Hataraku Maou-sama! - Volume 10 - Chapter Aft

THE AUTHOR, THE AFTERWORD, AND YOU! 
I’m sure that all of us, whenever life has us down in the morning, has thought about how great it’d be if a meteor landed on our school, or if our office building exploded into a million pieces. 
We feel that way when we’ve got a specific reason for our depression—an upcoming final exam, a disagreeable coworker—or even if there’s nothing particularly wrong. Maybe we just get sick of the same old routine, and the gap in our minds between ideals and reality starts driving us crazy. We look back at it all, and we seriously say to ourselves, “Wonder if there are any meteors around…” 
It’s not as though people like that honestly want the world to end. They’re just looking for some catastrophe that would let them toss away everything weighing them down and head to Hawaii for a bit. Unfortunately, life has a way of not allowing that. No matter how heavy and plodding things are, no matter how much you just want to give up and run away, it’s hard to just shove it all in the trash. You wind up doing your thing, time passes, and then things work out good, or bad, or whatever—but since you can’t run away or trash it, you do what you can to mold everything in a way that looks nice. Or at least I do. 

There aren’t a lot of people out there who can decide on something from a certain point, then proceed straight for it, over all obstacles, without any distractions or moments of self-doubt. If we were all like that, this world wouldn’t work at all. 
The people in this volume are the same way. They’re trying to push forward; they’re finding themselves lost; they’re up against the wall; the road they were taking turns out to be a gigantic trapdoor. But they struggle through it, and now, at the fork they’ve run into, they’re steeling their resolve and trying to pick a way. 
Like I wrote in the previous volume’s afterword, it’s a new stage in the Devil Is a Part-Timer! story. And pegging that new stage right on a nice round number like Volume 10, while a total coincidence, both feels great and makes me feel ready to tackle the future in earnest, from Volume 11 onward. 
I hope I’ll see you there. Until then!!