The Devil Is a Part-Timer! Vol. 11 Read online

  Copyright

  THE DEVIL IS A PART-TIMER!, Volume 11

  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 11

  © SATOSHI WAGAHARA 2014

  First published in Japan in 2014 by KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo.

  English translation rights arranged with KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo, through Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc., Tokyo.

  English translation © 2018 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.) | ISBN 9780316469364 (v. 7 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316473910 (v. 8 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316474184 (v. 9 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316474207 (v. 10 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316474238 (v. 11 : pbk.)

  Subjects: CYAC: Fantasy.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.W34 Ha 2015 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015028390

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-47423-8 (paperback)

  978-0-316-47424-5 (ebook)

  E3-20180710-JV-PC

  PROLOGUE

  On the night that Maou, Suzuno, and Acieth set off through the Gates of Hell in Ueno-Onshi Park for Ente Isla, Chiho gingerly looked up at the figure standing to the side, too preoccupied to worry much about Urushihara now that the screaming siren of the ambulance that took him away was no longer audible.

  That figure was Miki Shiba, landlord of Villa Rosa Sasazuka and a woman that Maou and Ashiya seemed to morbidly fear, and certainly, seeing her in person like this made Chiho realize the sheer impressive force that her body projected. Not the literal, special kind of overwhelming power that angels and demons seemed to bandy around her lately, though. To Chiho, she was just a middle-aged woman who weighed a fair bit and preferred to advertise it with excessively loud clothing.

  If there was anything odd about this meeting, it was that she and Shiba were having their first encounter alone in the apartment. Just a moment ago, Chiho was having the secrets of the world, so to speak, unveiled to her by Amane Ohguro, Shiba’s niece. Amane seemed to know about Maou’s true nature, as well as that of the demons from Ente Isla, and the Sephirah, and the life-giving trees that powered entire worlds. Maou and Suzuno had just gone off to rescue Ashiya, Emi, and Alas Ramus, and Chiho felt obligated to gather more intel while they were gone. Miki interrupted that—and then Urushihara, trying to eavesdrop on them, fell unconscious and ended the interrogation for good.

  The landlord’s sudden appearance clearly made Amane panic, and Urushihara was nonresponsive in Devil’s Castle. The landlord wound up making Amane summon an ambulance, and before very long, both Amane and Urushihara were gone. So, at around two in the morning, Chiho found herself alone with this woman.

  “Now, about Amane—”

  “Y-yes?!” Chiho asked, frazzled. The woman didn’t bother turning to her.

  “Amane’s always taken kind of an easygoing approach to things, I know. She wasn’t rude to you at all, was she?”

  “Um… Rude how, do you mean…?”

  “I mean, did she give you any incorrect information, as the offspring of a Sephirah?”

  “Oh…” This threw Chiho. She recalled Amane’s own words: “Miki Shiba’s another Sephirah child.”

  “I, umm…” the girl stammered.

  Which meant that, if anything, the woman in front of her lay at the very core of the truth Chiho wanted to learn, even beyond Amane. She opened her mouth, attempting to continue where she had left off a moment ago, but was stopped.

  “Chiho Sasaki.”

  The name stopped Chiho cold. Not because Shiba couldn’t have known the name, this being their first encounter; no, it was something else. Chiho swallowed, her very soul submitting.

  The moment her name was invoked, every fiber of Chiho’s consciousness fell to its knees before this insurmountable force. It brought her back to her younger years, when her mother yelled at her for committing some forbidden act. Her heart commanded it to her—the figure in front of her must not be defied.

  “Allow me to make one thing clear: You knowing the truth will not allow you to change a single aspect of it. You realize that, and yet you still want to know everything?”

  “…I…”

  “You were born on this world, without any special sort of ability, and that is exactly what makes you special. It seems you are unaware of the meaning behind the slight amount of holy force housed within your body. Knowing everything may very well cause your heart to break, leaving you unable to bear your powerlessness any longer. Yet you still wish to know?”

  She didn’t understand the question. Of course she didn’t. If she did even try to figure out the meaning of what Miki had just said, then of course she wouldn’t comprehend the question either. “Even…”

  “Yes?”

  “Even if knowing makes me curse my powerlessness, or gets me scared and I regret it later…”

  She willed her soul to get up off its knees. There was no pulling back. She didn’t have the force, the knowledge, even the life required to fight in unison with them—she knew how little she was capable of. But doing what little she could was the hill she had to die on. If what she learned made her flee the scene and simply become a passive observer, she’d no longer be able to stand next to them all.

  “I don’t want to run away from knowing. If I do, I feel like it’ll all be over.”

  “…”

  “Even if that new knowledge doesn’t enable me to do anything myself…the me who understands that situation will be born. So I…”

  Her wispy body fought back the stillness of the night, and the overwhelming pressure placed upon her soul.

  “I believe that, if I know everything, someone with the power to care for me can use that. As a tool. To fight and change all of this!”

  At that moment, Chiho could feel the force attempting to bind down her heart loosen a little. Shiba looked down at her admiringly. “…My,” she said, clutching at the gold chain on her purse.

  “I’m sorry if this is brazen of me. I know I’m powerless, and I’m not saying this out of some noble creed or what have you. It’s just…” Chiho looked up toward Villa Rosa. “I want to stay friends with the people I love. That’s the only reason why I’m here.”

  “There are few, indeed, who can fight for the sake of such motivations. I think I’m starting to see why She put her eyes upon you.”

  “…Oh?”

  The force on Chiho’s heart subsided as Shiba extended a hand toward her.

  “I’d like you to stay at my home tonight. I could hardly ask you to venture home by yourself this late, and it’d be rude of us to enter a tenant’s apartment without permission.”

  “A-all right…”

  She had a point. They couldn’t just invite themselves into Maou’s Room 201, and Amane, currently house-sitting for Room 202, was in the ambulance.

  Chiho meekly agreed to the offer and followed her into the Western-style house next to Villa Rosa. It boasted a large yard area and a house about three times that of Chiho’s own—by inner-city standards, it was a stately manor. Going through an entryway that would’ve looked at home in a prime-time soap opera, she made her way to an elegant, refined-looking parlor.

  “I know it’s late,” Shiba said as she motioned for her to sit on a sofa decorated with embroidered silk, “but I have a question or two for you as well, if that’s all right with you?”

  She provided some fresh, steaming tea for the nervous teenager. One mouthful of the soft, sweet, fragrant drink ever-so-slightly took the load off the young woman’s shoulders.

  “Now, Aman
e might have told you already, but on this world of Earth, there used to be something known as the ‘Tree of Life.’ This tree bore a jewel—a Sephirah—that forms the structure of a world; it was a keystone in creating human life.”

  “O-okay…”

  Chiho suddenly realized that she’d left her pen and notebook in Suzuno’s room.

  “Oh, you can write this down if you like,” Shiba said, providing paper, a feather pen, and a jar of ink from nowhere in particular.

  “Th-thank you.”

  Chiho began to write, struggling with these wholly unfamiliar instruments, but before she could even put a complete thought down, Shiba unleashed a bombshell.

  “As a rule, all of the Sephirah are required to stay within the world they were born in.”

  Once she understood what this meant, Chiho instinctively tried to hide her right hand. It didn’t escape Shiba’s notice. Her eyes turned toward the Yesod fragment embedded in Chiho’s ring.

  “Lately, though, the Earth has been visited by Sephirah that, well, don’t belong to it. I cannot feel them right now, but I very much doubt they have returned where they came from, now have they?”

  That was the question. Which Sephirah was Earth’s?

  “The Sephirah jewels hold the information needed to build worlds. Without them, the people who call that world home will slowly die out. They may survive for a short period, but the Sephirah still needs to go back to its world. As soon as possible.”

  As far as Chiho knew, this encompassed three people. One: Erone, a boy being dragged around by a demon. Two: Acieth Alla, the girl being dragged around by Maou. And three: Alas Ramus. The “child” of Emi and Maou, and a child that held an irreplaceable position in Chiho’s life.

  THE DEVIL AND THE HERO HAVE A GRAND DISAGREEMENT

  The bank account had been wrung completely dry.

  The reason couldn’t be simpler: She had used up all the money.

  What on? Well, first, there was that new cell phone that didn’t even belong to her. She had chosen a low-cost model, but she had to buy it outright instead of through a new contract, so even with an outdated brand, the monetary outlay was considerable.

  Next, there was the clothing. She had procured several outfits, suited for a middle-aged adult male; and covering everything from undies to shoes, no matter how much you bargain-hunted, cost a certain amount to cover.

  That, and the debt repayment. She was reasonably confident about her savings up to now, but the sheer extent of the debt was so completely beyond her imagination that it placed unexpected pressure on her plans.

  All of this—coming due at the same time, no less—had drained her cash.

  “Um,” the voice of a man in the prime of his life said, beating against her eardrums, “shouldn’t you have been planning your finances a little better?”

  “Oh, so you think it’s all right for me to owe him money forever? I should just let that demon of a debt collector harangue me for the foreseeable future?”

  “I-I’m not saying that…” The man chose his words carefully as he rebuked her. “If you have no job and not enough funding… I mean, there is no guarantee we’ll have any income after next month. Couldn’t we use my funds, or set up monthly payments or the like?”

  “I don’t like being in debt.”

  “Well, no, neither do I, but—”

  “And if we go on for days and days without settling this, who knows what the interest is gonna look like?”

  “But—”

  “Plus, what I’m worried about right now is paying people back karmically, you know? For everything I’ve had to borrow from everyone. If I can’t get that squared away by my own volition, I can’t really move on.”

  The scene was the living room of a fairly fancy apartment. In the middle of it sat a dour-looking daughter and a harried-looking father, sitting across from each other around a table with a cutely patterned cloth on it. The harried father suddenly stood up, opening the curtain on the wall.

  “Then how about this, Emilia?”

  Normally he would have more of a stern presence in his dour daughter’s life, but now his face bore a look of resignation as he gazed at the cityscape.

  “Could we at least move to the Villa Rosa Sasazuka apartments? I know they live there, but you have good friends in Sasazuka too, don’t you? Bell, and Sasaki, and…”

  “…” The girl called Emilia let off a sigh soft enough for her father not to notice. “I told you, I can’t leave here right away.” She stood up and walked next to her father. “I mean, I know a lot of stuff has happened, but I like this place. I like this neighborhood. And I don’t even have the money for moving expenses right now. I mean, the way it’s worked out, there’s only about a five-thousand-yen rent difference between here and there, and if I can live cheaply enough, I’ll have my last month’s salary before too long, but I can’t do anything until then, all right?”

  “…Ah.”

  “Thanks to everyone else, my ‘enemy’s’ gonna be gone for a while. If I can find a job fast enough, I should be able to make it out of this.”

  The sound of his daughter’s voice didn’t indicate to the father that this was impossible, or empty bravado on her part. But his intuition told him that this wasn’t her entire motivation. She had, he thought, some other reason to not want to leave here. But his daughter was grown now; she had overcome countless obstacles. He had neither the right nor the courage to wrest the true reason out of her.

  “But what about you, Father? Do you think your new life…well, not ‘new life’ exactly, but do you think it’s going okay in Sasazuka?”

  “Well… Acieth is whining at me about how she can’t see the stars at night as well as before.”

  “That’s downtown for you.” His daughter laughed, then lowered her voice. “But what about…you know? Think you have any clues yet?”

  “No,” her father replied gravely. “Nothing. There’s nothing to go on right now, so…”

  “All right. But you’re sure about this?”

  The daughter, Emilia Justina, turned toward her father, Nord Justina.

  “You’re sure that Laila…that my mother is here on Earth?”

  “She…should be,” came the wavering reply.

  Emilia frowned at it. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to attack you, but…”

  “No, no. You can’t help it.”

  Emilia—the former Hero known as Emi Yusa—looked down at the neighborhood of Eifukucho.

  “But the fact that we have no idea what Laila wants, or what she’s trying to accomplish, is really starting to worry me.”

  The environment surrounding Emi Yusa’s life had undergone a rapid flurry of epic changes over the past month.

  Returning to Ente Isla to track down the whereabouts of her parents, Emi wound up caught in unexpected trouble, preventing her from returning to Japan when she had planned to. For a while, she was helpless at the hands of three different forces: Efzahan, the Eastern Island kingdom that declared war on the rest of the world; the Malebranche demons that formed the core of the so-called New Devil King’s Army; and Olba Meiyer, who conspired with the heavens to make the other two players do his bidding.

  Sadao Maou, the Devil King Satan, quickly realized that both Emi and Alas Ramus—the fragment of the world-bearing Yesod seed that Emi held within her—needed help. But as he twiddled his thumbs, his close associate Shirou Ashiya (aka the Great Demon General Alciel) and even Emi’s father Nord Justina got caught in the conspiracy, forced to return to Ente Isla.

  So together with his neighbor, Church cleric and (tentative) Great Demon General Suzuno Kamazuki, and the fellow Yesod-born Acieth Alla, Maou made a grand journey back to Ente Isla to rescue Ashiya, Alas Ramus—and Emi, the greatest present obstacle to his world-domination plans.

  Olba and the heavens sought to use Alciel and the Malebranche to create a scenario where the Hero Emilia once again routed the Devil King’s Army from the Eastern Island—a ruse that Ashiya quickly picked up on. He knew that the heavens—along with Gabriel, an archangel among their forces—had their eyes set upon other goals.

  And as the battle unfolded across the Efzahan capital of Heavensky, it was ultimately Maou and Acieth who stole the show. While Maou rescued Emi and Ashiya from the field of battle, Suzuno rescued Emi’s friend Emeralda from the unfair inquisition she was enduring.