“Though…I feel, perhaps, that I have learned something from today. It may put an additional burden on our finances, yes, but perhaps the time has come for me to have my own cell phone. Have you any purchasing advice?”
Rika’s face instantly flushed a bright crimson.
“I understand you work for the same phone company as Yusa. I cannot say whether I would buy a device from your company or not quite yet, but if you have the free time, I would greatly appreciate some guidance when I make my choice.”
“Uh… Sure! Yeah, give me a call anytime!”
Rika nodded eagerly, all but standing on tiptoe to drive the point home.
“Thank you very much. In that case, I will be sure to contact you soon…from a public phone, I imagine.”
“All right…”
“I’d best be off, then.”
With a light bow, Ashiya turned and ran off toward the Korakuen rail station.
“No way… Oh, man, what am I doing…? This is totally nuts!”
Rika, meanwhile, remained rooted to the spot until Ashiya was no longer visible.
“What am I gonna do… What am I gonna do… What am I gonna do?!”
After a few more moments, she began to walk unsteadily in the opposite direction, toward Suidoubashi station.
THE DEVIL FEELS THE PAIN OF LOSS
Amid the darkness of untwinkling stars, there was a great land, one bathed in red and blue.
This land, which shone a glistening azure, took the form of an enormous engraved cross, each branch teeming with life.
In one part of this great blue landscape, the stars were accompanied by a planet teeming with life. Therein lay a vast wilderness, one bereft of any sound. Not even a single breeze flowed through it.
A single vast tree, itself the same color as the azure land, loomed ominously in the wasteland.
This tree, standing in the vast, flat wilderness, lived for countless months and years. It brimmed with the force of countless souls, countless lives; but externally, it resembled little more than a withered husk.
There were no leaves to cover the heavens, no flowering buds to decorate the passing Springs, no fruit with which to celebrate this blue world’s bounty. There was just the tree, standing there alone, as if it had committed a great sin it could do nothing to atone for.
Ten shrines were built around this vast tree, as if to surround it, each bearing a name carved upon its entrance.
The first shrine was Keter. The next was Chokhmah, then Binah, Chesed, Gevurah, Tifaret, Netzach, Hod, Yesod, and finally Malkuth.
These names belonged to someone. They must have. But no one could say where the people who could read and write these carved names could be now.
These shines were not stately buildings, no shining pillars or exquisite roofs adorning them. Instead, they were ten perfect spheres, like great stones dug up from the earth, spread out across the land like the enormous fruit the great tree must have borne at some distant time in the past.
One day, the blue wilderness was greeted with motion once more.
From the sphere carved with the word Yesod, a large figure appeared.
“Ah. Good. Found that one relatively quickly.”
It sounded like a man’s voice.
With that whisper, four pillars of light appeared around the large figure, each one soon taking the form of people themselves.
“After we received no response from the Central Continent, I was expecting to spend centuries searching…but it looks like we’ve lost nothing at all. The ‘fragments’ resonated with each other in a certain place.”
The people within the pillars of light began to murmur.
“The place Sariel disappeared to recently. Him, and likely…”
The large man took in the full length of the nearly rotted-out blue tree.
“Yes. That girl who stole the Yesod Sephirah is there as well.”
The large man raised his arms to the stars. The next moment, a great hole to another dimension opened up, filled with light and hovering in the air.
“Let us go. Go, and return the tree of Sephirot to its intended form.”
Then the five figures disappeared into the Gate.
Soon, the light from the Gate was gone, and silence returned to the azure land.
The five figures that once stood by the great tree now beheld the land engraved with the cross of life—Ente Isla, the Land of the Holy Cross. The azure land stayed close to this land of life, lazily revolving around it, but never daring to stray near the crimson orb that lurked beyond them both.
It was just a little bit before Maou and Emi disembarked from the Tokyo Big-Egg Ferris wheel.
“Yo! Bell! You around?!”
“Nrgh… Wh-what is it, Lucifer?”
Suzuno was surprised to find Urushihara outside of his closet fortress. She was even more surprised to find him visiting her room, in a state of panic.
She was enjoying a late lunch of boiled udon, causing her to almost choke on a mouthful when he burst through the door.
Urushihara noticed the heaping pile of chilled noodles in Suzuno’s bowl. Suzuno nimbly followed his eyes.
“There is none for you.”
“Yeah, I don’t need any udon for a while. I ordered in some pizza just now, so… Wait! Dude, that doesn’t matter!”
After making the confession, which would likely rile Ashiya back into his demonic form if he heard it, Urushihara asked Suzuno a question.
“Did you notice that just now?”
“Notice?”
Suzuno tilted her head in confusion.
“Guess not, huh? Hey, do you know how to contact Emilia? I’ll call Maou myself. I think we better get ’em back here ASAP.”
“Why? What do you mean?”
Suzuno frowned, noticing Urushihara acting sincere for a change.
“Just do it, dude. I don’t know why, but this huge Gate just opened up somewhere in Tokyo. I think we got some trouble brewing.”
With that, Urushihara zoomed back to his room and launched the SkyPhone app on his computer. Suzuno, finding it difficult to believe his behavior was just an act, picked up her phone and brought up Emi’s number.
That was when five figures materialized in Villa Rosa Sasazuka’s front yard.
“Whoa, whoa, you didn’t say anything about visitors.”
Maou flashed an easy smile, but still made sure to keep Alas Ramus behind him.
“So what happened first? The Gate, or this?”
“I apologize, Devil King… We were caught completely unawares.”
“Yeah, I’ll admit I didn’t think they’d make a move that quick.”
Suzuno grovelingly made the apology. Urushihara, meanwhile, demonstrated his usual lack of conscience.
“Ohh, there’s no need to blame them, mm-kay? They were nice enough to give you two a buzz, after all!”
Maou and Emi, hurriedly returning to Villa Rosa Sasazuka, found themselves greeted by neither Urushihara nor Suzuno.
“Besides, we aren’t doing anything too rough, ya know? It’d be a huuuge win-win for all of us if we can talk this out, so hopefully we can avoid any sticking points and stuff like that, mm-kay?”
The air inside Devil’s Castle was stifling.
Chiefly this was because the population density inside was causing the room temperature to skyrocket.
There were, after all, ten people in a hundred-square-foot apartment. Though, in strict humanist-biological terms, Suzuno Kamazuki was the only “person” there.
“Gabriel?”
“Ooh, bingo! Right square on the head! You must tell me how you guessed! Have we met before?”
The giant, easygoing, weirdly intense man, one Maou would have loved to punch right now, seemed to be the leader of the uninvited guests.
He had blue hair, cut neatly at the shoulders, and his eyes held no apparent concern or anxiety over anything. His upper body was easily as long as Ashiya’s, though, and the bulging muscles made him look like a professio
nal wrestler. He wore a body-length toga, something that would’ve been stylish among the ancient Greeks, and it couldn’t have looked less natural on him.
Besides the one Maou called “Gabriel,” four other men were in Devil’s Castle. One was holding a ridiculously ornate longsword to Suzuno’s throat, while the other three stood guard around Urushihara as he sat cross-legged on the floor.
“Yeah, uh, I heard that one of the archangels up there was this huge freak that made your head hurt whenever you talked to him.”
“Aww, that’s just being mean! Hey, what kinda rumors are people spreading about me when my back’s turned? I’m gonna have to bang some heads around, if you know what I mean!”
“That, and you’re the guardian angel of the Sephirah known as Yesod, aren’t you?”
“Ee-hee-hee! You do know how to flatter a man, don’t you?”
“Can you knock that off? All right. Let’s just cut the crap and get to the point. What do you want?”
“Well, that girl hiding behind you, for starters. And, ooh, if you don’t mind my being totally greedy, Emilia’s holy sword as well! Also, we ate all the pizza Lucifer ordered from Pizza Hat. Sorr-eeee!”
“You ordered that now? Now, of all friggin’ times?!”
Not even Maou could retain his composure. Urushihara shuddered.
“Oh, stop getting your whiskers in a bunch! We’ll pay for it later, mm-kay?”
“That’s not what I’m worried about! …Well, okay, I am, but still!”
Maou stopped himself midway. There was Ashiya’s ire to worry about later as well.
“Oh, wait, wait, wait! How ’bout this: Give us the girl, or you’ll never see your precious pizza money again!”
“What kind of parent would give up his daughter to a bunch of kidnappers to get out of a pizza tab?!”
Maou was screaming by now.
“Besides, aren’t you guys kind of late? How many days d’you think she’s been here with us?”
“Hey, now, maybe it was a few days to you, but we’ve been searching for centuries by this point. Centuries! So cut me a little slack if we were off a tad, mm-kay? I mean, when I picked up pulses from the Yesod fragment, I was just about beside myself! You wouldn’t believe what a doggie downer it was when that girl’s fragment was taken away from the Devil’s Castle on Ente Isla. I was like, ‘Oooh, not yet more centuries spent searching for that thing again…’—Oh!”
The man apparently named Gabriel stopped himself midspeech.
“Right! ‘Cut the crap,’ you said! Yes yes yes! Are you giving us the girl, or not? Which is it?”
He was nothing like what Maou expected—they never were, by his experience—but judging by his fixation on Emi’s holy sword, these had to be servants of the heavens. Angels, in other words.
The large man didn’t deny his name was Gabriel, either. Which meant, probably, that this was Alas Ramus’s real parent, or guardian, or whatever.
“……”
But the look on Alas Ramus’s face as she stared at Gabriel was clearly one of alarm. There was no way she bore any friendly feelings toward him.
“Hey, Alas Ramus? Do you know this big lummox here at all? ’Cause it sounds like he wants to take you with him.”
“No!! I haaaate him!!!!”
“Noooooooooooooo!!!”
Gabriel put on a Shakespearian performance of shock following Alas Ramus’s instant response.
“Stop calling me ‘big,’ you! Words can hurt, mm-kay?”
That was what floored him? The men covering Suzuno and Urushihara stirred, silently attempting to hide their embarrassment.
“Market, ’n’ Ketter, ’n’ Binah, ’n’ Cocama, all gone! I haaate him!!”
“Ooooh, twist the knife, why don’t you?”
Alas Ramus’s follow-up was enough to make Gabriel bring a hand to his head.
“…I don’t really get what’s going on here, but if Alas Ramus isn’t up for it, then I don’t care if you’re her dad or not. She’s not going anywhere.”
“Awwww… Okay, how ’bout the holy sword…?”
“I’ll pass, thanks. I don’t care if the gods themselves beg me for it. I’m not handing it over to anyone until I fulfill my mission.”
“…Ooooh, you are making this awfully difficult, you know that? What kind of Hero and Devil King is this? So difficult. I really don’t want to get rough here, but now that I’ve found this girl, I’m kind of beholden to get her back, sooooo…”
“Like I care.”
“The holy sword, I suppose I can do without. Even if Sariel screwed the pooch on that one, at least we know where it is, more or less. But I’m gonna have to put my foot down when it comes to the girl. So…please? Just give ’er back?”
“Nope.”
“She was kind of mine firrrrrst…”
“And I’m her dad now.”
“No matter what?”
“No matter what.”
“Even if it means you versus everybody in heaven?”
“Sounds like a risk I’ll take. I ain’t gonna make this kid cry.”
Gabriel muttered forlornly to himself.
“…So difficult. This really gets my goat, do you understand…that?!?!”
He released a jet-propelled blast of holy energy from his entire body, one strong enough to nearly crush everyone against the room’s walls.
It all happened in the blink of an eye. It was enough to make Maou stagger.
“I really hate forcing people like this. If you wanna surrender anytime, don’t be shy about sayin’ it, mm-kay?”
Gabriel, still as intensely happy-go-lucky as always, was in front of Maou’s eyes before he knew it.
“Whoa!”
From the edge of his eye, Maou noticed the holes Gabriel had bored into the tatami mat floor with his feet, as a result of the blast.
“Y’know, even if you had all your Devil King strength, I’d probably still win and all, right? So…maybe just give her back?”
There was a quiet, almost sanctified air to the room, one so oppressive that it seemed ready to crush everyone inside.
“…Damn, are you serious?”
Maou swallowed nervously. Against all the foes he had fought in his life, nobody had ever intimidated him so much before.
It wasn’t because he was weaker now.
It was because he was fighting a guardian of Sephirot, an angel several degrees more powerful than anything he had ever experienced.
It was a surprise. But it didn’t make him relent.
“Well, it’s still no from me. I’m the lord of all demons. I love doing things humans and angels just hate. Once I conquer the world, I’m gonna raise this girl to be the heir to my throne.”
“I’ll try to go easy on you, mm-kay? It wouldn’t be fair otherwise, what with your total lack of demonic force and all. …And don’t forget about the surrender thing, too!”
That was the signal that negotiations had failed.
Gabriel’s conditions seemed generous enough. It went without saying that Maou had no chance of winning this.
A simple brush of his hand against Maou’s arm would have been enough to turn him into confetti.
But there was one thing in the room capable of stopping an archangel’s holy light.
“Maou!!!!”
It was a simple shout. Not magic, not a sword slash, but a shout.
But the shout was enough to halt the archangel’s attack.
Everyone turned toward the source of the scream.
“Maou…”
It was Chiho.
Sweaty and out of breath, Chiho was atop the stairway, looking inside the room.
“Chiho?! No! Get away!”
Emi rushed to warned Chiho away. But the girl only shook her head.
“…I thought that I needed to apologize for today…”
“For today?”
“And then…this happened… I know I can’t really do anything, but I couldn’t just sit there.”
Mao
u still had no idea he had been subjected to a stakeout from Chiho and her companions.
Chiho had made it back to Sasazuka ahead of the pack, but then returned home, unable to take the regret of betraying Maou’s trust in her. But stewing in her room provided no solace either, and now she was here again.
“…You must be from this world, huh? Well, this isn’t anything you’d be familiar with. Calling the police isn’t gonna help at all. I bet you won’t believe me, but me and this Sadao Maou guy…”
“I know all that!”
Chiho’s shout stopped Gabriel’s lips cold.
“I live here in Japan, but I know all that. All about Maou—about Satan, and Emilia the Hero, and Ente Isla, too. That…and how you’re probably an angel here to pick up Alas Ramus.”
Gabriel shook his head in comic disbelief.
“Well! I was impressed enough that you’ve been interacting so naturally with visitors from another world, but you even spotted me right off as an angel! Heavens be! Do I really look that angelic to you?”
The archangel’s descent back into trivial flamboyance shook Chiho for a moment.
“…Up to now, if anyone’s done anything really bad to Maou or Yusa, it’s been an angel, so…”
The response was almost too honest for its own good.
Maou, Emi, and Suzuno looked on in astonishment. Gabriel and his crew winced painfully. Urushihara, meanwhile, busted out in laughter.
“Well. No comment when it comes to Lucifer, let me tell you, but what’d Sariel ever do to you guys?”
Gabriel was clearly thrown. There was too much previous evidence to deny the truth any further.
“Yeah, I’ll grant you that Sariel and me didn’t exactly live up to the image people have of angels around here…”
“Welllll, then why don’t you stop digging a hole for yourself, mm-kay? Image is important, you know.”
“Oh, like you’re one to talk about image. And what about these guys you dragged in with you? These are, like, first-level street punks in a yakuza film.”
Urushihara glared at the four figures guarding himself and Suzuno. For some reason, they stepped back, as if scared of him.
The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 3 Page 17
