“Chiho! I smell her over there!”
“W…wait…”
By the time she sputtered it out, Acieth was already running, leaving a footprint as deep as a fence post in the ground as she set off. Suzuno, grasping at empty air, slowly lowered her hands.
“I will have,” she said in a quivering voice, “to apologize to Chiho and the Devil King later.” She took out the phone tucked behind her kimono belt and began sending a warning text to Maou, no doubt giving his all to work at the moment and blissfully unaware of anything.
“Umm… Acieth has learned some…mistaken facts about Valentine’s Day… Ah.”
She pecked away at the keys, wiping the dirt from her hands first, but then noticed the clock on the upper right-hand corner of the screen. The blood drained from her head.
“No!!”
It was a little past three in the afternoon. She flung off the cloth she used to tie her hair back and stood up.
“Wait, Acieth! Chiho is still at school!”
It was Suzuno against a Sephirah child in this short-distance sprint to Sasahata North High School, and she had already given her a minute’s head start. But she ran off anyway, fervently hoping to keep Chiho safe…but before leaving the apartment grounds, she hit the brakes and ran up to Room 202.
“Ah, Alas Ramus! I cannot leave Alas Ramus behind! Ugh! Why did this have to happen?!”
Alas Ramus, left by Emi this morning and currently in dreamland for her afternoon nap, awoke to find herself on Suzuno’s back. Now Acieth had two minutes on her. And with every fiber of her being, Suzuno knew just how fatal those two minutes would be.
THE HERO STRUGGLES TO DEAL WITH WORKPLACE ISSUES
“Wait, you don’t do it?”
“Why would we? It’s a pain in the ass.”
It was just past the lunch rush, and Emi was giving a smiling Akiko Ohki, coworker and veteran kitchen jockey, a surprised look. It was well into February by now, and as she compared the order forms for the seasonal Mini-Chocolate Pies with the inventory that came in, Emi thought to ask Akiko about how this MgRonald location’s staff handled Valentine’s Day. It turned out the female crewmembers didn’t bother with chocolate or any other gifts for the guys.
“Did you do that at your last job, Emi-Yu?”
“Not me, so much as everyone at the office.”
“Ahh, yeah,” Akiko replied as she stocked the heater with Mini-Chocolate Pies. “Call centers usually run on pretty stable shifts, so that makes sense, but there’s never been any obligation like that here in Hatagaya. I was expecting something like that when I came here last year, but it came and went with nothing to show for it, so I brought it up to Kisaki eventually.”
It seemed that Mayumi Kisaki, manager at the MgRonald, had a less-than-rosy impression of the tradition. “I wouldn’t recommend the custom between crewmembers,” she had said, effectively prohibiting it. “You’re free to give whatever you want to each other outside the property, but that’s strictly between you and the other person.”
“I think she’ll probably tell you and the other guys who came in this year about it soon,” Akiko added. (That would include Chiho as well.) “And besides, do you actually find giving out chocolate fun at all? I’m not expecting triple the amount back or whatever, but we got more guys than girls working here, so that’s more to ask of them. Plus, if you don’t have shifts around those times in February and March, it’s like you get shut out of the whole thing. Neither side really gets much out of it. But anyway, no, we don’t do it, for all those kinds of reasons.”
“Oh. I didn’t know that.”
It wasn’t called Valentine’s Day, of course, but Ente Isla’s Western Island did have a tradition of women baking sweets for men as a sign of their feelings for them. Back in the village of Sloane, where she grew up, this usually meant cookies and sweetened bread around harvest time, but Emi wound up being thrown into battle against the Devil King’s Army before anyone taught her that custom, so she had never gotten to join in. Learning about Valentine’s Day last year, while she worked at Dokodemo, therefore made her more than a little excited. She gave her obligatory chocolate to her boss and her boss’s boss; they replied on White Day with little boxes of rakugan, a traditional Japanese treat, to all the women on staff.
“Rakugan?” Akiko remarked. “That’s those hard sugar candies that get served with tea and stuff, right? Those are neat.”
Emi recalled how enthralled she was by the intricate shapes and designs rakugan came in. She became a regular purchaser for some time afterward.
“So…”
“Hmm?”
“Talking about outside MgRonald…”
“Yeah?”
“Do you have, like, a reason to think about Valentine’s Day this year, Emi-Yu?”
“……………Oh.”
There was nothing very sudden about the question. It was Emi who brought the topic up. But still, for just a moment, her brain shut off on her. She groaned, and that groan kept her from answering immediately. Akiko, of course, picked up on that interval of silence.
“Whoa, no way.”
“N-no! I don’t!”
It was really remarkable. Subtle shifts in breathing rhythms and microscopic changes in your line of sight could sometimes be so much more eloquent than the words themselves.
“Wow, I’m surprised.”
“I said I don’t!”
“I didn’t think you were into that kind of romantic stuff.”
“Akiko!”
“But he doesn’t work here, right? You’re part of the team by now, but you haven’t been here that long… Oh, but you knew Maou before now, didn’t you?”
“W-Wait…”
This was tremendously frustrating to Emi. She wasn’t trying to hide anything, but there was no way to phrase a response that implied the opposite. She could feel her cheeks redden—not out of shame, but out of simple panic. Akiko wasn’t the type to take a topic and go hog wild with it, but given the air around them as of late, her and Maou being treated as an item was beyond inconvenient.
“Aw, there’s no need to get so worked up about Valentine’s chocolate. It’s not like one or two boxes are going to dictate the rest of your love life.”
“I’m not getting worked up!”
But Emi knew full well that it looked that way. Or maybe she really was worked up. Because when Akiko—who was now smiling warmly at Emi’s reaction—first asked the question, she had, for a single instant, a thought. The time lag between having the thought, and realizing she was now capable of naturally thinking such thoughts, was what sealed her fate.
“By the way, there’s a superawesome chocolatier near my school. You wanna know more about them?”
“No, thank you!”
“Aw, you’re so cute, Emi-Yu.”
Emi, realizing this line of talking would only drag her further into the swamp, ended it and tossed the final chocolate pie into the heater. But then, demonstrating perfectly terrible timing, Maou made his way downstairs from the café counter.
“What’re you two chatting about? Kisaki would yell at you if she was here. Do you have a copy of the order form? There’s something I need to check upstairs.”
“Um, oh, uh, right. The order form… Oh, here it is.”
Emi had been raising her voice. Realizing the cause of her delayed response to Akiko pitched it up even further. Akiko, whether she picked up on this or not, grinned to herself as she walked by Emi.
“Sorry, sorry. Emi-Yu just said she passed out chocolate on Valentine’s Day at her last job, so I was telling her how we don’t do that here, y’know?”
“R-Right,” Emi stammered.
“Oh. Valentine’s, huh? …Ah, yeah, we got one extra pack here we didn’t order.”
Maou demonstrated little interest in the topic as he skimmed through the order form, eyebrows lowered. Seeing this annoyed Emi a bit, but Maou lifted his head before she could fire back.
“Hey, speaking of Valentine’s,
I got some thank-you chocolate just yesterday.”
“Huh?”
“Oh, did you?”
Emi looked taken aback. Akiko, on the other hand, leaned forward to hear more.
“Yeah, but I don’t know what to do about it. It’s not like her and I have any relationship at all, so…”
“Maou, if Kawacchi heard that, he’d diagnose you with rich-kid disease and kill you.”
“No, I mean, we haven’t even seen each other all that often. What do people normally do with things like this?”
“Well,” Akiko said, “a lot of people give out chocolate out of habit more than anything, instead of expecting anything back. I’m not saying you should ignore it, but there’s no huge, pressing need to give her something, is there?”
“Mmm, maybe, but it came from a pretty fancy place. Have you two ever heard of…”
The French-sounding brand name Maou then uttered was unfamiliar to Emi’s ears. Akiko, on the other hand, blinked a few times in response.
“That’s…that’s the chocolatier I was gonna tell you about, Emi-Yu.”
“Oh…”
“Choco… What was that?”
“Chocolatier! A person who makes fancy chocolate for a living. There’s this little one in a residential neighborhood near my college. It’s not even all that well-known on the net or anything. Wait, are you sure this was just ‘thank-you’ chocolate? ’Cause that place doesn’t go cheap at all.”
“I…I’m pretty sure? She’s one of the people training with me, but this was only the third time we’ve seen each other.”
“Hmm… It’s hard to tell from that, but that chocolate seems like more than a thank-you to me.”
Akiko scrunched up her face a little, although there was still brazen curiosity peeking out from it.
“Well, what are you gonna do about it?”
“Huh?” Maou frowned at Emi’s oddly blunt question, then at his own indecision. “…Well, I dunno what. Aren’t you supposed to repay a gift with something half the value or whatever? Ashiya will yell at me if I just let it be, but I have no idea how much this cost her. I don’t have a computer at home right now, and it’s kind of a pain to search on the net with my old phone…”
“Half the value?” Akiko rolled her eyes. “This isn’t a business negotiation.”
“It doesn’t matter whether it’s expensive or not,” sniffed Emi derisively, “or how rare it is. You think she gave it just to be polite, don’t you? Then why don’t you be polite to her in return?”
“Is that all there is to it?”
“What else is there to it?”
“Yeah, I guess so, huh?” Maou looked convinced enough at Emi’s dry assessment. That, too, got on Emi’s nerves. “Ah, well. Sorry to take up your time with that.”
“Yeah, I bet Kisaki would yell at you if she heard this.”
“I hear you. See ya for now.”
Maou breezily returned upstairs, with Emi glaring at his back and Akiko watching her from the side before saying something that snapped Emi back to reality.
“…You think Chi knows about that?”
Emi turned toward Akiko. “I don’t think so!” she blurted with the urgency of a war declaration.
“Yeah, probably not. You know how Maou can totally forget about stuff like that sometimes. I feel like Chi’s intelligent enough to not let things like this faze her, but intelligence is different from feelings, so…”
The fact that Chiho had feelings for Maou was an open secret, clear enough to anyone close to the two of them. Those emotions were so clear and straightforward, everyone around them hesitated to mess with or poke fun at them about it. But this wouldn’t be the first time mental lapses on Maou’s part affected Chiho’s public behavior—something Kisaki upbraided him about every time it happened.
“Yeah,” reflected Akiko, “Maou may look nearly perfect, but that’s the one bad habit he has, and it’s a killer.”
“You said it.”
Emi could name quite a few more bad habits (or worse), but she held back on saying them out loud. If she did, she knew Akiko would ask how Emi knew all that stuff about him.
“How much you wanna bet that in a few days, he’ll be all like Oh no, I got chocolate from Chi, too, now what?”
Judging from past behavior, that sounded incredibly likely to Emi. But if she ordered him to keep quiet about this other woman, she knew it could come out anyway and damage Chiho’s pride. Letting Chiho know in advance, meanwhile, would just mess her up even more. And considering all the warnings Ashiya and Suzuno had given him, not even Emi thought Maou was dumb enough to ask Chiho directly for advice.
“……”
But thinking that far, a bizarre supposition formed itself in Emi’s mind: What if he receives this chocolate but can’t talk to Chiho about it, then gets guilty about hiding things from her, so he starts acting all weird in front of her and she figures out the truth anyway?
As her friend, Emi never wanted to see Chiho’s feelings get hurt. Turning her thoughts around, this was a situation Emi needed to keep an eye on for Maou’s sake, lest Maou’s thoughtlessness traumatize Chiho. But would “looking out for him” wind up making her the person acting weirdly, exposing it all?
Emi felt frozen in place. And while Akiko knew about Maou and Chiho, she didn’t have all the facts. She didn’t understand they were purposefully keeping some distance from each other. And given her personality, any lecturing she might give Maou about it would have little effect.
“…Why do I have to go out of my way to worry about the Devil King’s personal life?”
The propellerlike motion of Emi’s brain was frustrating her. Now she wasn’t so sure why she hesitated to answer Akiko’s question earlier. She, of all people, had no reason to consider this matter for even a moment:
What kind of chocolate would Maou like?
Thanks to that ridiculous thought crashing through her mind for a single instant, she had to deal with yet another wave of pointless anxiety. Neither she nor Maou had the wherewithal to address silly little events like that. She had a semiliteral god to defeat. Why did she have to get so worked up about some contrived Japanese custom like this? She had so many other things that required her attention.
Attempting to get her mind out of its current rut, Emi turned toward the restaurant entrance.
““…””
Akiko saw him at the same time she did. The sight made both of them visibly frown. Mitsuki Sarue, manager at the Hatagaya location of Sentucky Fried Chicken directly across the street, was passing by. His eyes, as he peered into the MgRonald dining room, were as pure as a child’s, eyeing something he knew he could never attain. One look at them indicated to Emi and Akiko that his expectations for Valentine’s Day were way off the charts.
He didn’t venture inside, as he was busy with his own job at this time of day, but Emi and Akiko still exchanged glances with each other.
“…Akiko, did she tell you what to do if…something happened?”
“…All I know is, Kisaki won’t be here on the fourteenth.”
“…No? He’s gonna pitch a fit, isn’t he?”
“…He hasn’t done anything before, but we’re supposed to call the police if that kind of thing happens.”
No matter how far-reaching and tragic their pasts were, Maou was currently the Devil King, and Sarue was an archangel. If Maou learned how preoccupied both he and Sarue were about something like Valentine’s Day right now, the ancient Devil Overlord Satan would probably look for some shrub to weep behind—and Ignora, the “god” leading the angels, would probably call her whole mission off. It was a worthless thought, but it entertained Emi for a moment.
“You think he cares about this that much?”
“Hey, some people do.”
Whether male or female, this land of Japan seemed to all but force you to keep Valentine’s in mind. It puzzled Emi. And while she hadn’t heard anything from Chiho yet, if Chiho was expecting to enjoy this Valentine
’s Day, Emi hoped whatever was going to happen would send her heart soaring into the heavens, rather than crashing down to earth.
However…
This fleeing hope was crushed before Maou or Emi could do anything about it.
“Maou received some chocolate?”
“Uh-huh! It was the very expensive-looking chocolate, too! And the giver, she was pretty beautiful woman! This is the big problem, Chiho! It calls for the swift action!”
And at almost the same time as a wide-eyed Acieth blurted out the news to Chiho at Sasahata North High School’s front gate:
“I…I was too late…”
Chiho was surprised all over again by Suzuno crumpling to the ground, covered in sweat, a sleeping Alas Ramus on her back. And then:
“Sasachi, you…?”
Unfortunately for everyone involved, Chiho wasn’t the only person to hear Acieth’s report.
“You still haven’t settled things with that guy?!”
Kaori Shoji, who was about to walk home with Chiho, heard it all. And as she put it later, Chiho could barely stand to watch the mask of despair that descended upon Suzuno’s face.
Even after she learned the truth about Ignora, Suzuno Kamazuki retained her faith in a benevolent god. She was currently begging this god she held inside her for forgiveness.
“What, so you finally gave up, Sasachi?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“But it is the Maou! You know, Chiho, he is the easily manipulated!”
“That’s…well…not untrue, but…”
For whatever reason, Suzuno had taken Chiho, Acieth, and Chiho’s apparent classroom friend Kaori Shoji to the Sentucky Fried Chicken in Hatagaya.
“Didn’t you tell me before, Sasachi, that he’s got a lot more freedom in his life than you do? He’s busy with this training right now, and if he gets hired on full-time, he’s gonna start meeting all kinds of people, isn’t he? You don’t have any choice but to be a student for now—if you keep wasting time, you’re gonna be left in the dust, you know?”
“But we were on the same page back at Christmas…”
The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 16 Page 4