The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 4

by Satoshi Wagahara

  Emi’s idea of “special” was a bit different from the travel-magazine details Chiho gushed about.

  “So the fog rolled in, these guys showed up, they were wrapped in fog, the lighthouse lit it up, and they were gone. It’d be crazy if the lighthouse wasn’t involved somehow, right?”

  “But this is Japan. You don’t have lighthouse keepers manning the tops of those towers all night like in Ente Isla. Plus, that was built years ago. It’s not gonna be infused with demonic energy or…”

  “Peeeeeeeeeeeeeeep?!!”

  “Tweety-tweet!”

  Camio’s sudden shrill scream stopped Emi’s rebuttal in its tracks.

  As the grown-ups were having their extremely grown-up conversation, Alas Ramus slipped out of Emi’s hands and leaned into the box to touch Camio…only to grab and pick up the blackbird by its tail feathers.

  “Whoa! Alas Ramus, no!”

  “No tweety-tweet?”

  “L-Let me free! Accursed human child! PEEP!”

  Camio continued shouting as Alas Ramus held on, peeping like mad and whipping his wings around like a hummingbird. It was a less than noble display for the Devil Regent and one of the most learned demons in all the realms.

  “S-Stop it, Alas Ramus! No! The bird’s saying you’re hurting him!”

  “It, it does! Ow! She will pluck my tail feathers before she’s done! Peep!”

  One classic way to handle a child who doesn’t know how to treat animals with care is to try some variant on “See? It’s crying! Can’t you hear it crying?” This, however, was likely the first time any bird literally pleaded for mercy at the hands of its tormentor.

  “Gahhpeep!”

  Scolded by Emi, Alas Ramus finally let go. Camio, wings still flailing with all his might, wound up flying all the way to the wall.

  The force was enough to knock over the long object concealed by the towel behind the box, trapping the bird underneath as it fell.

  “Uh… Camio! You all right?”

  The tubelike object made a heavy clunking sound against the floor.

  “Gnh, peep… Y-Yes, my lord! It is not a grave injury…”

  Now the surprise was enough to make Maou freeze.

  “Uh, whoa, you’re huge…”

  Camio, whom they thought had been crushed by the object in the towel, suddenly emerged bloated to the size of a chicken, like a novelty sponge growing several times its size in water.

  “Cock-a-doodle-doo!!”

  Alas Ramus’s eyes beamed in sheer wonder.

  She nimbly escaped Emi’s hands, taking advantage of her guardian’s shock and awe, and attempted a full-body tackle on the rooster-sized Camio.

  “Ah! Alas Ramus, stop it!”

  “Nhh! I—I will not take this indignity a second time, peep!!”

  Camio, to his credit, was not a willing participant. Leaping over the fallen object that crashed over him, he dug the claws of his short legs into the tatami floor, trotting just out of Alas Ramus’s reach.

  “Cock-a-doooo!!”

  “Did you think a mere human child could peep capture me?!”

  Trot, scamper, toddle, flap.

  The black chicken, wings flapping incessantly, and the silver-haired child chasing it trundled in and among Maou, Emi, and Chiho, like a certain Great Dane and his lanky pal pursuing a spooky space alien around a haunted house.

  “No! Alas Ramus, stop! You’re gonna fall over…”

  As if on cue, Alas Ramus fell.

  She tripped on the long, towel-covered object Camio had just leaped over a second time.

  Obeying at least the law of momentum, she toppled forward, doing a somersault on the floor. She looked around, a bit too bewildered to know what just happened.

  “Y-You all right, Alas Ramus?! Are you hurt?!”

  Maou helped her up in a panic, but Alas Ramus seemed happily unfazed as she shook her head.

  “H-Huff-huff-huff-peep…huff… V-Victory is mine… Peeeep?!”

  Meanwhile, Camio the black chicken, catching his breath in a very non-adorable manner by one corner, found himself grabbed by the neck by Emi, her eyes almost popping out of their sockets.

  “If you hurt Alas Ramus, I’ll sautée you and toss you in a curry pot. We clear on that?”

  “Um, I really don’t think Camio’s the one at fault here…”

  Chiho turned to their child, her voice a bit on the unusually harsh side.

  “Come on, Alas Ramus, say you’re sorry to the chicken here. You scared him, don’t you see?”

  Alas Ramus looked like she would tear up for a moment, but gave a pouty nod instead.

  “Ooo… I’m shorrie.”

  “Keh… Ha-ha-ha! I am not one to grow angered over the peep…playful eagerness of a child. A human one, at peep that.”

  He looked far more distressed than that at the time, but Camio was surprisingly eager to overlook the rambunctious Alas Ramus’s all-out attack.

  Emi, brought back to reality by Chiho’s semi-stern reproach, grudgingly placed the chicken back in his box.

  “…Getting back to the subject, if he wasn’t here to see you, what did this chicken come to Japan for, even? And also…”

  Emi looked at the long, apparently metallic object that had smashed upon Camio’s body and tripped Alas Ramus over in alarming fashion.

  “What is that? Why’d it blow up the bird so much?”

  “Gehh… Um, before that…”

  Camio, his neck still firmly ensconced in Emi’s death grasp, deftly rubbed his wings together as he looked to Maou for salvation.

  “Lord Satan… Do I have your peepmission to explain matters to these peep… These people?”

  “Huh? Sure. Go ahead.”

  Maou gave the chicken a friendly nod.

  “You’re right, by the way. These two are humans. This is Chiho Sasaki; she knows about me and Alciel, and she’s been a lot of help to us in this world.”

  “Ohh, is that the case, young peep human girl? On my master’s behalf, I offer you my utmost thanks.”

  The black rooster stood up in his box, extended a wing out in a sort of exaggerated wave, and leaned his head deeply downward.

  “Oh, um, not at all. I mean, he…um, Satan? Has been a huge help to me, too.”

  Chiho found herself kneeling forward in a bow herself.

  It was a historical moment—a high representative from the demon realms exchanging a cross-dimensional moment of Japanese-style understanding with one of that nation’s own finest citizens.

  “And the baby who grabbed your tail and this girl are the holy sword and her Hero, respectively.”

  “Peeeep?!”

  “Hey!”

  “Maou?!”

  The sudden confession from Maou made Camio’s, Emi’s, and Chiho’s eyes goggle in their own respective ways. Camio stood up once more, beak wide open as he stared blankly at Emi and Alas Ramus.

  He was surprised, but not as much as Emi and Chiho.

  “What’re you going around just admitting it for?!”

  Even if he looked like a petting-zoo reject, he was still a high-ranking demon in good standing.

  Camio was Emi’s enemy, and the opposite was true as well.

  “The peepro of the peep sword…?!”

  “…Hey, you mind if I make some chicken curry tonight after all?”

  “Leave him. He’s not doing it on purpose.”

  Maou had to stop Emi from reaching into the box.

  “And don’t get it wrong, Camio. That’s not the ‘Peep-ro’ of the holy sword. That’s the ‘Peep-ro’ and the holy sword.”

  “Maou, I think you need to start being serious before Yusa goes out of her mind.”

  Chiho’s astute observation was the only thing that saved the Devil Regent’s neck from being wringed to pieces by Emi’s iron fist.

  “Satan peep.”

  “Uh, who’s Satan Peep?”

  “Satan Peep!”

  At least his vocal tic kept Alas Ramus entertained.

&n
bsp; Camio skillfully leaped to the rear, saving him from Maou’s frustrated swipe.

  “The Hero of the Holy Sword was the cause of our invading force’s destruction. Why are you sitting here, so familiar with the Hero and her sword…………peep?”

  After all that effort stringing a sentence together, it was like he couldn’t resist one little spasm at the end.

  Peeping or not, there was nothing in Camio’s voice that suggested resentment toward Maou. It was seeking an answer. It wanted to know Maou’s true intentions. Peeping or not.

  But Emi stepped up to reply first.

  “…It all just kind of happened. Just remember, I’m ready to slice the Devil King’s head off in his sleep anytime I want. And you don’t try anything funny, either, or it’s the dinner table for you. If you wanna keep on living, don’t tell any other demon that I bear the Better Half, either.”

  The Hero’s habit of sounding like the villain of a gangster film was well familiar to Maou by now. It cowed the black chicken into bleak submission.

  “…Is kind of what it is, but there’s more to it than that. Lemme put it in a way you’d probably understand… Even Alciel was our foe once upon a time, yeah…?”

  “……peep.”

  Maou sat cross-legged on the tatami floor, making sure he came in loud and clear to the rooster in the box.

  “Remember how we managed to conquer the demon realms? I got a dream… A dream of doing that all over again here, in this country, with these humans. Maybe it all ‘just kind of happened,’ but me and the Hero have worked pretty closely together, y’know.”

  This all went over Emi’s and Chiho’s heads.

  “Your dream of conquest…!”

  This was a pact Satan and Camio forged long ago, in a realm far, far away. The decisive reason why Camio agreed to serve the young Satan in the first place.

  “It peep…pains me so that I failed to support you alongside your great General to the East.”

  “If I win this, even the foes I warred with yesterday can be tomorrow’s companions.”

  He was the only demon who knew that “conquering” was about more than turning battlefields into burnt wastes, filled with the bloodied corpses of the conquered.

  Maou laughed.

  “Yeah, I was kinda hoping you’d be more patient, back there…”

  “Wait, what’re you talking about?”

  “Maou?”

  The Devil King grinned sheepishly at the confused Emi and Chiho.

  “…We’re talking about how we failed to invade Ente Isla, even after I united the entire demon realm.”

  “Huhh?”

  “You may not believe this, but if you talk to Camio, you’d be amazed how accepting he is. He doesn’t look down on anybody—Hero, human, whatever. You picked up on that much, right? Once the heavens started directly meddling with things on Ente Isla, we were always gonna be a lot more than two warriors beating each other down until someone died. Even if it winds up being like that someday, we still got Alas Ramus to worry about. If we went at it right now, we might have to have Alas Ramus kill her own parents.”

  Maou caressed Alas Ramus’s hair.

  “Nee-hee!”

  She raised a fumbling hand to his.

  “We all eat around the same table these days, but it’s not like you keep me alive just because you accept it as fate or whatever, right?”

  “Of course, but what’re you trying to say?”

  There was a tone of alarm to Emi’s voice.

  “Like I told you—I know we’ll have to settle this someday. But if we want that to happen, we’re gonna have to share at least the bare minimum of information to deal with what’s going on today. Otherwise, we might expose Alas Ramus to danger. Like we did with Gabriel.”

  “……”

  She didn’t like it. He was the Devil King, for cripes’ sake. But there was absolutely nothing she could do to counter that.

  And she knew it, too. She knew it without requiring the demon’s reminder.

  “You are as direct in your s-peepch as always, Lord Satan. There are times, with a hated foe, when emotions do pose an obstacle to plain logic.”

  Camio sighed as he watched Emi.

  “Peep-ro of the holy sword.”

  “What the hell’s a ‘Peep-ro’?!”

  “If you find it difficult to accept, peep of it this way: If you share a common enemy, then share what must be shared, as long as you do not interfere with each other. There is no need to fight side by side in actual battle as peepquals.”

  Camio, increasingly succumbing to the one most annoying of his vocal habits, felt himself wither under Emi’s glare.

  “…I know that much, all right? I don’t need you lecturing me about it like my grandmother. So can we get on with the topic?! I want some answers!”

  All she could do was turn her back to them in dismay. Maou and Camio, after all, were absolutely correct.

  Maou, Camio, and Chiho grinned to themselves as they turned their eyes toward Emi’s back.

  In her own, unique way, she understood.

  “All right. Go ahead, Camio. What did you come to Japan for? Why were you half-slashed to death on the way? What did you mean when you said the demon realms and Ente Isla face chaotic times once more? And what’s that?”

  Maou pointed at the heavy-looking tube hidden by the towel.

  It contained the jeweled sword that once graced Camio’s side.

  His armor was now shattered, his body reduced to Sunday-evening dinner size, but the sword still retained its keen, dazzling shine.

  It was wrapped in the cape Camio once wore, in part to keep Amane from stumbling across it, but in part because Maou surmised this was a sword of far more importance than the mere value of its jewels.

  The angels who appeared from Ente Isla all had very clear objectives up to now: fetch the holy sword, kill Emi/Maou, that sort of thing.

  But here, there was next to nothing to go on. Demons, coming to Japan, and not at the bidding of their lord. It was all an enigma.

  “That…”

  Camio opened his beak to answer the question that struck at the core of Maou’s concerns.

  Until someone knocked on the door.

  “…Yeah?”

  Urushihara wouldn’t have bothered knocking. If it was Ashiya or Suzuno, they would’ve spoken up first. Which left only one answer.

  “Maou?”

  It was Amane.

  Strange. It was the same voice as always, but—maybe it was the AC affecting their ears—did it sound a touch colder than usual, perhaps?

  “I heard something like a chicken suffocating to death a second ago, but is everything all right? And, you know, a husband and wife skipping out on work to have an argument? I never read that advice column before!”

  Through all the sarcasm, it was understandable that the group’s now-extended absence alarmed her.

  Camio’s pained squawk and Emi’s raised voice must’ve been enough to raise customer eyebrows.

  “Mind if I come in?”

  “S-Sure.”

  Maou gave Camio a “no talking” glare as he spoke. The woman didn’t know a thing about him, after all.

  “All right… Wow, what’s with that chicken?”

  She opened the door, still sweating with hair tied back, oil and curry stains on her apron, her sandals off.

  Her dark eyes weren’t focused on Maou, or Emi, or Chiho, or Alas Ramus. They were fixated on Camio.

  The odd reaction did not escape Maou’s notice.

  From the moment she opened the door—before then, even—her eyes were firmly upon Camio’s cardboard box, and nothing else.

  It was as if she knew everyone inside this room, and everything that just went on.

  If she was just here to check on things, Amane would have made eye contact with at least one of the people inside. All three of them had their eyes on her.

  Amane kept her eyes upon Camio, unmoving, as she approached.

  “Wow, a
black chicken? You guys makin’ some yakitori later?”

  “Peeep?!”

  Camio sounded petrified.

  “Um…I found it last night. It was hurt…”

  It sounded strained even as Maou said it. How could a chicken blunder its way on to this beach? But nothing else came to mind—and besides, he wasn’t lying.

  Not even Maou’s excuse made Amane shift her gaze.

  “Well, I don’t think there’re any chicken coops nearby. Maybe it’s somebody’s pet? We should probably check with the local vet.”

  “Y-Yeah… Definitely.”

  “Also, Urushihara’s whining for you all to come back, okay? I think the rush is over, but we’ll have to start closing up soon.”

  Maou could feel his nervousness subside, little by little.

  Thinking rationally for a moment, if you saw a chicken in your guest house, it’d probably throw you off, too. They had been talking for a while. As their boss, it wasn’t strange at all that Amane was looking for them.

  Maou cleared the concern from his mind as he bowed his head.

  “I’m sorry. I’ll be right there.”

  “Great!”

  With that, Amane finally removed her eyes from Camio.

  “…Oo?”

  Then, for whatever reason, she flashed a perplexing smile at Alas Ramus.

  “Aw, look at you, little girl! Wonder what she’s gonna be like when she grows up, huh?”

  “Waph!”

  With a few pats to the girl’s head, she left.

  “…Well, that’s all we can discuss for now.”

  As long as Maou was employed, there was no defying his boss.

  Beachfront businesses like these usually closed well before sunset. They would have another chance later.

  But there, in a murmur:

  “You can go back to work. I’ll ask him about the rest.”

  “Huh?”

  “…I said, I’ll get the rest of the story from him! So just go to work already! If we need to take action immediately, I’ll let you know!”

  Emi glared at Maou, as if trying to sniper him using just her eyes.

  “W-Well, sure, but…are you sure?”

  “Am I sure? What did you guys just waste all that time lecturing me about?!”

  Maou and Camio had no way of telling, but Emi’s “you guys” included Chiho, too.