She had gone to Kimura Clocks for both the alarm clock in her bedroom and the watch she wore to work, and Ms. Kimura had treated her with very good humor on both occasions, so she must’ve gotten enough that seventy thousand yen didn’t much matter to her.
“But Keiko didn’t just connect me to this apartment… She was also the start of how I discovered the Devil King in the first place.”
“Ohh? How do you meeean?”
“Yeah, ’cause it sounds to me like you just pretended to be a ghost to force ’em to give you a deal on rent. Where does Maou fit into it?”
Emi laughed at Rika’s appraisal—she was never one to mince words—then stood up and took a scrapbook out from the closet.
“Here’s a newspaper clipping from back then…and here’s a map of part of the city.”
Rika and Emeralda peered at the page she’d opened up. It made Rika nod as she recalled her own memories.
“Ohh, yeah, I think I remember this happening. I moved here not too long before then, and I was like ‘wow, that’s kinda scary.’”
“Yeah, when Keiko became a…all right, ‘victim’ of that fainting epidemic thanks to me, it got reported on the news a whole lot. This map shows the sites where the victims before her fainted, along with the order in which it happened. It started in Harajuku, then slowly but surely made its way over to Sasazuka here, you see?”
“Ohhh! Nowww I see!”
Emeralda picked up on what Emi tried to say first.
“So you learrrned from Keiko’s Idea Liiink that there’s no holy force in this worrrld…and that you’ll looose it if you can’t controlll it.”
“Right.”
“Ummm?”
“In other words,” Emi explained to the slightly confused Rika, “I realized for the first time that the demons might be subject to the same conditions. There’s no demonic force in this world, either, so I thought, you know, they were wounded on their way here; maybe they lost so much force that they were too weak for me to detect. I didn’t think he devolved all the way down to a MgRonald part-timer, but…”
She laughed as she pointed at the site of the first incident.
“So the Devil King and Alciel came to Japan with essentially zero demonic power—but it didn’t just scatter to the four winds. Unfortunately, it was still here, in Japan.”
Satan and Alciel, both bruised and battered after fighting Emi, had the ability to intercept the power escaping their bodies and suck it back in. She had guessed that they first lost it after coming out of the Gate, but just as it was with Emi, the Gate’s exit had been in the middle of the sky. If they indeed lost their power the moment they came through, where had all that force gone? The answer: Into the atmosphere around the Gate. This force causes intensive changes to the human body when exposed to it, and that explained those mysterious bouts of unconsciousness—rogue bits of Satan and Alciel’s demonic force, being blown into people on the street.
“Huh? So, wait… So you’re saying that their demonic force was drifting around at random in the atmosphere, like PM 2.5 particles or cedar pollen, and that’s why everyone didn’t get stricken at once?”
“Well, that’s not all, either. They were both on the move, so I think they were probably marking entire neighborhoods behind them with that stuff until they finally settled down in that apartment.”
Emeralda laughed. “Thaaat’s kind of a nasty way to put it.”
“And I think nobody fell seriously ill from it because the demons really were that weakened. But anyway, once those incidents stopped taking place, I figured they had to be somewhere in the area, so whenever I had the time I cased all the neighborhoods around there accessible via private rail from Shinjuku and Shibuya. Of course, it was just me and I was busy with work, so it took a ton of time.”
“I apolllogize that I couldn’t be there to help when you neeeded it the most.”
“Oh, not at all. There was a good reason for it, and I believed the whole time you’d come for me, Eme.”
“Awww, Emiliaaa!”
Emeralda hugged Emi, overcome with emotion.
“Whoa, Emeralda, you’re gonna wake up Alas Ramus if you holler like that.”
Emeralda put a hand to her mouth at Rika’s scolding finger in the air.
“That,” Emi added, “and the maps I took the time to read carefully when I was looking through Keiko’s stuff gave me a few hints.”
“The white map and the blue map? The blue one shows the names of homeowners and ads for nearby shops and stuff, right? What was the white one with all the numbers on it?”
“Well, I probably won’t see it again, but it was a map of roadside land prices.”
““Roadside land prices?”” Rika and Emeralda asked in unison, unfamiliar with the term.
A map like this shows the price of land (per square meter) used by homes along the roads that made up a city area. These values are used to calculate things like inheritance and real estate taxes, but also serve as real estate price indices themselves, since they reflect the most direct value of the land as evaluated by public authorities.
“Out of the last three incidents that took place—except for Keiko’s—one was near a hospital, one was along the Koshu-Kaido road, and one was in a residential area near the Odakyu rail line. If you connect the dots, they’re all in locations with low appraised real estate values, nowhere near a major road—in other words, places with plenty of cheap, high-density housing. I couldn’t imagine that the Devil King with no demonic force had anything he could easily sell for money, unlike me, so I thought he might’ve been hiding out somewhere in this area.”
In reality, of course, Maou had retained a little of his magic, and he was using his own ways to obtain money. Villa Rosa Sasazuka, the place he and Alciel wound up at, was located a distance outside the triangle the three dots formed, but the MgRonald Maou worked at—and where Emi had just applied to—was neatly framed by the shape.
“Huh. So I guess he wasn’t just wandering around Sasazuka at random. But it took you a while to actually find Maou?”
“Well, it would’ve had to. It might seem like I narrowed it down a lot, but I didn’t have any impartial evidence to work with, and as small as it looks on the map, if you actually walk it, it’s still huge. And I couldn’t work on the search every day, either. Sometimes I’d get nervous and take the train out somewhere farther, or I’d hit the archives to see if there were similar incidents elsewhere in Japan. So I wound up pursuing a lot of false leads, but…well.”
Emi’s eyes regarded a point far away as she reminisced.
“Back then, you know, I didn’t think any of this was gonna happen.”
“This,” of course, referred to all the extraordinary events that transpired after she encountered Maou again. She couldn’t kill him—Maou, the Devil King. In fact, they started seeing each other daily, sharing the same dinner table, having a daughter…and she started trusting in him. Allowing him to help her, even.
“I never thought it’d turn out like this… I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought that in Japan, over and over again.”
“And do you regret any of thaaat?”
“Not really,” Emi swiftly replied.
She never thought she’d say that, either.
It was nearly a year after Emilia had arrived in Japan, right about at the point where she had walked down every street within that triangle she had narrowed him down to. That string of sudden faintings had long quieted down, forgotten. Unlike her first few days in Japan, she now had a whole life for herself here, one she was used to, and she was blessed with good friends and a decent workplace—but still, Emi’s loneliness had deepened once more.
As always, she could find no sign of Satan, the Devil King, or of his Great Demon General Alciel, and no help from Ente Isla seemed to be forthcoming. Instead, nothing but time passed, one day after the next. Acting Japanese, and growing content with life in Japan, meant she never felt in a position where she had to reveal her origin
s, like she had with Keiko Yusa once. If anything, doing so posed a high risk of making her the target of fear, as Keiko herself showed.
But she still had someone close to her. Someone who picked on all her anxieties.
“…Hey, Emi, you been feeling all right lately? You eating okay?”
“Yeah, I’m just kinda tired and losing my appetite…”
“Well, I guess you must be dealing with something big, but you aren’t gonna accomplish anything if you fall limp on the street. You better eat.”
“…Yeah. You’re right. Thanks…Rika.”
“Right? So get some stamina back, first off! You need some good food if you want the energy to worry about stuff!”
Without realizing it, Rika was helping banish Emilia’s loneliness. She never dug too deep into other people’s private lives, but it was like she knew all the tools for lightening Emilia’s heart from the moment they’d met.
Over time, Emilia began to train other people on the job, offering guidance on all the things she herself learned in Japan. It reminded her of Keiko. That agent had contacted her just once after she moved into Urban Heights Eifukucho, via postcard. It said that she was marrying and returning to Aomori, so Emilia would be working with a new agent from now on. And, yes, maybe Emilia had blocked Keiko’s memories, but having someone she’d revealed her heart so fully to leave and go far away was—as presumptuous as she knew it was—a shock.
She had agonized over telling the truth to Rika several times. But as her only friend in Japan, Rika had stepped up to ease her day-to-day loneliness and Emilia didn’t want to lose her, so she kept on lying instead. Someday, she imagined, the day would come when she didn’t have to lie any longer. She could find someone she could be with, without having to hide her origins and her true self. She wanted that so much—someone she didn’t have to hide things from, someone who knew about her past, someone who could bury all the solitude.
Those were the thoughts on her mind as she walked down a Sasazuka street she had passed through many times, only to run into some rain the weather forecast failed to mention.
“Oh, where did this come from?” she whined as she glared upward and jogged under a nearby restaurant’s canopy to wait out the rain…
“Um, if you like…”
“Huh?”
…only to be presented with a dirty, beaten-down plastic umbrella.
THE AUTHOR, THE AFTERWORD, AND YOU!
This afterword includes some mild spoilers. If you’re the type to read the back of the book first, take caution.
In the afterword to The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 13, I boldly declared that my magazine-published stories would “make it to print in novel form sooner or later.” Well, “sooner” came sooner than I thought! Volume 14 wound up being the first short-story collection since Volume 7.
It’s not that there’s some rule stating I have to put out one of these every seven volumes (and technically the Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 0 prequel came out in Japan first, so it’s actually been eight volumes), but anyway, if you read the stories in the book, it should help you understand the world of Devil on a deeper level than before. I’d like to pretend to believe so, at least, but I’d be lying. Half of what I cover seems to have to do with kitchen appliances, for example.
Let’s take a look back at each story, and the way that it weaves a picture of each character’s life.
The Hero and High Schooler Become Friends
This one begins several days after the end of Volume 1. It shows, I suppose, that this “typical girl you’d find anywhere” was really strong-minded even before anything happened to her. They were all so innocent back then, weren’t they? This was also around the first time Emeralda demonstrated her proclivity for gluttony, despite her tiny frame.
You know, though, is it me, or do conveyor-belt sushi places not have much along the belt any longer? Instead, everyone’s just tapping at their order panels to snag what they want first. Ah, well.
The Devil Looks Back on the Frugal Life
This guy probably ranks number one or two in the “characters who lead the most stressful lives” leaderboard, and I wanted to reward him a little.
As mentioned in the story, feeding honey to a baby under twelve months of age, before their intestinal system fully develops, may lead to a case of juvenile botulism. This bacteria isn’t something that dies when you boil it, so make sure you don’t give an infant that young any processed foods with honey in it, either.
The Devil Snags a New Phone With the Hero’s Money
Like I said in the afterword to Devil, Vol. 5, the reality depicted in the story is set around what you and I would consider the year 2010. That’s partly because that was when I wrote the prototype that eventually became Devil, but now I’m starting to see the real-life stores, companies, services, and systems I’m modeling the ones in Devil after cease to exist as I write this, in 2015. In an era where smartphones are all over the place, the term “cell phone” might start to fall off the face of the earth before too long.
The Hero Is Amazed by the Enemy General’s Vast Powers
You really do see these holes show up. It’d be funny if it didn’t feel like such a disgrace. Distressed jeans are in these days, but if you see holes anywhere besides the knees and cuffs, then that kind of goes beyond “distressed,” I suppose. Personally, when I start to get holes in the front pockets, that’s usually my cue to buy a new pair.
The Devil Learns About His Boss’s Past
Finally, a mystery from Volume 2 gets wrapped up! The story of a fierce rivalry from days untold! No, seriously!
Yuki Mizushima, manager of the Fushima-en location, is an imported character from the anime version, just like Takefumi Kawata, Akiko Ohki, and Kotaro Nakayama. I enjoy her as a character, but she mostly showed up in anime-original situations, like when all the women showed off their swimsuits or got involved in serious horror situations—real high-impact set pieces like that. Those scenes never really put the spotlight on her, so I tossed her in here since I thought that’d be my best bet for giving her something to work with.
It always hits you right there, doesn’t it, when someone all proper in their work outfit drops the façade and cuts loose in their own clothing?
A Few Days Ago: The Hero Is (About to Be) a Part-Timer!
This is a smaller prequel covering the days right after Emilia Justina came to Japan, dovetailing nicely with Devil, Vol. 1. It’s also the only tale in this book that hasn’t been published anywhere else before.
I know you guys have been waiting a long while for this. Yes, this is why Emi’s fancy apartment is so cheap. Being the Hero, and being alone, meant she had to face obstacles that not even Maou and Ashiya got to experience.
Simply living life can be a grind in a lot of ways, but as they say, you can’t take it with you. This volume offers a peek at how these characters honestly are—a little laid-back, as they struggle to survive each day. Hopefully it’s served as a kind of refresher that softened the hearts of everyone who picked it up.
See all of you in the next volume!
Thank you for buying this ebook, published by Yen On.
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The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 14 Page 20
