The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 5

“…Mraaaahhhhh.”

The man let out a cheek-stretching yawn as he unfolded from his reclining chair.

At first, simply dozing for an hour or two had made his back and shoulders painfully sore. But now, his body had grown used to the chair’s shape, and he never felt tired when he woke up.

“Man. Didn’t think I could
ever
adapt to this thing…”

With another stretch, he picked up the cup and toothbrush placed next to the BuBonic-branded computer screen on the desk in front of him, left his small compartment, and headed for the bathroom.

The space was notable chiefly for its high ceiling, wide expanse, and the seemingly endless array of bookshelves and open-top cubicles. It was an urban Internet café, and the only sound was the air-conditioning and the occasional grunt as someone shifted in their seat.

“Ah, the oolong’s…” As he passed by the self-serve drinks corner, the man noticed that the warning light was on next to the switch for chilled oolong tea.

“’Sup, Greek.”

“Morning, Satou.”

“Satou” was there as well, greeting him by his nickname.

“Ooh, bad luck, Satou!” the Greek said. “They’re out of oolong tea.”

“
What?
For real?!” Satou launched his vitriol directly at the drink dispenser. “Guh, how ominious. Y’know, I had a feelin’ today wasn’t gonna go well.”

“What, because they’re out of tea? So what? Just tell the manager guy up front.”

“Manager’s coverin’ afternoon shift today! The only dudes there right now are Kayo and that Vietnamese guy, and I hate talking to ’em ’cause they act all shifty whenever I show up.”

“So if you just gave it up and drank some soda, then…?”

The man didn’t know “Satou’s” real name.

What he
did
know was that his compatriot absolutely refused to let anything besides oolong tea pass his lips. He was watching his sugar and fat intake—or so he claimed, at least.

“Are you nuts? I don’t wanna die young! I’ll just drink some water and head to work.”

Satou filled a cup from the tap and briskly walked off, not giving the man a second look.

“Oh, you got work today, huh? Congrats!”

The warm praise wasn’t enough to make Satou turn around, but it did inspire him to wave weakly back.

“…Anyway, soda first thing in the morning is just painful.”

The Greek muttered it to himself while he found the bathroom and began brushing his teeth.

CyberSafe, the space he was spending his morning shuffling around in, was fairly famous around the neighborhood for providing a mailing-address service for its regular customers. “Regular,” in this case, meant the kind of people who couldn’t afford rent anywhere in Tokyo and slept in Net cafés and twenty-four-hour fast-food joints instead. It beat putting “The Streets” in the address box on your résumé.

All he needed for the moment, however, was Internet access and someplace to sleep during the night. Or whenever he was tired, really. By the time one spent as long in here as the Greek did, it grew hard to tell day from night.

He had come to know Satou along the way.

He couldn’t surmise why Satou refused to give his real name. “If I gave my name out all the time,” he boldly proclaimed the last time he had been asked, “lotta people could make trouble for me, y’know what I mean?”

The man didn’t.

Not that he himself ever reciprocated. Satou called him “the Greek,” and that was good enough for him. But since he himself was clearly not native to Japan, the man found himself fascinated by how frank and unreserved Satou was, talking to him out of nowhere. An interesting person to observe.

Yet, considering his reticence about identifying himself, Satou was remarkably verbose about his past history.

He came to Tokyo from out in the countryside somewhere, graduated fourteenth in his class from a prestigious university, passed one of the most stringent government-office exams in the country, worked several years in the Tokyo central bureaucracy, then quit to start a dot-com business back when the first bubble was in full swing. It hit big for him at first, apparently, affording him a freestanding house with a lawn in the ritzy neighborhood of Takanawa and a summer retreat in the resort town of Karuizawa, out in Nagano prefecture.

But thanks to his go-it-alone attitude and lack of personal magnetism, his company started to flounder, thanks in part to an employee embezzling angel-investor money from the accounts. The company fell into someone else’s hands, leaving him with nothing but massive debt.

That wasn’t enough to faze him, though. Not Satou. He took refuge working for a delivery company, using it to pay off every yen of his debt over the following ten years. But just when he thought he was free, a wave of governmental reforms led to a sudden influx of competing firms. One of them merged with his employer, and he was one of the first on the chopping block. Back to square one.

Still undaunted, Satou went homeless for a few months, saving up cash from odd jobs here and there. The Greek ran into him about two months into his “residency” at CyberSafe.

For now, he claimed, he was squirreling away all the money he could, bit by bit, so he could move to a real apartment by next year and start another company.

“How impressive… I sure don’t know anyone with balls that big.”

Whether that was all the truth or not didn’t really matter.

The important thing was that by the standards of this country, Satou was not exactly on Easy Street.

“It’s his eyes. Something really alive in ’em, hmm?”

Finished with his teeth, the man washed his face, rubbing it with a towel.

Looking in the mirror, he was greeted with a large frame, bright red eyes, and silvery hair with a bluish tone to it. If it weren’t for the
I LUV LA
T-shirt peeking out underneath his body-length toga, he would be the living embodiment of ancient Greece.

He looked younger, better built, and far healthier than Satou ever did. But:

“The frozen tuna at the supermarket sure looks more alive than
me
, doesn’t it?”

Gabriel, guardian angel of the sacred, world-bearing Sephirah jewels that grew from the tree of Sephirot, laughed to himself and shrugged.

“Hmm?”

Returning to his cubicle, he noticed something rumbling next to his computer. He hurried over to pick it up.

“Hello?”

Possessing a cell phone, a device endemic to this world, gave him access to something like a more precise version of an Idea Link.

He was rather proud of that recent discovery, since it allowed him to keep his Heavenly Regiment stationed in Japan, all biding their time at other nearby Internet cafés and a mere phone call away from action. But this call wasn’t from any of them.

“Ooh, already? Okay. Yeah, yeah, I blew it. So sue me.”

Gabriel shrugged to himself again, his voice completely unapologetic.

“So what, your ‘war’s’ going along dandy, then? …Oh, that wasn’t you? Oh, suuuuure, yeah, I’ll buy
that
for a dollar. So where are you? …Huh? The obelisk? Oh. There, yeah? Hey, uh, if you don’t mind me cluing you in a little, that’s not an obelisk. Like, people work in there and stuff? So, uh, can you just wait up top? I’ll meet you over there.”

He shut off the phone, his lack of enthusiasm growing more prevalent every moment.

“Welp…guess I better figure out what I’m workin’ for here.”

His eyes, supposedly deader than last week’s catch in the frozen-food aisle, glinted a little, perhaps in expectation of something on the horizon.

“I
am
an angel, after all. Would kinda like to do some
good
, you know?”