The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 4

by Satoshi Wagahara

  “…Anyway, a lot of the times, the prisons are so full up that people stay in jail even after they’ve been indicted. Olba hasn’t been accused of anything serious yet, so I’m sure he’s pretty low on the priority list for a prison spot. But that’s not the real problem.”

  Urushihara’s face grew stern—by his standards.

  “After you guys beat me on Ente Isla, I accepted his offer for two reasons. One was, basically, he said he wouldn’t kill me. After I lost, I kinda had no place to go—Malacoda and I weren’t really on good terms, and it’s not like you guys were just gonna let me run off somewhere.”

  “…Even today, I regret that I didn’t run you through for good. Just one more thrust.”

  “Dude, you’re gonna make Alas Ramus’s vocabulary all weird if you keep that up. Hey, where is she, anyway?”

  “I told Amane that she’s in your room behind the shop. But she’s in here.”

  Emi pointed a finger to her temple.

  “She’s not crying or carrying on or nothin’?”

  It was a surprisingly well-considered question, by his standards.

  “We woke up before dawn to watch the sun rise. We played in the water a while before coming here, too, so she’s sleeping right now. …What’s the other reason?”

  “Huh. Cool. …But, Maou told you that one before: Obla told me he’d serve as an intermediary between me and heaven.”

  Not long ago, in front of Sasazuka station, Urushihara and Emi had faced each other as mortal enemies. Neither of them could have imagined that they’d be managing a busy beachfront restaurant and sundries shop in Chiba a scant while later.

  “The Devil King’s armies were annihilated, but I couldn’t stay in the human world. As far as refuges went, back to heaven was just about it. I remember him telling me… He said, ‘I have all the material I need to negotiate with heaven.’”

  “‘Negotiate…with heaven’?”

  “Yeah. And he said I was one of his bargaining chips, too. I mean, taking a fallen angel people sang about in legends and reforming him into an angel worthy of returning to heaven… Like, that’d make the big guys up there flip their miters, right? Hell, they’d probably make him an angel while they were at it.”

  It depends on how you look at it, Emi reflected. By that logic, Maou taking an angel who’d fallen this low and forging him into an at least semi-focused hourly laborer should have earned the Devil King a spot among the clouds, too.

  “But the real ace he had up his sleeve, you know, was you, Emilia.”

  “Me?”

  Having her name come up unexpectedly made Emi’s ice-stabbing hand stop in midair.

  “Just like Maou said. I mean, we thought you probably weren’t much more to him than another thorn in his side. But something doesn’t add up. He literally had Emeralda Etuva and Albert Ende in a cell in Ente Isla, but he let them live. Why? I mean, Emeralda’s way up there in Empire politics, right? He must’ve known letting her go would mean trouble for him later.”

  “True, yeah.”

  The Holy Empire of Saint Aile’s relationship with the Church was undeniably unwinding. Emeralda said as much over the phone. Having Olba’s crimes bubble up a bit to the surface, and offering at least broad hints of Church corruption, led to questions about its influence on the Western Island. It put the Church at a slight disadvantage in the ensuing power struggles over the rebuilding of the Central Continent and, seemingly, everything else.

  “So there’s something I want to check on. The Holy Silver that’s used in your sword, and the Cloth of the Dispeller… Who managed that stuff?”

  Emi could feel the blood drain from her head as she heard the question.

  “…The Church’s department of diplomatic and missionary operations—where Olba was. The missionary side handles all of the holy instruments… Those are at the very center of the Archbishops’ seats, after all. The main Church building.”

  “Huh. I figured. Well, they all probably knew the whole time that the Holy Silver was really a bunch of Yesod fragments. I couldn’t guess what else he could’ve tried bargaining with heaven over.”

  It wasn’t the chill from the ice machine that made Emi shiver just then.

  “He had to give the sword and the Cloth to the Hero to fight off the Devil King army. But unlike Sariel and Gabriel, he knew they couldn’t just fetch the Holy Silver out of your body afterward. He figured you wouldn’t be too willing to just hand it back once it was all over. And if you got into politics once the rebuilding began, the Church would lose a crapload of influence. That, and they’d never get their Yesod bits back.”

  “…Why was Olba so eager to make contact with heaven, anyway?”

  “That, I don’t know. But given how many tools he has, I really doubt Olba’s just gonna sit around in prison for the next few years. We haven’t worried much about him lately, but now that I’m out here and kind of, y’know, seriously thinking about things… I’m startin’ to get a little nervous.”

  “…Lucifer…”

  “Plus, the new Monster Capturer is s’posed to come out for the GSP portable soon. If he starts something major out here, I won’t be able to buy the limited-edition version. With the custom GSP and everything.”

  “……………………………………………………”

  There’s just no saving you, is there? In so many ways.

  “Uh, I can read your lips.”

  “Oh? Oh.”

  “Besides, the holy sword and stuff is your problem anyway, right? I’m just sayin’, think about it a little.”

  “Yeah, thanks. Really appreciate that advice. That’s why I’m doing you all these favors right now, remember?”

  “You call scraping ice off that thing a favor? Plus, you and Maou seem to think it’s all over with Gabriel, but there’s no way he’s gonna pull back, either. He’s pretty well-known for being a persistent bastard like that.”

  “…I kind of know that, too, thanks.”

  There were mixed emotions to Emi’s voice as she shot a glance at Maou and Chiho.

  Just like Chiho worried about, Emi had yet to craft any concrete plan for dealing with Gabriel, nor any of the other unknown threats swooping down from the heavens.

  “But with me and Alas Ramus right now, I really don’t think I’d lose a match against them.”

  “Yeah. One-on-one, maybe. It’s not like we know what happened last night is totally unrelated, either. Maybe they’re trying some weird ruse or something to attack us where we—”

  “What happened last night?”

  “…Uh, you didn’t notice?”

  “Notice what?”

  Urushihara paused. He had assumed Emi and Suzuno had picked up on the the previous night’s demon attack.

  The demonic power Camio flew in with last night was nothing trivial in scope. And Urushihara used his holy magic, too, though not an enormous amount of it.

  He didn’t know where Emi and Suzuno stayed last night, but if they were inside the city of Choshi, they couldn’t not have noticed.

  “Hey! Emi! Got a sec?”

  Just as Urushihara was about to confirm his suspicion, he heard Maou call for Emi as he chatted with Chiho.

  Turning upward, he saw Maou and Chiho, engaged in some silly gabfest about something or other a moment ago, now approaching them with oddly stern faces.

  “I heard from Chi that you stayed on Cape Inuboh-saki, right? When all that fog came in, did you seriously not notice anything?”

  “Not notice what of anything? I’m really not sure what you’re talking about, but what’s up?”

  Maou exchanged glances with Urushihara, then lowered his tone a notch.

  “I’m saying, you didn’t notice any demonic or holy force?”

  “Huh?”

  He shot another glance, this time to ensure Amane was still focused on her dishwashing, then continued.

  “Uh, let’s go out back a sec… Hey, Amane! I’m going out for a minute!”

  “Su
re thing!” Amane shouted back, not bothering to turn around.

  Since the bar was still open, the three of them left Urushihara at the register, nodded to each other, and headed for the guest quarters out back.

  They needed to awaken the still-unconscious Ashiya anyway.

  Leaving the front entrance, they found Suzuno busy repairing the Sarou-Sotengai castle as the drying sand and ocean breeze began to erode the walls.

  Given that she was doing this in her swimsuit, a crowd had already formed around her. Like a practiced artisan, she focused on her work, not giving her onlookers so much as a passing glance.

  It was a charming little scene, but one had to question whether she wanted to be such a public figure right now. Maou idly considered building a barricade for tomorrow as he let the other two into the guest room.

  “Oh, I think she’s getting up.”

  The moment they went in, Emi’s faced turned upward in recognition as she sat on the tatami floor.

  She extended her hands to form a natural cradle. As she did, a mass of light osmosed out of her body, neatly settling upon her arms before taking the form of Alas Ramus.

  “Well, that’s sure useful. I bet every mother in the world’s jealous of you by now.”

  “Yeah, as long as they don’t mind being woken up at night by screaming from inside their head, I’d love to mommy-blog some tips someday. Are you up, Alas Ramus?”

  “Mnngh…uuugh…”

  The newly formed Alas Ramus squirmed in Emi’s arms, hands reaching out to empty space. The bird-and-cage toy from last night’s fireworks show was still carefully held in her hands.

  Emi brought a hand to the child’s free one. She gently grasped one of her more-or-less mother’s fingers as she gradually opened her eyes.

  “Good morning, Alas Ramus. Is your diapey okay?”

  “Oogh morring… Nnh, okay.”

  Alas Ramus rubbed her eyes with both fists as she groggily replied.

  “Well, now that she’s awake, I guess I’m off the clock workwise.”

  Emi held Alas Ramus in her arms as she spoke. Maou nodded. He had no particular complaint.

  “Sure. Thanks for the help. But anyway, I wanted you to see that.”

  Maou pointed at the cardboard box in the corner. Behind it, something long and thin was wrapped in a threadbare, somewhat dirty black towel.

  Chiho and Emi took a peek inside.

  “Aw, cute.”

  Chiho whispered it immediately.

  “Tweety-tweet moooved!!”

  Alas Ramus, commenting in Emi’s place, leaned over for a touch.

  “No, Alas Ramus. Don’t touch. It looks pretty weak…”

  “Peep…peep…Lord Satan? …Have you concluded your duties? …Peep?”

  “?!”

  “Tweety-tweet!”

  The blackbird’s sudden question made Chiho and Emi lean back in astonishment even as it filled Alas Ramus with paroxysms of glee. It was no doubt a melancholy sight for the bird from last night’s fireworks, which she now carelessly tossed aside.

  “Don’t do that, Alas Ramus. Chiho gave that to you, remember? You need to be nice to it.”

  Maou, obviously enjoying the audience reaction, picked up the toy bird and returned it to Alas Ramus’s hand.

  “Peep…mnngh… I detect humans. Lord Satan, peep, who are these—?”

  It was clearly a small bird, cute chirping and everything, but the gravelly, ponderous way it spoke made things more than a bit eerie.

  “…Is that a mynah or something?”

  “It’s…cute? Or maybe not so cute…”

  Chiho and Emi looked to Maou for an explanation.

  The response he gave was a shock to them both.

  “This is a demon from my realm. He fell out of the sky last night.”

  Camio, the Devil Regent. Emi had never heard the name, nor the title before.

  She never thought she’d receive a guided tour of domestic political affairs from the gnarled lips of a demon, either.

  But this little bird Camio was a military officer, one who apparently served the Devil King since back when he first began his conquest. There was no Devil King’s Army back then, no mass organization of slavering monsters at their beck and call. Ashiya and Urushihara didn’t even know Maou’s name yet. It was an ancient time, one when chaos still ruled the demon realms.

  Satan, seeking to unify this realm under his rule, invited Camio—begged, really, repeatedly—to join his cause, although his force of warriors was still too ill-equipped and ragtag to creditably be termed an “army” yet.

  Although he would be an impossibly formidable foe to your average human being, Camio was not particularly high up on the demonic social ladder.

  Yet, in a realm where strength and depravity was all that counted, Camio had banded together a group of his own demons—even though a human in reasonable shape could probably have KO’d some of them in three rounds of bare-knuckle action—creating a force that could survive and fend for itself.

  Seeing this, Satan recruited Camio in order to learn what it took to stay alive in this game.

  Camio hardly took Satan seriously at first, nor the weak clan of wannabes he led. But over time, he found himself joining them, impressed by the young warlord’s innate perception and wisdom.

  The wisdom, of course, that Satan was gifted at a very young age by a certain angel.

  As Maou put it, “If Camio wasn’t there, no way I could have formed anything like the demon force we had.”

  An appraisal like that would have made Camio the instant enemy of Emi and the rest of Ente Isla. But he was one of the few denizens of the demon realms gifted in the arts of persuasion and negotiation.

  He had an innate gift for language, learning the tongues and customs of each demon tribe and even deciphering the calls of all nature’s creatures.

  That might have been the reason why he used native-level Japanese from the moment he fell to Kimigahama, as if nothing could be more natural.

  Thanks to his advice, Satan and his gang avoided confrontation with the more formidable foes of the day, occasionally rescuing other tribes from disaster, occasionally using Camio’s diplomatic gifts to gradually build and expand their force.

  Then, in what both Satan and Camio would call their biggest turning point in their careers, they encountered Alciel.

  Just like the two of them, Alciel was a local strongman, aiming to harness his intelligence to strengthen his already-expansive powers and army.

  By that point, Satan’s force was a fairly decent size, his name beginning to attain notoriety among the general demon public. It was a time when infighting between different demon races gathered in the same region was threatening to explode into large-scale war.

  Thanks to Alciel’s timely initiation into the tribe, Satan was able to leave him with the task of managing military expansion, while Camio focused on smoothing things over with his army’s recruits. Their strength as an organization grew exponentially, and before they knew it, they were a major force, one powerful enough that demons from every region were volunteering to join the hordes.

  “The one thing Camio really surprised me with when we reorganized our outfit’s structure was the the concept of wyvern licenses.”

  “Wyvern…licenses?”

  “What’s a wyvern?”

  Emi and Chiho tilted their heads in confusion for different reasons.

  Wyverns were one of several mountable creatures the Devil King’s force used as transport across the battlefield. They were best described as enormous flying lizards. But who would give out licenses for those things, and how?

  “Well, there weren’t too many wyverns out there, for one. We needed to be more efficient with using them. So we selected the demons that had the best knack for wyvern wrangling and gave them a combat decoration that served as their right to fight on a flying mount.”

  This made a knowledge of wyvern husbandry a sort of status symbol in Satan’s force, vastly improving cohe
sion and giving rank-and-file demons something to aim for in their brutish, violent careers.

  “……”

  For Emi, learning about such highly…civilized practices being conceived of by demons from another world came as a pure, unadulterated surprise.

  In the end, Satan united all the demon realms and declared himself Devil King. When his ambitions turned toward Ente Isla, Camio served as Satan’s regent during the conquest, assuming leadership over the remaining denizens of his native land.

  He still hadn’t had a chance to ask why Camio fell straight on Kimigahama, alongside several of his demon soldiers.

  Emi, meanwhile, had trouble believing any of this tale.

  “So you’re saying that not just Camio but two other demons just popped into existence on the beach? In that fog?”

  “Hug tweety-tweet!”

  Alas Ramus’s focus was still squarely upon the live bird in front of her, and getting her hands on it. Emi deftly kept her nubby digits away as she looked on, her face still profoundly confused.

  “Cyclopeans and beast demonoids are mostly rank-and-file melee fighters…but I seriously didn’t pick up on them in the distance between here and Cape Inuboh-saki. That’s ridiculous.”

  “Yeah, you see? I mean, I thought you might’ve ripped those dudes apart at first. But you didn’t even touch ’em, right?”

  “No. If I did, I would’ve killed them. Not let ’em run off bleeding.”

  “So…someone besides you, Maou, and you, Yusa, dispatched these demons from another world?”

  Maou nodded his approval of Chiho’s summary.

  “I’m thinking about checking out that lighthouse later.”

  “The Inuboh-saki lighthouse? We were there this morning.”

  “What?!”

  Chiho looked to Emi for approval. Emi nodded.

  “You can, too, if you pay for a ticket. You can climb the stairs all the way up if you want. I saw the signal house with that big foghorn from last night and everything. There wasn’t anything else special about it.”

  The foghorn that had sounded multiple times. That was the only shared experience Maou and Emi had that evening.

  “They had this cartoon lighthouse guy on the signs telling you how many steps you had to go. It was pretty cute!”