The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 2, page 1
part #2 of Devil is a Part-Timer Series
THE DEVIL’S FINANCES ARE SHORED UP BY A HELPFUL NEIGHBOR
The coals glowed white-hot as they seared the sizzling strips of meat.
The oily drippings from the finely sliced pieces of flesh caused the fire to roar even stronger, further punishing the meat with its burning vengeance.
The room was filled with the smell of flesh and bone charring from the edges inward, along with enough smoke to hide even the death-scream-like sizzle.
He looked on at the sight, licking his lips as he did. The smile surfacing across his face was like that of a demonic beast possessed by sheer, overpowering greed.
“Heh-heh-heh… How does it feel, then? Being seared by the flames of hell without even a moment’s chance of escape?”
The dark voice, even restrained, could not conceal the innate, profound cruelty its owner was aiming at the meat as it wailed its last amid the flames.
“Now I will consume you whole. Your meat, your entrails, your very bones! And you will provide the energy I need to fulfill my great mission! So just rest easy and let the life escape you…heh-heh-heh…”
“Your Demonic Highness…”
A quizzical voice sounded above the smoke and flame. He paid it no mind.
“Ah, give me a moment. No need to hurry this. I’m not gonna be happy with this unless it’s charred to a crisp.”
“No, Your Demonic Highness, I mean…”
“Now! Let the great feast begin! Let’s start with the organ meat, shall we? …But look at you! What is the meaning of this? Cowering in the corner like a scared child?!”
“……”
“There is no longer any escape for you! You shall have the honor of being the first sacrifice offered to my lordly presence!”
With a final shout of glee, he nimbly brought the chopsticks in his right hand to the ready.
The edges of these two traditional weapons swiftly found their target, a well-cooked piece of beef laid bare on the grill. Ferrying it to a bowl of hot-and-spicy sauce as red as a blood-filled cesspit of hell, he drowned the tidbit inside before ruthlessly bringing it to his mouth.
“Heh-heh-heh… A delectable treat indeed!”
An evil look of self-satisfaction crossed his face as he finished off the mouthful.
“…My liege?”
“What, Ashiya?”
In a flash, his facial expression returned to normal as he turned forward, toward the unwelcome attention-seeker.
“If I may, could I convince my Devil King to enjoy his meal a little more quietly? You’re going to disturb the other diners around us.”
Across the undersized table, the tall man known as Ashiya peered through the rising smoke, eyebrows furrowed in apparent distress.
“Mm? Oh. Right. Guess I was getting too into this for my own good, huh? Sorry if I was too loud.”
The so-called Devil King, a perfectly normal young man in appearance, glanced about his surroundings.
“Also, there’s no need to become so passionate about some organ meat at a yakiniku restaurant. You’re acting like this is the first decent meal you’ve had all year.”
“Well, I’m not trying to act like that, but if you’re like me and you live off junk food and scratch-’n’-dent groceries, it’s kinda natural to get excited about eating someplace fancy, you know?”
The Devil King deftly transferred a selection of meat, organs, and vegetable bits from the grill to his plate as he spoke.
“I gotta be honest with you, I never really understood why all the other demons loved feasting on the organs of their victims up to now. This stuff’s really good! Like, what’s this bit? Veal heart or whatever? It’s so rich and melt-in-your-mouth yum. And I love how the pork belly and chicken cartilage crunch against my teeth! And what’s this stuff? Beef tripe? It looks pretty weird, but it’s not bad!”
“…I am glad, my liege.”
Ashiya nodded, his face still muddled with concern as he gave up the idea of calming down the Devil King anytime soon.
It was a weekend evening. Only a few chairs were empty in the restaurant, with the smoke of barbecued meat wafting up to the air vents. None of the nearby customers were demonstrating visible annoyance at the Devil King’s revved-up commentary, but internally, Ashiya regretted being so strictly frugal (okay, cheap) with the food he bought and prepared for his companion.
The pair lived in the “Devil’s Castle”—aka Room 201 of the Villa Rosa Sasazuka apartments, a rickety wooden structure built sixty years ago in a spot five minutes’ walking distance from Sasazuka rail station, which offered quick access to the rest of Tokyo’s Shibuya ward via the Keio line. A ten-minute hike from the Devil’s Castle brought them to the 100th Street shopping district, home to a horumon-style yakitori restaurant well-known to the local crowd.
As part of a campaign to celebrate ten years in business, the restaurant was offering one free drink and 390-yen deals on most plates during weeknights in the early dinner hours. To Satan, the Devil King—more likely to answer to the name Sadao Maou these days—it was a deal worth dragging his companion to.
He had just received his paycheck, which took the heat off his finances for the time being. And since certain earlier events made a “celebration” seem in order anyway, the Great Demon General Alciel—much better known around the neighborhood as Shirou Ashiya—had agreed to relax his iron grip on the Devil’s Castle’s finances for one night.
Sipping on his free mug of oolong tea, Ashiya set his side salad in front of him.
“Your Demonic Highness, you need to eat some vegetables in addition to all that meat. These days, if we wanted to eat this many vegetables at home, it would take far more than three hundred ninety yen.”
Briskly, he attempted to transfer some of his salad into Maou’s bowl.
“Oh, yeah, I heard that produce was startin’ to get expensive.”
“It is madness, my liege. A head of cabbage has risen to three hundred fifty yen.”
“Well, it doesn’t really matter, does it? I’m pretty much a born carnivore anyway.”
“It ‘doesn’t matter’ only if you think a sound nutritional balance doesn’t matter. It would be nice if we could at least cook some fish, but we don’t have a fish grill for the Devil’s Castle stove, and our puny ventilation fan would be no match for all the smoke and stink we’d generate.”
The pair of arch-demons commiserated over their oolong teas about the more poverty-stricken aspects of their lifestyle.
“Oh, speaking of which, we better buy some dinner for Urushihara, right? I think they have takeout bento boxes here.”
A small box on the side of the menu Maou took into hand listed the yakiniku bento options available. The galbi marinated beef option was priced at an extremely reasonable six hundred yen.
But Ashiya scrunched up his face and shook his head at the proposal. He sorted through the remains of his salad and had a waiter take the bowl away.
“No need. We can just buy a regular-sized pork rice bowl at the Sugiya on the way home.”
“Huh?”
Surprised at the unexpectedly cold response, Maou watched as Ashiya indignantly finished up his salad.
“Urushihara’s started to get into online shopping, if you haven’t noticed. He’s never worked a day of his life here, and yet he commandeers your credit card to fritter away our monthly budget. He never spends a great deal of money on each individual purchase, but if we let it pass unmentioned, we’ll all pay for it someday.”
“Wha? He’s been buying stuff?”
“I noticed on the past month’s credit card bill that there were quite a few more purchases made besides the computer and Internet installation we bought. Unless it was one of us wasting our money, which I doubt, it had to be him.”
“…Oh. Yeah, you know, I kinda had the impression that laptop’s gotten a lot more decked out since I bought it…”
The computer, a device that was undeniably the most state-of-the-art cultural artifact in the lives of all the Devil’s Castle denizens, was a gift funded by Maou in hopes of encouraging Urushihara’s computer skills.
“I kinda wanted to go easy on him. He can’t really go outside, and I don’t want him getting so stressed that he starts thinking about double-crossing me again. But if he’s going too far, I better read him the riot act, huh?”
“I earnestly hope you do, Your Demonic Highness. The iron hammer of justice needs to be struck, and quickly.”
Ashiya’s face was still locked in a frown, but it seemed to loosen a bit at Maou’s encouraging words. It did not last.
“Okay, well, if we got some free money, then how ’bout we splurge a little?”
“Ha?”
Ashiya’s chopsticks froze in the air as Maou suddenly shifted gears, menu already open.
“I kept this on the cheap side ’cause I thought we’d need to save some money for Urushihara’s portion, but if not, how ’bout we get one order of prime galbi, huh? What do you think? One prime galbi!”
Even with the early-bird special, the prime-grade galbi, tripe, and harami meat each cost 490 yen a plate.
Ashiya hung his head in resignation.
“…Well, if you insist. But just today, and just this once! There will be no more ordering tonight.”
“Yesss!!”
Maou pumped a fist in the air as he caught a nearby waiter, made his order, and requested the check. Watching his leader drool with excitement over a single serving of spiced beef, Ashiya couldn’t de
He raised a glass to his lips to drown the pangs of barren emptiness. All that remained was ice.
The world of Ente Isla, the Land of the Holy Cross, was fabled to be watched over personally by the gods themselves. It was composed of five vast continents, spread out in a cross formation over the Ocean of Ignora. And the king of demons, the supreme ruler of evil in this world, now lived here in the Sasazuka neighborhood of Shibuya ward, Tokyo, Japan.
Satan, the Devil King, was the iron-fist tyrant of the world of demons, a stained land infested with the writhing minions of darkness. His very name was synonymous with depraved cruelty and terror.
Together with his close-knit band of trustworthy Great Demon Generals, Satan had demolished Ente Isla’s human forces, to the point where he was just one step away from wholly conquering the land.
But then there appeared a Hero, one powerful enough to crush the Devil King’s ambitions and protect her motherland. Her name was Emilia Justina. After a climactic battle, the Devil King was defeated and forced to jump through a Gate connecting to another world, in a frantic attempt to make good his escape.
In his wounded, exhausted state, he could do little more than let the Gate’s flow take him to an unknown world, one that called itself “Earth.” It was much larger than Ente Isla, its civilization far more advanced—and, most distasteful of all, it was under the supreme rule of the human race.
Finding themselves in “Japan,” one of Earth’s nations, Satan and Alciel quickly realized they could no longer retain their high-level demon forms. The magical force that so naturally bubbled out of every pore of Ente Isla’s fabric did not exist at all in this world.
To regain their powers and return home, the pair of arch-demons decided to live with the humans in this strange nation, bereft of both holy and demonic force to live off of, and search for a way to safely regain their magical energy.
And by the time one Earth year had passed, the two arch-demons had found themselves a worthy position in Japanese society—the few, the proud, the menial part-time workers!
The Devil King Satan, who had taken on the name Sadao Maou, was now an A-level crew member at the MgRonald fast-food chain location in front of the Hatagaya rail station.
Alciel, his Great Demon General who now went by Shirou Ashiya in Japan, served as his de facto househusband, giving his all to support Maou’s new lifestyle.
The two established their temporary Devil’s Castle in Room 201 of Villa Rosa Sasazuka, a wooden apartment building in the Sasazuka neighborhood of Shibuya, Tokyo, that was a surefire nominee for the Rat-Infested Dump Hall of Fame. There they lived their days, just a pair of kind, energetic, law-abiding citizens trying to make their way in the world.
It was not the sort of life one would expect from a demon with dreams of world domination, but Maou was content enough with it. That changed one rainy day, when he lent an umbrella to a young woman caught in the rain on his way to work.
The woman was none other than Emilia Justina, the Hero herself, who had followed the Devil King to Earth in order to strike the final, decisive blow.
The sudden appearance of his greatest foe flustered Maou at first. But Emilia, too, was just as powerless and isolated in Japan as he was, living under the name Emi Yusa and painstakingly building up a part-time work résumé of her own.
Despite these natural enemies rediscovering each other, neither had the freedom to use their otherworldly powers with reckless abandon on Earth. Thus they glared helplessly at each other, forced to continue living as members of Japan’s underemployed young working class.
One day, the two of them were attacked by someone calling himself an “assassin from Ente Isla,” a nemesis who swore that he would dispose of both the Hero and Devil King in Japan.
The assassin was actually a pair. One was the fallen angel Lucifer, a Great Demon General who Maou had thought was defeated at the hands of Emilia the Hero. His partner: Olba Meiyer, Emilia’s close confidant and a powerful archbishop in the Church that ruled over the human race in Ente Isla.
Sent on the run by Lucifer and Olba’s barrage of destruction, Maou and Emi were forced into battle, nearly losing their lives on multiple occasions.
But following a last-ditch stab in the dark, the Devil King Satan was unleashed once more. Teaming up with the Hero, who released the remaining holy power she had saved within her body, he turned the tables and successfully defeated the assassins.
With Satan reborn and the Hero’s own companions arriving from Ente Isla, the final confrontation between holy and demonic seemed about to unfold.
But instead of waging battle, Satan used his newly recovered force to repair the destroyed city and erase the memories of the many eyewitnesses to the conflict. His powers quickly atrophied once more, and soon he was back to regular old Sadao Maou.
Resolving to keep the Devil King on close watch after he blew his best chance of returning home, Emilia decided to remain in Japan herself. And so the stalemate between holy and demonic continued in the sleepy side alleys of Sasazuka, not exactly the most exalted of divine battlegrounds.
Putting the yakiniku restaurant behind them, Maou and Ashiya’s lungs were instantly filled by intensely humid air. It was almost enough to make them choke—there was no fog, but it seemed like a cup of water had just been poured down their windpipes.
The season was just about to shift from early summer to summer summer. The days had grown long, and the temperature difference between night and day was quickly growing negligible. It was the rainy season, too, and the needles on their respective Annoyed-o-Meters were both about to pop right off their gauges.
“What the hell? It was cooler inside the restaurant! There were literally fires lit across the entire damn room!”
“We owe much to air-conditioning, my liege.”
Given how they had taken advantage of the early-bird special, the shopping street was still in the prime of activity. Herds of salarymen returning from work were walking en masse away from Koshu-Kaido Road, which served as Sasazuka station’s main exit point.
After purchasing the cheapest pork rice bowl at Sugiya, the beef-and-rice fast-food joint in the middle of the shopping arcade, Maou and Ashiya fought the waves of incoming traffic as they made their way toward the station entrance.
“These guys have to be crazy. It’s this friggin’ hot, and they still put on those full business suits like it’s nothing.”
“Well, a lot of those suits are made of much more breathable material these days. Even the discount chains like Akayama and Akaki are starting to sell them.”
“I know that, but how stupid do you have to be to want to wear long-sleeved shirts in the summer?”
“Your Demonic Highness, have you forgotten about our attack on the Desert Kingdom on the Southern Island?”
Ashiya’s face suddenly turned grim.
It was not quite seven o’clock, but with the long summer days settled in, the sky still retained its twilight colors, the streetlights lining the shopping street casting the unique shades one only sees on languid summer evenings like these.
At the end of the street, upon the intersection with Koshu-Kaido Road, the demons hit a red light.
“The sun can cause terrible damage to one’s skin. Do you recall what the people of the desert wore? Their bodies were covered in thick fabric. Japan may not be the searing wasteland you saw in the Southern Island, but then, Earth is quite a different place from Ente Isla.”
“Wh-what’re you talking about?”
Ashiya grew more impassioned as he continued.
“Overexposure to the sun can lead to sunburn, my liege, and excessive sunburn can cause skin cancer. Aren’t you aware that the thinning ozone layer is exposing the cities of Japan to more and more ultraviolet rays every year?!”
“Uh, no? So what?”
Ashiya pointed a finger toward the sky.
“Even on cloudy days, or evenings like these where the sun isn’t out, those UV rays are still raining down upon us. They are the direct cause of skin cancer and cataracts, and in places like Australia that are closer to the Antarctic ozone hole, some states even require children to wear protective glasses as they travel to school.”
Ashiya was careful to not let the rice bowl in his hand bump into anyone passing by as he continued his soapbox rant.
