The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 1 (11 page)

Emi nearly lost hold of her bag as she pictured the concept.

“…So, what? What’re you expecting out of her?”

“How should I know? I was merely shadowing them to ensure no one suspicious approached.”

“You’re the most suspicious guy here right now, Ashiya. Can you hear what they’re saying with your demon hearing or anything?”

Alciel, despite his current deviant behavior, was still the Devil
King’s right-hand man, his sole remaining Great Demon General. It was a natural question for Emi to ask, given what she knew of his true identity.

“Nonsense. We demons wield superpowers because of our magic! And now that my magic is gone, I could hardly pull superhearing out of my hat or whatnot.”

Emi was lost in thought, ignoring the majority of the oddly boastful explanation the Great Demon General had provided.

It would be bad, very bad, for her if the demons found a way to restore their magic. If they gained access to a massive store of power before she could recover her own holy force—it was difficult to picture Emi having a way to cope with that.

At the same time, even if she moved to dispatch Maou right now, she couldn’t tell if she would retain enough holy power to return to Ente Isla, to say nothing of dealing with the authorities afterward…

After all, unlike Ashiya, Emi could still detect magical force within Maou—enough to confirm his identity as Devil King. For all she knew, he could still be concealing the full extent of his remaining power.

In which case, there was only one option.

If the Devil King and his minion—the chief danger she faced right now—discovered a source of magic, she would have to destroy it before they could harness it. A stopgap measure, perhaps, but it beat sitting around and twiddling her thumbs.

“Ashiya?”

“Wh-what?”

“You know there’s no point standing here watching them. Follow me.”

“Follow you? Where?”

“Into that café, of course. If you aren’t sure you can trust that girl yet, then you have to get closer. Listen to her while you scope out the surroundings. Otherwise, how can you call that ‘shadowing’ them?”

“I-I wouldn’t dare! What would His Demonic Highness say if I performed such a bold—
Ahh!
Wait a minute!”

Her tenuous line of logic laid out, Emi grabbed the scruff of the reluctant Ashiya and dragged him straight into the café.

Half an hour before Emi spotted Ashiya, the great Devil King Satan met with Chiho Sasaki, new part-timer at his MgRonald location, in front of the Shinjuku Alita big-screen display.

“Oh! Hey, did you cut your hair, Chi?”

“Yes! I thought I’d take the plunge and go short for a while! Do you like it?”

It was a minute difference from before, one Maou could spot only because he spent hours by Chiho’s side during her training period, and it was difficult to tell how much of a “plunge” it honestly was. However, given that he normally saw her in either her school uniform or her MgRonald uniform, the untied, free-flowing hair and well-defined lines of her blouse seemed graciously fresh to him.

“Yeah. It suits you really well.”

“Aw, great!”

Chiho gleefully pumped her fist in the air at Maou’s honest response.

“I thought you were gonna show up in your school uniform, though. Didn’t you have some kind of after-school club or something?”

Maou had no particular motive behind the question, but it was enough to put Chiho straight off her
I did it!
gesture.

“Oh, I’d
never
show up in that! No way would I wear
that
lame outfit to the café with you, Maou! Besides, if you were walking around Shinjuku with a girl in a school uniform, people might start jumping to conclusions, you know?”

Chiho seemed oddly riled up as she defended her choice of clothing. He had seen Chiho in her school clothes before, whenever she came to work straight from class, but the uniform didn’t seem
that
bad on her. The response was a tad surprising.

“Oh, but look at
you
! I thought you never shopped anywhere except for UniClo, but you’re going upscale today, huh?”

She wasn’t trying to be mean, presumably, but Maou still had to chuckle at the meaning beneath the words.

“Yeah, my roomie said there was no way he’d let me out on a date in UniClo stuff.”

“Not that there’s anything bad about UniClo, but if you want to go head-to-toe with it, you gotta be careful how you coordinate it, or else it’ll turn out all weird. But, wow, you saw this as a date, huh? That’s awesome!”

What’s
awesome? What’s so bad about UniClo? Is this
really
a date? Maou nodded vaguely, a thousand questions popping into his mind.

“You gotta get home before dinner, though, right?”

“Well, yeah, but…”

Chiho nodded sullenly. That much was unavoidable; she had family waiting. Maou knew by now that the sort of teenage girls who partied in Shibuya or Harajuku until the wee hours were only a tiny handful of the entire population.

“So what do you wanna do? We can’t just stand out here on the street. I don’t go out to eat much, so I can’t really think of any place to sit down and relax except Ronald’s.”

Chiho, apparently anticipating this, thought in silence for a moment.

“Why don’t we go to the Barluxe café? It’s cheap, and it’s usually pretty laid back.”

Maou knew about Barluxe. The name, at least.

“Oh, and don’t worry about paying! I can cover all of that, if you don’t mind listening to me.”

She must have said that out of concern for Maou, who emitted a palpable “working poor” aura at all hours of the day. But even Maou boasted the pride of a young adult male—to say nothing of the pride of a Devil King.

“Nah, nah. I’m the guy here. I can cover that much for the two of us.”

Ashiya’s prediction was spot-on. It figured.

“Ready to go?”

The nearest Barluxe was a short ways down Yasukuni street, at the near end of a food court within an underground commuter-rail corridor.

“Oh…uh, Maou?”

“Hmm?”

Chiho stopped Maou, just as he began to walk off.

“Um…”

“What? What is it?”

“Your, uh, hand?”

“Hand…?”

Chiho turned her eyes downward a bit, teeth clenched, her face a little red for some strange reason. Maou thought she was going to cry out for a moment, but what came out instead was even more surprising.

“Do you mind if we…uh, hold hands?”

She was a grinning ball of energy earlier, but all of a sudden her voice was as soft as a buzzing mosquito. Maou looked on, confused.

“Sure, whatever.”

He casually picked up Chiho’s right hand. Chiho, surprised, tensed her body for a moment.

“What?”

“Oh, uh…no! Awesome! Uh, it’s nothing! Thank you very—”

“Sure, sure. It’s a crowded street anyway. Wouldn’t want to get separated from you.”

“Ngh…!”

Chiho’s whirling carousel of mood changes made it difficult for Maou to figure out what she wanted. She seemed to flip between each one like a deck of cards, from surprise to happiness to blankness to some weird sense of capitulation.

“…You’re right, aren’t you? I kinda see that now.”

Maou took another close look at Chiho’s face. Chiho, eyes wide open, tried to maintain a certain distance from him in response. She was less than successful, given how they were holding hands, and thus simply twisted her body a little instead.

“You’re acting kinda weird today, Chi.”

“Oh? Oh. Well, I guess it’s probably because of all this stuff that’s been happening to me!” Averting her eyes in an odd fashion, Chiho started to walk, dragging Maou’s hand behind.

“Yeah… Guess so.”

Maou had little choice but to accept the excuse, but…

“Mmm…” He peered at Chiho, as she let out what sounded like a very torn sort of sigh.

At first glance, she appeared not to be manifesting any sort of magical phenomena. There were no unusual deviations from the typical human body, and even as they made contact with each other, she neither showed any noticeable changes nor demonstrated any reaction to the remnant magical power she might have absorbed from Maou.

The only notable deviation from the norm was that Chiho’s palm seemed warmer than his, her pulse oddly fast.

Which meant that Maou had to consider the idea of someone externally interfering with Chiho’s psyche. Perhaps the enemy that attacked Emi and him, or perhaps some unrelated magical force, was acting upon her at the moment.

And all of that assumed Chiho was telling the truth…

Regardless, there was nothing unusual about her right now. It was time to hear the full story.

The eastern exit from Shinjuku station was home to a large underground shopping mall built around the JR Shinjuku entrance. They walked down a nearby stairwell to find the food court largely uncrowded, it being the lull between early afternoon and evening.

Barluxe, luckily, was fairly empty as well. He chose a table next to the front window, figuring it’d be easier for Ashiya to see him there, but then realized it could be difficult for anyone to observe them undetected from outside a food-court café.

Taking a glance back, he spotted Ashiya hiding behind a pillar a distance away.

“So anyway, Chi, how about we start with you going over the whole story again for me?”

“Okay.”

Maou kicked things off, a regular-sized blended coffee in his hand, a seasonal frozen latte in hers.

“So I told you how my ears have started ringing a lot more since I started working at MgRonald, right? At first, I thought it was stress—like, trying new things I wasn’t comfortable with, and stuff.
But you and Ms. Kisaki and everyone were so nice to me and we never have to deal with any weirdo customers or anything…and I don’t have any problems at school, either, so I thought maybe I just wasn’t feeling well.”

Maou nodded politely as she continued, taking equal care to keep a perceptive eye on both their surroundings and Chiho herself.

“So then there was that really big earthquake I told you about, right? The one that hit our house, and nobody else’s. I thought, wow,
that
was kind of weird, but last night, I was alone in my room, and all of a sudden I heard this voice talking into my ear.”

“Yeah, about that voice. What did it sound like? Different from you and me talking right now?”

Chiho placed an index finger on her chin, thinking for a moment.

“Mmm… Well, do you ever watch movies or anime or anything, Maou?”

“…Sometimes.”

Almost never, actually, considering the lack of a TV in his apartment. He glossed over that to keep the conversation going.

“Well, you know how they depict telepathy and stuff, right? Like, a really echo-y voice? It wasn’t like that at all.”

“No?”

Chiho’s pace accelerated, as if she just remembered something.

“It was, like, this very dignified male voice, and it sounded really frantic. I could hear it okay, but it kind of sounded like a radio that wasn’t tuned quite right.”

“Really?!”

“Y-yeah…”

Chiho nodded, a tad surprised at Maou’s sudden burst of life.

“And everything he said was, like, really basic. Things like ‘Uh, can you hear me?’ and so on.”

Hearing a strange man’s voice in your ear would be enough in itself to make anyone panic, but apparently Chiho sat quietly and listened.

“I ended up talking out loud to reply to him, but he just kept on saying ‘Can you hear me’ and stuff, so I guess he couldn’t hear anything from my end. So I sat around waiting for him to say
something, and then I heard, like, ‘Ah, whatever. This is only comin’ out to a limited number of people, so I’m just gonna say it. Your world’s got all kinds of weird natural events happening right now. There’s gonna be a really big one before too long, so watch out. And we’ll be over there, too, once the time is right, so…’”

With that, Chiho fell silent and took a sip from her frozen latte.

“…That’s it?”

“That’s it. And I don’t know what that means at all, so I figured it was, like, a wrong number or something. It definitely wasn’t for me. So I tried saying and thinking, like,
That’s not for me, you got the wrong girl
, but then the tuning got worse and the voice went away. My ears haven’t rung at all since.”

“So you thought the ‘natural events’ he mentioned must have been the earthquakes you’ve been feeling.”

“It took a little bit to figure that out, but yeah. I was so surprised to hear that voice, I couldn’t think about anything for a while.”

Chiho laughed a little to herself and sipped at her latte, which was starting to melt a bit as she lost herself in telling the tale.

Maou, meanwhile, pondered over this, not overly concerned about his increasingly lukewarm coffee.

The voice Chiho heard was probably a type of mental maneuver known as an “idea link.” It involved synchronizing the internal psyches of two people from different worlds and with differing languages, converting (for example) the speaker’s Japanese into a concept the receiver could natively understand.

In a world advanced enough to develop Gates that opened to other planets, sonar technology had been well-established for ages. Launching this “sonar” triggered invisible explosions of magic, the shock waves from which could be analyzed to determine the state of things in a Gate’s destination. These magical explosions could take on different forms wherever they took place.

It was entirely likely that one of these sonar blasts was directed at Earth—at Japan, to be exact—and manifested as the “natural event” of an earthquake.

A cadre of assassins launched it, no doubt, to destroy the Devil
King. The possibility of the sonar blast just happening to fall on Chiho’s home was dizzyingly low, but it wasn’t zero. That would explain why the quake was felt only in that immediate space and nowhere else.

They could have aimed that sonar blast at a fairly specific position as well, assuming they followed the tracks in Gate-space made by the Devil King, Alciel, and the Hero pursuing them.

And come to think of it, wasn’t there a little bit of shaking the night he and Emi were attacked? Maybe the attacker was hiding nearby, firing off a short-range sonar to gauge the Devil King’s potential magical response.

Something was going to happen, and much sooner than he expected.

Maou and Ashiya’s external appearance had assimilated fully to the Japanese norm, but in essence, they were still full-fledged demons. Demons who, just the previous night, had allowed an unseen foe to slink right up to them.

As Chiho put it, “There’s gonna be a really big one before too long”—which likely meant someone with a similar level of magical energy was about to take action.

The enemy was seated right next to him, waiting for the just right opportunity.

“Ahh… I’m really glad I could get this off my chest, Maou.”

“Huh?”

He snapped back to reality at the sound of Chiho’s voice.

“Thanks a lot. I knew you’d believe in me.”

“Oh, no, no, it was nothing…”

“No, it is! Most people wouldn’t give the time of day to a story like that. To be honest, I was a little scared to text you. I thought you’d just laugh at me.”

“You think so? Have you told your parents or your friends?”

“Oh, no
way
I could do that. I’m in my late teens. If I came out with a story like this, they wouldn’t just laugh—they’d be seriously worried about me. Like, why can’t this girl tell the difference between fantasy and reality?”

“Huh… Yeah, I guess so.”

Maou tried his best to reassure the downtrodden Chiho.

“Well, you know, if you ever need anyone to talk to, I can
grnghghff
!!”

“Uh, are you okay? What happened?!”

Chiho, concerned at Maou’s sudden and intense choking, offered him a glass of water. Gulping it down, his eyes tried to get a handle on his situation, but the image in the corner of his eye made it impossible to think rationally.

Why? Why are Emi and Ashiya entering the café
together
?!

“Maou?”

“Ahem! Sorry, I’m fine. Guess something went down the wrong pipe. I didn’t do anything wrong!”

“Huh?”

“Forget it. It’s perfectly normal for someone to discuss matters with their coworker, and there’s nothing at all dark or sinister about it, so I am definitely
not
here for any malevolent reason.”

“Um, are you all right, Maou?”

“Mm? Oh, sorry, Chi. Don’t worry about it. Just had kind of a seizure there.”

“A…seizure?”

“Fossa Magna.”

“Maou?!”

“No, no, I’m sorry. I’m all right, so…”

His befuddled, unresponsive mind had taken seven trips around the globe at light speed in the course of a second. Realizing he had stopped himself on the other side of the world, he took one more semicircle around to reach the café.

“Uh…anyway! Putting everything you said together, I don’t think that voice or the ringing in your ears is any kind of direct problem for you. What really matters is whether anything really bad
is
going to happen, that ‘really big one’ you mentioned. Will it, or won’t it?
That’s
the key here!”

Chiho was wonder-struck at Maou’s extremely bizarre behavior over the past two minutes, but nodded nonetheless. He appeared to be treating her seriously, at least.

“Luckily, it doesn’t sound like that man had any kind of malicious intent when he reached out to you. If anything
does
come up, just let people around you know. That could make a big difference.”

“I…guess so, yeah.”

“That’s about all I can say for now. Sorry it’s not really any kind of real solution.”

Maou took another gulp of water, attempting to prop himself back on track.

Chiho, hands still clasped around her glass of now-completely-melted latte, thought over something for a moment before bringing her head back upward.

“Thank you very much, Maou. This really feels like a weight’s been lifted from my shoulders.”

“Oh? Well, great.”

Take
that,
Emi! Maybe it’s a far cry from a Devil King’s normal behavior, but I’ve done nothing weird with her at all! No matter how you look at it, I’m just another nice guy, helping out the new girl at work!

“By the way…what made you think to talk to me about this?” Internally, Maou felt he had every right to be proud, but some nagging doubt in his mind made him ask Chiho the question. He
had
been Chiho’s training supervisor at work, yes, but it was less than two months since their first encounter. He knew full well that “veteran burger flipper” was not a particularly coveted position in modern Japanese society.

“Um…”

Chiho’s eyes darted around the café. The question seemed to embarrass her.

“You know…I don’t know. I guess I just thought you’d believe me, Maou. You’ve always been real nice to me, and…I dunno, you’re kind of different from other people.”

Maou chewed this over. “Nice” was never a compliment a demon appreciated. He did accept, however, that he, as a Devil King, was a marked deviation from the norm.

“Yeah, I guess I’m a little weird, huh?”

“Oh, no! I mean, I didn’t mean that in a bad way or anything.”

Chiho seemed oddly frantic as she tried to explain herself. Maou had to smile at her predictability.

“I know, I know. Hey, try not to gesture all frantic like that. You’re gonna spill your drink.”

“Aw, you’re really mean sometimes, Maou!”

Chiho let out a cough, her expression somewhere between concern and anger.

“But, I don’t mind if you’re weird. It was fun getting to have some coffee and talk with you like this.”

“Mm?”

The words emerged from Chiho’s light smile. It was hard to say if she directed them to Maou or herself, but either way, there was some serious portent behind them. Even Maou could see that.

“So…uh, Maou?”

The voice Chiho drummed up was shaky and weak. She was looking right at Maou, eyes full of concern, cheeks blushing a healthy shade of red.

“I…I think I…”

“Stop right there!”

Chiho’s furtive opening was blocked by a loud voice from the side.

Maou froze. Chiho, unsure what was happening, turned and looked up quizzically at the defiant woman glaring down at them.

“Nothing good’s gonna happen if you hang out with this guy.”

“E-Emi! What’re—”

“I just want to give you some advice. This guy’s going to be away from Japan before too long. You better just keep things where they are now, or else it’s gonna hurt you later on.”

Surprised at Emi’s sudden intrusion, Maou found his brain shutting down on him once again. Ashiya, who was sitting with her, was half crouched behind, having failed to stop her in time.

Chiho, for her part, responded rapidly.

“I’m sorry, but do you know Maou at all, ma’am?”

Her previously lost and forlorn expression was fortified into a
strong one the instant she stood up. Meeting Emi’s stare, her words, to Maou’s surprise, were full of hostility.

It was something Emi must have felt on her skin. Her face remained stern, but her voice switched to more of an advisory tone.

“Listen, I’m telling you this for your sake, all right? This man isn’t what he looks like. He’s a lot sharper…and a lot more brutal inside.”

“You can’t just come out of the blue and say those horrible things about him! How do you know Maou, anyway?”

Maou was shocked to see Chiho fire an equally powerful volley of reproach back toward Emi. He knew she was a bright young woman, but had no idea there was such dynamic passion lurking below.

Ashiya, meanwhile, could do little more than look on from behind Emi as he nervously swayed from side to side.

“I am this man’s enemy. Nothing more than that, and nothing less. Listen to me, Chiho Sasaki. I’ve given you my warning. Hang around with Maou, and you’re not gonna come out of it happy.”