“She framed the whole thing as something for Alas Ramus’s sake, and—you know—if that’s how it is, then whether it’s at Emi’s place or not, of course I gotta go.”
The main difference was that this was the real Devil’s Castle—not the postwar-era Villa Rosa Sasazuka but a vast, opulent throne room, the very site of the Devil King and Hero’s ultimate battle.
“But if we all bought our own presents for Alas Ramus, at least one of us was bound to buy the same thing for her. I was super-busy with training, so I woulda had to chisel some time out of my schedule to shop for it, too. That’s why I suggested—hey, I know Alas Ramus is important, but it’s not like we should shower her with gifts from the get-go. Let’s just pare it down to what the girl really wants and pool our money together for it.”
“Yeah. That sounds smart.”
Rika wasn’t sure how Urushihara would find any money to contribute to the cause, but she agreed nonetheless.
“Like, with a present, if the recipient likes it, that’s great, but if she actually uses it, that’s golden. You gotta go with something from the heart—that’s what Ms. Kisaki taught me. But this is all such a new experience for Alas Ramus. If we surprise her with something she doesn’t want, it’d be a buzzkill for both of us. So I asked Emi to try and casually ask her what kinda stuff she’d like. And then…”
Early the next morning, Emi had reported to Room 201, tears in her eyes. An alarmed Maou had asked her what was up, but she had just gone inside and asked him to summon Chiho and Suzuno at once. It was barely past sunrise, but given the way she was acting, Maou sensed it was wise to follow her instructions. Both of them came to Room 201 without complaint after having the situation explained to them.
The previous night, Emi had fulfilled her promise to Maou and casually asked Alas Ramus whether she had anything she wanted. She was a fan of corn soup, Emi knew, as well as curry. Relax-a-Bear was a big hit with her, as were small animals, and toys, and plushes, and stuff. But Alas Ramus didn’t want any of that.
“She said she wanted to see everyone,” Emi choked out between the sobs. “I didn’t know what she meant at first—the Devil King, or Chiho, or Bell, or whatever…but it wasn’t any of them.”
Everyone in the room held their breath, struck by an uneasy premonition.
“She wanted to see Malkuth and all her friends. She said she didn’t want anything else.”
Nobody had any words to comfort her with. Her tears smashed apart any would-be conviction that something from the store would ever please Alas Ramus.
“Devil King, everyone… I was such an idiot. This entire time, that child wanted nothing more than to see Acieth and Erone again. But I turned my eyes away from that. I shut my ears from that. Wasn’t that just so stupid?”
She hugged herself as she cowered down to the ground, as if cradling the Alas Ramus inside her.
“I… I was so preoccupied with myself.”
A near-infinite amount of time seemed to pass. It was really just half an hour or so, but that was more than enough time to change the minds of everybody inside Room 201.
“Look… Devil King…” Emi wiped the tears and looked up at Maou. “Is it all right if I go?”
“……!”
Maou gasped. Why was she asking him for permission? Why him?
“I don’t care about Ente Isla. No matter what kind of danger its people are facing, it doesn’t matter to me. But this child is the only thing I truly care about from the heart. I can’t abandon her.”
Being a Yesod fragment, or fused with her holy sword, or whatnot didn’t matter.
“This girl is my…”
“Ahhhhhhhh, maaaan!!”
Maou could no longer allow Emi to go on by herself. There was no way he could have Emi shoulder the punishment for all their crimes. That, at the very least, he could never forgive.
“Ashiya!” he barked, scratching his head.
“Y-yes!”
“Urushihara!”
“Uh-huh.”
“Chi!”
“Yeah…”
“Suzuno!”
“Yes.”
“…Emi?”
“…Devil King.”
Maou lifted Emi’s chin upward, toward him. They looked eye to eye.
“Look, we were all stupid pricks looking out for ourselves! That sound about right to you?!”
Nobody in the room tried to deny it.
“So I think I told you about Sephirot and the Sephirah back when Ashiya was kidnapped. The guy Laila and Gabriel wanted us to defeat is holding Alas Ramus’s family hostage. Alas Ramus is beside herself with loneliness because she can’t see them. That means there’s just one thing for us to do.”
After finishing the simmered kale, a bowl of rice, and a cup of instant miso soup, Maou left the empty dishes on the table and put his hands together.
“We need to bring Alas Ramus to them. I dunno if you could call them her friends, or her siblings, or her cousins, or whatever, but some grown-ups out there are treating them like crap, and we gotta whip their asses. I guess if we whip Ignora’s ass, too, that’ll be doing whatever Laila wants us to do, but I don’t really care about that. Nothing in any of this takes higher priority than Alas Ramus.”
Rika looked at her rice bowl for a moment, then lightly nodded. Now it all made sense.
“The one statement that turned it all on its head, huh?”
“Hmm?”
“That’s how Chiho described it. She said you were all so comfortable with sticking around in Japan, but one word made you all change your minds.”
She nodded again as she finished up her midafternoon snack and looked around the throne room she was currently sharing with Maou.
“Pretty funny one-room apartment you got here.”
“You like it? This is my Devil’s Castle. Not really my original one, but…”
“No? Given how you rebuilt the Shuto Expressway, I figured this would be a piece of cake for you.”
Maou shook his head. “I made the outside, but the interior’s been part of the demon realms for ages now. It dates from back when the Devil Overlord Satan—the Satanael guy Gabriel was talking about—descended into our realm.”
He stacked up the dishes and left the table, heading for the window Rika flew out of not long ago. Rika followed him.
“The guys from heaven were able to set up shop where they are on the moon because they had those mobile colony cities. Did you hear about that?”
“A little, yeah.” Rika nodded as she looked up into the sky out the window. Two moons were floating there in the middle of the afternoon.
“So Ignora and her team used the samples they got from Caiel and Sikeena to craft an immortality formula not long after they left their home planet for good. They gradually used it on themselves, gathering data and searching for a new habitable planet they could call home.”
“Sounds like it could’ve taken forever. I mean, when I first moved to Tokyo, I looked at five apartments in one day, and that was enough to exhaust me.”
“That’s a lot for one day, man. You probably couldn’t even figure out which was better than what by the end of it.”
Rika gave this perfectly normal reaction an eager nod.
“So anyway, those guys all wound up there. They tried to rule over the Sephirot on Ente Isla before it could conjure up a second Caiel and Sikeena for them. Basically, Ignora wanted to create a second paradise for her people, but Satanael was against it. His vision was basically, like, once we find someplace and things calm down, let’s undo the immortality and live in this pure new land as human beings again. But after seeing how foolish humans can be, the Ignora camp wasn’t buying any of it. That Sephirot had only just chosen Ente Isla and taken root in its land; it was trying to guide the people on the planet to their own utopia. But while Satanael and Laila and a few of the angels were against it, Ignora’s camp was in the majority. Can you guess why?”
“…No.”
“Well, they may�
�ve been immortal, but they still feared for their lives. None of them were willing to take these bodies that never got sick or starved and just toss them away. So Satanael left. He fled with his son Lucifer and the Sephirah Yesod, the core of Ignora’s immortality tech. He wanted to release the people of this new planet from the nightmare of living forever.”
“Yesod… Meaning Alas Ramus and Acieth?”
“Yeah. Caiel and Sikeena formed the base of Ignora’s research, and they were born from the Yesod back on their home planet. It was only natural they’d use the Yesod and Malkuth from this planet to continue with their research.”
“This is kind of a lot to wrap my head around. I’m still dealing with the reality of this fantasy world.”
“Yeah, maybe… Let’s go back down for now.”
“Be gentle.”
Rika rode on Maou’s back as he plunged down from that dizzying height once more. All so they could go wash the dishes from their meal. It would have been hilarious if it wasn’t true.
While the Lord of All Demons looked for some water to wash the bowls with, Rika, a bit more clearheaded now, looked around the camp for a bit. It was arranged neatly in rows of tents from the base of Devil’s Castle, overseen by a tandem effort led by General Hazel Rumack and Malebranche leader Farfarello. This was the site where humans battled bitterly against demons just a few years ago, but an alliance had been forged thanks to Ashiya and the Knights of the Great Eight Scarves, which had come under control of the demons once more. The forces were being led by Emeralda, Suzuno, Urushihara and Laila, and even Chiho to some extent.
The goals of this combined force, on the surface at least, were to dismantle Devil’s Castle and withdraw all remaining demons from the area while making it look like they had been wiped out for good. In other words, it was a cleanup effort—they wanted to eliminate all trace of the demon invasion and bring any remaining hostiles back home. Most of the demons here, outside those under Farfarello’s direct command, were forces that had survived life on Ente Isla ever since the first invasion.
This entire operation was treated as top secret. Maou was going around as a human being, not as a Devil King, since having him be “defeated” by the Hero Emilia would help keep confusion to a minimum should word get out about this.
“So Satanael tried to bug out of the colony, but Ignora, and Camael, and the others raked him over the coals for it. In fact, they even condemned it as yet another example of foolish human behavior. That despite their ‘guiding’ an entire planet’s worth of people to do their bidding.”
“And the people on Ente Isla didn’t think anything was weird about it?”
“You kidding me? Ente Isla at the time was still a bunch of prehistoric hunter-gatherers.”
“Oh, right, the people on heaven have these really long lives, don’t they? The whole scale of this is amazing to me.”
“Well, I’m almost done, so make sure you’re taking notes. It’s gonna show up on the test, so…”
As he spoke, Maou was busy washing the dishes, drying them and putting them back in their place.
“The Sephirah are all about selecting human populations that deserve to be saved, but that doesn’t mean all the competing species died out or anything. So Ignora used the guys who weren’t picked by the Sephirah and did something terrible with ’em.”
“Something terrible?”
“Yeah. They modified their genes and used ’em as experimental test subjects for the immortality research they conducted after Satanael took the Yesod.”
“Test subjects?!”
“Yeah, well, you can see how that kinda pissed Laila and Satanael off. It pretty much erupted into all-out war, but you know, even the test subjects wanted to keep on living. Maybe Sephirot skipped them, but we’re still talking human beings, y’know? So it’s not like all the modified test subjects just did what Ignora’s team told them to do. Satanael rounded them all up for his side to build his numbers and also so he could give those dudes a little more protection.”
Rika noticed the look of serenity on Maou’s face when he referred to “those dudes”—and that his eyes were focused on the demons, the grotesque monsterlike creatures around them.
“H-hang on, Maou. Are you saying those test subjects, the ones the Sephirah didn’t pick…?”
“With Yesod stolen from them, they needed something else to base their immortality research on. For their DNA sample, they picked Sikeena—in other words, the Sephirah Malkuth. That’s the Sephirah that rules over physical matter, and I guess it paid off, because the test cases received an incomplete form of immortality. They could go without food as long as they wanted, their life spans increased drastically, and their bodies underwent assorted changes. Some of ’em grew horns, some of ’em grew wings, some of ’em got tails…and some of ’em cast off the holy energy in their hearts and replaced it with something else.”
He pointed out a group of demons lined up in front of a cauldron full of soup Chiho was watching over.
“So, yeah, we demons used to be human, apparently. Just a different ancestry from the humans dominant on Ente Isla now.”
“Wowww,” Rika half moaned. It was such an epic origin story, she didn’t know how else to react. “So that story…”
“A fair amount of people know it by now. Ashiya and Urushihara, of course. Emi, Chi, Suzuno, Emeralda, and Albert. Emi’s dad, Acieth, and Erone. Amane and my landlord. We had to let the higher-ups in the Federated Order and Emeralda’s Holy Magic Administrative Institute on Saint Aile in on it, too, so they’d volunteer to pitch in. Also, he’s not here, but I have a proxy over in the demon realms taking the throne in my place, and I told him, too. And you now, I guess.”
“I kinda feel like I’m the one least impacted by it out of all of them.”
“What’re you talking about? History isn’t written by us. It’s written by people like you. People observing things one step away from the action.”
“I’m honored you put it that way, but I’m just one girl in the middle of these devastating events. I have a feeling anything I could say is gonna be buried.”
Rika gave Maou a closer look. This is something she was already well aware of, but the Sadao Maou in front of her wasn’t a single iota different from any other human being she knew. She knew he looked like this only after he was drained of all his demonic force, but it made it easier to imagine how, at the core of every demon, there was a human being who provided the root framework.
But this presented another question. A question that made Rika wonder if Maou had ever considered it.
“But you know, why is Sephirot and the Sephirah picking one human species over the other in the first place?”
“Hmm?” Maou murmured, washing additional dishes. Rika, for her part, was already looking at a passing contingent of Eight Great Scarves knights from Efzahan, not thinking too much about what she asked.
“I mean, all the knights here don’t look any different from you or Ashiya right now. The way you just put it, your ancestors were the un-chosen ones, right? So why’s Sephirot being choosy with people on Ente Isla? What are its criteria, and why does it only choose one?”
“Umm…” Maou’s hands stopped. “…Maybe it’s got its own reasons. God only knows, to borrow a phrase.”
“Huh. Well, no matter what you’d say about it, maybe they really are just that much different from you, huh? Like on the DNA level.”
Rika turned toward another group of what were clearly demons. Something about this seemed convincing to her.
“Okay, so if Ignora experimented on these guys, why are they living in the demon realms now? They were kind of like prisoners to her, weren’t they?”
“Eauhhh…”
Maou winced, as if a fish bone was caught in his throat. He quickly recovered, going back to his drying and putting-away duties.
“Well, after Ignora created the sort-of prototypes for the demons, Satanael basically decided she had gone crazy. So he picked up his ball and left.
He needed to get a safe distance away from Ignora’s side, since they were more capable of staging a full-on tactical war than his team. He needed to round up the demons, give them protection, and use the few angels who joined his side to train them into a fighting force somewhere far away from Ignora. So Satanael created the demon realms—by which I literally mean that he basically took his part of the colony and the chunk of moon it was on and cut it away. I can’t even imagine what kinda impact that had on the planet, but…ahh, Satanael was a scientist, so I’m sure he picked the exact right time to do it or whatever. Nowadays, it’s a demon-infested wasteland, but at the time, it was kind of like an evacuation vessel, protecting Ente Isla from its invaders… They called it Satan’s Ark.”
Satan’s Ark—the former domain of the Devil Overlord and the subject of myths and legends among all demons, including Maou as he attempted to unite their lands. It was literally a rescue ship, partitioned off by Satanael from his home colony.
“When I first made it to Satan’s Ark, there were still records dating from Satanael’s last fight with Ignora, not that I understood what they were when I first saw them.” Maou paused a minute, basking in nostalgia. “But Satanael was beaten by Ignora. He died in battle. The angels with him scattered all over the place, and the poor, primitive demons with them had to flee as well. I didn’t know it, but this Devil’s Castle itself was actually carved out from the remains of the Satan’s Ark Satanael left behind.”
“Huh?!”
“You can use Gate magic to transport a whole bunch of people at once, but there are limits to it, and I wanted to save the demons capable of casting it for the Ente Isla invasion. So we used this instead. Right now, Ashiya and Urushihara are out commanding demons and knights from the Eastern Island to repair the internal workings of Devil’s Castle. They’re borrowing some help from Emeralda’s Holy Magic Administrative Institute, too.”
“Wait, are you saying this… This whole castle is a spaceship?!”
She had been told that this Devil’s Castle appeared out of nowhere in the middle of Isla Centurum, the largest city in the Central Continent, and destroyed the whole place overnight. It literally crushed the city, landing right on top of it—and then Maou and the other demons rebuilt the outside to make it look more like a castle.
The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 15 Page 17
