The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 5 (21 page)

“Okay. I’ll see what kind of plan I can hatch. You mind staying where you are for now? I’ll call you later and letcha know if we see anything.”

“What kind of plan? Like, what are you… Hey!! Ugh, the bastard hung up on me!”

“What is wrong, my liege?”

“I dunno. It sounds like Urushihara’s got some kind of wacky-ass idea in mind that he’s not telling me about.”

“That is certainly unsettling. Hopefully it does not involve dipping into our bank account again.”

“What, you think he’s gonna call a detective or something? …Ugh. Let’s give him fifteen minutes. If I don’t hear from him by then, I’ll have everyone group back together somewhere or other.”

Maou dropped his cell phone back into his pocket and began trudging back down the stairs, Ashiya following closely behind.

Suzuno, following Urushihara, ran down the streets of the Yoyogi neighborhood.

The moment Urushihara hung up, this was what he said to her:

“I’m gonna lure the angel out. Give me a hand.”

Then he ran off. No further details.

“Lucifer! Where do you intend to go? We’re drifting away from the station!”

The pair of them were stationed at Yoyogi precisely because it was a quick train ride from both Tokyo Tower and the Skytree. Without a handy station nearby, they had no easy mode of transport unless they tapped their supernatural powers—which they needed to conserve in case a fight broke out.

“Hey… You and Emilia, you guys can refill your holy force, right? You got some kind of method handy for that?”

“…What do you mean?”

A capped bottle of 5-Holy Energy β was at the ready somewhere in Suzuno’s kimono. But she had little intention of revealing the secret to the Devil’s Castle.

“We can’t find Raguel. We have to, before he can fire off more of that sonar. But we can’t. And we got no time to call Emilia back here. So you do it.”

“Do what? What are you even bidding me to do?”

Suzuno looked up into the air once Urushihara finally stopped.

There was a needlelike tower before them, dark and smooth as an obelisk. It loomed large in the dark cityscape, the moon framing it from behind as four red warning lights flashed on each corner of its roof. It bore a company logo that Suzuno was familiar with.

“You know, I never really wanted a TV in the first place. Who needs it? If you got the Net and
maaaybe
a cell phone, that’s way more than enough.”

“This, this is hardly open to the public at time like this, is it?!”

Urushihara brushed off Suzuno’s flustered hesitation.

“Startin’ to see what I wanna do yet?”

“I do, but if you break something or cause any other problems, the entire city will descend into panic!”

“Yeah, dude. That’s why I’m having
you
do it. Not Emilia or Devil King–mode Maou. We don’t need to kill an archangel. Your power’s
juuuust
weak enough for the job.”

“…I do
not
like your tone of voice. …I, er, that is not the problem, but… Ah! Lucifer!”

Urushihara, unwilling to let Suzuno gripe at him for the next few minutes, made a beeline for the building entrance.

A security guard attempted to stop him. As he should have. A young man in a wrinkled, sweat-stained T-shirt did not fit the profile for this building’s usual clientele.

But, in a single glint of light from the purple eyes lurking underneath his long, unkempt hair, Urushihara completely disappeared from the guard’s sight.

In front of the guard, stopped cold at this guy suddenly vanishing before his eyes, Urushihara turned around and motioned Suzuno to follow. Then he strode right into one of the landmark buildings of the Yoyogi neighborhood of Shibuya—the Yoyogi Dokodemo Building, usually referred to as the Dokodemo Tower.

Suzuno followed behind, hesitant at first. But, remarkably enough, nobody lifted a finger to stop this dirty-T-shirt-wearing man and kimono-wearing woman, one of the oddest couples this building had likely ever seen.

“If there’s a company that does as much high-frequency transmission as a TV network, it’s gotta be a cell phone company, right?”

“W-wait, are you… Are you telling me to do what Raguel did…?”

Urushihara nodded and smiled.

“Yep. Fire a sonar bolt on Dokodemo’s cell phone frequencies. Use it to look for someone with more holy power than anyone in Japan’d normally have. One of the blips has got to be our angel.”

“Wh-why did it have to be this…?”

Suzuno shivered, hugging herself to stave off the cold.

It was blisteringly hot at ground level, but up here, at the top of the 902-foot-high Dokodemo Tower, the base of the building’s microwave antenna was in the midst of a powerful, punishing gale.

A kimono was a singularly inconvenient garment to wear in high winds. The flapping cloth was all but useless in keeping her skin insulated.

“Okay.”

Suddenly, Urushihara’s head popped out from an antenna maintenance corridor below, one usually restricted to company servicemen. A large map of Tokyo was in his hands, covered in frequencies and color-coded ranges.

“I’ve tracked down the frequency that’ll reach the biggest chunk of greater Tokyo. Fire your sonar at the antenna and I’ll make sure it hits that frequency. But don’t touch it. It’ll burn ya.”

Suzuno wondered blithely if Urushihara planned to put that map back where he found it after all this was done. Judging by the state of his computer desk, the answer was probably no.

“And…and doing this won’t destroy some important computer somewhere, or somesuch?”

“No, dude, it’ll be fine. I just suppressed part of their bandwidth to make room for your sonar, so hurry up before customers start bitching, okay?”

“…All right! Let it be, then!”

It was hard to tell exactly what Suzuno meant by it. But there wasn’t enough time to ask for clarification.

Boosting the holy power within her body to its limits, Suzuno shot it at full force toward the antenna.

“Holy Seeker!!”

The moment the power flowing out of Suzuno’s hands fused itself with the microwave antenna, it shot in every direction outward, as if invisible electric lines spidered out from the installation. It formed an enormous ring of light, growing larger and larger, until its edges were several hundred feet away from Dokodemo Tower. Then it dissipated into the air, disappearing quickly.

But even if the wave of holy power was impossible for a person to see or feel, just like the signals transmitted by their cell phone, it was definitely flying off, farther and farther away, and soon it would catch something.

“Hn…nnnnh.”

Holy Seeker, essentially a long-range method of detecting enemy positions, wasn’t a fire-and-forget weapon. Launching the wave was little more than taking some holy force
here
and tossing it over
there
. The trick was waiting, seeking out the responses that would wing their way back from the expanding wave. It was Suzuno’s job to keep her detection range as broad as possible, making sure the flow of power never stopped until she picked up something. But even though Suzuno wielded superhuman powers, that was still only compared to a normal human being. Her stores of holy force were like a can of baked beans compared to Emi’s fully stocked zombie apocalypse survival bunker.

“I…I can’t…”

If she kept letting the holy force pour out of her like this, she’d run dry in a matter of moments.

“Nh!”

With a groan, she thrust her hand into a pocket and took out her bottle of 5-Holy Energy β. With a single thumb whip, just like in the TV ads, she uncorked the cap and downed the entire contents on the spot.

“Whoooaaa,
that
thing, huh?”

Urushihara, right next to her, grinned in wonder, like a squirrel discovering a new acorn.

Suzuno was expecting to use the Light of Iron to jump down off the building once the job was done. That was on the back burner now. She had to use her recharged power to hang on until she picked up a response.

“…There!!”

Finally, the ring of Holy Seeker light came through for her.

Running through the wave of holy force, an unseen sensation, like a mild electric shock, shot across the Dokodemo Tower antenna and into Suzuno’s body.

At that moment, she let her concentration break, heaving a mighty sigh as the sweat poured down her face.

“There’s one about four miles southeast of here…two about nine miles east-northeast…one very faint reaction just southwest of here.”

Urushihara eyed the map in hand disapprovingly as Suzuno gasped out her report.

“Southwest of here is Sasazuka. I don’t know why it’s so weak, but that’s gotta be Sariel. Four miles southeast would be Tokyo Tower, I’m pretty sure, and nine miles east-northeast is near the Skytree. If Emilia and Alas Ramus are one of the Skytree blips, then… Yeaaaah, better call Maou. Someone’s gotta be in the—”

“And…one more…”

“Huh?”

The sweat streaming down her body, Suzuno deftly extracted the large pin holding her hair in place. With a flash of light, it transformed into a gigantic hammer, settling into Suzuno’s graceful hands.

Urushihara reared back for a moment, fearful that Suzuno’s patience for being ordered around without explanation had finally wore a little too thin. But she paid him no mind as she approached the edge of the antenna installation.

“Here.”

“Dude?!”

“Brace yourself, Lucifer. Something, I know not what, is approaching.”

Suzuno probed the night scenery of Yoyogi below with her eyes.

There was a light among the cars, just slightly stronger than their headlights. With a flicker, it zoomed upward, following the contours of Dokodemo Tower’s outer wall.

“It’s coming!”

“Wh-what is?!”

Urushihara was about as unprepared to battle as any demon could be. Suzuno reared back from the edge and steeled herself, ready for whatever this attack could bring, ready and able to bash whatever confronted her in the head with everything she had as she focused her remaining holy force.

Her foe was closely hugging the building’s wall. She might have to prepare for aerial combat, given that.

Then, the whooshing of the wind changed in tone.

“…!!”

Suzuno was left speechless.

Urushihara was similarly frozen, his frenzied panic now a thing of the past.

Someone they weren’t expecting in a million years was now floating in front of them.

The wide-open eyes of the figure, surrounded by a faintly glowing golden light, were also a change of pace from usual.

They were purple, like Urushihara’s or Sariel’s.

But any otherworldly mystery these deep-violet eyes might have projected to the viewer was somewhat ruined by the flowery light-pink pajamas and the green slippers with faded golden lettering on them that read S
EIKAI
U
NIVERSITY
H
OSPITAL
.

“Ch-Chiho?!”

“Dude, what the hell?!”

It was Chiho, right where she really shouldn’t have been.

“Oh! Hi, guys!”

The two “guys” were shocked, to be sure, but Chiho didn’t seem to anticipate running into them, either. With a hand to her ear, she began talking to…someone.

“This isn’t the right place! …Huh? Oh, uh, really?”

They had no idea who she was addressing. Urushihara began to wonder if Chiho, clearly enveloped in holy force, had unlocked some latent magical ability he didn’t know she had.

“An Idea Link?”

“Huh? Oh, not that! I got some earbuds from Socket City with a mike attached to them. It was kinda weird going in the store in this outfit, but…”

“…Oh.”

Urushihara, finally noticing the black cord wending its way from Chiho’s pajama pocket to her ears, fell to his knees. Suzuno, now agitated to the point where she was spitting out her words, addressed Chiho.

“That doesn’t matter! Chiho, what on Earth has happened to you?!”

“Um, I don’t really have time to explain! Was that you who fired that sonar shot from here, Suzuno?”

“Y-yes.”

Suzuno barely managed a nod. Having Chiho glowing a radiant gold as she asked the question was causing both of them serious confusion.

“Okay, uh, I guess you probably shouldn’t do that? Like, it’s kind of bad, apparently?”