The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 14

by Satoshi Wagahara

  What kind of person was this “eternal nemesis”? Whoever she was, the woman was originally assigned to manage the Hatagaya Sentucky, but apparently things hadn’t worked out that way.

  “Huh?”

  But then Maou noticed something funny about it all. How had Kisaki known that her “nemesis” was slated to run the Sentucky nearby? Even if they were part of the same shopping center, nobody from Sentucky had stopped by to say hello before they opened for business, and a MgRonald employee like Kisaki knowing about HR moves inside Sentucky would just be weird.

  “Um, Ms. Kisaki?”

  “Oh? What’s up, Chi?”

  Chiho, wiping down tables in the dining space, chose that moment to step up to the registers, looking a tad distressed.

  “We have a customer, um… It’s Mr. Sarue from across the street.”

  Kisaki instantly grinned at Maou. “Well, speak of the devil!”

  “Yeah…”

  “So what’s wrong with that? Just lead him to the counter.”

  “Um, yes, but there’s a customer accompanying him today, and…”

  She paused, still distressed, then motioned toward the entrance.

  “She told me to bring the manager, Mayumi Kisaki, over to her…”

  ““Huh?””

  Kisaki and Maou both furrowed their brows. Something about how the message was worded seemed foreboding. Besides, if Sarue was in the restaurant, there was no way it should be this quiet. Every day, he had a new declaration of his love to unfurl upon Kisaki, in tones bellowing enough that the other regulars at the Hatagaya location had taken to calling him the One-Man Flash Mob.

  “Who’s with Sarue?” the doubtful Kisaki asked. If she was being called by name, it was her job to step up. Maou found himself following behind as she left her spot at the registers, with Chiho leading the procession.

  It was definitely Sariel there—Mitsuki Sarue, Sentucky manager, right at the front door. But he looked oddly stiff as he stood there, not at all like normal. No, all the energy in the room belonged to the small woman accompanying him, her face too blocked out by the external glare for Maou to make out.

  “…Hmm?”

  But then, much to his surprise, Kisaki suddenly stopped walking.

  “M-Ms. Kisaki?” Maou yelped.

  Not only stopped, but began to practically exude an aura of furious rage around her. To Maou, a demon well versed in the art of converting people’s negative feelings into demonic energy, it was a shiver-inducing experience. He had seen Kisaki’s anger manifest itself in assorted ways before now, but this was sheer hostility—massive, sharpened, and like nothing else seen before.

  It’d be unthinkable to see that from Kisaki normally, but that was exactly what she was unmistakably jabbing at her visitor with. It was hard to imagine this from Kisaki, the woman who once joked that she’d never call the cops on Sarue unless he visited the MgRonald nude. This was a manager who could calmly deal with even the most unreasonable of customers, whenever they made their rare appearances. What’d happened to her?

  Chiho, ahead of her, must have picked up on this murderous rage even more keenly than Maou had. He spotted the look of abject horror on her face when she turned around toward Kisaki, no doubt wondering where that sense of doom was coming from.

  “…What are you here for?”

  Maou began to wonder if the earth was going to explode tomorrow. Of all the things to spit out at a paying customer! The unexpected turn of events made him and Chiho freeze on the spot, capable of nothing but watching it all unfold. Sarue’s continued silence made it all the more bizarre—he’d normally be half-dancing his way through the dining space by now, but now he looked so, so small, like a lamb among wolves.

  Everyone held their breath for a single instant before the cogs began to whirr.

  “That’s cold, isn’t it? How long has it been since we last met?”

  The words were not uttered by Kisaki, nor Chiho, nor Sarue, nor Maou (of course).

  It was the other “customer.”

  “I’m not here for anything. Just saying hello, is all.”

  Now Maou could fully see the woman, her voice sharpened to a fine point. Her shoulder-length hair was tied back, a leather messenger bag draped under her shoulder, and she was dressed in a pantsuit that’d look at home in public and at the workplace. She looked about the same age as Kisaki. To put it in a nice way, her spirit was unyielding, but no matter how sweet and charming her smile seemed to be, there was also a seemingly bottomless ire, and it was aimed right at Kisaki.

  “Saying hello?”

  The bullet-like impact of Kisaki’s voice made Maou and Chiho tremble anew.

  “Yes, I thought it best to say hello to other firms operating in my region.”

  Kisaki’s horrid mask of resentment spread deeper across her face. “Your region?”

  “Yes! There was a sudden personnel change just before I was to be appointed manager of my own location. Now I’m the regional manager of the western Shibuya area.”

  “You, a regional manager? If that’s a joke, it’s not funny.”

  “It’s not meant to be. I’m not as pigheaded as some people around here, so I’ve been working my way up the ladder far more quickly.”

  “……!!”

  “““Eep!”””

  The squeaks of terror erupted from Maou, Chiho, and Sarue simultaneously. Kisaki was a beauty, mistakable for a model at a distance—Sarue was far from her only admirer around the neighborhood—but when she twisted that beauty to demonstrate her anger to someone, the force behind the horror that resulted was difficult to put into words.

  “You know, Sarue here…”

  The mystery woman gave Sarue, next to her, a palpably forceful shove with her bag.

  “Oorf!”

  It must’ve hit home. Hard enough for Sarue to make that kind of noise, at least.

  “He just goes on and on and on about you. Oh, you’re so talented; oh, you’re so beautiful. Like a parrot with a one-track mind. So I thought I’d pay you a visit for old times’ sake. Started kind of missing the days when we competed with each other, you know? Like, the last time we were in direct competition was during that event in college, wasn’t it?”

  “Well, that’s a surprise. That stupid little show has stuck around this long in your mind?”

  Maou and Chiho were both thinking the same thing: This mystery event these women shared meant nothing to them; they just wanted out of this living hell as soon as possible. Maou now understood what it was like for a human being to be exposed to an onrush of demonic force—being next to Kisaki when she was unable to hide her wrath was enough to make the sweat flow, the breath quicken.

  “I should say so. It was a good college memory for me—’cause unlike you, I’m not so contrarian all the time that I can’t take a compliment.”

  “…!!”

  “M-Maou!!”

  Chiho, looking ready to bawl, finally sought refuge with her coworker. Unlike him and Sarue, she was just a normal person. Even the Lord of All Demons and an archangel from heaven had a tough time being here; the air was dripping with so much vitriol, it was a wonder a normal high school teen could even remain conscious.

  They couldn’t keep talking like this in here. There was bound to be hell to pay for it. So Maou spoke up, in part to drum up his own bravery.

  “Excuse me… We’d be getting in the way of other customers right here, so if you could, perhaps we could retire to the staff room…”

  Despite the herculean resolve it took, the words he uttered seemed distastefully weak to him. It took the better part of his courage and experience to muster even that. But the mystery woman brushed it away without even looking at him.

  “Oh, I’m fine here! I won’t take that much time, and it doesn’t look like you have that many customers anyway.”

  ““Gehh?!””

  “Waaahhhh!!”

  Maou and Sarue both groaned. Chiho, able to handle it no longer, ran off in tea
rs. This anonymous woman had just said the one thing a person must never say in front of Kisaki.

  Maybe not “anonymous,” exactly. They could tell by now that she worked for Sentucky and supervised Sarue, but she was just standing there, in the lobby, trying to goad Kisaki as much as possible. The rage was building up atop Kisaki’s shoulders, like a balloon about to explode.

  “And come to think of it, a little bird told me that you’ve been implementing a cavalcade of new services here, one after the other? Even though your average customer counts are below ours?”

  “Aaaaahhh?!”

  “M-Miss Manager! Please, that’s— Ooph!”

  Maou, fully aware of Kisaki’s disposition, fell into panic. Even Sarue couldn’t hide his concern any longer—but the woman simply whacked him again. She was on a roll now.

  “And despite that, you’ve always got that ‘Help Wanted’ sign out front, don’t you? You’re probably being all choosy with your new hires out of some misguided perfectionism on your part, huh?”

  ““Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah…””

  “Considering the size of your space, your sales don’t seem baaaad per se, but you’re gonna be a grunt in the trenches your entire career if you keep that up. You sure liked talking about your big dreams back at college, but you know, if you’re willing to allow the corporation to bury you here for good—”

  And this must have been exactly what the doomed residents of the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah saw with their last breaths. The light of despair, and the explosive blast.

  “Get out!!!”

  The screamed order traveled across the entire space, nearly shattering every window, Maou and Sarue having to run away at a low crouch to avoid getting hit by the shrapnel.

  The demon/human dinner mixer at Room 201 of Villa Rosa Sasazuka that night (an increasingly common occurrence as of late) was surrounded by a somber pall.

  “Egh…nnh…”

  “You all right, Chiho?”

  “Y-yeah…nnnnnnh…”

  Emi did her best to comfort Chiho, face down and tears falling on her knees, as she glared at Maou.

  “You’re sure you didn’t do anything?”

  “More like I couldn’t do anything…”

  Chiho shook her head, the tears hitting the tatami-mat floor around her.

  “It’s not Maou’s fault…but whenever I think about that moment again, I, I just get so scared, and…wehhhhh…”

  She had been caught up in a battle that took down a high-speed expressway overpass. She had directly pitted her wits against an archangel. Even when kidnapped by a demon, she always kept her dignity and courage intact. But this scared her senseless. Maou, watching from the side, was heartbroken for her.

  “It must have been so hard, Chiho. You’re crying so much.”

  “Chi-Sis, don’t cry! See? Owie all gone!”

  “The more I hear,” Suzuno pondered as Alas Ramus tried to assuage Chiho, “the less believable it is. Kisaki, of all people…”

  To her and Emi, who knew Kisaki’s personality well enough, the sight of Chiho crying her way into this apartment because of her was nothing short of shocking. Kisaki had lashed out at a customer out of nowhere and even forcibly removed her from the dining hall—that was the gist of it, from the outside. Then, not hiding any of it, she reported everything she did to her boss, the manager covering the region that included the Hatagaya MgRonald. That manager knew Kisaki too well for it to be believable at first—even Kisaki’s own crew doubted what they’d seen with their own eyes. But she reported it all, and asked the company to punish her as they saw fit.

  “I really had no idea what was going on between them,” Maou pleaded.

  “She filed that report,” Ashiya asked as he slaved away at the kitchen counter, “and received no punishment for it?”

  “About that…”

  Maou glumly shook his head.

  It amounted to a ten-percent salary cut for one month and a three-day suspension—such was the scandalousness of mouthing off to a competing regional manager like that. It was, to be honest, a pretty hefty price to pay. As Kisaki’s boss put it to Maou over the phone, the home office was willing to let her go with a verbal reprimand, but Kisaki refused to accept it.

  “So who was she, then? That Sentucky regional manager?”

  Maou shook her head again at Suzuno. “I guess she was supposed to be manager at the place across the street if that idiot Sariel hadn’t shown up. But beyond that…”

  “Wait a minute,” Emi said. “Why do you guys know about who works at Sentucky?”

  “Well, Ms. Kisaki said so first.”

  “I don’t mean that…”

  “You mean it’s weird that Ms. Kisaki would know about who works at Sentucky? Yeah, that’s what I’d like to know.”

  There was too little information to work with. What had possessed Kisaki to do that? Would it be proper to ask her what was up once her suspension expired? As he pondered this, Maou could be sure about only one thing: That Sentucky superboss had to be the “eternal nemesis” Kisaki had mentioned.

  “Hey, you think it’s this lady?” Urushihara called out from behind him.

  “Huh?”

  “This is Sentucky’s employee list. I toldja about it before, remember?”

  “Ohh, yeah, you did.”

  Back before Sarue’s cover was blown, Urushihara illegally accessed Sentucky’s HR database to point out how baffling a person he was. According to the logs he had uncovered, the manager over at Hatagaya wasn’t Sarue at all, but a woman named…

  “Waaaaahhhh!!”

  “M-Ms. Sasaki?! Please, get a hold of yourself!”

  The moment the photograph appeared on Urushihara’s display, Chiho was stricken with fear all over again, an unfamiliar sight Ashiya struggled to deal with.

  “That, that’s her! It’s that woman!” Maou stared at the display. “Himeko Tanaka, huh…?”

  The determination in her spirit was visible even in the ID photo. It was definitely the lady Kisaki had almost come to blows with.

  “Hey, I just remembered… Didn’t the ‘Mitsuki Sarue’ entry in that database describe someone totally different? Do we know what happened to that guy?”

  “Oh, yeah, you’re right. Umm, hang on…”

  Urushihara tapped away at the keys for a while.

  “Yeah, he’s still there. Sariel didn’t have him fired or anything. He’s out of the store-management business entirely, but…”

  “Oh…”

  Maou had no idea who the “Mitsuki Sarue” was whose identity Sariel had taken over, but the archangel potentially doing harm upon that innocent man was a concern for him.

  “But if you think about it, we know that Sariel didn’t become a Sentucky manager any normal way. If you got your demonic force back, couldn’t you just appoint yourself manager, too, Maou?”

  “Uh, I’m not just looking for money and power, I want to learn the work. It’s not about getting a full-time stint just so I can have a fancy title.”

  “You think that excuse is gonna work with me, dude?”

  “Hey, c’mon. I always trust the people under me. Why can’t I get that back from you?”

  “’Cause it’s a waste of time?”

  “Urushiharaaaaa!! How dare you treat His Demonic Highness’s feelings like that!”

  Urushihara was just being honest, at least, no matter how much it enraged Ashiya.

  “What? I’m just saying it’s a waste of time!”

  “You good-for-nothing parasite! The real waste of time is having my liege spend his valuable money supporting you!”

  Letting the two of them continue their fruitless yapping to their heart’s content, Maou sat down by the computer. “Himeko Tanaka… Her history looks pretty normal to me. Y’know, Chi?”

  “Y-yeah…”

  “Do you know how old Ms. Kisaki is?”

  “Huh? I think she mentioned it once… Like, she said she was ten years older than me, maybe?”

/>   “So twenty-six or -seven? That would make Tanaka as old as her. They seemed to know each other pretty well… Maybe something happened between them. Something to make that ‘nemesis’ talk not seem like much of a joke.”

  “Nemesis? What kind of talk?”

  “Oh, there was this one time when Ms. Kisaki referred to this Tanaka as her ‘eternal nemesis.’ It sounded like she was exaggerating to me, but…”

  “Wow… I’m sorry for Ms. Tanaka, but just looking at that ID photo is giving me flashbacks…”

  It was strange, seeing Chiho keep her face away from the computer screen like a vampire shunning the sunlight, but this was no laughing matter for Maou.

  “What’re we gonna do if this lady’s at the Sentucky down the street for a while to come, I wonder?”

  He’d never managed to get a word in with this Himeko Tanaka before she left. Kisaki was shoving her out of there before he could, Sarue following along with her. He still had no idea why she’d visited in the first place. A regional manager was someone a kitchen employee might almost never see, but when they showed up, they started showing up a lot. There was every chance Tanaka might stop in quite a bit while Kisaki was gone.

  Maou sighed as he propped his head up with an arm. “If she comes in again, I guess I’ll just have to treat her normally, like nothing happened.”

  “That sounds pretty passive of you,” Emi said as she continued to care for Chiho. “You see how scared Chiho is. Why don’t you scout out enemy territory and figure out a more active defense for yourselves?”

  “Enemy territory? You mean the Sentucky?”

  In the end, Maou pondered the question for quite some time.

  The next day, during his lunch break, Maou stood in front of Sentucky. He peered inside through the door, but didn’t see that regional manager anywhere.

  “Guess Sariel’s around.”

  Steeling his resolve, he opened the door, only to quickly realize something. Despite being a rival in two different ways—a competing fast-food chain, run by an archangel who had it out for him—he had never set foot inside this place before. It had a relaxed, chic atmosphere, maybe a touch more upscale than MgRonald’s, and that went a long way toward explaining the higher prices on the à la carte menu.