much their cells could metabolize in their lives, although this limit varied from individual to individual. Once reached, that’s the end of your natural life span. That wasn’t the only factor, of course, but metabolism is nonetheless considered a key part of one’s life span on Earth, with some theorizing that turning off this limit could stave off old age and death.

  “Plus, their genes held a strong immunity against all known disease. The biggest surprise for Ignora was that she couldn’t find a single potentially cancerous cell across either of their bodies.”

  “That’s not so uncommon, is it? They were young, you said.”

  “Well, based on our planet’s medical knowledge—we’re talking ten thousand years ago, keep in mind—the body, due to assorted reasons, always contains at least a few cells that are threatening to become cancerous. As long as your cancer resistance genes are working fine, your immune system will kill and restore those cells in the blink of an eye. If they stop working or some other unusual event happens that causes cancerous cells to spread, that’s what you and I mean when we say that someone has cancer.”

  Emi only became aware of cancer after coming to Japan. Her knowledge of the disease was vague at best.

  “Every day, constantly, your body is being damaged by lots of natural elements—ultraviolet rays, reactive oxygen, and so on. But your body’s constantly repairing itself, too. Sometimes, a few cells fall through the cracks and begin the preliminary cancer process, and that’s not at all unusual. But if the body isn’t seeing any cancerous cells at all, that’s normally unthinkable. It means every cell in your body is perfect, unblemished.”

  Laila paused.

  “Now, this is just how the people on my planet explained it. I can’t say if this applies to cancer in Ente Isla or Earth. As far as I know, it’s not that different. But anyway, once she discovered Caiel and Sikeena’s secret, Ignora carefully compared the differences between their genes and ours—and amazingly, in the course of a single month, she figured out what genetic adjustments were needed to make ours look more like theirs. That’s how things were by the time Satanael made it back from his holiday.”

  Then, for some reason, Ignora’s research began to get bogged down again. Why? Because Caiel and Sikeena suddenly disappeared. Everyone was incredibly suspicious, of course, but Ignora didn’t really need them any longer. With Satanael assisting, she took a genetic approach to the pandemic once more and reached a certain conclusion.

  “Caiel and Sikeena were like us but also not like us. In o
ther words, they were kind of like aliens, with DNA that didn’t conform to any human being from our planet. But they were definitely there, posing as human. Ignora figured that tracing where they came from would help her dive deeper into her research. Satanael already knew their records had been forged, so the two worked together to investigate them. And then…they found it. On the moon. The thing you could call their parent.”

  It appeared, at first, to be a gigantic, withered old tree—one rooted on the surface of the moon, where nowhere near enough air existed. Nobody knew why, but even with all the space probes the planet had launched, this somehow managed to escape detection, despite being located toward the rear of the laboratory’s territory. No scans from orbit picked up on it or any other useful underground resources, so developers simply ignored the whole patch of moonscape.

  “Ignora only found that tree thanks to a holy energy scan. There was this one intense blip of energy in an otherwise barren space. That’s where the tree was, in one of several of these blips on the dark side of the moon. Wells of holy energy, if you will. You see what I’m getting at? That was the Tree of Sephirot for our world, the parent of the Sephirah and the ‘mother’ of Caiel and Sikeena.”

  Taking a sample from the tree, Ignora ran a DNA check and found it matched Caiel and Sikeena perfectly. They were gone, but the tree provided all the experimental samples they needed. It helped her and Satanael’s research advance by leaps and bounds every day.

  “Now, if I can change the subject for a moment… Satanael kind of had a thing for Ignora. He loved her talents, and he deeply loved her personality. I kept my own emotions in check really, because it was so obvious that he would get in the way of anything…further I’d have for her. But after Caiel and Sikeena disappeared, it took a mere five years for the immortality gene to be completed. They were close in their research the whole time, but they were close as people, too. And on the day they formally established the genetic process and ushered in an era of immortality, where nobody had to worry about disease again…they got married.”

  “Uh?” Even Emi had to give this a bewildered grunt. “B-but wait, if Ignora is Lucifer’s mother, then are you saying Satanael… The Devil Overlord Satan of old… Whaaa?!”

  Laila nodded at her daughter’s most dramatic reaction of the day.

  “That’s what I’m saying. Satanael Noie is Lucifer’s father.”

  THE DEVIL KING IS OUT OF THE OFFICE (3)

  After Emeralda left Room 101 with a much better understanding of Nord’s feelings, she headed over to the MgRonald by Hatagaya station, back on her original objective—observing Emi and Chiho at work. It was her first visit since their combined birthday party, but luckily she still remembered the way there.

  It was evening, and the sky was already starting to turn red by the time Emeralda spotted Chiho sweeping the walkway in front of the entrance.

  “Oh? Emeralda? Are you here to have dinner?!”

  She greeted her with a smile as she ran up to her. There wasn’t a trace of jealousy nor any other dark emotion on her face—and Emeralda noticed she was wearing the Santa hat Emi mentioned.

  “Did Yusa know you were coming?”

  “Nooo, I didn’t saaay anything.”

  “Ooh, I bet she’ll be really surprised! Here, come on in! It’s cold out here!”

  Stepping inside, the entire staff was in Santa hats, just as promised. It certainly made for a festive atmosphere, although it didn’t change much else.

  “Do you know how to order and stuff?” Chiho asked, unsure if Emeralda was up on Japan’s fast-food culture.

  “I think I’ll be fiiine. If I mess up, I’ll just pretend to be a forrreigner and ask for help. Certainly a lot of decoraaations up, aren’t there?”

  “Oh, yes! We put up all our Christmas stuff today. I’ve never worked here when it was like this, so I was kinda looking forward to it. Um, I need to get back to work for now but enjoy your dinner!”

  “Keep up the good worrrk,” Emeralda replied as Chiho took her dustpan and broom back outside. Then she got in line in front of the register, head swiveling around as she took in all the unusual sights. She spotted Emi a bit beyond the counter, talking to someone with some strange machine attached to her ear. Kisaki, the manager, was also recognizable as the tall woman working upstairs.

  With the lines backed up, Chiho opened another register to work through the backlog, winking at Emeralda as she did.

  “…Hmmm?”

  As she waited for her turn, Emeralda noticed something odd. The number of people working didn’t match the total written in Emi’s schedule. It wasn’t like she had spotted everybody on duty yet, but even she could tell someone was missing.

  “Wherrre’s the Devil King?” she whispered to Chiho once she reached the register.

  “Maou is out training today again,” she whispered back. “He’ll be back later.”

  Come to think of it, Emi had mentioned that Maou was busy with that stuff yesterday. Emeralda briskly completed her order with Chiho’s support, but they needed to cook up a new batch of fries, so she took her seat with a burger, a drink, and a number card. Off in the kitchen space, she saw Chiho calling for Emi. Their conversation seemed like nothing unusual from Emeralda’s perspective; maybe they were getting along better than Emi feared.

  In the end, it was Emi who delivered Emeralda’s fresh-cooked fries to her.

  “What brings you here?” she asked, keeping an eye out for any nosy customers nearby.

  “Ohhh, you were all worked up yesterday, so I was kind of concerrrned…”

  “…You liar. You just wanna gawk at us all.”

  “I will not denyyy thaaat,” Emeralda replied, grinning wryly. “But I can’t do that if the Devvvil King isn’t here. I heard he was in traaaining, but what kind of training is it? I thought he was already the main forrrce running this place.”

  “…Oh, I guess I didn’t mention it. He’s training to become a full-time employee, so he’s been gone practically every day lately. I guess he’s gonna be salaried before too long.”

  “Salaried…? Whaaa?!” Emeralda half jumped out of her seat. “So the Devil King wants to pursue life as a laaaborer in this world?!”

  “That’s always been his goal, I guess, so none of the demons were too surprised by it. Yesterday, he was going around with Ms. Kisaki in this business suit that looked so bad on him, but today he’s out alone, visiting a MgRonald with a different configuration from this one.”

  Deliveries and MgCafés were far from the only unique things a MgRonald location could potentially boast. There were Mini-Mags, located inside supermarkets, big-box stores, and food courts with a common shared seating space. There were drive-thru MgRonalds, mostly along national highways. There were locations inside amusement parks and such, open limited hours and subject to different operational rules.

  “If he goes full-time, there’s no predicting what kind of store he’ll be assigned to, so he’s going around all the different offices and locations to build up experience and stuff.”

  “Wow. So maaaybe it won’t be long before he’s managing this restaurant, huh?”

  “I don’t know if it’ll be this one. But it won’t come that easy.”

  It went without saying that only the most talented of crewmembers got a chance to undergo full-time training. However, that didn’t necessarily result in a permanent position, either. It wasn’t the way most people went up the MgRonald ranks, and while not even Kisaki as a manager knew how it fully worked, there were cases in the past where people trained for nearly a year while part-timing and still didn’t get offered a full-time spot.

  “Well, the Devil Kiiing never liked Laila to staaart with, so I doubt he’ll take her request nowww, huh? He has a goooal he’s working hard for, and now he’s about to achieeeve it.”

  “………………Maybe.”

  That reply sounded incredibly noncommittal.

  “Sorry, I need to go back to work.”

  “Of—of courrrs
e! Sorry to get in the waaay!”

  “It’s fine. Take your time… Thank you for calling MgRonald by Hatagaya station. My name is Yusa, and I’m ready to…”

  The moment she stepped away, she pushed that machine back into her ear, talking with someone. Emeralda watched her go about her business for a while, until Chiho approached. “What did you think of your meal?” she asked. “That’s a special winter season set. It wasn’t available at the birthday party.”

  “Oh, it was verrry good! But I would probably gain weiiight if I ate it every day, wouldn’t I?”

  “Ha-ha-ha! I’m sure you would.”

  “Emilia was telling me the Devil Kiiing has a lot on his plaaate right now.”

  “Oh, you heard about his training? Yeah, he’s been working here this whole time so he could nail that opportunity. Whenever he shows up here these days, he’s got this crazy resolute look on his face.”

  “Reeeally?”

  “Yeah. He’s in, like, super high spirits. I worry every time that Yusa will pick a fight with him about it, but—you know—I think she’s kinda rooting for him, too.”

  “Hmm. That’s a little uuunexpected.”

  “Well, lately, who can say? They sure aren’t at each other’s throats like they were before they came back from Ente Isla.”

  For a moment, Emeralda recalled Emi’s concern. At the very least, Chiho, from her vantage point below her, didn’t seem to exude even the slightest shred of envy.

  “But since Maou’s been so busy, we haven’t been able to all eat dinner together in Room 201 the way we normally do, which is kind of a pity. I was hoping we could use this as an opportunity to all get friendlier with one another, but it’s proving kinda hard to work out.”

  Hearing this, Emeralda decided to ask a somewhat malicious question.

  “But if Emilia and the Devil King get a little toooo friendly with each other, you know, they might get maaarried and raise Alas Raaamus together, hmm?”

  Would she freak out? Would she snap back at her? Would she deny it? For Chiho, the answer was none of the above.