The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 5 Page 6

  “…Ughh…”

  The fatigue came like an avalanche. She put her face down on the bed, next to the child.

  Then her mind returned to the issues at hand.

  “I refuse to let the Devil King reform his army. He…he is the murderer of my father, the enemy of my people…”

  “Are you reading that from a script?”

  Emi could feel Suzuno snickering behind her.

  “Shut up a second. …I’m still kind of in a state of shock, okay? You don’t have to butt in.”

  I am the Hero, and he is the boss of the demons. Peace for the world and her fellow humans was on her mind, of course, but more than anything, she couldn’t forgive how his armies shattered the tranquil, quiet life she had had with her father.

  There was no way she ever could.

  And yet…

  It took a disturbingly long time for her to recall that, nowadays.

  I haven’t worked through my feelings or something, have I?

  There’s no way I ever could.

  “There’s no…way I ever could…”

  Emi whispered it to herself weakly.

  Then, while there was no way she meant it on purpose, Alas Ramus turned over and placed a soft hand on Emi’s head.

  Almost like she was trying to comfort her.

  “…Oooooogh.”

  Emi felt the sadness take over, her lips tight as her head flopped onto the bed again.

  “If Alas Ramus never sees the Devil King again…it would make her terribly sad.” Suzuno’s words hung quietly in the air. “And it would make Chiho sad, as well. I doubt it would ever be the same between her and us, either.”

  “……”

  “That, and the denizens of Devil’s Castle owe us a great debt. Until we collect on it, it would annoy me greatly to see them fly off somewhere.”

  “You’re reading my thoughts, aren’t you? That’s cheating.”

  Now Emi was lashing out at anyone, anything, she could.

  “Not at all. I just think we are of similar minds here. But what follows after that…is something that is not Emilia. As a cleric, I am bound never to allow a child to kill her own parent for reasons beyond her own control. No matter what. Even if that parent is the Devil King. Thus…”

  The sound of fabric against fabric told Emi that Suzuno was standing up.

  “For now, to prevent the worst from happening, we must protect the Devil King from the demons of his own realm.”

  “This is just…so hard. I can’t take any more of it.”

  “I am not asking you to handle it all, Emilia. I am still his neighbor, after all, and nothing would make me happier than to set the table for the Hero to slay the Devil King. That, at least, I will take responsibility for. As long as another archangel or Malebranche chieftain does not rear its ugly head, I can handle things well enough by myself.”

  “…One word of warning: Staking them out is the most boring thing in the universe.” Emi didn’t bother lifting her head as she spoke, evoking a very un-Hero-like sense of lethargy.

  “Alciel runs the place like a military school to keep them under budget. Lucifer just taps, taps, taps away at his computer day and night. The Devil King works, eats, and sleeps. That’s it. Smile on his face the whole damn time. Keeping a constant vigil over them made me feel like some kind of creepy celebrity stalker.”

  “Yes, but MgRonald is closed for the moment, is it not? We should remain cautious, at least for now. Once the restaurant reopens, Sariel will be running interference for us as well. The demons will be loath to take major action.”

  Across the street from Maou’s workplace off Hatagaya station, there was a Sentucky Fried Chicken franchise managed by the archangel Sariel.

  Thanks to his falling head over heels in love with MgRonald manager Mayumi Kisaki, Sariel had been kissing up to Maou to an almost embarrassing extent.

  The two of them were on rather poor terms, it was true. But Barbariccia would hardly be foolish enough to attempt to kidnap the Devil King while he was literally under the nose of an archangel.

  “…Huh. Suppose so.”

  Emi could barely summon a whisper in response.

  “…Listen, Bell. You know why I like samurai dramas so much? And not the ones about wandering ronin or peasants rising up to fight injustice. I’m talking Vice-Shogun Mito or Maniac Shogun or… Well, I’ve taken a liking to Samurai Inspector Hyouzo lately, too, but…”

  “Um? No…”

  Suzuno blinked, having trouble surmising Emi’s intent.

  After a moment, Emi finally lifted her head off the bed.

  “Because they’re about people in high positions fighting for truth and justice and all that. If there’s a villain who won’t listen to reason, he’ll beat them up until they see the error of their ways. Everything works out; everyone’s happy. Even if it’s all made up, I like seeing good win out so…completely like that. Clean and simple.”

  “I see. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, one could say.”

  “What?”

  “Something I read in a book recently.”

  “Oh.”

  With a groan, Emi stood up. Suzuno pretended not to notice the slight red twinge in her eyes.

  She sniffled and shook her head.

  “…If only…”

  “Hmm?”

  “If only they had AC in that apartment…”

  “The savior of our world has has grown soft indeed.”

  It was uncharacteristic sarcasm, coming from Suzuno as she caressed Alas Ramus’s hair.

  Emi bunched up her face and looked down upon her.

  “How much is the rent over there?”

  “Forty-five thousand yen, if I recall.”

  “’Cause this place has more than a few problems, but I got it for fifty thousand.”

  The price quote drove Suzuno to take another look around Emi’s room.

  “Could that be the case…? Truly?”

  A large closet. Two rooms, each about 150 square feet. With air-conditioning, a bathroom, a fully electric range, and an autolock down in the lobby.

  “No. This cannot possibly be fifty thousand yen per month.”

  “Well, I mean, there’s a lot of backstory to that, so… Ah, well. I guess there’s a lot of empty space over there, still. I’ll have to make up my mind someday.”

  Where was “over there”? When was “someday”? Suzuno decided not to ask.

  “Oooogh…Mommy…”

  Just then, a pudgy hand placed itself on top of Suzuno’s as Alas Ramus babbled in her sleep.

  Patting her soft, adorable skin, the cleric found herself smiling.

  “I do not so terribly mind, shall we say, the lukewarm bath I find myself in.”

  “Huh?”

  “How else could I describe our current situation? As long as the Devil King remains in Japan, he will be the perfect picture of hard work and diligence. We sit here, living in the most glorious civilization we have ever known, surrounded by caring friends and confidants, allowing the days to leisurely tick away. But how much…”

  Suzuno gently picked up Alas Ramus’s hand, running a towel up to the shoulder socket.

  “How much longer can we live like this?”

  It was question neither Suzuno, nor Emi, nor the Devil King could ever know the answer to.

  “Mommy, when will we go splish-splash next?”

  By the time Emi returned to her condo in Eifukucho, Alas Ramus was wide awake.

  “I wonder,” Emi replied vaguely. “If you’re a good girl, Alas Ramus…if everything stays as it is, I bet we can go real soon.”

  “Let’s go! Splish-splash peep peep!”

  Whether she was aware of Emi’s feelings or not, Alas Ramus picked up on “go real soon” and nothing else, eyes shining with glee.

  Recalling her conversation with Suzuno last night, Emi found it suddenly difficult to look Alas Ramus in the eye.

  “…All right, Alas Ramus. You’ve been sweating a lot today, hav
en’t you? Let’s go take a bath together.”

  “Bath! Splish-splash!”

  One never had to drag Alas Ramus into the tub.

  The outings to the public bathhouse with Maou, back when she lived with him, apparently left a positive imprint on her mind. Whenever the subject of a bath came up, Alas Ramus would faithfully spring into action.

  It took until now for Emi to realize that it probably had little to do with her genesis. This was just a little girl who loved playing in the water, was all.

  A lukewarm bath might be just the thing for tonight. Too hot wouldn’t be good for her. And in this summer heat, it’d make for a delightful soak.

  “Okay, I need to get a few things ready. Can you be a good girl?”

  “Okey!”

  Alas Ramus raised her hand in the air, trotted to the living room, took off the hat she was wearing, placed it on the table, and sat down on a chair. She picked up the papercraft birdcage on the table and began spinning it around, keeping a careful eye on Emi.

  It was her way of saying I’m being a good girl!

  Emi nodded, face considerably lightened, and tossed her shoulder bag toward a corner of the kitchen before heading to the bathroom. Draining the water she used for laundry purposes in the morning, she took up a sponge to give the tub a quick scouring as she reached for the shower valve.

  “Mommy! Whirr whirr whirr!”

  Then she spotted Alas Ramus at the bathroom door, not being a good girl at all, the smartphone from her shoulder bag in her hand.

  In fact, judging by the screen, she had already answered the incoming call, hadn’t she…

  Must’ve brushed a finger the wrong way when she took it out of the bag.

  Emi was crestfallen as she took the phone away. Whoever called must have heard the child shouting across the room at her.

  “Um, hello? Hello? Emi?”

  The voice from the speaker, along with the name screen, filled Emi with a profound sense of relief.

  “Well, thank you, Alas Ramus. But don’t touch Mommy’s cell phone without permission, okay?”

  “Don’t?”

  “Emi? Helloooo?”

  “Oh, but thanks for bringing it to me, though.”

  “Ee-hee! Okeh!”

  Emi patted her on the head. The little girl gave a ticklish grin in response and trotted back to the living room.

  “Emi, are you there?”

  “Hello? Sorry, Rika. Alas Ramus picked up my phone for me.”

  It was Rika Suzuki, Emi’s friend and cube mate at her workplace.

  She didn’t know about Ente Isla and everything surrounding that world, but she knew Maou, Chiho, and Suzuno well enough. She also knew Emi was watching a toddler named Alas Ramus.

  “Whoa, that was close. If you weren’t there, she might’ve decided to call up Saudi Arabia and give you a massive phone bill!”

  “Yeah, sorry, I’ll be more careful with it. What’s up?”

  “Oh, um…”

  Rika uncharacteristically clammed up.

  “Hmm?”

  “Hey, where are you, Emi? Your voice is kinda echo-y.”

  “Huh? I’m in the bathroom. I was just about to scrub the bathtub a little.”

  “Ohhhh. Okay. Well, if you’re busy, it doesn’t have to be right now or—”

  “What? Wow, what’s up with you today, Rika? Is this gonna go for a while, or…?”

  Rika couldn’t have sounded more reluctant. Compared to her usual sunny self, it was hard to imagine.

  “No, no, nothing that long, but… Oooh, how should I put it? Maybe it kinda will, actually.”

  “Rika…? What’s up? Something going on?”

  Emi stiffened her voice a little. Something troubling her, maybe?

  Depending on how you gauged it, this might be Rika acting agitated over something. Whatever it was had to be serious.

  Emi sat down on the edge of the tub, preparing for an extended chat.

  “If something’s on your mind, just say it, okay? You called because you wanted to talk to me, right?”

  She could feel Rika agonizing over something across the line.

  “…Well, don’t laugh, okay?”

  That relieved Emi a little. If Rika was afraid it’d make her laugh, it couldn’t have been too much of a doggie downer.

  “I won’t, I won’t. So what’s up?”

  “Um… So, like, I know it’s really weird to ask somebody this…”

  “Yeah?”

  “But I don’t have anyone else I can ask, so…you mind if I bend your ear for a little bit?”

  “Sure, go ahead. What’s on your mind?”

  Emi tried her best to squeeze it out of her. If her friend was in trouble, she wanted to help if she could. She’d done so countless times in the past, and Rika also helped her out of a pinch more than once.

  If she was pussyfooting around the issue this much, it must have been tormenting her pretty badly.

  “Okay, so…”

  Rika, her voice more resolute now, took a deep breath.

  “Um, what kinda clothes do you think Ashiya likes?!”

  “……………………………………………………………………”

  Emi, seated on the bathtub, mobile phone firmly planted against one ear, froze.

  “…Emi?”

  Rika took Emi’s lack of immediate response with a hefty dose of suspicion.

  It wasn’t enough to release Emi from her shackles.

  Whenever someone runs into a completely unexpected set of circumstances, they try to harness their past experiences, tossing all of them into the wind in a mad attempt at a solution. Much of the time, though, all those past experiences offer little more than a lot of wishful thinking.

  There was no better way to describe Emi at that moment. Which was why the answer that finally dribbled out in the end was:

  “Something…cheap, maybe?”

  “Cheap? So, like, no fancy brands or anything?”

  “Y-yeeeaaahhh.”

  Emi was still frozen, her voice bereft of emotion.

  “I’ve never seen him wear anything besides stuff from UniClo. There’s no way he’d be wearing those cheapo shoes because he likes them…”

  “Huh? Whoa, whoa, Emi, that’s not what I mean. I’m not talking about what kinda stuff he likes to buy for himself.”

  “…What do you mean?”

  Emi’s face began to twitch a little again.

  A dark foreboding spread across her mind. She could literally feel her organs squirm uneasily in her chest.

  “I mean… Oh, you know what I mean, Emi! I’m talking about what kinda outfit you think he’d find cute on a woman!!”

  It must have taken a lot of courage for Rika to ask the question.

  Of course she couldn’t have brought it up with anyone else.

  The only women who knew Ashiya before Rika were Emi, Chiho, and Suzuno. But as far as Emi knew, Rika wasn’t chummy enough with the other two to ask them questions like this.

  She and Chiho had gotten closer, certainly, thanks to the whole Alas Ramus thing. But this was a more intimate issue. Really, asking someone what to do in order to make a man pay more attention to you was the same thing, 99 percent of the time, as confessing you have a thing for him.

  “Can…can I ask you a question before I answer that, Rika?”

  “Wh-what?!”

  Emi, for her part, was shocked to the point where she thought her heart would stop and she would remain a statuesque figure on the bathtub forever. But across the phone line, it was clear that this coming-out party was sending Rika’s internal temperature off the charts.

  “Is there something with you and Alc…and Ashiya?”

  If there wasn’t something, Rika wouldn’t be asking any of this.

  She did notice, when they had both run into Ashiya in front of the Hatagaya Sentucky Fried Chicken, that Rika acted a bit odd around him. Not quite herself, somehow. Did they have a chance to interact with each other after tha
t?

  “N-no! Nothing! Nothing, I swear! But, it’s just that…um…”

  Emi could picture Rika flailing her hands in the air.

  But her voice trailed off as it continued on, down to a barely audible whisper as it proceeded to bring Emi’s body down to absolute zero.

  “Ashiya…invited me…to go shopping with him…”

  Emi’s vision went black.

  THE DEVIL EXPLAINS HUMAN RELATIONS

  “Dude, I should’ve known you were still in Japan. What’re you here for? If it’s Maou, he’s out right now.”

  Urushihara didn’t bother removing his eyes from the PC screen.

  The floor that Chiho took the time to clean up for him was already littered with empty plastic bottles and snack wrappers, forming a kind of magical barrier that seemed to naturally spring from the ground wherever Urushihara decided to lurk.

  The summer sky was blue as blue could be, the sun’s rays pounding mercilessly upon the town of Sasazuka as Urushihara took a sip of barley tea from a nearby cup.

  “Oh, I know. I was watching. I’m here ’cause I wanted to talk to you! The Devil King’s confidant and his next-door neighbor were nice enough to go away for me, too, so…now or never, y’see?”

  “For what.”

  Urushihara kept his back to the voice.

  “My word, though, this room is hot! How can your computer operate, or you move around? As I recall, it’s bad for computers to run in such heat.”

  “Not really. It’s not like I’m overclocking it or anything.”

  “Oh no? Well, that explains why your desk is right by the window, I s’pose. Guess you got the barest excuse for a breeze that way, mmmm?”

  “Dude…”

  “In any event, it sure is hot. This chocolate mint from Len and Mary’s is deee-lish!”

  This, finally, was enough to make Urushihara stir. He turned around, the annoyance writ clear on his face.

  “Can you just say what you want? Otherwise, I’m gonna call Maou on SkyPhone and tell him you stormed in, raided the fridge, and ran off, Gabriel.”

  Facing him was a large angel who was, as he spoke, about to bite into an ice cream bar he had just casually helped himself to from the Devil’s Castle refrigerator.

  “Ooh. Sheesh. He’s got you that tight on a budget, mmm?”