The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 8

by Satoshi Wagahara

  “Yes, Pop!”

  In response to the father’s misguided kindness, Tsubasa stretched her back straight and lowered her head to the point that it almost butted Maou’s.

  “I am sorry!”

  She had a reason to be—but then again, this all got started because Maou dropped a book on her. “Nah, it’s all right” seemed to be the right thing to say. The father nodded in response and turned away from Maou.

  “…”

  But the girl, after righting herself, stayed right there. He face was turned to him, as if watching his every move.

  …This is so uncomfortable, Maou thought to himself. How much time was there until the test center? He scowled at the thirty-kilometers-per-hour speed limit sign out the window.

  “Hey! Hey, sir!”

  They weren’t even at the next stop, much less the test center, and now this Tsubasa girl was talking to him! Why did this have to happen?! Maou couldn’t hide the discomfort on his face any longer.

  “Are you going to receive the license, too?”

  “Uh, yeah… Yeah, I am, but…”

  He was about to tell her off when he remembered her father was right next to him. It forced him to maintain at least a token effort at decorum. It sounded like they were headed to the same spot he was. Maou felt dizzy for a moment.

  “How many failures?”

  “Huh?” Maou turned his eyes way, not understanding the question.

  “This is my and Pop’s tenth test. World record!”

  “T-tenth…”

  Maou didn’t know how to respond. That was a shockingly high number. As Kisaki and the rest of the licensed MgRonald employees told him, the written exam was a tad tricky and easily failable if you didn’t know what you were getting into. Failing it nine times in a row, however, was hard to swallow. It probably was a world record, albeit one nobody would want published in a book.

  “Um, could you quiet down a little…?”

  Her father, the bearer of this record, was still right there. He might be a total stranger to Maou, but having this dishonor blared out for all the world to hear before they even reached the test site wasn’t an auspicious way to kick things off.

  “Yes, yes. So it goes, so it goes. Pop, he is not so good with the kanji yet…”

  Maou didn’t know if he was gunning for a regular automobile license or a scooter one like he was, but something told him that learning how to drive was the least of his problems. “So it goes” wasn’t the half of it. And as for the father being so publicly put upon right now:

  “…!”

  “…”

  Maou looked out the corner of his eye at him. Their eyes met for a moment, and once they did, Maou averted his and looked out the window. Or pretended to.

  “…” If you’re listening, Maou pleaded to himself, at least say something.

  “So how many for you, sir?”

  “Uh, this’s my second time…”

  “Wow! Cool. Just twenty percent of Pop!”

  She was right, but to Maou, it sounded like the girl was comparing her father to him and finding the results severely lacking. He had to find a way to keep Tsubasa from slamming her father’s good name.

  “Uh, s-so are you taking a test, too?”

  “Uh-uh. I’m his manager. Uh, his attendant? I’m attending Pop.”

  This was getting nowhere. What was she talking about? Was this girl going to stand next to her father during the whole exam? Wasn’t it usually the other way around, if anything? That would be unusual enough, but…

  “So…um, you aren’t taking it…?”

  “Oh, I was thinking about the taking!”

  She could’ve just said that first, Maou thought. Test takers didn’t need to reserve a spot in advance; it was open to anyone who showed up and filled out the application on time. Maou prayed internally that he wouldn’t be sharing a test room with this pair.

  “But I didn’t study, so maybe I won’t. Just attend Pop instead.”

  Maou began to feel fatigued. They were at least conversant in the Japanese language, but if he had failed the written exam nine times in a row, “Pop” must not be too good with the reading-and-writing part of things yet. Japan’s DMV didn’t just give out licenses to people off the street like this.

  “Well, better luck next time…?” was the only thing Maou could come up with to say.

  “I will do my best!” Tsubasa shouted, hands in the air. It would’ve been nice if that ended the conversation, but after a moment of silence and a single left turn from the bus:

  “Hey! Hey, sir? Sir?”

  “…What?”

  She spoke up again.

  Maou had given up on any further study on the bus, but thinking about how much longer this ordeal had to go on made him despair inside.

  “What is your name, sir?”

  “Umm…”

  Maou’s hesitation was wholly deliberate. Friendliness was fine and all, but this was not a relationship he wanted to foster at all. He honestly wondered whether giving a name would be a good thing or not.

  “My name is A—er, Tsubasa Sato.”

  Don’t mess up your own name, lady. Maou slumped in his seat.

  “Oh. Well, my name’s Maou.”

  “Maou?” The head under the newsboy cap tilted to the side a bit. Then:

  “The king of the devils?”

  Something in the pit of his stomach froze.

  “Wha…?”

  Maou was at a loss for words. Not a single human being had ever started a conversation with him like this. They made fun of him sometimes for how it sounded a bit like “devil king” in Japanese, but Maou made an effort to use a different intonation from that when stating his family name.

  “Yes,” Tsubasa Sato quizzically continued, taking Maou’s hesitation as a denial, “like what final boss is called in the video games…”

  “Not that,” Maou replied, exhaling deeply. That intonation must not have come across to her. Tsubasa Sato sounded like a suitably Japanese name to him, but if she spent her childhood overseas up to now, that might explain her lack of practice with the language.

  “Oh. Not a devil king, huh?” Tsubasa hung her head down. Apparently this came as a disappointment. But then she lifted it back up, suddenly realizing something. That cap over her forehead made it impossible to gauge her eyes, but there was a grin on her face.

  “Oh! But, you know? My pop’s name is Hiroshi Sato!”

  “Huh?”

  Maou took a look back at the father, wondering why this news was meant to be so monumental. The man lifted his head from his own book and met Maou’s gaze.

  “Hiroshi Sato, yes,” he stated with a nod.

  “Oh?” Maou said, a half smile on his face. He knew it was rude of him, but he just couldn’t help it. The man wasn’t exotically foreign—no blond hair or chiseled chin or anything—but his looks still indicated that “Hiroshi Sato” couldn’t have been any less appropriate a name.

  Ah, but it wasn’t fair to have such preconceived notions about people, was it? Even if his face looked purely European to Maou, maybe he had some Japanese blood from his ancestors. Maybe his parents just liked Japan a lot. Or maybe he was a naturalized citizen who decided to adopt a Japan-style name. It was entirely possible.

  “…”

  They looked at each other for a moment or two longer before Hiroshi Sato averted his eyes, just like before. Maou couldn’t guess what he was thinking.

  Then the PA system sprang into action. “Next stop, Test Site Front Gaaaaate, Test Site Front Gaaaaate. Disembark here for the Metropolitan Department of Motor Vehicles, Fuchu Test Center…”

  The ordeal was over. Maou was finally freed from this tragedy of a family. He reached out for the Stop button on a nearby safety rail. But then:

  “Agh!”

  Something pulled his hand back, keeping his finger away from the button by a few inches. Tsubasa had grabbed his arm again, and now:

  “…snif.”

  “What
are you doing?!”

  She was sniffing the back of Maou’s hand, head close enough that she could almost kiss it.

  “Tsubasa!” chided her father, face scrunched in frustration. Tsubasa, meanwhile, was inspecting Maou’s hand closely, her face the pinnacle of earnestness.

  “…I do not understand.”

  “That’s what I wanna say!”

  No point acting restrained now. He flung his arm away from her.

  “What’s with both of you guys?!”

  If the genders were switched in this situation, it almost certainly would’ve been treated as a criminal matter by now. Maou wasn’t interested in pushing the issue, but Tsubasa’s behavior went far beyond what manners allowed on the bus.

  “I do not know. The good scent is blocking it.”

  “Huhh?!”

  “Maou’s hand smells good.”

  What is she saying?

  Maou was an earnest hand washer, a habit he had picked up from work. But today he had only done it once, after visiting the bathroom in the morning, washing with a cheap eighty-yen soap bar from the pharmacy that barely foamed up at all.

  As this went on, the bus finally came to a halt at the stop in front of the Fuchu Test Center.

  “Okay, um, bye!”

  Tsubasa’s bizarre behavior was concerning to Maou—but more than that, he just wanted to get away. He shot to his feet, headed past Tsubasa’s side toward the front of the bus, and bailed out the door. The bus stop was across the street from the test site, so he half-jogged up the nearby pedestrian bridge and stormed past the front gate, praying he could file his papers before that wacky pair could exit the bus.

  Hiroshi and Tsubasa wound up being the last out of the line of people exiting the bus. The fare from Chofu Station’s north exit was 220 yen and they had to get change for a thousand-yen bill first. Predictably, it took a while.

  “You must stop the standing out so much, Tsubasa,” Hiroshi weakly warned.

  “Aw, but this is first time!” Tsubasa replied, not at all cowed by this. “There is something with the man. His hand smelled.”

  “Smelled? …Gack! Koff koff…”

  Hiroshi gagged a bit at the exhaust from the bus as it rolled away.

  “Yeah.”

  “It smelled how?”

  “Hmm… I wonder where Maou is?” Tsubasa ignored the question as her eyes darted around the bus stop in search of Maou.

  “…We need to take the test. I can pass it today.”

  “Good luck,” Tsubasa blithely replied to her father’s irresolute oath. After a few moments of fruitless searching, she joined Hiroshi up the stairs. “So, uh, this smell…”

  “You do enjoy changing subjects, no?” Hiroshi marveled as he turned back toward the girl.

  “You know what his hand was like?” she replied, ignoring him yet again, just as another bus arrived at the stop on the other side of the street. From above, they could see it eject another throng of test takers once the doors opened. Now Hiroshi had a hefty wait in line ahead before he could fill out the application. He sighed, expression unchanged, as Tsubasa prattled on.

  “It smelled like oil, and potatoes, and…and something from long ago.”

  “Long ago?”

  Hiroshi didn’t know where the oil and potatoes came from, but Tsubasa’s behavior indicated she found it important. She stood in place and, out of nowhere, began spinning around like a ballerina. Then, just as suddenly, she stopped, eyes turned toward the test site front gate.

  “From long ago,” she said in a low voice. “A place I was, long ago. A warm place.”

  “Hey, do you smell something funny?”

  Urushihara, seated at the computer desk, wrinkled his nose as he looked around the room.

  “Bell’s room,” Ashiya replied, not bothering to take his eyes off whatever he was writing on the basic kotatsu heated table he was seated by.

  Urushihara turned around. “Huh?”

  What he smelled was something pungent, a sweet concoction that stimulated every nerve in his nose, like someone was burning or boiling a random assortment of herbs and spices.

  “She is burning some kind of incense. She said she could use it to build an amplifier or something.”

  “…What’s she doing in there?”

  “I don’t know. It still beats the pink smoke I saw seeping out from under her entryway yesterday. That came as quite the surprise, let me tell you. I suppose she’s taking the kitchen-sink approach to her experiments.”

  “Well, if it comes out the windows,” Urushihara said as he held his nose and turned to Suzuno’s room, “isn’t someone gonna report it as a fire or something? I mean, I guess she’s searching for a way to figure out where Emilia is, but…”

  “Who can say?” Ashiya listlessly replied as he continued taking a pencil to the paper on his table. Ever since the day of the scheduled birthday party for Chiho and Emi, Ashiya had been spending a lot of his free time writing like this. Urushihara figured he was doing some home accounting at first, but he was filling out five or so standard pieces of letter paper a day.

  “You wanna borrow the computer?” he had offered once, in a rare fit of thoughtfulness.

  “I don’t know how to use it” came the blunt refusal.

  This put Urushihara off enough that he vowed to ignore his behavior after that, but given that he began this habit right after everything that happened, he figured he was making a few Emilia-related efforts of his own. It was too extensive to be any standard sort of home bookkeeping.

  But just then…

  “Whoa!”

  “Mgh?!”

  The apartment shook a little.

  There was an impact from Suzuno’s room, one large enough to safely term an explosion. Both of them yelped in surprise.

  “Ooooh…koff koff…”

  From out their open window, they heard Suzuno opening up her own window and coughing out of it.

  Urushihara and Ashiya exchanged a glance for a moment. Then they both leaned out the window, dodging the morning’s laundry hanging out to dry right now, and tried to gain a better look.

  “Whoa! Dude, what’re you doing in there? What’s with all that smoke?”

  Suzuno had pushed the window fully open in order to escape from what were now billowing clouds of white smoke from her room. She held her face out as far as she could, tearing up as she coughed.

  “L-Lucifer… I apologize…koff koff…but I think I failed the incantation a little…”

  “If failing it means you’re gonna level the apartment, could you do it outside, dude?”

  “N-no,” came the raspy reply. “I had gone around old antique shops for items that might serve as amplifiers, but the spiritual corpus instilled within them all clashed with each other… Koff koff koff!”

  Urushihara shook his head in exasperation. Ashiya took his position at the window.

  “What is the meaning of this, Bell? Because this is not very neighborly behavior, I don’t think! What if all our clothes start smelling like whatever it is you’re brewing in there?”

  Even as he griped at this, he was rapidly plucking laundry off the lines outside. Devil’s Castle was slightly downwind from Suzuno’s room at the moment. She, meanwhile, was taking deep breaths outside, most of her weight now placed on the window frame.

  “This, this should not be terribly difficult as long as I have access to the right tools… Here I am, declaring myself Chiho’s ‘instructor,’ and just look at this pathetic display…”

  Although it was nowhere near the level of Chiho’s, Suzuno’s own morale had clearly flagged over the past two weeks.

  “So, not too much progress yet?”

  “No, sad to say,” Suzuno said, breathing a sigh of relief as the mystery smoke finally dissipated.

  “Look,” Ashiya shouted as he moved the laundry over to the other window, “I don’t know what you’re doing in there, but please ventilate your room a little more before cooking again. It will be the end of us all if yo
u start a fire in there.”

  Suzuno, still draped over the window frame like a comforter hung out to dry, weakly waved a hand. “I just wish,” she moaned, “there was someone on Ente Isla we could trust apart from Emeralda and Albert…”

  “If there were,” Ashiya spat back, “would you have to go through these ridiculous incantations of yours?”

  Silence met the accusation. Suzuno knew full well he was right. “So be it,” she said. “I will wait a while, then try another approach…after I clean my room.”

  Just imagining the state of her room right now made them shudder. Between the smoke, explosions, and general state of clutter, it couldn’t have been the neatly organized space it used to be.

  “Apart from Emeralda, huh?” Urushihara pondered for a bit. “Hey, Bell?”

  “Mm? What?”

  Urushihara didn’t respond immediately, still fumbling with something in his mind. After a moment, he took out a piece of paper, about the size of a business card. It was hard to say where he got it, considering he almost never left Devil’s Castle—and with all the scuffs and folds on it, it was in pretty poor condition.

  “Outside of Emeralda and Albert,” he said as he looked at the slip of paper, “I don’t know about who you can trust, really…but I can think of someone who’d know about something if you asked—”

  “Ahh!!”

  Before Urushihara could finish, there was a shout from the road beneath both of their windows.

  “Hm?”

  “Ah!”

  “…Who’s that?”

  The person they saw by the side of the apartment was looking up at them, waving, a mixture of surprise and joy on her face—although Ashiya and Suzuno could sense the anxiety behind the smile.

  “Hello, Ashiya. Hi, Suzuno… Umm, I guess this is the first time we’ve met, but you’re Urushihara, yeah?”

  Urushihara raised an eyebrow, not expecting this unfamiliar woman to know his name. “Um, who are you, dude?”

  “Ms. Suzuki…” Ashiya murmured.

  “Rika, what are you…?”

  Neither he nor Suzuno could hide their surprise at the sight of Rika Suzuki looking up at them.

  “A little tea?”

  “Oh, thanks,” Rika replied at Ashiya’s offering. They had let her into Devil’s Castle, and although she spent her first few seconds there studiously observing the space, there wasn’t all that much to observe, really. After that, she simply stared at the tabletop in the center of the room, politely waiting for Ashiya to sit down first.