The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 5 (26 page)

The fact that the faintly glowing, green demonic barrier that protected everyone and everything inside had not even the slightest scratch on it was, if anything, a blow to Satan’s pride as a warrior.

That was because, although he’d constructed it to keep the pair of angels from escaping, Gabriel had just revealed that he could teleport himself out of it anytime he wanted.

“…
Deh
. Treating me like some kind of idiot…”

Satan clenched his teeth, along with his fists. Emilia’s eyes arced downward as she stared at the space Gabriel and Raguel had previously occupied.

“What was Gabriel trying to do…? If he wanted to, he could’ve helped Raguel finish his mission long before any of us were involved.”

Alciel’s eyes were elsewhere.

“…Our enemy’s gone. I don’t feel them anywhere nearby…and there’s something more important on my mind, too.”

Satan and Emilia found themselves following his gaze.

“Yeaaah, um…”

The three of them were sizing up the even greater enigma that remained. Chiho, somehow blessed with a new and massive power, was in front of them.

The aura of holy force, easily the equal of Emilia’s, still surrounded her. A blast of demonic force had put her in a coma before, but none of the evil power tossed around at the base of Tokyo Tower seemed to faze her now. This sudden, rapt attention from the others caused her to fidget and blush a bit. She bowed meekly.

“I-I’m sorry! I don’t think this’ll last much longer…”

The apology, and the body language, were both classic Chiho.

“H-hey!”

“I know I kind of ragged on Raguel and Suzuno about it, but I had to throw the world’s energy balance off a lot to build up demonic force for Maou and Ashiya, too. It sounds like I have to rebalance it pretty quickly, so… Uh, uh, okay! All right, I understand! I’ll be right there!”

Chiho put her hands to her ears and shut her eyes, like someone was shouting right next to her.

“Wh-what’s going on?”

“Um, she said she doesn’t know, and that’s the bad part about it!”

“
Who
said? Chiho, is there someone talking in your…?”

Then Emilia realized it. There was a pair of black earbuds, with mike, in her ears. Chiho wasn’t being possessed or controlled by anyone. Right now, she was moving by her own free will, borrowing someone else’s power as she did. And there was only one person she could have borrowed it from.

“…My mother?! Is it my mother?!”

“Uh, uhm, Yusa, I’m really sorry, but the way she’s putting it, we’re really,
really
short on time, so…”

Emilia’s probing query flustered Chiho a bit. Quickly, she readied her bow again.

“Maou, Ashiya, get back down to the roof of the deck! It’s too dangerous for you!”

“Dangerous? What is?!”

“Ch-Chiho! What’re you doing?! Please, could you lend me your phone for a—”

“
Nngh
, I’m sorry…!”

Chiho grimaced at the group’s disparate reactions. Still, with a light kick of her own against the Tokyo Tower antenna, she propelled herself yet higher into the night sky.

“Chihoooooo!!”

“I’m sooooorrrrryyyyy!!”

The divine presence of Chiho, coupled with her not-at-all-divine apology, fired a silvery arrow straight down at the antenna below her.

“Whoaahh?!”

The moment it struck the spire, the whole process began anew.

Sadao Maou’s transformation into Satan took place in total reverse, as if some god up above was rewinding the tape on him.

The green demonic barrier melted away, while Satan and Alciel felt the demonic energy ebb from their bodies.

Emilia was unaffected, but still had to steel herself to keep the gushing flow of force from blowing her skyward.

“Ah!”

“Argh!”

Once the barrier was fully gone, Satan and Alciel were back to Sadao Maou and Shirou Ashiya, lying on the roof of Observation Deck 1.

Chiho must have focused all their energy back upon a single point. Emilia could see that much. The demonic force concentrated itself upon the antenna, and then:

“Rain, rain, go
awaaaaaayyy
!!”

With Chiho’s signal, a long, thin belt of light shot out in all directions from the tower, bathing Tokyo in an aurora-like glow.

Now that no demonic barrier was stopping them, the crowd at ground level continued to marvel at the festival of light.

The fallen angel and cleric on top of the Dokodemo Tower in Yoyogi joined them, as did the King of All Demons, his Great Demon General, and the Hero of the Holy Sword atop Tokyo Tower.

The teenager in pajamas, growing more self-conscious by the moment, gradually sidled back down toward Maou.

“…! Chi!”

“Chiho!”

“Ms. Sasaki!!”

Emi and Ashiya hurriedly ran up to her.

A smile erupted upon her face as she fell into Maou’s arms and passed out.

“Uh, hey, Chi? Chi? What’s up? Are you…um.”

The cold wind was beating upon them once again, but not even that was enough to muffle the sound coming from her.

“…She’s asleep.”

Chiho was happily snoring in Maou’s grasp.

Her expression was one of pure contentment. The overwhelming presence that had stunned the warriors of another planet into silence was now replaced by a warm, baby-like smile.

“Um… Hello, Maou.”

It was not the most enthusiastic of greetings from Chiho, as her cheeks glowed red and she attempted to hide her face underneath her hospital-bed comforter.

“Hey. Uh, your mom said you were gonna be discharged tomorrow, so…where is she, anyway? She gave me a call.”

It was a bit awkward for Maou, being alone here without Riho present. He looked around the room.

“I-I think she’ll be back in a minute. She said she had some shopping to do…”

“Oh? Well, all right. Here, um, I got you some flowers.”

“Oh! Thank you very much.”

Chiho shyly brought her hands forward.

“So, um…”

“…Yes?”

Chiho and Maou sized each up for a moment, trying to read each other’s minds. The silence got to Maou first.

“Do you…remember last night at all?”

Chiho lightly, but clearly, nodded. Slowly, she began to recap the events of the previous night.

“After I helped you with the move, I went home and watched TV. Then the screen lit up all white…and then I don’t remember anything. Not until I woke up in here. Then, yesterday… Well, my phone should’ve been totally out of power, but it rang anyway, and this ring on my finger lit up…and I guess I figured out I could do all that stuff after that. But that was really all me, pretty much. I just, you know, I was hearing all these things on the phone, and I felt like I had to do something.”

Maou moved on to the question he wanted an answer to the most.

“Who was on the line?”

“Um…well, it was definitely a woman, and I think she was from your world…”

Anxiety and hopefulness coursed across Maou’s mind for a moment. But Chiho shook her head.

“But she didn’t give me her name. She said to just brush it off if anyone asked me. That was apparently her condition for lending me all that power…”

“…Man. So you believed her after she gave you that story? You practically surrendered your whole body to her.”

It was Maou’s honest appraisal. The idea made him break into a cold sweat.

“Well… I dunno,” Chiho replied sheepishly. “I just figured she wouldn’t be talking to me if you or Yusa were her enemy. I mean, look at all the power she had. She could’ve taken me hostage or controlled me like a robot if she wanted to, but she didn’t. So I figured she wasn’t a bad guy, anyway.”

“…Y’know, I’ve been thinking this for a while, but wow, Chiho, you’ve
really
got a thick skin for this kinda thing.”

“Well, that’s thanks to all my new friends keeping things exciting all the time.” Chiho let out an easy laugh. “Besides, when Gabriel first showed up…that really frustrated me.”

“Oh?”

“Remember how you told me that I shouldn’t go near your apartment until everything was worked out with Alas Ramus? I mean, I was glad to see you worry about me, and I know I’d just get in the way during a fight, but it was…you know, just a little frustrating, still. I wished that I had enough strength to fight like you guys. To protect everybody I knew. And then…”

Chiho picked up her phone, then looked up at Maou, an apologetic look on her face.

“The woman on the phone offered you her powers?”

It certainly wasn’t a good example of thinking ahead—giving your physical body over to a total stranger over the phone. Very un-Chiho-like. But Chiho shook her head briskly at Maou’s stern tone.

“Oh, it wasn’t that simple. She heard me talking in my sleep, so she gave me this lecture about how I shouldn’t be such a picky eater. Then she talked about why I fainted at home, and how you and everyone else came to visit me in the hospital, and how you and Yusa might be fighting over in Tokyo Tower or the Skytree right this moment, and how it’d be against Gabriel and this other angel I didn’t know, and how Sariel wasn’t involved at all, and how a lot of other people with vast holy powers were joining in as well, and how despite knowing all of that, she wasn’t in a position to go out in public and handle it herself, and stuff.”

“……”

Maou fell silent at Chiho’s astonishing verbal checklist.

“So once she told me all of that, she got really serious with me, like, ‘I’ll protect you if it gets dangerous at all and I’ll repay you afterward, so please, help me protect the people I hold so dear for me’ and so on. That’s what made me think, ‘Okay, I guess I can trust her.’ Like, if I could pitch in and help you and Yusa when you’re really, really in trouble…”

Chiho looked up again, gauging Maou’s countenance.

“…The idea made me kind of happy, to be honest. And it felt great, too. Flying in the air and all. Pretty cold, but great.”

Nobody on Earth was more aware than Chiho of her relationship with Maou and the other Ente Islans, and where exactly she stood with all of them. She would never be one to let her emotions carry her to the battlefield uninvited. That would just make Maou and Emi’s job more difficult.

That was why she was so willing to endure the pain of feeling helpless around them. It wasn’t hard to picture that. She was, after all, still just another teenage girl.

“Well, if that ever happens again and you think the lady’s willing to listen, don’t sell yourself out so easy, okay? You know, talk to me or Emi first. No guarantee it’ll work out so well next time, besides.”

Chiho nodded sincerely—enough so for Maou to accept it. He relaxed his face a little.

“So does your body feel different at all?”

Chiho found it difficult to answer.

“…In a way, yes. But in a way, no, too. I mean, I feel like everything’s back to normal, and I’m not in pain at all. But…I’ve got memories, now, that I know don’t belong to me.”

“Don’t belong to you?”

“I don’t know if I should call them memories or just…really strong emotions, or something? Like, at first, I thought I saw it in a movie or something and my brain decided to stick it into my dreams one night. But…but I really think they belong to you. Or, I mean, they belong to Satan.”

“…Me?”

“I see this really tiny demon.”

Maou gulped nervously.

“He’s crying his eyes out, and he’s covered in cuts and bruises… He looks like he might die unless someone helps him out. So then I came in and nursed him back to health, and I talked about all these different things while I did. And, soon, you and I were friends. I don’t know, it’s like I really wanted to help you out, or…”

“Chi?”

The pronoun shift threw Maou for a loop.

“But I was so busy trying to save you from the brink of death that I didn’t tell you about the most important thing of all. I kept wanting to apologize to you about it.”

Chiho’s eyes were squarely upon Maou.

“…Who are you?
What did you do to Chi’s body?
”

Now he knew. He sat forward in his chair, his voice stern and low.

“I suppose I was pretty immature back then, too. I was so lost in my ideals that I wasn’t able to see the big picture. That’s why I guess I made you go wrong in the end. But…what I’m doing now, it’s to the point where I can’t go back to you any longer. I’m truly sorry about that.”

The voice, and the body, was Chiho’s. But the atmosphere, the way she spoke, wasn’t.

“You haven’t forgotten about me…have you, Satan Jacob?”

That, finally, was enough to make Maou leap backward out of his chair.

“Listen to me for a moment. I promise it won’t be long.”

“What… You… How are you…!”

“I apologize for getting this child involved in this, but I had no other choice.”

Chiho’s possessor, ignoring Maou’s shaky voice, continued unabated.

“My mission is to bring Ente Isla back…to bring heaven, and the demon realms, back to what they need to be. If I wanted to do that, I needed a vast amount of support. And I have to admit it—in a way, I rescued you then because I thought it would help me out later on. I thought you’d grasp the truth I was trying to reach.”

“Chiho” turned her gaze toward the window.

“You, being here in this world right now…that’s no coincidence,” she said.

“What?”

“This is the closest Land of Sephirot to Ente Isla. You, and that child… It was rather like you simply moved a few doors down, in the grand scheme of things. It makes it easier to bring people and things back and forth…and more than anything, this Land of Sephirot is full. Complete. Its seed shall be carried on to the next generation. Neither tilted toward the holy nor the demonic…and yet, it holds both elements within it. Truly, a miraculous world…”

The unspoken
but
was clear in her voice.

“Now, our actions have dragged down the ‘inheritance’ process. If this continues, Ente Isla will face a disaster on the same level as the Demon Overlord Satan’s rise once again. I…I simply wanted to stop that…but I couldn’t. That’s the kind of people they are. All they care about is what’s in it for them. That’s why I took action.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying! Just get to the point!!”

“That child holds one of the keys…as does its father.”

Maou deliberately avoided pondering over which “child” she meant.
He
was talking to
her
. He needed to focus on that.

“Where are you right now?”

“My memories being copied into this child’s mind was a total coincidence. I never took her over, or possessed her. Not for a moment. Her brain will do away with them soon enough—they’re too much of a mismatch with the rest of her experiences. I wish I could have given her the power to protect herself, but…alas. However, I did give her one piece of information she needs to know for my goals. I hope you will forgive me for that.”

“Chiho” softly extended a hand to Maou.

“So please… You must find the Da’at of Ente Isla… That key will bring both father and child…to…ing the…en…”

“Whoa! Whoa, what’s up?!”

The voice grew scratchy, like noise in a radio transmission, gradually clouding up her speech.

“…the same…an…somehow…is all…”

A pained expression on her face, “Chiho” still mustered a smile.

“Bring the world back to what it needs to be. I wish you the best of luck, Devil King Satan!”

And, the next instant, Chiho was back.

“…Yeah, it’s like I’m remembering this stuff from back when you were a little kid, Maou, so I didn’t know what I should… Um, Maou?”

“…Oh. Sorry.”

Maou gave Chiho a light shake of his head, put his chair back in place, and sat down.

The purple stone on Chiho’s ring remained there as always.

“Eesh. Here I am in modern-day Japan, and I
still
don’t have anything to record audio with…”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.”

Maou smirked, mostly to himself, and shook his head again.

“So did whoever owns that ring tell you anything about what’s going to happen? It’s not like you can handle that Yesod fragment by yourself, right?”

Chiho took a glance at the ring on her left hand, her face perplexed.

“I think she did…or maybe she didn’t? I’m pretty sure that there’s something or other that I need to tell Yusa, though.”

“…Oh?”

The girl herself seemed fine with it, but Maou fretted nonetheless about what, if any, effect these otherworldly forces would have on her long-term health.

“Well, the way Suzuno put it, I don’t think you’d be able to store all that much holy force in your body anyway, Chi. It’s probably better that you don’t think about trying to harness it too much. It’ll make your mom get all worried.”

“Yeah. I know. An amateur like me, learning a little about these supernatural forces… That’s still not enough to let me fight by myself, huh?”

Maou nodded, satisfied.

“That’s what I figure. Our enemies aren’t gonna dial it down for us. If anything, they’ll dial it up.”

“Should I maybe let you or Yusa have this?”

Chiho’s eyes were still on the ring. Maou fell silent for a moment, unable to reach a conclusion. Then:

“Nah, you can keep it, Chi. A kind of lucky charm, you know?”

None of the archangels—Gabriel, Raguel, definitely not Sariel—demonstrated much of an appetite for Yesod-fragment collecting at the moment. That ring no doubt triggered Chiho’s performance last night, and whoever owned it had already guaranteed Chiho’s safety going forward. Having her take it would provide at least a bit of extra insurance, anyway.

That was how much of an indispensable presence Chiho had grown to become, to both demon and Hero. Anything that kept her safe was welcome.

“But… Oh! Maou!”

“Hmm?”

“
You’ve
already got an enemy like that, Maou! Someone who dials it up for you!”

“Huh?”

“Yusa, I mean! The Hero! That’s how she and the Devil King work, right?”

“I don’t think she’s really doing that just for me, Chi…”

“Maybe I’ll keep some some power after all! I’ll fight like her!”

“Wh-where did
that
come from?”

“What? I want to, that’s all! I can’t lose out to Yusa!”

“This isn’t about winning or losing, Chi…and, jeez, stop flailing around! You’re still technically in recovery, you know!”

The argument over Chiho’s potential battle prowess continued unabated, until Riho finally returned from the grocery store.