Amid the calm sea breeze, a whirl of colorful flame danced a rondo of light in the darkness.
“That… That’s got a lot of kick to it, huh?”
At the far end of the stick Ashiya gingerly held in one hand, sparks shot off in a seemingly neverending cavalcade of color, eerily lighting up his pained-looking face.
“Mommy! Sparkly sparkly sparkly!”
“We can just watch together, okay, Alas Ramus? You’re still too young for that.”
That was doubtful, considering her daughter could turn into a sword powerful enough to make archangels cry to their own mommies. But like any small child, bright lights and loud noises could often make Alas Ramus break into tears.
Their vantage point on the beach gave them a good view of the whizzing streams of light, but placing even a plain old sparkler in her hand would probably be too much for her.
“So, like, what’s so fun about these things, anyway?”
Urushihara, crouched down on the beach nearby, was never going to be particularly engrossed by the small black-snake pellets and their undulating lines of ash in front of him. Emi didn’t bother commenting, preferring to focus on her motherly duties.
The Ohguro-ya beach house now at least looked the part of a welcoming snack shop and beach retreat—enough so that Amane had the time to host a beachside fireworks party to welcome Maou and his pals.
“Hey! Ashiya! Gimme a light! I’m gonna try four of these at once!”
Now he was attempting to light four heavy-duty sparklers at the same time off the one Ashiya was carrying.
The almighty King of All Demons had his arms thrust into the sky, four different varieties of color sparklers in his hands.
“…I am gladdened to see you in good spirits, my liege.”
Ashiya stuck his sparkler toward Maou’s smorgasbord of fire sticks…but not in time.
“Ah, too slow…”
His sparkler sputtered out halfway down the stick, leaving him time to light only three of Maou’s.
“…Aw, man! The sticks were all different colors, but the light’s all the same.”
The Lord of Demons was a little disappointed.
When Emi returned to the beach house that afternoon, she was just in time to catch Suzuno and Alas Ramus, both a little bored of playing in the sand. They took a quick break as Ashiya experimented with making the kind of huge yakisoba batches they’d need with only the ingredients on hand. That wound up being everyone’s lunch.
“Ohh, if only we had this kind of firepower in Devil’s Castle…”
The temperature of the liquid propane gas-powered griddle was enough to astonish him, to the point where he kept muttering that plaintively to himself.
After the lunch break, Maou enlisted Suzuno to pick a spot shielded by the wind and build a full-on version of her previous Japanese-style sand castle. Emi left the work crew temporarily to keep Alas Ramus distracted.
Urushihara was busily sanding away at the tops of the chairs he had just ripped the foam away from.
Ashiya, studying the core recipes for Ohguro-ya’s food menu, attempted to prepare them with what he could find on the shelves. Chiho, looking on, took up the construction paper Emi purchased and started writing out the menu items in large lettering, making her characters as cute and girly as possible as she did.
Meanwhile, Maou, under the direction of Amane, staged a full-frontal attack on the shower rooms, the yardstick by which any beach cabana was measured. From corner to corner, not a single speck of mildew could escape his murderous rampage of soap and scrubbing.
The sun began to duck below nearby Byoubugaura, a famous beachside cliff popular with sunset photographers, as the sky descended into a dark-blue dusk.
Ohguro-ya, a dump that Emi declared she’d never set foot in a few hours ago, a place nobody expected to see in any kind of presentable shape in time for tomorrow, was now restored to the point where an impartial (or, at least, very charitable) observer could identify it as an old, beat-up, but still-operating rural shop.
There was nothing they could do immediately for the cracks and stains in the walls, not to mention the rusted-out sign—so many years’ worth of wear wouldn’t come off that easily. All they had left to focus on was tomorrow’s food deliveries and the final touches.
By this time, Suzuno’s masterpiece of sand—“Sarou-Sotengai,” she called it, or “Blue-Heaven-Covered Sand Building”—was complete.
“Dang, Kamazuki! We should just move the shop in there, huh?”
Amane had a point. It was a huge, elaborate edifice.
There was no telling what kind of magic she pulled with the sand. You could even poke at the walls and they wouldn’t crumble at all.
As Suzuno put it, the sands of Kimigahama were perfect for making sculptures. If you mixed water and sand in just the right proportions and sculpted the results after it hardened, it would easily remain intact for one or two days.
Emi and the ladies took this opportunity to walk over to their inn—a Japanese-style ryokan—ten or so minutes away from Kimigahama. After wrapping up dinner over there, they returned to the coast, eager to have their first up-close fireworks experience.
“Oh, what, so you are staying here?!”
It was at this point when Maou finally learned the extent of their plans. He protested loudly, but once Chiho explained she had her parents’ permission, he fell silent, still not very convinced.
Outside of Amane and Chiho, nobody in the group had any experience with fireworks.
They knew what they were, of course—a year or so spent in Japan taught them that much—but actually getting to grips with them made them realize just how much care went into these cheap little playthings.
There was no type of magic, demonic or holy, they knew of that could generate such mesmerizing colors and sounds.
“Hey, Alas Ramus! Look at this!”
Chiho took a particularly long and ominous-looking sparkler, showing it to the child.
“Wow, what’s that? That’s a pretty big one.”
Emi was similarly enthralled. It was a long stick with a hexagonal folded paper thing on the end serving as the fuse, even bigger than the fountain-type fireworks you stuck to the ground.
Making sure the coast was clear around her, Chiho brought the tip up to a candle they had placed inside a hastily-dug hole to keep it safe against the wind.
“Ooooohhhh!”
Alas Ramus exclaimed her rapt surprise.
The hexagonal paper tube at the tip spun around and around, spitting out a rainbow of colorful sparks every which way.
It only lasted ten or so seconds despite its size, but what happened next made Alas Ramus’s eyes shine with wonder.
“Birdie!!”
Out of nowhere, the spinning paper tube split in half, turning into a sort of papercraft birdcage. Inside was a cartoony yellow bird.
“Birrrdiee! Tweety-tweet-tweet!!”
She tried her hardest to touch it.
Chiho handed the stick over to Emi.
“It’s still kind of hot, so maybe wait a little bit before letting her at it, okay?”
“That’s pretty impressive… A lot more than you’d expect from a toy.”
“There’re some others that fire parachutes, or those strings of little plastic flags from all over the world. Too bad we can’t have anything that shoots out stuff on this beach.”
Rocket-type fireworks were banned on most of Japan’s beaches. The tidal winds were strong enough that there was no telling which way they would go.
“Tweety-tweet!”
After checking the heat level, Emi handed the stick to Alas Ramus, her eyes gleaming as she looked at the bird inside the cage.
“Hang on, Alas Ramus. What do you say to Chiho?”
“T’ank you!!”
From far away, Amane and Suzuno smiled as they watched Alas Ramus express her gratitude.
“Hmph. That would be three in a row for me.”
On the other end of the bea
ch, Maou—finally tiring of his fire-stick sword moves—sat in a circle with Ashiya, Amane, and Suzuno in her night kimono. They were busy playing “Sparkler Sudden Death,” where they competed to see how long they could make a basic sparkler last against the sea breeze.
“Dammiiiiit! Well, who cares, is what I say! She looks so cuuuute in that kimono, with the sparkler and everything! Right, Maou?”
Amane nudged Maou’s shoulder as she appraised Suzuno’s slightly coquettish look.
“No, I wouldn’t really…”
“You must not lose! Victory shall be ours next time!”
On his other side, Ashiya, playing referee, took out three fresh sparklers from the box.
“Mommy, Mommy?”
“Hmm? What’s up?”
“Izzat tweety, too?”
Alas Ramus, birdcage still delicately held under her arm, was pointing at something besides Maou and his fireworks game.
It was a series of lights from a group of fishing boats, plying their trade offshore during the night. It seemed like a fairly large group, and when you looked at it, the lights were almost the same color as that birdcage job they had lit earlier.
“I don’t know. But, you know, Alas Ramus, I bet you wouldn’t be scared of those little sparklers. Why don’t you go to Suzuno and join the fun?”
“Suzu-Sis!”
Gently shifting her attention back to the fireworks, Emi dropped Alas Ramus down on the sand and pushed her forward.
Alas Ramus ran toward Suzuno as fast as she could, although the sand almost tripped her up once or twice.
Seeing her off, Emi’s eyes turned toward the sea.
Faraway lights, floating atop a distant horizon out at sea, were never a good omen.
On Ente Isla’s Southern Island, the spirit fires that flitted atop the sea were considered the very personification of evil.
Anyone who laid eyes on these balls of light—supposedly released by the spirits of the dead—would be cursed by some kind of disaster from the gates of the underworld. That old tradition still held strong on the Southern Island.
The armies of Malacoda, one of the Great Demon Generals, were gifted in the ways of necromancy, the magic of death. It was the perfect weapon to wage war with in the Southern Island, a land where superstition still rang true to most people.
This, of course, was Japan, and Emi knew they were just lights on fishing boats. She knew the natural phenomenon they called St. Elmo’s fire on Earth was perfectly explainable by modern science.
But, on Ente Isla, they were nothing short of grotesque harbingers of doom.
“What’s up? You believe in that St. Elmo’s fire stuff or something?”
Emi raised her head at the sudden question. It came from Amane, standing as she watched the horizon Alas Ramus pointed toward.
She dodged the question with one of her own.
“Are you done with the sparklers?”
“Oh, man, no way could I beat those guys! Kamazuki ain’t wearing that kimono just for show, y’know. I had Chiho tag in for me.”
Emi never heard of any relationship between sporting a kimono and being blessed with godlike sparkler skills. Amane continued, undeterred.
“You know, I’m not trying to spook you or anything when I say this, but here in Choshi, there’s an old story about these guys called the moren-yassa.”
“Moren-yassa?”
“Yeah. The moren-yassa, you know, they’re these seafaring ghosts that appear on really foggy or stormy days out on the sea. They go up to fishermen and try to make them drown to join their ranks. They say ‘Lend me your inaga’—inaga is an old word for a water ladle—and anyone that lends ’em one, their ship sinks, right on the spot. They say that when you see lights out on the ocean like that, a moren-yassa’s got to be near. There’s a story like that down in Kyushu, too, I think. Common theme, I guess, spirits that can’t find their way to heaven playin’ tricks on the living instead.”
Amane’s eyes remained transfixed on the fishing boats.
“You see that a lot, I guess. Ghosts going back to our world and messing around with the living. But it really makes no sense to me.”
“No?”
“Well, I mean, that’s the whole point of the Obon ceremonies in Japan, right? To help the dead make a quick return trip to Earth to hang with their families or whatnot. It’s a lot more benign than all that ‘ooh, I’m coming to take your soul’ stuff. I think anyone who started gettin’ scared about vengeful spirits and stuff…I bet they lived pretty evil lives. Enough so that they got all worried about what happens to them in the afterlife.”
“Yeah, but everybody’s afraid of dying. Is there more to it than that?”
Urushihara butted in from the side. In front of him were ten or so snakes, their ashes starting to crumble and blow off into the sands. He must have liked them after all.
“Well, being afraid of death’s one thing, but being afraid of the dead reaching out and touching you is totally different, no?”
It was a very sudden opening to Amane’s debate about their views of life or death. Suzuno probably would have been better qualified to participate.
“I’m just saying, why all the hate for spirits just because they maybe had some regrets in life they didn’t get around to atoning for? I mean, what’s really scary…”
Amane’s eyes darted over to the edge of Cape Inuboh-saki, and the tower throwing its light upon the dark waters.
“What’s really scary, are people who live on forever. Immortality’s always gonna be a lot worse, in the long run. Plus which, most of the things we see as bad omens, there are scientific explanations for. It’s all just a bunch of coincidences. So…I guess what I’m trying to say is…”
She returned her eyes to the beach.
Ahead of her were Maou, Ashiya, Suzuno, Chiho, and Alas Ramus, happily grasping at the sparkler Chiho was guiding into her hand.
“Try not to raise your child so she starts discriminating against spirits, okay?”
“…Amane?”
“What’d you mean by that?”
Emi and Urushihara, not following Amane’s point, both interjected. Then, they were interrupted.
Buooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnn…
Buooooooooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnn…
Buoooooooooooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn…
A low-pitched, siren-like blare echoed across Kimigahama.
It was sudden enough to make everyone except Amane twitch in shock.
“Uhm?”
Alas Ramus, still busy with her sparkler, stopped and swiveled her head, a dissatisfied look on her face, dropping her still-sparking stick as she did.
“It, it’s okay. Nothing’s wrong.”
Chiho nimbly gave her a reassuring hug, caressing her cheek to assuage her. But the incessant blare made Alas Ramus’s face morph closer and closer into crying mode.
“It’s all right! There’s nothing wrong!”
She tried her level best to calm her down, but by now, Alas Ramus was a millisecond away from exploding. This supernatural being, who once stood (more like floated) proud in the face of Gabriel, was just as weak against the ominous and unfamiliar as any other baby.
Then another salvo of this unfamiliar rumble stormed across the beach. That was the trigger. The tears began to flow.
“Nnn-waaaaaaaggghhhh!!!”
“Oh, dear, dear… That always does unnerve the young’uns a bit.”
Amane, perfectly composed, turned her eyes back toward the lighthouse again.
“Um, we were kind of startled too, but…”
Another blare sounded off as Emi replied.
“Well, that’s the sound of the lighthouse’s foghorn. It doesn’t mean we’re in danger or anything, so you don’t have to worry about it.”
“Foghorn?”
Emi parroted back the unfamiliar term.
“Yeah. It’s a horn in the lighthouse that makes that droning blare whenever the fog’s real thick to warn the boats. To keep
’em from running aground, you know. I guess there’s some fog out there, huh?”
If the conditions allowed it, fog could appear just as easily in the summer months as it did in the dead of winter.
“Yeah, but wasn’t it totally clear just a second ago?”
Everyone on the beach gasped a bit as they looked up at Maou. There, on the faraway ocean, a white mist appeared, as if from thin air. It had already enveloped the fishing boats, their lights now hazily shimmering in the distance.
“It…is certainly fast.”
Ashiya darted his eyes to and fro around the area, as Chiho hugged Alas Ramus tight to keep her from panicking any further.
“Yeah, it’s sure coming in.”
There seemed to be a hint of nervousness to Amane’s voice.
“Kimigahama used to be called ‘Kirigahama,’ or ‘Fog Beach,’ back in the day. That’s how notorious it is for the stuff. We might see it here on land before too long. Sorry, guys, but the firework show’s over for now.”
Amane nodded to herself as she pointed the burnt firework casings out to Maou.
“Would you mind cleaning that up for me? I’ll take the girls over to the inn. Once that fog rolls in, it can get so thick that even the locals don’t leave their homes.”
The snappy, order-giving Amane was a far cry from the laid-back stoner act she stuck to earlier.
“A-all right.”
Maou and Ashiya teamed up to collect the spent casings. Alas Ramus refused to stop crying.
“Feehhhhhhhraaaayaaaiaiaaaaa!!”
“…She doesn’t pitch a fit like this very often…”
Maou’s eyebrows bunched downward. Even he could tell how quickly the fog was threatening to consume the shore.
“Can you take care of Chi and Alas Ramus for me, Amane?”
“Whoa, what about Kamazuki and your little lady?” Amane wisecracked back at him, though she still nodded her approval. There wasn’t much time to play around any longer.
“Sure thing. But you guys try not to linger outside too long either, okay? We’ll all be up early tomorrow, so try to get some sleep while you can. Ladies, you ready to go?”
The women, guided by Amane, hurried their way off the beach. Maou and his cohorts watched them go, their minds not entirely free of concern.
The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 4 Page 14
