“Hey… You and Emilia, you guys can refill your holy force, right? You got some kind of method handy for that?”
“…What do you mean?”
A capped bottle of 5-Holy Energy β was at the ready somewhere in Suzuno’s kimono. But she had little intention of revealing the secret to the Devil’s Castle.
“We can’t find Raguel. We have to, before he can fire off more of that sonar. But we can’t. And we got no time to call Emilia back here. So you do it.”
“Do what? What are you even bidding me to do?”
Suzuno looked up into the air once Urushihara finally stopped.
There was a needlelike tower before them, dark and smooth as an obelisk. It loomed large in the dark cityscape, the moon framing it from behind as four red warning lights flashed on each corner of its roof. It bore a company logo that Suzuno was familiar with.
“You know, I never really wanted a TV in the first place. Who needs it? If you got the Net and maaaybe a cell phone, that’s way more than enough.”
“This, this is hardly open to the public at time like this, is it?!”
Urushihara brushed off Suzuno’s flustered hesitation.
“Startin’ to see what I wanna do yet?”
“I do, but if you break something or cause any other problems, the entire city will descend into panic!”
“Yeah, dude. That’s why I’m having you do it. Not Emilia or Devil King–mode Maou. We don’t need to kill an archangel. Your power’s juuuust weak enough for the job.”
“…I do not like your tone of voice. …I, er, that is not the problem, but… Ah! Lucifer!”
Urushihara, unwilling to let Suzuno gripe at him for the next few minutes, made a beeline for the building entrance.
A security guard attempted to stop him. As he should have. A young man in a wrinkled, sweat-stained T-shirt did not fit the profile for this building’s usual clientele.
But, in a single glint of light from the purple eyes lurking underneath his long, unkempt hair, Urushihara completely disappeared from the guard’s sight.
In front of the guard, stopped cold at this guy suddenly vanishing before his eyes, Urushihara turned around and motioned Suzuno to follow. Then he strode right into one of the landmark buildings of the Yoyogi neighborhood of Shibuya—the Yoyogi Dokodemo Building, usually referred to as the Dokodemo Tower.
Suzuno followed behind, hesitant at first. But, remarkably enough, nobody lifted a finger to stop this dirty-T-shirt-wearing man and kimono-wearing woman, one of the oddest couples this building had likely ever seen.
“If there’s a company that does as much high-frequency transmission as a TV network, it’s gotta be a cell phone company, right?”
“W-wait, are you… Are you telling me to do what Raguel did…?”
Urushihara nodded and smiled.
“Yep. Fire a sonar bolt on Dokodemo’s cell phone frequencies. Use it to look for someone with more holy power than anyone in Japan’d normally have. One of the blips has got to be our angel.”
“Wh-why did it have to be this…?”
Suzuno shivered, hugging herself to stave off the cold.
It was blisteringly hot at ground level, but up here, at the top of the 902-foot-high Dokodemo Tower, the base of the building’s microwave antenna was in the midst of a powerful, punishing gale.
A kimono was a singularly inconvenient garment to wear in high winds. The flapping cloth was all but useless in keeping her skin insulated.
“Okay.”
Suddenly, Urushihara’s head popped out from an antenna maintenance corridor below, one usually restricted to company servicemen. A large map of Tokyo was in his hands, covered in frequencies and color-coded ranges.
“I’ve tracked down the frequency that’ll reach the biggest chunk of greater Tokyo. Fire your sonar at the antenna and I’ll make sure it hits that frequency. But don’t touch it. It’ll burn ya.”
Suzuno wondered blithely if Urushihara planned to put that map back where he found it after all this was done. Judging by the state of his computer desk, the answer was probably no.
“And…and doing this won’t destroy some important computer somewhere, or somesuch?”
“No, dude, it’ll be fine. I just suppressed part of their bandwidth to make room for your sonar, so hurry up before customers start bitching, okay?”
“…All right! Let it be, then!”
It was hard to tell exactly what Suzuno meant by it. But there wasn’t enough time to ask for clarification.
Boosting the holy power within her body to its limits, Suzuno shot it at full force toward the antenna.
“Holy Seeker!!”
The moment the power flowing out of Suzuno’s hands fused itself with the microwave antenna, it shot in every direction outward, as if invisible electric lines spidered out from the installation. It formed an enormous ring of light, growing larger and larger, until its edges were several hundred feet away from Dokodemo Tower. Then it dissipated into the air, disappearing quickly.
But even if the wave of holy power was impossible for a person to see or feel, just like the signals transmitted by their cell phone, it was definitely flying off, farther and farther away, and soon it would catch something.
“Hn…nnnnh.”
Holy Seeker, essentially a long-range method of detecting enemy positions, wasn’t a fire-and-forget weapon. Launching the wave was little more than taking some holy force here and tossing it over there. The trick was waiting, seeking out the responses that would wing their way back from the expanding wave. It was Suzuno’s job to keep her detection range as broad as possible, making sure the flow of power never stopped until she picked up something. But even though Suzuno wielded superhuman powers, that was still only compared to a normal human being. Her stores of holy force were like a can of baked beans compared to Emi’s fully stocked zombie apocalypse survival bunker.
“I…I can’t…”
If she kept letting the holy force pour out of her like this, she’d run dry in a matter of moments.
“Nh!”
With a groan, she thrust her hand into a pocket and took out her bottle of 5-Holy Energy β. With a single thumb whip, just like in the TV ads, she uncorked the cap and downed the entire contents on the spot.
“Whoooaaa, that thing, huh?”
Urushihara, right next to her, grinned in wonder, like a squirrel discovering a new acorn.
Suzuno was expecting to use the Light of Iron to jump down off the building once the job was done. That was on the back burner now. She had to use her recharged power to hang on until she picked up a response.
“…There!!”
Finally, the ring of Holy Seeker light came through for her.
Running through the wave of holy force, an unseen sensation, like a mild electric shock, shot across the Dokodemo Tower antenna and into Suzuno’s body.
At that moment, she let her concentration break, heaving a mighty sigh as the sweat poured down her face.
“There’s one about four miles southeast of here…two about nine miles east-northeast…one very faint reaction just southwest of here.”
Urushihara eyed the map in hand disapprovingly as Suzuno gasped out her report.
“Southwest of here is Sasazuka. I don’t know why it’s so weak, but that’s gotta be Sariel. Four miles southeast would be Tokyo Tower, I’m pretty sure, and nine miles east-northeast is near the Skytree. If Emilia and Alas Ramus are one of the Skytree blips, then… Yeaaaah, better call Maou. Someone’s gotta be in the—”
“And…one more…”
“Huh?”
The sweat streaming down her body, Suzuno deftly extracted the large pin holding her hair in place. With a flash of light, it transformed into a gigantic hammer, settling into Suzuno’s graceful hands.
Urushihara reared back for a moment, fearful that Suzuno’s patience for being ordered around without explanation had finally wore a little too thin. But she paid him no mind as she approached the edge of the antenna insta
llation.
“Here.”
“Dude?!”
“Brace yourself, Lucifer. Something, I know not what, is approaching.”
Suzuno probed the night scenery of Yoyogi below with her eyes.
There was a light among the cars, just slightly stronger than their headlights. With a flicker, it zoomed upward, following the contours of Dokodemo Tower’s outer wall.
“It’s coming!”
“Wh-what is?!”
Urushihara was about as unprepared to battle as any demon could be. Suzuno reared back from the edge and steeled herself, ready for whatever this attack could bring, ready and able to bash whatever confronted her in the head with everything she had as she focused her remaining holy force.
Her foe was closely hugging the building’s wall. She might have to prepare for aerial combat, given that.
Then, the whooshing of the wind changed in tone.
“…!!”
Suzuno was left speechless.
Urushihara was similarly frozen, his frenzied panic now a thing of the past.
Someone they weren’t expecting in a million years was now floating in front of them.
The wide-open eyes of the figure, surrounded by a faintly glowing golden light, were also a change of pace from usual.
They were purple, like Urushihara’s or Sariel’s.
But any otherworldly mystery these deep-violet eyes might have projected to the viewer was somewhat ruined by the flowery light-pink pajamas and the green slippers with faded golden lettering on them that read SEIKAI UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL.
“Ch-Chiho?!”
“Dude, what the hell?!”
It was Chiho, right where she really shouldn’t have been.
“Oh! Hi, guys!”
The two “guys” were shocked, to be sure, but Chiho didn’t seem to anticipate running into them, either. With a hand to her ear, she began talking to…someone.
“This isn’t the right place! …Huh? Oh, uh, really?”
They had no idea who she was addressing. Urushihara began to wonder if Chiho, clearly enveloped in holy force, had unlocked some latent magical ability he didn’t know she had.
“An Idea Link?”
“Huh? Oh, not that! I got some earbuds from Socket City with a mike attached to them. It was kinda weird going in the store in this outfit, but…”
“…Oh.”
Urushihara, finally noticing the black cord wending its way from Chiho’s pajama pocket to her ears, fell to his knees. Suzuno, now agitated to the point where she was spitting out her words, addressed Chiho.
“That doesn’t matter! Chiho, what on Earth has happened to you?!”
“Um, I don’t really have time to explain! Was that you who fired that sonar shot from here, Suzuno?”
“Y-yes.”
Suzuno barely managed a nod. Having Chiho glowing a radiant gold as she asked the question was causing both of them serious confusion.
“Okay, uh, I guess you probably shouldn’t do that? Like, it’s kind of bad, apparently?”
“Huh?” Suzuno replied.
“She’s saying you shouldn’t rock the world’s balance from one side only, or else everything’ll get all messed up.”
“Dude, Chiho Sasaki, who’re you talking to?” The sharp-eyed Urushihara focused squarely on Chiho. “There’s no way you should know about that. Who’s on the other end of your line?”
This question, oddly enough, made Chiho rear back a little, obviously reluctant to answer—almost in tears about it, it seemed.
“Um, she…she told me to tell you ‘take a hike, you total dimwit.’”
“Huhh?! What the hell?!”
“It-it’s not me! She’s, um, she’s telling me what to do through this thing…”
The rare sight of Chiho half-hysterically trying to defend herself against Urushihara brought order back to Suzuno’s mind.
Between Chiho’s ring and what Emi had said earlier, it was clear that whoever overloaded Chiho’s power with all this holy force without any ill side effects couldn’t have been on Gabriel’s side.
But the Chiho who greeted them wasn’t under anyone’s control. She was Chiho Sasaki, the same one Suzuno knew well by now.
So she, along with whomever she had on the phone, must be here on some sort of mission. But instead of asking for an explanation, Suzuno lifted her hammer, and in the blink of an eye, brought it down.
“Wave-Rending Light!!”
“Eek!”
A shock wave whizzed past Chiho as she balled herself up out of fright. Suzuno, following her own salvo, leaped off the Dokodemo Building into the night sky. The wave released by her hammer, so deftly handled by her dainty arms, flew in from the darkness…and effortlessly blew away the four balls of light that were, just then, rapidly advancing upon Chiho’s back.
“…The Heavenly Regiment!”
“Ohhh, yeah, guess Gabriel was coming and all, huh?”
Urushihara and Suzuno glared upward at the four shadows in the air, in the direction the balls of light came from.
“None of you move!”
The Regiment, the soldiers of heaven and servants of Gabriel, had their swords at the ready, floating defiantly in the air as they tried to deter their opponents.
“…Chiho. Once you do what you must here, you may safely leave these men to us.”
Suzuno’s hammer remained at the ready.
“Oh, uh, but…”
“What mission brought you here, and granted you that power? …I suppose we have no time to discuss it in detail, however. And I doubt you have gained the powers of a first-tier warrior in the course of a single evening. The Devil King and Alciel are at Tokyo Tower. Emilia is at the Skytree.”
“Um… Okay!”
Chiho, glowing gold, brought both arms in front of her.
The area between her palms lit up for a moment, and then Chiho spread them out to her sides.
She pulled her right hand all the way back behind her ear, bringing her left out front at just about the same height, pointer finger extended.
Urushihara noticed that the ring on her left index finger was glowing the same shade of purple as her eyes.
Then, from thin air, Chiho produced a silvery bow of light.
Her pose, the kai stage of traditional Japanese archery that signified the final moment before the arrow was released, would remind onlookers of a lunar goddess from mythology if it weren’t for the flower-print pajamas and slippers she had technically just stolen from the hospital.
“Maou’s at Tokyo Tower, you said?”
She was turning to Urushihara for confirmation. He nodded. A small smile found its way to Chiho’s face.
“Seelku etulo louseetoh!”
In her voice, in a language she couldn’t possibly have understood, Chiho fired an arrow of light toward the Dokodemo antenna, just as Suzuno had done a moment prior.
It was the light of Holy Seeker, one infused with enough holy power to make Suzuno’s seem like a children’s game. She had spoken in Holy Vezian, using words that meant “Holy Seeker” in the sacred language.
Arcing streaks of gold light, each retaining a clear shape in the dark landscape, spread out from the Dokodemo Tower into the sky.
Unlike Suzuno’s, the light streamed out across the heavens, never losing its luster or brilliance as it radiated across the Tokyo nightscape.
“I’ll explain everything later! Just be careful for now!”
And with those parting words, Chiho shot like a comet east-northeast toward Tokyo Skytree.
“Halt!!”
The Heavenly Regiment attempted to give chase. They did not get far.
“You are here to fight me!”
In the air above the Yoyogi Dokodemo obelisk, Suzuno stood strong against the four pairs of wings.
“You aimed those spheres of holy light toward Chiho, did you not? And your eyes, as you even now attempted to give chase, were nothing I would ever call angelic. What are you possibly doing?”
&n
bsp; Suzuno, a ferocious grin on her face, looked up at the “angels” she once prostrated herself before.
“If you act against mankind, wearing the mask of all that is holy…then it is time for me to correct this!!”
“Uh, Bell, if I could, uh, say something…”
Suzuno stopped Urushihara before he could continue from his perch next to the antenna.
“I know,” she said. “But if you attempt to lead a flock doing only what you are told to do, you never truly feel the pain of your errors. You cannot regret your mistakes in any true fashion.”
“Uh, what?”
“Their actions hurt innocent people and caused untold damage to other worlds. This is an error that no angel would ever dare commit. Thus, I must correct it.”
The four angels in the Heavenly Regiment, clearly ready for battle, couldn’t help but look confused at this.
“Sheathe thy weapon, human! We are the Heavenly Regiment, in the service of the archangel Gabriel! Thy foolish behavior goes against the will of our God and the teachings of the holy—”
“Silence, vulgar philistines!”
“…?!”
Being called “vulgar philistines” by a human clearly agitated the Regiment.
But one didn’t have to be Suzuno to break out that sentiment. They looked suitably angelic during the previous visit to Villa Rosa Sasazuka, but now, with their T-shirts and hoodies clearly visible under their togas, the way they were half-acclimating to Japanese culture presented a less-than-divine image.
Perhaps the angels knew it. Perhaps that was what agitated them the most.
“Do not speak to me about the will of our God! Our God speaks of loving thy neighbor! How would he dare allow an innocent girl, and the peaceful land she lives in, to face this pointless violence? And you, so freely using the divine as an excuse to hurt someone…”
Then, Suzuno planted a foot on the obelisk and flew into the Shinjuku night.
“Who do you think you are?!”
Hammer in hand, her internal holy power burning, the former Death Scythe of the Council of Inquisitors all but overwhelmed the four angelic servants facing her.
The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 5 Page 18
