The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 5 Page 7

  “Dude, just stop it. I’m the one he’s gonna get pissed off at.”

  “Oh, don’t be such a grouch! What’s so bad about a loaf of ice cream, a jug of barley tea, and moi?”

  “Nobody asked for you, dude. Just tell me what you want and get outta here. Don’t blame me if they burst in and whine at you to pay for the wall you knocked down.”

  “Hey! That’s not exactly how I remember it. It wasn’t me who knocked it down, exactly. It was that Alas Ramus girl who punched me through it, remember?”

  “Yeah, and who made her do that?”

  Urushihara was impervious to this game.

  Gabriel couldn’t have known that their landlord covered the entire wall repair, but he did appear to feel at least slightly at fault for the unplanned Devil’s Castle home renovation.

  “Wow, though… You’re the one he’s gonna get ‘pissed off at’? Reeeeeally?”

  Gabriel grinned a smarmy grin as he greedily licked at the bare wooden stick that once held his purloined ice cream bar, tossing it into a side wastebasket.

  “That box is for plastic. The regular trash can’s next to the fridge.”

  “Oh, who are you, the Grand Pooh-Bah himself? Come onnn…”

  “No! No ‘come onnnnn’! I’m the one he’s gonna yell at, all right? Just go away! You’re driving me crazy! Why are you even here?”

  Even Urushihara was nearing his limit now, no longer bothering to hide his irritation.

  “Y’knowww…”

  “What?!”

  “You were the golden child. The archangel closest to Mr. Big himself. And now you’re griping and moaning about some bozo getting angry at you? Now that’s rich. And you actually care about separating the garbage. This’s too surreal. I can’t even find it in me to laugh.”

  Gabriel knew exactly what he was going to do with this topic.

  But Urushihara betrayed no sign that it riled him any more than he already was. “Yeah, sorry. That was then, this is now. ’Sides, you were the one who talked about how important image is to us. If you’re gonna call yourself an angel, you could at least try to recycle.”

  Urushihara sniffed derisively and focused his attention back on his screen.

  Gabriel paid it no mind.

  “Why’re you even with that young demon wannabe anyway? I mean, I know everybody’s saying how much of a wimp you are right now compared to your glory days, but I kinda wasn’t around for those, you know? So I’m just wondering, what were you thinking? Like, sue me for asking, but what drove you to shack up with the demons over in their world…?”

  “It’s ’cause I was bored.”

  “Bored?”

  There was a chuckle lodged in the response.

  “Yeah. And it’s fun here.”

  “Fun? Sitting in this sweat lodge, watching Web videos, cowering in fear that your new lord’s gonna chew you out for tossing a bottle in the wrong bin? Not to rub it in, bro, but I’d take the Internet café I’m staying in any day over this pigsty.”

  “It’s fun. And at least it’s not—”

  “Whoa there, tiger! No making fun of Internet cafés.”

  Urushihara’s purple eyes made their way through the overgrown hair covering his forehead on their way to staring Gabriel down.

  “At least it beats staying up there. Staring into space for hours on end until it finally drives you insane.”

  “Yeaaah, and your little escape’s kiiiind of becoming a huge pain in the neck for me.”

  “Helps pass the time, right?”

  Gabriel declined to answer. A huddled mass of cicadas swarmed around the trees in the backyard, making the heat and humidity feel even worse with their incessant cries.

  “I hung out with Satan ’cause I had nothing to do, dude. I was so devoid of anything to occupy me that it was freaking me out. No other reason besides that. So, we done here? If that’s all you needed, the door’s that-a-way.”

  “Ah, there he is!”

  “Uh?”

  Just as he was about to shoo him outside, Gabriel stopped him cold.

  “I slogged my sorry hide all the way down to beautiful sun-soaked Sasazuka because I wanted to ask about that Satan guy.”

  “So? Ask him about himself. It’s not like Maou’s out on a trip or anything. He’s somewhere in Shinjuku.”

  “Ahh, but he’s not gonna tell me anything now, is he? Plus, he’s still pretty young, yeah? Not like you. I just thought asking the likes of you would save us all a lot of headache.”

  This manner of coercion was familiar to Urushihara. He had heard enough of it up in heaven.

  “Plus, the way I see it, instead of asking someone with nothing but secondhand knowledge, asking someone who knows the guy directly would give me much more accurate intel to work with, am I right?”

  “Huh?”

  This made little sense. Sadao Maou was the Devil King Satan himself. There was nothing secondhand about him.

  Gabriel wagged a chiding finger at Urushihara.

  “What I’m trying to tell you, Lucifer, is I’m talking about someone else. The ‘Satan’ that you were playing around with. Not the greasy-haired social dropout you’re bumming crash space from.”

  Urushihara’s eyes immediately stiffened into a sneer. Gabriel gave an equally jeering smirk in response.

  “I’m talking about the Devil Overlord Satan. You know him.”

  “Oh. Is that it? Dude, you made me sneer at you for nothing.”

  He sighed, as if disappointed at the revelation, and turned back toward the computer screen.

  “Heyyy! What d’you mean ‘is that it’?! If you didn’t notice, I was trying to make this into a serious conversation! Was that not clear enough to you?”

  “I’d be a second-class bum if I cared.”

  “Oh, what, do you have any perks for being a first-class bum?!”

  “No. No perks, but nothing really bad, either.”

  “Well, maybe that’s how you think about it. ’Cause if I had to give it to you straight, I’d say you’re wasting your life away, aren’t you?”

  “If I cared about what other people thought about me, I’d stop being a bum right there. That’s total bush-league bum-ness.”

  “If you’re planning to be that much of a bum, aren’t they gonna kick you out before too long?”

  “Dude, getting kicked out is, like, less than third-class bum. A first-class bum has to toe the line. You can’t make an effort to suck up to whoever it is you’re leeching off of, but you have to make sure you don’t drive him to do anything rash, either. It’s kind of like a sport.”

  “That’s one sport I really don’t want to visit the Hall of Fame for, I reckon. Where is it, the bathroom at the thrift store? Also, how is that not caring about other people?”

  “It’s totally not. I’m just gauging how much my opponent can stand and working within those rules. That’s different from caring. Sometimes the rules get rewritten and I have less space to work with, but that’s gonna be the same in any world, isn’t it?”

  “……”

  “A true bum isn’t afraid of death. He needs the resolve, the bravery to continue with his social-dropout lifestyle every waking moment of his life. If I broke a rule and he kicked me out, I wouldn’t be bumming anymore. I’d just be homeless.”

  The way Urushihara framed himself as a sort of religious practitioner, despite constantly snapping whenever his roommates mocked him for his bum-ness, gave an insight into exactly the sort of mental gymnastics he tackled every day.

  There were few less appropriate times to be busting out poetic epithets like “not afraid of death” or “with resolve, bravery.”

  Even an archangel from another world could agree with the rest of Japanese society on that front. His face was blank, confusion giving way to grim resignation.

  “Whatever it is you’re trying to convince me of, it’s not working, do you hear me? It wouldn’t convince anybody of anything.”

  This was just the sort of response
Urushihara relished the most.

  “You don’t have to be so pedantic, Gabriel.”

  “Huh?”

  “If it wasn’t for what happened, you, me, everyone else…we all woulda been bums. Up there.”

  “…!”

  Gabriel gasped a little, not expecting this.

  The grin on Urushihara’s face grew a shade darker.

  “See? You do care. Second class, second class.”

  “…Listen.”

  Realizing he was being taken on an all-too-familiar ride, Gabriel lightly shook his head, attempting to regain control.

  “We’re departing from the subject. I wanted to ask you.”

  “After all that high-and-mighty crap you gave me? Good luck.”

  The full bore of the archangel’s eyes was upon Urushihara.

  “If you know anything about the Devil Overlord Satan’s lost treasure, I want you to tell me.”

  “What’s that? ’Zit worth anything? ’Cause I want the money. I’d probably have the all-time mother of inheritance taxes to pay, but…”

  “That isn’t what I asked you. It…it’s not that kind of thing anyway!”

  “So what is it?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking!”

  “If you don’t know, how do you know it’s not worth anything?”

  “Do the demon realms even have a currency system?!”

  “No.”

  “Do you want to make me angry?!”

  “Ughh… This is such a pain in the ass…”

  Urushihara stood up from his seat, stretching out his cramped legs.

  Then he took out a memo pad and a pen from the prefab bookshelves and started to scribble something.

  “Okay, here it is. The treasure of the demon world, as much as I can remember. Enough to make people up there’s eyes explode.”

  “You call this handwriting?” Gabriel blurted out without thinking. He could be forgiven: It was the scrawl of a five-year-old, and in capital letters to boot.

  “NORTHUNG…Nothung? The sword of Gram, hmm? That’s not it. What’s this? Ader… No. What’s ADERAMEKINPEAR mean? Is this all one word?”

  “That’s ‘spear.’ The spear that was with Adramelech’s tribe back in the Age of Myths.”

  “The magical spear Adramelechinus! Can you at least learn how to write lowercase letters for me? And they invented spelling for a reason too, you know.”

  “Screw that. Too much to remember.”

  “Feh…FALSGOLD…? Oh. Alchemy. The story of how they created brass in an attempt to create false gold, hmm? ESTRLJEM, parenthesis, LEMBRENBE… The heck…?”

  “Lhemberel Levherbé. A magical beast the Demon Overlord kept. Rumor says it’s still alive somewhere in the demon realms, wearing a collar with an astral gem—an arcane jewel crafted by the Overlord himself. Hey, maybe it’s one of your Yesod fragments, huh?”

  “…You really want me angry, don’t you?”

  The look on Gabriel’s face was severely embittered. The look on Urushihara’s was hurt surprise.

  “What? I’m trying to be pretty serious here!”

  “Even back then, people named Satan tended to be pretty poor, all right? He was the Demon Overlord, and he was still cheap enough to try tricking people with fool’s gold! I don’t remember him leaving any weapons or technology worth a rat’s ass when he died, and I wrote down pretty much everything right there, okay?!”

  “Pfft… And who knows how much I can trust this, even…”

  Gabriel wadded up the piece of memo paper and threw it into a trash bin.

  “But I don’t have any way of making you talk. So whatever. I’m outie.”

  “I told you, that’s the recycle bin…”

  “Don’t forget, though, I’m practically doing you a favor right now.”

  “Huh? Favor how?”

  Gabriel turned unexpectedly stern as he looked upon Urushihara, currently pouting to himself as he fished out the paper wad and ice cream stick from the bin.

  “The Observer is coming. And depending on what he decides, it might not be ‘doves’ like me paying house calls any longer.”

  That marked the first time today that Urushihara showed any major change in expression.

  “The Observer?!”

  “Why’re you acting all shocked? Sariel, the Evil Eye of the Fallen, was teamed up with him, and now he’s outta the picture. You had to know he was gonna show up sometime?”

  “How could we know that, dude? And why’re you expending all this effort on us now, after millennia of bumming around? Oh, and don’t give me that ‘dove’ crap, either. You’re like a shoebill or something. I have no idea what you’re thinking.”

  “Yeah, thanks for that compliment. What’s a shoebill, anyway?”

  As he spoke, Gabriel took a piece of paper out from his robe.

  “Anyway. If you remember anything else, call me on this number. Not that I’d expect you to.”

  “Like I ever would.”

  There was a cell phone number on the business-card-sized paper Gabriel flung onto the floor before turning around to put his sandals back on.

  “By the way, though…”

  “What?”

  “If you’re trying to find Satan’s old crap, then what happened to your search for Yesod fragments? ’Cause Emilia just got a new one.”

  It was the one crudely embedded into the hilt of the jeweled sword Camio brought over for them. But not even Urushihara knew what Emi had done with it afterward.

  Fusing with Alas Ramus was enough to power up her sword and Cloth of the Dispeller to the point where Gabriel was helpless against her.

  Bringing another Yesod piece into that picture could help make more of her Cloth materialize. Or not. But if it did, that created issues for both the Devil King’s army and Gabriel.

  That was the intent behind Urushihara’s question, but Gabriel reacted with no measurable surprise.

  “Those? Yeah, that’s kinda on the back burner for now. I mean, the Observer is coming, so try to read between the lines a little, okay? I got taken off the front lines after the assorted managerial screwups we’ve had, so if that fragment is with Emilia, then fine by me for now.”

  “Hmm? Well, okay, but…”

  “Thanks again for the info! If you see Emilia, tell her I’m not gonna lay a finger on ’em for the time being, you hear me? So take care of that baby.”

  With a lazy wave, Gabriel stepped out of the door.

  Once his footsteps faded way, and the aura of his holy energy had finally disappeared from the Villa Rosa Sasazuka environs, Urushihara returned to his computer.

  He began typing away, the cicadas providing him with a little seasonal background music.

  Then, in a rare display of emotion, Urushihara began humming to himself as he browsed through his preferred video site.

  “Amaaaaazing graaaaace…how sweeeeeet the sooooound… Hell yeah.”

  The call center for the Dokodemo cell phone provider was shrouded in a strange sort of tension.

  There was always something of an unnatural aura surrounding Emi Yusa, the cheerful yet thick-skinned customer service representative whose skill in foreign languages made her one of the phone bay’s star players.

  She was there, just as always, handling the callers other agents were too helpless to handle.

  If you went up and spoke to her, she was the same old Emi Yusa.

  But.

  When she wasn’t speaking with anyone. While she was waiting for a call to come in. In other words, whenever she was alone—

  —her face was scary. At least, she looked scary. Anxiety and anger over something that couldn’t quite be put into words were etched across her features.

  She was clearly worried about something, and clearly, it was distracting her.

  It had no effect on her work duties, but today in particular, Emi was hard to approach.

  “Um, Ms. Yusa, I…”

  “…Yes?”

  “Uhm. Oh. Um. Never m
ind. I’m sorry.”

  The woman seated next to Emi excused herself, picking up on her state of intense concentration.

  Emi brought a hand to her forehead, wondering if she really looked that fearsome.

  Rika didn’t have a shift with her that day. Instead, on the opposite side of where she usually sat, there was Maki Shimizu, a college student who had joined Dokodemo after her two cube mates.

  She acted fairly reserved most of the time, but in a call-center job that required dealing with irate old men and whiny complainers on a daily basis, she had a remarkable resilience for her age. She was a fairly valued member of the force, in other words.

  “…No, it’s okay, Maki. What’s up?”

  Maki was in her second year of college, which meant that Emi was, by Earth standards, actually younger than she was.

  But the accumulated history they had both experienced, coupled with the aura the two of them generally emitted, made Emi seem far older.

  This gave Emi some level of respect among other people in the office, who treated her like a multiyear veteran of the call-center trenches.

  “Um, you…you’re looking scary.”

  The straight appraisal made Emi even more self-conscious.

  It must have been the face of a tormented monster. And as Emi thought about it, the sight of this hardy customer-representative soldier—never daring to flee at the sound of yet another irate pensioner who couldn’t read the manual—having difficulty facing up to her proved that the problem was fully on her own end.

  “Um, I’m sorry if this is a weird question, but…”

  “No, no, what is it?”

  Maki’s voice, while hesitant, was perfectly clear.

  “Did you have an argument with Rika or something?”

  “Huh?!”

  Emi was shocked. This was not at all what she expected, and so clearly, from her mouth.

  “Wh-why did you think that?”

  “Oh, it’s not…? Well, that’s good, anyway.”

  “I’m not arguing with Rika about anything. What gave you that idea?”

  Mika softened a little, the look of sheer surprise on Emi’s face calming her.

  “Well, I got to work the same time as Rika yesterday. I took my lunch break later than usual, but just when I went out to get something, someone called Rika on her cell phone.”