It was a hilariously oversized fruit of some sort, large enough that a grown man like Maou needed two hands to carry it.
It was yellow, apple-shaped, and tremendously heavy.
No one could drum up the courage to eat it. Not this. This was something the Guinness folks would hold champagne parties over.
“Is that…really an apple?”
“I guess it could be a pear, depending on how you look at it…but…”
“…They don’t grow ’em this big. Not even back in the demon realm. Don’t tell me this is a demon shaped like an apple or something. Someone could’ve at least stuck a shipping label on this thing for us…”
There were, it had to be said, demons that could imitate plant life in Maou’s kingdom. Most were humanoid, though, their bodies gnarled and wooden like ancient, sentient trees. He had never heard of one of his minions transforming into some prize-winning pickin’s from the county fair.
Gates weren’t something that popped up naturally. There had to be some mage or alchemist deliberately sending this apple over to them.
There was no way to tell who quite yet, though. That answer would arrive once they figured out whether it was sent here on purpose, or it was just a coincidence.
“Ugh. Give me a break.”
Emi’s mind was the first to wander off the present subject.
“How many times is this now? Something incredibly weird happening whenever the Devil King and Hero are in the same place? It’s barely been a week since the whole thing with Sariel! I swear, nothing good ever happens around you!”
“I could echo that right back at you, lady.”
Maou refused to remain silent as Emi accused him of assorted bad-seed behavior.
“Besides, most of this recent crap was kinda set off by you humans, wasn’t it?!”
“Ngh…”
“Yes…well, my apologies.”
Suzuno turned her gaze away toward the sky as Emi fell silent.
“I mean, did you even think there’s a demon out there right now who can open a Gate as blinding as that one?! It’s probably some troublemaker from the heavens again, no doubt! So here! Take it! Why don’t you stick it in the fridge for a few hours so it’s nice and cold before you dig in?!”
Maou brought the apple closer to Emi. Emi took a confused step back.
“What are you, stupid?! We’re about to go shopping downtown! How’re we gonna carry that thing around?!”
“I don’t care! That’s your problem! You’re the one skulking around me and getting all up in my business all the time! You weirdo stalker Hero!”
“How… How dare you call me a stalker! If you weren’t a demon, do you think I’d even dream of hanging around you, you Devil Welfare King?!”
“Ngh… Just shut up! Look at you, dressed up like you’re CEO of the world or something! Stupid Business Casual Hero!”
“Pfft! It beats having to go around in faded, threadbare UniClo junk all day, you Beefy-T King!”
As the words flew to and fro, resembling less an argument and more a very incompetently performed rap battle, Maou finally made the mistake of going one step too far.
“Well, a lady like you, you’d need to wear a kid-sized UniClo sports bra! Flattest Hero Ever, am I right?!”
Emi, fatigued by the sizzling heat and killer slams, shot her eyes wide open, flames of aggression suddenly burning behind her.
“That’s it! I’m gonna hack you apart right where you stand!”
“Uh—ah—whoa, wait a second, Emi! People’re gonna notice! C’mon, no holy sword! Please, we can talk this out!”
“Silence, fool!! My power shall smite all demonic perversions!!”
A burst of holy force shimmered a golden hue in the air, shooting across Emi’s right arm as she summoned her Better Half to her hand.
It was the only holy sword on Earth, a weapon wieldable only by a Hero imbued with the Holy Silver, which was guarded by the Ente Isla Church since time immemorial. Its purpose: demon slaying, and nothing else.
“Agh! Ahhh, ahh, ah, are you serious, Emi?!”
“My liege!”
Emi had summoned her most powerful of weapons, a development that went far past their usual unfriendly bickering. Ashiya, unable to stand by idly, took two steps down the stairway.
“Ah, ah, aahhhhhhhh?!”
Still wearing his indoor slippers, Ashiya’s feet found no traction whatsoever on the half-rotted steps. With a clatter and a scream, he fell downward.
“Oh, good job, twinkletoes.”
Urushihara, meanwhile, eyesight finally recovered from the blinding light, watched on from behind, still lying haphazardly on the floor.
“Hmm? Where’s Chiho Sasaki?”
He looked around the scene, realizing that Chiho was oddly absent in this furor so far.
He noticed Chiho staring a distance away from under the cicada-laden tree, then shrugged quizzically, quite a feat to perform while on one’s stomach.
“You have my full permission. Slay him.” For some reason, Suzuno was engorged with rage as she glared at Maou.
“Hey! Don’t add gas to the fire! Stop her for me! …Oh, dammit, you’re on Emi’s side, that’s right! Crap!”
“Devil King! Prepare to die!”
Who could have predicted that an off-color comment about a budget-priced sports bra would cause such an abrupt end to his dreams of world domination?
That pointless pang of regret was all that passed through Maou’s mind. None of this “life passing before his eyes” stuff. That was for humans.
He had nowhere to run, no way to dodge Emi’s lightning-fast strike. His only recourse, though he knew it was useless, was to heft the apple in his hands upward, blocking the holy sword as Emi swung it from heaven above.
“Huh?”
But the air-rending, earth-shattering blade of her sword never quite got around to neatly halving Maou vertically.
Fearing the worst, Maou slowly turned his face upward.
“……”
He saw Emi, eyes like small dots as she looked at the apple between her sword and her nemesis.
“…?”
Maou was at a loss, but still unable to move.
“Y-your Demonic Highness…rrngh…”
Ashiya spoke up for him, only now recovering from his tumble downstairs.
It was an odd sight he was met with. The Devil King, guarding his head with a giant apple. Crestia Bell, hands to her cheeks in surprise. Emilia, her holy sword still aimed downward. And:
“Is that…?”
But what particularly grabbed his attention was the human hand that just grew out of the apple.
Or hands, to be exact. Two of them, infant-sized, popped out of the large, round apple, arms following behind them.
“Uh.”
“Wha…”
“What the hell is that?!”
Ashiya and Suzuno grunted inscrutably. It was Emi, in the end, who shouted loud and clear.
Seeing hands grow out from an apple was nothing short of astonishing. Maybe this really was a fruit-shaped demon after all. It was entirely possible.
The biggest problem, however, was that these hands, unmistakably those of a human baby, had stopped the full brunt of Emi’s holy sword in its tracks.
This was not a matter of Emi hesitating or letting up at the last moment.
She was in a state of white-hot fury, so not even she had considered whether she could really slice through both the apple and Maou in one swipe. That should have been more than enough to at least cleave the fruit in two, though.
Emi reared back in a panic, just as Suzuno removed the hairpin from behind her head.
“Light of Iron!”
As she spoke, the cross-shaped hairpin in Suzuno’s hand instantly transformed into a gigantic, holy, power-driven war hammer.
Just like Emi a moment ago, Suzuno was on high alert, tense and wary against this unknown foe.
Staggering to his feet, Ashiya took a moment to figure out what to do.
But even with his experience as chief commander of the Eastern Island invasion force and his reputation as the demonic horde’s most brilliant strategist, he had never prepared for the situation of the Devil King pinned beneath an enormous apple with arms as it confronted the holy sword–wielding Hero.
Suzuno, for her part, appeared similarly hesitant, not moving an inch, hammer readied in her hands.
“…Uh, so, like, what just happened?”
Only Maou, unable to see the other side of his apple, lacked a full grasp of the scene. He warily looked around him, fruit still held high.
“M-Maou?”
It was Urushihara who finally responded, on his feet and looking on from the corridor guardrail.
“I think you, uh, maybe wanna put the apple down for now.”
“The apple…? Aghh! What’re those?!”
Maou gradually lowered the apple, only to be greeted with the sight of two infant arms groping around in the air. That earned the fruit an unceremonious toss to the ground.
“Ahh!”
The group around the mystery object gasped in unison, instinctively afraid of what kind of damage a jolt like that could do. Then they watched as the giant apple plaintively rolled across the ground.
“Ah, ahhhh…!”
Emi, caught right in the apple’s sights, sprinted off without skipping a beat.
But the apple pressed on. Worryingly so. Maou hadn’t thrown it with that much momentum. And he didn’t curve it like a baseball so it’d follow Emi’s path, either.
“Yeaaggghhhh! What, what, stop it!!”
The apple merrily chased Emi around the apartment building’s front yard, flailing its arms like propellers.
Maou and Suzuno, no new ideas coming to mind in response to this, simply watched.
Finally, the apple settled down in the middle of the yard—finally out of juice, perhaps. Emi gasped for breath, cornered like a rat against the concrete fence.
But the fruit refused to give. Pudgy little hands continued to grope toward Emi’s direction, even with the apple now firmly in stasis.
“Hey, uh, Emi, you gotta admit, it’s got its eyes on you, or hands or whatever, man.”
“Huff…huff… Wh-who does? Get it away from me!”
Emi’s rage toward Maou was now dissipated, replaced with frantic confusion over this shocking turn of affairs. Her eyes darted pointlessly between the sword in her right hand and the arms extended her way.
Those arms were strong enough to withstand the full brunt of a holy sword.
Or, to be more exact, it felt like some kind of cushioning force stopped the blow, like when you slap your palm against the surface of water.
Emi was beginning to get the impression that she had a lot more enemies impervious to the Better Half than expected. If this apple was one of them, that implied it was related to the heavens, or Sariel, both intent upon seizing her sword.
It made sense in her mind, enough so that she opted to dispel the sword into her body for safety’s sake.
That happened just in time for the next cataclysm.
The moment Emi’s sword was gone, the groping hands instantly slumped to the side, as if exhausted of power.
Watching them drop like a stringless puppet summoned another scream from Emi’s throat as she backed away.
“Yaghh! Now what?!”
The apple unpeeled itself, was what, the yellow skin unraveling like a tightly wrapped bandage.
Underneath this shell, built like a reinforced shelter to protect its contents, the apple was hollow. And there, in front of everyone except Chiho, the giant arm-toting apple said:
“…Bipf!”
It was now a small girl, its stifled sneeze ringing across the dumbfounded Villa Rosa Sasazuka front yard.
“……”
“……”
“……”
“……”
“……”
Everyone was stunned at this latest metamorphosis.
Not even able to gauge each other’s reaction, the group’s eyes fixated upon the baby that appeared from the apple.
“…Bipf!”
As if responding to her second sneeze, the yellow skin discarded around the girl once again floated in the air around her, leisurely changing shape until it transformed into a yellow dress that fit snugly over her, like she was wearing it the whole time.
“Mm?”
Maou was the only one to notice the emblem that appeared on the girl’s forehead the moment the dress took form. It was purple in color, shaped like a crescent moon. “Ooo!”
And then it disappeared in another instant.
The girl scratched her forehead a moment, right where the emblem had been. Then she looked around her surroundings, making the pudgy little hands that stopped Emi’s holy sword cold into fists, with which she lazily rubbed her eyebrows.
After a moment of staring into space, she laid down on the ground…
“…snif…”
Then fell asleep.
The Lord of All Demons, the half-angel Hero, the Great Demon General, the Reconciliation Panel cleric, and the fallen denizen of heaven looked on.
All of them, each born from similarly outrageously unlikely circumstances, found it equally impossible to comprehend what they had just seen.
“All right… Hold up.”
Maou, much to his credit, was the first to snap out of it.
“Wha, what, what on, what kind of, who…”
His speech, however, had yet to crest the waves of confusion ravaging his mind.
“How, how, I don’t know, how would I…?”
Emi was no different.
“Ma-Maou!”
Urushihara managed to squeak out a shout from his vantage point upstairs. Suzuno and Ashiya shuddered at the sudden thunderbolt of speech as they looked upward.
But Urushihara’s eyes were turned far away, toward the Sasazuka rail station.
“Dude, someone’s coming!”
The words were enough to propel everyone back into an ad hoc silence.
Regardless of what this apple girl was all about, there was no way to tell how many people witnessed that huge flash of light. No matter what, they had to avoid the neighbors’ prying eyes.
“H-hey, Emi!”
“Wh-what?!”
“Get this…this kid? She’s a child, right? Get her upstairs!”
“Wh-why me?!”
“She’s a girl! So’re you! Pick her up! I’ve never carried a human baby before!”
“What, you think I have? I mean, I hugged one once, okay, but she hadn’t been lying in the dirt when I did!”
“Hero! Devil King! How foolish the both of you are!”
Suzuno sprang into action.
Gently, taking care not to wake her, Suzuno used her well-practiced hands to pick up the apparently supernatural girl, now fast asleep after giving the neighborhood the shock of their lives.
“Ooh, good one.”
“Clerics such as myself must learn how to handle the young for their baptismal ceremony! You! Alciel! I wish to bring her up to Devil’s Castle! Bring some bedding out!”
“D-don’t you order me around, Crestia! Ow ow ow ow…”
Ashiya grumbled to himself as he painfully lurched up the stairs.
Following behind, Suzuno deftly removed her zori sandals at the base of the stairway, climbing up each dust-ridden step in her white tabi socks.
“Hey, you go up there, too, Emi! Why’d Suzuno take her sandals off? Bring them up to her!”
“Probably to keep from slipping, I’d guess! …Whoa! Bell! The bag!”
Grabbing the things she and Suzuno dropped when the Gate opened, Emi awkwardly climbed the stairs.
“That, and… Hey, Chi! Chi, what’s up? I haven’t seen… Huh?”
Maou, at this point, finally realized that neither Chiho nor her trademark panicky voice had played any role in this affair.
Looking around, he spotted her right where he had shaded her from the Gat
e’s light, staring into space in front of the tree.
“Uh…hello? Chi?”
Wild supernatural events like these shouldn’t have been enough to put Chiho in a stupor by this point.
Did the torrent of light from the Gate have some damaging effect on Chiho, totally unprotected against demonic or holy energy? The dreadful thought crossed Maou’s mind.
But, looking more closely, a twinge of red crossed her cheeks as a content smile spread across her lips. She was lost in reverie.
“Hey, Chi? Chi?”
“…We did it.”
“Huh?”
He brought his ear closer to pick up her whispering.
“Maou…held me. He went up and held me tight. Hee-hee! So tight…”
A hand went to her relieved, joyful lips as she whispered.
“Ahhhhhhh…” Maou groaned plaintively to himself. “Hey!”
“Agh!”
He had clapped his hands in front of her face, eliciting a shout.
“Please, Chi, back to reality!”
“Ahh! M-Maou! I, uh, I, that—!”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m sorry, but we don’t have time to chat about it over coffee, okay? Let’s go back to Devil’s Castle!”
“Um? Ah, ah, ah! M-Maou! Hand, hand!”
Unwilling to wait out Chiho as she navigated the road back to reality within her brain, Maou grabbed her hand and ran up the stairs.
Everyone, including the apple girl, was now ensconced inside the Castle, each exhausted to the hilt for their own individual reasons.
With the apple girl to one side—sleeping peacefully on her back atop a limp blanket—the demons, non-Earth humans, and high school teen silently consumed their ice cream.
To be exact, Chiho more picked at her ice cream, her mind on other affairs. The other five were wolfing theirs down in a futile attempt to flee reality.
Emi was the first to finish her cup.
“Okay, well, I need to go, so—”
“Wait a sec!”
Maou grabbed her leg before she made it any closer to the door.
“Hey! Let go of me!”
She tried to shake him off. Suzuno pointed a finger in the air.
“Sshhh! You’re going to wake her, Emilia!”
Emi meekly sat back down, her face resigned.
“…Bell and I don’t have anything to do with this! You guys figure something out yourselves!”
The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 3 Page 5
