The impact on her forehead also reopened the wound from the previous night. Blood was beginning to show on the bandage, making its way past the gauze below. The dressing itself had turned brown from the dirt and would need a change shortly. Ashiya, however, looked dejected as he showed the emergency kit to the Devil King.
“Nothing in here but adhesive tape. We did buy gauze and so forth somewhere else, no?”
“Maybe. We weren’t planning on anything as rough as this. We’ll probably have to go buy some stuff. Hey, Ashiya, you mind going out to the pharmacy by the rail station and buying bandages and gauze? They oughtta be open by now. I don’t want this girl yelling at me even more.”
“Yes, my liege. May I be permitted to borrow Dullahan from you? I have other shopping to take care of as well.”
“Permission granted. Hey, if you got that much money on you, why don’t you cook something better for me?”
“I am afraid, Your Demonic Highness, that your spending habits are such that I have to build my own stash and save my money carefully. I will return soon.”
Maou snorted derisively as he heard Ashiya, still wearing the morning’s jersey, pedal off.
“You better get that disinfected for now, at least. I have some stuff over here, so let’s get that washed and…”
Maou sat down in front of Emi, wet towel in hand. Emi, snapping out of her torpor, snatched it from his hand.
“D-don’t touch me! I’m not a child! I can do it myself!”
“Sure, sure, sorry. Tissues are over there.”
The box of tissues that Emi had flung at Maou still laid where it fell. She wiped the dirt from her nose and forehead, then used another tissue to apply the disinfectant. Then, she was struck by a crushing wave of sadness.
“What, does it sting?”
“No!”
Emi answered Maou’s simple question by throwing the bottle of disinfectant, lid still open, full bore at him.
“Whoa! What was that for?”
“Shut up! What is with you, anyway?! You’re the Devil King, you idiot! Why don’t you act like one and start wrecking this world already?!”
“Huh? Where’d all that come from?”
Maou was honestly surprised, unsure what Emi was trying to say. Emi continued shouting.
“What?! Who the hell ever heard of a dirt-poor, junk-food-eating, rising-star-in-the-workplace, loved-by-teenage-girls Devil King?!”
“Ngh…”
Maou was taken off guard by this astute observation, but quickly rallied. “Well, I’ve never heard of a Hero who started crying after falling down the stairs and had a demon fix her up!”
“And what kind of Devil King sends his minion off to the pharmacy for the Hero’s sake?! And what kind of Great Demon General actually says yes to that?!”
“Ergh…”
Emi began shouting like a toddler, unable to process her raging emotions.
“Why are you so damn kind to me?!”
The screamed question hit Maou where it hurt.
“Why are you kind to me, to other people, to the whole world?! How can… How can you be so nice all the time?!”
Maou was at a loss to answer. The unexpected sharpness of the query stabbed directly into his heart.
“And if you can be so nice…then why… Why…”
Emi shouted through the tears.
“Why did you kill my father?!”
The scream made the apartment’s wooden frame shudder. The moment of silence afterward seemed even more deafening.
Emi sobbed, out of breath. Maou stood there, unable to give any response.
“The…the Devil King I pursued was a malicious monster! He treated people like they were nothing more than insects! He loved nothing more than the despair, the blood that ran across the world!”
“I—”
“You turned our fields into gigantic firestorms! You crushed our castles with your lightning! You washed away entire towns with your floods! You allowed your horde of demons to perform any kind of savage brutality they wanted! Devil King Satan! Even when you die, I will never forgive you! You took my home, my father’s fields, my father’s life, my peaceful, quiet childhood…! Everything! And I’ll never forgive you!”
“Emi, I—”
“But why… Why are you…being so nice to me…?”
It was clear that Maou’s mental makeup had veered considerably away from his time on Ente Isla.
He was a tyrant back then. Even now, he remembered how he treated the world as his personal plaything and resolved to eradicate the human race from all the land. That desire, at least, was still there. So why was he presenting no resistance to the idea of living a comfortable life in a human-dominated world?
“I…I haven’t really thought deeply about it.”
Maou, unable to formulate a clear answer in his mind, forced the words out anyway.
“But…well, sorry, I guess.”
“… …”
Emi did not reply. Instead she looked up with her red, tear-moistened face at the man in front of her, mouth open as she stared.
His approach was casual, but Maou was apologizing from the heart.
“I mean, I didn’t know anything about any Hero at first. I was busy taking over the Central Continent and controlling my demon forces, so I guess I didn’t really pay full attention to what was going on, over on the surrounding islands… Well, I don’t mean to shift the blame to Lucifer, either, though. But what could I have done? Demons and humans… Well, we’re always in conflict with each other.”
He was clearly frustrated with himself. His eyes swiveled from one point in the air to the next, gesturing as he tried his hardest to formulate a decent excuse.
“Plus, you know, at the time, I guess I didn’t really understand humans all that well, so…”
Emi was not expecting Maou to come up with much, but this reaction was wholly unexpected. She turned her reddened face to the side, the realization that she had exploded in front of Maou filling her with shame.
“Hello, I was—”
That was the scene so suddenly interrupted by a familiar voice. Emi and Maou quickly turned toward the door. Ashiya walked in, as if guided inside, and behind him was Chiho, frozen as she noticed the state Emi and Maou were in.
Ashiya was just as lost himself, forgetting to close the door as he witnessed the scene.
Chiho, in her scarlet-tinged school outfit, was holding a paper bag printed with the logo of a Japan-style sweet shop located inside a Shinjuku department store.
“Uh, I…I ran into Miss Sasaki there, and she stated she wanted to meet with you, and so…”
Ashiya stammered out his explanation, pharmacy bag still in hand. After a moment standing there in shock, Chiho dropped the bag she was holding. Judging by the heavy clank, one could figure the bag contained a can of senbei rice crackers, not that it mattered right now.
Maou could guess what was running through Chiho’s mind.
Probably, she still felt bad about last night. Not only did she get Maou caught up in a disaster, but her selfish request had also led to repercussions in his personal life.
So to make up for it, she dressed up in her finest outfit and decided to stop by with something to snack on as a gift. By modern teenager standards, it was a tremendously polite gesture.
And then she ran into Ashiya, his roommate, near his apartment. Chiho hadn’t exactly had a deep conversation with Ashiya yesterday, but he knew who she was, and she knew he was at the disaster site. And Ashiya, ever the gentleman, must have kindly escorted her up the stairs.
As attentive to detail as Ashiya always was, he had doubtlessly told her of Emi’s morning visit. Chiho must have accepted the news well enough, given that she was here now.
So he came in expecting an injured Emi. Not a sobbing, red-faced Emi, along with a panicked-looking Maou trying his hardest to make excuses. It was simple to picture how she would gauge that situation. What’s more, thanks to her trip down the stairs, Emi’s suit w
as more than a little ripped and damaged. All of this raced across Maou’s mind in the course of a single second.
The nervous step backward Chiho gingerly took turned all of this guesswork into confirmed belief.
“Uh… Ha-ha! M-maybe, uh, this isn’t the best time…” she stammered.
“Ch-Chiho…”
Emi, no doubt reaching the same conclusion as Maou, rose up in a panic, realizing that Chiho was misunderstanding the scene in dramatic fashion.
“I guess it’s true…that…Maou and…Yusa… They really are.…”
Chiho’s knees were shaking. Her eyes were emotionless, but the smile on her face was taut and fraying at the edges.
This was turning into a serious misunderstanding.
“N-no, Chiho, that’s not it at all! This is…”
“Chi, listen, just calm down for a…”
“I-I’m sorry!”
Not willing to lend an ear to Emi’s and Maou’s wholly ungrounded excuses, Chiho spun herself around and galloped out. Her school-uniform loafers kept her safe as her footsteps clanged their way downstairs. The three of them listened on, still frozen.
“That was…bad, wasn’t it?”
Emi muttered the words flatly, the soul removed from her body. Maou turned his face upward, a hand covering his eyes.
“P-perhaps we should pursue her and get this straightened out?”
Ashiya took a look around the area beneath the stairwell. There was already no sign of Chiho.
Snatching the pharmacy bag from the nervous, twitching Ashiya, Maou threw it at Emi. She caught it instinctively.
“Look, just go home, okay? Nothing good ever happens when you’re near me!”
There was no responding to his verbal and physical abuse.
The unexpected Chiho factor had drained all the tenseness from the apartment.
“Oh, dear, Mr. Maou, that wasn’t very mature.”
That was why even Ashiya, still frozen near the open door, didn’t notice at first.
“Picking on a woman like that! This isn’t grade-school recess, you know.”
“Aaaghh!!”
He had failed to realize until that instant that a pillar of gold was standing behind him.
“M-Ms. Shiba!”
Her long, medieval-styled, marigold-print dress shone in the morning light. A peacock feather, painted a bright golden color, stuck out of her wide-brimmed hat, the same color as the dress. Her golden hair, reminiscent of French nobility, reflected the sun’s rays atop her body. She carried a bright yellow handbag with elegant handles that resembled strings of pearls, and she completed the package with a shawl replete with lime-green lamé strands, white enamel heels, and false eyelashes that resembled a field of grass growing on the seabed, so long that even the most egregious shojo manga artist would run for the hills if asked to draw them that length. She was Miki Shiba, the owner of the apartment, and she had appeared without a sound.
It was Ashiya’s outcry that finally made Maou and Emi notice the corn-on-the-cob-shaped landlord behind him. The golden light around her seemed to form an enormous yellow halo as they basked in her presence.
“This your girlfriend I assume, Mr. Maou?”
The gravelly voice seemed to belong to a woman fairly on in years, but Shiba’s wine-barrel-sized frame readily foiled any attempts to guess her true age.
“My name is Miki Shiba, and I’m the landlord here at Villa Rosa Sasazuka. It’s good to meet you!”
Emi squinted, as if trying to see through the glorious sunlight in front of her. Nodding back was the best she could manage.
“Feel free to call me Mikitty, by the way.”
“Uh, sure…”
There was no other response to give.
“I had come to visit, Mr. Maou, Mr. Ashiya, in order to inform my tenants of certain upcoming matters…but I see you are both rather occupied at the moment?”
With these overly prying words, she handed a piece of paper over to Ashiya, offering a whiff of her elegant perfume as her arm extended forward.
“But regardless. We have had quite a spate of earthquakes as of late, no? I’ve felt it necessary to perform seismic reinforcement on this residence, so I came to inform you of some construction work in the future.”
While this had been the case since they first met, for some reason, Maou had trouble dealing with his landlord. He didn’t mind the sassy, cheesy extravagance at all, but for some reason, his internal demonic sixth sense always told him that Shiba was a lady not to be defied at any cost.
The piece of paper contained a schedule for the reinforcement work, a notice that residents would need to vacate the property for a one-day period, and another notice that this would not change their monthly rent. The landlord’s seal was on the bottom, alongside a glossy, golden kiss mark. Maou made a conscious effort not to let his reaction to this show.
“But, there has certainly been quite a few earthquakes, hmm? Especially lately.”
Shiba made the casual observation as she sidled up to Maou.
“Y-yeah…”
“In fact, I wonder if we’ll have another one today, even.”
“I…I couldn’t say.”
“And speaking of that, on my way here, I happened across a charming young woman running down the road. Crying the whole way, I may add!”
She smiled as she leered at all three of the apartment’s residents simultaneously. It was a fairly impressive physical feat. “I believe she was heading for Sasazuka station as well…”
It was that instant.
“Did it…shake just now?”
Only the ever-elegant Miki Shiba chose not to nod her head in response.
“Mr. Maou?”
“Uh.”
“If you’ve involved her in this, I would hope a young man would see matters through to the end, hmm?”
“Wh-what do you…”
Maou was thrown into confusion, unable to comprehend his landlord. But as he stood there, the shaking grew stronger and stronger.
“Y-Your Demonic Highness! Th-this shaking!”
Ashiya was shouting.
“Chiho!”
“Did you honestly think that charming young woman receiving an idea link and being subject to that sonar strike was a complete coincidence, then?”
A single sentence was all it took from the landlord to turn the others into stone.
“I would think that you, of all people, would understand the power behind people’s thoughts and wills. Perhaps you had best hurry, before it is too late?”
There was something lurking underneath that thick makeup. But what?
“See? You can hear it, no?”
A loud rumble coursed across town.
“Argh, I feel horrible! I think I’m gonna get Gate-sick!”
“Please try not to vomit if you caaaaan…”
“No guarantees, man! Erp…”
“Hang in there, pleeease! I doubt we’ll have time to relax once we reach the other side.”
“Uh? You catchin’ something over there? Grhh…”
“A man-made magical reaction, picked up by our sonar readings. It’s far too large to be purely the latent magic of ‘Japan.’”
“So Emilia’s in trouble?”
“Possss-ible! We may need to prepare for battle!”
“Right! Let’s hurry! I can take this!”
“Yes, sir! On our waaaaaay!”
“Oooogh! Stop making it shake so much!”
Chiho sprinted at full speed, crying. Whatever Maou and Emi had to say, that was not the kind of situation she had the wherewithal to calmly pick her way through.
I really do like Maou.
But I’m just a new girl on the job, someone he’s only just met. I can’t do anything about the history Maou and Emi Yusa have between them.
It had to have been my first love. With Maou, I was full of spirit; I had a drive, a goal I could push to achieve with him. The high school boys, all mooching off their parents and partying all night; they
’re nothing compared to him.
He wasn’t particularly tall or handsome, but Chiho had still fallen in love with him.
Now that was gone, her heart ripped into a million pieces, and she had no idea what to do. So she ran as hard as she could, plunging into the crowd around Sasazuka station, running into an electric pole, tripping over a parked bicycle, colliding head-on with a pedestrian.
“S-sorry!”
She apologized, too ashamed to bring her head upward.
“Oooh, this looks like a good one.”
The voice, coming from a head or so taller than Chiho, was ringed with a bitter coldness wholly unfamiliar to Chiho’s ears.
“I had been following you since that last mistake, but I didn’t think you would be caught up in despair for them so easily.”
It was a young man, on the small side. He looked normal enough—long, flowing hair, T-shirt, and jeans. He couldn’t have been much older than Chiho, either.
But what about those eyes? Those purple eyes, with pupils that seemed to shine a rainbow of ominous colors that Chiho had never seen before?
“Chiho Sasaki. Allow me to take that hatred and despair the Devil King and the Hero brought to you, and make it a reality!”
They were in the middle of the midmorning Sasazuka bustle. Two people stopped in the middle of it caused a traffic situation in and of itself.
“Hey, get outta the way!”
A young, fashionably dressed man drowsily warned the stranger, placing a hand on his shoulder.
“…!”
Suddenly, the T-shirt ripped itself apart in the area the hand touched him. The young man was blown away by the thing that popped out of his shoulder, plowing into a line of parked bikes.
“Ahh…!”
Chiho let out a scream, deep within her throat. Other passersby stared at the man, unable to fathom what had just happened.
It was a wing. A set of large, jet-black wings, jutting out from this person’s back.
“The hunt has begun. Today, I will surpass the Devil King for good.”
At that moment, an elevated Keio rail line collapsed, the victim of a mysterious explosion.
Maou and Emi ran, Ashiya a small distance behind them.
The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 1 Page 15
