Demon King Daimaou: Volume 6

by Shoutarou Mizuki

  Keena was talking like she was the heroine of a tragedy. She’d gotten down on her knees to pray, but the rice pudding cup was still firmly in her hands.

  “I-I have no idea why this happened!” Keina, who’d been dragged up to the roof by Junko and then abandoned, was just standing there in shock. But unluckily for her, she found herself caught up in the battle.

  “Kyah!”

  Fragments of concrete rained down upon her. She put up her hands to defend herself, but a small rock struck her forehead.

  “Oww!” She put her hand up to her head. A small amount of blood stuck to her fingers.

  “Blood! Noooo! It hurts! Nooo!” When she saw the blood, Keina started to scream. But none of the three who were fighting noticed.

  One of Cerberus’s fireballs was knocked off course by a punch from Lily, and part of it flew towards Keina.

  “Watch out!”

  Her body was suddenly knocked to the side. Keena, still invisible, had tackled her and protected her from the spray of flames.

  “Kyaaah!” Keina fell to the ground, shocked. It was only then that the three realized something was wrong.

  “Hmm?”

  “What?”

  “What happened?” When they turned towards Keina, they saw Keena, too.

  “Stop!” Keena spread out her arms in the pose of a young girl trying to stop a war.

  “Stop fighting! Please! Please, I’m begging you!’ Keena said, weeping. But since the three of them were all women, a young girl’s tears didn’t mean that much to them.

  “B-But I’m fighting to right a wrong,” Junko mumbled.

  “But Dorry got hurt!” Keena yelled. Junko fell silent, but Fujiko was unimpressed.

  “Its her fault this whole thing happened!” Fujiko said.

  “I’m not just going to ignore it when someone flattens me with a door,” Lily said. Since she’d been an innocent bystander to begin with, she wasn’t going to forget this easily.

  “Stop it! I know why you’re fighting! So...” Keena dropped to her knees and put the cup of rice pudding on the ground in front of her.

  “Let’s all share it! That should fix everything!”

  The three of them stared at the cup in confusion.

  “...What are you talking about?”

  “And...”

  “What is that?”

  “What? This is rice pudding! The legendary rice pudding made from Uonuma Koshihikari rice! It’s strained until it’s silky smooth, and goes perfectly with milk! Its heavenly taste is said to make anyone who eats it feel like they’re floating on a cloud! The legendary Rosanjin spoke of it when he said, ‘My day begins with rice pudding, and my day ends with rice pudding!’ It was ranked #1 in a newspaper survey of foods people want for their last meal!” Keena explained in an awe-struck voice, but the others did nothing but glance at one another.

  “Rice... pudding?”

  “I’ve never tried it.”

  “It’s basically milk porridge. If you don’t flavor it, it tastes like milk and rice, and if you try to make it sweet, it’s not that different from regular pudding,” Fujiko said flatly.

  Lily looked at Fujiko like this was the dumbest thing she’d ever heard.

  “Is that what’s behind this? Did you blast off the door to the roof to get that stuff?”

  “Of course not! It’s another one of that girl’s stupid misunderstandings!”

  “I’m sure it is, but... Ugh. This whole thing is starting to feel so stupid.” Junko sighed and put her blade back in its scabbard.

  “I guess we can do this another time.” Lily’s shoulders slumped.

  “Yes, I agree. You can go back home, Cerberus.” Fujiko sent Cerberus back to his den, and put on her uniform.

  “I’m so glad you all understand! Now let’s all eat it, together!” Keena started to cut the rice pudding into five equal pieces, but the three of them just walked past her.

  “See you later.”

  “You can have it all to yourself.”

  “If I really want some, I can just use the student council budget to buy it.”

  Keena couldn’t believe what she’d heard.

  “Huh? Then I can have it all to myself? Oh, but you want some, right Dorry?”

  Keena looked towards Keina, who’d been crying a moment ago. She was looking at the rice pudding with gleaming eyes. Keina could be almost idiotically pure-hearted at times, and she’d evidently believed everything Keena had said.

  “Y-You’re willing to give me something so wonderful? You’re really sure?”

  “Yup! Let’s eat it together!”

  Keena and Keina nodded to one another.

  And then someone else appeared on the roof.

  “Huh? I heard there was a fuss, so I came up here. Is everything alright?”

  Akuto poked his head out from the broken doorway. Junko, Fujiko, and Lily were just about to leave, and all of them were shocked.

  “Oh.”

  “Akuto!”

  “What are you doing here?”

  Lily had nothing to do with it, but Fujiko and Junko remembered the original reason for their quarrel.

  “H-Hey! I heard you’re worried about your future! Why didn’t you come talk to me?”

  “Akuto! You’ve decided on a happy future with me, haven’t you?”

  Junko and Fujiko rushed towards him.

  Akuto was confused, but apologized.

  “Huh? If I gave you the wrong idea, I’m sorry. I wanted to think about something on my own. That was all.”

  “Think about something? I heard it was something important, that had to do with your future.”

  “No... I mean... I feel really bad for the owner of that café. His café might go out of business and he might lose his job because of me. So I thought I should send him some money.”

  “But you don’t have a lot of cash yourself, do you? That would be pretty expensive...”

  “That’s right. So I was thinking of asking the principal for a loan that I would pay back when I graduate. I just wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t. So I was trying to think about it and come up with a plan to repay the debt.”

  “No! I can’t let you get a job, Akuto!” Fujiko said as she clung to him. “If it’s that important to you, I’ll pay it! Whether it’s a hundred million, or two hundred million!”

  Junko interrupted her loudly, as if she didn’t want to lose her chance.

  “I-If that’s what this is about, then I’m at fault too. My family will pay the money...”

  But Akuto shook his head.

  “No, I thought about it, and we’re students, so we’d be relying on our parents’ money. But this time, I don’t want to use any money that’s coming from somebody’s family. I think part of what happened last time was because I tried to rely on the Hattori clan, for one thing.”

  “Th-Then...”

  “Unless I make the money myself, or somehow get lucky and find it, there’s going to be some political meaning behind it, right? So I have to do this myself,” Akuto said, but neither Fujiko nor Junko were willing to give in.

  “If you want money, I can go collect some in secret!”

  “I don’t think anybody will want money that you got illegally, Fujiko.”

  “What? It’s better than having your parents pay!”

  “Fine, but if you’re paying, that means you’re admitting you’re at fault for what happened at the café, right?”

  “Of course not! That was Keina Doronz’s fault! This whole fight started because of her ridiculous attitu...”

  “That’s right! I heard you were being mean to Doronz, so I came to stop you...”

  The two of them went back to being ready to fight at any moment.

  Akuto frowned. He looked at Lily, the most powerful person here, for help, but she just shook her head like she didn’t want to be bothered with it, and then walked off.

  Junko and Fujiko started screaming at each other, only to be interrupted by Keena, who was naked exc
ept for a school uniform jacket.

  “No fighting! If we all eat the rice pudding together, it will solve everything! We’ll all be friends!” Keena said.

  Fujiko and Junko tried to ignore her, but then they noticed that Keina was eating the rice pudding she’d been given.

  “Oh, this is delicious! I didn’t realize there was a way to make rice taste as good as bread! This is wonderful! We can be friends!” Keina said. She seemed to have forgotten all about the sex she was supposed to have with Akuto.

  Come to think of it, the jacket Keena was wearing belonged to Keina. That could only mean they were friendly enough now for her to lend it.

  “See, we’re friends! It’s delicious,” Keena said, “so try some!”

  She stuck a cup and spoon in Junko and Fujiko’s faces, and they each took a bite. They both frowned.

  “I hate to say it, but... it’s not great.”

  “No. It tastes awful.”

  “Huh? It’s delicious! Right? Right?” Keena offered the last bit in the cup to Akuto.

  He thought for a moment before eating it, and then shook his head.

  “I’m sorry, but it tastes very... mysterious. Huh?” Akuto saw letters at the bottom of the cup. “You’re a winner?”

  That’s what it said on the bottom of the cup.

  “Oh! Yay! I won!” Keena shouted with glee.

  “One of the reasons this rice pudding is so popular is that sometimes you can win a prize. It’s really hard to win, but you get a ton of money.”

  “Money?”

  “Yup. It keeps building up if nobody wins, so I think right now it’s about 50 million,” Keena said, as if that wasn’t an incredibly huge number.

  As everyone stood there in shock, Keena handed the cup to Akuto.

  “You said it was okay if it was money you found because you were lucky, right? Congratulations. You were the last one to eat it, so it’s yours, Ackie.”

  Akuto just stood there in shock. But Keena was perfectly calm.

  “See? Rice pudding made everything peaceful, right? So let’s all eat rice pudding!”

  ○

  Later, the other students heard about what had happened, and rice pudding became extremely popular.

  But nobody was able to eat rice pudding every day, and so Keena and Keina became popular for being the only students in the Academy who could do it. Huge amounts of rice pudding were brought into the school for them to eat, but nobody won, and the fad quickly faded.

  “It’s supposed to be legendary because it’s impossible to find, but...”

  Akuto was able to send a letter, along with the winning cup, to the owner of Café Bakhtin. This probably wasn’t a nice thing to say after he’d been so blessed by it, but...

  “...It’s impossible to find because nobody wants to eat it, and the prize money only built up so much because nobody bought a winning cup, right?”

  3 - Literature is Hard?

  Keena and Keina were much closer now, it seemed. It was hard to tell if it was because of the rice pudding or not.

  This made things a lot easier for Akuto, now that he didn’t have Keina following him around every minute of the day. Things were still just as chaotic, though.

  “Dorry, this is a book of things that really happened in the past!”

  “I see! I’m sure I’ll learn a lot from it!”

  Keena’s hobby lately was finding books for Keina to read, and Keina would always believe whatever was in them.

  —What’s she making her read now?

  Akuto glanced at the title; it was an old fiction novel about psychics. It was the story of how an evil mind invaded from space, and humanity fought back with a network of superpowered psychics.

  —It’s definitely not non-fiction.

  But Keina really seemed to believe whatever was written in it. In this case, Keena believed it too, so the effect was doubled.

  “The Earth is under attack, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right! If you don’t have a pure heart, you’ll be possessed and terrible things will happen.”

  Keena and Keina were nodding to each other.

  All Keina’s talk about ‘eco-friendly cafés’ was because of a magazine article she’d read just before she’d transferred here. From what Keina had said when she was drunk, after she was found, they’d decided to educate her by giving her magazines.

  A lot of the things that had been happening lately were because Keina believed everything she read. When she’d read a detective novel, she’d started investigating everyone around her, and ended up finding a hidden treasure one of the teachers was keeping. That had caused a mess.

  —Well, I guess superheroes can’t cause that much trouble.

  “From the way the possessed people are described in this book, I think Ms. Mitsuko is possessed by evil! She must be purged!”

  Actually, it could cause a lot of trouble.

  “The stuff in that book isn’t real,” Akuto interrupted the conversation.

  “What?!” Keina’s eyes went wide, like she was truly shocked.

  “Don’t say that, Ackie. You need to read everything in a book as if it were true,” Keena said scoldingly.

  “Fiction wouldn’t exist then, though.” Akuto laughed. But Keena shook her head.

  “That’s not what I meant. A book creates its own world within it. So it’s bad manners to take what you know about the real world into a book. It’s very stupid to try and take lessons from everything you read, or make it useful to you in the real world, and it’s just as dumb to say that a book is stupid because it works differently than the real world. Got it?”

  She had the relaxed tone of a village idiot, but what she was saying was fairly complex.

  —Come to think of it, Keena can’t do magic, but her grades in the other classes are pretty good.

  Akuto nodded, impressed.

  “I see. If that’s what you meant, then I’m sorry. But if that’s true, then Doronz needs to be careful not to emulate the book here in class.”

  “Don’t worry, she’ll figure it out. Dorry is a good girl. If you teach her not to trust what she reads first, she’ll never read any books at all.” Keena smiled innocently.

  “Anyway, you two sure love books,” Akuto said. The two nodded, and Keina nodded especially firmly.

  “Stories are really neat.”

  These days, most books were digitized. Even with just the network accessible from the student notebook, you could access an incredible amount of books. But that didn’t mean there were more readers now.

  Since there was so much of it, not many people wanted to access the data of the past. Fiction novels, especially, were something that you didn’t need to survive. For that reason, there wasn’t a lot of point in going back into the past for them, unlike academic papers.

  People would often read the latest novels for the same reason they’d go to a concert by a popular band. Since everybody was reading them, you needed to read them too to keep up with the conversation and feel like you were part of the group. But novels and movies weren’t good for much more than that.

  Akuto, however, wasn’t bothered by this. He was the type who didn’t really need books. To him, novels were just a thing that sometimes showed up in the bibliographies of non-fiction books. But Keena’s explanation interested him as an analysis of what was happening right now.

  “Maybe people who think the gods are real are doing the same thing as people who try to learn lessons from novels,” Akuto said. Keena nodded, but Keina seemed confused.

  Then a voice interrupted them.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt what sounds like a very strange conversation, but it’s time for our next class. It’s practicals again. This time it’s groups of three, so you’ll be pairing up with me and Keina Doronz.”

  The speaker was Junko.

  ○

  Now that she knew that Keina could control Akuto’s power, Junko wasn’t as nervous about the practicals as she’d been before. She didn’t have to
worry about Akuto going out of control.

  “Today we’re practicing in groups of three. We’ll be using drugs to affect living creatures,” Miss Mitsuko said.

  They’d all moved to the practice room for the class. All the students were standing in groups of three, and in front of each group was a case with a frog, and several vials of medicine.

  “First you’ll make the drug, then use magic to change it, and then administer it to the frog. Then, you’ll see if there’s any effect. We’re in groups of three today because we don’t have enough frogs for every individual, so please take turns. The drugs will change the color of the frog’s skin. Your job is to see if you can change the frog’s skin to the color of your choice,” she explained.

  But Junko’s face was frozen with fear. Even at a glance, you could tell she was nervous.

  “What’s wrong?” Akuto whispered, worried. She shouldn’t have been worried about him going out of control this time.

  “N-No, it’s fine. It’s nothing at all. Just don’t mess it up, okay?” Junko said in a shaking voice.

  Actually, Junko was afraid of frogs. Akuto had heard this once, but he’d forgotten it.

  “Imagine a color and then transfer its pattern into the drug. I think I can do this without causing any problems,” Akuto said.

  “Don’t worry! I’ll make it so you don’t mess up!” Keina said confidently.

  “P-Please. Please make sure he doesn’t. Really, please.” Junko nodded, shivering.

  “I’m a little worried, though, so I think Hattori should go first,” Akuto said.

  Junko was barely listening, but a moment later she finally seemed to hear what Akuto had said.

  “Y-You’re right. Yes. It’s a simple spell. Just watch.”

  Junko picked up the drug and cast a spell on it. The actual transfer of the image she had in her mind was handled by a program, but unless that image was bright and clear, the color wouldn’t come out right. It was something you needed to practice until you got the knack for it.

  Once the spell was cast, she went to hand the drug to Akuto.