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

  She drew a rectangle in the air in front of her to illustrate.

  “They’re all gonna be flat-screen models these days, so you just have to worry about the width when you’re deciding where to put it. How much money do you have to work with?”

  “Forty-one thousand, two hundred thirty-nine yen.”

  Maou’s response was instantaneous.

  “Why so exact?”

  “He’s never not exact with our budget.” He motioned to Ashiya.

  “No, I am not. So, do you think we’ll be able to purchase a television with…41,239 yen?” The nervous tension was clear in Ashiya’s voice.

  “I performed some preliminary investigation over the Internet earlier, but all I could find on the low end was used goods, shady-looking store sites, and things like discount offers if I signed up for a new broadband provider. I’m afraid I failed to get a clear picture of what a TV would cost by itself.”

  “Well, if you’re buying a home appliance like this, it’s probably better to get hands-on with it first anyway…”

  Rika nodded slightly.

  “But if you don’t mind going down to twenty inches or so, you could probably squeak under the forty thousand mark, I think.”

  “Hell yeah!”

  “Wha…!”

  Maou’s fist pump was accompanied by the blood draining from Ashiya’s face.

  Suzuno chose that moment to return, fresh bowl of noodles in hand.

  “Upsized a bit, huh?”

  It was another plain udon order, this one in a bowl easily twice the size of the first.

  “Even their largest size is only four hundred yen. How could they possibly earn a profit at these prices…? The state of Japan’s food security never fails to mystify me. Have we returned to the subject of television yet?”

  She was already slurping away as she spoke, her face softer now. Apparently she calmed down enough that she could think about other things besides noodles again.

  “I could provide a budget of up to seventy thousand yen if needed. Would that enable me to make a purchase?”

  “Oh, you could get a pretty good one with that budget, I’d imagine. We’ve got less than a year before Japan switches over to all-HD broadcasting, so some of the older models are starting to get really cheap these days.”

  “Is that the state of things…? Curse you, HD broadcasting… A thorn in my side to the very end…” It was unclear where Ashiya was targeting his grudge, but his chopsticks were about to snap in his hand.

  “Beyond that…if you hit up the thrift shops, you could get an old picture-tube TV for less than ten thousand if you wanted, but there wouldn’t be much point to that once they stop broadcasting in analog.”

  “So why’re they even selling those?”

  “Well, apart from changing your antenna, you can get HD broadcasts from a cable company, too. Then you’d have to rent a tuner, but that would let you watch digital TV on an analog set. There’s a lot of people who don’t want to throw out a perfectly good TV, you know?”

  “Hm,” Suzuno muttered. “Would that grant me access to a vacuum-tube and transistor-model television?”

  Rika shook her head at Suzuno’s oddly impassioned query.

  “I…dunno about that. I mean, I’ve heard of transistor radios, but…”

  “Ah. I merely thought that, considering how quickly things evolve in Japan, people would be all too ready to sweep away with the old to bring in the new. But hearing of this technique to connect yourself to the past… It gladdens me, a little.”

  “Hey, um, I’ve kinda been wondering about this, Suzuno, but did you maybe grow up in a foreign country like Emi or something?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I dunno, you just like saying stuff like ‘In Japan it’s like this,’ ‘In Japan you do that,’ that kind of thing.”

  “…Ah. Yes. Um, yes. I come from a religious family, and we were stationed overseas…”

  The unexpected question threw Suzuno uncharacteristically off balance.

  “You’re lettin’ the udon get to your head.”

  The muttered remark earned Maou a kick under the table from the blushing Suzuno.

  Rika did not seem particularly suspicious, however. Suzuno wasn’t lying, after all.

  “Oh, one of those missionary things? Wow, I guess there really are people like that, huh? Like, I saw on TV once about this priest in Japan who went deep into Africa to spread Christianity. Kinda made me think about what a big world it is, y’know?”

  “There…are people like that in this country, as well…?” Suzuno looked at Rika, eyes wide. “I had thought the Japanese held little interest in religion.”

  “Oh, no way! I mean, you wouldn’t see all those horoscope and fortune-telling apps on phones if we didn’t.”

  “Oh? I can call someone on my phone to have my fortune read?”

  “It’s not the automatic time hotline, Suzuno.”

  “……”

  Rika didn’t mean to bring it up, but it still put Maou in an embarrassed silence.

  “But…yeah, you see miniature Buddhist shrines inside IT firms and stuff. That, or some big electronics firm will hire a priest to drive the evil spirits away from a tract of land so they can build a new factory on it. I mean, pretty much everyone’s picked up their fortune on a piece of paper at a temple at least once in their life. I forget if I told you that our family lived right where our business is, but there’s a little shrine in the office, and in one corner of our workshop there’s an inari, too. I had to keep that nice and dust free as part of my chores as a kid.”

  “Was this an inari sushi production plant?”

  Suzuno’s eyes instinctively turned to the inari sushi—balls of rice wrapped in fried tofu—on offer back in the self-serve side dish bar.

  “Wow, Suzuno, I think the udon’s eating into your brain.”

  “Huh?”

  Maou shook his head at his quizzical lunch companion.

  “Gah-hah-hah-hah!” Rika burst out laughing. “No, no, I told you, we manufactured parts for shoes. But, oh, I guess maybe you didn’t know if you didn’t grow up in this country. I’m talking about a little shrine. It’s meant to commemorate the god of foxes in the Shinto religion.”

  “Oh! Oh, yes, of course, of course. Yes. I apologize… Urgh! Devi—Sadao! Why did you not speak up sooner about that?” On cue, Suzuno lashed out at Maou in self-defense, turning red.

  “You’re the one from the religious family. Ain’t that kind of a problem, you not knowing that? And you were totally clueless about that mukaebi thing, too… Why don’t you quit the whole missionary thing and just open up an udon restaurant back home?”

  The critique was as accurate as it was scathing. Suzuno visibly shrunk in her seat…

  “Ow!”

  …and delivered another kick with her wooden sandal-befitted leg. The results almost bought tears to his eyes.

  “Hee-hee… Aw, I’m sorry I laughed at you. I sure don’t go to Sunday mass or pray before meals or anything, but you’d be surprised. Japanese people have just as much respect and thankfulness toward the bigger things in life as anyone else would. We kinda spread it around in a lot of crazy directions, but it’s not like we’re the only ones, I suppose.”

  “Thankfulness?” Suzuno asked.

  “Yeah. Though I guess if I was a missionary like your family, I’d have to be a lot less casual toward it all than that, I bet.” Rika remained cheerful as Suzuno mulled over her words. “But Jesus said to love thy neighbor and all that, right? If your god told you to kill anyone who didn’t listen to what he said, that wouldn’t be much of a god at all, I don’t think. Instead, all the religions just kind of get along in Japan, and I think that’s how it oughta be.”

  “…!”

  Suzuno let out a light gasp at Rika’s observations. It went unnoticed.

  “Mm? That some kinda argument?”

  Maou pointed toward the front door, where a customer was having a loud verbal exchange with an emp
loyee.

  “Um, sir, I’m afraid that I…”

  The employee, a woman young enough that this was probably a part-time job to put her through college, was frantically trying to explain something in words and gestures. The message didn’t seem to be getting across.

  “Ahhh…”

  Which it probably had little chance of. They listened in, but the customer didn’t sound Japanese.

  The employee, realizing that English was this person’s mother tongue, was at her wit’s end trying to figure out what to do.

  A little help from her coworkers would have been appreciated, but the long line at the register precluded any immediate aid.

  Maou stood up.

  “Here, I’m gonna help out a sec.”

  “Whoa, don’t you think you should leave ’em alone…?”

  Rika stopped him. The customer was on the tall side, about as much as Maou. He was wearing a large, tacky pair of sunglasses, and the voluminous Afro he was sporting gave him a convincingly punk image.

  Given his continued shouting, this didn’t appear to be a calm exchange of opinion.

  “It’s fine, Ms. Suzuki.”

  It was Ashiya who stepped up to reassure Rika. Maou acknowledged both of them with a nod, then walked in between the employee and her customer.

  “Um, can I help with something?”

  “Huh? Erm…”

  The employee, about to break down in tears, all but latched on to Maou’s arm. Clearly she was in no position to give a collected account of what happened. Her eyes had that I don’t even know what I don't know look he saw in a lot of the rookie part-timers who haunted his MgRonald. So he decided to deal with the man instead.

  “”

  “Whoa, Maou can speak English?!”

  He could hear Rika’s blurted-out surprise from across the restaurant. It gave him a little jolt of glee.

  “Uhhh…” The man sized up Maou and the employee for a second, then finally addressed Maou.

  “”

  “”

  “”

  The man looked at Maou over the rim of his sunglasses as he spoke. Maou raised an eyebrow in response to this attempt at intimidation.

  “” With a grin, Maou turned to the employee to explain the situation.

  “Oh! Y-yes, I’ll bring one right out!”

  She scurried behind the counter, forgetting to take the man’s order entirely.

  “”

  The man, now notably friendlier, gave Maou a playful jab on the shoulder and joined the line for the self-serve bar.

  This puzzled Maou a bit. He understood how the system worked, apparently. So why couldn’t he tone down his behavior a bit?

  “”

  He turned his back to the man, still a bit confused, and returned to his table.

  “ Oh, whoops. Sorry.”

  There, he found Rika staring at her in befuddled amazement.

  “You people are, like, total mysteries. Why are people like you and Emi sticking to part-time work, anyway?”

  “Huh?”

  “Oh, nothing. But, hey, if we’re all done here, let’s get going. The store’s probably gonna get crowded soon.”

  “Uh, sure.”

  Taking another look, Maou realized that Ashiya and Suzuno had finished up their lunch while he was dealing with the other customer. In a restaurant this small, they couldn’t tie up their table forever. It was time for him to fulfill the day’s original goal. But before they could reach the exit:

  “Um, sir…!”

  The employee Maou rescued chased them down.

  “Hey, um, thank you so much for helping me out! The, uh, my manager wanted you to have this…”

  She presented him with a ticket, 1 SML PLAIN printed on it. Maou would’ve eagerly accepted it any other day, but this time he shook his head.

  “It’s fine, it’s fine. And I know it’s easy to get in a panic if someone doesn’t speak your language, but he’s only human, too. If he doesn’t understand you, you gotta do what you can to make him get the picture.”

  “Y-yeah…”

  “So the next time someone who doesn’t speak Japanese shows up, just try to figure out what he’s trying to say and give him whatever help he needs. He’ll come around sooner or later, so…”

  “R-right! Um, th-thank you very much! Come back soon!”

  The employee bowed deeply at Maou’s back as he briskly left the building. Ashiya strode on proudly, as if he was the one behind the whole event, while Suzuno watched on suspiciously. Rika, meanwhile, was still in a state of disbelief.

  “So! Leaping to the rescue of any damsel in distress you see, then?”

  Maou turned around at Suzuno’s snort.

  “It’s nothing like that, okay? It’s just that, if that kept going, it’d ruin the whole atmosphere in that place. Who wants to be uncomfortable while they’re trying to eat?”

  Rika jumped to Suzuno’s defense.

  “Then at least accept the free meal ticket, why don’tcha? I’m kinda surprised you turned that down.”

  “Yeahh, I probably didn’t need to do that. But, you know, when I go someplace like that, I always end up feeling for the staff.”

  “Huh?”

  “That girl just now reminded me of Chi when she first started. And now that I think about it, when I first met her, she was getting tripped up with language issues, too.”

  Maou smiled a wistful smile.

  “I really don’t want new hires to get in the habit of having their boss give out free food vouchers to smooth everything over. Then you don’t really feel like you did anything wrong. You don’t learn anything from it, other than there’s this escape valve you can tap anytime you want. So I guess I didn’t think it’d be good to take it.”

  “Indeed. I considered it a terrible waste, but if those are your wishes, I see no reason to question them.” The sigh emanating from Ashiya’s lips indicated just how much of a terrible waste he thought it was.

  “All that, and you don’t even know any TV brand names. So weird…” Rika crossed her arms in thought.

  “Well, I mean, sympathy by itself doesn’t help much, does it?” Maou went on. “That’s not what I’d want, next time I’m in the hot seat. And you mentioned ‘love thy neighbor’ just now, too. As a fellow fast-food lifer, if both of our joints can grow and attract more customers, maybe this episode’ll help that girl become a serious sales demon someday.”

  “You are making little sense to me. Love thy neighbor, so she can be your enemy someday?”

  “Well, let’s call it ‘frenemies,’ okay? The Mag and Manmaru are both pretty huge companies. There’s enough space for all of us.”

  It wasn’t entirely clear how serious Maou and Ashiya were being with their conversation, but something about it caused Suzuno to raise her head up.

  “Ah. Yes. Rika! I wanted to ask you. If it was not a god, what would it be?”

  “Huh? If who’s not a god?”

  “If a god told you to kill anyone who didn’t listen to what he said isn’t any kind of god, what is it, then?”

  Rika needed nearly ten seconds to grasp the intent behind the question.

  “Oh! Oh, you mean from earlier? Eesh, I totally forgot… Well, it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? It’s people. Who else would try to pin their god’s name on whatever evil they’re doing?”

  “Hello? Hey.”

  Right after the guy with the sunglasses and the Afro left Manmaru Udon, he took out his cell phone and made a call.

  Suddenly, he was speaking flue
nt Japanese.

  “Look, I picked English ’cause it was supposed to be the most commonly understood language in this world! Nobody’s getting me at all over here! And if you knew I was going to end up here the whole time, why didn’t you have me learn the language they actually use here?! I’m like a walking embarrassment to myself! I’m sick of it!”

  The person on the other end of the line must not have been very apologetic. Behind his sunglasses, his eyes were filled with rage.

  “…I don’t care if it’s spoken by a billion or so people! Because right now, I can speak to exactly no people! I knew I never shoulda trusted you!”

  He stamped his feet and removed his sunglasses so he could have something to whip around the air in his fury.

  “Huhh? Yeah, yeah, I’m full. Fine and full of energy. My schedule’s kinda full, thanks to a certain someone I could name, but whatever. Ugh, this drives me nuts.”

  His eyes, as he looked up at the bright summer sun in frustration, were purple—a good match for his counterculture fashion choices.

  “Right. Sure. Okay, so I got my second job left to do today. I thought I had a good thing goin’ yesterday, but it just picked up on this girl from a normal family. Like, why do I even have to do all this by myself?”

  The man shut off his phone, continuing to mumble to himself as he navigated the crowds of the city.

  The only person he had been able to communicate with so far in this world completely failed to notice the single streak of purple in his Afro.

  Just ten minutes of walking was all it took for the light beam to change direction.

  As she walked down the hill next to the police station that faced the western exit of JR Yoyogi station, Emi felt a faint hope that her target was closer than expected.

  Come to think of it, Tokyo Big-Egg Town—where Emi ran into the woman in white before—was situated in Bunkyo ward. It seemed unlikely that her target was wandering across the country with no destination in mind. Maybe she was sticking to the central area of Tokyo after all.

  There was no way she could be traveling around Japan with a Yesod fragment just for giggles. If the light’s direction changed this dramatically after a few minutes’ walk, just a few steps could alter how they were aligned with each other.