The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 6

by Satoshi Wagahara

  With that, Emi and Suzuno began to transfer a vast quantity of holy force into Maou’s body, through his shoulders.

  “Wh-what are you doing?!” a dumbfounded Farfarello shouted. The amount of force flowing into Maou was completely uncapped, a torrent of holy wrath. In his current weakened human form, it could very well evaporate him.

  “Stay there!!”

  But he was stopped by Maou himself, the pain clearly evident on his face.

  “Heh…heh-heh… Don’t…don’t get nervous. Wait’ll you see what happens next.”

  “Are…are you sure about this?”

  Maou seemed supremely confident, but he never got around to explaining what the point of it was to Emi or Suzuno. They reluctantly agreed to it, figuring he’d never do anything to put Chiho in danger. But all this looked like was them beating the tar out of Maou.

  “Gaaahhhhh!!”

  And before the magic torrent went on for very long…

  “…………!”

  “Wh-whoa!”

  “Hey!”

  Maou’s eyes rolled upward as he fainted.

  No one watching him knew what the point of this torture was. No one except Chiho.

  “Shining trees rustling under the new morning…”

  Suddenly, she began singing the MHK radio-calisthenics theme. The effort started to activate the holy force in her own body just as Maou limply fell to his knees. Emi lifted him back up, her face clearly concerned for his safety.

  “Open your heart up to the joy around youuuuu…”

  Then, out of nowhere, things began to happen.

  “And reach for the stars!”

  Maou’s body crumpled, as if someone had gone at him with a baseball bat.

  “Agh!”

  “Whoa!!”

  Emi and Suzuno, trying to keep him upright, were blown away by the same force. A dark light began to glow from within Maou’s body.

  “Build a healthy body with MHK Radio 1…”

  The light grew brighter and brighter, eventually cloaking Sadao Maou’s whole body in inky blackness.

  “Is that… It couldn’t…!”

  Farfarello shielded his eyes against the stream of dark light, but he still couldn’t dare shy away from the sight.

  “Open yourself to the fragrant wind—one!”

  The first thing to emerge from the cloud was a pair of beastly legs.

  “Two!”

  Then his gigantic body.

  “Three!”

  Then a pair of horns, one notably blunted by Emi’s sword.

  “Daaaamn, that was close. Nearly lost it for a sec there.”

  Then a dopey remark that completely ruined the whole atmosphere he just built.

  “What…what-what the hell?!”

  Emi was the most surprised out of all of them. How could injecting him with a stream of holy force create the Devil King out of thin air? Suzuno remained dazed on the floor, incapable of anything but looking up at the monster looming above her.

  “Jeez, guys, stop freaking out. …You get what’s going on, right, Chi?”

  Even with her newfound skills in activating holy magic, it still pained Chiho to be near the Devil King’s demonic force without any protection. Still, she flashed Satan a bold smile.

  “I…think so.”

  Before their confrontation at Tokyo Tower, Chiho herself was poisoned by dark force created by her own body, a reaction to the holy-power overdose she’d received. So what would happen if you did that to Sadao Maou, everyday human? The answer, clad in a hideously overstretched UniClo T-shirt and pair of denim jeans, was right in front of them.

  “Wow, you’re big,” Erone marveled, looking up at Satan with a light smile. Clearly he was the only one really enjoying the sight.

  “My…my liege…”

  Farfarello immediately fell to one knee. Having ascended to chieftain after the Devil King’s Army was destroyed, he had never enjoyed a direct audience with Satan before. But having him, in all his gory glory, thrust upon him like this filled his heart with shame and regret. Satan, the Devil King, was alive and well, tapping into reserves of power completely beyond Farfarello’s comprehension and preparing to seize the world for himself. And now he even had his old enemies on his side!

  “Well? You got any more complaints now?”

  The booming voice from on high immediately chided Farfarello’s soul into obeisance. He fell prostrate before his lord.

  “This…this is all due to my own imprudence. I am willing to accept any punishment you deem proper for ever doubting your heart, my liege.”

  A moment of silence ensued. Farfarello, on his hands and knees, was prepared to have his life snuffed out at any moment. But:

  “Who the hell said anything about that?”

  The reply was far more casual than he expected.

  “It’s just like I’ve been telling you this whole time. Just go back home, all right? I got my plan in action here, and I’m not gonna do anything stupid to mess it up. And get Barbariccia and his troops out of the Eastern Island already. I’m here in this new world, obtaining new power for myself, and paving a path to conquer the world with. As long as we’re clear on that, it’s all good.”

  “…I cherish your grace, my liege…”

  “’Course, it’s probably gonna take more than that to convince Barbariccia. Once you get home, I got a message I want you to give him. Tell him that I’ll introduce him to the four Great Demon Generals of the real New Devil King’s Army. I got ’em here on Earth.”

  “Uh?”

  “Huh?”

  “What?”

  The existence of this force was news to all the humans in attendance.

  “Alciel and Lucifer you probably remember. To that, you can add the Hero Emilia. She’s an expert fighter, and she might even be stronger than I am.”

  “Hey!!”

  “And over there is Crestia Bell, the ‘Scythe of Death’ from the Reconciliation Panel. She’s a brilliant strategist with a background in Church diplomacy and an encyclopedic knowledge of the geopolitical situation in Ente Isla.”

  “What are you…!!”

  “Finally, we have Chiho Sasaki, MgRonald barista and my personal assistant. Her mind-control skills are what it took to take these two former foes of mine and win them over to my side. These are the four Great Demon Generals of the new army I am assembling.”

  “That’s five!!”

  Emi and Suzuno couldn’t help but shout it out in unison.

  “Wait! That doesn’t matter! You can’t just make me a Great Demon General or whatever! I got a say in this, too!”

  “Of all the nonsense I have ever heard from you… This is nothing short of defamation! I demand an immediate correction, retraction, and self-immolation!!”

  “And what do you mean ‘MgRonald barista’?! We can’t put Chiho in any more danger than she already—”

  “MgRonald…ballista…?”

  “Huh?”

  “Hmm?”

  Maou made a point of introducing the Hero, the Reconciliation Panel enforcer, and the MgRonald barista as titles of apparently equal class. Farfarello actually bought it.

  “A MgRonald ballista…a royal bishop defender? Are you a talented archer?”

  “Where’d you get that from?!”

  For reasons Emi couldn’t fathom, he was mistaking a piece of résumé padding as some kind of elaborate military appellation.

  “Wow…me, a general…?”

  “Look!” Suzuno involuntarily exclaimed. “She is enjoying this!”

  Chiho was ignoring them entirely, practically exuding holy force as she fell into reverie, the power of Satan’s dark strength no longer any bother to her. Suzuno, at least, had a better idea of what was going on than Emi.

  “Magur on Alde… A bishop in service of the King… Is his brain made of mush?!”

  Farfarello ignored her. “I promise you,” he proclaimed, “that I will join your new Devil King’s Army and do whatever it takes to conquer bo
th this world and the demon realms. From now on, I will never view the humans before me as my enemy!”

  “Well said!”

  “No, please do! ’Cause we are, all right?!”

  Not even Emi screaming at Farfarello could snap him out of it. Maou nodded at him, convinced that he would no longer offer him any resistance.

  “All right,” he said, picking up the ball of dark magic on the ground with two gnarled fingers. “You can have this back. Oop!”

  With a moment’s concentration, Satan’s body disappeared into a pyre of dark flame.

  “My-my liege?!” Farfarello shouted in panic.

  “…Take this with you.”

  In the blink of an eye, the Devil King Satan—his overwhelming power, his body, his royal majesty—was back in the form of a young man, his now completely stretched-out T-shirt hanging limply from halfway down his shoulders.

  “This oughta help fill your coffers a little,” Sadao Maou said. “Bring it back home and eat it, or pass it around, or whatever. Your choice.” Then he tossed the ball of dark force at Farfarello.

  It looked like little more than a cannonball, but the force imbued within was almost the entirety of the Devil King Satan’s internal powers, reawakened by an overload of holy magic.

  “But…but then, my liege…”

  Now Satan was a weakling again, one with only the barest sliver of magic force. Farfarello failed to see how disposing of this power would help his liege on his conquest.

  “Didn’t you see?” Maou said. “I can pull that trick anytime I want to get that form back. Besides…” He chuckled as he turned toward Emi and Suzuno, seething silently at him from behind. “I better keep it cool around these ladies for a little while. You wouldn’t like them when they’re angry.”

  Farfarello could do little more than stare in mute amazement at the trio.

  “Maaaaoooooouuuuu!!!!”

  Then, with a shout that evoked memories of the Devil King of a moment ago, Maou’s Great Demon Generals descended upon his back.

  “Devil King! Take it back at once! You cannot have five Demon Generals!”

  “Why not? Hell, how about I bring on two more? Then it could be Devil King and the Seven Demon Dwarfs.”

  “Oh, you want even more?! That’s not even the problem!”

  “A new set of Great Demon Generals, and a new civilization engineered by His Demonic Highness… The people of the demon realms shall be very pleased to hear this!”

  “I told you, that’s not the friggin’ case!!”

  The voices of the frantic Emi and Suzuno, the emotionally overcome Farfarello, the holy-power-driven and practically airborne Chiho, and the artfully dodging Devil King Satan filled the Shinjuku air.

  “Wow! Wowwwww…!”

  Only Erone, witnessing the pandemonium from afar, was enjoying the scene, clapping in glee at it.

  “…What’re they even doing up there? If they don’t need the barrier, I’m taking it down.”

  And finally there was Sariel, who had traveled up to the roof to find out why there was no to-the-death struggle going on. He found himself shrugging his shoulders at the casual bickering he encountered instead.

  “Look, I told you a thousand times! If we don’t want to create any more enemies for ourselves, it’s easiest for all of us if we acted like we were allies!”

  Sadao Maou’s shouting echoed across the Shinjuku evening.

  Now back to human form, Maou was forced to sit down on the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building roof and take a verbal beating from Emi and Suzuno, both enraged at their recent promotions to Great Demon General. The proclamation Maou had for Farfarello impacted everyone on the scene so much, his promise to lecture Chiho about trying to extract information from the demon was completely forgotten.

  The thing that angered Emi the most was how he had appointed Chiho as a general, too. If Farfarello stepped through the Gate Erone had created to take him home and immediately reported that to Barbariccia, Chiho would no longer be a passing witness to events on Ente Isla—she’d be a full-fledged participant. Someone might see her as an enemy now; they might just pay her a visit, even. The whole point of teaching her holy magic was completely lost now, something the women nagged Maou about nonstop on the way home. But now he was sniping back at them, unable to withstand any more of it.

  “Look, they aren’t gonna mess with her that readily if she’s one of my Great Demon Generals, all right? That’d be like one of your knight corps taking on Barbariccia by themselves, and he wasn’t even a general in the first place.”

  “That’s not the issue! Now everyone on Ente Isla might see Chiho as some kind of menace to them, you see? Plus, you made her a general instead of any of the demons in your realm! What if some would-be demon officer from your ranks gets jealous and decides to take her down?”

  “My officers wouldn’t do that! They’re not that malicious!”

  “Oh, so you only hired kind and benevolent demons for your army?”

  “Oh, come on, Chi! Are you accusing me of being malicious here? You humans never believe a single word I tell you, but then you take my words out of context to make me the bad guy! If that isn’t being malicious, what is?!”

  “Well, if you weren’t being malicious, then you were just being stupid, all right? And either way, now Chiho’s in a completely new kind of danger thanks to you! You demonic moron!”

  “Hey, you wanna go? ’Cause I’ll go, man!”

  “Oh, bring it on!”

  “Will you please keep it down?!” Suzuno could bear it no longer. From the the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building all the way to the Hatsudai station on the Keio New Line, Maou and Emi had been endlessly griping at each other. “There is no use crying over spilled milk like this. This is our fault for not fully solving the problem while Farfarello and Erone were still here. This is a defeat for us!”

  “Suzu-Sis, don’t be mad!”

  Alas Ramus, sitting in Suzuno’s arms, hit her on the head a few times. Suzuno childishly batted the pudgy arm away.

  Just before Erone left with Farfarello, the child had sprung out from Emi’s body, once again against the Hero’s will.

  “…Erone.”

  “Alas Ramus… It’s been a long time.”

  “Mmm.”

  That conversation seemed to confirm it. Whatever Erone was, he was extremely close to Alas Ramus.

  “Erone…are they okeh?”

  “I’m sorry… I don’t know. I’m fine, though.”

  “Mmm.”

  That was enough to make Alas Ramus beam brightly.

  “Wanna play again later?”

  “Sure.”

  And thus the short encounter between the two seeds of Sephirah ended. Alas Ramus never took her eyes off of him until he stepped through the Gate with Farfarello and out of Japan. Emi and Maou’s arguing began immediately thereafter, and in the midst of it, the child was transferred over to Suzuno’s arms.

  “We failed to even ask where Erone came from before he left… You lose all of your brain power whenever Chiho is involved, do you not?”

  “…Sorry, did you say something to me, Suzuno?”

  Chiho, still half-floating in the air as she walked, was in a dreamlike state.

  “I did not. Chiho, let me remind you that your lecture awaits once we return.”

  “…All riiiiiiiight…”

  It was difficult to tell whether that reply meant Chiho was listening or not.

  “Dehhh! You people drive me to my wit’s end!”

  “Suzu-Sis! Don’t get mad!”

  “You may say that,” Suzuno sternly replied, “but someone needs to stay serene and consider things rationally at a time like this! Otherwise, none of us would be thinking about anything at all!”

  “Stay sreen an’ consider things rasshon’ly?”

  “…Ah. Little point telling you about it, I suppose.”

  There were still fairly severe limits on Alas Ramus’s vocabulary skills. She tried her best to
keep up, but there was only so much she could do.

  “Ahh, let ’em gripe,” said Sariel, himself almost floating in the air. “All’s well that ends well. I’ve finally made up with my goddess. What more could anyone possibly ask for?”

  “Is there anyone here willing to see things from my point of view?!” Suzuno snapped back.

  “Ah! You scared me, Suzu-Sis!”

  “Huh,” Maou remarked as the cleric ran off in tears. “She’s really putting herself through a lot, huh?”

  “Whose fault do you think that is?” Emi replied. “And why’d you give that dark force to Farfarello anyway? Not that I mind, but…”

  “Oh, like you were gonna let me keep the ability to turn into the Devil King anytime I want on the shelf or something?”

  “Hey, I said I didn’t mind!” Emi barked back.

  “…Well, would you have, though? I mean, if I decided to stay Devil King, team up with Farfarello, and take over the world, that’d be a pretty darn good excuse for you to kill me.”

  “Do you think that’s what I wanted this whole time?!”

  “What do you mean, ‘that’? Me taking over Japan, or you having an excuse to kill me?”

  “……Are you just trying to rile me up, or what?”

  Maou laughed a very deliberate laugh in Emi’s face. “Haven’t you been doing that all night to me? I deserve a turn, too.”

  Emi gnashed her teeth and turned her back to him.

  “But to be serious for one second, considering Chi and all…”

  The two of them turned back toward Chiho, still almost literally walking on air.

  “Given everything she said to us, I wasn’t stupid enough to leave anything for you guys to get in a big snit about. Oh, and before I forget, here’s your fee.”

  Before she had the time to chew on that, Emi frowned at the ragged thousand-yen bill Maou dangled in front of her.

  “What, don’t you want it?”

  “No.”

  “What?!”

  She turned it down without any hesitation at all. Maou almost caught himself respecting her for that.

  “If I take that, then it really would be like we’ve got a business relationship going. Don’t get any weird ideas. I just helped you this time because I had to if we were gonna save Chiho.”

  “I wasn’t really thinking along those lines…but, but if you don’t need it, I seriously won’t give it to you, okay? You sure about that?”