The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 5

by Satoshi Wagahara

  “Fall back, Heavenly Regiment! Your judgment begins now!”

  She pointed her hammer straight toward the angels ahead, her long hair shining dully in the air.

  “One! Thy master’s behavior has hurt innocent people and property. By the values of justice the Church is rooted in, I beseech thee to take proper atonement! Two! Provide one good reason why you have attempted to harm sensible, God-fearing Church members without warning! I have laid these two sins bare before the face of our God as I shall attempt to make you atone for—Hoh!”

  The Regiment did not bother to listen to Suzuno’s oratory to the end.

  Wordlessly, they drew the same swords they had challenged her with once before and lunged forward.

  Not panicking, in full control of herself, she stopped the swords with the hilt of her Light of Iron.

  These were not that same as Emi’s holy sword, Sariel’s great scythe, or Gabriel’s Durandal. These were made of simple tempered steel, completely normal in nature.

  Urushihara, watching from the Dokodemo Building roof, whistled his admiration.

  “Dang. Pretty intense.”

  “You? The child of a human, laying judgment upon the servants of heaven? You make me laugh!”

  “Oh, do I? An archangel, one formerly of your ranks, came begging to me for confession, for holy mercy! But, regardless…”

  Suzuno grinned as she swung her hammer to deflect a sword away.

  Using the resulting recoil to spin her weapon around, Suzuno aimed it squarely at the back of one angelic soldier.

  “Star-Rending Light!”

  “Krahh!”

  It did not send the soldier flying. Instead, the explosive force from her body sent him up in the air, eyes lolling lazily as he fell on to the roof where Urushihara was standing.

  “Let your guard down, and even the child of a human can defeat you.”

  Suzuno swung her hammer three times in the air before letting it come to rest on her shoulder.

  “I am using my holy force to overload my physical form. I created this move in the hopes of quelling the demon hordes, originally…but so be it. Who will be next? Or will you instead meekly accept my judgment and admit to your mistakes with—Oh, I suppose not, hmm?”

  The remaining three soldiers attacked as one, the gist of the question already clear enough to them.

  Their swords, coming from three different directions, were all blocked by the round edge of Suzuno’s hammer. Then:

  “Wha!”

  “Yow!”

  The soldiers and Urushihara let out a simultaneous cry of surprise.

  She wrapped up the blades in her kimono, grabbing them all with her bare hands, then kicked them with the heel of a sandaled right foot that brimmed with holy power.

  Her assailants found their allegedly galvanized swords, along with most of the bones around their right wrists, thoroughly shattered.

  “We had best take our garbage with us. Sharp fragments falling from this height could cause serious injury.”

  Suzuno looked almost serene as she deposited the now-useless blade and scabbard shards into a sleeve.

  “Now. I have given you two chances to relent. There will not be another one. The great Buddha that is found here is willing to forgive people’s sins three times. Myself, I am not so patient. Twice is all I have time for.”

  She readied her hammer with both hands and let out a small breath.

  “!!”

  The angels had no time to react.

  A holy-power-infused heel kicked through the air, making a sound like a mortar. The noise took them by surprise, drawing their attention away from Suzuno. While it did, the kimono-clad cleric in front of them suddenly veered behind their backs.

  The next instant, after alighting behind them, Suzuno leaped once more, showing her own back to the soldiers in the blink of an eye. Her foes, expecting a hammer strike, blinked helplessly as they felt nothing more than a passing wind against their bare skin.

  Suzuno, slicing the wind with her hammer as she used her free left hand to wrangle her hair back into a recognizable shape, returned her Light of Iron to its hairpin form like a samurai returning his sword to its sheath. Then, with a caress of her hair, she clicked it back in place.

  “Dance of Light: Phoenix Transcending.”

  Everything changed.

  Three shock waves of holy light echoed across the Shinjuku night sky.

  The three angels, unable to withstand the wave of force from within, were knocked out instantly, just as the one before them was. As a group, they fell to the Dokodemo Building roof, directly next to Urushihara.

  “Do not take humans lightly. Taste the pain of living.”

  “Ooh, scary.”

  Urushihara was very unironically shaking.

  Ignoring him, Suzuno wiped the sweat of battle from her brow. She extracted a piece of debris from under her sleeve and examined it.

  “But…how am I to think of this? What are angels, in the end?”

  There was no Holy Silver gilding the swords these warriors of heaven wielded. It was not some mystery supermetal beyond human reckoning.

  It was plain old iron. A metal Suzuno interacted with on a daily basis.

  “Hey! Bell! Is there something else coming?!”

  Suzuno turned, puzzled.

  “…?”

  She looked up, folding a sleeve so that its contents did not fall out.

  Something was drawing toward them, from the faraway edges of the sky.

  It looked like one of the bolts of light Chiho had unleashed a moment ago. But something was accompanying it.

  What Chiho unleashed differed in appearance from Suzuno’s, but it was a sort of sonar all the same. Then, perhaps, this was the “reaction”—a signal that the caster had found to indicate what he or she was looking for.

  But was the signal it carried…within?

  “Ngh…!”

  Suzuno instinctively steeled herself. It couldn’t be.

  Chiho had fired a bolt of holy force just now. That was undeniable fact. And yet.

  “Demonic force?!”

  The belt of golden demonic power extending above the dumbfounded Suzuno’s and Urushihara’s heads flew southeast.

  “…Huh?”

  As the streak passed them by, Suzuno felt something small—trivial, perhaps, but clearly malicious—lift itself from her body.

  “What in the hell did Urushihara just do?”

  Maou and Ashiya were standing in front of a bathroom mirror inside Tower Leg Town, a shopping complex spread out underneath Tokyo Tower, around the main elevator to the observation deck.

  Ten or so minutes after Urushihara hung up on them, Maou and Ashiya felt an ominous premonition as their hair stood on end once more, as if someone was playing some static electricity-oriented practical joke on them.

  “Any messages, my liege?”

  “No, nothing.”

  Neither of them were vain or greaser-y enough to carry a tub of gel around at all times, so the two of them were now in the john, trying to wet their hair down to socially acceptable levels.

  Nobody knew what was going on. That went double for Ashiya, who had been struck by Suzuno’s sonar twice in the course of a day.

  “Eesh. Emi isn’t calling me, Raguel’s nowhere to be seen… Why did we even come here?”

  The two of them moaned at each other as their hair finally calmed down a little. Gloomy, they left the bathroom as they looked back at the Tower, which they had just spent far too much time going up, then back down, to no avail.

  The masses around the tower still showed zero sign of dissipating. The idea of having to find someone in this crowd without knowing what he looked like filled them with fatigued irritation. Then:

  “…Hey, Ashiya, do you sense that?”

  “Yes… I have a bad feeling about this.”

  The pair exchanged uneasy looks. It was just like the last time their hair went all pointy—a sense of dizziness mixed with dread, not unlike un
relenting seasickness.

  Then someone from the crowd pointed at the sky.

  “Whoa, what’s that? A shooting star?!”

  Maou and Ashiya joined the rabble as they all looked upward. A single streak in the sky was coming in from the south. Maou’s Devil King experience helped him spot it right off.

  “Holy energy… Was that what made me go all tingly? Emi?”

  “Your Demonic Highness, if Emi ever heard you say her presence made you ‘all tingly,’ it may very well be your head. Besides”—Ashiya pointed his own finger upward as he enigmatically chided his leader—“I think the source of our consternation might be behind that, actually.”

  Maou knew what he meant well in advance.

  A streak of gold was coursing along behind the shooting star, zooming downward as if ready to envelop all of Tokyo Tower.

  As it eddied around the tower, it gradually formed itself into an enormous circle of light.

  This was nothing natural. Yet, there couldn’t have been any spellcaster left in Japan capable of unleashing it.

  “W-wow! What kinda trick is that?!”

  “The northern lights?!”

  “There aren’t any northern lights in Tokyo! Maybe it’s fireworks or something!”

  Maou steeled himself, ready either for a fight or for the crowd to erupt in panic. But despite this cataclysmic turn of events, the sheer beauty of it all kept anyone from acting remotely concerned.

  “Dahh, did Gabriel try pulling something stupid again?”

  “Hrgh?!”

  Maou spotted it. Someone in the crowd around them said that, while the rest were pointing at the sky. He looked around in a panic.

  Then he realized there was a man behind him in sunglasses and a punky Afro.

  “Agh! You…”

  “Hmm? Oh, what a coincidence! The man from the udon shop.”

  Maou was stopped cold at the sight of the familiar man, dressed like some relic from the American 1970s but now, oddly, speaking perfectly fluent Japanese. Before he could react, Ashiya stepped in between them protectively.

  The man tilted his sunglasses a bit, sizing up the pair. He had, for some reason, a toothpick in his mouth.

  “My liege, his eyes…”

  The low growl from Ashiya made Maou take a closer look.

  “Purple…?”

  “Mm? Something up with my eyes?”

  The man’s toothpick bobbed up and down as he spoke. Then he removed his sunglasses, giving them an up-close-and-personal look at his eyes.

  “The udon at the ground-floor cafeteria here, y’know…not too shabby! And I think I’m startin’ to get the hang of those stupid chopsticks, too!”

  “Uh… Wait, you’re…?”

  Maou began to quiver. It was hard to tell whether it was out of anger or due to the mystery ring of light approaching them.

  Taking a closer look at the man, he could see that his Afro wasn’t fully black after all. There was one shock of purple, as if he decided to get a bit fancy with the hair coloring in the shower.

  “You’re Raguel?!”

  “Ohh? I’m not sure I quite remember stating my name to you…”

  The Afro-bedecked man’s eyes opened wide in abject surprise.

  “Oh, for eff’s sake, you really were eating at the ground floor?!!”

  Just as he spoke, the ring made contact with Tokyo Tower’s antenna, bathing the structure with an enveloping shower of light.

  “…Oh!”

  “Huh?!”

  “Oooooh! Ahhhh!”

  Maou, Ashiya, and the man who was apparently Raguel all voiced their exclamation.

  The moment the exploding particles of light made contact with the Tokyo Tower floor, now filled to the brim with onlookers, the glowing dots suddenly swirled together and made a beeline for two young men.

  The shower made a direct hit on Maou and Ashiya. The Afro man covered his eyes at the resulting shock wave.

  The sense of discomfort that greeted them instantly afterward, along with the job it did on their hair—making the guy’s Afro look like amateur hour at the hotel nightclub—were both things the pair had no time to comment on.

  Instantly, the transformation took place.

  Within the whirlpool of gold, a darker, more sinister light was welling up from the two of them.

  “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!”

  The scream absorbed the golden shine, shattering it to pieces among the jet-black rays of darkness and instantly dispelling Tokyo Tower’s subdued illumination.

  The red-and-white tower, a constant watchman over a mighty age in human history, found itself with a seemingly endless flood of darkness emanating from beneath its chandelier of light.

  A bloodcurdling voice of evil made its way out from the darkness. What it had to say, however, was not quite as foreboding as its sound.

  “If you were on the ground floor, you could’ve told us, man! We had to waste so much money going up there!”

  The world was now filled with a green hue, emanating from underneath the Tower.

  The next moment, the green light covered all of the area around Tokyo Tower, freezing everything within.

  Just like the demonic barrier that was triggered over Sasazuka once, all people and things in the green light were both there and not there, in another realm and protected from all destruction taking place within the sphere.

  From afar, the aurora-like barrier probably made it look like Tokyo Tower was all done up for St. Patrick’s Day.

  The lone demon behind this phenomenon, his eyes brimming with enough anger to put anyone they gazed upon into cardiac arrest, glared at the Afroed man.

  “I’m gonna make you inhale soda up your nose!!”

  At that moment, the Devil King Satan and his Great Demon General Alciel descended upon Tokyo Tower, the demonic force tucked inside the golden light firmly ensconced within their bodies.

  “What are you talking about, man?!”

  The Afro man tossed his sunglasses aside and returned a snide stare. But, when he opened his mouth, he did not address the demons.

  “Eesh, Gabe, did you know these guys were in Japan?”

  “!!”

  The Devil King Satan’s UniClo T-shirt, stretched beyond all reasonable limit, opened up a new tear as he turned around, quickly growing as battered and bruised as his one missing horn.

  “Yeah, sorrr-eeee. Didn’t think they’d get involved, all right?”

  Since when was he here?

  There, within the Devil King’s barrier and looking none the worse for wear from the demonic force flowing around him, was the proud angel who once tried to take Satan and the Hero’s child away from them.

  It was Gabriel, the “shooting star” who had chased the streak of light all the way to Tokyo Tower.

  “…Mommy?”

  “……”

  “Moooommmyyy…”

  In a corner of the Tokyo Skytree observation deck, Emi was balled up on the floor, hands on her knees.

  Alas Ramus tugged at her, her face wavering toward tears as she steadfastly refused to let her alone. Emi did not respond.

  Emilia’s father was alive.

  She remembered when they were separated, five years ago. The sight of her father standing before her, hazy through the tears. It transformed in her mind into sadness and anger, and it was what kept her fighting.

  Compared to that, the story of how angels were not supernatural beings at all seemed like a mere triviality. Nothing about Lucifer or Sariel, certainly, suggested they were supernatural at all. If anything, it made it clearer what heaven really was—a powerful organization that saw her as its enemy. Nothing more, nothing less.

  But more important than that, her father was alive.

  It should have been ample cause for joy and celebration, something she hoped and wished for more than anything.

  But her legs were too jittery to prove much use.

  There was little chance Gabriel was lying about it. He had nothing to gain pe
rsonally by deceiving Emi about Nord’s health.

  One of the issues that made heaven “pretty well cut in two,” as Gabriel put it, no doubt stemmed from the fact that Laila and Nord had a child in the first place. It had the potential to muddy the waters so deeply, to rob heaven and the angels of their invincible holy aura, that they probably saw that as a danger.

  Heaven, and its denizens, were the target of worship and adulation precisely because people believed they were supernatural, beyond human comprehension. If they realized they were just another race, of sorts—a culture with a different civilization from theirs—that would be the end of the gravy train, so to speak.

  Ente Islans, after all, were capable of miracles just as astonishing as those in heaven could conjure. The only difference, really, was the scale involved.

  No, if Gabriel wanted to lie, he would’ve said Nord was dead, no longer part of this or any world.

  Then he could have manipulated the world’s image of her father, the father of the Hero Emilia, any way he wanted. He could have revealed to Ente Isla that Nord was a simple wheat farmer. He could say that he enjoyed a place in heaven, or was appointed an angel. Anything. It would have been twisting the knife.

  And before that, it was only natural to hate someone for killing your parents. Emi was hardly friends with Maou at first. If Gabriel had confirmed that Nord was dead, it would have made Emi hate the Devil King Satan all the more. In fact, it could have even helped heaven quash two annoying mosquitoes at once.

  But Gabriel hadn’t said that. He’d said Nord, her father, was alive.

  That, in itself, enshrouded the road ahead in fog. She turned her head up a bit, only to find Alas Ramus’s pained expression sizing up her own.

  “Mommy? Are you okay? Your tummy hurt?”

  “…No. I’m fine. I’m fine, but…”

  She smiled weakly and buried her face back between her legs.

  “…I’m just trying to…you know, figure out what I should do.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  It was something she was fully aware of from the first time she stood on the battlefield as a Church knight, but the one reason she savored the most, the single greatest inspiration she had to defeat the Devil King’s army, was in order to exact revenge for her father.