He had aimed for a slower stint of the afternoon, so it was quickly his turn at the counter—and just as he hoped for, Sarue was manning the register in front of him.
“Hello! How can I…? Oh. You.”
The salesman’s smile disappeared the moment he recognized Maou, but his eyes were turned down, as if a bit fatigued.
“What do you want? Because I don’t have the energy to talk to you right now.”
“Because your boss pissed off Ms. Kisaki?”
“Ugh…” Sarue groaned at this unwelcome call out, only to then hedge. “Um…how was Ms. Kisaki afterward?”
“Well, thanks to her violently kicking you guys out, the company’s punishing her a couple different ways.”
“P-punishing?! Ah, ahhh, what terrible news! And I was there the whole time…”
He began to shake, as if he’d crumple to the floor right there.
“You were there, but you didn’t help any of us out at all, did you?”
“I—I don’t need you reminding me! As if you could’ve stepped in between Manager Tanaka and Ms. Kisaki back there!”
Remaining totally statue-like instead of attempting to stop an argument between two fast-food employees was a pretty pathetic performance for both of them, frankly. But:
“What, you have trouble dealing with her?”
“I am weak against the beautiful, as a rule.”
“I wasn’t asking that, dumbass.”
Maou banged a fist against the counter, before he realized what he was doing. He didn’t know much about Sarue’s personal preferences, but if Kisaki was a beauty like ice, or night, or the moon, Himeko Tanaka was more like the sun or the prairie in summertime. Flashier. Whether he wanted to get closer to her was another matter, but she was definitely pretty—pretty enough to earn praise from Sarue, despite his infatuation with Kisaki.
“Well, in so many words…Manager Tanaka is…an old classmate of Ms. Kisaki’s.”
“Ah, so that’s it. They seemed acquainted.”
He surmised that much from the HR database, not that he was going to tell Sarue about that.
Sarue continued, “I mentioned to her that I’ve spoken with Ms. Kisaki in the past, and she latched on to that in the strangest way. I was hoping to learn more about Ms. Kisaki myself, so we talked about what we knew with each other. Then, out of nowhere, she shows up yesterday and says she’s gonna say hello to her…”
“Mm-hmm?”
He made it sound like Himeko Tanaka wanted to see Kisaki more than anything in her restaurant.
“But didn’t you just tell me that you had trouble dealing with that manager?”
“Like I said, I am weak against beautiful women.”
“Are you being serious with me, or what?”
“I could ask the same of you—couldn’t I, Devil King? If you aren’t buying anything, I’ll have to ask you to leave. Just thinking about how your company has punished Ms. Kisaki makes my heart feel ready to burst!”
Maou would have loved to see him explode into tiny pieces right now. He would have to be disappointed.
“Oh, uh, I’ll take three pieces of Original Chicken to go.”
“…All right.”
Anyone with money in hand’s a customer. Sarue silently handled the order from Maou, a flip-flop from how their interactions usually worked.
“So what kind of info did you share with each other?”
“You’re going back to that?” Sarue couldn’t have looked more annoyed, but he fielded the question anyway. “It was nothing important. Like, that Manager Tanaka and Ms. Kisaki knew each other for a long time, that I was passionately in love with Ms. Kisaki, that sort of thing.”
“You said that? I have to admit, I gotta respect that.”
“Also about that thing from before.”
“What thing?”
“We ran into Ms. Kisaki outside of the restaurant once, remember? After Chiho’s Idea Link training.”
“…Oh.”
Chiho had trained at one point to learn a holy magic known as Idea Link, so she could make fast contact with Maou and the rest in case of emergency. They had enlisted Sariel’s help for it, and on the way back from the session, they had bumped into Kisaki.
“Wait, did you tell her about Ms. Kisaki’s…?”
“Do I look like that much of a fiend? I’m not thoughtless enough to reveal someone else’s dreams that easily. I did phrase it in a way that indicated she might be interested in going independent, though, sometime in the future.”
That still seemed like a lot to reveal, but Maou let it slide. It didn’t venture beyond the range of topics a person might bring up when discussing a mutual acquaintance.
“Here you go.”
Just then, Maou’s chicken order was wrapped up and sent to the register. Sarue carefully placed it in a bag and handed it over.
“And either way, Manager Tanaka isn’t going to come around again for a while. You don’t need to worry yourself sick about anything. But when I think about Ms. Kisaki at home right now, all gloomy over what happened at work… Ahhhh!”
“Thanks.”
Maou, certain that continuing this talk would just set Sarue out of control and annoy his coworkers, took his cue to leave. He had gotten some info out of him, at least.
“H-how was it?” Chiho asked when he came back.
Maou just glumly shook his head. “Useful, but not too useful, I guess.”
He went over the basics with her: Himeko Tanaka was an old acquaintance of Kisaki’s, she still had an interest in her, and Sarue had been keeping her abreast of Kisaki-related happenings. None of it adequately explained Kisaki’s outburst.
“Well, just because you’ve known someone for a while doesn’t mean you like them. Kind of like frenemies, maybe, or people doomed to fight with each other.”
“Frenemies…?”
That evaluation sounded right to Maou. But Chiho saw the term another way.
“Why’re you laughing, Chi?”
“Oh, that just reminded me of a couple people in my life.”
“Mm?”
“Ah, nothing. So what’s Ms. Tanaka doing now?”
“Well, according to that idiot Sariel, we won’t be seeing her again for a while.”
“Really?” Chiho breathed a visible sigh of relief. “Because if she comes back once Ms. Kisaki is back on duty, I’m not sure I’m going to survive.”
“Yeah, if she’s able to confront Ms. Kisaki when she’s fully raging like that, I don’t think anyone could beat that manager.”
It was the honest truth, straight from the Lord of All Demons’ heart.
But in the end, they didn’t have to wait long for another outbreak.
“Goddammit, Sariel…”
“Huh? What was that?”
“N-nothing…”
Maou instantly swore in his mind to take revenge against the archangel when Himeko Tanaka, the manager Sariel swore wouldn’t be around again, had marched right into MgRonald that same evening. Chiho, and the rest of the crew familiar with her, swallowed nervously as they watched Maou engage her.
“Let’s see…I’ll have a teriyaki burger combo with fries and orange juice. Also, one regular hamburger by itself. Regular-size juice, no ice.”
She didn’t look much different from before as she strode up to the register, lassoing Maou before he could run off in a panic and ordering like a regular customer for a change.
“All right. That’ll be six hundred and fifty yen, please.”
“Here. Sorry for all the change.”
She tossed a small collection of coins on the change tray. Maou mentally counted them up.
“Er, I apologize, but this coin here…”
There were four 100-yen coins, four fifty-yen coins…and then, among the five copper coins on the tray, there was one that didn’t look like the standard ten-yen piece at all.
“Oh, I’m sorry!” Tanaka chirped, not sounding at all apologetic as she replaced it with another coin. �
��I must’ve forgotten to take this out of my purse after I got back from England.”
It was a two-pence coin, the same copper color as the ten-yen piece but a completely different size. Mixed in with a bunch of other spare change, it could’ve easily been overlooked.
“…You were traveling there?”
Tanaka gave him a natural nod. “Yeah, sort of.”
In the midst of this, the completed order was sent to the counter on a tray.
“Here you go. Enjoy!”
“Thank you.”
Then she took the tray and sat down by the front window, a bit out of sight from the registers. Maou watched her go from the corner of his eye.
“Wow, Marko.”
Behind him was Takefumi Kawata, a seasoned coworker of Maou’s, better known by Kisaki and the rest of the crew as Kawacchi.
“Me and Chi were freaking out back here, but— Huh?”
He realized that Maou had his right hand out toward him, palm up, from an angle that customers couldn’t see in the dining space. A “stop” signal. Once Maou was sure Kawata got the message, he approached him as casually as possible, then quickly whispered into his ear as he passed by:
“Wait until she leaves.”
And with that, Kawata went back to his own work, as if nothing had happened. Maou gave the same warning to Chiho before doing the same.
After a good hour or so, Himeko Tanaka finally got up, cleaned off her tray at the trash bin, gave a light wave of the hand to Maou, and left. Even when she was no longer visible from the inside, Maou stayed on guard for a while to come—half an hour, in fact, until he finally felt it safe to breathe normally again. Chiho and Kawata immediately ran up to him.
“What was that all about, Maou?”
“I think we were probably being tested.”
“Oh?”
“What do you mean?”
“The teriyaki burger she ordered is easily affected by the condition of the plates. It’s a pain in the ass to assemble, too.”
The “plates” referred to the metal plates on both sides of the clamshell grill used to cook MgRonald burger patties. A teriyaki burger required the cook to put a unique sauce on the patty while cooking, which made it hard to prepare alongside strings of other burgers. Plates in poor condition affected the taste of both the patty and the sauce, easily resulting in an inferior sandwich. What’s more, when assembling the burger, smearing on the patty’s sauce and the mayonnaise incorrectly would guarantee soggy buns and wrappers when served, making for a messy eating experience. Among the burger menu items, it required the most attention to get right.
Alongside that, Tanaka had ordered a regular, plain old burger, which couldn’t be made on the same plates as the teriyaki one. The MgCafé expansion included a new grill with more plates, allowing them to cook teriyaki and other burgers in parallel—maybe that was her way of deducing this location’s kitchen setup.
“And I wonder why she ordered an orange juice. That, and why she sat where she did.”
The beverages at MgRonald, except for coffee and hot tea, were served out of a dedicated drink server that mixed concentrated syrup with water or carbonated water as needed. However, the syrup for fizzy dinks needed to be handled quite differently from the concentrate for orange juice and cold oolong tea.
“Was she checking to see how the machines were maintained?”
“Yeah. Making a point of going with no ice, too.”
The syrup and carbonated water for sodas and drinks flowed out of tanks kept separate from the server, but orange juice and oolong tea were kept in special bags on their own. What’s more, between the fructose in orange juice and its relative unpopularity compared to sodas, lazy maintenance led to residue buildup in the tubes and dispenser much more quickly than with other drinks.
“That, and she went all the way to the other end of the dining space so she could scope out how clean the place was, I think. I can’t be sure, but…” Maou frowned. “Mr. Sarue told me that his manager, Tanaka, knew Ms. Kisaki from a while back. I don’t know what’s happened between them, but we’re all a part of Ms. Kisaki’s team. I didn’t think we could afford to show any weakness around her.”
“Kawacchi made those burgers, so I think we’re fine there,” Chiho said.
“Yeah, I’m definitely not gonna disappoint ya on that!”
“And I cleaned the dining area after lunch down to the last detail, so that shouldn’t be a problem, either!”
She and Kawata, at least, were supremely confident. Maou nodded broadly. He trusted them on that score.
“Yeah. And I just inspected the drink server yesterday. As long as we’re around, nobody’s gonna write this location up about anything.”
Even as he spoke, Maou couldn’t wipe away his concerns about Tanaka’s behavior. But neither she nor Kisaki were that old, as it went. Maybe they always liked competing with each other, and it just happened that one was now ahead of the other.
“Well, either way,” he said as he looked at the shift schedule on the wall, “we’ll just have to keep this place safe until Ms. Kisaki comes back.”
Around half an hour before closing time, Maou placed a call to the regional manager (MgRonald’s, that is) and reported that the closing procedure was under way without a hitch. Maou would be locking up the place tonight, and his regional boss would be opening the next morning—a rare event.
So he made his rounds, ensuring most of the procedure was wrapped up. It was eleven thirty in the evening, and while customers weren’t uncommon up to ten or so, it was well past that now. The dining area gradually emptied out, marking the end of another day of the MgRonald grind…and then the automatic doors sprang open.
“Welcome! …Um.”
He made a point of turning up the enthusiasm for the late-night customers who’d appreciate it the most, but this customer was wholly unexpected—in a non–Tanaka kind of way.
“Huh?” he instinctively said.
“Hey. Nice to see you’re still at it.”
She was about the same height as Maou, a calm, refined woman with a clean-looking bob cut. Her soft voice and gentle face often made it hard to believe what a hard, diligent worker she was. It was the first time Maou had seen her out of uniform.
“Oh… Is that you, Ms. Mizushima?!”
“Hello! Sorry I’m coming in so late,” she said, smiling as she walked to the register.
Yuki Mizushima had been hired full-time at MgRonald at the same time Kisaki was to manage the location inside the Fushima-en theme park. That was in a different region from the west-Shibuya ward Hatagaya was in, but the two locations would frequently share employees to fill holes in their respective shifts. Maou himself had spent more than a few hours over at Fushima-en. This, however, was the first time Mizushima had ever showed up here.
“Um… I apologize, Ms. Mizushima, but Ms. Kisaki isn’t in today…”
Judging by her clothing, she wasn’t coming back from work. The only reason Maou could think of for her being here was to see Kisaki.
“I know,” she replied, stopping him. “She’s on self-suspension today, right?”
“Self…? Well, I mean, it’s kind of official from the company, I think, but…”
“Pretty obstinate of her, don’t you think? I don’t think her bosses had any intention of punishing her.”
“I heard about that. But I know how Ms. Kisaki feels, too. Forcibly removing a customer from the premises, in front of all of us…”
Kisaki always believed in treating all customers equally, a drive she made sure was deeply instilled in her entire crew. That was the golden rule and she broke it, so Maou was sure she probably felt like burying herself in the sand at the moment.
As he thought about that, Mizushima leaned over the counter, a knowing smile on her face. “By the way…”
“Yes?”
“Do you have some time after work, Maou?”
“…Yes?”
That coaxing voice was hard for Maou to deal with.
“How about we get some dinner together, hmm?”
“What?!”
“Um, so, where’re we going…?”
“Oh, don’t worry. Just follow me.”
Mizushima paid no mind to the timid Maou as she immediately started walking forward, out of the bike lot behind the building. He followed behind, pushing his bicycle, but Mizushima stopped before long.
“Huh? Oh, um, yeah… Huh?”
Maou couldn’t be blamed for his surprise. They were stopped in front of a building with a franchise izakaya chain inside, in the same shopping center, no more than 150 feet from where they began. She immediately began climbing the stairs to the place, opening the door.
Being a Sunday night, there was plenty of seating available—but instead of saying anything to the staff, Mizushima kept on walking, right into the dining space, an increasingly confused Maou following her.
“Hey!”
When he saw the person seated where Mizushima stopped, Maou almost jumped out of his skin.
“M-Ms. Kisaki…?!”
There, sourly crossing her arms inside the booth, sat Kisaki in street clothes.
“Hey…Marko. Thanks for covering today. Sorry to call you over right after.”
“I watched him close up for you, Kiki. Everything’s good.”
“K-Kiki?”
It must’ve been Kisaki’s nickname, judging by things. But having a woman powerful enough to make Devil Kings and archangels bend to her will be called “Kiki” left Maou at a loss for words.
Kisaki must’ve realized. “Stop calling me that around people, Yuki,” she said, looking even more peeved. “I’m not a kid anymore.”
“You’re not being too convincing, Kiki, given how you immediately got worked up the moment you saw Hime in there. You haven’t changed at all from the past! Right, Maou?”
“Eee?! Huh?! Ah?! N-no, um, uhh?! Wh-what, whatever do you mean ‘the past’?”
The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 14 Page 11
