The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 3

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The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 3 Page 16

by Satoshi Wagahara


  Emi was, if anything, surprised.

  Given that he went around calling himself Satan the Devil King, she expected that he was born that way, part of a prestigious lineage of noble demons (assuming such a thing existed down there).

  “So it took a pretty long time to heal, I think. I was pretty banged up, after all. And after a while, it finally dawned on me that this angel wasn’t gonna kill me. She kept on talking to me, no matter how much I hated it, so I started to learn a lot. But the more I heard from her, the more I realized there was no way angels should be going around helping demons. So I asked her: ‘Why are you helping me?’”

  “…And?”

  “…Don’t laugh, okay? If you do, I’m not saying any more.”

  For reasons only he knew, Maou averted his eyes in embarrassment.

  “She said it’s because I was crying.”

  “Huh?”

  “She said she never saw a demon crying before, so she just couldn’t let me be.”

  It was hard for Emi to imagine a demon crying at all, for any reason. It made her realize for the first time how little she actually knew about the collection of species her human compatriots called “demons.”

  “What reason did you have for crying?”

  Maou winced at the question. But, realizing she didn’t mean to poke fun at him, he resignedly continued.

  “Well, a bunch of things. Like I said, I didn’t really care much about losing my parents or the people around me. If I had to put it in words… I guess I was just pissed. Pissed at how weak I was. Pissed at how unfair it was, just dying without even a whimper like that.”

  Maou’s eyes were still averted from Emi’s, a side effect of retelling these bitter memories.

  “But anyway, this angel took care of me until I was healed, and taught me about a lot of stuff, too. That was the first time I learned there was such a thing as the human world.”

  “!!”

  Maou had glossed past it, but to Emi, this was a shocking revelation.

  Was an angel the root cause that ultimately led to the Devil King’s invasion of Ente Isla?

  There was no conclusive evidence behind anything Maou said, of course. But if he wasn’t lying, this fact had the potential to shake the very core of what little peace Emi’s world clung to.

  “And this girl…or the crystal she used to be, at least… She left it with me the day she went away. It was this beautiful violet crystal, shaped like a crescent moon.”

  “No! I’m looking!”

  Alas Ramus yelped in protest as Maou lifted her up.

  Nothing was on her forehead at the moment, but that crescent-shaped mark must have been meant to symbolize her original crystal form.

  “‘If you want to learn more of the world, take this seed. Plant it, and allow it to grow. Then, you will go far, Satan, my Devil Overlord.’”

  “What?”

  “That’s what she wrote in the note she left behind. Literacy, too—that was another gift she gave to me. A revolutionary way to convey information, one that didn’t involve violence or crazed gibbering for a change. So I’ll gloss over the next two hundred years of glorious conquest, when I took the demonic rabble and forged it into a proper civilization, but there’s no way that ever would’ve happened without the knowledge she gave me. So that’s why I planted that crescent-shaped seed. I thought it would benefit me, sooner or later, even if I didn’t know exactly what it was. Then, when I planted this crystal on that angel’s command—get this—it actually sprouted into a tree. Kind of a letdown, you know?”

  Now Maou’s eyes were focused upon a not-so-ancient point in his life. The Devil’s Castle—the original one, the symbol of the transformation he had engineered in the demon realms, built on the ruins of Isla Centurum in the center of the Ente Isla lands.

  The Devil King, upon setting foot on a world that was not his own for the first time, planted the moon-shaped purple crystal in its soil, anticipating it would bud into a harbinger of the future.

  He cultivated it inside a pot placed deep inside his personal chamber, fully exposed to the sunlight, in an area nobody but himself was allowed access to.

  “I mean, it’s not like I was tutored and trained from birth to be Devil King. Back then, in the demon realms, you couldn’t spit without hitting someone whose name was Satan. We were taught that it was the name of some great demonic overlord, one who lived in an era before legend, blah blah blah. It’s really a miracle any kind of legends existed at all in that dump before I came around. I have no idea why that angel called me ‘Devil Overlord,’ but I guess that’s where I got my start. With her.”

  Maou gave Alas Ramus a pat on the head, but the girl escaped from his hand, plastering herself against the gondola window.

  “But, anyway, that sort of thing. In terms of the role I had in taking that purple crystal and making it into Alas Ramus, I guess you could make the case I’m her dad.”

  “So would that angel be her true…?”

  “It’d make sense, wouldn’t it? But it was just this plain old crystal when she gave it to me, so… I dunno if you’d really call that an embryo or whatever.”

  Emi, breaking out in a cold sweat as she felt her pulse rise and an ominous premonition loom over her mind, asked the obvious question.

  “Who was it?”

  Laila had disappeared from Emeralda’s sight. The woman in white knew Alas Ramus’s name. The crystal that produced Alas Ramus was gifted to the Devil King by an angel. That girl now saw Emi as her mother.

  It couldn’t be.

  A superstorm of anticipation, premonition, and anxiousness raced through Emi’s heart.

  “Nobody you know.”

  The storm dissipated into a light drizzle.

  “…You aren’t trying to hide her from me, are you?”

  “I’m not trying to, but I don’t think she’s anyone that famous. She didn’t show up in any of the sacred Church tracts or anything. Hey, but can you tell me why Alas Ramus is back to normal now? You know something about that, right?”

  Emi found Maou’s sudden vagueness inscrutable. But she answered anyway, reasoning she had already learned enough about Maou’s past for today.

  “She was healed by this girl dressed entirely in white. She put her hand above her, and that was all it took.”

  “…Whoa, what’s up with that? Some kind of New Age deal?”

  Maou must not have seen the woman. Emi pressed on.

  “No! She was there when you got back! Didn’t you see her?! It was like, I think her ring glowed a little bit, and then Alas Ramus was right back awake! Like she was just having a dream or something!”

  “I didn’t see anybody! What kind of ring?”

  “Just a plain old ring. I think it had a purple stone in it, but…”

  “…That’s definitely not plain or old.”

  These occasional mental lapses on Emi’s part were enough to make Maou scream.

  “Did you notice anything else?”

  “Well, I didn’t have that much time before some idiot came in shouting at me like a crazy man.”

  “C’mon.”

  “Oh, and she said something about the Heavenly Regiment, and something about a…Yesod fragment? I think that’s what it—ow!”

  Maou instinctively landed a karate chop on Emi’s hat-adorned head.

  “Wh-what’d you do that for?! I’m gonna kill you!”

  Emi quickly grew eager to ratchet up the conflict. Maou stuck to his guns.

  “Look, are you really a knight of the Church, or what? I swear! Young people these days are so stupid! At least try to learn something for a change!” Maou bellowed as he held his head in his hands, hunching over in mental anguish. “Yesod… Yesod?! Not that, dammit! Jeez, of all the things that bastard could’ve pushed on me… So that thing before, too…!”

  “Wh-what? What’re you going on about all of a sudden?”

  “Man, when we get home, Suzuno is gonna call you such an idiot.”

  “Huhh
?!”

  “Look, doesn’t the word Yesod mean anything to—”

  “Whaaaat, Daddyyy?”

  Alas Ramus, attention focused out the window up to now, suddenly reacted to Maou and his Yesod keyword.

  “Uh?”

  Emi paused, confused on the meaning of this. Maou stooped down to Alas Ramus’s level, his face somewhere between conviction and desperation.

  “Alas Ramus, listen…”

  “Yeah, Daddy?”

  “What’s that?”

  Maou pointed out a red balloon. The girl replied at once.

  “Gebba.”

  “And that?”

  He next pointed to a dark-yellow, almost orange balloon.

  “Tiparuh.”

  “And how about this bright yellow one?”

  “Market. I like him!”

  “And the white one?”

  “Ketter.”

  “Wh-what’s she going on about…?”

  Emi blinked in helpless confusion over the unfamiliar terms.

  “Okay, how about this?”

  Maou fished a purple balloon out from the bunch.

  “Me! Yeffod.”

  “Oooh, good girl. You can say it and everything.”

  “Oooo! Hee-hee!”

  The gondola was nearing the end of its journey. Emi squinted at the western sun illuminating the Big-Egg stadium.

  “I don’t really know why…but I got a feeling Alas Ramus is something way beyond a demon. Or an angel.”

  “Huh?”

  “Gevurah, Hod, Malkuth, Keter, and then Yesod. They’re each the names of the Sephirah, the world-forming jewels that grow on the tree of Sephirot. I think…Alas Ramus might be the personification of the Yesod Sephirah.”

  Chiho, waiting on the bench as Maou’s and Ashiya’s gondolas spun slowly around, was wallowing in self-loathing.

  By herself, able to more calmly assess the situation, she now realized she was in no position to criticize Rika’s rubbernecking habit.

  She had pretended this was all for a just cause, offering to lend her cell phone to Ashiya in case anything happened to Maou. But, as she now admitted to herself, all she was doing was stewing in her jealousy over Maou’s pseudo-married relationship with Emi.

  “Maou said he believed in me and everything, too…”

  Having that trust be shattered by Chiho herself was something she couldn’t dare to face up to Maou or Emi about.

  As she dwelled on the point, a deep, helpless sense of shame enveloped her.

  “Maou… I’m sorry.”

  Taken in by waves of anxiety and jealousy, she did the one thing she should never have done. Chiho stood up and walked down the stairs, not bothering to wait for Ashiya and Rika.

  Not long after she was gone, the gondola bearing Maou, Emi, and Alas Ramus came down.

  “Whew… Sure is hot out, huh?”

  “Mmmph!”

  Maou and Alas Ramus winced at the blast of hot air awaiting them outside.

  Emi, eerily silent, was the last to exit.

  “Thank you very much! We have your photo here if you’d like!”

  Turning toward the voice, Maou was greeted with a print of the photo they had reluctantly taken of themselves, complete with special commemorative mounting.

  “Oooooooo!!”

  “…Ugh, I look terrible.”

  Alas Ramus’s eyes gleamed as she spotted herself in the photo. Emi, meanwhile, winced. Her face in the picture looked like she just swallowed a wasp.

  “You can have this photo, along with a special mounting you can write a personalized message on, for one thousand yen. We can make copies, too!”

  “Wait, it’s not free?”

  Maou blurted out his honest reaction. Emi slapped him on the back of the head.

  “Hmm… A thousand, huh…?”

  “Daddy! Daddy, look! Look!”

  Alas Ramus clearly wanted the photo. But considering the cost of the photo paper, printer ink, and mounting, it was pretty clear which side of this exchange was profiting the most out of it.

  “…We’ll just take one, please.”

  To Maou’s surprise, it was Emi who made the snap decision. Taking a thousand-yen bill from her wallet, she accepted the photo and passed it over to Alas Ramus.

  “Yaaay!”

  Opening the twofold mount, Alas Ramus exclaimed her joy upon seeing herself, the vaguely half-smiling Maou, and the outright sulking Emi inside.

  “W-wait, are you sure?”

  “It’s just a thousand yen. You don’t have to act so cheap all the time. This is her first photo, isn’t it?”

  “Well, I guess so, but…”

  “And lemme just warn you! Next time Eme and Al get here, don’t show that to them! It’d put my position with them at stake, all right?”

  “Oh, so it’s okay with Ashiya and Chi and Suzuno and so on?”

  “It’s kind of too late with them, okay? Don’t you dare show Lucifer, though!”

  “You are being so stupid.”

  Snickering over Emi’s admittedly stupid demands, Maou crouched down to look at Alas Ramus.

  “Okay, Alas Ramus, say ‘thank you’ to Mommy.”

  “’Ank you, Mommy!!”

  Emi’s face turned bright red at the childish squeal, loud enough to make everyone in the gondola loading area turn around.

  “I…I’m just doing what any mother would do! It’s not my fault her father’s such a worthless bum!”

  It was hard to tell what she was making excuses for. Perhaps she simply wanted to make it clear that her gesture for Alas Ramus had nothing to do with feeling sorry for Maou.

  “C-Come on! Let’s go!”

  Maou and Alas Ramus walked behind Emi as she descended the stairs, face turned away. Then, he paused.

  “Hold on, Emi. I got a phone call.”

  “Huh? …Oh, me too. Wait here a second, okay, Alas Ramus?”

  The pair both received a call at the same time—Urushihara to Maou, Suzuno to Emi.

  “W-we lost them?!”

  Ashiya was exasperated to find the gondola loading zone deserted. They were sitting only two gondolas behind, so they shouldn’t have been separated by longer than a minute or two.

  Running down the stairs, Ashiya scoped out the shopping area ahead of him. Maou and Emi were still nowhere to be seen.

  “I…I wonder where Chiho could’ve gone, too.”

  Rika, despite spending the past fifteen minutes inside an air-conditioned gondola, was notably red in the face.

  “Maybe Chiho decided to chase after them… What should we do, Ashiya?”

  This was seriously bad news. If Chiho didn’t find the errant couple soon, Rika would have to be together, with Ashiya, by herself, for even longer!

  “I…am not sure what we can do. We have no way of contacting her.”

  “Huh?”

  “I am afraid I don’t have my own cell phone.”

  “What? Really?!”

  Released from her air-conditioned prison, Rika was slowly returning to her normal self.

  “I had planned to borrow Ms. Sasaki’s phone if anything untoward happened…but now…”

  It was approaching the evening hours, but the park was still fairly crowded, too much so to make searching for Maou and Emi a practical option.

  “…Well, so be it. This is kind of pushing it more than I like, but…”

  Rika took out her own cell phone and brought up Emi’s number. “Uh, hey, Emi?”

  Ashiya was about to scream in response to Rika’s brazen act of recklessness, but fell silent as Rika put her index finger in front of his lips in a classic “shut up” pose.

  “Hmm? Oh, no, nothing too important… I was just wondering if your date with Maou was going okay and all… Ha-ha-ha! Aw, sorry, sorry. I know, it’s for the sake of the kid and all. I’m not calling at a bad time, am I? Are you about to eat or… Huh?”

  Rika, attempting to ferret out Emi’s location under the guise of her trivial banter, wasn’t ex
pecting the response Emi gave.

  “You’re going back home now?”

  “What?”

  This threw Ashiya. Rika attempted to hide her own surprise as best she could.

  “Ohh, I gotcha. The kid’s probably pooped by now, huh? Yeah. Well, at least she had a lot of fun today, right? Okay, sorry to interrupt you on the way to the station and all! Have a safe trip back!

  “…Well, that explains that.”

  Rika shut off her phone as she turned to Ashiya.

  “They’re gone… Ugghh! That’s no fun.”

  “In that case, there is little point remaining here. Do you think Ms. Sasaki might have left as well?”

  “I dunno about that, but I guess that was kinda mean, huh? Leaving her down there and all. Hey, next time you see her, do you mind telling her I’m sorry?”

  “Oh, no, not at all. In that case, I had best hurry on myself. Thank you for your help today.”

  “Oh… Wh-whoa! Wait a second!”

  Rika found herself stopping Ashiya, just as he was about to run off in search of Maou.

  “Um… So, uh… Oh, right! Here…”

  Fumbling around in her bag, Rika finally produced a notebook, ripping a page out of it and jotting something down before handing it to Ashiya.

  “Is this…your phone number?”

  “It’s my…uh…”

  “Your?”

  Ashiya scrutinized the digits on the paper.

  “Well, you know, the next time something comes up…I could, like, maybe help you guys out…or whatever?”

  Not even Rika had a clear picture of what kind of something she was referring to. But if she didn’t say something, there was no way she could withstand the oppressive atmosphere within her mind any longer.

  “I see… Well, certainly, I may just be calling upon your services again sometime in the future.”

  “…Huh?”

  Her request couldn’t have been more awkward, but Ashiya nodded, completely convinced by it.

  “As I mentioned, I have yet to purchase my own cell phone, so if I need something, I could use Maou’s to…”

  Ashiya stopped at that point, shaking his head as he recalled something. Maou’s cell phone served as the chief link from Devil’s Castle to the outside world, but he realized that giving his supreme master’s digits to a semi-acquaintance he rode the Ferris wheel with might not be the best thing.

 

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