The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 6

by Satoshi Wagahara

  “N-no, um…erm…”

  She was talking to Sariel, whose voice remained tiny and imploring. He stammered, knowing that telling her the real reason would only disenchant her even more. But it was too late for that.

  “I heard that it’s mainly because I banned you from my restaurant.”

  “Mngh!”

  Kisaki must have known that from the start. Even Emi and Suzuno, originally hearing the story secondhand from Chiho, could see that.

  “You’re more sensible than I gave you credit for. I all but resigned myself to seeing those stupid red roses on the counter just like normal the next day.”

  “I-I figured that would go too far into stalker territory for your tastes,” Sariel timidly stated.

  Kisaki shrugged and chuckled to herself. “If I wasn’t as generous to you as I was, what you were doing before then was stalker-ish enough. I don’t know where you heard my age from, but giving a total stranger one rose for every year of her lifespan is grounds for a sexual harassment lawsuit these days.”

  “You…you did that?”

  “Oh, man, you gotta be kidding me…”

  “Duuuude. See, this is exactly why we got such a bad rep these days.”

  There was little Sariel could do to counter this criticism.

  “I still believe I’m justified in banning you. You’re the one acting creepy around all the women you see—it’s completely your fault. …But.” Kisaki turned just a little toward Sariel, eyebrows still lowered. “I feel like I’m using your whacked-out love to bring down Sentucky, and that doesn’t make me feel good. No real barman would defeat their business competition with dirty tricks.”

  “Then…you’ll…?”

  With a hefty sigh, Kisaki turned her face away from him.

  “If I have to watch you mope around on the street and have dogs piss on you, it’d be better for everyone if you’re happy and sane inside my dining area instead. You can come back starting tomorrow.”

  It is difficult to describe the transformation in Sariel’s facial expression. Imagine a penguin chick, surviving a brutal winter’s blizzard, sighting the first blessed ray of sunshine spreading out from between the clouds. The very color of his soul had changed.

  “But!” Kisaki snapped. “No more roses. Please. I have to get permission from my regional manager to put plants in the restaurant space, and I’m sure you do, too. It’s a pain in the butt to deal with. Also, this is your final warning. If I ever catch you making trouble for my staff or customers again, you can expect a permanent ban and maybe a court summons if I’m in a bad mood.”

  Then she sauntered off into the Hatagaya evening cityscape, not bothering to wait for a response.

  “…That sure worked out well, didn’t it?”

  “I suppose so,” Maou blankly replied.

  “Mm…? L-Lord Sariel?!”

  “Sariel! Sariel, snap out of it! You’re f-floating in the air!”

  The happiness within Sariel, a dreamy, doll-like smile on his face as he watched Kisaki leave, must have been made of helium. His body was bathed in an angelic light as his feet left the sidewalk. The street was deserted, luckily, but it still took ten minutes to get him grounded again—emotionally and physically.

  Saturday. The day of the MgRonald Barista seminar was almost tragically beautiful.

  As far as Maou could tell, Chiho’s skill with holy force hadn’t improved all that much in the few days since Kisaki had lifted the ban on Sariel. Work prevented Maou (and Emi, too) from being around her for very long, but that was the impression Ashiya and Suzuno gave him, at least. Farfarello and Erone remained incommunicado, so it appeared to everyone that this was going to be a drawn-out battle.

  Maou sweated it out at nine AM as he waited for Chiho at Sasazuka station, cursing the sun for this final blast of summer heat but still finding himself oddly anticipating the upcoming seminar.

  Even during summer break, the ever-diligent Chiho remained busy. Between her club activities, her part-time job, and her alien-world magic training, there wasn’t much free time left. She more or less wrapped up all her summer school projects in mid-July—that was so classically Chiho of her—but considering all the trouble these visitors from Ente Isla had caused her this summer, Maou felt that he owed her a trip out somewhere after the workshop was over.

  Then, inside a pocket of the tote bag he was using to bring writing materials and such along, his phone vibrated.

  “Huh?” he said to himself as he brought it to his ear. “That’s odd. Is she late or something?”

  {“I’m right behind you, Maou.”}

  “Waggh?!”

  The sudden voice in his head made Maou jump on the spot.

  “Um, sorry if I scared you!”

  She was right there, clad in a robin’s-egg blue dress and hefting a large shoulder bag, looking a little despondent upon realizing that she gave Maou heart palpitations with her act. “Are you all right? I thought I’d surprise you a little, but…sorry.”

  “Oh, uh… No, it’s fine, but…that, just now…” Maou blinked, noticing that Chiho had no cell phone in her hand.

  “Uh-huh! That was an Idea Link.”

  “Y-you mastered that?”

  She seemed completely serene, the act of activating her holy force not taxing her strength at all. The voice that spooked him had a direct link to his brain, no doubt about it.

  “Not quite yet, actually. Your phone rang just now, didn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” Maou peered at his phone’s screen and bought up his call history. “…No caller ID? I thought I had anonymous calls blocked on this thing.”

  He didn’t check before picking up, figuring it had to be Chiho calling him, but the only word in the call log was “Restricted.”

  “I still can’t get it to work unless I have an amplifier to work with. I don’t need to have anything on me, but I can’t get other people to pick up on my messages unless they have a phone on them.”

  “Huh. Kind of a roundabout way of doing it, isn’t it? That’d actually be harder for me than just linking up directly.”

  Chiho chuckled. “Suzuno and Sariel said the same thing.”

  “You’re pretty much just making a phone call with holy magic, aren’t you? That’s kind of a convoluted way to keep from using up your minutes.”

  “Well, I just can’t quite picture linking into someone’s mind like that yet. But I know you can talk to someone by sending a message to a phone number at the right wavelength or whatever, so I tried memorizing Suzuno’s number, and…it just kind of worked.”

  Chiho made it sound simple enough, but not even Emi could have come up with that idea, and she used a phone to Idea Link with Emeralda all the time. The way holy magic worked, it was the spellcaster, not the receiver, who needed to have an amplifier. What was the science, so to speak, behind this approach?

  “…Wow. Even if I wanted to try doing it that way, I’m pretty limited in terms of dark power, so…”

  Even now, Maou still had no idea how Emi and Suzuno were recharging their holy force. Urushihara seemed to be in on the secret, but he refused to tell him—“it wouldn’t help us anyway,” as he put it. If Chiho was tapping into the same supply as the other two, maybe Maou would have a chance to see that in action today.

  “Well, either way, I’m glad you can send out an SOS when you need to now. What kind of range do you have?”

  “As far as we could tell during practice yesterday, I can manage a radius of three hundred feet or so.”

  “Three hundred feet?” Maou’s face soured a bit. “That’s pretty damn good for a beginner, but it’s hard to say if that’s gonna be good enough or not. I guess phone signals can’t break through Erone’s barrier, either. I doubt your power’s affected by that much, but I wouldn’t rely too much on the maximum end of that range, either. ’Course, I guess we’ll spend all day together anyway, so it doesn’t matter too much.”

  “…!”

  The way Maou said “all day together”
so naturally made Chiho gasp a little.

  “I…I guess it’s been a while, hasn’t it? You and I together, alone, for a while…”

  Maou reflected thoughtfully on this for a moment. “Ummm…yeah, you’re right. Not since that whole deal underground at Shinjuku. Hard to believe that was only three months ago.”

  “…………Yeah.”

  Chiho expected that tepid reply. But, inside, she wanted the topic to last at least a bit longer than that.

  “Well, shall we, then?” Maou said as he took out the ticket he already bought and headed for the turnstile.

  “…Sure,” Chiho said glumly. “Oh, wait a sec, I need to go buy a ticket.” Maou waited for her to buy a one-stop ticket before joining her through the gate.

  Three pairs of eyes stared at them from behind a nearby column.

  “Why do we have to stalk her like a bunch of Peeping Toms?”

  “We must. Chiho may have acquired the knack for sending Idea Links, but the Devil King himself has practically no ability to fight.”

  “I am prepared to sacrifice everything I have to protect the crew of my goddess!”

  “Oof. Talk about the leopard changing its spots. Are you cutting work today?”

  “Say what you will. My goddess told us herself: No matter how old a man becomes, he must always keep sprinting toward his dreams! And I am not cutting work, thank you. I would never shame my goddess in such fashion! I took a vacation day!”

  Emi, Suzuno, and Sariel all agreed long ago that they needed to tail Chiho today. What surprised the girls was how sincere Sariel was in his zest to keep the girl safe. They were concerned that Kisaki’s softened stance toward him would make him break his promise to help with her training, but if anything, he was more passionate about it than ever before. The courtesy he now showed Maou and Emi was almost sickeningly cloying, and he even offered to cover all the training-space rental fees until Chiho mastered amplifier-based spellcasting. Now, even though nobody asked him—or even told him that Maou and Chiho were attending a MgRonald training seminar—here he was, following them around since morning.

  “Well, as long as you don’t get in our way… Let’s go before we lose them.”

  The trio went through the gate and spoke in hushed voices as they watched Maou and Chiho line up for the front car of the next train to Shinjuku.

  “You said, ‘no matter how old a man becomes,’” Emi asked Sariel, “but are you guys really…just people, in the end?”

  Gabriel had suggested as much to her. That “divinity,” at least as it applied to the angels above Ente Isla, didn’t really exist—that they were more human than not. She wanted confirmation, and now that Sariel was on friendly terms with her—who would’ve thought a MgRonald manager could’ve engineered that miracle? Truth really was stranger than fiction—she figured there was no time to waste.

  “You must’ve made Gabriel confess to it, hm?”

  Not only did Sariel not deny it, but he even knew the source of the leak.

  “So you’re not, like, immortal or…?”

  “No. At least, I don’t see myself as some sort of supernatural being. People call us angels, but really, we’re just people, too. The only difference is that we live longer, we’re more intelligent, we’re stronger, we have more capacity for holy force, we’re prettier, and we’ve got scads of holy charisma.”

  “God help me,” Suzuno moaned behind them, “I can hear my faith disintegrating in my soul…”

  “I didn’t ask you to brag about it like that, but… Okay, one question.”

  “What? Wait. Before you say it, let me remind you: There’s one woman in my life, and that shall forever be my goddess.”

  “I know that. She told you to knock that off, remember? I wish you wouldn’t keep reminding me.”

  Emi wiped the sweat from her brow as she asked, “How is society, like, set up in heaven?”

  “Hmm,” Sariel replied, eyes turned upward. “Kind of a vague question, isn’t it? We could take the next train from here to Hachiouji and back by the time I finished answering it.”

  The western Tokyo suburb of Hachiouji was the last stop on the opposite end of the Keio Line, thirty stops and a good twenty-five miles away. Not exactly a quick ride, in other words.

  “Right,” Suzuno said. “So how about the Heavenly Regiment?”

  “Hmm?”

  “They were equipped with shoddy weapons, mere toys compared to your scythe or Gabriel’s Durandal sword. They are clearly different from angels or archangels, but what is their position in heaven, exactly?”

  Inside a box in her apartment, Suzuno still kept a few broken pieces of the Regiment’s weaponry she’d picked up from their battle at Dokodemo Tower in Yoyogi. They were of unusually poor make, forged from metal so brittle that a single kick of Suzuno’s foot was enough to shatter them. Hardly weapons worthy of being wielded by an angel, in other words.

  “Ah. Yeah, those are all originally Ente Islan, actually. I don’t know about their weapons. Maybe they made ’em themselves? Or maybe they brought ’em with them.”

  “Whaat?!”

  Emi couldn’t help but exclaim in surprise as well.

  “The Heavenly Regiment is all people from Ente Isla?!”

  “Sure is,” Sariel briskly replied, striking the two women dumb. “You know how there’s all that scripture and mythology about people being called for by angels? Well, a lot of that’s pretty true.”

  “B-but not even the loftiest of Church clerics… Some of them were canonized after death, yes, but summoned by the angels themselves? Not a one…”

  The next train to Shinjuku chose that moment to arrive. The conversation continued inside the air-conditioned rail car.

  “Hey, it’s our choice to make, isn’t it? What’s the benefit to us, picking up some old geezer who spent the last X number of decades lusting after power, wasting his life on stupid Church politics, and cultivating a vast knowledge of things that matter to absolutely no one? Did you think that’s the kind of person we’d welcome in? He’d rebel against us in half a second. We make our selections from the general public.”

  “The what…?”

  “You know—tortured slaves, war orphans, that sort of thing. That’s who we use to fill the Regiment ranks. They’re really important to us! They take care of a lot of the little things for us in heaven, you know, and since these are people with a truly pure faith in the Church and all, they’re never going to betray us. If you guys want to make it up there, I’d recommend going back to secular life, pronto.”

  He couldn’t have been blunter. It was a complete damnation of the Church and all it stood for.

  “It’s not like the Church is totally useless to us, though. There’s no more effective way out there to build faith in us, after all.”

  Even Suzuno, capable of compartmentalizing the Church’s dual purposes as a beacon of faith and a de facto government, had trouble wrapping her mind around this.

  “And plus, we sometimes pick people up from there if we think they’d be useful, even if there’s a few skeletons in their closets. Not a lot, but some. I’m guessing that’s the retirement Olba Meiyer’s aiming for.”

  “That’s crazy!” Emi exclaimed, face stiff. “What Olba’s doing right now is making him accomplice to a completely new tragedy in Ente Isla. If that’s the kind of person who’s allowed into heaven, I’d say heaven’s in sore need of a revolution!”

  Sariel shrugged his shoulders. “Ooooh, you’re a scary lady.”

  Their train, which started its journey on elevated rails, soon descended into a tunnel. Shinjuku was just a few moments away.

  “Although…there’s a pretty big information gap between the first-genners like Gabriel and the second-genners like me and Raguel. I guess you could say the first-genners aren’t very big fans of keeping all of that on the down low.”

  “First-genner…?”

  “Oh, didn’t you notice? There’s two types of angels you guys have seen.”

&nbs
p; “…Oh.”

  Suzuno clapped her hands in realization and looked into the eyes of Sariel, seated adjacent to him.

  “Angels with purple eyes, and angels with red eyes…”

  “Yeah, that. Red’s the first generation, and purple’s the second one. Ignoring the Heavenly Regiment, you can pretty much divide us into two groups like that.”

  “So Lucifer is in the second generation? And even then, he was equal in ranking to Gabriel?”

  “Welllll…” Sariel shook his head. “There’s a lot about Lucifer that not even I know about. He was always apparently kind of a lazy bum, though. Ever since I remember, he was always a fallen angel, out of heaven. But I’m one of the oldest of the second-genners, too, so who knows what’s up with him?”

  “What is the difference between the two generations, my lord? Do you see them as your parents or whatnot?”

  Sariel nodded eagerly. “Ah, yeah, I better explain that first. The boundary’s right when—”

  Just then, the train shuddered loudly as it navigated the rail switches just before Shinjuku station.

  “We’re almost here.”

  The two women wanted to hear more, but they also needed to keep an eye on Maou and Chiho. The three of them sidled up to the door of the largely uncrowded car. And Sariel’s last revelation, delivered alongside the conductor’s station announcement, was something difficult for Emi and Suzuno to digest at the time.

  “The boundary’s right when the Cataclysm of the Devil Overlord took place. The first generation was born before it; the second generation afterward. That’s how it was explained to me, anyway.”

  Ten shiny new coffee servers were lined up against one wall of a large conference room.

  The part-time crew and salaried employees gathered here, at MgRonald’s Japan headquarters near Shinjuku station’s west exit, numbered about a hundred or so. The sight of all these employees looking to polish their MagCafé skills filled Maou with excited anticipation.

  “Thank you all for taking time out of your busy schedules to attend this MgRonald Barista workshop. First off, I’d like everyone to make sure the number on their registration forms matches the one on their desks. After that, you’ll want to go over your handouts to make sure everything’s in order…”