The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 15

by Satoshi Wagahara

  He was grabbing for another fry as he said this, only to be met with the empty bottom of the bag he was holding. He rolled his eyes.

  “But there wasn’t much they could do to avoid it. Once the phosphate was gone, all the international companies and laborers were bound to go with it. Nauru got poorer and poorer, and naturally they couldn’t keep that basic income thing going. No money, no way to buy food. Now, Chiho Sasaki, what would you do if you were there?”

  Chiho thought Gabriel was starting to sound like a history teacher, but she tried to use her unpolished intellect to cobble together an answer.

  “Well, I’d look for work, but… I guess there wouldn’t be any, huh? Like in the Great Depression. So I guess I’d try to farm or fish what I needed or go find a job in another country…”

  Chiho’s mind flashed back to the black-and-white photos of breadlines in her textbooks.

  “Very good! If it was a certain freeloader I know, he’d probably just give up and starve to death right there.”

  Nobody needed to ask who Gabriel meant.

  “That’s the proper way to think about it. Nobody wants to starve. If you’re starting to look short on cash, you search for work or try not to spend as much, right? That’s normal.” He flashed a self-effacing smile. “But guess what? Most Nauruans didn’t do a thing.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s not that they couldn’t do anything. They chose to do nothing. Unless their families had already been living off the land for generations, most of them just sat there and watched their nation’s industry and economy collapse.”

  “They didn’t do anything? But that’s just…”

  “You gotta work if you wanna eat, as they say, mm-kay? And we only have that little adage because the people who lived before y’all really did work to eat.”

  This attracted the attention of Amane, who had spent the dinner mostly picking on Acieth and Erone, even as she worried about how quickly they were vacuuming up the contents of her wallet.

  “The people of Nauru went too long without having to work,” she explained. “During the phosphate glory days, most of the mining work was done by foreign labor, and before that, the locals either fished or traded or used what little arable land there was to farm. There wasn’t even a currency-based economy in place. No matter which generation you look at, there was never this custom of laboring for money.”

  And even that fishing was just on a subsistence level. None of it was large-scale enough to develop into an industry. And the phosphate mining had plugged the island so full of holes right up to people’s backyards that they couldn’t even keep themselves fed any longer. But despite that, the people of Nauru, which had spent generations living without working, never really accepted the premise of labor for money.

  This, of course, doesn’t apply to every islander. Even now, Nauru is home to trade and communication and industry and everything else. It has the feature set needed to become a tourist destination if it wanted to, and there are even efforts to find new veins of phosphate to prop up that dying business. Some foreign-educated politicians are even trying to use real estate and finance to revitalize the economy. With Nauru being a generally laid-back place, the collapse of the economy brought about no rioting or other major unrest; the already-small population didn’t suddenly shrink.

  The people’s determined disinterest in working, however, remains a tough nut to crack. A combination of their eating habits during the good old days and a Pacific Islander tendency to equate extra weight with wealth has led to some of the world’s highest rates of obesity and diabetes. Most economic policies so far have failed, not stopping the decline and even accelerating it at times. Eventually it got to the point where it accepted war refugees in exchange for aid, and even the refugees turned their backs to them, saying they “couldn’t be here.” The century-long dream of paradise was over, and it would take an incomprehensibly long time to go back to a more traditional, tranquil South Sea Island nation.

  Chiho couldn’t hide her surprise over such a nation actually existing. But she still didn’t see how any of this connected to heaven.

  “Now, y’know, it’s not like I went over there to see it for myself. This was just some of the stuff I found online back when I was holed up in that Internet café, right?”

  This didn’t quite answer it. Chiho didn’t think Gabriel brought this up just so he could talk about this cool site on the Net he found. But then Gabriel’s face took an unexpected turn for the serious.

  “So, um, how to put it? I guess you could say heaven right now’s kinda where Nauru was just before it started declining, ’kay? Most of the angels don’t want for a single thing up there, but me, Ignora, the guardian angels… All right, the ‘upper class,’ if you insist on me putting it that way… We all know that we can’t expect the dream to go on forever, y’know? But nobody’s tryin’ to change anything, and nobody’s even thinking about it.”

  He shifted his eyes from Chiho to Suzuno.

  “Lemme ask ya. What’s, like, the ultimate goal of you guys over in the Church? When you pray to God ’n’ stuff, what are you expecting back?”

  “Divine salvation and guidance to an eternal paradise, free of pain,” replied Suzuno, who still acknowledged herself as a Church cleric. “That is the brunt of it. This assumes, of course, that this world exists and is reachable if you try hard enough. The paradise our scripture describes is one that can only be realized through the joint efforts of us all—such is the current mainstream interpretation in Sankt Ignoreido.”

  “All righty. So if an eternal paradise free of pain really did exist, what do you think people would do?”

  “…Hmm.”

  Suzuno brought a hand to her chin, thinking about it for a moment, but the question seemed to give her little trouble.

  “Then we would all descend into sin, or our emotional and ethical standards would tumble downward. Either way, human society as we know it would be toppled.”

  “Correct!” Gabriel gave this his very best golf clap, as Amane nodded her agreement. “Well, Ignora went and actually built that paradise. And she’s still ruling over it now.”

  “Whatever do you mean by thaaat?” Emeralda asked.

  “Humans,” he replied, making an uncharacteristically serious effort in his word choice, “cease being human when they can’t die. Or at least can’t die unless they really, really try to. They just turn into this living…thing.”

  He used his right hand to make a throat-slitting gesture over his neck.

  “Angels are basically immortal, but all that means is you don’t die naturally, mm-kay? If your head explodes or you lose more blood than your body can replenish itself with, then you’ll die all the same. But y’know, even if your heart gets all smashed up, as long as you got enough holy force to heal the wound, it’s possible to revive you. That’s one of the core tenets of holy magic, am I right? And yeah, maybe you’ll have some aftereffects or whatever, but we all got a really good chance of surviving something that’d kill a normal human. And the amount of holy force we got connects directly to our immune system. I dunno the, like, science behind it, but we pretty much never get sick. Not even a sniffle.”

  “Ah, yes, I’ve heard about that.”

  Chiho recalled the impromptu magic seminar Suzuno had given her in the bathhouse before learning how to send an Idea Link. They nodded at each other.

  “Yeah. Now, if you look at it the other way, with all the holy force we got, the passage of time can’t do a damn thing to kill us. We can swear off food and water for thousands of years, but nothing related to metabolism or growth or illness will do us in. And what’s what heaven is right now—a totally safe shelter, not a care in the world for humans, to be in a place where they can’t die unless someone actively tries to kill them.”

  Not having to lift a finger to keep on living. In a way, just like Nauru of the day, where simply existing granted you enough money to live as long as you wanted.

  “So thanks to
that, the people in my homeland… Well, they kinda fell apart, you get me? It used to be a real community, full of real, mortal people—lots of different families and stuff—just like anyplace you’d see on Earth or Ente Isla. But thanks to a lot of coincidence and tragedy, plus all of Ignora’s power, we got to be called angels. We weren’t people any longer. After all, why would we be? We had no active goals left in life. We became immortal, and then too much time passed where we didn’t have to do anything…and now we’ve forgotten what it means to have a goal.”

  In other words, the heavens, or the people of Gabriel’s homeland, were like the Nauruans—sent money for free across multiple generations.

  “Lemme remind you guys—how many angels have appeared before you so far?”

  “Ummm…” Chiho glanced at Suzuno again as she counted on her fingers. “Sariel, Gabriel, Laila…”

  “Raguel, Camael, the Heavenly Regiment… Would Emilia and Lucifer count, too?”

  “Not too many, huh? We’re supposed to be these crazy intelligent aliens steering the history of Ente Isla from behind the scenes, and we got, like, no one practically. Try to think about how many working demons there were when the Devil King invaded Ente Isla by comparison for me.”

  “When we carried out our sweep up of the Central Continent,” Suzuno articulated slowly as she looked at Maou from the side, “we estimated their force to be at least fifty thousand.”

  Maou didn’t offer any special reaction to this, but he didn’t deny it, so it had to be a close estimation. It meant that probably several times that number of demons were slain by the Ente Islans, but while Maou took responsibility for that, Suzuno knew he didn’t fault the enemy for it.

  But now that everyone knew that statistic, Gabriel offered an even more surprising one of his own.

  “Well, you know, the entire population of heaven is, maybe, a little over five thousand, you feel me? And over nine out of ten don’t do jack with their lives. They just exist. They don’t even try to do anything else.”

  “Just…five thousand?” Chiho croaked.

  For the population of an entire species that had its own fully constructed society, that sounded outlandishly low. Gabriel nodded at her.

  “My planet’s a lot more scientifically advanced than Earth, and it’s more magically advanced than Ente Isla, too. But the whole reason we’re going around as angels on Ente Isla is ’cause the whole dang planet was ruined.”

  Gabriel casually tossing out the word ruined made Chiho, Suzuno, and Emeralda freeze. After all, it was Laila who was asking Maou and Emi to help with the crisis on Ente Isla.

  “It’s really the result of one tragedy on top of another.” Gabriel sighed as he rested his head on a hand. “Right when the star at the center of our system was having a lull in its solar activity, there was this huge supernova in the next galaxy over. That itself wasn’t a huge biggie; it was kind of like going without phone service for a day or two. That wasn’t the issue. You can call it, like, a change in the airflow of space—the pressure from the supernova just hit our entire planet dead-on from out of nowhere, and it brought a lot of harmful crap along with it. By Earth standards, I guess our star was in a pretty inactive period for, what, thirty years? So you didn’t see any solar winds going around the stars that protected our planet, and then all of a sudden, this supernova sends a shock wave that carries all the crap in the local space right over to us. And then, just when our star gets active again, it started sending all that harmful matter back across the whole system. I tell you, it went from bad to worse to even worse. Of course, Ignora’s scientists didn’t figure all this out until long after it was too late.”

  “Weren’t you one of those scientists, Gabe?”

  Gabriel shook his head at Amane. “Nah,” he replied as he gave another airy grin, “I was hardly into science, or medicine, or astronomy, or whatever back then, sweets. When I was living on my home planet, I was chief of security at the research lab Ignora headed. The pay was, well, not exactly what the researchers got, but we all got along pretty well. I even knew a lot of the higher-ups… Man, I don’t even remember the last time I talked about that place. Here I thought I’d forgotten most of it…”

  He looked out at the window, a nostalgic tinge to his eyes as he watched passersby make their way across Nerima Station.

  “But anyway, thanks to that wave of harmful particles, the whole planet got caught up in this huge, lethal pandemic. A few of the less powerful nations died out entirely. Ignora’s lab was set up by top scientists from around the world to find an effective solution against this disease. It was actually set up in one of our moon colonies—we already had a long history in space, so it was to the point where, man, we were sending people to live on all kindsa planets around our local system. So here you had this Institute set up to protect mankind from this harmful matter and the pandemic—all its medicine, its astronomy, its holy magic, its climate, its geology, its civic policy, its architecture, its genetic engineering, and all the laws and economic policy and logistics that harnessed all that stuff. But then…”

  Gabriel turned toward Acieth and Erone, currently fighting over Maou for control of his wallet so they could make another food order.

  “Then well, we failed. We couldn’t save the planet or anyone on it. In the space of less than twenty years, the pandemic wiped out every piece of our civilization. Our homeland. Someplace way more advanced than Earth, and I’m sorry, but way, way more advanced than Ente Isla. And that happened after war broke out worldwide over the immortality formula Ignora came up with. It’s not even funny, is it? I couldn’t believe how stupid we all were. It really freaked me out back then.”

  “In the midst of seeking paradise, you lost sight of your own standards?”

  “Y’know, Crestia Bell, I’d like to say it was as noble as all that, but I’d be very much lying.” Gabriel laughed at the question. “People were just too impatient, y’know? All they wanted was some magic that could sweep away this disaster as quickly as it appeared. Like, normally, you’d have to spend decades developing an antibody for the disease, or build secret underground shelter cities worldwide to evacuate to, or—hell—spend a century or so making this force field or whatever that blocked out the harmful radiation. But Ignora’s talents refused to let her settle for that. She zoomed right past all that boring antibody junk and just found a magic formula for immortality instead. Everyone swarmed on it, of course. Like, who gives a flip about anything else? I’m lookin’ out for numero uno, so gimme that body and I’ll never have to worry about disease again! That’s what I thought, y’know, and so did everyone else in the world. It wasn’t a breakdown in standards—we all just exploded ’cause we couldn’t hold out anymore, you get me?”

  “So can I ask you something?”

  “What is it, Amane?”

  “How did you achieve immortality anyway?”

  Her voice was stern, deep, as if she already knew the answer. Picking up on this, Gabriel turned his eyes toward Acieth, who had successfully relieved Maou of his wallet and was already racing for the cash registers.

  “Ignora managed to find the last remaining traces of the Tree of Life on our planet. She found the Sephirah children who blundered their way into the human world.”

  THE DEVIL KING IS OUT OF THE OFFICE (2)

  The following evening after Ashiya’s boundlessly frustrating encounter with Sariel, a pair of young women stood in the middle of Shinjuku, surrounded by flashy Christmas signs but looking seriously miffed.

  “Haaaaaaaaah…”

  In the midst of this dazzling display of light and color, as Tokyo’s retailers fell over themselves to make Christmas a shopping extravaganza for young and old alike, this pair acted like the bright lights were just too much for them.

  “I feel so miiiserable…”

  “I-is there any need to feel quite so downtrodden about it?”

  They were grown women, actually, although they still looked youthful enough to be called young women. O
ne wore a beret and drawled out her vowels; the other had her hair done up as tightly as her machinelike pronunciation.

  “This is hardly the last time you will be here. There will be another occasion…”

  “You know it won’t be that eeeasy. That’s what I’m so dowwwn about! Ugh…”

  Emeralda Etuva sullenly eyed a Christmas tree on the other side of a store window. In her hand was a gelato cone, something she waited in line for despite how cold it was outside.

  “Things are starting to look like so much fuuun, and now I have to go? I can’t belieeeve it…”

  Suzuno Kamazuki gave an awkward chuckle, one finger scratching at her cheek.

  Only two days ago Emeralda received a rather angrily worded summons to return to her post. It was, of course, from Albert, whom Emeralda had left Western Island matters with on Ente Isla. As he put it: “I can’t take any more of this. Get yourself back here already. Otherwise, we’ll be so broke, we’ll need a hundred times the budget for next year, and I’ll have Rumack redo the entire Institute in her image before you can do anything about it.”

  Emeralda was supposed to be here on Earth just long enough to inform Emi about the trial proceedings against Olba, the man who threw all of Ente Isla into chaos. But before she could return, Laila showed up, Erone and the other Sephirah started acting out, this and that happened, and before she knew it, Emeralda had spent over a month away from home.

  She had remained in constant contact with Albert, of course. He had taken pains to cover for Emeralda’s absence, out of an abundance of concern for Emi’s situation. But—perhaps noticing how Emeralda’s trip was now less business and more pleasure cruise, or perhaps Albert really couldn’t do the job of two people any longer—their Idea Links had grown testier as of late. Then, the day before yesterday, the gavel came down.