THE DEVIL KING GETS SENTIMENTAL
From somewhere in the distance, a dog’s howl ripped through the shadowy night.
Only a few cars passed down that way, with almost no human figures to be found—not even a stray cat crossing the street.
Step into a side alley from here, and the ambient light visibly dims, the nearby stoplights cycling through their lonely red-yellow-green routine to an empty audience.
At one in the morning, the neighborhood of Sasazuka, in the Shibuya ward of Tokyo, was slowly putting the previous day behind it, settling down to sleep and preparing for the new, upcoming day.
But in the midst of this, a lone figure was crouched over his bicycle, pedaling with an unsteady pace, as if feebly pursuing the past.
He was clearly exhausted, body and soul. Along with that howling dog, the horns from the cars traversing the Koshu-Kaido road, and the knifelike breeze of cold air that dominated the city, the only sounds occupying the night were this man’s breathing, the chain of his bike, and the occasional screeching of his rear disc brake.
He took no notice of those sources of noise, even though they were clearly there; but each obstacle stood boldly before him, sapping his already-drained will to continue.
Through it all, the man discovered his home looming ahead in the darkness, drumming up what little spirit he had left as he pushed down on the pedals. The building was like a shadow itself, completely bereft of human activity, but it was nonetheless his lone island of solace.
He stopped his bike, his breath forming wild, wispy curls in the air, and forced his already-spent body to climb up the building’s outdoor staircase. The handrail felt like a cylinder of ice on this cold winter’s night, as did the doorknob that greeted him at the top. It felt like winter was designed from start to finish to rob this man of any strength he dared keep for himself.
Now in the hallway, the only sound was the buzzing of a fluorescent light about to breathe its last. Nobody but him was there, and nobody else was beyond any of the doors that lined the walls in greeting.
His numb hands fumbled the key to Room 201 several times before he finally succeeded on getting it into the lock.
The room beyond, as illuminated by the hallway light, was barren. No furniture or fixtures of any sort were visible. The man pulled the cord dangling from the lone light upon the ceiling. It revealed a single pile of clothing in the corner, neatly folded up for him.
“One AM , huh…”
The man looked down at his watch as he removed it, then glanced further, toward the center of the floor. He quickly averted his eyes.
“Let’s just sleep. Tomorrow’s gonna suck.”
He placed the watch into his pocket, then removed his coat and hung it off a hanger set on the windowsill. He shivered a bit, the indoor temperature not much higher than outside, and began to disrobe, changing into a set of sweats he used as pajamas, as quickly as he possibly could.
“Ugh, it’s freezing,” he muttered to himself as he plugged his phone into its charger. Taking a few steps over to the decrepit-looking kitchen area, he filled a well-worn kettle with water and turned on one of the gas burners. Then, from next to the sink, he picked up something that resembled a tortoise shell. Its lid twisted off. It was a Japanese hot-water bottle, and once the water was heated up enough, the man quickly filled up the container.
“Oops…”
Wiping away the steaming water that had spilled out from the lip, the man closed the bottle and tucked it inside a handmade-looking cloth pouch.
“This is the only thing saving me right now…”
With that, he unfolded and laid out his futon. A full futon. Not the simple sheets he had been using all summer. An actual mattress, a blanket, even a full-on duvet!
“Nnnhh…… Ahhh…mmph…”
Clutching the hot-water bottle close, the man moaned in pleasure as he burrowed deep inside the brand-new bedding. The fabric of the futon was just as frigid as the air temperature, but between the bottle and his own heat, it ever-so-gradually began to grow warm. However, as much as that combined heat loosened up his body, it could do nothing to open up his tightly wound heart.
Not long ago—not very long at all—this apartment room had been bustling with bright activity. The man had had roommates to live with, a litany of guests to entertain, and between them all, he always had a crowd to deal with around the dinner table. They didn’t need a gas heater; the place always felt perfectly warm and cozy to him.
Now, though, he was alone. The table they all gathered around was gone, as were any utensils he could cook with. The refrigerator contained some cucumbers, a cube of konnyaku gel, a container of milk, and little else; it was actually colder outside the fridge than inside it, so the man kept it running mainly to keep the milk from freezing.
Nearly everything that had kept this room a warm place in the past was now far, far away. In exchange, the man got this futon.
He had prepared himself for this state of affairs, or so he thought, but now, he could physically feel precisely how unprepared he really was. Nobody was coming to visit. Nobody was waiting up for him. Nobody was cooking. Nobody was calling his name. Everything that was here, only a moment ago—gone.
“Ashiya,” the man whispered. “Urushihara. Emi, Alas Ramus, Suzuno.”
Only the man himself, curled up in his bedding, could hear his voice.
“Chi…”
The sigh, formed just as his body was warm enough to be comfortable, puffed out into a small, white cloud before dissipating.
“…I might be a little lonely.”
The man would have a battle to fight soon. A battle to earn the birthday present he felt he owed his daughter. There would be a god to slay for that, and to prepare accordingly, most of his friends and acquaintances, along with nearly everything he owned, had been transported to Ente Isla, the Land of the Holy Cross. And now that it was all said and done, Sadao Maou was beginning to feel seriously lonesome.
The future of mankind, the fate of the world—none of that mattered more than a lone request from their daughter. Such was the judgment of Sadao Maou and Emi Yusa.
Back when they were strictly the Devil King and the Hero, two presences that could never coexist in harmony, they were greeted with Alas Ramus, a “daughter” who nestled in right between them. The three of them weren’t related by blood, and “Mommy” and “Daddy” didn’t exactly have the healthiest of relationships, but the bond between parent and child was real nonetheless.
The potential fall of Ente Isla, a destiny that the archangel Laila had spent the past few centuries (a millennium, even) laying the groundwork to prevent, was something that made neither Maou nor Emi bat an eye. Maou, being a demon, had no motivation for rescuing mankind, and apart from being called a Hero in her past, Emi had no duty to play the savior once again. The people around them—those who treasured Emi and Maou in their lives anyway—fully understood that. But no matter what Laila said in a vain attempt to convince them, no matter how much Gabriel (connected to Laila behind the scenes in complicated ways) pushed them in her direction, neither Maou nor Emi felt the need to step up and defend Ente Isla’s people. Not the two of them, not Shirou Ashiya, not Hanzou Urushihara, not Suzuno Kamazuki, not even Chiho Sasaki.
But in the end, even after finding this safe, pleasant home in Japan after days of blood, pain, and fighting, all of them (Chiho included) had resolved to throw themselves into the fray, to defeat a figure that was the closest Ente Isla had to a god and also, oh yes, save the planet as a result. There was no lofty ideal behind this, no noble drive to step up and save the world. They had decided to fight strictly because of a single, forlorn little girl, and the simple, modest hope she had for her life:
“I want to see Malkuth. I want to see everyone.”
As Alas Ramus was revving up for her first Christmas in Japan, Maou talked with his acquaintances about what to give her as a present. But all she wanted was to see the people from her past again—her old comrades, the friends she held dear, the family she loved. And as a Sephirah, born from the Tree of Sephirot that protected all humanity on Ente Isla, the “everyone” Alas Ramus wanted to see was connected to the battle Laila and Gabriel wanted to wage.
Now all of them—the Devil King, the Hero, and all their friends—were united under a single goal. They had to make the girl’s wish come true. They were all ready to risk their lives once again, on a stage with world-changing consequences, all for the sake of Alas Ramus.
“I do intend to risk my life for this. Even now.”
The shallow light of a winter’s morning hit Maou’s face through the window, waking him up. His watch told him it was half past six. The sunrises were starting to come earlier again, but the chill he faced outside his futon was still bracing. Because he’d purchased a full futon set, something he swore he would never invest in, the pain of getting out of that warm sanctuary every day was beyond description. He had forbidden himself from buying a futon because he feared doing so would root him in Japan too much to return to Ente Isla; now, ironically enough, he was forced into buying one just as he was forced to go back. Abandoning this warm abode and exposing himself to the freezing air surrounding him took an astonishing amount of resolve and courage.
“I’m never gonna get breakfast if I stay in here… Dahhh! Oof!”
Maou was still balled up in the futon, whining to himself, but it was almost time for work. Struggling to find any willpower at all to muster up, he leaped out of the futon.
“Ahhhhh, it’s freezing, it’s freezing, ugghhh, I’m gonna diiieeee…”
The fatigue, like an aura of haze around him, quickly vanished, but in its place was a sudden rise in blood pressure that made him wonder if heat shock was on the horizon for him. Fumbling around at six in the morning wasn’t going to make a heater show up in this apartment, though, so he filled his kettle once more, cupping his hands in front of it as he patiently waited for a fresh hot-water supply.
“I’m sorry, Alas Ramus,” he admitted to a daughter who wasn’t there. “I think I’m losing my enthusiasm…”
Rubbing his hands and legs against each other, he looked around the empty, almost cavernous-looking apartment, reflecting on how this all happened.
It all began with Ignora, the leader of the angels and the “god” who ruled over heaven, or at least, heaven as pictured on Ente Isla. Reaching her would involve traveling up there, of course, but—due to reasons that still remained murky—heaven was not currently accessible by a direct Gate jump. It wasn’t clear whether this was a two-way restriction or only applied when going from a mortal plane to heaven, but it meant the only way to reach the blue orb the angels called their home base was to physically travel there from Ente Isla.
They would need a spaceship, in other words—and this existed in the form of Devil’s Castle, the vast edifice built by Maou in the middle of the Central Continent and where he engineered the invasion of Ente Isla. However, as they recently found, restoring Devil’s Castle to spaceworthy shape would require replacing a few parts.
These parts were the so-called relics left by the Devil Overlord Satan. The relics were, in no particular order: the Nothung, a fabled magical sword; the Spear of Adramelechinus, wielded by the late Great Demon General Adramelech; the Sorcery of the False Gold, a tome of forbidden magic; and the Astral Gem, a crystal of concentrated energy whose manufacturing method was lost to time.
Together, they were called the Noah Gears, and Maou’s group needed to track down all of them—but apart from knowing that everything except the Spear was in the demon realm, they had zero leads. Camio, Maou’s regent who was currently ruling there, was combing every inch of demon land in search of the sword, the tome, and the energy gem, but it would clearly take time to see results.
Meanwhile, over on Ente Isla, a combined team of humans and demons was working to prepare Devil’s Castle for launch, as well as search for demon survivors from the war before any hostile humans unwittingly killed them. The human side was led by General Hazel Rumack, hailed as the most influential Western Island leader outside the imperial court of Saint Aile; and Albert Ende, former companion of the Hero. The demons, meanwhile, answered to the young Malebranche tribal leader Farfarello—connected to the Sephirah children, aware of Maou’s presence in Japan, and on astonishingly friendly terms with the human Chiho.
Under this trio, the army was working to prepare for this human-demon tandem effort to slay their own “god,” under the guise of dismantling Devil’s Castle and wiping out the remaining demonic forces. The two species joining hands like this, even if it was just partially and provisionally, would have been impossible to imagine a scant few years ago; seeing it unfold like this indicated what kind of crosstribal peace Ente Isla enjoyed at the moment.
But this peace was both heavily limited and built off extremely personality-driven reasons; just a tiny sliver of nations and people knew the reasons behind it, and spreading the word far and wide would never convince everyone else of its validity. Unless they defeated the god who lived up on her moon world, the holy force that enveloped this world would disappear before long, wiping out humanity. It was far too outlandish a story to swallow in one gulp. Attempting to explain that an angel who appeared in holy scripture had learned of this world’s potential end, and that the Hero and the Devil King were working together to help everyone after they had been blown into another world, would make most people wonder about your sanity.
Ente Isla was in the “post-Devil King” era. The rebuilding process was well underway, and every nation was engaged in a power struggle over who’d gain the most advantageous positions in the new world order. If this operation was revealed to anyone not currently a part of it, more than one national power would take it as humans colluding with demons —and the fallout would spread worldwide like a flash flood. There were already people who saw the Hero’s existence as too much to bear; they already tried to betray her once.
For now, they had enough commanders to work with, considering Ashiya, Urushihara, Suzuno, and Emeralda were all ensuring things went smoothly between humans and demons. The chain of command was working flawlessly as a result, and even if the heavens staged an attack, they had Gabriel and Laila on tap—as well as Ashiya and Urushihara, who had full access to their demonic powers in Ente Isla.
The result of all this was that Sadao Maou and Emi Yusa weren’t needed on-site, and therefore unwelcome. Gathering so many powerful figures in a single place tended to attract attention, after all.
Maou had been personally involved with the Western Island’s leaders, and with Ashiya’s Eastern Island connections, many people from that continent had also joined the army. For similar reasons, Hazel Rumack, head of Saint Aile’s palace guard and general commander of the Federated Order, would never want Albert Ende and Emeralda Etuva, the Hero’s closest friends, on the Central Continent without good reason. Add the elite troops from the Eastern Island’s Knights of the Eight Scarves, and the whole area was already sticking out like a sore thumb.
At the moment, the Eastern and Western Islands were in deliberations, seeking common ground over the East’s meddling in the Central Continent. The Northern and Southern Islands, alongside the numerous smaller nations on the Western one, believed in that pretext—but to avoid attracting curious eyes, Rumack, Albert, Emeralda, and the Eastern knight leaders had taken pains to rotate their schedules, making sure their stays in the Central Continent didn’t overlap too closely with one another.
After all, besides the crossplanetary travelers in Suzuno and Emeralda’s party, the only people from the East who were in on the story were the Azure Emperor and a handful of generals among the Eight Great Scarves forces who served him. In the Western lands, that group consisted of the palace guards under Rumack, the sorcerers in the Holy Magic Administrative Institute, and a few clerics with the Reconciliation Panel; it didn’t include the leader or crown prince of Saint Aile, or any of the Six Archbishops, who wielded decision-making power in the Church. The Northern and Southern Islands, meanwhile, were completely out of the loop.
In this situation, having someone like Emi (whose face was too well-known) or Maou (who’d have hordes of demons falling to their knees in supplication whenever he passed by) hanging out there would simply get in the way. As Suzuno Kamazuki, chief logistics lady at the site and a woman who had clout with the East, the West, humans, and demons, put it: “I will call for you when I need you. Until then, live in Japan as you always do. Chiho has college examinations awaiting her next year; this is a vital time for her. To a high school senior, a round trip of one hour and twenty minutes is nothing to sniff at. We cannot afford to make her travel away from her school and her job too frequently. I will not demand she stop visiting, but as it was in Room 201, there is a certain line that needs to be maintained. Plus…”
She gave Maou a smile, one that seemed to chide him despite the gloomy air surrounding it.
“I am sure you being in Japan would help calm Chiho.”
Maou wanted to say a lot about that but couldn’t find the words to counter her. He was, at first, reluctant to have Chiho come to Ente Isla to back him and Emi up. She was certainly involved with Ente Isla now, of course, but Chiho lacked the strength to fight, and the idea of taking a high school teen to a battle that could decide the fate of worlds filled him with anxiety. What surprised him, though, was how no one was against Chiho making the trip. If anything, they welcomed her.
“I wanted to have her come here sooner or later!” Emi effused.
“Indeed,” Suzuno replied. “I was hoping I could give her a tour of my hometown.”
“If we have the tiiime, she simply muuust see the imperial seat of Saint Aiiile, too…”
Ashiya, standing alongside Urushihara, shrugged. “Well, why not? Apart from the angels, there is no one on Ente Isla who would wish harm upon her. As long as she doesn’t stray too far from Devil’s Castle, we and the Malebranche can keep her safe enough.”
“Yeah, what’s the big deal, dude?” Urushihara chimed in. “It’s not like Chiho Sasaki’s stupid or anything. If we tell her Don’t go anywhere dangerous , she’d be smart enough to follow that.”
In fact, it turned out that Maou had nothing to worry about. Once he’d brought the Earthling to Ente Isla, Hazel Rumack had made sure Chiho always had a guard with her—a suggestion from Emeralda, perhaps. Even Farfarello was eager to bodyguard her, for reasons that Maou assumed he hadn’t been around to witness. In a way, all this attention almost made Chiho a tad uncomfortable. Plus, in the end, Emi’s need to keep her identity on the down-low meant she was often working alongside Chiho anyway. The girl didn’t have just an iron wall of protection; it was more like a full-on fallout shelter.
By this time, Chiho had fallen into a regular routine—crossing worlds via Room 201 with some food and other provisions; chatting with the demons and humans she was close with, then returning to Sasazuka before it grew too late. It was really Maou who had problems to deal with. The main one: that forty-minute-long journey each way that Suzuno mentioned. With Maou’s current living situation, it was a pretty big burden.
“Maybe I better head back for today… My shift ends at six…but, ah, if I go to the bathhouse and stuff, it could wind up being more like nine…”
Emi had always been living by herself in Eifukucho, as did Suzuno in Room 202. But Maou had roomed with Ashiya since the very start, splitting up chore duties in Japan under a system designed with perfect precision by Ashiya. At the moment, Ashiya was busy leading the demons and Eight Great Scarves knights in Ente Isla, and his base of operations was there anyway, so if Maou wanted any domestic contribution from him, he’d have to travel to his apartment from work, then take the forty-minute journey across the Gate. With as many acquaintances around Sasazuka as he had now, Maou couldn’t say who might see him if he opened a Gate in the middle of town instead of returning home first.
This made Maou’s schedule maddeningly complex. The journey between his job at the MgRonald near Hatagaya Station and Villa Rosa Sasazuka was five or six minutes by bike, fifteen on foot—fairly close, and Maou structured his work shifts to take advantage of this. It let him pull off power moves like back-to-back closing and opening shifts. But when another forty minutes of commuting was added to this, then suddenly, the schedule turned into a gauntlet.
If Maou was closing at MgRonald, the absolute earliest he could reach his apartment was twelve forty at night. If he went on a Gate cruise, he’d be at Ente Isla at one twenty AM Japan time—and presuming he ate dinner and so on, he’d likely get to sleep around two. But if he was opening the next day, he had to be at MgRonald no later than six thirty. It meant he’d have to sleep at two, then wake up at five if he wanted time to eat breakfast and make the long Gate crossing. What’s worse, being a demon (which he was, regardless of whatever human form he took on Earth), he couldn’t rely on an angel’s feather pen to open a Gate, like Chiho and Rika could. If that feather pen allowed them a first-class bullet-train seat to Ente Isla, Maou had to take the highway route on a rickety old beater car—and much like driving a car, he had to stay alert while the Gate spell was active. No napping was possible on the way.
So basically, there were dates on Maou’s schedule that made it all but impossible to return to Ente Isla between shifts. On nights like those, if he wanted to eat dinner, he’d have to use the MgRonald employee discount, grab something from the twenty-four-hour convenience store, or use the few cooking tools that hadn’t been taken to Ente Isla and attempt to cobble something together.
“I’ve got so much laundry to do…” Maou sized up the pile of clothes on the floor, then he checked the clock as he recalled the current contents of his wallet. “Crap. I don’t want to waste the money, but I guess I gotta hit the Laundromat…”
Ashiya’s absence didn’t just affect his daily habits; it made every chore impossible to organize.
Maou had planned to clean when the place screamed for it, but since work and Ente Isla came first, it wasn’t long before a fine layer of dust had settled on the bathroom floor, the windowsills, and the spaces between the kitchen’s wood paneling. Thanks to his long shifts, it was hard to find the time to dry the laundry at home, too, so he had come to rely on the dryers at the Laundromat once the pile grew impossible to tame.
He knew from his early days in Japan that this was a decadent luxury; he could practically hear Ashiya admonishing him with every 100-yen coin he tossed into the dryer.
Emi, his rival, was less of a threat now. No human or angel could best him, and he had fully regained his demonic force. To Satan, the Devil King, the world was his oyster—but to Sadao Maou, the human being, life felt oppressively constricted.
But what was Chiho doing? Chiho, a girl he figured would help out on the food and cleaning front? Maou had actually forbidden her from hanging out at Room 201, apart from when she used the Gate. The reason, of course, was that Maou’s residence was a literal man cave.
Chiho had become a frequent visitor, motivated by her feelings for Maou, after Urushihara and Suzuno moved in. To her, Room 201 was not just Maou’s home, but also the place where a lot of her friends hung out, which was the main reason she was there all the time. Now that it was Maou and Maou alone, things were different. Room 201 had always been an entirely male domain, but Suzuno had been right next door, and the paper-thin walls ensured she could hear everything. Now, however, Maou was usually the only person in the entire building—and having a teenager in a high school uniform regularly visiting a part-timer living alone in his crappy apartment was not really something modern society would smile upon. She had, in fact, already been called to task about this, based on the sensibilities that ruled in modern Japan.
Thus, whenever Maou was forced to let Chiho head to Ente Isla, he established the rather mean-spirited condition that the two of them should never be alone together in Room 201. If she had to use a Gate, she could either work with Suzuno and Emi to make one in Villa Rosa Sasazuka or do it in her own room instead. This exasperated their friend circle—why that attitude, at this point?—but Maou doubled down on it, and Chiho had meekly accepted it.
“I guess it’s important, huh? Making…distinctions like that.”
The statement, delivered with a straightforward smile, gave Maou a guilty conscience—perhaps because he never got around to making the “distinctions” he should have made a long time ago.
Still, it wasn’t like he was totally cut off from Ashiya, Urushihara, Suzuno, Nord, or Laila. Ashiya had too many responsibilities to come home very easily, but Suzuno and Urushihara swapped taking trips back to Earth every two or three days. She had even begun setting up a vegetable garden in the backyard, when he wasn’t paying attention. Suzuno or Nord would also come home to babysit Alas Ramus whenever Emi—now a prime contributor to MgRonald at Hatagaya, despite cutting down her hours a bit—had a particularly long shift.
But despite that, Maou was now facing many more days than before where he never talked to anyone outside the restaurant. It made him realize all the more exactly how blessed he had been, with all the kindness his friends gave him.
And so morning came, about a month into this new life of living alone, incomparably quieter and more barren than his life before.
“Maou! Maou! Heeyyyy!!”
“…” Maou winced at the merciless knocking on the front door, cursing it in his mind.
“You are going to the training again in afternoon, no? Starting when?!”
“…I’m working through the lunch rush, so one PM. ”
He had half muttered the words, but the woman on the other side had superhearing at times like these.
“Yahoo! If I ask Mikitty for early lunch, I have enough time! Today, I go to new all-you-can-eat restaurant!”
“…Yeah, great.”
“See ya!”
The presence in the hallway loudly drifted off, never getting to see how badly Maou twisted up his face.
“I seriously wanna punch the dude who created this whole ‘latent force’ system.”
Thanks to assorted circumstances, there was one person who still loomed just as large in Maou’s life—Acieth Alla, a woman who didn’t have the words modesty or concern in her dictionary. He could imagine her briskly smiling, imagining the culinary delights waiting at this new eatery. He hadn’t eaten anything yet, but his stomach already felt heavy.
Upon finishing his MgRonald shift at one, Maou took the Keio Line to Shinjuku, in the heart of Tokyo. As he walked to the site for his full-time staffer training, he spoke up to Acieth, who was fused back inside him.
“So how was the all-you-can-eat place?”
“Huh? You will take me to it again?”
Maou still had trouble grappling with Acieth’s leaps in logic. It was usually Miki Shiba, landlord of the Villa Rosa Sasazuka he stayed at, who took her around—why was it “again” for him?
“…”
“Just kidding! Come on, I am just the kidding! Maou! You need broader heart!”
Acieth must have picked up on how frayed his heart was, because she tried (and failed) to make up for her words quicker than usual. She was, after all, one of the biggest reasons why he couldn’t keep a broader heart. She was as gluttonous as always, she never demonstrated a care in the world about him, she didn’t try to hide her conniving side, and it was impossible to tell what she’d do next.
Waging this god-slaying battle to make Alas Ramus’s dream come true was a good thing for Acieth as well, being Alas Ramus’s younger sister. But Maou was stressed out. If it was Acieth who had crashed into his yard in that golden apple instead of Alas Ramus, he doubted he’d ever have adopted a father-daughter relationship with her, much less accept Laila’s plea. Apart from their faces, there was nothing alike about the two sisters.
“So you know, the restaurant, it was mainly about the meats.”
“An all-you-can-eat meat deal? Wait, did you go to a yakiniku place for lunch?”
Fused like this, Acieth’s voice could be heard only in Maou’s mind and to nobody else. Maou, meanwhile, had to actually speak to get his words across, so an impartial observer could marvel at the disturbing sight of a young man in business attire mumbling incoherently to himself.
Maou’s face had taken on a dour look as of late, besides. If he didn’t have his phone to his ear like he did now, pretending to talk to someone, he’d likely be put in a facility long before the police got involved.
“Uh-uh. The all-you-can-eat yakiniku near us, they say I eat too much. They ban me.”
“Seriously?”
Maou wasn’t aware of this, but whenever Acieth joined Amane Ohguro (her usual caretaker at the moment) at a place like that, the manager would usually have to intervene once she started treating it like an eating contest on TV. If someone with Acieth’s voracious appetite went all-out at a yakiniku , Maou couldn’t blame the place for booting her.
“Mostly, they have big metal skillet, and they cook the steak and the sirloin. If you pay more, then drinks and salads and soups and curries and desserts, they are all free.”
“Wow, not only drinks and soups but all that, too? That’s brave of them. Do they give you any rice?”
“Oh, yes! All-you-can-eat rice.”
“Huh. Remember the name of the place?”
“The name? Um, what was it? It was maybe Big Guy ? Or Giant Boy ? …But why you ask so sudden? Normally, when I eat, you say, ‘Oh, it is the bad manners, it is bad for wallet.’”
“Just one second.”
Maou lowered his phone and used it to search for the place Acieth mentioned, relying on her vague memory of the all-you-can-eat curry location for his keywords. He found the chain restaurant in short order.
“Oh, here? So if you pay extra, you get free drinks and an all-you-can-eat buffet for salad, the soup of the day, curry, and desserts. Hmm… Too bad. I like the price, but this is more a diner than anything.”
“What is it you mean?”
“A few people in my training program are talking about a get-together sometime soon. We haven’t settled on a date yet, but we’re starting to toss candidates for a location around, so I’m looking for places we can go to.”
“Eww.” Acieth sounded disgusted. “Too much work. A get-together like that, it is all Oh, pour beer for boss , Oh, let boss berate you in front of friend , Oh, let coworkers who are only good at the sucking-up-to-boss run all over you , then Oh, blackout on the sake you can’t drink , and then coworker says Oh, you are the wimp the next day, yes? It is the waste of precious time, yes?”
“Where did you take all that from?” Maou shook his head, the pace of his walk slowing down. “Stop sounding like Urushihara if you don’t even know what you’re talking about. Get-togethers like this, you never know how they might help you out down the line. I might wind up sharing office space with some of these guys later on, so unless you wanna get on their bad side, it never hurts to hang out and have a drink.”
“It is what you say, but you are not so, ah, enthusiastic, yes?”
“…I’ll partly admit that.”
It was rare to hear Maou sound unmotivated about work. He knew that, in this fused state, Acieth could partially pick up on what he felt, although it wasn’t some kind of full-on telepathy trick.
“I mean, you see lots of different trainees attend these classes. You got people with customer-facing jobs like me, you have people from the bun manufacturing plants, you got hires from other companies, and you got brand-new guys brought on to lead new locations, which means I have to do a bunch of on-location training, even though I know it by heart. So we’re all talking about going out some evening.”
“Hmm.”
“And I do want to talk to people from our rival chains and the processing plants. One of ’em used to serve in the Japan Self-Defense Forces, and he’s still young, but I’m kinda curious about what his life’s been like. But… I dunno. I think this get-together isn’t gonna work like that.”
“Why not?”
“Well, the guy who suggested it is this dude in his midtwenties, from a region the Hatagaya location isn’t part of, and it’s like…he’s not really hiding it, you know?”
“No? You are being the not very specific. It is strange.”
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