“Funny to think there used to be a cat in here, huh?” he added.
“Indeed…but, Your Demonic Highness, you are acting like Silverfish has passed away. Let us pray that he enjoys a long and fulfilling life in Mr. Hirose’s residence.”
“…Yeah.” Maou nodded.
“Dude, I’d appreciate it if my sneezing didn’t get you all nostalgic for… Behh-choo!”
The sneeze made the closet walls shudder, further distressing Suzuno next door.
“Pray for a long and fulfilling life, huh…?”
“My liege?”
“…That might not be such a dumb idea after all.”
“Hmm?”
“…Never mind. I’m going to bed. Yo, Urushihara! I’m opening the closet to get a blanket!”
“Whoa! Wait, I don’t have the mask on… Dude, I told you to wait! Hahh…choo!”
While disgusted at the goings-on in Devil’s Castle, Suzuno shared one thing in common with the demons: Prayer might be just the thing right now.
“…The Devil King, rescuing a small animal’s life…”
The god she was praying to wasn’t in the skies above Earth, but she scoped out the stars above her regardless.
“If that virtue can establish even the tiniest of footholds in the Devil King’s mind, who can say what will build from there…?”
The summer night rolled on, bringing the heat and the bustle of the city with it—not caring about the thoughts of anyone human or demon below it.
THE DEVIL AND THE HERO GO FUTON SHOPPING
“Hey, Bell, I’m sorry, but could you watch Alas Ramus for me?”
“Ah, Emilia. What brings you here?”
It was evening, the summer sun just beginning to release its grasp on the world, and Emi—presumably fresh from a visit next door—had just interrupted Suzuno’s important business of leafing through a kimono catalog.
“Suzu-Sis!” the child exclaimed as she allowed herself to be transferred from one pair of arms to the other.
“I’ll be right back, okay?” Emi said before hurrying off, not bothering to give the suspicious woman the reason for the favor.
“Suzu-Sis, that a picture book?”
“…Hmm?” replied Suzuno. “Ah, yes. Well, it is a book, yes; one with all kinds of pictures of Japanese clothing, and—”
“I refuse!!” came the thundering interruption through the wafer-thin wall.
“Hmm?” replied Suzuno as she came to her feet, Alas Ramus eyeing her curiously. This was followed by what sounded like an enormous mouse scurrying about on the other side, where the neighbor’s closet would be, and then silence.
“…Alas Ramus?”
“Yes, Suzu-Sis!” the girl politely replied, hand in the air.
That shout undoubtedly came from Emi. Emi, who was in the room next to Suzuno’s—Devil’s Castle, conveniently located in Room 201 of Villa Rosa Sasazuka, which was a cramped, creaky apartment building smack-dab in Tokyo’s Shibuya ward. And if Emi Yusa (aka the Hero Emilia Justina over on another world) was shouting inside there:
“Alas Ramus, are…Mommy and Daddy fighting again?” Suzuno asked.
That was the only logical explanation. Sadao Maou, the Devil King Satan on the same other world, was the “Daddy” in that observation, and he must’ve done something yet again to attract “Mommy’s” ire. But, to Suzuno’s surprise, Alas Ramus shook her head.
“Uh-uh! Today, I said, I said I wanna sleepy in Daddy’s house, but Mommy said go play with you, so…”
“…Oh.”
Suzuno’s shoulders fell at the news, expressed with the best vocabulary skills Alas Ramus could muster.
“…Hopefully there won’t be a storm at the end of this.”
“You—you don’t have to be so loud all of a sudden!”
Sadao Maou, the chief breadwinner at Devil’s Castle, tried to calm his racing heartbeat as he protested.
“It’s not ‘all of a sudden,’” Emi said as she stared Maou down with her cruel, heroic eyes in the middle of the sunbaked room. “You should have realized the moment I put Alas Ramus in Suzuno’s room that I wasn’t about to go along with that. I’m letting you see her once every few days because she demands it of me, all right? But that’s as far as I’m willing to go! You will not let her stay overnight!”
“Such narrow-mindedness for a Hero,” exclaimed the other, taller resident next to Maou—Shirou Ashiya, the Great Demon General, strategic genius, and professional househusband.
“You have no right to complain, Alciel!”
“I have heard it all before by now, Emilia. You believe demons such as ourselves will be detrimental to Alas Ramus’s education, yes? And for that shallow, baseless reason, you refuse to let the child stay over?”
The history between the trio said as much. They once formed the two sides of a battle for the very fate of the world of Ente Isla—the King of All Demons and his faithful assistant in one corner, the Hero with the holy sword in the other. Emi, with her unique perspective on the demons and how they behaved, had hardly exercised restraint in giving them her unfettered opinions on their good names before.
“And you still call yourself a decent mother?” Ashiya continued. “What kind of Hero—no, what kind of sensible living creature of any kind—would so cruelly deny a mere child the right to be together with her own father? Regarding Alas Ramus, at the very least, is this really the time to let our past conflicts bubble to the surface?”
This was all complicated by the fact that Alas Ramus—currently under the care of Suzuno Kamazuki, better known in Ente Isla as Church cleric and would-be reformer Crestia Bell—was no ordinary toddler. She was the personification of a Yesod fragment, a seed from the Tree of Sephirot that formed the embryos for worlds themselves in their native dimension. She believed Emi to be her “mommy” and Maou her “daddy,” and when she first arrived out of the blue in Japan, she resided in Devil’s Castle. Following a couple of battles against Ente Isla’s angels for control over both her and Emi’s Better Half holy sword, Alas Ramus had fused herself into the sword and, by extension, into Emi’s psyche, requiring an unplanned move into the young woman’s apartment.
All of this drama resulted in the extremely precarious situation of Emi having to team up with her old nemesis for the sake of this child’s future in Japan. It was a sort of silent agreement between the two—for her, at least—to try not to dredge up the past too much in public.
That was the point Ashiya was trying to bring up. Emi snorted at him.
“Our past ‘conflicts’? Alciel, is that seriously why you think I’m refusing this? I mean, it’s not not the case, but—”
“Yeah, no duh.”
Emi ignored Maou’s jab.
“—but even if I didn’t see you guys as horrible demons, there’s no possible way I would ever allow Alas Ramus to sleep in here!”
To prove her point, she marched up to the closet, put her fingertips to the sliding door, and flung it open.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” came the surprised, sniveling response from the second tier of shelving as a small man tumbled out from it. Emi’s initial ranting made him retreat inside, and he had had a literal ear to the door ever since. That was the way Urushihara rolled—Hanzou Urushihara, also known as Lucifer, another former Demon General.
“Geez!” he protested, his hands breaking his fall just in time to keep from going headfirst into the tatami-mat floor. “Give me some warning next time, dudette!”
Emi, ignoring his plight, pointed right at the tier he used to be lying on.
“You see what should be here? Futons! Bedding! Something! If you want Alas Ramus to stay here, at least get some of that!”
The three demons fell silent. There wasn’t much countering that.
Emi, for her part, wasn’t deliberately trying to be the bad guy in this argument. Within reason, she wanted to satisfy Alas Ramus’s wishes, too. For the first week of her life on Earth, after all, this cramped single room (a studio apartment, if you wer
e willing to be extremely charitable) was the only home the child knew. It might still be now if it weren’t for that whole sword-fusion thing, in fact.
But what happened, happened—and the changes to Alas Ramus’s living situation had been pretty drastic. Emi’s apartment had air-conditioning, for example. For a child not all that far removed from weaning age (or whatever they had up there on that tree she came from), that was key. It didn’t seem like Tokyo would end its habit of setting new heat records anytime soon, and while Villa Rosa Sasazuka had been built in another time and offered fairly decent ventilation as a result, simply standing here and staring at her sworn enemy was making beads of sweat run down Emi’s forehead.
The second reason: the futon she was just yelling about. For a woman who hadn’t grown up in an environment where sleeping on the floor was a norm, Emi still preferred a full-on bed for her own apartment. Even now, she couldn’t forget the first time Alas Ramus slept at her place. “Fluffy! Fluffy!” she kept crying out in joy as she slapped at the mattress. Before then, apparently, it was either the tatami-mat floor, or a bath towel placed on top of said floor. Even in Ente Isla, whose culture and economy weren’t even a shadow of Japan’s, everyone who wasn’t dirt-poor had beds of their own. It was impossible for Emi to figure out why Maou, who clearly managed to keep his head above water despite Japan’s high prices on everything, couldn’t buy a single futon for his only child, or pseudochild, as the case may be.
“I’m not asking for memory foam or a hundred percent goose down or anything, but having a girl her age sleep on the bare floor is just ridiculous, you know that? Her bones are still forming and everything. If you make her sleep like that, it’s gonna stunt her growth!”
The mere idea of three demons lined up in a row, sleeping on tatami in this deadly summer weather, was enough to make Emi burst out laughing. They kept themselves and their domain relatively clean, at least, but there weren’t exactly any bottles of disinfectant spray lying around, and this tatami-mat floor couldn’t have been that clean.
Maou and Ashiya failed to respond to Emi’s completely valid complaint. Urushihara was attempting to nonchalantly climb back into the closet before Emi’s gaze stopped him, sending him running toward the window.
“…And, you know, I’ve been wondering this, but why don’t you ever buy futons in the first place? It’s not like you’re that poor, are you?”
As long as they weren’t too picky about the store they got them from, they could at least assemble a couple full single-size sets for cheap. Around fifteen thousand yen could get them a setup they could easily use for any season.
Emi looked at the empty space in the closet and sighed.
“I have given up on it,” Ashiya growled. “As far as I am concerned, that is merely Lucifer’s storage space now.”
“Dude, I’m not luggage,” Urushihara protested. But the words rang true enough to Emi’s ears.
“Okay, so the top tier’s out,” Emi said. “But you could make some space on the bottom, couldn’t you? I don’t think there’s all that much stuff inside those cardboard boxes.”
“Emilia, I don’t spend all day in there…”
“I don’t really wanna say this,” a despondent Maou interrupted as he spread his legs out on the floor, “but before I answer that, lemme ask you this, Emi. All the bedding and appliances and other crap you’ve bought here—what’re you gonna do with it if you go back to Ente Isla?”
“Appliances? You mean the ones I use?” Emi turned an eye to the refrigerator and microwave in the Devil’s Castle kitchen.
Maou nodded at her.
“Well, I was thinking maybe I could take them back with me. Like, convert their power source to holy magic or something.”
“Seriously? It’s okay for you to bring advanced stuff like that into another world? Don’t you think they’d burn you at the stake for witchcraft or something?”
Emi knew what he was getting at, but shrugged anyway. “Look, I’ve traveled across every inch of Ente Isla. I’ve even followed you here to slay you. I don’t think anyone’s gonna complain if I want a few amenities in my life after that.”
“…Quite the lofty aspirations,” whispered Ashiya under his breath. All that work on Emi’s part, and the consumer products birthed by Earth’s scientists were good enough for her the whole time. Crossing entire dimensions just for a chance at a microwave, a fridge? The second-tier prizes you get for guessing the price of a car wrong in a game show? Talk about a cheap date.
“Yeah, I guess I’m not all that different,” Maou said. “I’d love to have that microwave back home, too—hell, maybe two or three more fridges, even. Still…” He glanced at the closet looming behind Emi. “Futons…don’t exactly work that way. Think about it. We’re demons.”
“So?”
“Like, Urushihara’s one thing—he didn’t change much in the transformation. But even now, a blanket’s startin’ to not be enough for Ashiya, you know? Or for me, for that matter.”
Now Emi understood. These demons were in human form—for now. But their actual forms were large, demonic, and all-powerful. Maou and Ashiya in particular, back at home, were far larger than any human being could ever be. Which meant…
“Pfft!”
Emi chuckled to herself, trying to picture the cloven-hoofed demons trying to fit in a futon. Maou, guessing this would happen, winced.
“Well, that’s…ffppfftt! That’s fine, isn’t it?” Emi asked. “You’d be a Devil King of the people! Your own futon and everything! Maybe you oughta go for memory foam so that horn I cut off doesn’t bother you at night! Bah-ha-ha-ha!”
“Enough laughing!” exclaimed Ashiya, face reddened. “Enough imagining His Demonic Highness in a human futon already!”
“Ashiya, do you have to spell it out like that? You imagined it, too. That hurts my feelings a little.”
“Gah!”
“…Anyway. Even if we buy futons, we can’t use ’em back there. Besides…” Maou crossed his arms and sat back, looking up at Emi. “If we did buy that stuff, that’s pretty much declaring to the world that we’re just fine shackin’ up in this world for good. I just didn’t want to buy ’em, okay? Japan, to me at least, is just a rest stop.”
“Ahhh…ha-ha-ha-ha…” Emi, finally composing herself again, brought a hand to her hip. “The King of All Demons, playing mind games with himself like that? Puh-leeze. And you better not give that reasoning to Chiho, either.”
“…”
Emi bringing up the name of a certain girl absent from the room drove her point home even harder. Chiho Sasaki, high-school teen and the only girl in Japan who knew the whole truth behind Ente Isla and everyone currently in the room, still had feelings for Maou anyway. If she heard him proclaim to the world that he was just doing the equivalent of couch-surfing in this world, it would dishearten her, to say the least. She was a good friend to Emi, for that matter.
“…Well,” Maou deflected the subject, “besides, buying a set of three futons is gonna set us back a pretty decent amount, isn’t it? We ain’t that well off yet, so I figure—hey, if we made it this far without ’em, might as well go all the way.”
“All right…” Emi wasn’t willing to delve into Maou’s finances, but something still made no sense to her. “But you’ve been here in Japan for over a year by now, haven’t you? What’d you all do last winter?”
A little urban camping wouldn’t hurt them much in the summer, but going without a futon in midwinter Tokyo seemed like suicide to her.
“Oh, that?” Maou pointed at the low table in the center of the room. “When I bought that, it came with this wimpy little kotatsu heater inside it. After that, we just put on a bunch of layers, and I had Ashiya sleep opposite to me and we stuck our legs under there.”
“Oh my God…”
Maou proudly placed his palm on the dining table/writing desk/etc. in front of him. Urushihara, still inexperienced with Japanese winters, groaned.
“…Well, I’m not gonna
complain if you all freeze to death this winter,” Emi said. It really seemed that way to her. These demons were gonna get themselves killed even if she didn’t bother slaying them. But that still didn’t solve the problem at hand. “So be it. Like you said, Alciel, I care for that girl, so… I’ll pay for it.”
“Really?!”
“What?!”
“Dudette!!”
Emi glared at the wide-eyed demons, doubting their gratitude. “Alas Ramus’s, all right? Why do I have to pay for yours? Also, you’re her ‘daddy,’ remember? We’re going Dutch on this or nothin’.”
The wave of depression this statement generated was as palpable as it was dramatic. Emi wished she had it on video.
“Ugh,” groaned Emi to herself on the commuter train the next morning. “Why did I have to go that far?”
She knew it wouldn’t be fair to Alas Ramus to shut off visitation rights entirely—that much, she was willing to accept. The problem was the holy-sword connection between “mother” and daughter. It prevented the two of them from being physically separated beyond a certain distance. Which meant, naturally, that Emi would need to be near Devil’s Castle if Alas Ramus wanted to sleep in peace in there.
A night in Suzuno’s place next door would suffice, although it’d be imposing terribly on her friend. But would Alas Ramus be willing to accept that?
On the night before their first battle with the angel Gabriel and his minions, Emi, Maou, and Alas Ramus spent a single “family” night together at his place. If the child still had vivid memories of that stayover, she’d all but demand a repeat—all three of them together again. Nobody had any futons at the time, so it wasn’t like Emi was “sleeping with” Maou (in so many words).
But Emi had even more serious, nonimaginary reasons to be concerned.
“It’s not like I could kick out Alciel and Lucifer, either…”
From a purely physical perspective, there was no sleeping space left in Devil’s Castle for Emi. Things were different from the last time she stayed over. As small as Urushihara was, three men lying in that tatami-mat space would immediately fill it up. There would be only the barest of gaps for Alas Ramus, just like how it was last time. If Emi was going to somehow snake her way between the computer desk and table to stay near Alas Ramus, that would put her dangerously close to the other demons as she attempted to sleep.
The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 7 Page 9
