Hataraku Maou-sama! - Volume 14 - Chapter 2

THE DEVIL LOOKS BACK ON THE FRUGAL LIFE 
The 100 Trees Shopping Arcade was alive with activity that evening, full of consumers and those citizens returning home from school or work via Sasazuka Station. 
Suzuno Kamazuki, deftly flowing through the crowds and carefully perusing the day’s dinner offerings, suddenly recognized a man nearby—someone who, despite her smaller size, she had no problem spotting, given the way he stood a good head above his surroundings. He wasn’t the type of person Suzuno would lob a friendly hello at if she met him on the street, but they were neighbors back at the apartment—and he had a nose for bargains that she couldn’t ignore. 
“May as well speak up,” she muttered as she kept her eyes on the back of Shirou Ashiya’s head. But as she approached one of the tenants at Room 201 of Villa Rosa Sasazuka, she noticed something strange. 
“Hmm? I thought that store was vacated not long ago… What is he doing?” 
Ashiya was standing there, in an apparent trance, in front of a shuttered storefront. He was on the far side of the street and thus not in anyone’s way, but this was decidedly abnormal behavior for Ashiya. 
“What are you doing, Shirou?” Suzuno asked as she drew closer. 
He had two shopping bags in his hands, one the reusable grocery bag he always had with him and the other an unusually large paper bag that contained something heavy-looking. 
“Shirou? Shirou…” 
Ashiya didn’t turn around at the sound of his repeated name. Suzuno was about the only person in Japan to call him by his first name. Perhaps he didn’t recognize it, she thought—so, within the murmuring of the crowd, she finally steeled her resolve and used his real name. 
“Alciel!” 
“……Ah. Crestia Bell.” 
Finally, he turned toward her. But something was clearly off. His eyes were unfocused, and him using her own real name on a public street was something the normally cautious Ashiya would never do. 
“Wh-what’s become of you? Have you taken ill?” 
It honestly worried her—that is, the thought of herself having honest concern for Ashiya, whom she had increasingly been treating as just another face in the neighborhood, what they were to each other totally forgotten. 
“This…” 
With a shaky hand, he lifted up the heavy-looking bag in his right hand. 
“Mm? What? What is there inside…?” 
The mouth of the bag was wide open. Suzuno peered in. 
“I won,” came the wavering voice from above, making Suzuno turn her head up before she could read the lettering on the box inside the paper bag. 
“What?” 
“I thought it would never happen… That it was all just a fantasy…” 
Ashiya—who himself would be considered a fantasy creature to most people on Earth, much less Japan—slowly turned his eyes forward. Suzuno followed his gaze, only to find a white tent in a corner of the path, labeled 100 TREES SHOPPING ARCADE LOTTERY BLAST. 
“…Wait. Alciel, are you moping around here because…?” 
Already Suzuno was struck by the rapidly approaching conclusion that having even a moment’s concern for Ashiya was an idiotic decision on her part. She looked into the bag again. There was a sturdy-looking cardboard box inside, labeled D-FAR 4-LITER PRESSURE COOKER. 
She sighed. 
The group that gathered in Room 201 of Villa Rosa Sasazuka that evening felt a slight twinge of pity for Ashiya, as he all but rubbed cheek to cheek with the cooker’s silvery body. Alciel, the Great Demon General who’d made one of Ente Isla’s four great continents fall upon its knees and beg for mercy, was practically doing a little jig over winning a pressure cooker at a free shopping-center drawing. To Emi Yusa—who had traveled across worlds as Emilia the Hero to pursue him and his cohorts—the sight couldn’t have been more sorrowful. 
“Um, Devil King? Lucifer? Doesn’t this embarrass you at all, having this take place in your room?” 
“Uhh…” 
Sadao Maou, better known to Emi as the Devil King Satan, kept his head down and his lips pursed under her withering gaze. 
“And you!” Suzuno went on at Lucifer. “Merely winning a pressure cooker was enough to put him into an unconscious stupor. He is working his fingers to the bone to support you both. Could you at least give him a single moment of thanks?” 
“Yeah, uh… Yeah.” 
Hanzou Urushihara, aka the Great Demon General Lucifer, let out an annoyed-sounding retort to the lecture. 
“You must sure be happy,” marveled Chiho Sasaki, the only human on Earth aware of Maou’s and Emi’s true identities. 
“Makes ’im happy?” squeaked the little girl of the group. 
“Yep,” Chiho agreed down at Alas Ramus, the daughter of the Hero and Devil King. “This cooker, you know, if you buy it, it’s really expensive.” 
It would be an uphill battle to make the child understand Ashiya’s abject glee—and Maou himself, unable to withstand the withering blows from Emi and Suzuno, gave Ashiya a wry smile over it. 
“Well, um… Yeah. Sorry we’ve, uh, put you through a lot.” 
“What are you saying, Your Demonic Highness?! In light of the monumental events of the day, I have been put through nothing! Nothing!!” 
The compliment added even more sparkle to Ashiya’s smile as he brought the new and blindingly shiny pressure cooker to the sink and began rinsing it for use with tonight’s dinner. 
“I don’t know what kind of stuff he’s had to deal with,” Emi shouted out from behind, “but how hard was it, if all I needed to take down a Great Demon General was a pressure cooker?” 
Nobody could defy her on that point. Anyone who knew Ashiya personally was aware that a new kitchen appliance would have an incalculably serious impact on his househusbanding activities. But anyone that close to him would undoubtedly be troubled, as well, by this performance. Was it really that hard for him, such that a simple pot with a plug was enough to leave him in bliss? Or, on the other hand, were his expectations really just that low? 
“She said it was expensive,” a dubious-looking Urushihara chimed in as he examined the empty box in his hands, “but how much does one of those actually cost?” 
“Oh,” interjected Chiho as Maou looked toward the box, “even the small ones cost a good ten thousand yen or so.” 
““Ten thousand yen?!”” Urushihara and Maou screamed. 
The box fell out of Urushihara’s hands as Maou’s jaw almost fell to the floor. 
“Ten thousand yen for a pot? What the hell, dude?!” 
“This is that expensive?!” 
Emi picked up the box from the shocked demons. “Ten thousand’s on the cheap side, actually. This is a four-liter cooker, so I’d have to guess it’d cost twenty thousand yen or so.” 
“Twenty thousand yen?!” Maou shrilled again, half-rising from his seat on the floor. “Wow. Hey, if it’s worth that much, maybe we should sell it for the money and—” 
“We will not!” barked Ashiya, apparently lending a sensitive ear to the conversation all along. “Household goods like these go for a pittance on the secondhand market, even unused! I refuse to let go of this!” 
“All right, all right! Just thought I’d suggest it…” 
Maou had to very hurriedly take it back, following Ashiya’s threat. 
“I’ve been wanting to try braising some pork for so long now! And with a pot this big, I could do things like French pot-au-feu, and stews, and things… Ahh, the possibilities are endless!” 
“Do you think one of those possibilities might be giving up on conquering the world?” Emi interjected. 
“Wow, Ashiya, you’re literally glowing!” Chiho added. 
“I see things have been very, very difficult for you, Alciel,” Suzuno offered. 
It was with deep sympathy, among other things, that the three women gave their statements. 
“Don’t you go touching that pot, Urushihara,” Maou instructed. “If you break that thing, we’re both dead.” 
“You don’t have to tell me twice. Ashiya’s scarin’ me today, dude.” 
Both of the other residents who made up Devil’s Castle seemed a bit taken aback by their demon general’s unusual behavior. 
“But you’re going to make something with it right now, Ashiya?” 
“Well, I guess he’s done a lot of research in cookbooks and stuff by now. A twenty-thousand-yen pot, though…” Maou looked at the appliances in the kitchen. “Hey, didn’t we buy our frying pan for, like, seven hundred yen at the grocery store?” 
“Indeed we did, my liege. My cutting knife was about fifteen hundred, perhaps? I’ve sharpened it so often, it’s worn rather thin, I’m afraid. A pressure cooker, to me, is like a dream within a dream.” He began drying it off with a washcloth. “When we bought that oil-filtering pot, I thought that would be it appliance-wise, for space reasons. This is truly a wonderful day.” 
Every word Ashiya uttered was aflame with the intense joy the pressure cooker brought him. There was no way he could hide it. 
“When we first arrived in Japan, if I recall, we were so restricted in our kitchen utensils that we had trouble sticking to even the most bare-bones of frugal budgets.” 
“Frugal? How do you mean?” 
Emi looked up at the puzzled Suzuno. “Well, for example, taking the white radish sprouts you’d normally throw away and using them in something else, right? Alas Ramus likes onion tea, so I’ve been saving onion skins lately, too.” 

“Onion…tea?” 
Maou raised an eyebrow, the two words not quite linking together in his mind. Ashiya, of course, knew exactly what she meant. 
“Ah, boiling the brown-colored skins for their flavor? I understand people drink it with sugar and honey.” 
“And it’s okay for kids to drink that? I thought honey was bad for babies.” 
Maou gave Alas Ramus a rub on the head, resulting in a ticklish smile. 
“Anh! Daddy, no mussing meee!” 
“I don’t need you to tell me that,” retorted Emi. “I’m keeping tabs to make sure she doesn’t eat too much. And infant botulism only affects babies under twelve months, before their intestines fully develop.” 
“Well, radish sprouts and onion tea are doable enough,” reflected Ashiya. “If one truly seeks to be frugal, many of the finer practices can’t be done without the right kitchen environment. Deep-frying the pods that edamame beans come in is a good example.” 
Chiho’s eyes burst open. “You can eat edamame pods?!” 
“Aren’t you more concerned that these demons thought about eating edamame pods?” Emi asked, surprised for a different reason. 
“Normally, we would not, of course. But you see a great deal of frugal recipes like those, invented as a way to make what we’d usually throw away more palatable for eating.” 
Ashiya was already peeling an onion as he spoke. 
“With fried edamame pods, first you’d remove the stems and fibers on the top and bottom. Then you cut the pods in half, bread them with wheat flour, then fry them up. They say it is rather simple. But,” he continued as he began chopping up some potatoes, carrots, and other vegetables, “with how much breading and frying oil it uses, it would be rather like putting the cart before the horse for us, back then.” 
In those early days, freshly arrived in Japan and seriously penniless, Maou and Ashiya’s definition of “frugal” meant not only using cheap ingredients, but also avoiding anything that used the Big five seasonings in Japanese cuisine (salt, sugar, vinegar, soy sauce, and miso) or required well near anything one could define as “cookware.” 
Frying requires a lot of cooking oil; use it once, and it can easily be oxidized by flour and other impurities, making it unusable unless stored appropriately. Since the idea of throwing away cooking oil was unthinkable in Devil’s Castle, they needed a setup that could recycle large amounts of oil if they wanted to fry anything—but that would require a heat-resistant filtering pot or strainer, along with the discipline to use the oil for some other fried dish before it deteriorated. It required concerted effort. Eating things you’d normally toss out (like edamame pods) might seem like a money-saver at first blush, but if you already barely had two coins to rub together, you couldn’t really set up the environment you needed for it. 
“In addition to that, one cannot use the same pot for both frying and regular cooking, or else it will shorten its lifespan. Washing them requires more soap as well. Besides, purchasing new seasonings and such because you want to be ‘frugal’ would be the height of folly. No, true home cooking lies in making the most of whatever’s in your refrigerator, crafting recipes that don’t require a great investment over the long term and—” 
“All right already! I got it! I’m sorry!” 
Emi hadn’t done anything wrong, but she apologized anyway. It was the only way to get Ashiya off his lengthy diatribe on frugal living. 
“For what? I thought you might be interested in the kind of dishes you can make with one frying pan and one cutting knife.” 
“I’m fine, thank you! Look, I know Alas Ramus is looking forward to whatever you make with that thing, so hurry up and do it!” 
Ashiya nodded, noticing the child’s gaze upon him. “Mm. Very well. Patience, please. This is my first attempt, so I must proceed with caution. Let me put in…just a little consommé to begin, then?” 
“Huh.” Maou smirked at his ever-passionate general. “Yeah, we seriously had our hands full with day-to-day survival at first. I don’t think Ashiya got serious about cooking until after I scored the MgRonald gig.” 
After the two of them had been defeated by Emi and found themselves washed up in Japan, they arrived with literally nothing. Without the generosity of Miki Shiba, landlord of the Villa Rosa Sasazuka apartment building, they’d been in serious danger of dying from malnutrition. 
“We ate stuff like broccoli stalks all the time back then. We begged the supermarkets for the cabbage leaves they threw away. And the bean sprouts. Ohhh, man, all those bean sprouts!” 
Broccoli stalks were edible enough once you peeled the harder skin off and cubed them. With cabbage, as long as you removed the outer leaves and damaged bits, they were fine for soups, salads, and stir-fry. Truly, a pair of jacks-of-all-trades. And if you showed up at the grocery on the right day, you could buy a whole box of bean sprouts for ten yen each. Filling and highly nutritious. 
They had eaten a lot of the vegetable refuse Emi mentioned, and they weren’t afraid to try purchasing all kinds of cheap food castoffs, from discarded bread crusts to okara, the soybean dregs that are a by-product of tofu production. Thanks to all that effort, they (almost) never had to sleep on an empty stomach. 
“…Dude, I am not gonna live like that,” Urushihara warned. 
“Well, even then, Ashiya worked pretty hard to make all kinds of stuff, so we weren’t in as much poverty as it sounded.” Maou accentuated the point by giving his other general a light kick on the back. For someone like Urushihara, who had never had a taste of the good old days around the new Devil’s Castle, Maou felt a reminder was in order. “You oughta thank him, you parasite. It’s thanks to Ashiya’s frugal living that you can live high on the hog over there.” 
“…Can I help you with anything, Ashiya?” Chiho suddenly asked, standing up and moving away from the demons’ conversation. 
Ashiya turned around and smiled. “Oh, do you mind? I have two tomatoes at the bottom of the refrigerator—could you peel them in hot water for me? You can use that pot over there.” He motioned toward the pot with his eyes. 
“…I think I will go cut up some of the tsukemono vegetables,” Suzuno pronounced, standing up. “They are store-bought, but I found a maker I’ve taken a fancy to lately.” 
Thus she left the room, promising a little something extra on the table for them all. 
Meanwhile, in the midst of all this, Alas Ramus was looking straight up at Emi. 
“Wh-what, Alas Ramus?” 
“What ’bout you, Mommy?” 
“Huh?” 
“Aren’tcha gonna help?” 
“Um…” 
The child’s pure, innocent eyes stunned Emi into silence. She must’ve assumed Emi would do something, if Chiho and Suzuno were already under way. Sadly, Emi had brought nothing to add to the menu. 
“…What?” 
“Hmm? Nothing.” 
She could see Maou’s self-satisfied expression from the corner of her eye. Enjoying the sight of Emi struggling under the weight of Alas Ramus’s forlorn eyes, no doubt. She bottled up her welling anger. 
“…I’ll make something this time, too,” she said, more to the entire room than to her daughter. 
“Yeah? Well, don’t kill yourself over it. You’re always straight here from work.” 
Whenever she participated in these human-and-demon dinner parties at Devil’s Castle—a regular event now, though she never meant it to be—Emi usually did so after a call-center shift. Even if she did cook something at home, it was too much of a pain to return home to fetch it, or carry it around with her at work all day. 
“You know, Alas Ramus, Mommy’s really tryin’ hard today, all right? More than you’d think,” Maou offered as he picked the little girl up. 
“What do you mean, ‘more than you’d think’?!” 
But Maou ignored the rebuttal to his accusation. “Hey, Alas Ramus, can you do me a favor and ask Lucifer to help out, too?” 
“Don’t get me involved, dude.” 
Alas Ramus stared at the peeved fallen angel for several seconds with her big eyes. Then she lightly shook her head, looking a bit distressed as she looked back up at her “father.” 
“Daddy, Lushifell won’t helllp…” 
“““…!””” 
Everyone else in the room stopped breathing for a moment, Urushihara audibly hissing “What?!” and turning back toward the toddler. 
By the time Suzuno came back with a small bowl of pickled vegetables, everybody except Urushihara was uncontrollably laughing, the man himself beet-red and shivering as Alas Ramus just blankly looked at them all. Suzuno didn’t know what was up, but one thing was clear—she had just missed something hilarious. 
“Wow, Lucifer, are you all right with Alas Ramus saying that? Hee-hee-hee…” 
“Nnnnhh!!” 
Emi’s teasing made him even redder. 
“Don’t ask!!” he shouted at Suzuno, who was standing by the front door. Then: “……………All right,” came a voice like a mosquito’s cry. “I’ll wash the dishes, okay? All of ’em except the pressure cooker…” 
“I must have missed something quite interesting indeed,” Suzuno said, growing curious about what could possibly make Urushihara volunteer for chores. “How frustrating. Could someone explain what happened?” 
“I said not to ask, dudette!!” 
Any more prodding was liable to make him lash out at just about anyone by now. 
“A child’s eyes are pretty crazy things, huh?” Maou asked. 
“They sure are,” Emi agreed, as she and the Devil King thought about the incredible wisdom hiding behind Alas Ramus’s gaze. 
“I’m done peeling the tomatoes, ha-h-ha…” Chiho had been smiling the whole time she’d been working, but not even she could keep a laugh from erupting out at the end. 
“Thank you, Ms. Sasaki. And don’t worry about washing, Urushihara,” Ashiya said. “But can you switch on the rice cooker for me? You can do that much, I imagine.” 
“Stop picking on me, dude! Seriously, you’re pissing me off!!” 
His shoulders were pinned back in anger as he meekly turned it on. It made a little beep as it began cooking the rice that both humans and demons would enjoy in this room shortly. The steam and aroma from both it and the pressure cooker soon filled the apartment as everyone hurried around to prepare the table and mark the end to just another day in Sasazuka.