The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 5 Read online

  PROLOGUE

  “…Mraaaahhhhh.”

  The man let out a cheek-stretching yawn as he unfolded from his reclining chair.

  At first, simply dozing for an hour or two had made his back and shoulders painfully sore. But now, his body had grown used to the chair’s shape, and he never felt tired when he woke up.

  “Man. Didn’t think I could ever adapt to this thing…”

  With another stretch, he picked up the cup and toothbrush placed next to the BuBonic-branded computer screen on the desk in front of him, left his small compartment, and headed for the bathroom.

  The space was notable chiefly for its high ceiling, wide expanse, and the seemingly endless array of bookshelves and open-top cubicles. It was an urban Internet café, and the only sound was the air-conditioning and the occasional grunt as someone shifted in their seat.

  “Ah, the oolong’s…” As he passed by the self-serve drinks corner, the man noticed that the warning light was on next to the switch for chilled oolong tea.

  “’Sup, Greek.”

  “Morning, Satou.”

  “Satou” was there as well, greeting him by his nickname.

  “Ooh, bad luck, Satou!” the Greek said. “They’re out of oolong tea.”

  “What? For real?!” Satou launched his vitriol directly at the drink dispenser. “Guh, how ominious. Y’know, I had a feelin’ today wasn’t gonna go well.”

  “What, because they’re out of tea? So what? Just tell the manager guy up front.”

  “Manager’s coverin’ afternoon shift today! The only dudes there right now are Kayo and that Vietnamese guy, and I hate talking to ’em ’cause they act all shifty whenever I show up.”

  “So if you just gave it up and drank some soda, then…?”

  The man didn’t know “Satou’s” real name.

  What he did know was that his compatriot absolutely refused to let anything besides oolong tea pass his lips. He was watching his sugar and fat intake—or so he claimed, at least.

  “Are you nuts? I don’t wanna die young! I’ll just drink some water and head to work.”

  Satou filled a cup from the tap and briskly walked off, not giving the man a second look.

  “Oh, you got work today, huh? Congrats!”

  The warm praise wasn’t enough to make Satou turn around, but it did inspire him to wave weakly back.

  “…Anyway, soda first thing in the morning is just painful.”

  The Greek muttered it to himself while he found the bathroom and began brushing his teeth.

  CyberSafe, the space he was spending his morning shuffling around in, was fairly famous around the neighborhood for providing a mailing-address service for its regular customers. “Regular,” in this case, meant the kind of people who couldn’t afford rent anywhere in Tokyo and slept in Net cafés and twenty-four-hour fast-food joints instead. It beat putting “The Streets” in the address box on your résumé.

  All he needed for the moment, however, was Internet access and someplace to sleep during the night. Or whenever he was tired, really. By the time one spent as long in here as the Greek did, it grew hard to tell day from night.

  He had come to know Satou along the way.

  He couldn’t surmise why Satou refused to give his real name. “If I gave my name out all the time,” he boldly proclaimed the last time he had been asked, “lotta people could make trouble for me, y’know what I mean?”

  The man didn’t.

  Not that he himself ever reciprocated. Satou called him “the Greek,” and that was good enough for him. But since he himself was clearly not native to Japan, the man found himself fascinated by how frank and unreserved Satou was, talking to him out of nowhere. An interesting person to observe.

  Yet, considering his reticence about identifying himself, Satou was remarkably verbose about his past history.

  He came to Tokyo from out in the countryside somewhere, graduated fourteenth in his class from a prestigious university, passed one of the most stringent government-office exams in the country, worked several years in the Tokyo central bureaucracy, then quit to start a dot-com business back when the first bubble was in full swing. It hit big for him at first, apparently, affording him a freestanding house with a lawn in the ritzy neighborhood of Takanawa and a summer retreat in the resort town of Karuizawa, out in Nagano prefecture.

  But thanks to his go-it-alone attitude and lack of personal magnetism, his company started to flounder, thanks in part to an employee embezzling angel-investor money from the accounts. The company fell into someone else’s hands, leaving him with nothing but massive debt.

  That wasn’t enough to faze him, though. Not Satou. He took refuge working for a delivery company, using it to pay off every yen of his debt over the following ten years. But just when he thought he was free, a wave of governmental reforms led to a sudden influx of competing firms. One of them merged with his employer, and he was one of the first on the chopping block. Back to square one.

  Still undaunted, Satou went homeless for a few months, saving up cash from odd jobs here and there. The Greek ran into him about two months into his “residency” at CyberSafe.

  For now, he claimed, he was squirreling away all the money he could, bit by bit, so he could move to a real apartment by next year and start another company.

  “How impressive… I sure don’t know anyone with balls that big.”

  Whether that was all the truth or not didn’t really matter.

  The important thing was that by the standards of this country, Satou was not exactly on Easy Street.

  “It’s his eyes. Something really alive in ’em, hmm?”

  Finished with his teeth, the man washed his face, rubbing it with a towel.

  Looking in the mirror, he was greeted with a large frame, bright red eyes, and silvery hair with a bluish tone to it. If it weren’t for the I LUV LA T-shirt peeking out underneath his body-length toga, he would be the living embodiment of ancient Greece.

  He looked younger, better built, and far healthier than Satou ever did. But:

  “The frozen tuna at the supermarket sure looks more alive than me, doesn’t it?”

  Gabriel, guardian angel of the sacred, world-bearing Sephirah jewels that grew from the tree of Sephirot, laughed to himself and shrugged.

  “Hmm?”

  Returning to his cubicle, he noticed something rumbling next to his computer. He hurried over to pick it up.

  “Hello?”

  Possessing a cell phone, a device endemic to this world, gave him access to something like a more precise version of an Idea Link.

  He was rather proud of that recent discovery, since it allowed him to keep his Heavenly Regiment stationed in Japan, all biding their time at other nearby Internet cafés and a mere phone call away from action. But this call wasn’t from any of them.

  “Ooh, already? Okay. Yeah, yeah, I blew it. So sue me.”

  Gabriel shrugged to himself again, his voice completely unapologetic.

  “So what, your ‘war’s’ going along dandy, then? …Oh, that wasn’t you? Oh, suuuuure, yeah, I’ll buy that for a dollar. So where are you? …Huh? The obelisk? Oh. There, yeah? Hey, uh, if you don’t mind me cluing you in a little, that’s not an obelisk. Like, people work in there and stuff? So, uh, can you just wait up top? I’ll meet you over there.”

  He shut off the phone, his lack of enthusiasm growing more prevalent every moment.

  “Welp…guess I better figure out what I’m workin’ for here.”

  His eyes, supposedly deader than last week’s catch in the frozen-food aisle, glinted a little, perhaps in expectation of something on the horizon.

  “I am an angel, after all. Would kin
da like to do some good, you know?”

  THE DEVIL STRONGLY DEMANDS TV PRIVILEGES

  People called the structure “the Manor of Roses.”

  Since time immemorial, the rose has signified beauty, its proud petals garnering it the love of each era’s powerbrokers, its place in the annals of time and song firmly ensconced.

  Under the name of this queen of flora, the manor, along with its equally elegant and beautiful, benevolent overlord, has quietly woven a tapestry of history over the long years, evolving into a place of solace—one worthy for the great leader they called King to come and rest his weary bones inside.

  With its sanctified master and royal guest, the manor’s past was just as refined and everlasting as that of the red rose itself. Perhaps it was only natural that the angels themselves, the subject of worship and adulation from all mankind, occasionally deigned it with their presence.

  But, despite it all, the Manor of Roses was still an earthly structure. As a reception hall for the divine and heavenly, its confines occasionally proved a mite cramped.

  In fact, when last greeted by the awesome light of an angel, the rosy paradise within its walls was marred slightly by an enormous hole gouged into one wall, marking a potentially final twilight to the King’s solace.

  The King looked up at that wall, the one so helplessly disfigured not long ago. “Feels like we’ve been out here a lot longer than we actually were.”

  The King’s servant, standing faithfully next to him, was equally transfixed by the sight. “It was not long at all, my liege. We barely worked half the time we planned for.”

  The cadger that the King reluctantly allowed room and board also chimed in, listlessly: “No complaints from me, dude. Now I don’t have to deal with the outside world ever again!”

  The cleric, inhabiting the room adjacent to the King’s, expressed a profound solemnness instead: “Wherever you hang your hat is home, as they say…and this is starting to look rather homey again, indeed.”

  The King’s able work assistant regarded the manor with admiring eyes: “I’m pretty amazed they patched the whole thing up in four days, though.”

  The King’s enemy ruefully observed the proceedings: “This is crazy. That hole was enormous, and in the space of four days, it’s gone without a trace?”

  The child who mistook the King and his foe for its parents asked the King a question: “Home all bedduh?”

  “…Well, look—I know we all got our own personal takes on this, but there’s one thing I seriously wanna ask my landlord.”

  The Manor of Roses, aka Villa Rosa Sasazuka.

  Beholding their two-floor, sixty-year-old wooden apartment in the Sasazuka neighborhood of Tokyo’s Shibuya ward, Satan, the Devil King who once plotted the wholesale subjugation of the faraway world of Ente Isla—currently doing business as Sadao Maou to you and I—could barely hide his anger.

  “Why’d she make us cart all our crap out of there, anyway? ’Cause everything’s the exact same as before!”

  “There” referred to Room 201 of Villa Rosa Sasazuka, the “Devil’s Castle,” which was recently ventilated in unplanned fashion by a death beam from the archangel Gabriel.

  In the space of just a few days, the cramped, one-room Devil’s Castle looked exactly as it once did—another dilapidated apartment in a lonely corner of Sasazuka watching time pass inexorably around it.

  Sephirot is the tree of life. The Sephirah, the treasured jewels it bears, each contain one aspect of the world’s core composition. Yesod was one of them.

  Alas Ramus, the personification of one of Yesod’s fragments that fused herself with the Hero Emilia’s holy sword Better Half, became the subject of a pitched battle against the archangel Gabriel the other day. The end result was a hole in the wall that brought the structural integrity of Villa Rosa Sasazuka into serious question, although it was an open question as to whether or not any of the neighbors could tell the difference. The residents were forced to leave temporarily while repairs were completed.

  Crestia Bell—the cleric who occupied the room next to Devil’s Castle and called herself Suzuno Kamazuki in this world—had some crash space in the apartment of one Emi Yusa, the name the Hero Emilia took on for her new life in Japan. But Maou, temporarily out of a job already due to workplace renovations, was also out of his home.

  Thanks to the machinations of his landlord, Miki Shiba, however, he managed to snag a seasonal position at a beachside snack bar and souvenir shop run by Miki’s niece. Accompanied by Shirou Ashiya (aka the Great Demon General Alciel) and Hanzou Urushihara (aka the not-at-all-great fallen angel Lucifer), Maou trundled himself off to the coast of Chiba prefecture.

  Following soon behind him, as if magnetically attracted in some cosmic fashion, were Emi, Suzuno, and Chiho Sasaki—mild-mannered teen and the only person in Japan who knew Maou’s and Emi’s true identities and the world they both came from.

  The summer job, to put it mildly, did not go as expected. Following the arrival of the Demon Regent Camio—whose wings Maou had entrusted the demon realms to in his absence—the group learned of monumental events unfolding both in Ente Isla and in Maou’s former domain, as well as some of the darker secrets that lurked around the lesser-explored reaches of Earth itself.

  And—the most important thing to Maou at the moment—the beach house he was expecting to work at for two or so weeks went out of business, and also out of existence, in the space of just over four days.

  Between Maou, Ashiya, and Urushihara, the household managed to scrounge up enough pay to more than cover what Maou himself had expected to earn in half a month. But the sudden reintroduction to unemployment was nonetheless difficult to bear.

  The partitioning of the demon realms that Camio came to warn him about, and the battle between Ente Isla’s peoples over Emi’s Better Half sword, weighed heavily on the hearts of both Hero and Devil alike.

  It was starting to become clear that Olba Meiyer—Emi’s former traveling companion, Suzuno’s boss, and top-level cleric in the Church headquartered on Ente Isla’s Western Island—was starting to take action behind the scenes.

  If anything else negative happened to Maou and his cohorts in Japan at this point, he wasn’t sure how he’d put food on the table next month.

  That was how things stood in this, the first week of August—a day Maou had expected to spend in Ohguro-ya, serving ramen and yelling at kids to stop tracking beach sand into the shop.

  “’Kay, let’s do it, Ashiya.”

  “Yes, Your Demonic Highness. Do not misguide us, Urushihara.”

  “Dude, all right! Just watch your step, okay?”

  A fairly humble set of boxes and kitchen appliances were lined up in Villa Rosa Sasazuka’s front yard.

  They needed to bring them back into their room, but once he realized the moving company charged an extra fee for lugging large furniture upstairs, he refused to allow the mere thought of it.

  So here they were, Maou tugging at the refrigerator from above, Ashiya pushing up from below, and Urushihara providing verbal guidance from the ground.

  Considering the number of times the bearer of the Holy Sword had plunged down these stairs, attempting to cart heavy machinery up them required more heroism than even a Hero could likely muster at this point.

  But, to a man, the King of All Demons and his faithful Great Demon General agreed that, if they were to someday enslave the entire world and all who lived and breathed within it, they were gonna have to get that goddamn fridge up there sooner or later.

  Chiho craned her head out of the Devil’s Castle’s second-floor door, located at the top of the stairs.

  “I’ve gotten the apartment pretty much tidied up…but be careful, okay, guys?”

  The lighter things—the clothing, the modular shelving, the dishes and such—were already inside and mostly in place, thanks to Chiho’s volunteer work. But she wasn’t expecting Maou and his friend to actually attempt the heavy stuff themselves. The worry was written across her f
ace as her eyes wavered at them.

  “Will you be quick with it? You are blocking my right of way.”

  Suzuno, meanwhile, turned her irritated eyes upward, offering the demons nothing in the way of pity.

  Unlike Maou, her room was laden with furniture and appliances, from the stately wooden chest that held her Japanese-style wardrobe, to the family-sized fridge that was clearly overkill for a woman living alone, to the expertly crafted mirror stand with the cherry-blossom motif. If any of them broke, the mental anguish would almost certainly be far beyond anything Maou could ever drum up for his own junk.

  But she, too, breezily refused the movers’ offer to carry it all upstairs.

  “The men here will help me,” she said as she shooed them off. The men would have to bring it all up, starting with the much smaller fridge in Maou’s room.

  “Goooo, Daddy!”

  A little ways away, Emi watched the scene with Alas Ramus in her arms, looking more bored than enthralled.

  This was, in all likelihood, a job too delicate to ask Emi to lend a little holy power to.

  And—more to the point—common sense dictated that there was no way these two women could have hefted up all of Suzuno’s possessions by themselves.

  Was this their way of making Maou pay for them saving his hide back at Ohguro-ya?

  The mere thought of what would happen if he let any of this premium-looking furniture slip and break in his hands made a chill wind blow across Maou’s heart.

  “My liege! Why are you just standing there?!”

  Realizing Maou was off in his own little world, Ashiya angrily stirred him to action.

  “Oh! Sorry. I got it, I got it. Keep it up on your end… Hooph!”

  Climbing a few steps, Maou lifted the fridge a few inches off the stairway on his end.

  “Here we go… Hnnngh!!”

  Grabbing the handles on either side, Ashiya devoted every fiber of his being to pushing the heavy box upward a single step.

  “Put the right side up a little, Ashiya. You’re gonna scrape the corner. Okay, good!”

  As Urushihara scurried around below the stairwell, directing the action from multiple angles, Maou and Ashiya cagily changed position just enough to finally achieve the Herculean task of climbing one step.