“Gehh!”
Then things got even worse.
“Wh-whoa, are… What the hell?!”
The blade of Maou’s sword, the one he used to defect the spear, was starting to eat between two of the trident’s prongs with its eerily sharp blade. This made it physically clear just how fine a weapon it was, but it was exactly what Maou didn’t want right now. If he cut through the space between the prongs, there wouldn’t be anything there to keep the rest of the weapon from stabbing straight through him.
“G-geez!” Maou shouted in a panic. “This is too much of a good thing, man! Acieth, disengage!”
“Okay, Maou!”
Two things then happened at once. The sword in Maou’s hand instantly dissolved into a swarm of light particles, which then gathered to a point below the two fighters. It created a human form, fusing upon itself at lightspeed to create a person. A girl, named Acieth Alla—the child of a Yesod fragment, just like Alas Ramus. And just as the now-freed trident was about to penetrate Maou’s skin, Acieth’s willowy fist punched right through the middle of it.
“Nngh!”
The dull thud that accompanied the onrush of force, something her arm never should have been capable of, made Camael’s weapon go flying upward. He lost his balance on the rebound, leaving his torso wide open.
“Yahh!!”
It was greeted by a flying elbow from her wispy frame.
“Mngh!!”
Considering the size difference, the strike should have resulted in nothing but a broken elbow for Acieth. Instead, it sent cracks running across the midsection of Camael’s armor like it was made of glass and sent his body somersaulting through the air before it crashed into the roof.
“Maou! What happened?!”
She was surprised to find Maou lying on the roof next to Camael’s crumpled form.
“I lost my balance while I tried to dodge the spear, okay?!” Maou protested as he picked himself up.
“Maybe practice limbo dancing more, yes?”
“Devil Kings don’t practice limbo dancing at all, lady!”
“…Dude, treat this seriously…”
Nobody heeded the words of Urushihara, still lying near the edge.
“I am serious!” Acieth replied. “Time to fight more! These guys, they are more enemy to me than Maou!”
Acieth’s body, far more powerful (it turned out) than it looked, wriggled in the air as she struck what she presumably thought was a menacing fighting pose.
“Well, whatever you want, as long as you’re helping us…”
Maou brought a finger to his forehead. This was Alas Ramus against Gabriel all over again. Acieth didn’t evoke much confidence with her semifluent Japanese, but the hostility she bore for Camael sure seemed like the real thing to him. She wouldn’t be expending all this strength on him otherwise. But what about Erone? He seemed to have no ill will toward Farfarello and the other demons at all. Was it just a matter of differing personalities?
“I wouldn’t think so, no…”
“Ugh…”
“Yeah, I didn’t think that’d be enough to do him in,” Maou said as the sight of Camael struggling to his feet distracted him.
“Sataaann!!”
“Oh, great, me again? What’s your problem with me, anyway?”
Maou was 100 percent sure they had never met before. He’d never seen any angels at all, in fact, until he went to Japan.
“I mean, I don’t really wanna sic Acieth on you if I don’t even know what you’re angry about…”
“Oh, I am okay with it!”
“Chill out a sec, all right?” Maou said, attempting to calm her for a moment so that he could think in peace.
“…Yeah, just chill out, mm-kay? You too, Camael.”
Maou and Acieth both reared back, creating distance from the voice that suddenly popped up.
“Ga—”
“Gabriel!!” Acieth shouted before Maou could finish, voice tinged with even more hatred than what she lodged at Camael.
“Whoa, wait—what?!” Gabriel exclaimed, rather surprised himself as he gaped at her.
“W-wait, Acieth!”
Maou had to quickly step in to keep the girl from leaping for Gabriel’s jugular right then and there.
“What, Maou? Lemme do it!”
“Wait, wait!” he said, grabbing her arm as he watched Gabriel. “We finally got someone I can actually talk to here! Don’t go killing him before I can at least do that!”
He didn’t expect much from this new visitor—more of the meandering, misleading nonsense that Gabriel had given him last time—but at least he was more capable of coherent speech than Camael or Libicocco.
“Acieth…?”
Gabriel, meanwhile, sighed at the sight of the silver-haired girl who was ready to kill him at first sight.
“My, my, my. All these unplanned events, one after the other…”
“You pulling more of this behind-the-scenes crap again?” Maou asked, more exasperated than surprised by now. Whenever there was strife in his life, Gabriel always seemed to be part of it.
“Well, yeah, uh… Or I s’pose you could say that it wasn’t so behind-the-scenes, mm-kay? Kinda different now, though. If that makes me a rat, then gimme some cheese to gnaw on, huh?”
He shrugged in self-depreciating fashion.
“I’m going home, Camael. If we keep trying to be greedy like this, it’s gonna bite us in the ass, that much I’m pretty sure of. This latent force is enough of a pain in the butt, but now we got someone waaaaaay rougher getting into the mix.”
Camael’s stomach heaved up and down.
“Boy, someone’s in a real tizzy, huh?”
“I think something’s wrong with him, Gabriel.”
Maou couldn’t help but butt in at the sight. Gabriel’s suggestion to retreat seemed to not register with Camael at all. He simply kept breathing, loudly and heavily.
“Yeah. Guess he can’t keep cool when Devil King Satan’s around.”
“Uh, I don’t think we have a beef with each other, do we? We haven’t even met.”
“Hey, don’t bitch at me, mm-kay? Bitch at your mom ’n’ dad for naming you Satan in the first place. Maybe things’d be different if you were the Devil King Jimmy or something, but—”
“What’s so bad about Jimmy? You got a problem with the Jimmys of the world?”
“Yeah, sure, tell ’em all I said sorry for me. Come on, Camael, let’s go. We can’t flex our full muscle in this world anyway, and neither can they. There’s some seriously bad hombres gettin’ involved, mm-kay?”
“Wait, you’re going?” Maou snarled. They seemed ready to take off, but he wasn’t ready to let them fly the coop quite yet. “No explanation or apology or anything?”
“Yeah, um… Let’s just say that, uh, what I saw freaked me out so much that I want outta here ASAP, yeah?”
“What?”
“Um… Hey, you. The biggest bum in the world.”
Gabriel stepped toward the prone Urushihara, chiding him. Maybe he was still sore about how he treated him earlier.
“You still got that business card I gave you, right?”
“Business card?” Maou glared at Gabriel, wondering what archangels needed something like that for.
“…It’s at the bottom of one of my drawers. Covered in dust.”
“Well, take better care of it than that, all right? Those things don’t exactly grow on trees, y’know! That really hurts my feelings!” Gabriel nodded perfunctorily, a twinge of sadness to his voice. “Anyway, that bum has my phone number, so gimme a call later, mm-kay? Oh, and here’s a little…uh, something for your trouble?”
He clapped his hands once. Maou and Acieth steeled themselves for the worst, but instead a soft light extended out from the roof to cover the entire school grounds, before vanishing in the blink of an eye.
“I kept all the storm damage intact ’cause it’d be too weird otherwise, but with that, nobody in this school has any memory of the
past hour or so. So can we call ourselves even for now?”
“…”
Maou paused. He found himself looking at his feet, then at Chiho and Suzuno behind him.
“For now…? You planning a rematch later on?”
“Hey, if you’re up for it.”
“I’d prefer not to, man.”
“Even if I told you that we’re in possession of Emilia the Hero’s body?”
“……!”
To some extent, he was expecting Gabriel to say that. Considering how much the angels preferred to keep their diabolical plans under wraps and unnoticed, he knew they’d risk a flashy, destructive strike on Japan for one reason, and one reason only—because the Hero Emilia, the greatest current threat to their way of life, was gone. Hearing it from Gabriel’s mouth, though, made every muscle on Maou’s face tense up.
“Ooh, that’s a funny face you’re making! Not exactly the kinda thing I’d expect the King of All Demons to make, mm-kay?”
Gabriel smiled, the sheer joy behind it something that Maou had never seen from him before.
“Well, see you later, Devil King…or should I say, the latest disaster we have to deal with?”
And so Gabriel went “home”—but not after trashing Sasahata North High; taking Camael, the Regiment, and Libicocco with him; and leaving a bombshell revelation in his wake. “Home,” in this case, was much more likely Ente Isla than the heavenly realm.
“Goddammit,” spat Maou as he looked at the now-calmer sky. It was almost two in the afternoon. He should have been on a train back home by now, all smiles after acing his road test. “Where the hell am I gonna get the money for a third exam?”
But as he shook an angry fist at the skies above, Maou realized something. His body was back to its human self—back to good ol’ Sadao Maou. Surprised, he turned to Acieth, who was still yelling something toward the area Gabriel disappeared into.
“…This makes zero sense.”
Maou set off. Getting Suzuno and Urushihara patched up came first.
“You all right, Chi?”
“Ah…” Chiho looked down at herself. Her uniform, as well as her face and hands, were stained with muddy red blood. It was a sight to behold.
“I’m…fine?”
She nodded, and then tears began to well in her eyes.
“This is…all…Suzuno’s blood. She tried to protect me…”
“…She did?”
“Gnhh…”
The prone Suzuno groaned out loud. She sounded like she was ready to faint.
“I-I’ll go fetch my 5-Holy Energy β bottle from my classroom! Suzuno needs some right now!”
“Wait a sec, Chi!” Maou shouted. “You can’t go back lookin’ like that!”
Chiho being witnessed by other students in her current bloodied state would, at the very least, have an impact on her social life.
“Let’s go back to my apartment for now. Acieth?”
“Don’t run, monster! Come back here now! We will fight this fair and square, chicken!”
“Acieth!”
“I hate you! All stupid angels! Next time, it will be the last time! You wait and see, I tell you! You assholes!”
“Acieth!!”
It took a lot of lung power to wrest Acieth’s attention away from her apparent nemesis. He sighed, a sense of fatigue suddenly overcoming him.
“Can you take all of us here over to my apartment?”
“One, two, three… Uh-huh! No prob!”
Maou wondered whether she really needed to count them or not.
“Who…is this girl, Maou?” Chiho asked.
“Hold that thought, Chi. We gotta get Suzuno and Urushihara home first. You’re coming with us, too—we can talk then. We’ve gotta discuss Emi, too.”
“Oh…!”
The reminder startled Chiho. She must have heard Gabriel as well as Maou did.
“So… Wait, Maou, are you gonna go and res—”
“We’ll talk about that, too, okay? Let’s go. Acieth!”
“Okay!” Acieth gave a pointless thumbs-up and clapped her hands. “Hop on!”
“Ah!”
“Oof…”
“Ngh!”
Chiho, Suzuno, and Urushihara all floated in the air, Maou and Acieth joining them a moment later.
“Take it slow, okay? I don’t want anyone to notice us.”
“Bossy, bossy, bossy! I will try. I gave my body to you long time, after all.”
“…Please don’t phrase it like that.”
Maou, seeing that Chiho was too busy tending to Suzuno behind him to notice the statement, felt a sudden sense of relief. Acieth wasn’t wrong, exactly, but that statement alone would be enough for Emi to slice Maou in half lengthwise if she was around.
“Nah-ha-ha! You look funny. Okay, here we go!”
With that signal, the five of them gently glided through the light drizzle that now fell over the school.
“We’ll be there soon, all right?” Chiho said, using a handkerchief to keep Suzuno’s and Urushihara’s faces dry along the way. “Hang in there. We’ve got some 5-Holy Energy β in your room, Suzuno.”
“Some” didn’t describe it. There was virtually a lifetime supply of holy magic now stored in her apartment. That would be enough to help revive the two of them, and it seemed safe to assume that no further threat to their lives was forthcoming.
Maou kept an eye on them as he thought through his leads. It was vital for him, once he got back home, to extract all the information he could from Acieth and Nord and get a full grip on their current situation. But already he had the suspicion that no matter what the picture looked like, his plan of action looked the same in the end.
“Back to…that world, huh?”
Back to Ente Isla, the Land of the Holy Cross, the human world he was once a hairbreadth away from conquering.
“Too bad we wound up half-assing it so much.”
It was an expression of regret that Maou wouldn’t have even dared let Ashiya hear, muttered to no one in particular as they floated above the Shuto Expressway traffic. As a conqueror of mankind, as the supreme leader of demondom, he had failed to fulfill his full duties as Devil King. Now he was slumming it here in Japan, living day to day with seemingly not a care in the world. Was that really all right? The doubt had taken up permanent residence in his mind.
He wanted to learn everything he had access to in this world, and then he wanted to bring it back to the demon realms. That much was the truth. But before he could pursue that dream, he felt, there were certain things he had to do.
“I gotta do something about my shifts before anything else… Wasn’t exactly expecting to fail twice, so I didn’t schedule any more days off this month… Hope I can find someone to cover a shift for me…”
That was another concern of his, yes. Flying over Hatagaya Station must have made Maou’s mind jump the track a bit. He shook it off.
“But now…? I can’t do a thing by myself anymore.”
He needed Chiho, and Suzuno, and Urushihara, and—
“I need all of their strength.”
“Oh, they’re back. Heeeyyy!”
A familiar voice greeted them from below. Maou and Chiho looked down to find someone waving at them outside the Devil’s Castle front door. They were shocked.
“Amane?!”
“Huh?”
It was Amane Ohguro, their summer-job boss from Choshi. She was the niece of Miki Shiba, the corpulent landlord at Villa Rosa Sasazuka, so it wasn’t too strange that she knew Maou’s address. But he still remembered what she’d pulled off above the waters of Choshi, and the bizarre and undoubtedly superhuman way she’d disappeared from their lives.
“Oh, great, another lead to pursue,” Maou mumbled to himself. It took only a few more moments for him to realize that it was far more than that.
“…Guh.”
Urushihara slipped down onto the floor of the interior hallway upon losing Maou’s support. Neither Maou nor Chiho (currently
keeping Suzuno upright), had any ability to help him now. That was because both Ashiya and Nord were gone from Devil’s Castle—and in its place was a scraped-up Rika Suzuki, sleeping like the dead and wearing clothes taken from Maou’s closet.
“Um… Amane?” he asked, voice shaking.
“Yep?”
“Where’re Ashiya and the…older guy who was just here?”
“Kidnapped,” Amane blurted as she quietly helped Urushihara up. “Right in front of me, too.”
“K-kidnapped?!” Chiho shouted, too surprised to do anything but parrot the word back at her. “Ashiya?!”
“All I was capable of doing,” Amane calmly replied, “was keeping this woman safe.” She pointed at the recumbent Rika as she placed Urushihara down a little ways from her. “It was them against this gang of armored knights and this lanky goofball named Gabriel.”
““…!”” Neither Maou nor Chiho could hide their shock.
“I’m guessing you were expecting this?”
Yes and no. Certainly it made sense that Gabriel would want to seize one of Emi’s relatives if he was still after the holy sword and Yesod fragments. But why Ashiya, too? It only served to confuse Maou even more—and Chiho, who hadn’t heard about the events at the DMV yet.
Amane sized them up, then nodded. Rising quickly to her feet, she presented Maou with a sheaf of papers Ashiya had kept next to the laundry.
“What’s this…?” he asked.
“It’s written in some script I can’t read. Looks like a map or something, but…”
“It’s Centurient…in Ashiya’s handwriting.”
“Also,” Amane interrupted, as she noticed Chiho peeking at the stack of papers, “don’t you think you should be patching up Suzuno right now, Chiho? You look pretty soaked yourself, too. You’re gonna die from the flu if you don’t dry out.”
“Oh! Right! Sorry, Suzuno, but I need to go into your room, okay?”
The color returned to Chiho’s face as Suzuno groaned her approval. They both went into the still-unlocked apartment.
The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 8 Page 18