The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 2 (27 page)

Suzuno simply had to ask.

No matter what world he was in, a Devil King never stripped to his skivvies before battle.

But here he was, this deviant sporting boxers, fake-leather shoes, and a grimy mop, snorting derisively at Suzuno like she was an idiot.

“Hah! Like some unemployed ditz like
you
would ever understand.”

Maou’s eyes flashed toward the folded uniform off to the side.

“Listen, I don’t
own
those. MgRonald
loaned
those to me! If I get ’em messed up for nonwork reasons, I’m gonna have to pay restitution, all right? And the Devil’s Castle kinda doesn’t have that sort of surplus cash sitting around right now!”

“Wha…!”

Maou exuded devilish majesty as he spoke. Despite everything that happened so far, Suzuno couldn’t help but blush.

“Also, what are
you
doing, huh?! Where do you get off, getting my employees caught up in this?!”

He boldly pointed straight at Suzuno with his mop.

“I didn’t want to go hard on you. You had guts, moving in right next to me like that, and you’re a hell of a good cook. But if you screw around with my job and hurt my crewmates, you’re gonna have one pissed-off assistant manager to deal with!”

For an instant, she wavered in the face of such overpowering impact.

“What…!”

Then, in an instant, Maou was upon her.

“Ngh!”

She tried to duck down, avoiding the handle of the mop as he swung it, but then fell back in a panic as the mop head, swarm of fluffy, black pieces of mystery garbage stuck to it, flew straight at her face.

Suzuno was amazed to see how Maou handled the mop, like a certain amphibious ninja with a
bo
pole. She finally managed to deflect the head away with the middle part of her hammer, preparing his backswing to be countered with a swipe of her own.

“Oop!”

But the swing was again just a moment too late, as Maou made a grand leap backward.

It was no regular jump. One leg was all he needed to jump high, and fast, straight up before landing on a streetlight. Suzuno was thunderstruck, eyes wide-open as she looked upward at his body—the lower part—and once again felt her cheeks turn red at the sight.

“This…this is no time for
that,
you perverted monster!”

“You don’t like it? Blame yourself!”

Maou’s running shirt, perhaps grazed by the light from Suzuno’s hammer, ripped apart from the stomach out, flying into rags in the night air.

Now Suzuno was looking up toward a boxer-clad Devil King in severe danger of exposing a little too much of himself.

“So you retained some demonic power all along. Did you not, you sexually deranged Devil King?”

“Yeah, well, there was no telling when someone like you would come along. They call it a trump card because you don’t show it until the very end.”

“…When did you notice that I was not Japanese?”

Maou sighed like an embittered bus driver.

“The moment I first saw you, when did you think? No Japanese person in her right mind would start caring for this bunch of destitute schlubs living next to her the moment she moved in! Not even some samurai-era Japanese beauty like you! And sure, it made me happy, but before that, it was incredibly sketchy, you know?”

In the end, Suzuno was the only one out of all of them with zero doubts about her act.

“What…what do you care about Chiho, then?!”

“I taught Chi everything from A to Z about the job! She’s my right-hand girl now! And if you thought it was just some kind of thin, fragile relationship, you’ve
seriously
got the wrong idea!”

Maou jumped down to the ground, keeping a polite distance away from Suzuno.

“But it’s too bad, huh? I thought you had some potential, trying to take us on by yourself and getting all chummy with Emi. But you’re just another Olba, aren’t you?”

Suzuno’s back teeth gritted against each other.

“Long as you can score some power, you don’t care what sacrifices you have to make along the way, yeah? You don’t care how much of a hypocrite it makes you. If I let someone like
you
slay me, the sheer patheticness of it all would make me cry. What makes you guys different at all from us demons?”

“S-silence…!”

“Not gonna happen. I’m a demon, and I just
love
making people despise me.”

Maou’s eyes were pointed straight toward Suzuno’s.

“So answer me! Tricking Emi, getting Chi involved… Aren’t you even a
little
ashamed of yourself?!”

“Siiiilennnnnnce!”

“Yeoow!”

“…Wha?”

She had swung her hammer, fully expecting him to dodge again, only to find she made a clean hit.

The boxer-clad Maou was a tough sight to watch. He was on his hands and knees a distance away, groveling like a crushed spider.

“Damn…that hurt… Rngh!”

“What are you doing?! Why did you not dodge that?!”

Flustered, Suzuno ran up to Maou, despite having just sent him flying.

He was now covered in abrasions from head to toe, a side effect of his free-love approach to mortal combat.

The puddle of blood he had coughed up indicated that the hammer’s shock wave made it to his internal organs.

“I, I tried to, but, but I exhausted my demonic force… I couldn’t release as much power as I thought…”

“Whaaa?!”

“Before I came here…I hypnotized someone over the phone…and I had to get through the barrier over city hall, too… Ah, crap, I totally miscalculated this. I thought it’d hold out a little more than that.”

Maou finally propped himself up, but quickly fell facedown on the ground, unable to gather any strength whatsoever.

One more full-swing blast from Suzuno right now would send Satan, the Devil King, to wherever his beloved mount was enjoying the afterlife right now. But:

“…What? Not gonna do it? It’s your chance…
cough, cough
…to be a hero.”

Standing in front of Maou, who was still grinning defiantly even as he grunted in pain, Suzuno could do nothing but cast her eyes downward in shame. There was nothing, no final trump card, the Devil King could use to corner Suzuno any longer. But she couldn’t do it.

“Must’ve been real embarrassing for you, huh?”

“…What?”

“You want to beat me fair and square, then go home in triumph with Emi. That’s why you used Chi’s phone to call me. You wanted to have me defeat an opponent you were powerless to defy.”

Maou raised a shaky arm toward the skyline, and the Tokyo city hall building that dominated it.

“You…realized that…?”

The golden hammer disappeared from Suzuno’s hand. She fell to her knees next to the fallen Maou.

A cross-shaped glass hairpin fell from the hand that once held the hammer, plinking against the ground.

“Well, it wasn’t hard to guess. You were proceeding along with
your plan, gradually weakening us with your food. You weren’t gonna suddenly go dirty and kidnap those two. If you were gonna do that, you could have just poisoned us the normal way. Or, hell, you could’ve killed us any number of other ways and just gone home. You didn’t have to care about Emi.”

A pink clamshell cell phone, one Maou was familiar with, fell out of Suzuno’s kimono sleeve. It was Chiho’s. The strap with the cartoon clip art of MgRonald menu items on it was a telltale sign.

“Someone able to kidnap the Hero without a struggle wasn’t going to just sit pretty while Chi tried calling me for a minute and a half. Whoever
did
call me, had to be capable of doing it. Jeez, you really hammered me, you know that? You better pay my medical bills if you broke any bones.”

Maou slowly checked over his body as he pleaded his case. He tried to painfully ease himself upward, but was interrupted.

“…The angel is here.”

Suzuno picked up the flagging Maou’s hand. Maou readily accepted it.

“Huh. Yeah, I guess you couldn’t defy an Ente Islan. What’s he here for?”

“…To recover Emilia’s holy sword, he said.”

“Huh? Without killing me first?”

This confused Maou. Why would the angels want their sword back from the Hero if the Devil King was still alive and well?

“I do not know why… He said it was nothing a human should wield…”

“Well, we can let him deal with that on his time. What about Chi?”

Blissfully kicking away the topic, one that could very well decide the fate of every human being on Ente Isla, Maou pressed forward. To a demon, the farther away the Better Half was, the better.

Suzuno hesitated for a moment before continuing.

“A valuable sample, is how he put it. He wants to make her into a research subject…someone with feelings for the Devil King, despite a full knowledge of his deeds… He wanted to examine her heart, and her mind.”

“…That bastard…”

At that instant, Suzuno instinctively looked upward.

Maou’s voice was darker, grittier, and angrier than she had ever heard it.

“You.”

“Wh-what…?”

”Who was it? Who was the puke-ridden psycho-freak bastard who did it?”

“Um…puke-ridden…?”

Maou grabbed the confused Suzuno by the shoulders, shouting at her.

“I
said
, gimme the name of that angel bastard who’s trying to kidnap a member of my effin’
staff
, dammit!”

“It, it’s Sariel.”

The sheer forcefulness of the tirade made Suzuno dribble out the name.

“…The Evil Eye of the Fallen, huh? Hell, no wonder Emi couldn’t take him.”

“You…know of that?”

Maou’s apparently intimate familiarity with archangels surprised her.

“Yeah, we got some history. It just had to be that womanizing freak, didn’t it? I
knew
it—Mitsuki Sarue!”

Finally, that flamboyant store-manager wannabe connected himself to the current state of affairs in Maou’s mind.

“W-wait! Are you going now? You are injured!”

Suzuno tried to stop the snorting Maou, all but ready to sprint into city hall.

“Of course I am! My precious coworker is quaking in fear waiting for me!”

“You can’t! You’ll be killed! Sariel’s force grows stronger the closer he is to the moon! There’s no way you could defeat him up on the roof, bereft of—”

“So you think I’m gonna run instead?”

Maou’s quiet reply stopped Suzuno’s panicked advice cold.

“It’s my job to handle crisis management for the crew on my shift.
Chi’s a valuable employee. I have to protect her. It’s basically my fault anyway that Sariel chased Emi into this world. I’m not dumb enough to foist that responsibility on someone else and run for the hills. That’s just
shameless
!”

“!!”

Suzuno froze, caught off guard by this unanticipated speech.

“How the hell am I supposed to conquer the world if I can’t take care of business here? I can’t! So I’m going! And, worst-case scenario, if I can’t beat Sariel, I might be able to get Chi out of there!”

Then, with a demonic roar, he brought his pained body to a frenzied run.

“Hyaaahhh! Hang on, Chi!”

He was inside City Hall before Suzuno could stop him. She stood dumbfounded for a moment, but quickly snapped out of it as she turned up toward the roof.

Sariel had closed off the entire area from the outside, which meant nobody was going to stop Maou’s mad rush, but the elevators weren’t going to be operational. The climb to the top would sap even more of his energy.

And even if it didn’t, this was a wounded man in his drawers. It was hard to see how he’d possibly win this.

“Why…why are you doing this? You are a demon!”

Suzuno wailed at the heavens above.

“You are the Demon King… How can you even
say
things like that?”

Then she picked up Chiho’s cell phone and returned to her feet. There, on the screen, was the word
Maou
, followed by a modest heart symbol.

“If that is the Devil King’s stance, I could hardly allow myself to remain as shameless as I was.”

Wiping her accumulated tears, Suzuno took a deep breath, feeling her pulse calm down.

Never misunderstand what needs to be protected. Never allow yourself to lose sight of the justice that must prevail.

As head of the Council of Inquisitors, as a proud member of the Church, it was a credo that always reigned over her heart.

Was there any other reason that she traveled so far away, all the way to Japan?

Suzuno racked her brain, searching for a way to open up a larger hole for the justice she needed to push through to the surface.

Then she recalled a passing observation from Sariel.

Negative energy for the Devil King to harness.

Lifting her head, Suzuno grasped the hairpin that fell to the ground, turned away from City Hall, and, in a flash, flew into the night sky.

“Hmph… It doesn’t fill me with joy, but so be it. I hate to perform such a grave disservice on a lady, but forgive me. It is simply part of my appointed task. I was expecting my Evil Eye to make the Holy Silver simply divorce itself from your body, but I suppose I will have to directly take it from you instead.”

Sariel’s face was pained as he spoke to the limp, exhausted Emi.

“Directly…?”

Repeated exposure to the Evil Eye of the Fallen had robbed her of nearly all her stamina, but the sensation of Sariel suddenly reaching for a blouse button sent emergency signals across her entire body, making her open her eyes and bite back.

“Hey! What’re you doing?!”

“Harvesting the Holy Silver from your body. Oh, but this won’t be a horror-movie scene, so try not to worry about that. Think of it as a type of surgery, one where my holy force will provide all the anesthesia you need…”

“That’s not the problem! I… Stop it! I’ll kill you!”

Emi screamed as she flailed her head around, the only free part of her body. But Sariel paid no heed as he calmly, efficiently removed the buttons on Emi’s business-casual blouse from the collar.

“Wh-what are you doing to Yusa, you weirdo?!”

Another voice of dissent echoed behind Sariel’s back. His hand stopped for a moment as he turned around.

“Trust me, I would never want to do anything to humiliate a woman. The present situation notwithstanding, I am considered
quite the gentleman up in the heavens. But if I had to place my good name against the recovery of our Holy Silver, I’m afraid my mission must take priority.”

“That’s awful! Just awful! Why do all you angels have to be these absolutely horrible people?!”

Chiho Sasaki, the girl Crestia Bell brought up to the roof, focused upon Sariel, her eyes filled with as much hatred as she could manage.

She had awakened just before Bell had gone off to eliminate their recent intrusion. Ever since, she had been savaging the archangel with as much abuse as her creative mind was capable of generating.

“Well, considering your position near the Devil King, I suppose Lucifer is your primary experience with them, is it not? I would prefer you not to lump him in with the rest of us, thank you.”

“Urushihara’s a self-serving shut-in creep, but at least he’s not a molester like you!”

There was little love lost for either of them, apparently.

“Yes, yes, all right. I’ll be happy to listen to your running commentary after we return. So would you mind being quiet for a moment?”

“Whoa, not so fast there! What’re you gonna do to Chiho?!”

Now it was Emi shouting out in protest.

“You aren’t gonna take her back with you to Ente Isla, are you?!”

“But of course. I have to, if I want to research her.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s a
totally
normal thing to say… Hey! Don’t touch me!”

“I am a gentleman. I will do my best not to look, so please be quiet. Besides, I am not a fan of, shall we say, ‘petite’ women.”

Sariel did not hesitate to say one of the few things no man should ever say to a woman, ever.

Emi’s emotions exploded to the point where they almost blew her into next Tuesday. She quickly regained her senses as she directed yet more vitriol at Sariel.

“Oh, you are
dead
! You are
so
dead! And I’m not gonna let you take Chiho away, either! I’ll make sure you regret every single thing you’re doing right now!”

“My, you certainly do make a lot of noise, don’t you? Did you think I was going to take a scalpel to that girl like a lab animal?”

Sariel’s face tightened, as if hurt by the rebuke.

“I have nothing but high praise for her beauty. Once my research is complete, I would be more than happy to promote her to the echelon of the angels and greet her as my wedded wife.”

His face, and his face alone, was the very definition of angelic. But the juxtaposition with what he was saying transformed his smile into something downright indecent.

“I’d rather die!”

Chiho opened her mouth as wide as possible as she turned down the proposal.

“But, of course, I will need to examine her in great detail, from head to toe, before that. I need to know how building a close relationship with the Devil King affects a human being, both in body and in spirit.”

“You’re a hopeless monster! D-don’t touch me! You make me sick, you freak!”

“Molester!”

“Pervert!”

“Die!”

“Psychopath!”

“False angel!”

“Peeping tom!”

“Panty raider!”

“I didn’t go
that
far!!”

Being sandwiched in by Emi and Chiho’s bashing was finally enough to make Sariel snap.