“…”
“You yourself asked me once—if I truly cared for Chiho’s safety, why wouldn’t I immediately erase her memory? Well, allow me to return the question to you: Why do you insist upon having Chiho by your side?”
“You’re making it sound like I’m some bad guy stalking her or something.”
“You never respond to Chiho’s boundless courage. She fully accepts you, warts and all, and you string her along, and along, and along, never providing an answer. The very epitome of a ‘bad guy’!”
“I…I’m not trying to do that, but…”
Maou let out an anguished groan. It was all Suzuno’s fault, of course. She just had to be there when Chiho decided to reveal her feelings to him.
“The way you have been acting as of late is a complete mystery to me. And by ‘you,’ I do not mean Sadao Maou. I mean Satan, the Devil King.”
Suzuno sighed softly, staring into the campfire.
“At first, I was all but convinced that your life as ‘Sadao Maou’ in Japan was a ruse, a cover for the Devil King’s latest upcoming conspiracy. I was certain you continued to see humans as beneath you. That you would betray them, hurt them, the moment you were given a chance.”
“Well, geez, that’s mean. Though I s’pose most demons would take it as a compliment…”
“But that simply fails to mesh with reality. You fully adhere to the law of the land; you play everything fair and square; you maintain healthy relationships with your boss and coworkers and neighbors; you show nothing but respect for the very species you attempted to subjugate not long ago. And you are not the only one—Alciel and Lucifer are just as worthy of praise.”
“Uh, has Urushihara talked to any of our neighbors before?”
“He has a rather close relationship with the Sasuke Express deliveryman by now, I would assume.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake…”
Maou rolled his eyes. He suspected it all along—while he and Ashiya were away, Urushihara was still buying random crap off the Internet. How nice of Suzuno not to tell him.
“And yet all of you, to a man, remain adamant that someday you will conquer Ente Isla once more. You maintain that, yet you seem to bear no particular ill will toward Emilia, the woman who is by far the greatest obstacle between you and that goal. Even when I revealed myself to you, your reaction was more bemused than hostile. So does that mean…”
With a grunt, Suzuno stood up, staring down Maou—even though his back was still turned to the fire.
“Does that mean there is some benefit to all of you? In having myself, and Emilia, and Chiho close by?”
“Sure. To our finances, yeah. Adds a lot more variety to our diet, too. It’s gravy all the way.”
“You have transformed back into your full demonic self several times since traveling to Earth. Why have you never returned before now? Why have you never tried to eliminate us? Why do you remain ‘Sadao Maou,’ law-abiding citizen of Japan?”
“…”
“This journey of ours—would it not be the greatest chance you’ve gained yet to destroy us? You should have enough force to overpower even the archangels at this point. You have Alciel close by, as well as a seemingly infinite army of loyal demons. You could have killed me anytime here on Ente Isla, forgotten all about Japan and Earth, and returned to your home realm. Emilia is no longer free to act. The humans here can no longer forge a united front against your forces. What better time to make your move?”
“…You want me to do that?”
“Of the Devil King Satan pictured by the populace of Ente Isla,” Suzuno bluntly replied, “I would expect nothing else. But instead here you are, with me, in this forest. You fear for Emilia’s safety; you took action to calm Rika’s nerves; you promised Chiho you would return to Japan; and you asked Amane to keep the land safe in your absence.”
“Fear for her…? Nothing as big as that, really…”
Suzuno sighed again. Maou must’ve already forgotten what he’d blurted out inside his apartment before they’d left.
“If you add it all up, it looks to me that you say one thing, yet act the exact opposite. But over the past few weeks, I’ve come to formulate a theory. A theory that, assuming I am right, explains everything about your inexplicable behavior.”
“…Can you knock this off? This ain’t a science lab. Save your theories for someone else.”
Suzuno ignored him.
“Devil King Satan.”
“I said…”
Her voiced softened.
“Nothing has ever changed in you from the beginning, has it?”
“Knock it off…”
“Truly, Chiho is wise beyond her years. Or perhaps being exposed to you with no previous knowledge let her see what I could not. Devil King, you—”
“Ahhhhh, shut up!” Maou shouted, covering his ears. “I don’t wanna heeeaaarrr it! Ahhh, la-la-la-laaa-la-la-laaa…!”
Suzuno’s cold eyes easily bore through the interference.
“You… You were always a kind, sober-minded man. Almost strangely so, considering your demonic birth.”
The sound of popping kindling from the fire echoed through the forest, almost interrupting her revelation.
“…Are you listening to yourself?” Maou countered. “You’re embarrassing me.”
“I am simply repeating what Chiho has said all along,” Suzuno flatly stated. “She knows you are the Devil King of an alien world, but she never doubted your nature for a moment. Love may be blind, but in Chiho’s case it seems to have only further sharpened her perception.”
Maou found himself at a loss for words again.
“And there is something else she noticed. Something neither I, nor Emilia, nor anyone on Ente Isla could have seen.”
Their small argument at the Shinjuku electronics store replayed itself again in her mind. He said it himself back there.
“You are, at the core, a true king. One who leads the people of the demon realms.”
“…Um, yeah?” Maou sulked, back still turned. “That’s part of my title. Devil King. What about it? And what’s my past got to do with right now, anyway? We’re both trying to get Emi and Ashiya back to Japan with us. What’s so bad about that?”
“Everything.”
“Why?!”
“To put it simply, it worries me. You may decide to have my head any moment you wish. You may decide to betray me the moment we regroup with Alciel in Heavensky. There is certainly a non-zero chance you will seize that moment to launch a new Devil King’s Army.”
“L-look, girl, aren’t you the one who’s saying one thing and doing the exact opposite right now?”
“I have made a career out of suspecting others, remember.”
“Shouldn’t a cleric believe in people a little more?”
Maou glowered to himself, facing the dark forest before him. Behind him, Suzuno smiled softly. “Indeed,” she said, “they should. I may be a former inquisitor, but before that, I am still an acolyte of the Church… Oof.”
“Whoa!”
Maou turned around at the sensation of something pushing against his back. Perhaps a few inches below his eyes was the sight of Suzuno’s head lit by the fire. She was seated right behind him, back to back.
“Wh-what the hell?” Maou protested, a bit offended at the invasion of space.
“A Church minister,” Suzuno quietly began, “never reveals what is stated to them during confession.” Her voice was the picture of calmness. “This way, you will not need to see my face. If you like, you are free to tell me, O King of All Demons. Why did you lead your people on a conquest of Ente Isla?”
“What has gotten into you tonight…?” Maou buried his face in his hands and sighed deeply. “Look, it’s not like I haven’t talked much about this to anyone because I have some grandiose dark secret I’m hiding or anything. It’s just that nobody asked me, in particular. That’s all.”
He lowered his voice a level.
“It’s gonna sound all
too familiar to you humans, too. You’ve probably heard it a million times before. So don’t start whining if you think I’m just giving you a line, all right? I’m not treating this as some huge bare-my-soul thing for your sake.”
“Very well. Duly noted.”
“…Ugh. This is so stupid.” Maou let another sigh out into the forest, feeling the warmth touching his back. “Where should I start?”
Then, as if recapping the past day’s work to his friend, he started to speak in a natural, relaxed voice.
“I forget if I told you this before, but back when I was born, the demon realms were a real piece of shit. Violence was the only rule—if you were strong, you got to torment the weaker demons to death and bask in the gory results. That kinda place. I wanted to change all of that, so I started up an army. And once people like Camio and Alciel joined me, the ball really started rolling, y’know? And after a while, we had an actual civilization going. A kingdom, led by me. Got all that so far?”
“Yes.”
“So that pretty much put an end to the weaker demons being doomed to a life of torture, at least. We put together a formal system of demonic magic, too. That made the kingdom stronger, and a hell of a lot more efficient, too. But that whole time, there was something that neither I, Camio, nor Alciel ever picked up on.”
Suzuno could sense Maou’s breathing quicken a little through her spine.
“Like you know, demons can siphon off people’s fears and desperation to gain magical force. They can obtain the energy they need to survive that way. But my kingdom brought peace and order to the demon realms for probably the first time in ages. Fear and desperation gradually started to disappear, and that means the realms’ supply of demonic force started to dwindle pretty damn fast. It dwindled, but after unifying the realms, we had a population boom on our hands. You see what I’m getting at? The demon realms used to teem with dark energy, and I pretty much swept all of it away. It’s like it was just billowing away from the land, like smoke from a fire. We calculated that it probably couldn’t last us another five centuries. I didn’t know what the hell I was gonna do.”
“…So you invaded Ente Isla? A rather shockingly logical motivation, that.”
Maou couldn’t see Suzuno’s face, but from her voice he could tell he had her rapt attention. So he continued.
“Invading another country to colonize it…to seize the natural resources you’ve used up in your homeland…that’s an all-too-typical motivation for war, isn’t it? Almost makes you laugh, not that I had anything to laugh about back then. My people followed me because they believed in me. They were freed from the curse of lethal violence meted out by their fellow demons. I couldn’t let them starve because I dropped the ball on my whole plan. So that’s why we went here.”
“To ‘rule over’ Ente Isla?” Suzuno asked, choosing her words carefully. “Based on your appearance and your overwhelming power, we all assumed you were here to destroy us all. But you say that was not the case?”
“Speaking of that, you think the humans could ever forgive me?”
“That is not for me to say. I am here to listen to your confession, not to cast doubt upon your words.”
He could tell she was smiling a little.
“If we destroyed you all, it’d just be kicking the can down a few centuries. I already knew by then that humans live nowhere near as long as we do. If we exterminated the entire species, all we’d have were more demon mouths to feed in our new colony. So I figured we could rule over humanity by applying juuust the right amount of fear to their psyches. I strictly ordered my generals to show no mercy to those who defied them, but to fully accept the surrender of any human force that offered it. ’Course, how much they stuck to that order was another ball of wax…”
“I see. Is that why you spared the nobility of Ente Isla?”
Even before she arrived in Japan, Suzuno had known that some of the Great Demon Generals who ruled the islands had more of a reputation for cruelty than others. Beyond the Central Continent that played home to Devil’s Castle, it was the Southern and Western Islands that bore the brunt of human casualties; by comparison, the northern and eastern lands had it somewhat easier. The Church’s statistics spoke for themselves.
“Yeah, I s’pose you know the rest. Emi started freeing each of the islands, I fled with whatever forces I had left, and I wound up in Japan. Really not that interesting, is it?”
Suzuno smiled at how adamant Maou was that this was the most boring story in the world to him. “Oh, I would say otherwise,” she said. “It has taught me a great deal. Now I know that you are not so much different from a king as we humans define it. There is still something I fail to understand, though.”
“Oh?”
Maou turned around. Suzuno, by coincidence, apparently did the same, because their eyes came close to meeting dead-on.
“What did you do after setting foot on Ente Isla?”
“…Me?”
Maou was puzzled. It wasn’t the question he was expecting—or, to put it another way, nobody around him had ever expressed interest in that before.
“Indeed,” Suzuno replied. “You. You and your army ransacked Isla Centurum, the de facto capital of the Central Continent…and, truly, that was the last time I heard the name ‘Devil King Satan’ until your final battle with Emilia. Each of your four generals had their own invasion forces handling the other islands, yes? So I simply wondered—what were you doing, while the Devil King’s Army did their dirty work for you?”
The campfire flickered in her eyes.
“If you even so much as snicker, Suzuno, I’m shutting up.”
“Well! Rather timid of you, no? Are you that uncertain about your past behavior?”
“Of course I am,” came the curt reply. “I failed spectacularly in the end, remember? So anyway, I…I was conducting research. On humanity.”
The voice was almost a whisper now.
“They seemed so…strange to me. Humans had so many languages. They looked and acted so different from each other—not as much as demons, but still. But after they all got done fighting wars against each other, they kissed, made up, built new societies, and worked together to survive. It made me curious.”
“…Hmm.”
“If a demon from my realm encountered a wounded countryman lying on the road, it would be a blemish on his honor if he didn’t trample over him. With humans, though, you’d always find someone who’d try to help him, to make him feel better. I just wondered where that difference sprang from.”
“I would hardly say every human is as virtuous as that.”
“Yeah, but they aren’t all total assholes, either. That’s demons for you.”
Another light sigh. Maou looked up at the sky.
“I did a hell of a lot of things I’m embarrassed about now. Like, for example, I decorated my personal Devil’s Castle chamber to look like the kind of reception room you’d see in a human noble’s manor. I figured, hey, I’m gonna be the unquestioned ruler of the human world sooner or later, so I’ll need someplace where I could gather all the nobility together and make them pledge their oaths of fealty to me. That kind of BS.”
“Hm. I wish I could have seen it.”
“Oh, yeah, I would’ve loved to show off my personal room to a total stranger like you. But that wasn’t it. I took in and researched all kinds of stuff we salvaged from Isla Centurum—human language, human society, that kinda thing. That’s in part, of course, because I wanted to know more about who I’d be ruling over soon.”
“And did it bear any fruit for you?”
“No, and that’s why I’m working fast-food in Japan right now.” Maou shrugged. “But it’s always better to act on something instead of worry about it, y’know? Between invading Ente Isla and having my ass handed to me by Emilia, I spent nearly every day trying to figure out what made us different from the humans. Once I wound up in Japan, though, I had it all worked out in three days.”
“What was it?”
“It’s the simplest thing in the world. So simple, it just makes me want to laugh at this point.”
Maou looked over at Acieth, blissfully sleeping nearby.
“It’s whether you have to eat or not. Period.”
Suzuno lifted her head to face Maou again.
“Food?”
“Yep.”
He deeply nodded. He doubted he would ever forget his third night in Japan, when he fell asleep on the ground and then woke up staring at the ceiling of the hospital he was rushed to for dehydration and malnutrition.
“We demons didn’t need to do anything to gain the dark force that kept us going. Sometimes demons devoured the corpses of their enemies, but that was more for their own amusement than anything else. There was no reason at all for us to eat anything. But humans can’t get away with that. No matter how rich you are, you can never live by yourself.”
He turned to face Suzuno, deliberately this time.
“I’m not talking in some kind of spiritual fashion, Suzuno. I just mean, you can live off your riches but it’s not like money’s the thing that directly keeps you alive. You turn money into food, and that’s what does it. With money, you can have some total stranger make you something good, something healthy; something you like. You want to eat, so you work to make money for it. That’s how all of human society works. It’s completely different at the core from how demons worked…and I had no idea the whole time.”
“…Devil King?”
“I had no idea…and that cost the lives of so…so many people who believed in me. I was so shallow. I thought I could rule over humanity through sheer force of demonic power.”
His back shivered against Suzuno’s.
“Wait. Are you…?”
Suzuno attempted to turn around. Maou sidled his body to one side to stop her.
“I’m not crying, man. You know who should be, though, are all the Devil King’s Army men who followed that idiot. That, and Emi and all the other humans who got killed or traumatized by that moron. I messed up. I was king, and I messed up.”
The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 9 Page 18