It was really more of a forfeit than a victory, but with Gabriel unable to fulfill his mission, Alas Ramus was now free to live where she wanted to be.
What made things tricky was that Alas Ramus had fused herself with the Better Half, the holy sword that Emi wielded in battle.
The sword, and Alas Ramus herself, was created from shards of Yesod, one of the world-creating Sephirah jewels that grew on the Tree of Sephirot.
Gabriel’s goal was to snatch away the child and Emi’s sword, connecting the Yesod fragments together to restore the Sephirah to its original state.
Despite leaving these fragments unattended for what would seem like eons to a regular person, Gabriel seemed to be in a terrible rush to glue, as it were, the Yesod back together. His sudden frantic haste was difficult to understand.
But thanks to Alas Ramus merging with the holy sword that proved doggedly nonremovable from Emi’s body, Gabriel had no way of returning home anything but empty-handed.
Thanks to that, Alas Ramus was forced to move from her previous domain—the Devil’s Castle located in room 201 of the sixty-year-old Villa Rosa Sasazuka apartments in Sasazuka, Shibuya ward, Tokyo—to Emi’s place, a condominium in the Eifukucho area of Tokyo’s Suginami ward.
This created assorted issues.
One: Alas Ramus was hopelessly devoted to Maou, her “daddy.”
Emi, as a Hero, could never let herself ignore common sense and allow Alas Ramus to live near the Devil King, someone who’d not only stunt her educational growth but also quite possibly eradicate humanity from the face of the Earth.
But now that Alas Ramus was a literal holy sword with the power to take human form, she had a tendency to cry out in Emi’s mind whenever she felt lonely.
The crying of a young infant, as anyone who’s been around one knows, has more destructive force than the roar of a savage beast.
Emi had sworn to herself after the fusion to keep Alas Ramus away from Maou’s apartment as much as possible. That resolve crumbled to dust in three days.
Alas Ramus’s mental outlook on life remained the same whether she was in baby or sword form, it seemed. She didn’t care whether Emi was at work, or sleeping, or doing anything else. When she wanted to see Daddy, she turned up the volume.
So, in order to avoid the morbid tragedy of being kept up all night by plaintive sobbing only she could hear, Emi’s visits to Devil’s Castle came even more often than before.
Two: Even if it weren’t for that, there was the matter of all the care the Devil’s Castle residents practically tore their hair out giving to the child. Food. Teeth brushing. Diaper changes. Now Emi was traveling down that same road, and in her weakened mental state, their support was like an inviting beacon, a surefire way out of life’s annoyances.
Alas Ramus generally listened to what Emi told her, rarely erupting into a temper tantrum if things didn’t go her way. But her life cycle continued unabated, sword or not. Emi returning home after work, only to find Alas Ramus materializing before her with a disturbingly full diaper, was a catastrophe that happened more than a few times.
This didn’t mean she could just toss the child over to Devil’s Castle, though. That would be too easy. Alas Ramus could run around in child form independent of Emi, but deep down, she was still deeply connected—fused, really—to Emi.
If the toddler ever ventured too far away from her, she would dematerialize and force her way back into Emi’s body. The Hero confirmed this for herself with some experimentation.
All in all, Alas Ramus could remain physically separate from Emi as long as she stayed within roughly the length of one stop on the Keio train line.
The only woman who could understand Emi’s current state of anguish was Crestia Bell, cleric for the Church’s Reconciliation Panel, currently living next door to Devil’s Castle under the name Suzuno Kamazuki.
Chiho, upon learning of this, had been less than sympathetic.
“Wow! So you don’t have to worry about her getting lost or anything?”
She had it dead-on, of course, but what it spelled for Emi was the humiliating thought of constant paternity visits to Devil’s Castle. At least, Emi rationalized to herself, Maou liked getting to see her more often. Hopefully that would thin out any evil urges in his blood. The thought was the only thing Emi had to keep herself together.
As crackerjack MgRonald store manager Mayumi Kisaki frequently reminded her thoroughly cowed employees at the franchise near Hatagaya station, she never told a joke unless she wanted people to laugh.
She was feared by the part-time crew, who called her the “demon of sales” under their breath in their hushed conversations behind the counter, but she was always sincere with her customers and evenhanded with her staff.
There was no guile behind that attitude, no two-faced treachery at all, but the matter-of-fact remark she had just tossed in Sadao Maou’s direction was something he couldn’t unravel at all.
Kisaki never told lies. Or unfunny jokes. That’s what made it so unbelievable.
“Okaaaay, shutdown’s tomorrow, people!”
She uttered those foreboding words at four in the afternoon, a relatively quiet time customer-wise, just as Maou, Chiho, and the rest of the afternoon shift were wrapping up.
At that moment, all sound disappeared from Maou’s ears.
To him, it was like Kisaki cast a magic spell—demonic, holy, it didn’t matter—that froze everything in the space around her. It was an instant locked in infinity, like the nanosecond before the Big Bang.
“M-Maou?”
“Npghh!”
If Chiho hadn’t called for him, hand brushing against his arm, Maou might have embarked on a boundless journey across space and time he could never return from.
Recovering from the science-fiction dreamscape, Maou’s brain was pounded by a torrent of conflicting information.
Within this region of the corporate map, the Hatagaya-station MgRonald was a poster boy for superb management, posting rising sales on a constant year-to-year basis.
It wasn’t a very large location by square footage, but its combination of flexible service, sincere customer relations, and painstaking standard of cleanliness earned it a commendation after every quarterly regional contest.
That Hatagaya store was being closed?!
It verged on the absurd.
But Maou appeared to be the only one the declaration took by surprise. Chiho and the rest of the crew betrayed no sign of anger or shock.
The only emotion being shown at all was the concern in Chiho’s eyes as she watched Maou all but melt into a puddle of goo.
“I suppose we’ll be going our separate ways for now, but I hope you all won’t forget what you learned here, wherever you wind up. Keep up the good work! That’s all.”
“Ah, uh, uh, uh, Ms. Kisaki?!”
“Hmm? Got a question, Marko?”
“Q-Question…? I mean, like…?”
The ignition system powering up Maou’s thought process was having trouble finding a spark to work with. Where could he begin? Wait—before that, what did she mean by “wherever you wind up”?
And why wasn’t anyone else going nuts over this? Maou didn’t know who to turn to any longer.
“The place is…shutting down?”
Kisaki’s eyebrows plunged downward at the few words he finally managed to squeak out.
“We talked about this two or so weeks ago, didn’t we?”
“Uhh…”
This reminded Maou of absolutely nothing. Two weeks ago would’ve marked the more-or-less endpoint of the cross-world struggle over Alas Ramus.
“Um…Maou…?”
From behind, Chiho whispered into his ear.
“I think it might’ve been the time you thought Alas Ramus was gone…”
“Uhhh…”
With another dimwitted drone, Maou pressed deeper into his memory, dragging out the events of half a month ago to the forefront.
Right after he asked Kisaki for more
shifts in order to provide for Alas Ramus, Gabriel showed up and wreaked havoc on his life.
For the next two days, Maou thought that Gabriel took Alas Ramus away to heaven-or-wherever. It admittedly depressed him. In fact, it was one of the worst eras of his employment with MgRonald, one where he repeatedly made the kind of mistakes a newbie on his first shift would make. But Kisaki let it slide. She was a bit concerned about Maou’s health, but…
“Oh. Wait…back then…?”
“Don’t tell me…you weren’t listening?”
The disbelieving tone to Kisaki’s voice made the rest of the crew instinctively tense up.
She was always fair when evaluating work performance, but when it came to carelessness or laziness, she was a slave driver.
“…Well, nobody else has a problem with this, right?”
“No, ma’am!!”
Everyone except Maou shouted in practiced unison, like a well-trained military choir.
“You heard ’em, Marko. Why don’t we go to the office?”
The blood drained from Maou’s face as he sheepishly followed Kisaki.
Despite it being the middle of summer, the air around them stung blisteringly cold as Chiho and the crew watched them go in bloodcurdling silence.
Kisaki sat at her desk, leaving Maou standing, and silently began tapping at her computer.
Maou, bolt upright, couldn’t see anything apart from her turned back.
After a moment, a printer even older than the Alas Ramus one buzzed loudly while it spat out a form.
Picking up the first page, Kisaki finally turned around and brusquely presented it to Maou.
“If this can’t help you, I’m afraid there’s not much else I can do.”
“Uh…mm…? What’s this?”
“It’s a list of MgRonalds you can pick up shifts at right now.”
“A list of Mags…? So this location’s really closing down?”
Kisaki averted her face from the ashen-faced Maou, one finger on her temple.
“Wow. You really weren’t listening at all, were you? You just kind of stared into space and mumbled ‘okay’ to me back then, but I figured you must have noticed the calendar and the bulletin board by now. I mean, there’s even a notice to customers on the door out front. You’ve been kinda mailing it in lately, Marko. Didn’t the shift schedule look weird to you at all?”
Kisaki’s “mailing it in” observation was half wrong, half right.
Since Alas Ramus showed up, Maou devoted himself to working more shifts than ever before. In an attempt to gain a more stable paycheck, he tried to pick up one shift per day as supervisor. This meant he now started and ended work on the same times daily, which made him pay far less attention to the shift schedule than before.
Alas Ramus might be living at Emi’s apartment, but since Maou all but declared that he was responsible for the child’s upbringing, he was always on the lookout for an opportunity to give Emi some money for child-rearing expenses.
It hadn’t quite happened yet—Emi steadfastly refused all offers so far—but Maou kept on working, figuring that it’d help prop up his own budget if worse came to worst.
Reflecting on these past events, Maou turned his eyes toward the printout Kisaki had given him.
“Why would one of the best-performing locations in the west Shibuya region have to shut down, Marko? This is temporary. We’re remodeling the place to convert it to a new category. It’ll open back up in mid-August, after the Obon holiday wraps up. Most of the offices nearby are on summer break right now anyway.”
“New category?”
The explanation wiped away a decent percentage of the disquiet in Maou’s soul. Just learning that it wasn’t a permanent closing lightened his heart tremendously.
Not every MgRonald was the same, of course. There were suburban locations with large indoor playgrounds, smaller “Mini-Mag”-themed storefronts inside shopping centers, and drive-through MgRonalds by major highways.
Along those lines, the Hatagaya MgRonald was now being converted to a “MagCafé” that offered a premium breakfast-café menu in addition to the standard offerings.
MagCafés had to handle a larger variety of dishes and ingredients, so the new menu veered toward the more costly side compared to the regular fare.
To compensate for that, MagCafé dining spaces were designed for more comfort and a more refined atmosphere. This required a top-to-bottom remodel of the store space, though, and that required time.
The interior would be completely different, from the lighting and ceilings to the walls and floors, and the kitchen would also need a litany of refurbishments to handle the new menu selections.
“But…we’re building a MagCafé in this space?”
That was the other rub, the niggling concern that kept him uneasy.
Currently, there were no MagCafé-exclusive locations in Japan. MagCafé was a subset of a typical MgRonald setup, but due to the square footage required to execute the concept, all MagCafés were in fairly large spaces, whether in the city or out in a freestanding building.
The Hatagaya MgRonald set up shop in the ground floor of a commercial building facing a shopping area. But it was small. They couldn’t even fit fifty seats in there.
Maou could picture the new MgRonald/MagCafé combo essentially forcing the customers out of the place, what with all the remodeling and new equipment. Kisaki, however, pointed upward in response.
“We’re taking over the second floor.”
“Whaaa?!”
“No way could we pull this plan off otherwise. Not in this tiny space. The company upstairs is pulling out at the end of July, and we managed to snap it up from them. It happened pretty quick, so this conversion’s kind of on a breakneck schedule, but we’re planning to have the regular setup downstairs, MagCafé upstairs, and ninety seats total.”
Maou wondered aloud why they didn’t just remodel the second floor, then, and keep a smaller operation running downstairs.
“That wouldn’t work. There’s just too much construction to do. A location’s exterior and product lineup is kind of like a businessman’s suit. If your shirt isn’t tucked in and your jacket has moth holes in it, that’ll turn off your customers. You need to have the full package ready, or else you’ll be scraping for dimes in the gutter.”
The way Kisaki put it, despite the suddenness of this conversion, it was a pretty involved project. A common water system would need to be installed across both floors, and the POS register system required a complete upgrade. Trying to stay open in the midst of all that, the higher-ups decided, would scare customers away. Hence the decision to close for remodeling.
“So for the time being, we’re sending the staff out to nearby locations in a support role…but I guess you didn’t get the memo, huh? I probably could’ve found somewhere pretty close for you if you’d noticed sooner.”
Kisaki shrugged a “my hands are tied” shrug.
The available MgRonalds in the list Kisaki handed him were all either an impractically long commute from Sasazuka or didn’t have much to offer shiftwise. It being the middle of summer break, the employee rolls at most MgRonalds were fairly well saturated with students and other part-timers.
Maou, having risen to the point where he boasted a regular shift-supervisor gig, no longer had the chance to see Kisaki in person as much as before. Being the general manager, she didn’t need to be around when Maou was.
That was another indirect cause of this current disaster.
“All of the crew’s jobs are guaranteed. It’s the company closing this location on its own volition, after all. But, I’m sad to say, a lot of this is your fault. You weren’t checking up on our important notices. I like you, Maou, and I want you to work in the best possible environment I can find for you. But at this point, this is about all I got.”
Kisaki stood up and placed a hand on Maou’s shoulder.
“If you want to help support any of those locations, let me know by tomorrow evening.”
>
Maou could feel his vision blacking out.
Chiho, still looking worried, was there to greet Maou as he shambled out of the staff room like a horror-film extra.
“So you didn’t notice at all?”
“N-No… No. Uh, are you gonna work some other location, Chi?”
“Nah, I’m gonna take some time off until we reopen, but… I dunno. I’m sorry.”
Chiho, her head lowered in apology, baffled Maou.
“I haven’t had too many shifts lately ’cause I’ve been busy with school club trips and so on…and you’ve been so busy with Alas Ramus, too. You probably would’ve noticed sooner if we had a chance to talk a little more…”
Apparently Chiho felt some odd sense of responsibility for Maou’s error. She turned her head back upward, eyes welled up a little. Maou briskly shook his head, fully aware that she bore exactly zero of the blame for this.
“N-No! No no no no! It’s not your fault, Chi! And, I mean, Alas Ramus is over at Emi’s place now, so it’s my fault for spacing out so much, you know? Heh-heh! Guess I can’t switch my brain on and off like I thought I could, huh? But…uh, hey, you wanna come over to my place today, Chi?”
“Huh?”
Chiho’s eyebrows shot upward at the sudden invite.
“Suzuno told me this morning that Emi’s gonna come over to eat dinner with us. Alas Ramus would love to see you and all, and…well, like I give two craps about Emi, but the more, the merrier when it comes to dinner, right? So, you know…”
Maou gave Chiho a pat on the shoulder.
“I…I mean, I’m okay, so cheer up a little, huh?”
“A-all right…”
Chiho’s face turned a light shade of pink as she shallowly nodded.
“Yo! I’m back!”
“Um, hello, guys…”
Thanks to today’s morning start, Maou found himself back home by seven PM. It was still sunny out, but lights shone through the windows of nearby houses as the people inside prepared for dinner.
“Daddyyyy!”
Returning to Villa Rosa Sasazuka, an apartment building that was new back when Elvis was considered “up and coming,” Maou and Chiho were greeted by the warm, angelic smile of Alas Ramus, enough to instantly calm the frazzled Maou’s mind and body.
The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 4 Page 2