THE DEVIL GETS TOUGH
Off duty this evening and already changed out of her uniform, Chiho returned to the staff room to check whether there were any mistakes on the November shift schedule passed out that day.
Only then did she notice something was off. The schedule was sorted by name first, and Chiho thus knew that she’d always be in row twelve of the spreadsheet. Maou was usually ninth and Emi twenty-fifth, but for whatever reason, Emi was moved up to row twenty-four this month. It wasn’t until she began copying her schedule into her notebook that she realized why.
“Oh, right! Kota’s gone!”
Kotaro Nakayama, one of the more talented among the younger crewmembers, was the missing row on the sheet.
“He was trying to get a full-time job somewhere, wasn’t he? Wow. I guess he really quit.”
The thought saddened her just a little as she reexamined the schedule. She had heard the news before—on several occasions, including from Kotaro himself—but seeing his name vanish like this made it seem like time had flown by all too fast.
“No more of him, I suppose…”
Kotaro was a college student, Chiho in high school. One would think their relatively close ages would let them hit it off more, but the two had never engaged in any particularly deep conversation. They weren’t enemies, of course, and they talked well enough when they shared a shift. Kotaro, the more experienced of the two, had given her training on more than one occasion even.
But—looking impartially back—apart from the university he went to, the fact he lived somewhere in Hatagaya, and the video games he played as a hobby, Chiho knew nothing about Kotaro Nakayama. She wasn’t a gamer at all, so they couldn’t talk about that, and when it came to chatting about college life, he was more than likely to do that with fellow student crewmembers Takefumi Kawata and Akiko Ohki.
In more private matters, there was one time when Chiho had mentioned she was on the school team for kyudo, the Japanese martial art of archery, and Kotaro replied that his girlfriend practiced Western archery. They then chatted for a while about bow-and-arrow sports—something they kind of but not really had in common. But even that was just ten minutes or so during break, it felt to her.
Really, when it came to veteran part-timer Kotaro Nakayama, Chiho could summarize everything she knew about him in the space of a few minutes. But even so, he was still part of her life, something she treated as a given—and now he was threatening to disappear from memory for good.
It was, to her, quite a surprise. In a way, it felt kind of like when she graduated from middle school. It wasn’t like she was besties with the entire student body, but in the space of a single day, the people she always hung out with were gone. It created an unsettling sense of loss.
“What’s up, Chi? What’re you scowling at?”
“Oh! Ms. Kisaki…”
Mayumi Kisaki, the manager, strolled into the room, removing her hat and earpiece. Chiho looked up at her.
“I was just copying my schedule into my notebook, and I noticed that Kota’s shift isn’t on here anymore.”
“Ah, yeah. I kinda hoped he’d stay on the rest of the year, but even with job interviews and stuff starting later for students than they used to, I guess he really wanted that extra month to balance his course load with all the other prep work he had. That’s gonna be a hard hole in the schedule to plug up with new staff, too. It’s a big headache.”
Kisaki didn’t seem too affected by it, but when it came to work, she absolutely never joked or told lies to her staff. Kotaro’s absence did produce a major hole. With the Hatagaya location in particular, the shift schedule was one thing, but having someone so intimate with all aspects of MgRonald operations depart put that much extra stress on everyone else’s shoulders.
“Are you off for today, Ms. Kisaki?” Chiho asked as Kisaki began undoing her tie.
“Nah, there’s an emergency regional meeting at another location after this. At this time of the day, no less. Marko’s off today, too, so I hope we don’t have an emergency here.”
She looked at the clock and sighed. Having the main manager out of the restaurant just before the dinner rush made everyone on staff nervous, to say nothing of the other managers not on-site today. With Maou not making any appearance all day, Kisaki honestly wished she could ditch this meeting. In a business like this, having a single person disappear, or not be there, often wound up having much greater impact than at first glance.
“Around the dinner rush, pretty much every location has to deal with personnel shortages…even as our workload keeps going up. If things get any worse, we might have to assign shifts to some of the corporate front office staff.” She shrugged. “When it rains, it pours, huh? I got a bunch of other stuff to wrap up, too, so I won’t be back today. I’ll have my phone on for emergencies, so if anything comes up, just ask Kawacchi or Aki or Saemi, okay?”
“Oh… All right.”
Her not being back today struck Chiho in a way Kisaki didn’t intend at all. It made the wrinkles around her eyebrows deepen even further. Seeing this, Kisaki (for a change) found it difficult to piece the correct words together.
“Yeah… Though, speaking of, if you think something like that’s gonna happen with you, Chi, please let me know sooner than later.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
Chiho didn’t quite get her point.
“To be honest, Chi, I really hope you won’t fall away from your current schedule, if at all possible—but that’s probably not gonna happen, huh?”
“Oh?”
Chiho tilted her head a bit. She never recalled asking for new shifts or extended time off. But it made Kisaki look all the more flustered.
“It’s winter of your next-to-last year in high school, isn’t it? I bet all your friends are going crazy with college admissions by now.”
“College… Ah?!”
She yelped a little louder than she meant, as she finally got Kisaki’s gist.
“You’re the one in high school, aren’t you?” Kisaki smiled a bit, realizing Chiho honestly had no clue. “I don’t wanna impose on you simply because you forgot about that, but keep it in mind, all right? It’ll be your last year soon, starting in April. I know how much you worry about that kinda thing, so I doubt you aren’t treating it seriously. Once you have to start studying for college exams for real, that’s gonna hurt your shift schedule, right?”
“Y-yeah, I guess it will.”
Chiho realized her heart was racing—as if someone had leaped out from around a street corner and yelled, “Boo!” Just the other day, at Emi’s friend’s place, she had been made to think about the exact same thing—but if the topic shocked her that much this time, then all those ideas of college and exams must have still felt like a distant world to her. Kisaki knew it concerned Chiho greatly, even more than her own family, teachers, or friends knew. It had come up in the middle of her job interview, and Chiho had asked for advice from her manager about the subject several times before.
“Well, when…when the time comes…I’ll definitely talk about it with you.”
“Great, thank you. It’s for your sake as well, after all.”
Then, without another word, Kisaki went into the changing room. Hearing her boss close the door behind her, Chiho took a peek at the scene on the dining floor.
“When…I won’t be here any longer…”
It hadn’t even been a year since she’d begun working here, but sooner or later, she would be leaving the MgRonald family. Chiho didn’t know when, but it was definitely coming—and that unavoidable truth felt like a snake coiling itself around her chest. There wasn’t any outside air, but it still felt like a cold gust of wind was coming over her. She buttoned up the puffy coat she wore on her way to work and sighed.
“Oh, you’re still here?”
“Eeep!”
Chiho leaped into the air at the sensation of someone patting her shoulder from behind.
“Pretty bundled up, huh?”
Kisaki, in her trench coat, gave Chiho a curious look. The teenager hadn’t stopped at just her coat—from head to toe, there was hardly a square inch of skin that wasn’t covered in several layers.
Chiho meekly explained, “Oh, um, I’m going somewhere else after this, so…”
“Ah. Well, stay warm out there. It’s already dark out, so don’t stay out too long.”
Chiho nodded at the grown-up advice. Kisaki stood next to her, peeking into the restaurant space like Chiho was doing.
“If you don’t mind me saying…”
“Yes?”
“I don’t think this is someplace you should be intent with staying at forever. It’s merely a stepping-stone in your life—for you, for Marko, for Saemi, and for me, too. Everyone needs to find their own place to settle down, you know?”
“…But it hasn’t even been a year for me.”
Kisaki smiled at the way Chiho assessed her words. “Well, if it seems like just yesterday since you started working here, then I guess you’re liking it, huh? But don’t be afraid to fret over it. It might seem like you’re surrounded by a bunch of older people who’ve got it all figured out, but they all have the same worries you do, really. Things like, Did I make the right decision back then? or Am I going to make the right call from now on? and all that.”
Hearing this made Chiho realize exactly how obvious it seemed, but until she did, it was difficult for her to even imagine it. She looked at the backs of the MgRonald crewmembers at their stations through the crack in the door and sighed. Guess everybody’s like that. Maybe even Maou and Emi.
“…Well, I better head off for now.”
“Sure thing. Take care.”
Either way, this wasn’t the sort of problem she could solve by endlessly stewing. Chiho bowed to her manager, briskly put her things inside her bag, and left. The air just outside the automatic doors was crisp against her skin, taking the floor space’s warmth away from her cheeks.
“Am I going to make the right call from now on—huh…?”
Her sigh melted into the cold air. But she took a decisive step forward anyway.
“Better hurry.”
She had to. This was the first day she’d be visiting Room 201 of Villa Rosa Sasazuka as part of Maou and Laila’s negotiations.
One could say the archangel Laila was the original source of the chaos sowed between the two worlds of Earth and Ente Isla—the villain pulling the strings from up above.
As the mother of Emilia Justina, better known as Emi Yusa around here, Laila had finally appeared before Maou and his cohorts. Having known Miki Shiba for the past sixteen years, she was thought to have a great deal of information about Alas Ramus, Acieth Alla, and Erone, the children born from the Sephirah. The two born from the Yesod Sephirah were, by now, indispensable parts of the local residents’ lives, and to Maou and Emi, Laila was like a walking, talking font of wisdom that couldn’t be more vital to their futures.
To Emi, however, Laila was also a riddle. On one hand, her mother had forced her to slog her way single-handedly through a litany of chaotic disasters; on the other, this woman before her seemed so goofily irresponsible, not at all the evil puppet master she pictured. It made her refuse to deal with her at all—and Maou was the same, his attitude toward her hardening as he attempted to fish information out of her. They had both fought on the front lines up to now, even as Laila lurked around in the shadows, and their discussions had not only failed to bear fruit—they were drifting even further apart than before.
And only a few days after she had appeared in their lives, someone had attacked the subway train Emi and Chiho were riding on, a dark shadow of an attacker totally unfazed by Emi’s holy sword and even able to shrug off the powers of Amane Ohguro, child of planet Earth’s Sephirah. Laila seemed to know this shade’s identity, and as Maou and Emi understood the situation, it was yet another symptom of her machinations. It didn’t help relations between them much.
The one thing the demon and half angel agreed on was that neither of them wanted to be dancing to someone else’s tune any longer. That applied all the more now that the MgRonald they both worked at began offering delivery service after a long run-up period, making it hard enough just to keep up their regular human being lives.
But they were both half dragged back to the conference table by none other than Miki Shiba and Amane Ohguro. They had captured the shade that had attacked the subway and even gravely injured Laila, reporting to Maou and Emi that the dark fiend was Erone, child of the Sephirah Gevurah paired to Ente Isla. The mystery transformation of his body and Laila’s own secrets certainly weren’t unrelated, and if they continued to ignore the baggage Laila came to Earth with (as she had put it), there was no telling what would happen to Alas Ramus and her sister Acieth Alla.
Realizing Emi was still reluctant to talk with Laila despite all this, Maou came up with a deal where they would negotiate with the archangel only within the confines of Room 201, with Maou taking Emi’s place at the table and accompanied by either Ashiya, Urushihara, Chi, Acieth, or some combination thereof. Laila claimed what happened to Erone wouldn’t occur to Alas Ramus or Acieth anytime soon, but between that and the danger to Ente Isla’s humanity Shiba had talked about in Urushihara’s hospital room, the future facing Maou and Emi seemed dark, foreboding, inscrutable, and ready to pounce upon them at any moment.
Chiho had been to Villa Rosa Sasazuka more times than she could count by now, but tonight it seemed like a completely different building to her. It must have been the butterflies at work.
The light in the windows would normally reassure her that she’d be seeing familiar faces soon; now that light seemed oddly cold and indifferent. Normally she’d be able to hear Ashiya and Suzuno and Urushihara yelling at one another by the time she took her first step up the stairway, but today all was quiet. The landing upstairs almost seemed deserted. No sign of Suzuno or Alas Ramus anywhere. It almost made Chiho feel like everyone dear to her had left her in the lurch, as she gingerly pushed the Room 201 doorbell.
“Chi? C’mon in. It’s open.”
She unconsciously let go of a deep breath. The voice sounded wooden in tone, but it was unmistakably Maou’s. The impending (and evidence-free) sense of doom that overcame Chiho made her hang her head a bit, before she recalled the role she was tasked with. Steeling her resolve, she opened the door.
“Hello, it’s…”
Then she froze for a few moments.
“…H-hello, Chiho…”
“Hey, Chi. Hope your shift went okay.”
“Close the door. It’s cold.”
The air was chilly. Not metaphorically, either. There was no draft working its way into the apartment, but the ambient air within Room 201 was a good five degrees or so cooler than outside. That much became eminently clear once Chiho caught sight of the three people waiting for her inside.
Maou was wearing a wool cap on his head, the zipper on his UniClo superlight fleece hoodie zipped all the way to the top, and he had two pairs of socks on his feet. The layers covering Urushihara, his back to the front door as he sat by his computer desk, made his shoulders padded and frumpy looking. The collars on each layer of his clothing were haphazardly draped over one another, and even then he had another blanket covering his lap. The only one with a normal-looking outfit was Laila; she wore a dress of somewhat thick fabric but otherwise wasn’t shielded from the cold at all. She looked more than a shade paler than before, thanks in part to the way her hair went purple following the subway attack.
The apartment was so chilly that Chiho wondered if that gelatinous block of demonic force they were storing in the closet had sprung a leak. But it wasn’t—she felt perfectly fine not having to utilize any of her own holy force to block it. The place was just freezing is all.
“Yeah, see? I told you, when it comes to stuff like this, Chiho never misses a beat. She’s always two or three moves ahead of everyone else in the way she preps for stuff. You should learn from her.”
“Er…?”
The enigmatic praise from Maou the moment she came in did nothing to cure Chiho’s confusion.
“Well,” Laila countered, “how was I supposed to expect this? Didn’t they renovate this apartment several times by now? Why’s it even more freezing than outside?!”
It was exactly the question Chiho had, and the tenant had a terse answer for it.
“It’s just that kind of building, man.”
“…!”
The archangel was forced into silence by the Devil King’s frosty declaration.
“Dude, close the door already!” Urushihara called.
“Oh! Sorry!”
Chiho hurriedly did so. It did nothing to warm the room up, but it was still apparently enough to satisfy Urushihara.
“…Did you know about this, Chiho?”
“About…what?”
“About…how cold this place is…?”
“Uhmmm…”
Chiho gave Laila’s query a level amount of consideration before remembering the outfit she had on herself: Her favorite earmuffs and scarf. A heavy coat with a sweater under it. Heat-retaining bottoms underneath full-length denim. The low temperature for the day was forecast at around forty degrees, but it’d reached fifty-seven in the afternoon, enough to make her sweat a bit. Right now, though, this wardrobe was perfect for her.
“I…I didn’t know exactly, but I knew I was coming here in the evening, so I just kind of naturally went with this.”
“Naturally?”
This seemed to amaze Laila.
Maou gave Chiho a satisfied nod. “Yeah, because you know that we don’t have any real heating equipment in here. You see? Chi can prep for this kinda thing, I’m sure, because she knows how to pick up on stuff.”
“And you’re proud of that?!” Urushihara and Laila muttered at once.
“You shouldn’t let Maou treat that as a badge of honor, Chiho,” Urushihara went on, feeling confident enough as a local resident to take Laila’s side here.
“Oh, um, I didn’t mean to…”
“Well, you are! Thanks to you siding with him, Ashiya’s all obsessed with the idea that we don’t even need a heater!”
Urushihara took a heavy-looking bag out from beneath his legs.
“This is a hot-water bottle! He says we don’t even need to bring out the kotatsu table heater until the new year as long as we have this!”
“Um, well, what’s so bad about that? I use that when I’m sleeping, too…”
“Yeah, when you’re sleeping! You ever try cuddling with a hot-water bottle all day at home?!”
“Well, no…”
“Enough, Urushihara,” Maou interceded. “Chi isn’t wrong. Those things are nice.”
“They ain’t nice, dude! If all the Devil King’s Army troops who gave their lives in the invasion of Ente Isla heard you say that, Maou, they’d cry their eyes out until they all became withered husks!”
“Shuddup. We buy an AC or a heater, it’s our bank account that’s gonna dry up.”
“So what’s our demonic force for, dude?!”
Chiho fully agreed with Urushihara’s assertion, but something about seeing him and Maou carry on surprisingly like old times helped ease her initial butterflies. Then, as if timing her change of heart, there was a knock on the door from outside.
“Chiho! Chiho, you are there, I know it!”
“Acieth? Um, Maou…”
“Maou! You may think you hide the smell of Chiho from my nose, but the world, it is not so much easy as that!”
“What is she carrying on about…?”
“We are hungry in the stomachs! If Chiho is there, there must be the fried chicken, too!”
“I…I didn’t bring anything this time. I’m just here after work, is all.”
“No, Chiho, it’s fine,” reassured Maou as he rubbed his head, Chiho herself having half withered at Acieth’s all-too-sudden appetite. “Nobody would expect you to.”
“Oh! Nothing? Aw. Too bad.” Surprisingly, it was Urushihara who lodged the first complaint. “Ashiya and Bell have been constricting our diets really badly in order to help Acieth and Erone eat healthier, so I was kinda hoping Chiho Sasaki would have some chicken for us maybe…”
“Wow, Urushihara, talk about literally feeding off Chiho’s generosity,” Maou spat back.
“Um, I’m sorry,” Chiho said, flustered, “I’ll make some next time, so…”
“No need for you to concern yourself with it, Chi; it’s nothing for you to worry about. Ever since he left the hospital, he’s gotten more shameless than ever.”
“Shameless? Oh, as if anyone cared how I was doing during and after my hospital stay! You all went crazy for Emilia’s friends and Ashiya. You could at least give me a little something extra to eat, okay?”
“You aren’t actually being serious, are you?”
In Maou’s eyes, despite Urushihara’s hospitalization, he hadn’t undergone the sort of change debilitating enough to merit any particular concern.
“Are you serious, Maou? Like, hell, Amane and the landlord never even told me what I was being hospitalized for, right to the end. Don’t you think something must’ve happened to my body for me to be there at all?”
“Well,” Chiho tried, “all we can say is that Ms. Shiba’s strange force had a negative effect on you…is all.”
Apart from Shiba and her relatives, Chiho was the only one there to see Urushihara be taken to the hospital. She had set things up so that Urushihara could listen in on her asking Amane about Earth’s Sephirah, but just as she was getting to the crux of it, Shiba had walked in, putting Urushihara into a coma and sending him off to treatment. If that treatment had been to heal his body after protecting Chiho and Suzuno from the archangel Camael’s brutal attack on Chiho’s high school, that would be one thing—but if the cause of any damage was simply “I ran into our landlord,” it was hard to drum up much sympathy.
“Come on, I’m still losing my hair color any time she’s nearby! Something’s got to be messed up with me!”
“You’ve got too much hair on your head anyway. You could stand to lose some.”
“I’m talking about the color, Maou, not the hair itself!”
“Oh, hush up. Losing your color, though… Did that ever happen to you, Laila?”
“No. It’s been this color ever since you healed me a little while ago. Meeting with Ms. Shiba didn’t change it at all.”
Laila’s hair had undergone the opposite transformation of Urushihara’s. Originally a silvery shade of blue, it segued into an Urushihara-like purple hue right when Maou had used his demonic force to heal her wounds.
“The color’s different, but it hasn’t affected my health or anything.”
“Yeah, and it didn’t affect Urushihara’s, either,” Maou finished. “You’re carrying on too much about that color, man. It’s not like you willingly go outside anyway…ever. Just stay away from the landlord, and you’re fine. It’s not from the aftereffects of fighting Camael, either, so quit whining.”
“Well, no,” the dubious Urushihara replied, “but—”
“You say ‘something extra to eat’! I hear it! Give up and open the door!”
The glutton on the other side of the door bellowed far louder than Urushihara, choosing to focus only on the parts of the conversation that meant the most to her. At a loss for any other solution, Maou stood up, bringing Chiho into the room as he stepped down to open the door.
“Whoo-hoo, Chiho— Eek!”
At that moment, the ravenous Acieth—mouth agape at all the edible gifts that Chiho didn’t have for her—turned into a swarm of purple particles that were sucked into Maou’s body.
“…In the house, please.”
It was a rather forceful way of shutting her up but one that Maou and his fusion link with Acieth granted him unique access to.
“Ugh, all this racket… I’ll let you out once we’re done talking, so chill out for a while. Also, Chi’s just back from work and she’s tired. Don’t give her any trouble!”
Maou winced and lectured Acieth, who was screaming at him at full volume in his mind, something that putting his hands to his ears wouldn’t ease.
“Huh? Where’s Acieth?”
But Acieth wasn’t the only one outside. There was also Erone, his skin looking quite a bit healthier now, and, thanks to the Japanese clothing Nord and Laila bought for him, overall he appeared not at all different from any other neighborhood boy. Acieth did say “we” out there earlier—and now that Erone was tranquil and no longer “berserk” (as Laila and Amane put it), he was usually right by Acieth’s side, manipulating Nord or Laila or Amane and forcing them to come up with the funds to satisfy both of their appetites. Today, though, the Sephirah child was clearly on the hunt for something, ferreting out the smell of Chiho (or the general MgRonald funk she had on her) and seeking a few freebies.
“You shouldn’t hang out with Acieth all the time, either,” Maou said to him, finger pointed at his own head. “You keep following behind her, and you’ll start to act as brazen and pathetic as she does.” Then he winced—no doubt Acieth yelling at him to “stop being so the rude” again, that much Chiho could tell.
“I don’t want to go away from her, if I can,” the boy suddenly blurted out. “We were separated for so long. Just getting to eat together every day… I still can’t believe it. The past few days have been like a dream.”
“Yeah, I can’t believe how much you guys eat. And the funds we’re going through for that aren’t any dream at all. It’s a cold, hard reality.”
“Ah-ha-ha…ha-ha…”
Chiho had to laugh. She knew the extent of Acieth’s and Erone’s appetites all too well. But the chuckle subsided quickly as something occurred to her.
The two of them both had a seemingly insatiable hunger, but none of it had changed their bodies’ shape at all. That was weird. The archangel Sariel—aka Mitsuki Sarue, erstwhile manager of the Sentucky Fried Chicken across the street from Maou’s workplace—had attained a blimp-like appearance in very short order after getting smitten with Kisaki and subsequently living off nearly nothing but MgRonald value meals. It was obvious what eating so much fatty food should do to a body—either Sariel’s or the Sephirah’s—and even then, Sariel’s gluttony was only a speck on the map compared to what Acieth and Erone were doing. They were absolutely stuffing themselves; it hadn’t fattened them at all, and there had to be a reason for it.
Chiho tried to dismiss the vague concern from her mind, but the next words from Erone plunged her into a veritable ocean of worry.
“But if this isn’t a dream, then this isn’t any place for us to live.”
“…!”
It may have been Chiho, or Maou, or both of them who gasped at the assertion.
“Acieth and Alas Ramus and I all have places we need to return to. But if I lose myself like I did before, I may never be able to go back.”
“Don’t say any more,” Maou said, his voice suddenly stern. Erone ignored him.
“I have people I want to meet. I need you to lend me your power.”
“I said, don’t say any more.”
“…Please, Erone, hold it back,” Laila added, her voice low but sharp as she felt the danger lurking behind Maou’s tone.
“All right. I’m sorry.”
Following his apology, the boy bowed briskly at Maou, then did the same to Chiho, her face still tensed with anxiety.
“Sorry to you, too, Chiho. I’ve done nothing but scare you.”
“Uh…ah…”
She wasn’t scared at all, no. But the boy born from the Sephirah must have keenly picked up on the other kind of terror that was lurking deep in her heart.
“When we first met and later on, too. I have to protect people like you, Chiho, but look at me…”
“Protect…people like me?”
“I could never apologize enough to you, Chiho, but you always make such good food for me. You treat me so nice. And I…I’m trying to take these precious things from you, Chiho. I don’t know what I should do.”
“Erone…?”
“Will you quit it already—?”
“Oh! There you are!”
The voice of a harried-sounding Nord thundered up the outdoor stairway.
“I’m sorry. I took my eyes off him for a moment, and he ran off on me.”
With all the lecturing Maou had given him lately, Nord was still having trouble figuring out exactly how to deal with his neighbors. He looked around the room.
“Did Acieth merge with you?”
“…Come on out.”
“Agh!!”
It almost looked like the sour-faced Maou spat Acieth out, sending her reeling against the tatami-mat floor. She quickly picked herself up and turned toward Chiho.
“Chiho! I think you should give it the more thought!”
“Huh? More thought about what?”
“About Maou! You go in love with that man, you will receive the serious injury! If you marry Maou, it will be all of the trouble!”
The sudden marriage keyword took the already vaguely discomforted Chiho’s mind and sent it well past the boiling point.
“Aaaaaaaaaaacieth?! What? Where did that come from?!”
“I mean it! You see, too, Chiho! When Maou feels— Oh no! I do not like this. He puts me in him! I promise you, all he say in future will be ‘food, bath, sleep’! He is no good! Arrogant! And he will be ruling roost with aghhggghh!!”
Nobody had any idea where Acieth picked up this TV-sitcom griping-housewife tone from. But just as it was starting to make Chiho’s mind go in circles, there was a dull thud, followed by a weird and not at all Sephirah-like groan of pain.
“Ooh, that had to hurt,” observed Urushihara.
“W-wait, Satan!” Laila added. “You should treat girls like Acieth better than that…”
The brisk, closed fist from Maou was enough to give both his plaintiffs instant pause.
“This is the only way I know to make kids who don’t listen to reason sit down and shut up.”
He then grabbed Acieth by the head and scruff, forcibly ejecting her from Room 201 and into Nord’s arms, then slammed the door shut. Judging by the extended whining, cursing, and “I’m hungry!!” emanating from the corridor, Maou’s tactic hadn’t succeeded very much, but he ignored it all, locking and dead bolting the door and letting out a long-suffering sigh.
“…Sorry, Chi.”
“H-huh?”
“Uh… Don’t worry about it. Like, about what Erone and Acieth said.”
“Oh, uh, o-okay.”
Chiho nodded mechanically more than anything, her mind still racing. Seeing him sit down on the floor toward Laila again, she recalled why she came here in the first place and did the same, unzipping her coat to kneel down. That was why she couldn’t say it—the question, heavy enough to have a physical presence, that made itself gently known in her mind as her brain cooled down. Right here, right now, it was a pointless query and really a doubt that meant nothing to anybody except her.
She knew why she was called here. She was witness to a conference between the Devil King and an archangel, covering topics that involved the fate of the human race on Ente Isla. Being asked for by name by Maou, a man she cared deeply for, was something she had to rejoice about. Being close to him, helping him, providing him strength—the perfect opportunity for all that.
So she swallowed the question, placing a lid over her complex, convoluted thoughts.
After all, in regard to Erone’s and Acieth’s words, what exactly was there not to worry about?
Despite being asked to accompany Maou and Laila in this talk, Chiho really had no idea what they’d be talking about.
Judging by the events around Urushihara’s hospital bed, Laila probably wanted to enlist Maou and Emi’s aid to help the Sephirah of Ente Isla out of their current crisis. Everything Laila had done up to now had to be driven by that, she knew, but when Chiho put everything she had learned together, it seemed like Laila was responsible for pretty much the whole bit—the young Maou becoming the Devil King Satan, and Emi being pitted against him as the Hero Emilia.
On Maou’s side, the Yesod fragment that formed the mold for Alas Ramus. On Emi’s, the one that formed her Better Half battle gear. The two of them clashing against each other should have been a great calamity for the people of Ente Isla—which should have been a cause of concern for both Laila and Miki Shiba, a woman closely involved with the Sephirah of planet Earth.
And Chiho herself, despite having nothing to do with Ente Isla, had an Ente Islan Yesod fragment of her own. She had lately taken to carrying it in a locked accessory case she bought to keep on hand at all times. A high school teen wearing a gaudy ring in public raised too many eyebrows, and the ban on jewelry at her job meant she almost never wore it anyway. Owning it once put her in mortal danger at the hands of angels, but between Maou, Emi, Amane, Shiba, and all the other forces protecting her, the heavens were no longer much of a threat.
Besides, given the place Chiho was granted with this ring and the person who did the granting, she had to surmise that Laila and Gabriel—both apparently living in Japan long-term now—had their reasons for not wresting the ring back from her. Those Yesod fragments were at the core of the vast mystery Chiho had been staring at, and today that mystery was about to be solved.
“First,” Laila said, “I want you to see this, Chiho.”
“All right. Huh? Is that…? Huh?”
She reflexively looked at the item presented to her from the side. Her face had been deadly serious as she looked, pondering, but now her eyes were wide with surprise.
It was a plain old clear plastic file, blue in color, the kind you could find at any stationery shop or convenience store in Japan. Chiho took it from her like nothing was amiss, opened it up, then gave both Laila and Maou looks once she realized it.
This… This is just too crazy.
“Um… The crisis facing the world… Wow.”
Could you really take all the dangers facing another world, another planet, and fit it in a standard letter-sized file, twelve pockets, straight from the hundred-yen shop?
The first page was the cover, the sort that’d lose out even to an ad flyer for a cultural studies course at the local community center in terms of flashiness. The title—“The Potential Danger to Ente Isla’s Humanity Caused by Interference with the Tree of Sephirot”—was written in outlined characters that curved across the top of the page, a rainbow color gradient slapped over the white space below, and it had been printed notably off-center on the sheet.
“…Laila?”
“I tried working the layout so it’d be easy to read.”
Chiho sighed at the angel, whose eyes were brimming with confidence at her own computer skills. This was, in its own way, dangerous. Any threat to humanity would involve a vast number of lives. Were rainbow colors and chunky letters really the way to go with this?
“Um, what do you call this stuff? This fancy 3-D lettering and design and so on?”
“WordArt,” Urushihara replied. “From a really old version, too. I don’t have any software that can do that, but I definitely think they upgraded all those designs for the current version.”
“Oh, yeah, I think I learned this stuff on the really big computers they had in the AV room back in grade school…”
“That…that was brand-new technology back then!”
Faced with people as steeped in modern computer culture as Urushihara and Chiho, Laila suddenly felt less confident in her digital literacy. Her face reddened in shame. At least, Chiho reasoned, she knew now that this archangel, mother of the Hero of another world, had used her own PC to create this.
“It wasn’t as cheap as what they have now and they weren’t so easy to buy, but I worked hard to save up for my computer! I saved up a lot of money for my own family, too.”
“It was, um, seventeen years ago when you first came to Japan, right, Laila? Back when the C drive on your average desktop had, what, two or four gigabytes?”
“Oh, I’m not using the exact same computer from seventeen years ago,” Laila countered. “I replaced it around seven years later, so I got a sixty-gig hard drive and the newest business software suite they had at the time! And I’ve gotten to work with a lot of other computers, too!”
This wasn’t exactly the debate everyone had come here to have. A ten-year-old business software suite would be an antique you’d have trouble even finding nowadays.
“Y’know, dude, it’s practically criminal how much of an old model of notebook PC Maou got for me, but it’s still got an eighty-gigabyte hard drive. If your computer’s ten years old, they must’ve dropped support for the OS ages ago. It’s dangerous to even use that thing.”
“Oh, it’s fine! It’s not connected to the Net!”
Given her direct experience with the threat Laila’s powers portended, it was difficult for Chiho to feel as close and casual with her as Maou and Urushihara seemed to be. But the sight of an archangel and fallen angel weighing the specs of their hopelessly outdated computers against each other still seemed oddly charming to her. Scenes like this were no longer any great surprise.
“So it’s a decade-old computer with no Internet connection? What good is it then, dudette?”
“What’s the big problem? If you’re just browsing the Net, it’s a lot easier with a smartphone anyway!”
Laila took her phone out from the bag she had placed in a corner of the room.
“Wow,” marveled Chiho. “Like mother like daughter, huh?”
“Huh? How so, Chiho?”
“Oh, um, nothing…”
It seemed to her that the yawning abyss between Emi and Laila had narrowed just a bit in the days since the subway attack. Even so, Emi couldn’t will herself to confront her mother, and Laila seemed lost about how to deal with her daughter, making both an agreement and any kind of parsable conversation an uphill battle. Calling them “mother and daughter” would be a joy for Laila to hear and a pain for Emi.
“It’s just, you know, you really don’t seem different from anybody else in the world, Laila.”
“Really? Well, personally speaking, I’m happy to hear that. It’s not like I set out to become an angel. I’ve always wished people could treat me more familiarly than that.”
Laila seemed to treat Chiho’s observation as a compliment. Urushihara did not.
“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t be that happy. By that, y’know, she also means I thought you lived up to your rep more, but you ain’t nothing like what I thought, so…”
“Urushihara!”
“What, am I wrong? You’ve never given a crap about being around angels and demons. You seriously asked me and Sariel if we were angels. Like, incredulously, to our faces.”
“I—I didn’t… Well, all right, maybe I did…”
“Yeah, but she’s right to have done so.”
“You too, Maou?!”
Urushihara was one thing, but having Maou join the choir gave Chiho a slight shock. Had she always been that sneering or sarcastic with them and maybe never realized it? The thought depressed her—but Maou’s thoughts were slightly different from his fellow demon’s.
“Well, I mean, Chiho’s a lot stronger deep down than just in terms of her heart, or her feelings, or whatever. Demons like us, or angels like Sariel or Gabriel, aren’t enough to make her fall to her knees in reverence or anything.”
“Um, the angels are one thing, but I have a lot of respect for you guys, Maou!”
Despite her panic, Chiho still made it a point to exclude the angels from her appraisal. Maou couldn’t help but laugh.
“Yeah, I appreciate the thought. Basically, what I’m saying is, you’re perfectly fine being yourself, Chi.”
“Ah—ah—ahhhhhhh…”
She was still panicked, unsure whether she understood Maou’s intended meaning or not. Laila gave her a gentle pat on the shoulder as she half rose to her feet in a dither.
“It’s all right. It’s all right.”
“Wha—wha—wha—wha—what’s all right?”
“I know you don’t think anything ill of me, Chiho, so…you know, you should read that report.”
“That… Oh, right, this…”
Urushihara’s passing remark had thrown the conversation far off course, but it all began because Laila had written this very nonangelic report on everything going on. Despite the distinct lack of critical danger the cover seemed to present, Chiho steeled her resolve and turned to the first page.
Once, there was a tree of life—a Tree of Sephirot—on Earth, along with the Sephirah born from it. As the Tree of Life nickname suggests, it was a gigantic growth, and it is fair to say that the Sephirah are its seeds, which eventually grow into similar trees. It is impossible to know for sure whether the Sephirots of Earth and Ente Isla are of the same species.
These trees only appear on planets whose animal life has sufficiently advanced into the realm of oxygen-breathing apes and other vertebrates. It sets up shop, parasite-like, on the moons or other celestial bodies closest to these planets, so as to have the maximum effect, and nurtures the creation of a civilization-bearing humanity from the hominids that call it home. A Sephirot does not have a cadre of chosen ones it decides to favor; instead, it basically facilitates the evolution of those people who have gained an unshakable position through the planet’s long history of natural selection. There were other hominid races on Earth unrelated to modern mankind, but it wasn’t that Earth’s Sephirot eradicated them from the planet—if these other species had outclassed Homo sapiens and spread their influence planetwide, the Sephirot would have recognized them as “civilized” and not modern humans.
So what exactly is this tree, then, that attempts to cultivate civilized races? That, sadly, neither Laila nor anyone else from the heavens had an answer for. One thing they could provide, however, was a phenomenon observed from heaven once in the past. There had been a Sephirot that produced its so-called “last Sephirah,” then released itself from its planet of its own biological will, vanishing into the nether regions of outer space. This was why nobody was sure whether Earth’s and Ente Isla’s Sephirot were the same in nature. Laila stated that evidence has been found for the remains of three past Sephirots at this point, but the only one currently active (as far as they knew) was the single one on Ente Isla.
Regardless, once a Sephirot picked the species it deemed worthy of further evolution, it gave birth to “children” to aid in their progress. These children of Ente Isla are the ten Sephirah: Kefer, presiding over thought and creativity; Chokhmah, over knowledge; Binah, over understanding; Chesed, over compassion; Gevurah, over strictness; Tiferet, over beauty; Netzach, over victory; Hod, over glory; Yesod, over foundations and spirits; and Malkuth, over the heavens and physical matter.
The role of these Sephirah is to come to the aid of mankind in the case of a danger to the entire race, in order to prevent a final, lethal destruction of the species. Thought, creativity, knowledge, understanding, and beauty all help in the quest to protect people from the illness and disasters that befall so many of them; victory and glory instill competitive spirit in them to help further polish their civilization; strictness and compassion both create and put an end to the wars that drive this competition; and the foundation, spirits, heavens, and physical matter help take all these individual members of a species and encourage them to behave as a cohesive unit.
The Sephirah are neither the guardians of mankind, nor some malevolent force interfering with their history. But when mankind faces the potential danger of extinction, something their civilization offers no way for them to avoid, they use their powers in all ways, shapes, and forms to keep them alive.
On Ente Isla, however, both the Sephirot and its Sephirah have had these abilities robbed of them. The angels in heaven have gained full control of the Sephirot, keeping its Sephirah exclusively for themselves. Having the heavens intervene between the people of Ente Isla and their Sephirah is what allows them to act as miracle makers, literal “servants of heaven,” to mankind on that planet.
This has led to several adverse side effects. First, it has greatly slowed the advance of science and technology across all Ente Isla’s intelligent people. It also led to them discovering the natural resources of demonic and holy energy. As can be seen from the vast similarities between humans on Earth and Ente Isla, Sephirots tend to latch on to planets that look a great deal alike. If Ente Isla had taken the path it was meant to take, it would have developed medicine to treat the ill, weapons to wage wars with, and science and technology to make people’s lives easier, at a rate more or less close to Earth’s. But with the heavens butting into the process, Ente Isla was losing the chances it had to discover or develop that tech for itself.
Instead, the angels used the powers they were originally gifted with to directly rescue Ente Isla’s humanity from danger. Seeing these powers in action, the Ente Islans sought not to cultivate a process that would open perpetual growth and advancement to them but a way to copy these miraculous powers the servants of heaven showered upon them. This led to magic powered by holy force—and around the same time as the Ente Islans discovered the existence of holy force, the angels stopped paying regular visits to the planet’s surface. This made mankind deify the angels, forming the cornerstone around which the Holy Church built itself.
Thus, the planet chose to advance its civilization by analyzing the nature of holy energy and weaving new magic that took advantage of it. But that led to serious problems. First off, unlike the Sephirah, the angels—and the heavens they dwelled in—had no inherent drive to keep the human race protected. The Sephirot/Sephirah system was built as a way to foster new civilizations; it would never ignore any potential threat to the species it had its eyes on. As had been seen over a long period of observing the heavens, the angels had no interest in taking on this role. Physically and deliberately, they have shown over the long string of years that their behavior did not match the Sephirah at all. To Sephirah eyes, it must have felt like a miracle that Ente Isla’s humanity hadn’t faced extinction yet.
The biggest issue of all, however, lay in how holy energy was not at all an unlimited resource. A Sephirot has the power to cultivate civilized species, but both it and its Sephirah are organic creatures and thus need to take in some form of energy to survive. This energy, to a Sephirot, was none other than the spiritual force housed within the species it chose. Much in the way a little water and nutrients in the soil can lead to astonishing crop growth in the right conditions, a Sephirot and its species existed in a form of symbiosis, extracting the energy both sides needed from each other.
That so-called holy energy, however, was now being expended across Ente Isla at an alarming rate. With magic at the very center of civilization, the rate of consumption was now far above the amount the planet’s Sephirot would ever tap into.
“Spiritual force serving as energy…”
Chiho gasped a bit once she reached this point in the dossier.
The demonic energy Maou and his cohorts lived on, she knew, was driven from feelings of fear and despair in the minds of humanity. If this new revelation was to be believed, then the holy energy in Emi’s and Suzuno’s bodies—and her own as well—was the spiritual energy possessed by every man, woman, and child on Ente Isla.
What would happen if this was deliberately condensed and consumed in the form of holy energy? The answer was on the following page.
The predicted result of excessive holy energy usage is the withering of the planet’s Sephirot and the subsequent death of its Sephirah. Ente Isla’s humanity would lose its get-out-of-jail-free card for any lethal threats, and before long, its civilization would wane. They would no longer have the Sephirah protecting them from such threats, and the astonishing amount of holy energy driving their magic would irrevocably deplete the supply, tapping it fully and eventually making magic a thing of the past.
When that day came, it would mark the end of Ente Isla as a functional civilization. Even people like Emeralda, Albert, and Olba, capable of storing and accessing large amounts of holy energy, would eventually lose their stockpile and become…well, regular people. And with little scientific advancement to shore themselves up, the Ente Islans would have nothing to defend themselves within times of danger.
Even worse, holy energy was derived from the spiritual force within all humans; consuming too much of it would have effects that went far beyond a typical energy crisis. Following careful observation, Laila stated that birth rates across all five great continents that formed the “holy cross” of life on Ente Isla had gradually fallen over the past several centuries. Excessive holy energy consumption, she posited, may even hinder healthy births. This statistic formed much of the basis for Shiba’s warning that Ente Isla could face a mortal crisis within another hundred years.
The planet, sadly, lacked the culture needed to create and keep worldwide statistics for itself. The Federated Order of the Five Continents, formed following the Devil King’s Army invasion, still wasn’t advanced enough to be capable of that. If anything, it was easy to imagine that the planet would come to rely even further on magic for rebuilding, developing, and prospering now.
That was why Laila believed that all the Sephirah have to be released as soon as possible. There was no taking back the past, but if they acted now and returned the Sephirot and Sephirah to their rightful positions, they might still be able to rescue Ente Isla’s humanity from this crisis, albeit at a heavy cost likely.
In the way of this future, however, lay the heavens and its angels, forming a massive wall to block any progress. These angels hadn’t captured the Sephirah just so they could act all high-and-mighty around the Ente Islans. Doing so provided them with several key advantages, in part thanks to the extremely long life spans and prominent force they wielded—but whether Laila would go into detail on this depended on whether Maou and Emi, now fully aware of the situation, agreed to help or not.
To sum up, Laila’s mission was to release the Sephirot and Sephirah from heavenly rule, ensure the tree could give birth to its “final Sephirah,” and guarantee Ente Isla’s safety into the future. Achieving this meant resigning herself to a long, arduous string of battles. It meant making enemies out of a large chunk of heaven. But still, over a ponderously long time, Laila had been searching for someone or something powerful enough to take them all on.
“…All right. I see.”
“And what do you think?”
Chiho, hearing the anticipation in Laila’s voice, was unsure how to reply. She had no questions about what was written in the report. She was in pretty deep by now, having learned a great deal from her own experiences and what Amane and Shiba told her, and from that, there was a lot in Laila’s testimony that made sense to her.
But if Ente Isla was in that much danger, it meant that within this cheaply bound printout, the fates of countless human beings hung in the balance. Considering that, the report certainly didn’t seem very…urgent to her. She had at least a vague idea of Laila’s concern and the issues facing Ente Isla, but it still all felt like someone else’s problem. It was a bit dizzying to Chiho, like she was being shown a translated picture book detailing the myths and folklore of some foreign nation.
Laila had made an effort to keep the report accessible, even adding some schematics and other diagrams, but that wasn’t what Chiho wanted. Chiho and likely Maou, too. It was important, yes, but none of this was enough for either of them to make a decision off. It hadn’t really affected them emotionally at all.
“Um, may I ask something a bit odd?”
“…”
But rather than Laila, it was Maou that Chiho turned to. He gave her a silent nod—
“Oh, anything!”
—only to have Laila turn straight toward her, ready to take on the world if necessary.
“Well, then.”
Chiho took a breath and returned her gaze.
“Laila…”
“Mm-hmm?”
“Are you working here in Japan at all?”
“………………………………………Huh?”
It was not a question anyone in the room could have predicted. Laila was the cleanup hitter, all crouched over in the batter’s box and ready to swing for the fences, only to have the opponent’s ace pitcher throw an intentional walk.
“Um…working?”
“Yeah.”
“…Why do you ask?” Laila countered, her smile still painted on her face.
“Why? You said ‘anything,’ so…”
“I…suppose I did, yes…but why?”
“You’re startin’ to act really weird on us, Laila.”
The angel was clearly disturbed by this line of inquiry, to the point that she ignored Maou’s jab completely.
“No, um, I just started wondering as I was reading through this.”
Her pupils now the size of dots, Laila’s eyes moved toward Chiho, Maou, the back of Urushihara’s head, then back toward Chiho.
“Well, not to answer your question with another question…”
“Oh?”
“But was that paper kind of hard to follow? Like, did it make you think about my work or my life here or…?”
“No,” came the short reply. “That’s exactly it. It didn’t say anything about your own life, Laila, as far as I saw. That’s why I started wondering.”
“Ah…” Maou grinned a bit at this, understanding Chiho’s point before Laila could. “You sure are kind to her, Chi. I wasn’t planning to say anything about that until she noticed it for herself.”
“Oh! Um, was that bad of me?”
Chiho, recalling Maou’s lack of enthusiasm for this whole discussion, gave him a concerned look. Maou grinned and shook his head.
“Nah. I doubt she’ll pick up on it anytime soon unless someone spells it out, so now’s as good a time as any.”
As the stupefied Laila looked on, Maou went up to his cheap plastic shelving and took out a piece of paper and a card case that not even Chiho had seen before.
“So here’s the draft version of the contract you gave me.”
“R-right.” Laila distractedly nodded as he presented the familiar sheet to her.
“If you were giving me something like this, I figured you were at least kind of aware, but seeing it, I doubt I’m gonna be interested in seriously hearing you out for a while to come.”
“Was—was there some kind of issue with it? Because I looked at a bunch of templates and bought a book about contracts and stuff…”
“It’s not about the content. Down here.”
He pointed at the bottom of the draft. It spelled out the names of Laila, executor of the contract, and Maou and Emi, its targets, including a little space to affix their seals to make it official.
“Isn’t something missing?”
Peering at the draft from the side, Chiho took a quick skim, immediately noticing what Maou was referring to.
“Laila, this… The addresses.”
“Um?”
“The addresses. There’s no place to write them.”
“Ad…dress?” She made a face like this wasn’t in her vocabulary. “Did—did you need that?”
“Of course we do! What are you saying?”
Laila looked shocked at this. It almost hurt Chiho a bit; if anything, she reasoned, she had a good reason to be shocked. Even a teenager who hadn’t worked with anything besides a labor contract for her part-time job knew that any valid contract in Japan needed three things: names, addresses, and official seals. Laila was trying to sign a contract with Maou that included promises of rewards later on, and yet she had failed to even provide a space for addresses. It went far beyond the realm of a careless error.
“I’m not going to break this contract or anything,” Laila doggedly exclaimed. “Besides, it’s not like we can take this to Japanese court if either side has a problem, is it? All we need here is our names and a common agreement…”
Just as Chiho and Suzuno were entering the Tacoma’s Best coffee shop under the tracks:
“Oh dear, it’s so late. I’m sure Ms. Sasaki is back home by now.”
A harried young man tore out from near the turnstiles, rubbing his frigid hands.
“I hadn’t expected the phone call to run for so long. Ahh, it’s so chilly!”
The tall form of Shirou Ashiya, carrying a recyclable bag filled with his assorted evening purchases, sped its way out from the station.
“Mornin’, Saemi!”
“Oh, good morning, Akiko.”
It was customary in the Japanese language to say “good morning” when greeting someone at the beginning of a shift, even if it was actually six PM, like it was now.
Emi was on from noon to ten that day, and MgRonald veteran Akiko Ohki had caught her just as she wrapped up her predinner break. She was the same age as Kawata, but she had joined the Hatagaya crew a good half year later, and she was a year behind him in college. As she put it, she figured studying for college exams would be easy, found out otherwise, and took a year off to prepare.
The end of November was usually a busy period in the Japanese college year, so Akiko was running on a reduced schedule. Emi hadn’t seen her in about a week.
“Hey, Saemi,” Akiko called as she changed into her uniform.
“Yeah?” Emi asked as she put a book she was reading into her locker.
“You used to work somewhere else, didn’t you? Like, office-type stuff?”
“Yeah, I worked at a Dokodemo call center.”
“Whoa, really? How long?”
“About a year and a half, I think. I had some family stuff come up so I had to take off for a while, and they basically tore up my contract.”
Being held prisoner in an alien world and forced to wage a massive war against legions of unearthly demons was, if you didn’t mind skipping a lot of the details, “family stuff” in Emi’s mind. But it was the mention of a contract that made Akiko wrinkle her eyebrows.
“Oh, man, firing you for stuff that’s not your fault? That’s mean. But you lasted a year and a half, huh? ’Cause I flamed out after, like, two months.”
“You’ve worked at a call center before?”
“Yeah. Outcalls mostly.”
“Ooh. I was usually doing support.”
Call center jobs could be broadly classified into one of three categories. Emi worked at an in-call site, which fielded questions from customers. She didn’t know what kind of job Akiko had, but if it involved outcalls, it probably meant selling products or taking orders from people. Some companies were involved with both at the same time, too.
“You know how we’ll lose Kota soon, right? That kinda reminded me a lot of the stuff I did on that job.”
“Mm-hmm?”
“I mean, I knew in advance that call center jobs are tough, but my first job was with kind of a big educational company. We were mostly dealing with the mothers of small children, right? I figured there wouldn’t be anything too scary about them.”
“…You didn’t think so at first, I bet.”
Emi grinned. She could see where this was going.
“Yeah. One time, when I was just starting out, this old man called with a question and told me I’m the reason why Japan is going down the toilet.”
“Wow. Pretty big leap in logic.”
Akiko nodded without going into further detail. “It’s like…I don’t know, the more normal someone is, the more extreme their mood swings and stuff can be. Like, I almost liked it better if they started the call all angry or peeved, because maybe they’ll yell at ya, but you can still deal with them.”
Emi had a memorable sequence of screaming and lecturing along these lines once, from another elderly person who put the entire weight of Japan’s future upon her shoulders. The general flow: Modern electronics have to stop leaving older people in the lurch like this. ? You young people are so focused on these gadgets, Japan’s manufacturing is spending its money on nothing but heavy industry and electronics. ? It’s deplorable how young people think they know everything about the world through their little phone screens. ? And there’s so much poverty in rural areas, and agriculture is about to fall apart. ? You should be ashamed of yourself, working for a company that’s screwing Japan so badly. ? Why don’t you try going outside for a change. ? See, you’re exactly why this country’s going to hell in a handbasket!
All this over the course of around three hours.
She wasn’t the sort, of course, to let irrational insults and shouting faze her, but the exchange stuck in her mind even now, partly because it happened early on when she wasn’t used to the work and partly because she never did figure out what the customer even called for. The guy just hung up after extracting a promise from Emi that she’d vote in the next general election. Fortunately, that was a pretty extreme example, setting the standard for epic calls across the office for a while afterward—to the point that the floor leader and several of Emi’s friends, Rika Suzuki included, treated her to dinner for it.
“So, you know, at the time, it really depressed me. Like, am I ever gonna find a job or anything? It’s easy enough when you’re dealing one-on-one with customers in person, but if I’m at a desk with a phone, it’s gonna be such a trauma dealing with those calls, I bet. I guess you and Ms. Kisaki are used to it enough that you can run the phone orders here, though, huh?”
“Well, keep in mind, you always remember the craziest calls because they were so crazy. Ninety-nine percent of them are nothing like that. I’m sure you’ve taken a lot of normal calls, too, Akiko, so I bet you’ll be fine.”
“Yeah, I know, but it’s kinda hard to forget being called a murderer just because you’re trying to sell teaching materials, y’know?”
Emi was sincerely curious about the sequence of events leading to that, but the minute hand on the clock was dangerously close to the end of her break, so she hurriedly put on her crew cap and headset.
“Oh, but why were we talking about this again?”
“Hmm? Oh, right!” Akiko, almost done dressing, clapped her hands. “So I’m pretty sure one of your friends is in the dining room, Saemi.”
“Huh? One of my friends?”
“Yeah, a girl. I think I’ve seen her a few times before. She’s got that classic young-lady business suit on, so I thought maybe she’s a friend from a previous job.”
That would describe exactly one person in Emi’s life.
“…Hey, Emi.”
“Oh, it is you, Rika! What brings you here?”
The sight of Rika Suzuki, looking a bit abashed as she sipped a large coffee in a corner of the first floor, made Emi smile as she walked up.
“Are you off work?” she asked.
“Y-yeah. I got off a little bit early today, so, um, I was free this evening, so I thought I’d stop on by to see you.”
“Oh, really? Well, I’m sorry, but I’m still on for a while. Till ten tonight sadly…”
“I know. I asked.”
“Huh? Oh, you did?”
Emi wondered who told her. Just like Chiho, Rika was fully clued in on the situation surrounding Emi, Maou, and Ente Isla. She had been in more frequent contact with Chiho and Suzuno as of late; one of them must have provided the info. Either way, though, why would she come here when she knew Emi still had four hours of work left?
“Ah, I’m sorry,” Rika hurriedly added, perhaps picking up on Emi’s internal pondering. “I knew you were working late, but, um, I couldn’t help myself, or—like—I figured seeing you would help me chill out a little.”
“…Is something wrong or—?”
Even Emi could tell something was amiss by now. Rika was talking a mile a minute, she kept staring into space before turning her eyes back toward Emi, and she kept nervously squirming around in her seat. It made Emi recall a time not long ago when she similarly lost her cool.
“Well, um, you don’t have work early tomorrow, do you, Emi?”
“No.”
“Okay. I can wait, or like, if I’m distracting you, I can kill some time somewhere else first.”
“No, no, not distracting…”
“Okay, so, uh, you mind if we chat a bit after you’re done tonight? Dinner’s on me.”
“Well, of course, but what’s up? Seriously.”
“Ahhhhhhh…I’ll tell you later.”
It was rare to see Rika act this indecisively.
“You really are gonna distract me if I don’t know, Rika! If you need some advice, I could spend my shift thinking about the issue until I get off.”
“Hmmm, you think? Because it’s nothing that big, really…”
This was completely impossible. She was acting hideously unnatural.
“But okay, so, um…”
“Yeah?”
After all her previous hesitation, it still took Rika two or three more deep breaths to gain the will to continue.
“So earlier…Ashiya called to ask me out…”
“………Oh…………………………… Oh, okay.”
Emi could hear her own voice from some corner of her mind reminding her that this was what happened last time, too. She did indeed have trouble focusing for the rest of her shift.
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