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

  They were already covered in sweat.

  “Whew! All right! We went up!”

  “Y-you sure did! Just keep that pace up for twelve more steps!”

  “All right! I’m going up another one! One, two, and…!”

  “Harrnnghhh!!”

  “Maou, it’s gonna hit the wall!”

  Screek, whack, thump.

  Step by laborious step, the Devil King and Great Demon General pooled their powers together as the refrigerator gradually ascended to Devil’s Castle.

  “Hang in there, Maou!”

  Chiho cheered on from above.

  “Dude, three thousand yen more and we wouldn’t be going through any of this…” Urushihara groaned down below.

  “For once, I actually agree with Lucifer.”

  Emi sighed as she watched her two archnemeses attempt to will the weight upward by sheer mental force, the refrigerator bobbing precariously in their hands. She turned to Suzuno’s furniture.

  “You aren’t seriously gonna make those guys help you, are you, Bell?”

  Suzuno shook her head.

  “I very much doubt that, no. If Chiho would be kind enough to spot for me, I can handle this much by myself.”

  If two grown men were being creamed by a fridge nobody could ever describe as particularly large, how could a spindly-armed, small-sized woman handle an industrial-sized model alone?

  “Yeah, true.”

  But Emi didn’t betray a sliver of doubt.

  After an extended battle, though, Maou and Ashiya finally managed to ferry their refrigerator up to the second floor walkway without dropping it once.

  In the early August heat, this attained for them the appearance of two lemons with the juice squeezed out of them.

  “Duuuudes? We still got the washer to do, remember? No resting yet.”

  Urushihara’s voice from below was ominous.

  “Almost there, Maou! You hang in there too, Ashiya!”

  As always, Chiho remained the pair’s sole ally in the affair.

  “Hey, Chi, can you bring some flattened boxes over?”

  She came back with two broken-down boxes, borrowed from a nearby supermarket by Ashiya to pack their clothes in.

  “Ashiya, bring it up a little bit… Okay. Put this back there.”

  The feet of the refrigerator dug into the cardboard on the walkway.

  “Okay, I’m pulling it in. One, two…”

  With that, he began dragging it up to the front door, using the cardboard like a sled to avoid damaging the bottom panel and/or his floor.

  After a few moments, the two of them were in front of Room 201 once more, summoning whatever fumes of strength remained to lift the fridge over the door frame and place it in position.

  The moment they plugged it back in, it began whirring happily, defiantly generating cold air in the face of the sweltering malaise around it.

  “Whew. Well, we didn’t break it…”

  Maou gave the door a tender caress and turned toward his sweltering shell of a companion.

  “C’mon. We got the washer next. Emi and the rest’re gonna yell at us if we stop.”

  “Y-yes, my…my arms are shaking…”

  Ashiya wiped the sweat from his brow as he turned to leave the room. He didn’t get far.

  “Agh! S-Suzuno?!”

  He heard Chiho shouting from the walkway, accompanied by the sound of something heavy thudding against the wooden floor.

  “What’s up, Ch…i?”

  Maou refused to believe what he saw.

  The Devil’s Castle washer, until just a moment ago, was sitting on the front yard downstairs.

  Now it was poised next to the drain outlet along the outer wall.

  Next to it stood an utterly astonished-looking Chiho, along with Suzuno, her face cool as she held her hands outward.

  “At your pace, the sun will set before we are done.”

  Her voice was cheerful, her eyebrows low against her slightly damp forehead.

  Maou and Ashiya, faces peering out the doorway, looked at the washer, then Suzuno, then back at the washer.

  “Y-you did that…by yourself?”

  “Yes. What of it?”

  “‘What of’… I mean…”

  Maou’s mouth hung open, unable to string any more words together. Ashiya instinctively hid his quivering arms behind him.

  Neither of them could imagine Suzuno, the gangly-armed, flappy-kimono-clad little woman in front of them, lifting up a washing machine by herself and tugging it up the Villa Rosa Sasazuka stairway.

  “S-Suzuno just… It was just, like…zoop! Just, ‘up we go’!’”

  Chiho, in a rarity for her, had trouble finding her words as well.

  “There is nothing that surprising about it, Chiho. To Emilia and me, the feat is hardly of special note.”

  Walking past the dumbfounded masses, Suzuno went back downstairs, her wooden sandals clacking the whole way.

  Urushihara was there, eyes just as saucerlike as the others’, and as he watched on, Suzuno approached her own refrigerator…

  “…Oof!”

  And hefted it up like a piece of packing foam.

  “Devil King! Alciel! Bell can’t walk down the hall if you keep standing there! Get outta the way!”

  The two dumbfounded demons obediently shuffled back into their room at Emi’s guidance.

  Chiho edged back, little by little, at the refrigerator bobbing its way upstairs.

  “Excuse me, Chiho. Would you be able to open my door?”

  “Um…okay…”

  The refrigerator gave a polite bow as it entered Room 202, a small woman in a kimono following behind.

  “Hey, you know…”

  Maou muttered to himself as he watched on.

  “When she first came here, she was carrying that huge box of udon noodles around like that, too, wasn’t she?”

  “Perhaps she is rather more…MMA material than she looks, my liege.”

  “I can hear you! Such insensitive demons!”

  Suzuno popped out of Room 202, her embittered face stopping the hushed conversation in its tracks.

  “It is a simple application of holy magic to my muscular structure. Surely you were not unaware of such power.”

  “N-no, but…”

  Holy doping, in other words. Though not as blatant as Emi’s Heavenly Fleet Feet magic, perhaps, given how that let her freakin’ fly.

  It was originally casted by Church-affiliated doctors and the like, harnessing it to boost patients’ strength during treatment and ensure their safety during intricate operations.

  This wasn’t a case of “if a little is good, a lot is better,” though. Attempting to infuse more holy energy than a subject was capable of retaining was a waste of strength, and a single misstep in the related incantations could have adverse side effects as well. You couldn’t use it to, say, turn a common foot soldier into a musclebound behemoth.

  It would take someone like Suzuno, a high-level cleric and wielder of the Light of Iron warhammer, to toss holy energy around like that.

  Taking this power, one revered as a miraculous blessing from up high in Church culture across the Western Island, and using it to move household appliances upstairs made Maou wonder a bit about where this cleric’s priorities were these days.

  “Wait, can’t you do that, too, Maou? With your demon hocus-pocus and stuff?”

  “Not anymore, he can’t. If he could, he wouldn’t have nearly drowned in the sea back in Choshi.”

  Emi sneered upward, her right hand holding Alas Ramus and her left easily holding up Suzuno’s microwave.

  Maou sneered at her, but:

  “Daddy looks all mean!”

  Alas Ramus’s guileless observation made him drop the retort and heave a sigh instead.

  “Alas Ramus is so gonna resemble her mother someday…”

  “What’s that mean? What’s wrong with that?” Emi didn’t let Maou’s lifeless parting shot go unnoticed while Urushihar
a sidled upstairs and walked toward Devil’s Castle.

  “Means what it sounds like. None of us live in that big a place, shouldn’t you keep her from listening to all that trash talk?”

  Emi wanted to bite back at Urushihara, but he had a point. She sheathed her verbal sword, choosing to seethe at the demons upstairs instead.

  Alas Ramus was about the only subject Urushihara treated with any level of seriousness. Both Emi and the rest of the gang found that offputting.

  “W-well, okay, but that just means Maou used up all his power to keep Japan safe! You know?”

  Ashiya nodded sagely. “Well put, Ms. Sasaki. So very understanding!”

  “And you said it yourself, right? You said you were partly responsible for the whole Malebranche thing.”

  “Ngh…” Emi fell silent at Maou’s point.

  “So it’s partly your fault, too, that we had to spend all afternoon lugging our crap up here!”

  “Are you crazy?! That’s something totally different!”

  “No, it’s not! Besides, you guys have, like, some kind of ‘infinite holy power’ cheat going on all of a sudden! Which strategy guide did you pick that trick up from? When we use our force, we tend to go through a lot of it fast, all right? Think about that a little!”

  The Devil’s Castle denizens were still unaware of the existence of 5-Holy Energy β, the heaven-blessed energy shots Emeralda Etuva—Emi and Suzuno’s friend on Ente Isla—was sending them a steady supply of.

  “So? Wouldn’t that make you feel sad at all? Using your demonic force on something like this?”

  “Oh, what, Suzuno can but I can’t? Besides…”

  “Anyway!!”

  Just as Maou and Emi were about to embark on another of their pointless verbal tirades against each other, a paulownia-wood dresser stepped in between them.

  “You are both in the way.”

  “Oh, whoops.”

  “S-sorry.”

  “And not to parrot Lucifer, but it is said that a child exposed to its parents’ verbal sparring faces developmental issues later on in life.”

  The oddly talkative dresser floated between the stunned Emi and Maou, lightly whizzing its way into Room 202.

  “R-right! So let’s just get along, okay?”

  Picking up on the thread Suzuno left behind, Chiho spoke up, either failing to correctly read the atmosphere or reading it all too well.

  “……”

  Maou and Emi gave each other an awkward stare and turned their backs, attempting to end it there.

  “Mommy, Daddy, no fighting!”

  But in the end, it was Alas Ramus’s completely carefree intervention that marked the real finale to the great Devil’s Castle / Suzuno Move-In, despite how uncomfortable everyone felt about it afterward.

  Maou surveyed the room once more.

  “…Man, though. It’s all exactly the same.”

  Sitting around the low table in the middle were Maou, Ashiya, and Chiho. Urushihara had taken position in front of the windowside computer, hydrating with a glass of cold barley tea.

  Emi, Suzuno, and Alas Ramus were having tea of their own in Room 202. The idea of everyone stopping in Suzuno’s place for dinner self-imploded sometime during the afternoon.

  With all the people walking in and out on a regular basis these days, four people in Devil’s Castle almost made the place seem empty.

  “Not exactly, Your Demonic Highness.” Ashiya pointed out the kitchen sink. “They fixed the leaky kitchen tap. No matter how tightly I closed it, there would still be a drip. It was driving me up the wall, so I am enormously grateful for it.”

  “…Oh.”

  That was the only answer Maou had. It was hard to tell how serious Ashiya was being.

  “Don’t you think they repainted the walls, too? They probably had to, with the hole and everything,” Urushihara added.

  “Hmm? Really?”

  “Rilly rilly. I think it was a lighter shade of green before, but now it’s more lime colored, you know? They must’ve repainted it to match the new wall.”

  “Huh… I didn’t notice.”

  Chiho was right. It seemed like the indoor walls were a little more brightly colored than before.

  “Well, the rent ain’t going up, so it’s not like I was expecting too much.”

  “Oh, absolutely! I want you guys to stay nearby for a while to come, so I wouldn’t like to see your finances suffer, either.”

  Chiho phrased her reply to sound like a perfectly natural rejoinder to Maou’s statement. Still, it jarred him.

  “Why’s that, Chi?”

  “Huh? Well, I mean, if you had to go someplace farther out instead, I wouldn’t want that, you know? In fact, I thought that was what’d happen just a few days ago. I was kinda scared!”

  “Well, I’m not going anywhere. Not like we got anyplace to move to. Or the money for it.”

  Ashiya nodded his agreement to Maou’s humdrum reply.

  “…Well, good.”

  The “That’s not what I meant” was loaded up in Chiho’s mouth, ready for deployment. But she never quite pulled the trigger.

  “…It’s always the main dude involved who notices last, huh?”

  Urushihara, ever attentive to the conversation (although he rarely betrayed it), nobly sat up and checked the battery level on his laptop.

  It must have been time for a recharge. He plucked the charger cable out of a nearby box and connected both ends to the computer and the wall.

  Then he noticed something unfamiliar.

  “Huh?”

  Every room in Villa Rosa Sasazuka had five electrical outlets—two in the kitchen for the fridge and microwave and so on, one on the outside for the washer, and two general-purpose plugs on the wall facing the backyard.

  Urushihara normally reserved one of the general-use ones for his PC stuff, but in addition to the usual two sockets on the wall panel, there was another connector.

  Before its recent renovation, this outlet had been blocked by a pair of tiny screws, preventing its use. No one gave it much notice, since no appliance in the Devil’s Castle needed it. But now, before Urushihara’s eyes, the connector had transformed, a wholly different beast from back in the pre–Ohguro-ya days.

  “Hey, is this…”

  It was a round connector.

  The screws were gone. In its place, a round, white protrusion with a few pinholes bored in it.

  The next moment, something went off in Urushihara’s mind.

  “Dude, no way!”

  The sudden exclamation made Maou, Ashiya, and Chiho turn toward him, eyes wide.

  Urushihara ignored them as he practically flew out the door.

  His voluntarily leaving the room was akin to Jabba the Hutt leaving his crime lair and becoming a triathlete, but before Maou had time to comprehend what was going on, Urushihara was down the stairs and looking up at the apartment’s roof.

  What he saw convinced him for good.

  “There it is…!”

  When he returned, his face was so stern that the other three, still clueless, all thought it best to wait for Urushihara to open his mouth and explain.

  It wasn’t long before the purple-eyed fallen angel stirred.

  “Maou, this is nuts.”

  Maou gulped unconsciously.

  Then, giving them a look sincerer and more diligent than anything they had seen, Urushihara proceeded to floor the Devil King and his faithful general with one stroke.

  “Villa Rosa Sasazuka’s…got an HD hookup!”

  A beat. Chiho failed to see why Urushihara found this so urgent.

  It was not the case for the other two.

  “Uh?”

  “Wha…?”

  Then, in unison:

  “Whaaaaaaaat?!”

  “Agh! Ow, guys!”

  “What is all that racket?! Do you want to wake Alas Ramus?!”

  “What’s going on? Someone attacking us?!”

  The demons’ harmonic scream was loud e
nough to make Emi and Suzuno leap out of their own room…and seriously weird Chiho out.

  From the fridge to the washer, from the computer to the bicycle, the Devil’s Castle crew had made more than a few infrastructure investments over the past year and change. But they still had no television set, for several reasons.

  They could never find enough free funds, for one. That, and when Maou and Ashiya first fell into Japan, they didn’t even understand the concept of “watching TV” in the first place.

  By the time they understood its use as a news source, weather forecaster, and font of colorfully inane advertising, they already had many other ways to gain that information.

  Most of all, however, the greatest source of hesitance for the Devil’s Castle was the fact that Japan switched over to full digital broadcasting a while ago.

  The antenna connectors in Villa Rosa Sasazuka were all from the analog era. There was nothing in the rental contract about providing for HD broadcasts, either.

  They examined their options a bit, only to find that (a) signing on for an individual plan could put them on the hook for antenna construction costs, and (b) putting up an antenna by themselves could send the MHK man their way, demanding a television license fee and spelling yet more doom for their monthly budget.

  So, to the demons, purchasing a single TV required the bravery and resolve of an Acapulco cliff diver. But they were too afraid to discuss it with the landlord. She could always seize upon the topic to put up an antenna herself and jack up the rent on them.

  Besides, Japan was bubbling with other information sources. Compared to the fridge and washer—two essentials for keeping the demons clean and fed—a TV was far from first priority.

  “Oh, well, you can get news and weather from the Net and your phone and stuff these days, so…”

  “Something about you telling me that really pisses me off.”

  Something about the smug way Emi, fellow newcomer to Earth, put it rankled Maou.

  “Indeed. I, myself, have only just begun to comprehend how to obtain information on my cellular phone via the Internet.” Suzuno took out her Jitterphone 5, a basic Dokodemo model meant for the elderly and other Net newbies, to strike home the point.