The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 3 (19 page)

“Look, doesn’t the word
Yesod
mean anything to—”

“Whaaaat, Daddyyy?”

Alas Ramus, attention focused out the window up to now, suddenly reacted to Maou and his
Yesod
keyword.

“Uh?”

Emi paused, confused on the meaning of this. Maou stooped down to Alas Ramus’s level, his face somewhere between conviction and desperation.

“Alas Ramus, listen…”

“Yeah, Daddy?”

“What’s that?”

Maou pointed out a red balloon. The girl replied at once.

“Gebba.”

“And that?”

He next pointed to a dark-yellow, almost orange balloon.

“Tiparuh.”

“And how about this bright yellow one?”

“Market. I like him!”

“And the white one?”

“Ketter.”

“Wh-what’s she going on about…?”

Emi blinked in helpless confusion over the unfamiliar terms.

“Okay, how about this?”

Maou fished a purple balloon out from the bunch.

“Me! Yeffod.”

“Oooh, good girl. You can say it and everything.”

“Oooo! Hee-hee!”

The gondola was nearing the end of its journey. Emi squinted at the western sun illuminating the Big-Egg stadium.

“I don’t really know why…but I got a feeling Alas Ramus is something way beyond a demon. Or an angel.”

“Huh?”

“Gevurah, Hod, Malkuth, Keter, and then Yesod. They’re each the names of the Sephirah, the world-forming jewels that grow on the tree of Sephirot. I think…Alas Ramus might be the personification of the Yesod Sephirah.”

Chiho, waiting on the bench as Maou’s and Ashiya’s gondolas spun slowly around, was wallowing in self-loathing.

By herself, able to more calmly assess the situation, she now realized she was in no position to criticize Rika’s rubbernecking habit.

She had pretended this was all for a just cause, offering to lend her cell phone to Ashiya in case anything happened to Maou. But, as she now admitted to herself, all she was doing was stewing in her jealousy over Maou’s pseudo-married relationship with Emi.

“Maou said he believed in me and everything, too…”

Having that trust be shattered by Chiho herself was something she couldn’t dare to face up to Maou or Emi about.

As she dwelled on the point, a deep, helpless sense of shame enveloped her.

“Maou… I’m sorry.”

Taken in by waves of anxiety and jealousy, she did the one thing she should never have done. Chiho stood up and walked down the stairs, not bothering to wait for Ashiya and Rika.

Not long after she was gone, the gondola bearing Maou, Emi, and Alas Ramus came down.

“Whew… Sure is hot out, huh?”

“Mmmph!”

Maou and Alas Ramus winced at the blast of hot air awaiting them outside.

Emi, eerily silent, was the last to exit.

“Thank you very much! We have your photo here if you’d like!”

Turning toward the voice, Maou was greeted with a print of the photo they had reluctantly taken of themselves, complete with special commemorative mounting.

“Oooooooo!!”

“…Ugh, I look terrible.”

Alas Ramus’s eyes gleamed as she spotted herself in the photo. Emi, meanwhile, winced. Her face in the picture looked like she just swallowed a wasp.

“You can have this photo, along with a special mounting you can write a personalized message on, for one thousand yen. We can make copies, too!”

“Wait, it’s not free?”

Maou blurted out his honest reaction. Emi slapped him on the back of the head.

“Hmm… A thousand, huh…?”

“Daddy! Daddy, look! Look!”

Alas Ramus clearly wanted the photo. But considering the cost
of the photo paper, printer ink, and mounting, it was pretty clear which side of this exchange was profiting the most out of it.

“…We’ll just take one, please.”

To Maou’s surprise, it was Emi who made the snap decision. Taking a thousand-yen bill from her wallet, she accepted the photo and passed it over to Alas Ramus.

“Yaaay!”

Opening the twofold mount, Alas Ramus exclaimed her joy upon seeing herself, the vaguely half-smiling Maou, and the outright sulking Emi inside.

“W-wait, are you sure?”

“It’s just a thousand yen. You don’t have to act so cheap all the time. This is her first photo, isn’t it?”

“Well, I guess so, but…”

“And lemme just warn you! Next time Eme and Al get here, don’t show that to them! It’d put my position with them at stake, all right?”

“Oh, so it’s okay with Ashiya and Chi and Suzuno and so on?”

“It’s kind of too late with them, okay? Don’t you dare show Lucifer, though!”

“You are being
so
stupid.”

Snickering over Emi’s admittedly stupid demands, Maou crouched down to look at Alas Ramus.

“Okay, Alas Ramus, say ‘thank you’ to Mommy.”

“’Ank you, Mommy!!”

Emi’s face turned bright red at the childish squeal, loud enough to make everyone in the gondola loading area turn around.

“I…I’m just doing what any mother would do! It’s not my fault her father’s such a worthless bum!”

It was hard to tell what she was making excuses for. Perhaps she simply wanted to make it clear that her gesture for Alas Ramus had nothing to do with feeling sorry for Maou.

“C-Come on! Let’s go!”

Maou and Alas Ramus walked behind Emi as she descended the stairs, face turned away. Then, he paused.

“Hold on, Emi. I got a phone call.”

“Huh? …Oh, me too. Wait here a second, okay, Alas Ramus?”

The pair both received a call at the same time—Urushihara to Maou, Suzuno to Emi.

“W-we lost them?!”

Ashiya was exasperated to find the gondola loading zone deserted. They were sitting only two gondolas behind, so they shouldn’t have been separated by longer than a minute or two.

Running down the stairs, Ashiya scoped out the shopping area ahead of him. Maou and Emi were still nowhere to be seen.

“I…I wonder where Chiho could’ve gone, too.”

Rika, despite spending the past fifteen minutes inside an air-conditioned gondola, was notably red in the face.

“Maybe Chiho decided to chase after them… What should we do, Ashiya?”

This was seriously bad news. If Chiho didn’t find the errant couple soon, Rika would have to be together, with Ashiya, by herself, for even longer!

“I…am not sure what we can do. We have no way of contacting her.”

“Huh?”

“I am afraid I don’t have my own cell phone.”

“What? Really?!”

Released from her air-conditioned prison, Rika was slowly returning to her normal self.

“I had planned to borrow Ms. Sasaki’s phone if anything untoward happened…but now…”

It was approaching the evening hours, but the park was still fairly crowded, too much so to make searching for Maou and Emi a practical option.

“…Well, so be it. This is kind of pushing it more than I like, but…”

Rika took out her own cell phone and brought up Emi’s number. “Uh, hey, Emi?”

Ashiya was about to scream in response to Rika’s brazen act of
recklessness, but fell silent as Rika put her index finger in front of his lips in a classic “shut up” pose.

“Hmm? Oh, no, nothing too important… I was just wondering if your date with Maou was going okay and all… Ha-ha-ha! Aw, sorry, sorry. I know, it’s for the sake of the kid and all. I’m not calling at a bad time, am I? Are you about to eat or… Huh?”

Rika, attempting to ferret out Emi’s location under the guise of her trivial banter, wasn’t expecting the response Emi gave.

“You’re going back home now?”

“What?”

This threw Ashiya. Rika attempted to hide her own surprise as best she could.

“Ohh, I gotcha. The kid’s probably pooped by now, huh? Yeah. Well, at least she had a lot of fun today, right? Okay, sorry to interrupt you on the way to the station and all! Have a safe trip back!

“…Well, that explains that.”

Rika shut off her phone as she turned to Ashiya.

“They’re gone… Ugghh! That’s no fun.”

“In that case, there is little point remaining here. Do you think Ms. Sasaki might have left as well?”

“I dunno about that, but I guess that was kinda mean, huh? Leaving her down there and all. Hey, next time you see her, do you mind telling her I’m sorry?”

“Oh, no, not at all. In that case, I had best hurry on myself. Thank you for your help today.”

“Oh… Wh-whoa! Wait a second!”

Rika found herself stopping Ashiya, just as he was about to run off in search of Maou.

“Um… So, uh… Oh, right! Here…”

Fumbling around in her bag, Rika finally produced a notebook, ripping a page out of it and jotting something down before handing it to Ashiya.

“Is this…your phone number?”

“It’s my…uh…”

“Your?”

Ashiya scrutinized the digits on the paper.

“Well, you know, the next time something comes up…I could, like, maybe help you guys out…or whatever?”

Not even Rika had a clear picture of what kind of something she was referring to. But if she didn’t say something, there was no way she could withstand the oppressive atmosphere within her mind any longer.

“I see… Well, certainly, I may just be calling upon your services again sometime in the future.”

“…Huh?”

Her request couldn’t have been more awkward, but Ashiya nodded, completely convinced by it.

“As I mentioned, I have yet to purchase my own cell phone, so if I need something, I could use Maou’s to…”

Ashiya stopped at that point, shaking his head as he recalled something. Maou’s cell phone served as the chief link from Devil’s Castle to the outside world, but he realized that giving his supreme master’s digits to a semi-acquaintance he rode the Ferris wheel with might not be the best thing.

“Though…I feel, perhaps, that I have learned something from today. It may put an additional burden on our finances, yes, but perhaps the time has come for me to have my own cell phone. Have you any purchasing advice?”

Rika’s face instantly flushed a bright crimson.

“I understand you work for the same phone company as Yusa. I cannot say whether I would buy a device from your company or not quite yet, but if you have the free time, I would greatly appreciate some guidance when I make my choice.”

“Uh… Sure! Yeah, give me a call anytime!”

Rika nodded eagerly, all but standing on tiptoe to drive the point home.

“Thank you very much. In that case, I will be sure to contact you soon…from a public phone, I imagine.”

“All right…”

“I’d best be off, then.”

With a light bow, Ashiya turned and ran off toward the Korakuen rail station.

“No way… Oh, man, what am I doing…? This is totally nuts!”

Rika, meanwhile, remained rooted to the spot until Ashiya was no longer visible.

“What am I gonna do… What am I gonna do… What am I gonna do?!”

After a few more moments, she began to walk unsteadily in the opposite direction, toward Suidoubashi station.

Amid the darkness of untwinkling stars, there was a great land, one bathed in red and blue.

This land, which shone a glistening azure, took the form of an enormous engraved cross, each branch teeming with life.

In one part of this great blue landscape, the stars were accompanied by a planet teeming with life. Therein lay a vast wilderness, one bereft of any sound. Not even a single breeze flowed through it.

A single vast tree, itself the same color as the azure land, loomed ominously in the wasteland.

This tree, standing in the vast, flat wilderness, lived for countless months and years. It brimmed with the force of countless souls, countless lives; but externally, it resembled little more than a withered husk.

There were no leaves to cover the heavens, no flowering buds to decorate the passing Springs, no fruit with which to celebrate this blue world’s bounty. There was just the tree, standing there alone, as if it had committed a great sin it could do nothing to atone for.

Ten shrines were built around this vast tree, as if to surround it, each bearing a name carved upon its entrance.

The first shrine was Keter. The next was Chokhmah, then Binah, Chesed, Gevurah, Tifaret, Netzach, Hod, Yesod, and finally Malkuth.

These names belonged to someone. They must have. But no one could say where the people who could read and write these carved names could be now.

These shines were not stately buildings, no shining pillars or exquisite roofs adorning them. Instead, they were ten perfect spheres, like great stones dug up from the earth, spread out across the land like the enormous fruit the great tree must have borne at some distant time in the past.

One day, the blue wilderness was greeted with motion once more.

From the sphere carved with the word
Yesod
, a large figure appeared.

“Ah. Good. Found that one relatively quickly.”

It sounded like a man’s voice.

With that whisper, four pillars of light appeared around the large figure, each one soon taking the form of people themselves.

“After we received no response from the Central Continent, I was expecting to spend centuries searching…but it looks like we’ve lost nothing at all. The ‘fragments’ resonated with each other in a certain place.”

The people within the pillars of light began to murmur.

“The place Sariel disappeared to recently. Him, and likely…”

The large man took in the full length of the nearly rotted-out blue tree.

“Yes. That girl who stole the Yesod Sephirah is there as well.”

The large man raised his arms to the stars. The next moment, a great hole to another dimension opened up, filled with light and hovering in the air.

“Let us go. Go, and return the tree of Sephirot to its intended form.”

Then the five figures disappeared into the Gate.

Soon, the light from the Gate was gone, and silence returned to the azure land.

The five figures that once stood by the great tree now beheld the land engraved with the cross of life—Ente Isla, the Land of the Holy Cross. The azure land stayed close to this land of life, lazily revolving
around it, but never daring to stray near the crimson orb that lurked beyond them both.

It was just a little bit before Maou and Emi disembarked from the Tokyo Big-Egg Ferris wheel.

“Yo! Bell! You around?!”

“Nrgh… Wh-what is it, Lucifer?”

Suzuno was surprised to find Urushihara outside of his closet fortress. She was even more surprised to find him visiting her room, in a state of panic.

She was enjoying a late lunch of boiled udon, causing her to almost choke on a mouthful when he burst through the door.

Urushihara noticed the heaping pile of chilled noodles in Suzuno’s bowl. Suzuno nimbly followed his eyes.

“There is
none
for you.”

“Yeah, I don’t need any udon for a while. I ordered in some pizza just now, so… Wait! Dude, that doesn’t matter!”

After making the confession, which would likely rile Ashiya back into his demonic form if he heard it, Urushihara asked Suzuno a question.

“Did you notice that just now?”

“Notice?”

Suzuno tilted her head in confusion.

“Guess not, huh? Hey, do you know how to contact Emilia? I’ll call Maou myself. I think we better get ’em back here ASAP.”

“Why? What do you mean?”

Suzuno frowned, noticing Urushihara acting sincere for a change.

“Just do it, dude. I don’t know why, but this huge Gate just opened up somewhere in Tokyo. I think we got some trouble brewing.”

With that, Urushihara zoomed back to his room and launched the SkyPhone app on his computer. Suzuno, finding it difficult to believe his behavior was just an act, picked up her phone and brought up Emi’s number.

That was when five figures materialized in Villa Rosa Sasazuka’s front yard.

“Whoa, whoa, you didn’t say anything about visitors.”

Maou flashed an easy smile, but still made sure to keep Alas Ramus behind him.

“So what happened first? The Gate, or this?”

“I apologize, Devil King… We were caught completely unawares.”

“Yeah, I’ll admit I didn’t think they’d make a move
that
quick.”

Suzuno grovelingly made the apology. Urushihara, meanwhile, demonstrated his usual lack of conscience.

“Ohh, there’s no need to blame them, mm-kay? They were nice enough to give you two a buzz, after all!”

Maou and Emi, hurriedly returning to Villa Rosa Sasazuka, found themselves greeted by neither Urushihara nor Suzuno.

“Besides, we aren’t doing anything
too
rough, ya know? It’d be a
huuuge
win-win for all of us if we can talk this out, so hopefully we can avoid any sticking points and stuff like that, mm-kay?”

The air inside Devil’s Castle was stifling.

Chiefly this was because the population density inside was causing the room temperature to skyrocket.

There were, after all, ten people in a hundred-square-foot apartment. Though, in strict humanist-biological terms, Suzuno Kamazuki was the only “person” there.

“Gabriel?”

“Ooh, bingo! Right square on the head! You
must
tell me how you guessed! Have we met before?”

The giant, easygoing, weirdly intense man, one Maou would have loved to punch right now, seemed to be the leader of the uninvited guests.

He had blue hair, cut neatly at the shoulders, and his eyes held no apparent concern or anxiety over anything. His upper body was easily as long as Ashiya’s, though, and the bulging muscles made him look like a professional wrestler. He wore a body-length toga,
something that would’ve been stylish among the ancient Greeks, and it couldn’t have looked less natural on him.

Besides the one Maou called “Gabriel,” four other men were in Devil’s Castle. One was holding a ridiculously ornate longsword to Suzuno’s throat, while the other three stood guard around Urushihara as he sat cross-legged on the floor.

“Yeah, uh, I heard that one of the archangels up there was this huge freak that made your head hurt whenever you talked to him.”

“Aww, that’s just being mean! Hey, what kinda rumors are people spreading about me when my back’s turned? I’m gonna have to bang some
heads
around, if you know what I mean!”

“That, and you’re the guardian angel of the Sephirah known as Yesod, aren’t you?”

“Ee-hee-hee! You
do
know how to flatter a man, don’t you?”

“Can you knock that off? All right. Let’s just cut the crap and get to the point. What do you want?”

“Well, that girl hiding behind you, for starters. And, ooh, if you don’t mind my being totally greedy, Emilia’s holy sword as well! Also, we ate all the pizza Lucifer ordered from Pizza Hat. Sorr-eeee!”

“You ordered that
now
?
Now
, of all friggin’ times?!”

Not even Maou could retain his composure. Urushihara shuddered.

“Oh, stop getting your whiskers in a bunch! We’ll pay for it later, mm-kay?”

“That’s not what I’m worried about! …Well, okay, I
am
, but still!”

Maou stopped himself midway. There was Ashiya’s ire to worry about later as well.

“Oh, wait, wait, wait! How ’bout this: Give us the girl, or you’ll never see your precious pizza money again!”

“What kind of parent would give up his daughter to a bunch of kidnappers to get out of a pizza tab?!”

Maou was screaming by now.

“Besides, aren’t you guys kind of late? How many days d’you think she’s
been
here with us?”

“Hey, now, maybe it was a few days to you, but we’ve been searching
for centuries by this point. Centuries! So cut me a little slack if we were off a tad, mm-kay? I mean, when I picked up pulses from the Yesod fragment, I was just about beside myself! You wouldn’t
believe
what a doggie downer it was when that girl’s fragment was taken away from the Devil’s Castle on Ente Isla. I was like, ‘Oooh, not yet
more
centuries spent searching for that thing again…’—Oh!”

The man apparently named Gabriel stopped himself midspeech.

“Right! ‘Cut the crap,’ you said! Yes yes yes! Are you giving us the girl, or not? Which is it?”

He was nothing like what Maou expected—they never were, by his experience—but judging by his fixation on Emi’s holy sword, these had to be servants of the heavens. Angels, in other words.

The large man didn’t deny his name was Gabriel, either. Which meant, probably, that this was Alas Ramus’s real parent, or guardian, or whatever.

“……”

But the look on Alas Ramus’s face as she stared at Gabriel was clearly one of alarm. There was no way she bore any friendly feelings toward him.

“Hey, Alas Ramus? Do you know this big lummox here at all? ’Cause it sounds like he wants to take you with him.”

“No!! I
haaaate
him!!!!”

“Noooooooooooooo!!!”

Gabriel put on a Shakespearian performance of shock following Alas Ramus’s instant response.

“Stop calling me ‘big,’ you! Words can hurt, mm-kay?”

That
was what floored him? The men covering Suzuno and Urushihara stirred, silently attempting to hide their embarrassment.

“Market, ’n’ Ketter, ’n’ Binah, ’n’ Cocama, all gone! I
haaate
him!!”

“Ooooh, twist the
knife
, why don’t you?”

Alas Ramus’s follow-up was enough to make Gabriel bring a hand to his head.

“…I don’t really get what’s going on here, but if Alas Ramus isn’t up for it, then I don’t care if you’re her dad or not. She’s not going anywhere.”

“Awwww… Okay, how ’bout the holy sword…?”

“I’ll pass, thanks. I don’t care if the gods themselves beg me for it. I’m not handing it over to anyone until I fulfill my mission.”

“…Ooooh, you are making this
awfully
difficult, you know that? What kind of Hero and Devil King is this?
So
difficult. I really don’t want to get rough here, but now that I’ve found this girl, I’m kind of beholden to get her back, sooooo…”

“Like I care.”

“The holy sword, I
suppose
I can do without. Even if Sariel screwed the pooch on
that
one, at least we know where it is, more or less. But I’m gonna have to put my foot down when it comes to the girl. So…please? Just give ’er back?”

“Nope.”

“She was kind of mine firrrrrst…”

“And I’m her dad now.”

“No matter what?”

“No matter what.”

“Even if it means you versus everybody in heaven?”

“Sounds like a risk I’ll take. I ain’t gonna make this kid cry.”

Gabriel muttered forlornly to himself.

“…
So
difficult. This
really
gets my goat, do you understand…
that
?!?!”

He released a jet-propelled blast of holy energy from his entire body, one strong enough to nearly crush everyone against the room’s walls.

It all happened in the blink of an eye. It was enough to make Maou stagger.

“I really hate forcing people like this. If you wanna surrender anytime, don’t be shy about sayin’ it, mm-kay?”

Gabriel, still as intensely happy-go-lucky as always, was in front of Maou’s eyes before he knew it.

“Whoa!”

From the edge of his eye, Maou noticed the holes Gabriel had bored into the tatami mat floor with his feet, as a result of the blast.

“Y’know, even if you had all your Devil King strength, I’d probably still win and all, right? So…maybe just give her back?”

There was a quiet, almost sanctified air to the room, one so oppressive that it seemed ready to crush everyone inside.

“…Damn, are you serious?”

Maou swallowed nervously. Against all the foes he had fought in his life, nobody had ever intimidated him so much before.

It wasn’t because he was weaker now.

It was because he was fighting a guardian of Sephirot, an angel several degrees more powerful than anything he had ever experienced.

It was a surprise. But it didn’t make him relent.

“Well, it’s still no from me. I’m the lord of all demons. I love doing things humans and angels just
hate
. Once I conquer the world, I’m gonna raise this girl to be the heir to my throne.”