Copyright
THE DEVIL IS A PART-TIMER!, Volume 6
SATOSHI WAGAHARA, ILLUSTRATION BY 029 (ONIKU)
Translation by Kevin Gifford
Cover art by 029 (oniku)
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
HATARAKU MAOUSAMA!, Volume 6
© SATOSHI WAGAHARA 2012
All rights reserved.
Edited by ASCII MEDIA WORKS
First published in 2012 by KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo.
English translation rights arranged with KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo, through Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc., Tokyo.
English translation © 2016 by Yen Press, LLC
Yen Press, LLC supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact the publisher. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wagahara, Satoshi. | 029 (Light novel illustrator) illustrator. | Gifford, Kevin, translator.
Title: The devil is a part-timer! / Satoshi Wagahara ; illustration by 029 (oniku) ; translation by Kevin Gifford.
Other titles: Hataraku Maousama!. English
Description: First Yen On edition. | New York, NY : Yen On, 2015–
Identifiers: LCCN 2015028390| ISBN 9780316383127 (v. 1 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316385015 (v. 2 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316385022 (v. 3 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316385039 (v. 4 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316385046 (v. 5 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316385060 (v. 6 : pbk.)
Subjects: | CYAC: Fantasy.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.W34 Ha 2015 | DDC [Fic]—dc23 LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2015028390
ISBNs: 978-0-316-38506-0 (paperback)
978-0-316-39808-4 (ebook)
E3-20161123-JV-PC
PROLOGUE
The red sky grew blurred and bleary above him.
It was a short life. And, in his young mind, he was ready to give it up.
Lacking even the strength to move his fingertips, his indistinct view of the world around him was enough to make him realize his life would disappear before long. There was no fear. He was so young that there wasn’t any capacity to dread it yet.
In terms of life expectancy, he should have had a while to go. His parents had each lived for a thousand years, he was told. But that meant little compared to the whirlwind of violence he was faced with. Everything around him was stained in red, red, red, making an already scarlet-tinted world even bloodier as it began to consume him.
There was no despair, no sadness; but there was something…
“…”
…He was bitter.
Was this soul infused within this body just so someone else could squeeze it out? Did time march on to this point just so that his entire tribe could die in pools of blood?
Just when he began to consciously recognize himself and the paths he had taken in life, that life of his was about to be lost, valueless, like a cloud dissipating into the air. Like a passing breeze, like the loose earth, soaking up the blood around him.
Why did my soul have to take up residence in a place like this?
If a soul being born, then fading away, is the natural order of things, why did mine have to find itself in a body like this?
The red sky blurred a little more, growing further indistinct. Then from his eyes, a strange, clear liquid, different from the red puddle around him, fell downward. At that moment, there was something else ruling over his soul, pushing away the red sky, red ground, red wind, and red-stained body that was at the brink of death.
Within the vast, dark sky above him, untold hundreds of points of light twinkled. Among them were two spheres, much larger and distinct than the rest. Two places that untold numbers of souls called home, or so it seemed to him. And, he felt, lands he might find himself traveling to very soon.
They had an attraction that was difficult to define, their unknown colors alluring and comforting. It was a far cry from the red that now enveloped him, and it called him closer.
But he could not reach them; his body and soul refused to move. And yet they seemed so close, within arm’s reach—these spheres where both could finally find solace.
The lights floating in the emptiness grew indistinct once more.
“…Well, not to disappoint you or anything, but it’s not exactly a lovefest all day up there, either. If you asked me, there isn’t a word out there used and abused more than paradise.”
The crimson quickly returned to his vision.
His consciousness was buffeted by the jolts of pain that ran across his body. But he had definitely heard it.
“A lot of things change when you have a different perspective, I guess you could say. In fact, I’d say all the red around here is a lot prettier.”
“But…I’m scared. Of red.”
“Oh? Scared, huh? Well, that’s a surprise. Seeing a demon cry is one thing, but I didn’t think you’d start whining about the one color that defines the entire demon realms, too.”
The existence of a voice meant that someone was nearby. The life was almost vacant from his body, but the fact he was now lying on the ground, defenseless, filled him with a new sensation: fear. And a fearful heart is a heart that wants to live, a heart that thinks it wants to keep muddling forward.
He furtively searched for the enemy with his blurred eyesight, only to find an unknown someone looking down upon him. Its form was not much different from his own young body—even thinner, if anything. It was a foe like none he’d seen before, and now its lips were curled upward in a smile.
“Would you like to know the name of that color you just saw?”
He found himself nodding without hesitation at the query. Enough spiritual force had found itself back inside his soul to make it happen.
The enemy’s hair seemed to shine, its aura reminiscent of the color he was now so curious about.
“Once you do, you’ll learn more about the world itself. That, and you’ll learn about a new aspect of the red that you fear so much.”
He found himself bathed in a dim light, the pain palpably easing away from his body.
“What’s your name?”
“…Satan.”
It was an extremely common name, where he came from. But the enemy still gave it a grandiose nod.
“That’s a nice name.”
What was so nice about it? It came from some great emperor who united this land at some point in the ancient past. Too regal a name for some kid from one of the bog-level tribes, all but ready to give up the ghost right here. He never had a chance to even try living up to it.
“I’m going to impart to you the knowledge you need
in order to learn about the world. The knowledge you need to make that fear-tinged red seem beautiful to you.”
The smile seemed to etch itself within his soul.
“The color you saw was—”
THE DEVIL CLOCKS BACK IN
From the outside, things didn’t look too terribly different. Not that it would have been. Despite the extensive renovation work inside, as rent-paying tenants, they weren’t allowed to change all that much with the externals. They didn’t even apply a new coat of paint to the outer walls. One look at the cornerstone, and it was clear to anyone that the building already had a good twenty years or so of age on it.
“You look disappointed.”
His boss gave him a self-satisfied smile as she crossed her arms. The shoulder bag dangling at her side was packed to the gills with paperwork and other necessities.
“Well, I dunno. You said there were all these upgrades we were gonna do, so I figured it’d look a bit newer on the outside, kinda.”
As he spoke, Sadao Maou parked Dullahan II, his trusty fixed-gear steed, in the all-too-familiar employee parking area. Today was the day his workplace, the MgRonald in front of Hatagaya rail station, opened its doors once more.
The nonslip construction flooring and antidust covers were all peeled off the building, a sign advertising the new services (the whole reason for the renovation work) was attached to the front, and most of the external fixtures and such were shiny and new. But none of the changes seemed particularly drastic to him.
Still, taking in the new sign, he realized that the red paint on the old one—one of the official corporate colors—must have faded a fair bit over time. Exposed to the city air and the sun’s UV rays, that kind of aging process was inevitable.
On that note, the newly installed sign and its vibrant red hue definitely exuded an air of newness.
The large windows facing the door had some new tint work done on them, making it hard to see inside. But the windows themselves were still in the same frames, the automatic doors in the same position, and the interior doubtlessly not all that different, either.
If the kitchen and customer-entrance locations were the same, traffic flow around the dining space couldn’t be much different, either. Maou doubted that corporate did much with the seating arrangements and such.
“Well, let’s not judge a book by its cover too quickly, shall we?”
Mayumi Kisaki, store manager and Maou’s boss, looked supremely confident as she strode up to the door, using a key to release the lock on the bottom—the same as always with that, too. She pushed the door open as she continued, fumbling anxiously through a key ring she’d fished out of her shoulder bag.
“Give me just one minute. Once I open the door, I have to turn this other key on the new alarm panel within forty seconds or else the security company will automatically call the authorities. Um, which key was it…? This one?”
Maou took his first step into the dim dining space as she briskly walked inside, noticing a constant electronic beep from the security panel deeper within. He waited patiently, the still-sweltering heat making him wish summer would end already. Then, after half a minute or so:
“!!”
The lights suddenly turned on.
It was a kind of light Maou had never experienced before in his daily life. Certainly not the fluorescent-tube illumination he had grown so used to. Investigating the ceiling revealed that it was lined with countless lights, each one a tiny yet powerful bulb. They seemed to stab into his eyes with their sharpness, but the rows of alternating white and orange worked together to fill the place with a soft sort of radiance neither too dim nor too bright.
“Whoa!” The shock ejected itself out from his lips. “This must be the LED lighting I’ve heard so much about!”
And everything it illuminated was a marked departure from what came before it. The plush seating that lined the walls, their plastic pastel colors faded through years of use, were now a uniform, refined brown, modeled after high-priced leather seating.
The swivel seats that once lined the bar counter, which grated annoyingly against the hard tile floor and were a pain to keep neat and orderly, had been replaced with high-seated chairs mounted against the wall. And those walls, whose color had morphed over time from pink to a vaguely sort of Caucasian skin tone, now boasted a line of yellow tiles with patterns in them, their relaxed tone a refreshing match with the lights and fixtures.
Kisaki spun the key ring around her finger as she came back. “What do you think? Still disappointed now?”
Maou firmly shook his head.
“The kitchen equipment got an upgrade, too, though it mostly works the same as before. But we finally got a three-plate grill in, so that oughta make the rushes a bit easier.”
“Ooh, I appreciate that!”
Maou wasn’t lying. It honestly put a sparkle in his eye.
MgRonald burgers could be divided into several core components—the buns, the patty, then the cheese, vegetables, sauce, and so forth. The kitchen used what was known as a clamshell grill, an industrial skillet featuring movable platens that allowed the operator to cook patties on both sides simultaneously. Their previous grill had only two platens, reflecting the small size of the original business setup.
Since every order had its own ingredients and flavorings, these platens would need to be cleaned after cooking things like fish and teriyaki chicken sandwiches to keep any rogue flavors from bleeding through to the next order. That cleaning process, if it came during the lunch or dinner rush, would inevitably generate what was called “wait time” in MgRonald corporate speak—in other words, customers would need to wait longer than strictly necessary, messing up the store’s order rhythm. The availability (or lack thereof) of a single platen made a night-and-day difference in work time and stress.
“Hey, is the wash basin bigger, too?”
“Yep. Plus, the faucet’s automatic now.”
“Wow!!”
Admiration and wonderment oozed out of every pore of Maou’s body. Although, really, the universal presence in Japan of porcelain basins with metallic spigots that spat out fresh water with a simple turn of a handle had been an enormous culture shock to him when he first showed up. Nowhere in the demon realms—and certainly nowhere among the five continents that made up the land of Ente Isla—was there a water system robust enough to bring clean water to individual homes whenever you needed it. The “water system” in Maou’s old domain was whatever stream you happened to be nearby, running from the source to wherever it drained to, with maybe a few magically operated valve systems in the manors of nobility.
To someone like Maou, for whom the presence of a water source you could shut off at will was already exciting enough, the first sight of an auto-flushing public toilet left him astonished. You don’t even have to turn a handle anymore?! was his honest thought. But now, he understood their purpose. Faucet handles in public facilities could be crawling with germs. And considering MgRonald’s standard rule of one thorough handwashing per hour, having an automatic faucet seemed like a godsend.
“This all is a really big step forward!”
Kisaki looked graciously, if a tad suspiciously, at the astounded Maou.
“You know, I love how…I dunno, rustic you act sometimes.”
“Huh?”
“Oh, never mind. It’s nothing big. By the way, Number Ten’s around this corner. There’s three of them across the two floors.”
“Number Ten” was semiofficial corporate code for the public bathrooms. Maou stepped inside the one nearby, only to find himself stopped cold for a moment.
“Something wrong?”
“N-no, i-it seems like something’s missing. Did it get smaller?”
A toilet sat inside the room, but it was one wholly beyond Maou’s ken.
“Oh, that’s one of the new heated-seat models, the kind that doesn’t need a separate water tank. And also…”
Kisaki pointed out a panel lined with buttons, a sort of remo
te control bolted to the wall.
“You can push a button to lift the lid up.”
“Whaaaaa?!”
The amazement was deep-rooted and profound. He could see the advantage of an automatic faucet, but what possible need could there be for a remotely operated toilet seat lid? His slack-jawed reaction drew a bemused smile from Kisaki.
“And if you’re a guy doing a number one, this button lifts the whole thing up, too.”
To Maou, this seemed like taking a simple, instinctive routine and making it needlessly complex. He could understand if someone was leery to use a john touched, rubbed, and/or soiled by God-knows-who before them, but didn’t this just mean the germs were on the control panel now instead?
“Um…so what do the buttons with one water drop and a lot of them mean?”
“Right, that’s how you flush.”
Kisaki motioned Maou to press the single-droplet button. Maou obliged, and a trickle of water—much less than he expected—began to flow along the inner surface.
“Bet I could save on my water bill if I had this at home…”
The Japanese-style floor toilet at the Devil’s Castle in Villa Rosa Sasazuka, a sixty-year-old wooden apartment building five minutes from Sasazuka rail station, didn’t differentiate between little and big flushes. There was a lever, and that was that.
Letting only a little trickle go through was supposedly bad for the water tank, but indulging in a full flush with every trip to the little demon’s room caused both a huge racket at night and a fair amount of concern for their utility bills.
Maou put his home affairs aside for a moment in his mind. “Um…so is this kind of thing normal now? I mean, I know my place was pretty much built in the Stone Age, but most public bathrooms still have the regular kind, right? Do you think our older customers will know how to use this?”
“Hmm…” Kisaki nodded. “You might have a point. We should probably post up some instructions. But anyway, this is still just for starters. The real show isn’t until you see the brand-new space upstairs.”
There was no point jaw-dropping in the crapper all day. Kisaki guided Maou toward the stairway to one side of the order counter. “This’ll probably be a whole new world to you, up here. A new battlefield, I guess you could say. It’ll be a test for all of us. Just remember: outside of myself, you’re the first member of the Hatagaya crew to set foot up here, all right?”
The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 6 Page 1