The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 5 (17 page)

“Gabriel did?!”

The other three in the room were instantaneously stupefied.

“That huge, slimy freak better not have laid a finger on her…” Maou growled.

“Yeah, I wish the story was that simple. He came in on other business,” Urushihara replied. “Apparently he’s been put on desk duty after screwing up the Yesod-fragment hunt one too many times. Now they’re looking for some relic from the Demon Overlord Satan or whoever.”

Emi rolled her eyes.

“Desk duty? You think this is some kind of cop drama?”

“A ‘relic from the Demon Overlord’…?”

“You know that, Maou?”

“Hope it’s worth money. I could use some of that…though the inheritance tax would probably be a deal breaker. …Yeah, I think it rings a bell, but I don’t see why folks up in heaven would get in a lather searching for it.”

“Whoa. Glad to see we’re both on the same level, Maou.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing. Anyway, I guess Gabriel’s searching for that…whatever it is, but there’s a chance they’ve sent another angel down in his place. And if they have, I know who it’ll be.”

“Yo, Suzuno. If you have even a shred of conscience left as a cleric, go back to Ente Isla and take down the Church as the idol-worshipping fraud it is,” Maou grumbled.

“…I have no defense.”

Suzuno hung her head down low. Meanwhile, Ashiya crossed his arms.

“My, my, my. Between this lazy shut-in and that girl chaser… Is there anyone at all half decent up there?”

“Dude, don’t lump me in with them, Ashiya. I left ’cause I hated it, remember?”

“‘Left’?”

“So you’re saying that even you, the self-described shut-in, has some self-awareness?”

“Geh…”

Ashiya tipped his head lightly at Urushihara’s words, but as soon as all that, Maou thrust in, and Urushihara was only able to get a single word out.

“A-anyway!”

The fallen angel sputtered through his attempt to continue:

“If we’re gonna believe Gabriel, they sent the Observer down here to Japan.”

“The Observer…? Raguel? The angel who oversees the behavior of all the other angels?”

Urushihara nodded at Suzuno.

“He’s not all that high on the ladder, so to speak. Gabriel could probably whip his ass in a fair fight, and he’s not a Sephirah guardian, either. Thing is, though, Raguel’s been granted certain…powers the others don’t have.”

“The Call of the End Times…?” Suzuno muttered.

“Good evening. It’s the end of the week and time for your Friday evening news…”

The newscaster on TV demonstrated impeccable timing.

“……”

All eyes rested upon Suzuno. She turned red once she realized why.

“Wh-what? A mere coincidence!”

“……”

Then all eyes swiveled their way back toward Urushihara.

“I did not intend to do that! It is not my doing!” Suzuno protested.

Urushihara ignored her.

“I don’t know how the Call of the End Times was described in Ente Islan mythology, but it’s nothing all that fancy. Raguel has the power to observe the other angels, judge them as necessary, and announce the results to the rest of heaven. It usually involves booting angels out of the club, though.”

“Fallen angels?”

“Yeah. They set that whole system up not long after I left heaven. The Observer levies his judgment, and the Evil Eye of the Fallen carries out his sentence.”

“You mean…Sariel?”

It wasn’t a name Maou expected to come up.

“Think about it, dude. If Sariel was the sole judge, jury, and executioner when it came to kicking out angels, there wouldn’t be a single man left in heaven.”

Maou, Emi, and Suzuno exchanged glances. It was an extremely persuasive explanation.

“I know it looks like everyone just does what they want up there, but inside the bureaucracy, you’re pretty restricted in how you can use your powers. Not too different in the human world, either, right? The same kinda idea as why the soldier with his finger on the A-bomb button doesn’t try taking over the world.”

“But why is Raguel in Japan? The way you’re putting it, it doesn’t sound like he makes all that good of a substitute for Gabriel, given his power levels.”

Urushihara nodded at Emi’s question. “Well, if you assume that Raguel ain’t here to bring Gabriel back to heaven…I’m guessing he’s here to lay judgment on someone.”

“It might not be ‘doves’ like me paying house calls any longer.”

The warning was clear upon Urushihara’s mind.

“What kind of judgment?”

“You don’t know?”

Maou’s question seemed far less weighty to him than Emi’s.

“Neither of you? The King of All Demons and the half-angel Hero over there?”

Urushihara then turned to Suzuno.

“Heaven stood by blithely while the Devil King’s army ran roughshod over Ente Isla. So why’s it sending angels down to Japan, on another world, like it’s goin’ outta style? You ever think about that?”

For Suzuno, a high-level Church cleric who sent many of her sect’s knights to their doom while proclaiming all the while that her god’s blessings were on their side, the question was enough to crush her.

“…No matter how many Ente Islans lose their lives, it never affects the heavens at all…” she whispered.

“Bingo.”

A cruel reply.

“But if they think it’s their fault, they’ll try to fix it…in the way
they
prefer to do it. You get me? Maou, Yusa, and Ashiya and Bell, too, of course—you’re all getting close to a truth the heavens want to keep hidden; you’re keeping Sephirah fragments to yourself; and you used your innate powers to dispatch multiple frontline angels. If Raguel declares you to be an enemy of all heaven…”

The newscast, playing to Maou’s crew and nobody else, played footage from a civil war in one nation or another.

“
That’s
when heaven’s gonna start gettin’ serious. They’ll make Gabriel’s Heavenly Regiment look like a bunch of kindergartners.”

“…Bullcrap!” Maou hammered an angry fist down on the table. “Then why didn’t they just attack us directly this time, too?!”

“Dunno, man. All this assumes that we can believe what Gabriel told me. For all we know, they’re after something totally unrelated to us—that ‘woman in white,’ for example. We have no idea where Chiho Sasaki’s ring came from, right?”

“So what do you want us to do? We can hardly just sit here and wait for Raguel to take action. That could lead to more victims like Ms. Sasaki.”

“Yeah, about that. I actually got ideas along those lines, so I’ve been waiting for a bit now.”

“Waiting? For what…?”

“Now for a roundup of the day’s top news.”

The newscaster chose that moment to wrap up his civil-war coverage and launch into a recap of Japan’s main news stories of the day.

“Technicians are still looking into a bug that’s inconvenienced users across the metro area, one that’s preventing TV-compatible cell phones and tablets from receiving broadcasts.”

“Oh, that wasn’t just Dokodemo?”

Emi, who had spent much of the past few days assuaging irate customers about that exact issue, perked up at the mention.

The screen showed some hapless phone-company executive apologizing at a press conference, bowing down low as he drowned in a blaze of camera flashes.

Then:

“Geh!”

“Whoa!”

“Agh!”

As if thrown off balance by the litany of flashes, Maou and Ashiya fell off of their chairs.

Urushihara managed to grab on to the table in time, but his knees were visibly trembling.

“Wh-what’s wrong with you guys?”

“Are you all right?!”

Emi helped Maou up and Suzuno lent a hand to Ashiya, both wondering why they had been suddenly blown aside by nothing in particular.

“Huh?”

“Wha?!”

When they set eyes on the two demons, however, their eyes popped out of their sockets.

Their hair was on end, as if they had been electrocuted.

Poor Ashiya, fresh from Suzuno’s sonar probing, had his hair going every which direction, as if he purchased an economy-sized jar of hair wax and figured he better use it all before the sell-by date.

“What is going
on
with you people?!”

“…That’s what I want to know.” Maou’s voice was shaky and cheerless.

“Emilia and Bell didn’t notice that? Must be that receptiveness you guys have…”

Urushihara looked unfazed at first glance, but he still sounded a bit pained as he gestured toward the TV.

In the midst of this furor, the news had already moved on to a story about the nationwide heat wave leading to an epidemic of heatstroke cases.

“Wh-what? The TV? Huh? A-all right, all right, gimme a sec!”

Emi, meanwhile, was talking to herself, one finger to her temple. Hurriedly checking to make sure there were no people or security cameras around, she summoned Alas Ramus into the visitor space.

“Teh-bee!”

The child made a beeline for the TV and began banging a tiny fist against the screen.

The LCD screen bent slightly at the force as Emi earnestly tried to stop this sudden bout of violence.

“Wh-what’re you doing, Alas Ramus? You can’t do that! That’s the hospital’s—”

“It was all
whoosh
!”

“…Huh?”

Alas Ramus’s soft hands continue to bop against the screen.

“All
flaaaash
, then
ziiiiing
, then
dooooooooom
!”

Her right hand was battering the TV. Her left was pointed at her own large eyes.

“‘Flash, zing, dooooooom’?”

The barrage of sound effects meant little to Emi. Urushihara, still straightening out his hair with a comb that nobody had realized until now he kept handy, motioned toward the TV.

“Remember what Bell just did to Ashiya, dude? Alas Ramus must’ve picked up on it. She’s really sensitive to that kinda stuff. It’s that sonar, except, like,
mega
scaled up. Someone’s breaking into the broadcast and firing sonar bolts. Multiple times today! He can trace the TVs that sent back a sonar response, so that’s a lot easier than casting a net nationwide. One of them must’ve done in Chiho Sasaki.”

“Sonar? That jolt right now was
sonar
?!”

Maou, his hair still sticking several inches off his head, confronted Urushihara at his seat. Ashiya nodded, glaring at Suzuno as he did.

“It…it was rather similar to Suzuno’s little trick earlier, yes…”

“Are you saying that was Raguel just now, Urushihara?”

“Yeah, there’s a pretty good chance of that. If it isn’t Gabriel, it’s gotta be the other guy.”

“W-wait a minute. How could they fire off bolts of sonar through TV waves?!” Suzuno exclaimed. “And even if they could, tens of millions of people are watching TV in Japan right now! Surely Chiho would not be the only one affected! Besides, I have never heard of anyone rendered comatose by it…”

The only local expert at the procedure seemed genuinely offended. But Maou, suddenly realizing something, looked upward as he finally got around to straightening his hair.

“Chi’s house has already been the site of at least one sonar strike.”

“What?!”

“Oh…”

Emi came to the same realization as Maou. It made her mouth hang open.

“You mean Al’s—I mean, Albert’s sonar?”

That episode had come before Chiho had learned the truth behind Maou and Emi:

Albert, one of Emi’s traveling companions, had fired off several sonar messages to warn his friend in Japan that something terrible was coming her way.

Chiho chose Maou to discuss the experience with…which was part of what brought the two closer to each other in the first place.

“You got it. All those untargeted sonar blasts and Idea Links, no particular recipient in mind, pummeling against Chi’s body… Hey, Suzuno. A decent caster can change who or what his sonar or Idea Links react to, right?”

“Y-yes. If you are merely seeking out the position of someone or something, the required calculations are quite simple. If you change resonation methods, as I did with Chiho and Alciel, you can use them for a variety of purposes.”

That
was why Chiho unintentionally picked up on Albert’s Idea Link. That ministorm of sonar pulses took place all because Albert happened to find a willing recipient in Chiho before anyone else. The Link was tuned to search for “someone with a strong link to Devil King Satan”—and now, Chiho was the only Japanese person who knew about Ente Isla.

“That’s why the sonar that made it through the TV in Chiho Sasaki’s house must have sparked some kinda explosive reaction.”

“Wait. Why’s it matter if the area had a strong reaction to a pulse before now? Are you saying it responded to whatever residue was left from Al and Eme’s holy force? ’Cause if that was the case, all the holy power me and Gabriel tossed around Sasazuka would’ve made the whole town explode whenever a sonar pulse hit it.”

“Uh, that holy-power sonar blast just now nearly took our heads off.”

“You said it.”

Maou’s and Ashiya’s complaints were not commented upon.

“Y’know, I wasn’t paying attention at the time ’cause Maou was too busy kicking the crap out of me…” Urushihara, meanwhile, was back to his usual air of supreme confidence. “But why were Emeralda Etuva and Albert Ende able to fire sonar bolts over to Japan, on Earth, anyway?”

“…What do you mean?”

“Well, Olba, I get. He’s the guy who sent Emilia through the Gate after Maou in the first place. But not those two. They shouldn’t be able to use Gate magic at all. How’d they manage to take a sonar bolt and transmit it right over to Japan?”

“That was before I arrived here, so I am unaware of the details, but did they not follow your and Lord Olba’s paths through space? That was how I arrived here.”

“Why’re you making me repeat myself, Bell? Emeralda Etuva and Albert Ende
don’t know how to work Gates
.”

“But they both made it over here! Like what the Devil King said, they could use that feather pen made from an archangel’s wings to summon Gates without using demonic force. Both of them had feather pens from Laila…from my mother. They probably just came over here to send out those sonar and Idea Link transmissions. That’s how Chiho was able to pick up on Albert’s… Um?”