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

by Satoshi Wagahara

  “A striking decline in the water’s holy force content, though…? Maybe there was a cave-in somewhere and the underground streams changed direction or something?”

  Albert raised an eyebrow as he affixed the Institute’s formal seal of approval on the request and began listing the people he’d ask to join the project.

  “Caiel and Sikeena’s objective was to eradicate the immortality tech. They went around the place, destroying any data and equipment we had related to that project. No way any regular security force coulda handled them, right? It wound up being me, Satanael, and Camael as the last line of defense against ’em. It was an insane battle! If we didn’t have Satanael around, with his understanding of their DNA structure, that probably woulda been the end for me.”

  Gabriel visibly shivered. For the first time, Chiho sensed that this angel, who breezily fought off the Hero and Devil King at the same time, could feel genuine fear after all.

  “But didn’t Caiel and Sikeena help Ignora with that research? Why would they do that?”

  It was an obvious question, one that Gabriel had anticipated in advance.

  “They didn’t think Ignora was as talented as she turned out to be. They didn’t expect lending her a hand would lead to this crazy discovery. Maybe they figured she’d stumble upon a more direct solution to the pandemic, a vaccine or something, long before then. But to the Sephirah children, making immortality into a real-life thing kinda put the whole human race in danger.”

  The Sephirah interfered with the course of human history only when mankind faced a danger it couldn’t handle by itself. The lack of progress fending off the pandemic definitely counted as that. But the Sephirah’s involvement inadvertently led to humanity discovering immortality—in a way, an even graver threat.

  “Like, think about it, ’kay? If we all woke up tomorrow and people just stopped dying, what’d happen to the world?”

  A population explosion. Worldwide famines. Territorial wars. All that and more flashed across the minds of everyone at the table. That wasn’t what Caiel and Sikeena lent a hand to Ignora for—and that was why they raided the lab: to eliminate this mortal danger from the universe.

  “But you know what happened? Satanael and Camael did it. After this long protracted battle, they actually beat them. Maybe it was because they both had a grip on Caiel’s and Sikeena’s DNA. I dunno. But that’s how it turned out, and that’s when Ente Isla’s troubles began.”

  The lunar laboratory had fended off the threat from the Sephirah children. But now it was facing a completely different threat from its home planet. All the nations down there had independently reached the same conclusion—this attack on the lab was being carried out by one country or another, in hopes of locking up the research results for themselves.

  Soon, it resulted in war—one that ultimately never ended. Every nation deployed troops to the lab, under the pretext of keeping their own researchers secure. On the ground, in the air, in space, and on the lunar surface, they all set about killing one another. The researchers and colonists, faced with a sight they never expected to see when they finally reached their research goals, decided that drastic measures had to be taken. Those measures: full-scale evacuation.

  If the lab was going to be broken into little pieces by these nations, the immortality tech would be lost forever. The home planet had gone well and truly insane; the lab could try pleading with the nations all it wanted, but at this rate, its research was as good as lost already.

  Thus, Ignora and her team waved good-bye. Gabriel joined them as head of security, along with a portion of the colonists. All the colony cities were set up to be operable as mobile space bases in case of emergency—a measure set up by treaties in the early stages of space development, so that no single country could seize them all. In the end, this measure allowed the colonies to flee from their home planet forever.

  All the world’s armies could do was look on resentfully as the colonies took off from the moon. Attacking them might cause them to lose the immortality tech forever; anyone who tried it would face the wrath of the entire rest of the world.

  “But even at that point,” Laila said with a sad shake of the head, “the nations of our world couldn’t stop fighting. They told us not to run, to side with this or that nation. They never truly understood what we were running from.”

  Filled with despair for her native planet, Ignora set a course for the colonies beyond the event horizon.

  “And just as the planet and its moon had disappeared from view, our holy force scanner picked up an unexpected reaction. Our ultra-long-range optical telescope picked up that old, withered tree—slowly separating itself from the moon.”

  “Mankind has ended.”

  “I am sorry, Da’at.”

  Nobody was around to hear those words exchanged by Caiel and Sikeena, captured after their bloody battle, before they disappeared into thin air.

  It was only later when Ignora and the rest of the lunar colonists and researchers found out via their long-range scanners that all the other colonies, as well as the main cities of their home planet, had vanished. This they found out a mere ten years later, as they were floating around the outskirts of their star system. Just like that, they had lost any connection to the universe—and all that remained was a long, so unimaginably long era of wandering across space.

  “So,” said Laila, “as I think you can see now, our wandering ended when we came across the moon of Ente Isla. Our holy force scanners picked up the same waveforms from it that we saw with the tree on the dark side of our own moon.”

  “And that…!!”

  Emi gasped. Laila gravely nodded at her.

  “And right next to that moon, we saw a world exactly like our own. So we chose it as our second homeland. But at the time…Ente Isla still had only one moon.”

  THE TEEN AND THE CALL-CENTER LADY RING IN THE NEW YEAR CONT’D

  “Why…? Why did it have to turn out like this?!”

  Rika’s shouts, after Chiho finally told her the whole story, echoed their despondent way across the empty shell of Room 201.

  “We were all gonna spend Christmas here for Alas Ramus! We weren’t gonna worry about all of the baggage from Emi’s mom’s! We’d forget about fighting, we’d leave the people in heaven and Ente Isla to deal with their own crap, and we’d worry about our own lives for a change! What happened to all of that?!”

  “The Christmas party,” Chiho replied, not a shred of emotion on her face, “never happened.”

  “Huh…?”

  “Emeralda went home first. Then Suzuno. Yusa and Alas Ramus were next, along with Nord and Laila. Maou, Ashiya, Urushihara, and Acieth went last. That was on the twenty-sixth.”

  “The twenty-sixth? You were talking about holding the party then…”

  “We were counting more on the twenty-third, actually, since it’s a national holiday.”

  The birthday of Japan’s currently reigning emperor was always treated as a national holiday. In the case of Emperor Akihito, that date is December twenty-third.

  “We decided to go with that since it’d be easier for you to join us, Rika. But they all decided to go back to Ente Isla before the twenty-third rolled around, and…three days later…”

  “They left you behind?”

  “…Yeah.”

  “But that… That’s terrible! I thought you were all supposed to be friends! And you didn’t even hold the party you were all planning?!”

  “I couldn’t do anything about it. About anything. One statement was all it took to turn it all on its head. Something so strong it even made Urushihara resolve to fight it out.”

  “But… But they all had their own motivations, their own things they wanted to do. So why…?”

  The stone-faced Chiho cracked a light smile. “We couldn’t win. None of us could. Not when that’s what we were told.”

  “Chiho…”

  What could’ve transpired to make Chiho—a girl far stronger than Rika, someone who had dealt
with these visitors for so much longer than her—concede so easily like this? Rika couldn’t even begin to guess what had happened.

  “Laila was pretty surprised about it. You know, Maou and Yusa had been so stubborn with her for so long, and then they both just said yes. She kept asking them if they were sure about it—her and Gabriel. And not just those two. She asked me; she asked Ashiya, Urushihara, Suzuno, Emeralda, Nord; she wanted to be sure we were all on board for it. And we said yes. I said yes. I had to. I wasn’t forced to. That was just the only thing I could’ve said to her.”

  The fact that Chiho offered no resistance whatsoever was a shock to Rika.

  “It was that convincing?”

  “And I couldn’t choose to fight with them, either. I don’t have that kind of power.”

  Chiho sighed slightly, her breath given a white sheen by the cold of the room.

  “I apologize that it took this long to tell you, Rika.”

  “…It’s all right. I had the worst trouble facing up to Emi and Ashiya anyway, and I had some family stuff pop up back at home, so I was stuck over there for a while…but… But wow, they’re gone, huh? I sent Emi a New Year’s card, you know.”

  Emi mentioned that she missed her chance to send any New Year’s greetings last year, so Rika went through the trouble of making a handwritten card and sending it to Emi’s place from Kobe. That card was now undoubtedly shivering inside her mailbox at Urban Heights Eifukucho.

  “So…when’ll we see them again? This isn’t, like, it, is it?”

  “…Um.”

  “They’re off to defeat this god…um, Ignora, right? That’s gonna take a really long time, isn’t it? But it’s not like it’ll be just constant fighting day after day, don’t you think? They have to be able to make it back here sometime.”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t know then, either—like, what’s waiting for them over there, so…”

  Chiho unsteadily rose up. Rika was still sprawled out on the floor, unable to stand. She couldn’t accept this—but it really had been the reality all along. There were these people who never should’ve been here, and now they were back where they belonged, on their own free will. Neither Rika nor Chiho had any right to stop them.

  There was no man named Sadao Maou in this world. There was no woman named Emi Yusa, either. Everyone was back in the world where they belonged, in the form they should’ve been in all along.

  “So…”

  The world where they belonged.

  “So I really can’t accept that. We can’t wait that long, can we?”

  Rika, her heart ruled by a great emptiness now that the world was back to what it should have been, looked up at Chiho.

  “I don’t know how long it’ll take,” she spat out, her voice dry and scratchy. “I don’t know if they’ll ever come back alive. We can’t wait for a battle like that to end.”

  She undid the scarf covering the bottom of her head and tossed it on the floor.

  “Ch-Chiho?”

  And that wasn’t all. She removed the bag she had on her back, threw her coat down on the ground, then ran over to the front door and put on her shoes, running back with Rika’s shoes as well.

  “Chiho? What’re you doing?!”

  “Rika! Put these on! Right here!”

  “H-here? What, on the tatami mats? Hey, Chiho, get ahold of yourself…”

  “This is something I just can’t put up with. I can’t wait that long. I couldn’t wait that long. Could you, Rika?!”

  “Wh-whaaa?!”

  Now Rika was being jostled around by the collar, Chiho almost pulling her up off the floor.

  “Maou never answered me! I told him months and months ago that I loved him! I said just a bit ago to give me the answer if he thinks he has one! And then he forgot all about it and let that single statement drive him to go! How long am I supposed to even wait?! Don’t you think he could’ve at least given me a timeline?! Despite all this love I have for him?!”

  “Huh? Huh? Wha—?!”

  “You have to agree with me, don’t you, Rika?! You never got an answer from Ashiya, either! Is this how you want everything to end? That can’t be good for you, can it?! You want an answer, right?!”

  “Uh? A-an answer? You mean about my love? But I already, uh—”

  “Did Ashiya say that he didn’t like you, Rika?!”

  “Uhh? Whaaat?”

  “Did he say I love you, or I hate you, or Let’s be a couple, or I can’t be with you, or Let’s just be friends, or I don’t wanna see you again?! He didn’t, did he?! You were crying, weren’t you, Rika?! If he made you cry, the least he could’ve said was something like Don’t come back here again or whatever! They’re always like this! And maybe they see it as a way of being nice, but they’ve kept it up for so long, it’s not convincing anyone anymore! Is it?! Ashiya went off without even telling you what his feelings were, didn’t he?! Doesn’t that annoy you at all?!”

  “I, um, uhh…”

  “If he can’t stand to be around you, why can’t he just say that?! Instead he just phrases it to try and make you give up instead! That’s so unfair! And after all this time, Maou’s still like I don’t know, I don’t know! Then what does he know?!”

  “C-calm down, Chiho! What’s going on with you?! Why are you…?”

  “Look, I’m past being the nice little Chi who sits on her bed, hands on knees, waiting for everyone important to her to get back here! I’m past it! That’s what I’ve decided! So!”

  She released Rika, then reached down toward the edge of one of the tatami mats lining the floor.

  “Hnnnnngh!”

  “Ch-Chiho?! What’re you doing?!”

  “I’m ripping this tatami mat off! Help me out!”

  “O-okay?!”

  Rika lent a hand to Chiho, not a single clue what it was all leading to. The mat came up easily…and revealed nothing but bare floorboards. It wasn’t hiding anything—she still had no idea what Chiho was doing. But something was odd about these floors. It was almost too clean. The bottom sides of tatami mats like this one usually grew dusty over time, the baseboards getting stained and cracking here or there. Meanwhile, the floor here almost looked freshly polished.

  “We can’t fight,” a determined Chiho declared. “We can’t fly, we can’t swing a sword, and we can’t breathe fire. If we fall off a building, we die. If the expressway overpass falls down, I can’t fix it. But…I know how to cook!”

  “Huh?”

  “I know what Maou likes to eat! Him, and Yusa, and Ashiya, and Urushihara, and Suzuno, and Alas Ramus, too! I know what they don’t like! I know how to clean! I’m learning how to sew! If someone has a problem, I can listen to them whine for a while! If I have my phone with me, I can cast an Idea Link! And I can swear up and down that I was a close friend of everyone who ever set foot here in Room 201! So!”

  Then Chiho took something out of her pocket. It was small and light in her hand, emitting a faint glow, and she lifted it high into the air and smashed it against the bare floor.

  “Agh!!”

  Rika instinctively covered her face. The floorboards suddenly lit up, the surface shimmering like an oily film. The light grew stronger and stronger, forcing Rika to shut her eyes.

  “What—what is that, Chiho?!”

  “Wait just a minute. The border surface will stabilize enough in a moment to connect to the other side.”

  “Connect to… Ahh?!”

  A final, intense flash of light coursed across the room, then subsided.

  “You can open your eyes now.”

  “Wh-what on…?”

  At Chiho’s signal, Rika put her hand down. For a few moments, she stared, astonished, at where the floorboards used to be. Now it was a spring of light, pulsing shades of white and blue. The remaining five tatami mats in the room, cracked and sun bleached, were now home to an almost divine well of eerie light. It was so beyond the realm of common sense, Rika couldn’t even begin to explain it.

  “I think y
ou’ve seen this at least once before, Rika. In Ueno.”

  “Ueno… Ah!!” Rika gasped, realizing what this meant. “Suzuno, in front of the Gates of Hell sculpture… So this is…”

  “Right.” Chiho nodded, her voice a little shaky. “This is a Gate. A magical tunnel connecting one world to another across the stars.”

  It was the same path to another world that Maou and Suzuno opened over in Ueno Park, on their way to saving Emi and Ashiya.

  “Here we go.”

  “Huh?”

  Before she knew it, Rika found her hand being taken. Somewhere along the line, Chiho had picked up the bag she had dropped on the floor, along with Rika’s satchel. Her eyes were pointed right on the light beneath her.

  “W-wait! Go where?”

  “You don’t get carsick or anything, do you, Rika? It was pretty rough on me the first time, so I brought some antinausea pills with me. If you think you need them along the way, go ahead and take them, okay?”

  “Along the way? I… What? What are you talking about, Chiho? Like, really, where are we…”

  “Here we go!”

  “Where are we gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooiiing?!”

  An unexpectedly strong force was dragging Rika, hand in hand with Chiho, right into the spring of light. The floor that was there turned into an empty space, no foothold in sight. Rika was struck with fear as she plunged into what felt like thin air.

  The falling seemed to go on forever until, just for a single moment, she felt something lightly patting her tensed shoulders. Considering they were falling, it didn’t really seem like there was anything to land on. There wasn’t any wind or anything else to indicate how fast the fall was. Gingerly, she opened her eyes, only to find something she had seen in movies and photos before, but that almost nobody would ever get a chance to truly see in person.