The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 2 (25 page)

“Well, what? I know you never pick up your cell phone during work. I’m callin’ from home, what’s so bad about that?”

“From home?! When the hell did you buy a phone?! You
had
that kind of money?!”

“I don’t have a phone, dude. You think I’m loaded or something? I’m using SkyPhone. You know, SkyPhone?”

“What’s SkyPhone?”

“Basically, it’s a phone you can use over the Internet. It’s practically free to use, and you can even call landline phones with it. Like, signing up with a phone company is
so
last year, you know?”

Maou internally marveled at how Urushihara thought he knew everything after two months of life as a Japanese shut-in.

“All right. Fine. As long as it’s not messing up our finances. So what do you want?”

“Jeez, you don’t have to be so passive-aggressive like that. Ashiya asked me to find some inside info on Sentucky Fried Chicken, so I found it. You happy?”

Urushihara’s own attitude wasn’t much better. To the impatient Maou, this call didn’t seem like much of an emergency.

“Yeah, yeah, sorry. But I’m kind of busy right now. I’ll ask you about it at home.”

He tried to hang up. Urushihara shouted at him before he could.

“Wait! You sure about that? You know, Sentucky… Something’s really effed up about it.”

“Ah?”

Maou could hear someone clicking away with a mouse on the other end. The audio quality was clearer than he’d expected.

“That location’s managed by a guy named Mitsuki Sarue. The one with the Hatagaya address is, anyway. That’s the one, right?”

“Yeah, I suppose.”

“Well, the employee profile on the site says that Sarue’s five
foot eleven and used to play rugby in college. He look like that to you?”

“…It said what?”

Maou was too thrown to shoo him away now.

“That’s gotta be someone else’s profile. He was this little shrimpy dude, just about as tall as you are. He looked like he’d be more at home trying to hook up with chicks at a sleazy Kabukicho bar than stiff-arming dudes on a rugby field.”

“Oh, so you’re calling me shrimpy now? Thanks a lot. Anyway, Sarue’s a pretty rare last name, so when I checked the personnel logs on Sentucky’s HQ site based outta Shibuya, that was the only Sarue on the whole list.”

“Uh…wow, what the hell kinda sites were you accessing?”

“And that’s not all. According to the HQ logs, Sarue’s supposed to be working for the advertising department.
Those
logs list someone totally different as the manager at Hatagaya. Someone named Tanaka. A girl!”

“Hohh…”

If Maou wasn’t focused on other crises at the moment, he could have just written that off as an inconsistency with SFC’s record-keeping.

But considering the events at hand, was it really safe to let this Mitsuki Sarue guy, manager at the Hatagaya Sentucky Fried Chicken, go ignored when his very existence was now being called into question?

And then there was the missing-in-action Chiho, the unusually silent Emi…and the girl who was with them.

“Hey, uh, is there any way to, like, look up where somebody is right now if you have their cell number? Anything as useful as that?”

“Why d’you ask? I guess so, but I’d have to look.”

“There
is
?!”

The twenty-first century was still news to Maou in countless ways.

“But I don’t have anything like that right
now
, and figuring that stuff out is probably gonna take a ton of time. I don’t even even know if this piece-of-crap PC can handle it or not…”

“All
right
! Sorry it’s such a piece of crap! Jeez!”

It was a piece of crap Urushihara hadn’t spent any of his own money on. Maou felt justified taking offense.

“But, like, what, you want to know where somebody is?”

“Yeeaaahh, kind of…”

“’Cause if it’s Emilia, I could probably tell you.”

Maou stopped breathing for a moment.

“What?!”

“Well, yeah. I kinda stuck a tracker in her shoulder bag. A hidden GPS transmitter.”

“A hidden…GP…what?”

All this rapid-fire lingo was too much for him.

“Uh…well, just imagine one of those little bugging devices you see in movies. They use ’em to track wild animals and migrating birds and stuff, you know? They tell you what kind of path whoever’s carrying it is taking, and how much time it took to do it.”

There was no doubt Emi was a far more fearsome presence in the demons’ lives than some collared wolf or bear. Tracking her was a brilliant idea.

“When did you do that?”

“Back a coupla days ago. I put it under the bottom layer of her bag so she wouldn’t notice it right away.”

It made sense. Maou recalled how Urushihara picked up all the purse contents scattered across the ground after Emi’s flying leap off the stairway.

“Plus, you had to have noticed by now, right, Maou? Like, how Suzuno’s not exactly a normal Japanese woman?”

Urushihara made it sound like the most obvious thing in the world.

“You didn’t say anything, so I figured I’d play along, but you know, what reason would anyone have to move into this building unless they were seriously short on cash? I mean, there’s
nothing
.”

“…You’re more observant than I thought.”

“I don’t know if Emilia’s noticed, though, and that’s why she’s getting chummy with her. But our landlord isn’t really normal, either, right? A regular human being signing a lease with that lady and
moving right next to us… You’d have to be crazy to think that was just your typical tenant.”

When Suzuno moved in, Maou wasn’t concerned about the sort of things Ashiya mentioned—acting like a decent neighbor, being part of the community, blah blah blah.

His sole reaction was that anyone willing to sign on with
that
landlord could very well be from Ente Isla.

“So…the udon noodles and other stuff Suzuno made for us…”

“Well, duh, I’m half-angel, remember? Holy power isn’t gonna mess up
my
body. I ate everything you gave me. It didn’t hurt you at all, Maou?”

That must have been what put Ashiya down for the count—the assorted food Suzuno brought into Devil’s Castle.

Both on Earth and in Ente Isla, food played a primary role in the sacred ceremonies generally known as “consecrations.”

On Earth, the food involved was usually bread or wine, placed into special holy vessels for use in religious rites.

Ente Isla, meanwhile, often used special ingredients, grown within Church grounds, raised with the help of holy water, and instilled with the power of the gods themselves.

All of the food Suzuno brought with her must have been consecrated on Ente Isla.

And it was easy to imagine why Suzuno was so generously sharing it with Maou and his cohorts. She was an assassin—one whose approach chiefly differed from Emi’s in its leisurely pace.

Consuming purely cultivated, consecrated food could indeed be hazardous to the health of a lesser demon. But…

“Hey, the worse it is for you, the better it tastes, right?”

“
That’s
your take on it?”

Maou’s utter indifference exasperated Urushihara.

A higher-level demon eating consecrated food was essentially the same as placing holy force directly into their body. It would hurt him in the long run, but only in the same way trans fats and “bad” cholesterol would hurt a normal person. It wasn’t something that
would drain his strength and shut down his bodily functions with a snap of the fingers.

In Ashiya’s case, the cause was partly that he’d all but used up his demonic power in the battle two months ago and partly that Suzuno’s cuisine simply didn’t agree with his stomach.

“It’s not like she’s flailing away at us the way Olba did. I’m not enough of a prick to complain about whatever someone feeds me, and hey, it helps us save some cash. I figured we’d use her for as long as we could get away with it.”

“Yeah, but isn’t it kind of like that documentary about the guy who ate burgers every day just to see what would happen?”

“You know, Ashiya used to bring up that film all the time when he lectured me. I think he’s a huge fan or something.”

Maou chuckled to himself.

“What’s he doing right now, by the way?”

Ashiya seemed unlikely to remain still if he discovered his next-door neighbor was his mortal enemy.

“Well, he got home, ate some udon, and now he’s grunting and groaning on the crapper.”

“…Oh.”

The mental image of his beloved general and tactical genius meeting his match against indigestion almost brought tears to Maou’s eyes.

“I think he was getting pretty suspicious of Suzuno, too, though. It’s just that you never said anything, so I guess he kept quiet because it was helping keep the lights on.”

“…I’m glad he’s got faith in me, but dude, he doesn’t have to ruin his health just to save a few yen.”

“Yeah, seriously. So that’s why I snuck that GPS transmitter in there, but Emilia hasn’t done anything suspicious at all, really, so I turned off the tracker a while ago.”

“Huh. All right. I gotcha. So you can use that to see where she is now?”

“Probably. The battery’s gonna run out pretty soon, I think…”

Maou heard Urushihara tap away at the keyboard for a moment.

“Whoa.”

Some surprising turn of events stopped his fingers.

“Whoa, what?”

“So she was at this intersection between MgRonald and our place, then all of a sudden she’s moving in this straight line. Like, right though buildings and stuff, like she’s flying or something.”

“Where’s she going?”

Urushihara’s reply was short and to the point.

“Tokyo city hall, it looks like. The GPS signal’s been hovering around building number one, the main one, for a while now.”

“…Great. That’s all I need to know. Way to actually help out for a change.”

“‘For a change’ is kinda mean, you know.”

Maou nodded before bringing up something else that crossed his mind.

“By the way, how much did that track editor or whatever cost you?”

The moment he asked the question, there was a flushing sound over the phone line, followed by the old, sticky door opening. Ashiya was out of the john.

“It’s a
tracker
, dude. Uh, Ashiya’s back out now, so I don’t really want to say, but…”

“I got your back on this one, I promise. Just tell me.”

Maou could feel the hesitation over the phone.

“I got it from an Akihabara online store for…uh, forty thousand…on your card.”

The sound of something heavy falling echoed across the line.

Through the phone’s audio, Maou easily pictured Ashiya fainting in shock from Urushihara’s extravagant purchasing habits.

“Well, at least you’re honest. I don’t know what Ashiya’s gonna say, and I’m not sure I wanna know what you bought that thing for in the first place, but you got my permission. You really helped me out tonight.”

“I’d kinda appreciate it if you could get home ASAP and tell Ashiya that. I’m a little scared…”

“Can’t. Not done working yet. But thanks. See you.”

“Whoa, wait, Mao—”

Ignoring Urushihara’s pleas, Maou hung up the phone.

“I don’t want you bums following me, either. Not with all your demonic energy drained. You’d just get hurt. A good supervisor needs to watch over the condition of his staff.”

After whispering it to himself, Maou took a deep breath, almost choking on the grab bag of powerful odors that pervaded the break room, than slapped his cheeks a bit to wake himself up.

“If this is still just Emi getting sidetracked, she’s gonna have some
serious
explaining to do.”

He took a look around the room before his eyes stopped on the cleaning-supply closet.

“Huh? Are we cleaning the floors already, Maou?”

One of the crew members noticed Maou leaving the break room with a mop in his hand.

“Well, uh…yeah. I need to go out for a bit.”

“What? With a mop? Where?”

Maou had trouble responding for a moment, but drummed up the most stoic look he could.

“There’s something annoying me that I need to clean up.”

“Um, I’m not quite sure I know what you… Ah! Maou, wait a sec!”

Ignoring the employee’s cries, Maou ran across the dining area.

“Maou!”

“Don’t worry! I promise I’ll come back!”

“I don’t care about that! Just don’t leave us in here!”

The employee’s shout sounded like a battle horn to Maou’s ears as he boarded his trusty two-wheeled Dullahan and flew off.

Dullahan’s bell rang its approval at its master’s burning spirit, its staccato ding-a-ling now a beastlike roar.

Like a cavalryman of old, Satan, lord of the demon realms, held his mop firmly in hand as he galloped down a side road removed
from Koshu-Kaido to avoid police attention, heading straight for the city center in Hatsudai-Shinjuku.

“Hmm… So the angel refuses to fall that easily.”

A cross floated in the sky, emitting an eerie purple light. The creepy scythe-wielding maniac looked up at it, and the body of Emi that was crucified upon it, as he muttered softly. Suzuno, standing right next to him, had her eyes cast upward as well.