The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 2 (29 page)

“Allow me to take advantage of the one you hold dear, Chiho.”

“Bell! Have you gone mad?!”

“You are the only madman here, Sariel.”

Suzuno stood strong, keeping Chiho behind her back.

“Pushing a false peace upon our people; planting the seeds of chaos in another world; backstabbing the very people whose faith we rely on, and must protect… Is
this
the truth the gods hold for us?! As chief inquisitor of the Reconciliation Panel, I refuse to overlook such a shameful, deceitful truth!”

“And you would even link hands with the Devil King for it?! Your ‘reconciliation’ means nothing to me! You are a demon yourself! A tainted demon, driven by your inquisitor’s thirst for blood!”

“Silence! The Devil King’s life on Earth as Sadao Maou, at least, does not run afoul of the justice that we seek!”

“Whoa, thanks. Guess I’m the big man at MgRonald after all, huh?”

Satan looked on as the argument raged between divinity and follower, taking abject pride in his comparatively puny assistant-manager position.

“You know, though, I’d say the Hero and the angels have been the real villains here lately. I’m just sittin’ here living life day by day, you know?”

Satan took another step, boring a hole into the heliport.

That small move was enough to put Sariel on guard, halting the argument and flying backward to safety. Satan chidingly watched him go.

“Bell…what did you have to do to gather all this evil force…?”

Not even Satan was expecting this tsunami of demonic power to flood through Sariel’s barrier into this space. At best, he was hoping he could get Chiho to safety somehow.

Bell turned around and gazed at the nightscape before her.

“Tonight…the men and women using Shinjuku station have my pity.”

“Uh?”

“Wha?”

“Huhh?!”

Chiho and Emi both looked straight at her.

“What did they call them? Electrical transformers? There were these power lines between the tracks that led to all of those, and I sliced a few of them in half. I figured stopping the trains would create a storm of anger across the area…”

“Dude, that’s a terrorist attack!”

Even Satan, and his visions of conquering the world, were thrown.

“Do…do you have any idea how many trains go through Shinjuku?! Like, even if you count the Japan Rail lines alone, that’s gonna affect nearly every single service in greater Tokyo!”

“Ah. I see. Then my guess was correct. I am glad to see my missionary training wasn’t for naught. It is quite annoying if the transport wagons in Ente Isla fail to arrive at their appointed times, after all, yes? I assumed that delaying so many trains at once would create an aura of rage that could transform into demonic force…”

“I’m not praising your analytical skills, okay?! I’ve never even
been
on one of those dumb wagons!”

Satan’s alarmingly dynamic comeback was enough to send another shock wave of evil force across the area.

“Aagh!”

The barrier protecting Chiho wavered at the impact, almost knocking her off the heliport entirely.

“M-Maou! Please, be careful!”

“Sorry, sorry…”

“Oh, but now, Maou…or Devil King, maybe? Or Satan? Ooh, I don’t even know what I should be calling you!”

Maou tried to ignore Chiho as she blushed, starting to feel quite out of place.

“We, uh, we can figure that out later. Yo, Sariel. Little freak over there. Nobody’s gonna accuse me of being merciless tonight. Lemme give you a choice.”

Satan now stood high and mighty above Sariel.

“Either you turn your tail and run back home, or you accept your punishment and let me beat the tar out of you. Which is it?”

“It’s obvious.”

The archangel, great scythe in hand, spread his white, swanlike wings wide as he glared at Satan.

“Devil King Satan! I will defeat you and fulfill my mission!”

In an instant, Sariel was in the air, focusing his holy magic as the moon framed his body.

“What do I have to fear from a Devil King who can only regain his powers after getting doped up on the negative energy of humans?!”

“Man, shut
up
, happy hands.”

Sariel’s wings shone across the night sky like a pair of crescent moons.

“Thunderwing Moonlight!!”

A laser-like beam of light navigated its way among Emi, Chiho, and Bell before boring down upon Satan. He may have been enraged, but he had not forgotten his mission. Satan had to appreciate his twisted sense of feminism, too.

“I wouldn’t sass a Devil King at full power, man.”

Satan raised his arms against the advancing bolt of moonlight.

“Nngh!”

A simple moment of concentration was all it took to repulse it.

“Wh-what…?!”

“Pfft. Bet you’re missing your home-field advantage right now.”

Satan snickered at the flabbergasted Sariel.

“Something tells me you’ve sorely overestimated our strength. Let me show you what you’re
really
worth.”

The lightning that Satan repulsed was now balled up in a single palm. He handled it effortlessly, like he himself had conjured it up, despite being a product of Sariel’s holy power.

“Guess that Evil Eye of the Fallen made you feel a lot more powerful than that, huh? You never fought against anyone who
didn’t
run on holy power, did you?”

As if throwing a ball and chain, Satan tossed the small mass of energy right back at Sariel, using nothing but pure brute strength.

“What?!”

Sariel hurriedly tried to cancel the attack, but with the ball of lightning right before him, he fired a bolt of purple from his eyes to send it scattering.

“That ability of yours makes you pretty much invincible against any holy force user, I’m betting…”

From his hand, Satan summoned a ball of black fire. It was only the size of a baseball, but with the form of a Major League pitcher, he hurled it toward Sariel in the sky.

“But when you’re faced with some other kind of power, you’re utterly clueless. Should’ve chosen someone else to pick on, huh?”

The moment the mass reached Sariel, it grew into an enormous fireball, large enough to envelop his entire body.

“Grraaaghhhh!!!”

“I’d suggest you sell those chicken wings of yours, but it’d probably make Sentucky’s sales plummet.”

Sariel’s pained scream echoed within the blazing ball of dark flame.

Satan snapped his finger once. The mass of hellfire disappeared in an instant, revealing a Sariel who was plainly charred, his holy protection failing him.

“Oop.”

The moment he appeared, Satan nonchalantly swung his mop down upon the back of Sariel’s neck.

“Gahahhh…”

It was enough to break the mop at the middle of the handle. Sariel’s eyes rolled back as he lost consciousness, falling downward through the air.

“Agh!”

As he fainted, the purple cross Emi was bound to dissipated, sending her hurtling toward the heliport.

Sariel, for his part, slammed helplessly against the pavement.

“And…oop.”

Satan caught Emi, robbed of her strength and unable to even prepare for impact, just before she reached the landing zone.

“Whadaya think, Emi?”

“…Think of what…”

Nearly out of breath, a depressed-looking Emi looked at Satan, helpless in his arms.

“I’m here to catch you. You could appreciate that a little, huh?”

“………………………”

Emi, all too aware of what he was talking about, groaned and contorted her face into a thousand combinations, as if chewing on a faceful of something awful. Then:

“…I have to. I can’t do anything else.”

The Hero always had to get in the last word.

Satan chuckled to himself, then quietly placed Emi on the ground.

“Hey. Emi. Your top.”

“Huh?”

The Devil King was patting his own chest as Emi howled a response, shoulders still tensed from the strain.

“Dude, your top. Button it up. Pff…!”

A beat, and then Emi finally realized what he meant. She took off one of her pumps and throw it straight at Satan’s face.

“Oww! Look, demon or not, that still hurts! …Agh!”

The other shoe hit him square on the forehead.

“I
told
you not to look!”

Emi wrapped an arm around her chest, face beaming red. Satan turned around long enough to let her redo her blouse’s buttons.

The anger quickly returned to his voice.

“That’s
your
fault for spacing out in the first place! I was kind enough to warn you, remember! Besides, it’s not like showing them off is gonna make ’em even smaller, so—
gaghhh
!!”

Emi, out of ammunition, didn’t deliver the final, merciful blow that stopped Satan’s cruel rant cold. That honor belonged to Bell and her war hammer.

“You…bast…ard…!”

“My apologies. I simply found that too difficult to listen to.”

Bell couldn’t have said it more matter-of-factly as she placed her hammer back behind her shoulder.

“Uhmm, look, guys, you beat that creepy guy and all, so could you stop arguing for…”

Chiho tentatively spoke up from behind the holy barrier that protected her.

“What?!”

“What do you want?”

Emi and Bell were oddly curt as they turned toward her. Chiho wondered to herself why they weren’t looking her in the eye, instead gazing right at her chest.

“Um…I’m sorry.”

She decided to diplomatically step away.

Emi, realizing that Bell was preoccupied about the same thing she was, felt a bizarre sense of kinship.

Satan was less than thrilled at any of this.

“Man, why did I even both rescuing either of you, huh? I shoulda just snatched up Chi and hightailed it outta here! Boy, did I blow it!”

He began to visibly pout, ignoring his own tirade of just a few moments ago.

Then, in a very undemonic, dejected tone:

“Gate, open!”

Suddenly, a Gate erupted to life before him, just large enough for a single person to venture through.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa! You aren’t going back now, are…”

Emi, shocked to see Satan so casually open a Gate before her eyes, tried to stop him.

“Yeah, I’d sure like to! But you know that’s not gonna happen!”

With that, Satan picked Sariel up off the ground and tossed him in the Gate, like a MgRonald customer throwing his refuse in the garbage container.

“Ahhh!!”

“Devil King! What are you…”

“Maou?!”

This exceedingly rough treatment of the archangel was enough to amaze even his victims.

“I’m not gonna kill him or anything. He’s still got most of his power left. Maybe he’ll wind up someplace livable, if he’s lucky. Who knows if he’ll make it back to Ente Isla from there, though?”

Satan shrugged.

“Gate! Close Sesame! Or whatever!”

With that un-incantation-like incantation, the Gate popped out of existence.

And with its conjurer out of the picture, the holy force field that covered the building must have disappeared as well. Soon, the nighttime murmur of Shinjuku ward could be heard once more. Satan turned back toward the others as they looked down at the city and its cacophony of neon and ad jingles.

“You aren’t blaming me, are you? Keeping him around would just cause more trouble for us, but killing him would bring even more trouble down on
me
. That was the best way to do it.”

“Yeah, but…he isn’t just some pile of garbage…”

“I’m not too interested in killing an archangel and setting off a
full-scale war with heaven quite yet. And if they take this as Sariel screwing up his mission and getting stranded somewhere, then everything works out. Everything except his rep, I guess.”

Nobody could deny that, but was this really an issue that could be resolved so easily? Emi and Bell stood there, mouths agape, unable to react.

“So! Now for the real problem.”

Satan clapped his hands once, Sariel already apparently a thing of the past for him, and gave Bell a stern look.

“We gotta clean this whole thing up. Let’s move, Bell.”

“Clean up?”

“Don’t just go,
Cleanup in aisle seven
, dude! You can’t stop every train in Tokyo and go,
Oops, sorry!
afterward! There’s gonna be a ton of electrical lines and transformers to repair, and now that Sariel’s barrier is gone, someone’s probably gonna be up here before long. So let’s go! I need to get back anyway. I can’t leave MgRonald before closing it!”

Satan, sounding exactly like Sadao Maou despite his current dreadful form as king of all demons, was too much of a sight for Bell to avoid being flummoxed.

“Oh, right. Emi?”

“Wh-what…?”

Satan snuck a look at the teenage girl who had been staring at him through the holy energy barrier the whole time.

“Get Chi back home. For real this time. Her mom’s worried about her.”

It was Bell, not Chiho or Emi, who was the most surprised.

She looked up at Satan, an alien creature now more than twice her height.

Only Chiho was serene, flashing a small yet undeniably triumphant smile.

“I always knew you were a good guy, Maou.”

“Ah, jeez, get outta here.”

Satan shooed them away with his hands.

“I’m royalty, you know? Kind of a big deal? I like to treat my
underlings right, and if I’m gonna conquer this land, I wanna make sure it’s all nice and neat first.”

“That all sounds fine to me for now.”

Chiho nimbly flashed a smile back at him. He stiffened for a moment, embarrassed.

“Ugghhhh! Let’s just go, Bell!”

“Ah, wait, where are you grabbing me—
aaaaaaahhhhhhhhh
…”

He had grabbed her by her kimono’s collar, lifting her up before flying off, as if fleeing Chiho and Emi.

Chiho finally escaped the barrier after they departed off the edge.

“Hey…Yusa?”

“……”

Emi watched Satan and Bell fly off for a little while, hands still folded over her chest. She furrowed her brows at Chiho.

“Let’s just leave it at that for today. But only today, all right?”

Her defeated voice was nearly a whisper. Chiho snickered a bit in response.

“In that case, could I ask you a favor, Yusa?”

“…What’s that?”

She looked a bit concerned as she turned away from where Maou left, looking at the skies over Hatsudai-Hatagaya.

“Maou said he left the MgRonald open. I think he’ll probably be in trouble.
Big
trouble.”

“Ugh… Why’d you
do
all of that…?”

Sadao Maou lumbered groggily out of the taxi in front of Hatagaya station, near the Keio line entrance.

“Ha-ha…ha-ha-ha-ha! Well, you see… I mean, Chiho mentioned that the Devil King restored the entire Shuto Expressway back to normal, so I wanted to be sure I had a widespread impact. That way, I could be certain you would expend as much demonic energy as possible.”

“You liar. There’s no way you could’ve planned all this!”

Suzuno Kamazuki laughed shrilly as she broke out in a nervous sweat.

The Shinjuku that Satan and Bell were greeted with was an unprecedented traffic disaster.

The way Bell had worded it, Satan wasn’t expecting much more than a few downed power lines here and there nearby the rail station. Said expectations were dashed when he found she had all but leveled an entire transformer building.

“Yes…well, I cannot easily slice through wiring with my hammer, so I am afraid blunt trauma was the order of the day…”

Satan saved her the trouble of coming up with any more namby-pamby excuses by flicking her on the forehead. With demonic power behind the blow, it got the message across.

First, the transformer station had to be fully restored; next, he had to unravel the chaos unfolding on the rails across all of greater Tokyo. Then came the repairs on all the cascading damage the haywire transformer caused to the city’s electrical grid. The demonic force that was his all the way up to tossing the archangel through the Gate was running on fumes by the end of it all, transforming the Devil King Satan back to Sadao Maou, part-timer in a set of stretchy boxers.

Bell was no help at all during the repairs, either.

Considering she hadn’t consumed a great deal of her holy force in the battle, burning through all this evil power in front of her actually put Maou in life-threatening danger, now that he reflected upon it. But nothing happened. She merely sat and watched on as Satan worked to bring everything back to the status quo.

And once Maou was utterly exhausted of power, she was kind enough to pick up the uniform he left on city hall grounds and grab a taxi for him.

He had little idea what sparked this change in heart from her. But instead of trying to fish an explanation out of her, he decided to think over more pressing issues.

It was already near midnight, closing time for the MgRonald in front of Hatagaya station.

“Devil King! What is wrong?”

Suzuno chased after Maou as he tried to toddle away once the taxi left. But there was no time to deal with her. Every minute, every second counted as he made his way back.

But there was no avoiding punishment for his crime of ditching his shift for nearly two hours.

Maou found himself frozen in the glaring light as a familiar vision marched in front of him.

“…Now just
what
is going on here, Marko?”

“Ms.…Kisaki…”

The expression on Kisaki as she stood tall in her business suit, staring down at the emasculated Maou, was hidden by the glare. But, just the same, he could tell how stern, how judgmental, it was.

“I mean, just…why?”

“I had a phone call… Something happened to Chi.”

Kisaki’s gaze, just as sharp and stabby as the Hero’s, crashed down upon Maou’s face like comets of white-hot light.

“Yes. And it sounded like you took a mop, ran out, and never came back. You caused a lot of trouble for a lot of people.”

“I… No, but…”

Maou’s face twitched as he leaned away from her. Suzuno stood motionless next to him, perhaps just as awed as he was.

“You got a lot of guts, you know that? The shift supervisor, one who
still
hasn’t made up for the morning’s losses, cutting work for two hours without telling anyone where he’s going. What is this, a date? Well?
Is
it?”

“That, uh…”

His brain was running in circles. This couldn’t be more awkward.

Maou wasn’t expecting Kisaki here, but looking back, he must have really freaked out the staff. After all, he ran right out of the place with barely a word after Urushihara’s phone call.

Since repairing the train system took longer than expected—and took far more of his demonic strength than expected—he wound up having to waste more time waiting for Suzuno to go fetch his uniform for him.

And with him reporting back to work with a girl in a kimono, it wasn’t outrageous to imagine the idea of Maou shirking work to hang with the ladies for a while.

Kisaki didn’t seem too open to the real reason behind his disappearance, and he didn’t have any other useful excuse for her. Giving her even more transparent lies would only make her angrier…

“Mr. Maou rescued me, madam.”

“What?”

Kisaki looked up at the unexpected voice, noticing an unfamiliar woman in front of her.

Where did she come from? Maou briskly turned around, never expecting to hear
this
voice right now.

“…Can I ask who you are?”

“My name is Yusa. I’m friends with Chiho Sasaki, and…”

She froze for a moment, taking the time to gauge the ball of sweat and nerves in front of her.

“And Mr. Maou, too.”

There. She said it.

Maou was already sheepish enough before. Now, looking at Emi, he felt like an entire flock of them.

Emi averted her eyes, focusing on Kisaki alone.

“Marko’s…friend?”

“Yeah. When we were returning home with Chiho and Ms. Kamazuki over there, we were stalked by a molester. We hid, and Mr. Maou wound up rescuing us.”

“A molester? Oh. You know, I
did
hear about something happening at an intersection in Sasazuka.”

“We were just three women, and we didn’t have anything to defend ourselves with. It was all we could do to keep ourselves unseen…”

Kisaki listened on, still dubious. Then Suzuno decided to board the roller coaster for herself.

“Yes…she’s, er, Yusa is correct.”

“Suzu…uh, Ms. Kamazuki…”

Maou barely avoided revealing his familiarity with Suzuno. That was how unexpected her follow-up was.

“M-Maou chased the stalker away for us, but he, er, he needed to return to MgRonald because he’d left it empty, so I reasoned, uh, I thought I should accompany him back…”

It was an awkward performance, but the tears Suzuno somehow summoned to her eyes did wonders to sell it.

Maou had to resist asking whether she’d made up that character herself, or she was imitating someone on TV.

Then Emi gave him an even bigger fright.

“…Sadao.”

“What…?”

It was the first time Emi called him by that name in front of anyone else.

“We wound up bringing Chiho back home. Her mother was waiting for her.”

“Oh? Oh. Well, great. Sounds, uh, good.”

Maou found himself unable to form a coherent sentence. He decided to nod lightly instead.

Kisaki watched all of this in silence before speaking up.

“…Well, I suppose it’s not your fault, then.”

She sighed, eyebrows still slanted downward, as if resigning herself to the “truth.”

“I guess I knew I shouldn’t have had teenage girls working dinner alone. You never know what kind of people are out there, waiting to prey on them.”

She placed a hand on Maou’s shoulder, plainly a level calmer than before, even as she ruefully reflected on her scheduling practices.

“Listen, Marko. You’re a really important part of the team, both for me and the rest of the staff. So try not to get yourself hurt, okay? I’m glad you were brave enough to protect Chi and these other two friends of yours, but if you were injured out there, that’d really hurt me…and them.”

“Ms. Kisaki…”

“I hope that today’s been a constructive experience for you…and I hope you understand how these girls feel, too.”

Then Kisaki finally rested her eyes upon Suzuno.

“Thank you for bringing Marko…I mean, Maou…back for me. Why don’t you take a break inside? I’ll get some coffee going. You, too.”

She gave Maou another friendly pat on the shoulder as she called for Suzuno and Emi.

“What do you think?”

“Oh, I think we should…”

Suzuno and Emi looked at each other hesitantly.

“Ah, just have a drink.”

Maou abruptly stopped them before they could refuse.

“It’s weird how good the coffee at the Mag tastes when Ms. Kisaki makes it.”

It came out more awkwardly than he’d hoped. Suzuno and Emi exchanged another glance.