Hataraku Maou-sama! - Volume 5 - Chapter 3

THE DEVIL AND THE HERO DECIDE TO FOCUS ON MORE IMPORTANT MATTERS 
To Maou and Ashiya, who’d been on everything from a Ferris wheel to an ambulance at this point, there was one method of transportation they had yet to try out. 
The humble taxi. 
A very convenient way of navigating the city, getting you where you wanted to go with pinpoint accuracy (assuming the driver cared enough), its convenience came at a cost. It was the most expensive ride Maou had ever been on. 
The base cost alone of catching a taxi within the city center was equivalent to boarding the Keio Line in Shinjuku, taking forty miles or so to the last stop at Mount Takao, then doubling back and going almost all the way back down the line before getting off at Kami-kitazawa. 
Besides, Maou had never been in a position where a taxi was a necessary choice. He and his demon cohorts were the kind of Tokyoites willing to walk anywhere within three station stops of their current location, if it meant saving on train fare. 
And yet, when Ashiya arrived back home, Maou and crew wasted no time calling for two taxis to their apartment—the Devil King’s army in one, the Hero and her servant in the other—and heading straight for Yoyogi. 
The scene inside was grim. No one said a word. 
Maou, in the front passenger seat, wistfully watched the cab ahead with Emi in it, grabbing the strap above the window with undue force. 
Ashiya looked equally pensive. Even Urushihara, ever ready to ruin the atmosphere with one inappropriate quip or another, simply stared out his window. 
Before the meter had much chance to tick above the base rate, the two taxis entered the roundabout in front of the Tokyo Hospital, run by the Seikai University Department of Medicine. 
Once they stopped, Maou asked Ashiya to handle the fare and flew out of the cab without so much as a “thanks” to the driver. 
Emi was already out of her own taxi, Suzuno apparently volunteering to pay. 
“This way.” Emi motioned toward Maou, then headed on toward the hospital’s front desk. “We’re here to visit Ms. Sasaki in Room 305…” 
“Certainly. If you could just fill out these cards and take them to reception on the third floor…” 
The time it took to jot down everything the visitor cards demanded from them seemed a colossal waste. 
“I know you want to, but we can’t run inside the hospital. Just calm down. Her life isn’t in danger right now.” 
“…Yeah.” 
Maou took a deep breath to ready himself, face still knotted with concern. Emi, watching on, picked up a visitor card for him. 
“Don’t lose this. They won’t let you see her if you don’t give it to ’em.” 
“Jeez, I’m not a child. Just take us up there.” 
“Right. This way.” 
For now at least, Emi didn’t bother taking the bait as she took the lead and briskly set off. 
Riding the large elevator to the third floor, they each presented their visitor cards to the nurse station. 
“All right. You can see her now. It’s a shared room, though, so try to be quiet if you could, please.” 
The staffer, clad in white, pointed out the door to them. 
Emi and Maou nodded their thanks to her and headed for Room 305. The door was already ajar. 
Inside were four beds, separated by privacy curtains. The plethora of strange and ominous machines installed near one made Maou’s blood freeze. Emi picked up on it at once. 
“Not that one. This one.” 
She grabbed his sleeve and pointed out the much less cluttered bed in front of them, a nameplate reading SASAKI poised on the edge of the curtain railing. 
“…Sorry to bother you again. It’s Yusa.” 
Emi’s reserved voice was enough to summon another familiar one from inside. 
“Sure, come on in.” 
“Thanks.” 
It was Riho, Chiho’s mother, seated in a chair next to the bed. Maou tried to greet her, but something else caught his eye first. 
“……” 
In the hospital bed, Chiho was asleep. She looked healthy enough, breathing on her own and all. But the fact she was sleeping in a hospital bed at all made Maou lose his voice. 
Riho, noticing him, stood up and bowed lightly. 
“Oh, hello, Maou! How nice of you to stop by.” 
Her smile was warm and unpretentious, but it failed to hide a tint of fatigue around the edges. 
Maou finally managed to gurgle up a question. 
“What…what happened to Chi, ma’am?” 
Riho bent her neck downward, troubled. 
“Well, if only we knew…” 
Her tired smile warped with anxiety. 
“She was sleeping on the sofa when I came home around dinnertime last night. I told her to get some rice cooking for me, but I thought she was just having a nap or something instead…” 
Riho tried her best to retain her serenity. It wasn’t working. 
“But… It was the strangest thing. She just wouldn’t wake up. I called for her, I shook her… Nothing. It was so weird. I tried slapping her, even though I knew she’d be angry at me…but she didn’t respond to that, either.” 
Realizing this was no ordinary nap, she had immediately called for an ambulance. They had brought her here, to Seikai University Hospital. 
Neither the first responders nor the doctor who admitted her could diagnose why Chiho was in such a deep sleep. 
Her breathing and brain waves were normal and she had no external injuries, so the hospital decided her life was not in danger and admitted her for observation. That, as Riho put it, was the story. 
“And, you know, there wasn’t a gas leak or anything. She didn’t hit her head. There’s just no telling what happened to her…” 
Riho turned her eyes toward Chiho, clothed in flower-patterned pink pajamas as she lay there. Emi and Maou found their gazes similarly fixed. 
The girl seemed perfectly tranquil. No suffering at all. 
But if Emi was so sure this was demonic force poisoning, something grave must have happened. 
Suzuno entered, dragging Ashiya and Urushihara behind her. 
“Chiho.” 
“Ms. Sasaki!” 
“Dude, you’re too loud, Ashiya.” 
“Oh! I’m so glad to see all of you. I’m sorry it had to be in these circumstances… Um, you’re Suzuno Kamazuki and Hanzou Urushihara?” 
Riho bowed deeply to these unfamiliar faces. 
“I hate to bring this up now, but I do appreciate you watching out for Chiho over in Choshi. She didn’t bother you too much, did she?” 
Maou stepped up to respond. “Oh, absolutely not. We—Chi’s always been a huge help to us. Without Chi…and you…we probably couldn’t have the life we have right now.” 
“Well, make sure you tell her that first thing once she wakes up. I don’t think there’s much that makes her happier than a compliment from you.” 

“……” 
Riho’s casual observation robbed Maou of words all over again. 
“So…there’s no telling what this is or how long it’ll last, so I haven’t gotten around to contacting her friends or school yet… Honestly, I’m not sure what to do.” 
In Riho’s hand was Chiho’s cell phone, a familiar sight to Maou. 
Riho was, by nature, a cheerful woman. That must have been why she tried to hide it. But the fear and anxiety of seeing her daughter stricken by some mysterious…event, or whatever it was, was clear as day, all over her. 
But there was no way Maou, or Ashiya or Emi or Suzuno, and especially Urushihara, could find any words to cheer her up. 
“Chiho…” 
Suzuno’s voice was shaky as she took a step forward, grasping the right hand that stuck out from under Chiho’s blanket. 
“……” 
Emi looked on sternly. 
“Oh! Actually, Maou…” Chiho’s mother began. 
“Yes?” 
Cheerfully, if a little shakily, Riho placed both her hands on Maou’s shoulders. 
“Was that…you, perhaps?” 
“That…? What’s that?” 
“Oh, don’t be silly! You know I’m not angry or anything. Although I will admit that from a woman’s perspective, I’m not sure it suited Chiho very well.” 
What was she talking about? Riho pointed to Chiho’s left hand, opposite to the one Suzuno held. 
Not even that was enough to make Maou understand. He looked doubtfully toward Riho. 
“You’re sure it wasn’t you? I wouldn’t think she’d go around in public wearing that if you didn’t give it to her, but…” 
Riho went around the bed and picked up Chiho’s hand. 
What she revealed made everyone except Emi gasp. 
On her left index finger was a ring. If it was any normal ring, one could explain it away as a teenage girl’s experiment with accessorizing. 
But the stone in that ring sparkled as it reflected the sunlight from outside, transfixing everyone who looked at it. 
At that moment, Maou finally realized why Emi knew where Chiho was first. 
They had exchanged a few words before she traveled to Choshi, but it seemed hard to believe Riho would contact Emi before even Chiho’s school. 
Emi was after that ring. And it just happened to bring her here. 
There, inside the Seikai University Hospital southwest of Muddraker’s in Yoyogi, was the polished Yesod fragment Emi had been guided to. 
 
Each floor of the hospital had a public space, giving visitors a place to rest and the more ambulatory patients a chance to take in some TV. 
Urushihara was the one staring glassily at the TV. Maou, Ashiya, and Emi, meanwhile, sat silently in chairs, their faces tormented. 
Suzuno, by herself, was using Emi’s Relax-a-Bear notebook, and a pen with Relax-a-Bear’s friend Yellow Bird perched on top of it, to jot out a long set of what looked like mathematical equations. 
To the uninformed observer, a quick peek at her writing would have produced more questions than answers. It would have looked like nothing but a bizarre, seemingly random string of patterns. 
She was writing in Holy Vezian, one of the common languages shared across Ente Isla’s Western Island. 
Holy Vezian saw use chiefly on the continent’s western side, where the Church’s influence was particularly pervasive. On the eastern side, nearer to the Central Continent, there was a dialect known as Common Vezian. The common tongue saw more widespread use as a spoken language, thanks to the influence it had on Ente Isla’s universally taught language of Centurient, but Holy Vezian was the working language of higher education across the island. 
This was the language that saw the most use in specialized pursuits, from politics and government to law, medicine, and the arts. If you wanted to participate in any of these fields, a working knowledge of Holy Vezian was a must. 
The Western Island was the only one of Ente Isla’s major landmasses that the Devil King had failed to conquer. Maou, Ashiya, and Urushihara could understand Common Vezian to some extent, but—from the written language onward—they were wholly unversed in the Holy variant. 
Maou tried asking Emi what she was scribbling away at when Suzuno began, but Emi shrugged it off, telling him to “shut up and wait.” 
Over an hour passed after they’d left Chiho’s hospital bed. It was still bright out, but darkness would no doubt be spreading across the horizon soon. 
In no part thanks to that, Maou and the gang were the only ones left in the public space. 
Right when the TV switched from a quick news update to a series of ad spots for the day’s wacky variety programming: 
“I have it!” Suzuno finally lifted her head above the notebook. 
“You have what? What have you even been doing this whole time?” 
“This is the first time I’ve had to write out all of the formulas from scratch since…my time at the seminary, if I recall. I’ve found it, Emilia.” 
“And?” 
Suzuno beamed. 
“Chiho’s body is the perfect picture of health. She is young, and strong. As soon as tomorrow—no later than two or three days—her body will neutralize the demonic force, and she will awaken.” 
“S-seriously?!” 
Suzuno’s appraisal made Maou jump out of his seat with a clatter. Ashiya looked dubiously at her. 
“How…how are you so sure of that?” 
“It would perhaps be easier to demonstrate with an experiment. Give me your hand, Alciel.” 
“What?” 
He extended his arm, eyebrows still arched downward, and obediently clasped hands with Suzuno. Then: 
“Nrrhh!!” 
With a groan, Ashiya’s entire body glowed dimly for a moment. The next instant, his hair stood on end, as if he had just stuck a fork in a power outlet. 
“Gnh…nh… Wha-what are you doing?!” 
Ashiya glared at Suzuno with unfocused eyes, having trouble articulating his complaint at first. 
“That hard on a demon, is it? That was the same level of force as the sonar I probed Chiho’s body with.” 
“…Sonar?” 
Maou’s eyes came to attention. He hadn’t heard that word in a while. 
Come to think of it, Suzuno’s compassionate caress of Chiho’s hand seemed a little too forced to be sincere. She must have been sonar-ing up and down her body then. 
“Before one can undertake full training in the holy arts, they use this method to measure your body’s core receptiveness to magic. This can greatly affect how one’s holy magic affects their body, as you know.” 
“Y-yeah…” 
“A form of holy sonar is run across the body, containing a spell meant to examine its contents. Gauging the reactions one receives from each section of the body allows you to gain a general idea of their receptiveness. The human body can react in a variety of complex ways, so normally you would use specialized instruments for this procedure, but a caster can use their own senses if an approximate calculation will suffice.” 
Suzuno pointed out the ten or so pages of Emi’s notebook she had filled with her mysterious scrawl. 
“Of course, even an approximate calculation can take quite a bit of time if you do it by hand.” 
Maou and the hair-on-end Ashiya pouted ruefully at her. Urushihara was still focused on the TV. 
“Look, I don’t need the deep-cuts version, all right? Cut to the chase!” 
“Before that, I need to ask. Emilia, why did you diagnose Chiho’s condition as magic poisoning?” 
“I followed this light into the hospital.” 
Emi extracted the bottle with the Yesod fragment from her bag. It made Maou’s eyebrows arch up a bit. 
“…That’s the piece Camio had, huh? You didn’t give it to Alas Ramus?” 
“If I fuse it with her, I can’t pluck it back out later, you know? I kept it because I thought we’d have to look for the other fragments, sooner or later. I can’t go brandishing my holy sword around in public to search for them.” 
“Oh… Right.” 
Emi explained her motives—the woman in white at Tokyo Big-Egg Town, the way she healed Alas Ramus, and the Yesod fragment she tried to track her down with. 
“I busted it out near the Tokyu Hand in Shinjuku, but I wasn’t expecting to find it after less than thirty minutes of walking. And who could’ve known Chiho, of all people, had it…” 
The story of Chiho in a coma at the hospital was shocking enough. But when Emi came to see her, she could feel, clear as day, the residual signs of demonic force. 
That, combined with the ring on Chiho’s finger, made it impossible for Emi to figure it out by herself—so off she went to Devil’s Castle for assistance. 
“So why did you not call myself or the Devil King?” Suzuno inquired. 
She had a good point. Emi knew perfectly well that Maou, Ashiya, and Suzuno were somewhere in Shinjuku at that point in time. But the reply came from Urushihara. 
“’Cause I called her. I needed to talk to her about somethin’…but it kinda doesn’t matter now. I wanna hear Bell’s full diagnosis first.” 
His eyes never left the TV screen. 
“…So, that’s the long and short of it. I saw all kinds of people afflicted by demonic force in Ente Isla, and Chiho reminded me of all of them. That, and there’s no way I should detect demonic power from Chiho, of all people. So I figured she was poisoned right off, but…” 
Suzuno nodded in agreement. 
“Emilia’s intuition is half correct, half mistaken.” 
“How so?” 
“Chiho, indeed, suffers from demonic poisoning. But not from an external source. The demonic power was generated from within, due to a dangerous energy imbalance in her body.” 
“?!” 
Maou and Ashiya joined Emi in a clear gasp of shock, striking the point home. Even Urushihara looked back toward Suzuno sharply. 
“Generated from within Chiho’s body?” 
“One might say that Chiho’s own spiritual energy transformed into demonic force.” 
“Uhhh, wait. Hang on a sec.” 
Maou raised a hand in the air. 
“Is that kind of thing even possible?!” 
“Assuming my calculations are correct, yes. That, and the equations themselves, handed down from generations of Church doctrine.” 
“Well, do it over again,” Maou demanded. 
Suzuno pouted, indignant. 
“Don’t be ridiculous. I could not believe it myself at first, so I double-checked every calculation before reaching my conclusion.” 
“But…demonic power from within? Chi’s a human being. A Japanese girl. She’s from Earth!” 
“I understand what you are trying to say, but have you already forgotten your past? You regained your Devil King form on more than one occasion here in Japan by absorbing demonic energy from the hearts of mankind.” 
“I… Well, yeah, but…” 
“Regardless. After estimating the remaining demonic force within Chiho’s body with my sonar, it is clear that this is a case of poisoning, though not one serious enough to threaten her life. She fell into a coma due to her body consuming its strength in the act of trying to push it back and neutralize it, but the holy force I infused within my sonar should help catalyze the process. Once that is complete, she will wake up naturally.” 
“So if all the pieces are put together…you’re saying that you almost vaporized my person just now?” 
Suzuno let the irate jab from Ashiya slide with a smile. 
If she was telling the truth, no one had any reason to worry about Chiho’s safety. But discovering the cause only led to a completely different problem rearing its ugly head: 
Chiho, a mere human, was generating demonic force within herself, and they had no idea what was inducing this. Furthermore, in her comatose state, she was wearing a ring festooned with a Yesod fragment. 
Emi racked her brain for some sort of hint. 
“This may not lead to anything…but I think Chiho’s ring is the same kind as the one that woman in white had on.” 
“You think?” 
“Well, I was kind of in a panic, all right? I don’t really remember what kind of ring it was. But I think it looked like that.” 
“Yeah, great. Really useful, Emi. So why’s that ring on her finger?” 
“Maybe…that woman in white put it on her, for some reason…” 
“Oh, come on! Let’s worry about where it came from later, okay? The thing we really need to be thinking over right now is…” 
“The external cause of Chiho Sasaki’s body generating that force, right?” 
“…Urushihara?” 
Everyone focused on the man, whose gaze was still fixated upon the TV. 
“Demonic force in her body is weird, dude. Real weird. But judging by how you guys keep on transforming, it’s totally likely that humans in this world…you know, just do that, right? But either way, someone or something acted upon Chiho to make her do that.” 
“Could you at least stop watching TV and face us?” 
Emi was clearly irritated. Urushihara paid it no mind, currently enthralled in a local-interest news story about a regional cook-off in one rural burg or another. “I told you that I called Yusa, didn’t I? Yusa, the girl who never saw me as anything besides a breathing vending machine and line wrangler. Why do you think she bothered answering my call?” 
Emi scowled. 
“Because you said that Gabriel paid a visit to Villa Rosa Sasazuka.” 
“Gabriel did?!” 
The other three in the room were instantaneously stupefied. 
“That huge, slimy freak better not have laid a finger on her…” Maou growled. 
“Yeah, I wish the story was that simple. He came in on other business,” Urushihara replied. “Apparently he’s been put on desk duty after screwing up the Yesod-fragment hunt one too many times. Now they’re looking for some relic from the Demon Overlord Satan or whoever.” 
Emi rolled her eyes. 
“Desk duty? You think this is some kind of cop drama?” 
“A ‘relic from the Demon Overlord’…?” 
“You know that, Maou?” 
“Hope it’s worth money. I could use some of that…though the inheritance tax would probably be a deal breaker. …Yeah, I think it rings a bell, but I don’t see why folks up in heaven would get in a lather searching for it.” 
“Whoa. Glad to see we’re both on the same level, Maou.” 
“Huh?” 
“Nothing. Anyway, I guess Gabriel’s searching for that…whatever it is, but there’s a chance they’ve sent another angel down in his place. And if they have, I know who it’ll be.” 
“Yo, Suzuno. If you have even a shred of conscience left as a cleric, go back to Ente Isla and take down the Church as the idol-worshipping fraud it is,” Maou grumbled. 
“…I have no defense.” 
Suzuno hung her head down low. Meanwhile, Ashiya crossed his arms. 
“My, my, my. Between this lazy shut-in and that girl chaser… Is there anyone at all half decent up there?” 
“Dude, don’t lump me in with them, Ashiya. I left ’cause I hated it, remember?” 
“‘Left’?” 
“So you’re saying that even you, the self-described shut-in, has some self-awareness?” 
“Geh…” 
Ashiya tipped his head lightly at Urushihara’s words, but as soon as all that, Maou thrust in, and Urushihara was only able to get a single word out. 
“A-anyway!” 
The fallen angel sputtered through his attempt to continue: 
“If we’re gonna believe Gabriel, they sent the Observer down here to Japan.” 
“The Observer…? Raguel? The angel who oversees the behavior of all the other angels?” 
Urushihara nodded at Suzuno. 
“He’s not all that high on the ladder, so to speak. Gabriel could probably whip his ass in a fair fight, and he’s not a Sephirah guardian, either. Thing is, though, Raguel’s been granted certain…powers the others don’t have.” 
“The Call of the End Times…?” Suzuno muttered. 
“Good evening. It’s the end of the week and time for your Friday evening news…” 
The newscaster on TV demonstrated impeccable timing. 
“……” 
All eyes rested upon Suzuno. She turned red once she realized why. 
“Wh-what? A mere coincidence!” 
“……” 
Then all eyes swiveled their way back toward Urushihara. 
“I did not intend to do that! It is not my doing!” Suzuno protested. 
Urushihara ignored her. 
“I don’t know how the Call of the End Times was described in Ente Islan mythology, but it’s nothing all that fancy. Raguel has the power to observe the other angels, judge them as necessary, and announce the results to the rest of heaven. It usually involves booting angels out of the club, though.” 
“Fallen angels?” 
“Yeah. They set that whole system up not long after I left heaven. The Observer levies his judgment, and the Evil Eye of the Fallen carries out his sentence.” 
“You mean…Sariel?” 
It wasn’t a name Maou expected to come up. 
“Think about it, dude. If Sariel was the sole judge, jury, and executioner when it came to kicking out angels, there wouldn’t be a single man left in heaven.” 
Maou, Emi, and Suzuno exchanged glances. It was an extremely persuasive explanation. 
“I know it looks like everyone just does what they want up there, but inside the bureaucracy, you’re pretty restricted in how you can use your powers. Not too different in the human world, either, right? The same kinda idea as why the soldier with his finger on the A-bomb button doesn’t try taking over the world.” 
“But why is Raguel in Japan? The way you’re putting it, it doesn’t sound like he makes all that good of a substitute for Gabriel, given his power levels.” 
Urushihara nodded at Emi’s question. “Well, if you assume that Raguel ain’t here to bring Gabriel back to heaven…I’m guessing he’s here to lay judgment on someone.” 
“It might not be ‘doves’ like me paying house calls any longer.” 
The warning was clear upon Urushihara’s mind. 
“What kind of judgment?” 
“You don’t know?” 
Maou’s question seemed far less weighty to him than Emi’s. 
“Neither of you? The King of All Demons and the half-angel Hero over there?” 
Urushihara then turned to Suzuno. 
“Heaven stood by blithely while the Devil King’s army ran roughshod over Ente Isla. So why’s it sending angels down to Japan, on another world, like it’s goin’ outta style? You ever think about that?” 
For Suzuno, a high-level Church cleric who sent many of her sect’s knights to their doom while proclaiming all the while that her god’s blessings were on their side, the question was enough to crush her. 
“…No matter how many Ente Islans lose their lives, it never affects the heavens at all…” she whispered. 
“Bingo.” 
A cruel reply. 
“But if they think it’s their fault, they’ll try to fix it…in the way they prefer to do it. You get me? Maou, Yusa, and Ashiya and Bell, too, of course—you’re all getting close to a truth the heavens want to keep hidden; you’re keeping Sephirah fragments to yourself; and you used your innate powers to dispatch multiple frontline angels. If Raguel declares you to be an enemy of all heaven…” 
The newscast, playing to Maou’s crew and nobody else, played footage from a civil war in one nation or another. 
“That’s when heaven’s gonna start gettin’ serious. They’ll make Gabriel’s Heavenly Regiment look like a bunch of kindergartners.” 
“…Bullcrap!” Maou hammered an angry fist down on the table. “Then why didn’t they just attack us directly this time, too?!” 
“Dunno, man. All this assumes that we can believe what Gabriel told me. For all we know, they’re after something totally unrelated to us—that ‘woman in white,’ for example. We have no idea where Chiho Sasaki’s ring came from, right?” 
“So what do you want us to do? We can hardly just sit here and wait for Raguel to take action. That could lead to more victims like Ms. Sasaki.” 
“Yeah, about that. I actually got ideas along those lines, so I’ve been waiting for a bit now.” 
“Waiting? For what…?” 
“Now for a roundup of the day’s top news.” 
The newscaster chose that moment to wrap up his civil-war coverage and launch into a recap of Japan’s main news stories of the day. 
“Technicians are still looking into a bug that’s inconvenienced users across the metro area, one that’s preventing TV-compatible cell phones and tablets from receiving broadcasts.” 
“Oh, that wasn’t just Dokodemo?” 
Emi, who had spent much of the past few days assuaging irate customers about that exact issue, perked up at the mention. 
The screen showed some hapless phone-company executive apologizing at a press conference, bowing down low as he drowned in a blaze of camera flashes. 
Then: 
“Geh!” 
“Whoa!” 
“Agh!” 
As if thrown off balance by the litany of flashes, Maou and Ashiya fell off of their chairs. 
Urushihara managed to grab on to the table in time, but his knees were visibly trembling. 
“Wh-what’s wrong with you guys?” 
“Are you all right?!” 
Emi helped Maou up and Suzuno lent a hand to Ashiya, both wondering why they had been suddenly blown aside by nothing in particular. 
“Huh?” 
“Wha?!” 
When they set eyes on the two demons, however, their eyes popped out of their sockets. 
Their hair was on end, as if they had been electrocuted. 
Poor Ashiya, fresh from Suzuno’s sonar probing, had his hair going every which direction, as if he purchased an economy-sized jar of hair wax and figured he better use it all before the sell-by date. 
“What is going on with you people?!” 
“…That’s what I want to know.” Maou’s voice was shaky and cheerless. 
“Emilia and Bell didn’t notice that? Must be that receptiveness you guys have…” 
Urushihara looked unfazed at first glance, but he still sounded a bit pained as he gestured toward the TV. 
In the midst of this furor, the news had already moved on to a story about the nationwide heat wave leading to an epidemic of heatstroke cases. 
“Wh-what? The TV? Huh? A-all right, all right, gimme a sec!” 
Emi, meanwhile, was talking to herself, one finger to her temple. Hurriedly checking to make sure there were no people or security cameras around, she summoned Alas Ramus into the visitor space. 
“Teh-bee!” 
The child made a beeline for the TV and began banging a tiny fist against the screen. 
The LCD screen bent slightly at the force as Emi earnestly tried to stop this sudden bout of violence. 
“Wh-what’re you doing, Alas Ramus? You can’t do that! That’s the hospital’s—” 
“It was all whoosh!” 
“…Huh?” 
Alas Ramus’s soft hands continue to bop against the screen. 
“All flaaaash, then ziiiiing, then dooooooooom!” 
Her right hand was battering the TV. Her left was pointed at her own large eyes. 
“‘Flash, zing, dooooooom’?” 
The barrage of sound effects meant little to Emi. Urushihara, still straightening out his hair with a comb that nobody had realized until now he kept handy, motioned toward the TV. 
“Remember what Bell just did to Ashiya, dude? Alas Ramus must’ve picked up on it. She’s really sensitive to that kinda stuff. It’s that sonar, except, like, mega scaled up. Someone’s breaking into the broadcast and firing sonar bolts. Multiple times today! He can trace the TVs that sent back a sonar response, so that’s a lot easier than casting a net nationwide. One of them must’ve done in Chiho Sasaki.” 
“Sonar? That jolt right now was sonar?!” 
Maou, his hair still sticking several inches off his head, confronted Urushihara at his seat. Ashiya nodded, glaring at Suzuno as he did. 
“It…it was rather similar to Suzuno’s little trick earlier, yes…” 
“Are you saying that was Raguel just now, Urushihara?” 
“Yeah, there’s a pretty good chance of that. If it isn’t Gabriel, it’s gotta be the other guy.” 
“W-wait a minute. How could they fire off bolts of sonar through TV waves?!” Suzuno exclaimed. “And even if they could, tens of millions of people are watching TV in Japan right now! Surely Chiho would not be the only one affected! Besides, I have never heard of anyone rendered comatose by it…” 
The only local expert at the procedure seemed genuinely offended. But Maou, suddenly realizing something, looked upward as he finally got around to straightening his hair. 
“Chi’s house has already been the site of at least one sonar strike.” 
“What?!” 
“Oh…” 
Emi came to the same realization as Maou. It made her mouth hang open. 
“You mean Al’s—I mean, Albert’s sonar?” 
That episode had come before Chiho had learned the truth behind Maou and Emi: 
Albert, one of Emi’s traveling companions, had fired off several sonar messages to warn his friend in Japan that something terrible was coming her way. 
Chiho chose Maou to discuss the experience with…which was part of what brought the two closer to each other in the first place. 
“You got it. All those untargeted sonar blasts and Idea Links, no particular recipient in mind, pummeling against Chi’s body… Hey, Suzuno. A decent caster can change who or what his sonar or Idea Links react to, right?” 
“Y-yes. If you are merely seeking out the position of someone or something, the required calculations are quite simple. If you change resonation methods, as I did with Chiho and Alciel, you can use them for a variety of purposes.” 
That was why Chiho unintentionally picked up on Albert’s Idea Link. That ministorm of sonar pulses took place all because Albert happened to find a willing recipient in Chiho before anyone else. The Link was tuned to search for “someone with a strong link to Devil King Satan”—and now, Chiho was the only Japanese person who knew about Ente Isla. 
“That’s why the sonar that made it through the TV in Chiho Sasaki’s house must have sparked some kinda explosive reaction.” 
“Wait. Why’s it matter if the area had a strong reaction to a pulse before now? Are you saying it responded to whatever residue was left from Al and Eme’s holy force? ’Cause if that was the case, all the holy power me and Gabriel tossed around Sasazuka would’ve made the whole town explode whenever a sonar pulse hit it.” 
“Uh, that holy-power sonar blast just now nearly took our heads off.” 
“You said it.” 
Maou’s and Ashiya’s complaints were not commented upon. 
“Y’know, I wasn’t paying attention at the time ’cause Maou was too busy kicking the crap out of me…” Urushihara, meanwhile, was back to his usual air of supreme confidence. “But why were Emeralda Etuva and Albert Ende able to fire sonar bolts over to Japan, on Earth, anyway?” 
“…What do you mean?” 
“Well, Olba, I get. He’s the guy who sent Emilia through the Gate after Maou in the first place. But not those two. They shouldn’t be able to use Gate magic at all. How’d they manage to take a sonar bolt and transmit it right over to Japan?” 
“That was before I arrived here, so I am unaware of the details, but did they not follow your and Lord Olba’s paths through space? That was how I arrived here.” 
“Why’re you making me repeat myself, Bell? Emeralda Etuva and Albert Ende don’t know how to work Gates.” 
“But they both made it over here! Like what the Devil King said, they could use that feather pen made from an archangel’s wings to summon Gates without using demonic force. Both of them had feather pens from Laila…from my mother. They probably just came over here to send out those sonar and Idea Link transmissions. That’s how Chiho was able to pick up on Albert’s… Um?” 
“…Oh.” 
Emi and Maou exchanged glances, both picking up on something of their own. 
“Yeah, dudes, that’s it. You know what Raguel’s trying to look for now?” 
The blood drained from Emi’s head. 
How long ago was that phone call from Emeralda? 
How could I have been so stupid, this whole time between today and running into that woman in white in Tokyo Big-Egg Town? 
“The number one item on Raguel and Gabriel’s list right now isn’t the Yesod fragments; it isn’t the Better Half; it isn’t Maou. For now, that all takes a backseat.” 
I should have known that angel might be coming to Japan. 
“It’s Laila. I don’t know why, but they’re tracking Laila’s trail and they’re trying to lay some kind of judgment at her feet.” 
“All thanks to that idiot Albert sending an Idea Link with Laila’s feather pen, huh? Man, lucky thing Chiho’s mom wasn’t caught in the cross fire, then.” 
Maou groaned to himself, realizing the situation was far worse than it seemed, but Emi felt the brunt of it. 
“What…what happens with Raguel’s Call of the End Times?!” She found herself grabbing Urushihara by the collar. 
“Garghh!” 
“Emilia! That is too strong. And this is a hospital! Calm down!” 
“You want me to calm down now?!” 
Her voice was rising. 
“I’ve never met her… I didn’t even know she existed until recently… But…unless I can meet her and talk to her…unless she’s safe, she…she’s my mother, all right?!” 
“Um, is something the matter? Should I call for somebody?” 
A nurse had appeared, watching them dubiously, no doubt alarmed by the shouting. Emi returned to her senses and, for the time being, released Urushihara. 
“I… Sorry. It’s nothing.” 
“Oh, no? Well, remember, this is a hospital. I’d like to ask you to keep things quiet, please.” 
The nurse, not looking particularly convinced, quietly padded off nonetheless. 
Urushihara, near tears and realizing Emi was done screwing around with him, opted to cut out the back talk from here on in. 
“Kahh…nnngh… They’re probably gonna kick her out of heaven, I’d assume. Raguel and Sariel work as a team, after all. Or worked.” 
“Sariel’s in on this, too?!” 
“Nah, dude. Not at this point. I probably shouldn’t dis him too much, but I’m startin’ to get the impression he doesn’t give two craps about heaven any longer.” 
Maou recalled the last time he saw Sariel—metaphorically melting into a pile of goo and oozing into the sewer grate after Kisaki, the supreme love of his life, banned him from MgRonald. 
“So I dunno how he’s planning to do that, really. Banishing someone from heaven doesn’t happen all that often, but I’ve never heard of them going to other worlds, interfering with all kindsa crap over there, all so they can lay judgment on a single archangel.” 
A beat, and then Maou nodded and stood up. “…So we’re gonna have to beat up Raguel and make him give us the whole story, huh? If Urushihara doesn’t even know, our only option’s gonna be to ask the guy himself.” 
Ashiya remained seated, much cooler to the idea. “Your Demonic Highness, why do we need to, as you say, ‘beat up’ Raguel?” 
“Look, I don’t care about how angels deal with humans. Like, not at all. But he just took out one of my prime candidates for a Demon General spot in the army I lead. Do I need any more reason than that?” 
Ashiya smiled and nodded at Maou’s stern countenance. “Not at all, my liege. I would be glad to lend a helping hand to a talented future comrade.” 
“Urushihara. Emi. Suzuno.” 
“Mm?” 
“What!” 
“Yes?” 
Maou sized up each one of them in succession. 
“I need to smoke this Raguel guy out and make him pay for putting Chi in the hospital. Help me with that.” 
It wasn’t the most politely phrased of requests, but strangely, no one offered any resistance to it. 
“Well…sure, dude. I’m free anyway. I guess I owe her for least a coupla things.” 
“I wouldn’t mind if you saved that talk about Demon Generals until after I kill you, but if it’s one of my best friends we’re talking about, so be it.” 
“I will gladly teach even an angel a lesson to protect my friends. For this, and only this, I officially agree to cooperate with you.” 
For the sake of a single girl, the Devil King, his Great Demon General, a fallen angel, the Hero, and a Church cleric stood strong in the hospital waiting room, uniting for a common goal. 
“…Hmm?” 
Maou noticed something tugging at the sleeve of his pants. 
“Daddy!” 
Alas Ramus, eyes deadly serious, was looking up at Maou. 
“Alas Ramus love Chi-sis, too!” 
She seemed proud of this affirmation. 
Maou whisked the child into the air, smile just as strong as her eyes. 
“Wanna do it?” 
“Yehh!” 
The five of them, plus one toddler, headed down the elevator and marched out of Seikai University Hospital as a group. 
They were seen out by the same nurse who had upbraided Emi for screaming in the waiting room. 
Waving something resembling a clipboard in her hand, the nurse headed for Chiho’s room. 
“Pardon me for barging in, Ms. Sasaki… Hmm?” 
Upon entering, she found the young patient’s mother gone. Her handbag was still there, perhaps indicating a quick trip to the bathroom or the gift shop. 
The nurse gave herself a nod and stood next to the sleeping Chiho’s bed. 
“Ms. Chiho Sasaki? I think your friends might just help you see the outside of this hospital soon!” 
She peered into Chiho’s face, a beaming smile painted upon her own. 
“You have all these disparate minds focused on a single goal… The mother of a new Da’at, perhaps?” 
Several minutes later. Riho, returning from the ladies’ room, spotted a piece of paper on the small desk next to the bed—a rundown of the examinations slated for the next day. 
The distraction made her completely fail to notice the faint glow that was now present around the ring on Chiho’s left hand. 
Leaving the air-conditioned hospital interior, the warriors from another planet were instantly assaulted by the stifling heat, which showed no sign of loosening even as sunset loomed. 
Several minutes after their solemn oath, all five of them were already starting to grimace under the strain. 
“So…if you were willing to give that speech just now, do you have an idea of where Raguel might be?” 
Emi set up a no-look pass to Maou. He ignored it. 
“Uh, you know anything, Urushihara?” Maou asked. 
Urushihara, realizing the ball was headed his way, rolled his eyes at Maou for his clear failure to take initiative. 
“Well…I got a thought, anyway. But how ’bout you go first? You’re soooooo good with machines, I wouldn’t want to look like an idiot if I got it wrong.” 
The defiant sooooo was still ringing in everyone’s ears by the time he concluded the sentence. 
“So, what’re you thinkin’, dude?” 
“Two places.” 
Urushihara’s eyebrows arched upward. “Huh. Guess we’re in agreement.” 
Suzuno gave him a poke on the back. “Would you mind sharing it with the rest of the world, please?” 

Maou responded with a single arched eyebrow of his own. “What was it that broke apart around us at the electronics store? What’s the thing that’s been flashing white and screwing up for people all day? What just scrambled my and Ashiya’s brains a moment ago?” 
“Frizzy-frizz!” 
Maou paid Alas Ramus no mind as she played with his hair, still on end even now. 
“It’s the TVs, right?” 
“You… Wait.” 
Emi’s eyes opened wide. Urushihara nodded at her. 
“It’s not like all the TVs involved were airing the same program every time. He’s not targeting a single network—he’s working across the entire range of TV signals in the Kanto region. Which means there’s only two places I can think of.” 
“If there’s one thing that fancy-pants prick always liked, it’s high places. He’s like a goat or something. Not that I was one to talk, but…” 
A summer evening’s breeze lapped at their hair. 
“Tokyo Tower and the Tokyo Skytree.” 
 
“Hey, did you know, Ashiya?” 
“Yes?” 
Shiba Park, in the Minato ward of Tokyo. 
The Devil King of another world turned toward his faithful Great Demon General and snorted. 
“The top of Tokyo Tower is made out of tanks!” 
“……” Ashiya sighed and looked at what Maou clenched in his hand. “Is that written in there, my liege?” 
Maou was holding a copy of a small paperback entitled Everything You Wanted to Know About HDTV* (*But Were Afraid to Ask). He’d purchased it at a station-side kiosk on the way here. 
“The area of the tower that lies above the topmost observation deck is made from steel taken from American tanks that were scrapped after the Korean War,” Ashiya concluded. “It was still hard to obtain high-quality steel in the Japan of the nineteen fifties, the US was eager to develop a new generation of tanks, and—as I understand it—their needs dovetailed each other very closely.” 
“…! …!” Maou look at Ashiya, then his book. “…Y-you knew that?” 
“When I was working as a theater stagehand, I had to move props around for a play set in that era. They touched upon it in one scene or another.” 
Ashiya had a thoughtful look on his face. (The two of them had finally gotten around to fixing their hair earlier.) 
“Did you know, Your Demonic Highness, why the tower is painted in white and red? Or, should I say, the shade of yellowish red known as ‘international orange’?” 
“…No.” 
“According to aviation regulations, any structures or other objects over two hundred feet above the ground that may interfere with air safety need to be painted in alternating shades of white and international orange to indicate the obstruction. These markings are painted across the entirety of Tokyo Tower, however.” 
Maou stared at Ashiya, mouth agape. 
“But…but the Skytree isn’t that color!” 
“The pattern is not required if you install high-powered aircraft warning lights or other devices.” 
A few furious flips through the paperback, and: 
“………Whoa, you’re right.” 
He’d found the relevant section. 
Ashiya grinned as his master’s crestfallen look. “That’s what led to the Tokyo Tower we know and love today…but personally, I think a nice shade of pure red would suit this tower the most.” 
He sized up the tower before him as he spoke. The tower, all one thousand ninety-three feet of it, was used as a central site for radio, television, and other electrical signals, gradually evolving into an architectural symbol for all of Tokyo over the years. 
The Skytree, while still under construction, already had it beaten in height. That still wasn’t enough to tarnish any of the structure’s grandeur, however. Thousands of tourists visited Tokyo Tower daily, and since HDTV transmission duties were now handled by the Skytree, the resulting free bandwidth in the Tower ensured it would be serving Tokyo and its citizens for years to come. 
“Y’know, I know I came here on my own volition and stuff…but I’m starting to have cold feet.” 
“How so?” 
“There’s too many people. Is there really an angel around here?” 
It did not affect Maou and his friends whatsoever, but to most Japanese citizens, it was currently the tail end of summer vacation. 
Tokyo Tower was a landmark icon of Japan. In this warm August evening, it was predictably mobbed. 
“Meaning that Emi has more of a chance to find our target at the Skytree, you mean?” 
While Maou and Ashiya were at Tokyo Tower, Emi had volunteered to head for the Skytree, with Urushihara (at his suggestion) remaining at Yoyogi so he and Suzuno could swiftly reach either building and provide backup should trouble arise. 
The fact Urushihara suggested this provided Maou some pause, but his logic was sound enough. From Yoyogi, they could either quickly board the JR Sobu Line to Kinshichou, near the Skytree, or hop on the Toei Oedo Line to Akabane-bashi, the preferred stop for Tokyo Tower sightseers. 
Suzuno, whose usefulness in a fight was undeniable at this point, protested the idea of being behind the front lines. 
But if an angel really felt like a scrap, the fact was that only Emi had the strength to deal with that. 
So Suzuno acquiesced in the end. Maou’s none-too-subtle reminder that she was incapable of standing up to Sariel at first—and, indeed, helped Maou take Devil King form only because she was outside the field of battle—helped the opposition’s case immensely. 
“Hey, but can we settle this someplace where I don’t have to repair a lot of collateral damage again?” 
Maou felt justified in emphasizing this point. This was the Suzuno, after all, who destroyed enough of the train infrastructure around Shinjuku station to bring all JR lines to a screeching halt. But Suzuno’s response was arctic in tone. 
“Assuming you can collect enough power in said place to turn you into the Devil King.” 
The potential of another postfight cleanup filled Maou with dread, but he appreciated that Emi and Suzuno were willing to accept that he might have to take demon form before long. That was a huge step forward for them. 
“But the Skytree hasn’t gone into full operation yet, has it? Wouldn’t someone up there notice if some intruder started messin’ around with the satellites and stuff?” 
The demons certainly noticed by now—their brains were still a bit scrambled by it—but if, as Urushihara thought, this angel Raguel was inserting sonar signals into TV broadcasts, being harassed by Japanese video technicians along the way wasn’t a very efficient way to go about things. 
“Tokyo Tower, as well, is subject to frequent and, may I say, extremely thorough safety inspections. Things are little different here. Instead of fretting over it, I say we make our move and see for ourselves instead.” 
Here, on the ground, Maou and Ashiya were just two men stuck at the back of the visitor line. 
Given how they needed to investigate this tower as much as humanly possible, their main priority right now was to explore every nook and cranny they had the right to access. 
Without a moment’s hesitation, they paid the 2,840 yen required for two tickets to the tower’s twin observation decks. The fact this was their first visit to the site since touching down in Japan added to the lack of pause. 
It was, in its own way, a sign of how large a presence Chiho had grown to become in both of their lives: 2,840 yen was, yes, worth that much to them. 
“Your Demonic Highness, we will be going upward by elevator from this point…” 
“Uh-huh?” 
“But Tokyo Tower can also be climbed by stairs, I understand.” 
“…Um?” 
“I think this to be rather improbable, but if an angel like Raguel was on the staircases…” 
“Whoa, whoa, hang on, are you saying we should…?” 
Maou looked up at the illuminated red tower looming above. 
In the back of his mind, he recalled having to climb up the entirety of the Tokyo City Hall building to rescue Chiho, clad in nothing but a pair of boxers. 
“…Are you kidding me?” 
Emi, meanwhile, could just Heavenly Fleet Feet up from the roof of a nearby building to conquer the Skytree. Dressed in a black sweatshirt, pants, and boots to keep her from being spotted in midair, she was on comparative Easy Street. 
Wearing a long-sleeved shirt, by itself, almost drowned her in her own sweat when she tried it on at the UniClo in Shinjuku. At nearly two thousand feet above sea level, however, the wind was howling hard enough to give an unprotected human being hypothermia in no time flat. 
“Maybe I should’ve put on another layer…” 
The muttering was all but drowned out by the sound of her hair flapping in the gale-force breeze. But unless she was willing to shell out serious cash for mountain gear or the latest winter fashions just as the season was ramping up, she’d have to make do with this. 
Despite the late hour, the Skytree was still packed with TV staff and technicians, thousands of people running to and fro down on the ground. Instead of trying to dodge them all and enter from below, it was far easier to begin at the very peak and work her way down. 
Inspectors, of course, were still doing their work up high. The Tokyo Skytree wasn’t fully built yet, but the news reported earlier about the daily test broadcasts radiating from its antennas. Maintenance and inspection work was more likely to happen at night than any other time. 
This was because, if you approached an antenna unprotected during the afternoon or evening hours when the most electricity was coursing through it, you risked being literally cooked by the high-frequency waves running through you. 
Emi landed above the observation deck located about 1,500 feet above the ground. 
She checked the emergency supply of 5-Holy Energy ? she had in her chest pocket, then carefully gauged her surroundings. 
She was wary of bystanders, of course. But if the angel actually was in this tower, he had probably noticed the holy force Emi had used to reach this vantage point. 
In the worst case, Emi could expect an incoming barrage from within the tower at any moment. But, for now, she felt nothing but the cacophonous wind against her face. It puzzled her. 
The vast Tokyo cityscape spread out beneath her eyes, the mountains that formed the westernmost boundary of the Kanto Plain hazily visible in the night air. 
Taking a quick look at the the high-powered aircraft warning light nearby, Emi carefully began to walk across the roof of the observation deck, taking care not to let the wind throw her off balance. 
“So…no dice?” 
Except for the heavy wind, the brightly shining warning light, and the sturdy walkway she was currently on, there was nothing. 
“Maybe I should look around a bit more, then head for Tokyo Tower…” 
She took out her cell phone, almost dropping it in the wind, as she attempted to contact Maou or Suzuno about her failure. Then: 
“!” 
The wind suddenly carried a clearly out-of-place noise with it. On cue, Emi crouched low and scanned her surroundings. 
No one was visible in the scaffolding. 
That was what made it seem so eerie to her. What she had heard just now… 
“A sneeze?” 
“Ehhhh-choooo!!” 
It was clear as day that time. A man, sneezing, in vastly comical fashion. And she recognized the voice, too. 
“Mommy! Up there!” 
Alas Ramus pointed him out from within Emi, an odd trace of frustration to her voice. 
In the scaffolding, fifty or so feet above her, was a figure that could only be described as bizarre. 
Emi was expecting a fight—with this angel Raguel, even, should the need arise. That was what made this man’s outfit all the more ridiculous to her. 
It was too dark to make his face out too well, but he was curled up in a ball, arms over his shins. 
“Ehhhh-choooaahh!!” 
Another sneeze. Emi gazed at him, unsure what to do next. But: 
“Ah!” 
The curled-up man noticed her. 
Then he stood right up, in an apparent panic. The force was enough to make his foot slip right off the railing he was perched upon. 
“Look out!” Emi shouted instinctively, still not knowing who this was. But the man’s possible fate 1,500 feet below was extinguished in the next second. 
“!!” 
Emi, looking on, did not hesitate another moment to materialize her holy sword. 
It was because the man, just as he fell off the railing, spread his glowing wings into the air. 
Beyond any doubt, it was an angel lying in wait for Emi. 
Maou was right to finger the TV towers the whole time. But now that the truth was thrust before her, one question remained: 
Why didn’t the angel engage Emi in combat when she first approached him? 
Emi had energized her holy-force banks to their limits, preparing herself for any potential opponent she could picture. But the angel, wings in the air, found himself foundering around like a kite on a windy day, plopping slightly in front of Emi like a squashed toad. Then he went still. 
Once again, Emi wasn’t sure how to react. She took a step forward to investigate further. 
But Alas Ramus, in her sword, stopped her. 
“Mommy! That’s Gabwraell! Don’t!” 
Emi, realizing after a few moments that the jumble of syllables she just uttered were meant to mean Gabriel, leaped back and brandished her holy sword without a second thought. 
Urushihara told her that Gabriel was back in Japan, but running into the angel as she was snooping around for holy-force sonar clues was totally unexpected. 
She had defeated him once before, but he was still a powerful archangel, the symbol of all that was holy up in heaven. Emi stared him down, ready to react to so much as a single twitch. 
“You scaaaaared me, girl!” 
The first reaction Gabriel made was to warble out that shaky-voiced whine. 
“I, like…totally didn’t notice, mm-kay? S-since when were you bumpin’ around down there?” 
He glared sullenly at Emi, hands crossed at the elbows, his lips a clear shade of blue. 
“It, it, it’s collllld up here!!” 
“…Well, don’t look at me.” 
Emi found it hard to think of anything else. 
In a remarkably inspired fit of fashion coordination, Gabriel’s toga—right at home at a summer party in ancient Greece—was paired with a T-shirt with an I LUV LA logo on it. His legs were bare, the sight of which Emi did not appreciate very much, and he wore his sandals without so much as a pair of insulating socks. 
All of his garments, except for the T-shirt perhaps, naturally held untold powers that Gabriel could wield at will against his foes. The power of warmth, sadly, did not seem to be among them. 
“I-I mean, E-Emilia? What’re you doing here? Th-the Skytree isn’t even open yet! It won’t be up to full two-thousand-eighty-foot mode until later!” 
His teeth chattered a bit as he complained at her. 
“I-I-I guess the humans sure did one on me, huh? Yeah, I ain’t ever seen nothin’ like this in Ente Isla. Or h-heaven, even! Like, maybe the Devil’s Castle was T-Tokyo Tower height, but…I didn’t think it’d be so cold and windy up… Grphhoo!” 
The archangel’s unhygienic sneeze spread particles of spittle across the city sky. Emi was unimpressed, pointing the tip of her blade at him. 
“I’d like to know why you’re here. Weren’t you fired from your Yesod-fragment job?” 
“Yeaaaah, about that. You got any t-tissues or something? Like, p-premoisturized would be nice right about now.” 
If Gabriel felt any danger at Emi’s presence, he was doing a good job hiding it. But there was no reason to treat him with kid gloves. Not after what he’d tried to do to Alas Ramus. 
In a flash, Emi ran up to Gabriel, bringing her sword’s tip to his chest as she had done once before. 
“You haven’t forgotten about earlier, have you? I was never a very patient woman.” 
“Oh, c’mon! You treat angels and demons the exact same way, girl!” 
The wind was starting to make Gabriel tear up. 
“Look, I… Y-you know, I told Lucifer, but I don’t care even in the slightest about you or the Better Half or those silly little demons, ’kay? Cross my heart, I’m serious! I’m just here on a bit of a business assignment, so as long as you guys keep all bein’ good little boys and girls for me…” 
“Sorry, not gonna happen. That’s why I’m here. Did you fire off those sonar bursts?” 
“……” 
Emi, the wind to her back, chose her words carefully. For now, she had no clear signal that the angels, as Urushihara theorized, were after Laila. 
“Do you remember the girl who knew all about us? That sonar put her in a coma.” 
“Huh? Really?” 
Was that an honest expression of surprise, or just Gabriel being Gabriel? Either way, the natural-born class clown of heaven’s face betrayed sheer dismay. He opened his mouth and took a deep breath. 
“Hehhh-choooo!!” 
Rather a lot of force behind that one. 
Then, at that moment, Gabriel vanished from Emi’s view, her sword left jabbing at emptiness. 
“…!!” 
“Mommy! Not there!” 
Following the holy force, Emi whirled her sword behind her back. 
“‘Bzzzt’!” 
Then she felt a finger against the back of her head. 
“Bang! I win.” 
“……” 
The Better Half’s blade sliced through nothing but the fog of holy power Gabriel unleashed as a decoy. The real Gabriel was behind her, upside down in the air, putting his finger against Emi’s head like a pistol. 
“Maybe I don’t have much of a chance with your sword from the front. But I can always skin this cat another way, right?” 
She could sense the holy energy surging into his finger. 
“…You gonna kill me and take Alas Ramus?” 
Emi’s voice was almost lost in the high-altitude wind. 
“Oh, of course not! Now why would I do that when I don’t even know how that child’s fused with you? I’d be super double screwed if I killed her, too!” 
Suddenly, the holy force rapidly dwindled, the murderous rage she sensed behind her head disappearing. 
“Instead…can you tell me more about that girl in the coma?” 
“Huh?” 
“’Cause all I did was make sure the test broadcasts from this tower didn’t interfere with what Tokyo Tower was transmitting. Didn’t want that to dilute our sonar’s accuracy. I don’t know how Raguel was actually firing that stuff off, really. He didn’t say anything about it knocking the people of this world unconscious.” 
Emi turned her head, never letting her guard down for a moment. She tried her best to stare down Gabriel, although she found it slow going, considering his current inverted state. 
“It’s that girl, huh? Chiho Sasaki? That cute girl who’s gone all ‘teen romance’ for the Devil King? She works at the same place he does, doesn’t she? I think Sariel mentioned that.” 
“Why do you care about that? Are you gonna kidnap Chiho and treat her like a lab animal? The way Sariel wanted to?” 
“Uh…? He was trying to do that?” 
Gabriel wiped his nose, then used the momentum to feverishly shake his head, arms wide open. 
“Did you honestly think I’m that depraved, too? ’Cause that really hurts, my dear. I just wanna know what that girl’s suffering from, is all.” 
“…Why do you want to know so badly?” 
Gabriel scratched one of his cheeks awkwardly. 
“Wellllll… Maybe I don’t wanna get so directly involved the way Sariel did, but I guess we both wanna know a little, y’know? I mean, you know how folks on Earth research stuff like evolution and genes and all that, right?” 
Something about Gabriel’s phrasing disgusted him. She was leaning over his face now, not bothering to hide her frustrated rage. 
“You expect me to tell you after saying that to me?” 
“…Is that a ‘nah’? Though given everything we’ve done to you guys, I guess it’s a bit much to sit down and have a nice chat over coffee at this point, huh? So how ’bout we do a little business instead, pray tell?” 
“Business?” 
A particularly strong gust of wind blew Emi’s long hair into the dark sky. 
“I’ll even pay in advance! I’ll leak a couple of particularly tasty tidbits to you first. Then you can decide for yourself whether you wanna talk about Chiho Sasaki or not.” 
“…Like you can prove you’re not lying through your teeth. I’m not gonna sell my friends over some story the enemy plants into my brain.” 
“That’s why I saaaaid, you can decide for yourself! Talk or not, it’s all good in the ’hood! I’ve got a sneakin’ suspicion you’ll consider it, though, once I’m done.” 
Finally taking the time to put himself right side up, Gabriel gave his wings a light flap as he landed on the roof of the observation deck. 
“For example, what if I told you that your father…that Nord Justina is still alive?” 
“Wha…?!” 
The unexpected angle the words took on the way to Emi’s ears made the shock clear upon her face. The reaction seemed to cheer Gabriel up noticeably. He chuckled a bit from deep down in his throat. 
“Wanna hear more?” 
“…ah.” 
Emi wasn’t allowed the time to formulate a response. 
“Oh, wait…wait, get away from me, get… Geh-shooo!” 
His entire head twisted in pain, no longer able to stem the tide rising from his chest, Gabriel sneezed heartily upon Emi’s face. 
“…………” 
The gusting wind chilled the completely unwelcome liquid particles that now covered Emi’s cheek. 
“Hngh!” 
The young woman lowered the butt of her sword onto Gabriel’s head. 
“Gahh! Ugh, my eyes… They’re pounding…” 
“Keep it short, and I’ll listen to you. But if Alas Ramus thinks you’re lying, I’ll help your head kiss your ass good-bye for you.” 
“Oh, jeez, lady…! Why d’you have to treat both me and the demons like we’re some kinda plague…?” 
A quick glance at Gabriel’s blubbering countenance gave her all the reassurance she needed. 
“I show my foes zero kindness. And that goes double for Alas Ramus’s foes.” 
The archangel raised both hands up in a surrender posture. 
Five minutes later, the two of them were inside the freshly constructed observation deck. 
The lack of wind made things blessedly warmer for both. 
Masking sheets were draped here and there on the walls and floor. The space was still clearly a work in progress. 
“Hey, I think it’s gotten a lot warmer. You want some?” 
Gabriel took a can of coffee out from somewhere within his toga. He showed it to Emi. 
“Mommy, no drink! He’s mean!” 
Alas Ramus, her animosity for Gabriel clearer than ever, was now materialized and hovering around Emi’s legs. 
Emi didn’t need the warning. There was no telling what Gabriel used to warm that can up. 
“Oh, come onnn! I didn’t spike it or anything, okay?” 
Gabriel tried to defend himself. But poison wasn’t the issue to Emi. 
“Sorry, but I’m not interested in accepting food or drink from people outside of this world. Tea’s fine by me, so just say what you’re gonna say and get your ass back to heaven.” 
“Jeez, what a slave driverrrr! Y’know, it’s funny, though. That myth about ‘oooh, no, don’t eat anything from the afterlife, you’ll never come baaaaack!’ The same thing in Earth and Ente Isla, huh?” 
Gabriel, not looking particularly offended, popped the top off his can of low-sugar coffee. 
“Oooooh, this hits the spot…” 
He remained unhurried, as always. She knew this was all part of his strategy, but she found herself tapping her fingernails against the wall regardless. 
“I’m not here for light conversation, Gabriel. If you want anything from me, talk about my father now.” 
“Oh, you’ll listen?” 
“If I think you’re lying, it ends. Right there.” 
“Don’t lie to Mommy!” 
Being accused of deceit in stereo by a mother-daughter pair was enough to deflate even Gabriel’s monstrous ego. 
“…Well, like I said, you can listen to me, and then you decide what to do, all right? I’ve got things to tell you about besides Nord Justina, anyway.” 
Gabriel held the coffee can lovingly in both hands. 
“So, listen. Heaven’s, like, about thiiiiis close to being pretty well cut in two, yeah? It’s like nothing ever before… Well, okay, not nothing ever before, but we’re talking, like, maaaaybe once every thousand years or so. And your mom and dad…and where you came from, too…plays a huuuuge role in it.” 
“…I don’t need reams of exposition, okay? Just cut to the chase. I get that this guy Raguel is pursuing my mom Laila, for whatever reason. …Did my family do something to piss you guys off, or…?” 
“Oooh, not exactly that, but I do think y’all kinda went out of your way to make life difficult for us.” 
Gabriel smiled weakly, taking great care not to let his true thoughts come to the surface. 
“But really, Laila and Nord are just one facet of it all. I mean, if you don’t mind a little angel straight talk for a sec, there’s you, there’s the Devil King Satan, there’s that Yesod fragment… And why stop there, even? There’s Lucifer, there’s that cleric chick in the kimono, there’s Satan’s ever-faithful lapdog… And Chiho Sasaki, too. They’re all involved now. And, eesh, you could also say that for everybody else on Earth, huh?” 
“Didn’t I just tell you to keep it short?” 
Emi remained peeved. 
“All right, all right! What, you got a plane to catch or something? I’m just tryin’ to set everything up so you realize how mind-blowing it all is when I open the curtain.” 
Gabriel’s eyes turned down toward his can of coffee. 
“But first off… Just to be sure we’re on the same page and all, we angels…we’re not exactly strangers to this world.” 
“Huh?” 
“Our job descriptions, you know, they can be summed up pretty easily. If something poses a danger to heaven, we do whatever it takes to avoid it. Simple, huh? I know it’s extreme, but we really don’t care how many people the Devil King’s army kills down on Ente Isla. As long as it doesn’t put heaven in danger, hakuna matata, baby. Do a poll around heaven—they’re all gonna say that.” 
It was a candidly worded statement, but it had the power to send any religious man or woman on Ente Isla into hysterics. 
“So, like, when the demons got pushed out of Ente Isla, you got blown all the way to Earth, right, Emilia? And once that happened, you officially became a certified, bona-fide danger to heaven.” 
“How delightful to hear. Why?” 
“Aw, don’t you remember, lady? Like, when I told you to think again a little about what you really are?” 
It was true. It had been one of his parting shots after nobly fleeing their first battle over Alas Ramus. 
“What I really am?” 
“Yeah. Ummm… This might not really be the best example, but maybe it’ll help you understand a little more. Like…you know how people and chimps can’t interbreed, right?” 
“Huhh?!” 
Emi’s eyebrows arched high upward. It wasn’t the sort of question she expected. 
“Well… Yeah. Of course not!” 
“Why not?” 
“Why… Well, why do you think? They’re different types of animals.” 
“They’re both primates, right? Like, humans are really close to monkeys that way. Different breeds of dogs and cats mate and produce offspring all the time, right?” 
“That’s because their genes are a lot closer to each other! I mean, there’s still some debate about the structure of human and chimp genes, but the theory that there’s only a few percentage points of difference between them’s still just a theory!” 
“Ooh, you’re a lot better read up on genes than I am. Nerrrrrd!” 
“It…it was just something I saw on TV a while ago!” 
“Wow! The Hero goes channel surfing, huh? Wait’ll I tell the folks back home about that!” 
Gabriel eyed Emi for a moment, as if silently gloating over his little jab. 
“But anyway, what you’re saying, Hero, is that humans and chimps can’t produce children because they’re too disparate from each other.” 
“Yes! What are you getting at?!” 
“So why are a human and an angel any different?” 
Time stopped. 
It was the perfect—really, the only—way to describe that instant. 
“…What…are you…?” 
“You’re the daughter of Laila, an angel, and Nord Justina, a human. That much I guarantee is true, so don’t start doubting that on me, too, all right? That’s the whole reason you’re a danger to heaven right now, besides.” 
“H-how so…?” 
“…Y’know, I think you put it best just a second ago. There’s nothing that disparate about them. You’re totally right.” 
Gabriel spread his arms out wide. The sudden flourish made the remaining content of his coffee can spill out a little, staining his toga. 
“In the realm of creatures, which do you think it is—are humans angels, or are angels humans?” 
“Which…? What do you…?” 
Are angels…humans? 
The wings folded behind him. The overwhelming aura of holy force. The blue-tinged silver hair and deep blue eyes. As long as she ignored the coffee stain, Gabriel clearly wasn’t human. 
But. 
“You guys… For whatever reason, you just decided that heaven and the angels were these crazy, supernatural things, no? And as an angel, I’m not gonna deny that, exactly. But supernatural? No. I mean, if anything’s supernatural here…” 
Gabriel looked at the small figure in Emi’s grasp, her eyes still transfixed upon him in a hostile glare. 
“It’s her.” 
The girl just labeled by an archangel as “supernatural” stood up in Emi’s arms, trying to protect her mommy with her own body, and gave her best attempt at a threatening snarl. 
“Ooo…” 
Her challenge wasn’t that threatening. 
Emi, still attempting to process everything, realized her legs were shaking. Gabriel wasn’t prepared to wait for her. 
“But really, that’s just the opening act, y’know? The real meat of it comes after that. And the fact we angels don’t take action unless heaven’s in danger has a lot to do with it. We got two sides kinda fighting over how to define that, if you follow me, and so Raguel’s stepped up to make everyone march to the beat of a single drummer again. And the way Raguel decides to settle that little question… Well, he’s got a lot of stuff to consider.” 
Gabriel seemed to enjoy this now, directly addressing the colorless Emi. 
“Like, for one, I’m pretty sure your dad’s here on Earth, along with your mom. And depending on Raguel’s judgment, he might face the long arm of heavenly law before long, too.” 
 
The lights were out in Room 305 of Seikai University Hospital. 
The only illumination came from the crack under the hallway door and a flashing LED that indicated the location of the NURSE-CALL button. 
That—and another, dimmer light, deeper inside. It was purple in color and had an odd warmth to it. Only the snores of the nearby patients greeted it. 
“Mommm… You know I don’t like it when you put peas on top of my pork dumplings…” 
Chiho, voice clearly still half asleep, sat up in bed. She tossed the covers aside, the last memory she had still fresh in her mind. “Ah! Sorry, Mom! I kinda fell asleep so I forgot to turn on the…rice…?” 
She blinked at the wholly unfamiliar walls, the ceiling, the window. Then she turned around, sensing someone whispering something into her ear. 
“Huh…? A hospital?” 
Then she noticed her cell phone by the bed. The battery must’ve run out on it. The back panel wasn’t displaying the time. 
Chiho puzzled over this for a moment. Then it came to her. She had had this whispering experience before. 
Carefully, she sized up her surroundings. The voice sounded like it wasn’t even two feet away from her. But there was nobody nearby. She didn’t expect a response, but Chiho went ahead and asked anyway. 
“Um…Albert? Or is it…Emeralda, maybe?” 
Suddenly, the phone she thought was dead lit up in a dazzling pattern, something Chiho knew she never configured herself. 
This wasn’t a call, or a new text. But something, to be sure, was accessing her phone. 
Gingerly, Chiho picked it up and opened it. The screen was jet-black. She brought the phone to her ear, doubting her sanity as she did. 
“Uh…hello?” 
She was rewarded with a female voice on the other end. What it had to say defied expectation. 
“Oh, what do you mean, don’t be so picky?” Chiho replied. “I mean, whoever decided to pair up pork dumplings with peas must be some kind of devil spawn! Maybe the demons like it, but I’ll take shrimp or corn any day!” 
She had commented on Chiho’s half-awake murmurings. There were two occasions that Chiho would voluntarily eat peas: If someone cooked them into a dish without knowing any better, and if all food except for peas was eradicated from the planet. 
The voice didn’t seem to be making fun of her, but Chiho’s face reddened in the darkness anyway. She had let a total stranger know about her childish food hang-ups. 
Then the voice directed Chiho to look at her left hand. Only then did Chiho realize she was wearing an unfamiliar ring. 
“My left hand? …Oh, wait, is this one of those things? A Yesod fragment?” 
She chuckled to herself a little. With everything that had been happening to her lately, her shock threshold was pretty high. The voice seemed suitably impressed. 
“…Satan? Oh, you mean Maou… Huh? Oh. Where in Tokyo? …Okay.” 
The conversation continued for a few moments. The tenseness in Chiho’s voice gradually disappeared. 
“All right. I’ll try and help you out. …Huh? No, not scared, really. Kinda nervous, but…” 
She smiled. 
“I mean, all the demons and angels and Ente Islans around me… They’d all deny it, but they really get along pretty well, so. …Hmm? Oh, not really. Like, what would trying to trick me accomplish for anyone on that world? If that’s what the game is, it’d be a lot quicker and easier to just kidnap me like Olba did.” 
The light from Chiho’s ring flickered a bit, as if tittering to itself. 
“…Weapons? Well, I don’t know if I’d really call it a weapon…” 
Chiho made a fist in the air, demonstrating her resolve to her invisible partner. 
“But I’ve been doing kyudo for a while, so I think I’m pretty decent with a bow!” 
 
“Hey… You think he’s really here?” 
“Don’t ask me.” 
Maou and Ashiya made their way down yet another Tokyo Tower stairway, the fatigue starkly written across their faces. 
It being the dead of summer vacation, the entire tower was crawling with visitors. The trauma of his experience in Tokyo City Hall was fresh enough on Maou’s mind that he successfully convinced his cohort to start by taking the elevator all the way up, then running back down the stairs to conduct the search. 
But even the journey up to the observation decks was enough to nauseate Maou. The crowds seemed to ripple and undulate around him, and every square inch of the observation space was filled with people, people, people. 
It was impossible for the two of them to check up on everyone present. And there wasn’t a speck of holy force nearby, either. 
Since they had no idea who, or what, was generating those holy sonar pulses, they went through the trouble of standing in line for each and every one of the coin-operated binocular stands. They studied the in-room displays intently, knowing they were getting in the way of other people as they did, trying to find some clue as to how the tower’s TV equipment was connected to the sonar. 
Their efforts were fruitless on both decks they examined. And from the one stand that offered a view of Tokyo Skytree, they saw no sign that Emi was waging any sort of battle over there. 
“If he’s eating dinner at the ground-floor restaurant or something, I’m gonna make him inhale soda up his nose.” 
Maou and Ashiya, grumbling in a sort-of threatening, sort-of ridiculous manner, trudged their way downstairs. The little signs showing the calories you’d burn based on how many steps you’ve taken were proving to be too much irritating trivia even for Maou’s tastes. 
Unlike the Skytree, Tokyo Tower was lit up at all times, making it all but impossible to hide in a convenient shadow. And there was no sign of anyone suspicious trying to hide in the scaffolding around the observation decks, either. 
Which meant the only possibilities were that their target was even higher up than what the observation deck allowed, or posing as a figure in the wax museum perched underneath the tower. 
“If you think about it, my liege, this sonar signal isn’t something that is being constantly broadcast… The chances of this Raguel remaining here at all hours of the day might be rather low, actually.” 
Ashiya’s theory seemed to make sense. 
Even if he could keep himself in Devil King form, not even Maou was too willing to hang out in this maze of metal beams, exposed to the elements, unless he had some damn important business. 
“Yeah, but…what now, then?” 
“I am afraid we have little data to work with, but if the sonar truly is the culprit behind that incident at Socket City, that means the two sonar events today occurred five or six hours apart from each other. Which means…” 
“The next one’s coming at midnight or so? I can’t wait that long!” 
“Why not, Your Demonic Highness?” 
“Um?” 
Maou was puzzled at Ashiya’s confusion. 
“Assuming we can trust Bell, Ms. Sasaki should be safe for the time being. And while I hate to make Socket City lose any more inventory for our sakes, there won’t be quite as many TVs on at midnight. As long as we can find a way to convince Ms. Sasaki’s parents not to turn on the TV tonight, I think it safe enough to wait it out.” 
Maou looked reluctant to accept this. “Whether Chi’s fine or not… If we let them launch another bolt and that gets certain other things involved, that’s gonna be bad for me.” 
“Hmm?” 
“I…I want to hear him out. What he’s got to say. Now that I’m Devil King and Ente Isla’s already slipped outta my hands… If I let heaven get a leg up on me like this, I’ll have even less of a chance than before.” 
“My liege?” 
Ashiya failed to follow Maou’s concern. Maou ignored his servant’s puzzled face as he took out his cell phone and called Suzuno. 
“Kamazuki speaking.” 
“Yeah, we did the rounds around Tokyo Tower, but we didn’t spot anyone. How’s Emi doing? She tell you anything yet?” 
“I cannot say. She has yet to contact me. …Hmm? What?” 
“What is it?” 
“Lucifer is… Here. I’m putting him on.” 
Maou heard some scuffling about, followed by Urushihara’s shrill voice: “Nothing, dude?” 
“No. We’re startin’ to think maybe he’s not in the tower right now.” 
“Yeah, guess he wouldn’t have to be there all night.” 
“‘Maybe’ is the key thing. I mean, if we just sit here, he’ll have a chance to fire another sonar bolt. I dunno what to do.” 
“All right. You try calling Emilia yet?” 
“No. I was just about to. But as far as we could tell through the binoculars, it didn’t look like there was a fight goin’ on or anything. Plus, if she was duking it out right now, I could probably feel the holy force all the way from here anyway.” 
“Okay. I’ll see what kind of plan I can hatch. You mind staying where you are for now? I’ll call you later and letcha know if we see anything.” 
“What kind of plan? Like, what are you… Hey!! Ugh, the bastard hung up on me!” 
“What is wrong, my liege?” 
“I dunno. It sounds like Urushihara’s got some kind of wacky-ass idea in mind that he’s not telling me about.” 
“That is certainly unsettling. Hopefully it does not involve dipping into our bank account again.” 
“What, you think he’s gonna call a detective or something? …Ugh. Let’s give him fifteen minutes. If I don’t hear from him by then, I’ll have everyone group back together somewhere or other.” 
Maou dropped his cell phone back into his pocket and began trudging back down the stairs, Ashiya following closely behind. 
 
Suzuno, following Urushihara, ran down the streets of the Yoyogi neighborhood. 
The moment Urushihara hung up, this was what he said to her: 
“I’m gonna lure the angel out. Give me a hand.” 
Then he ran off. No further details. 
“Lucifer! Where do you intend to go? We’re drifting away from the station!” 
The pair of them were stationed at Yoyogi precisely because it was a quick train ride from both Tokyo Tower and the Skytree. Without a handy station nearby, they had no easy mode of transport unless they tapped their supernatural powers—which they needed to conserve in case a fight broke out. 
“Hey… You and Emilia, you guys can refill your holy force, right? You got some kind of method handy for that?” 
“…What do you mean?” 
A capped bottle of 5-Holy Energy ? was at the ready somewhere in Suzuno’s kimono. But she had little intention of revealing the secret to the Devil’s Castle. 
“We can’t find Raguel. We have to, before he can fire off more of that sonar. But we can’t. And we got no time to call Emilia back here. So you do it.” 
“Do what? What are you even bidding me to do?” 
Suzuno looked up into the air once Urushihara finally stopped. 
There was a needlelike tower before them, dark and smooth as an obelisk. It loomed large in the dark cityscape, the moon framing it from behind as four red warning lights flashed on each corner of its roof. It bore a company logo that Suzuno was familiar with. 
“You know, I never really wanted a TV in the first place. Who needs it? If you got the Net and maaaybe a cell phone, that’s way more than enough.” 
“This, this is hardly open to the public at time like this, is it?!” 
Urushihara brushed off Suzuno’s flustered hesitation. 
“Startin’ to see what I wanna do yet?” 
“I do, but if you break something or cause any other problems, the entire city will descend into panic!” 
“Yeah, dude. That’s why I’m having you do it. Not Emilia or Devil King–mode Maou. We don’t need to kill an archangel. Your power’s juuuust weak enough for the job.” 
“…I do not like your tone of voice. …I, er, that is not the problem, but… Ah! Lucifer!” 
Urushihara, unwilling to let Suzuno gripe at him for the next few minutes, made a beeline for the building entrance. 
A security guard attempted to stop him. As he should have. A young man in a wrinkled, sweat-stained T-shirt did not fit the profile for this building’s usual clientele. 
But, in a single glint of light from the purple eyes lurking underneath his long, unkempt hair, Urushihara completely disappeared from the guard’s sight. 
In front of the guard, stopped cold at this guy suddenly vanishing before his eyes, Urushihara turned around and motioned Suzuno to follow. Then he strode right into one of the landmark buildings of the Yoyogi neighborhood of Shibuya—the Yoyogi Dokodemo Building, usually referred to as the Dokodemo Tower. 
Suzuno followed behind, hesitant at first. But, remarkably enough, nobody lifted a finger to stop this dirty-T-shirt-wearing man and kimono-wearing woman, one of the oddest couples this building had likely ever seen. 
“If there’s a company that does as much high-frequency transmission as a TV network, it’s gotta be a cell phone company, right?” 
“W-wait, are you… Are you telling me to do what Raguel did…?” 
Urushihara nodded and smiled. 
“Yep. Fire a sonar bolt on Dokodemo’s cell phone frequencies. Use it to look for someone with more holy power than anyone in Japan’d normally have. One of the blips has got to be our angel.” 
“Wh-why did it have to be this…?” 
Suzuno shivered, hugging herself to stave off the cold. 
It was blisteringly hot at ground level, but up here, at the top of the 902-foot-high Dokodemo Tower, the base of the building’s microwave antenna was in the midst of a powerful, punishing gale. 
A kimono was a singularly inconvenient garment to wear in high winds. The flapping cloth was all but useless in keeping her skin insulated. 
“Okay.” 
Suddenly, Urushihara’s head popped out from an antenna maintenance corridor below, one usually restricted to company servicemen. A large map of Tokyo was in his hands, covered in frequencies and color-coded ranges. 
“I’ve tracked down the frequency that’ll reach the biggest chunk of greater Tokyo. Fire your sonar at the antenna and I’ll make sure it hits that frequency. But don’t touch it. It’ll burn ya.” 
Suzuno wondered blithely if Urushihara planned to put that map back where he found it after all this was done. Judging by the state of his computer desk, the answer was probably no. 
“And…and doing this won’t destroy some important computer somewhere, or somesuch?” 
“No, dude, it’ll be fine. I just suppressed part of their bandwidth to make room for your sonar, so hurry up before customers start bitching, okay?” 
“…All right! Let it be, then!” 
It was hard to tell exactly what Suzuno meant by it. But there wasn’t enough time to ask for clarification. 
Boosting the holy power within her body to its limits, Suzuno shot it at full force toward the antenna. 
“Holy Seeker!!” 
The moment the power flowing out of Suzuno’s hands fused itself with the microwave antenna, it shot in every direction outward, as if invisible electric lines spidered out from the installation. It formed an enormous ring of light, growing larger and larger, until its edges were several hundred feet away from Dokodemo Tower. Then it dissipated into the air, disappearing quickly. 
But even if the wave of holy power was impossible for a person to see or feel, just like the signals transmitted by their cell phone, it was definitely flying off, farther and farther away, and soon it would catch something. 
“Hn…nnnnh.” 
Holy Seeker, essentially a long-range method of detecting enemy positions, wasn’t a fire-and-forget weapon. Launching the wave was little more than taking some holy force here and tossing it over there. The trick was waiting, seeking out the responses that would wing their way back from the expanding wave. It was Suzuno’s job to keep her detection range as broad as possible, making sure the flow of power never stopped until she picked up something. But even though Suzuno wielded superhuman powers, that was still only compared to a normal human being. Her stores of holy force were like a can of baked beans compared to Emi’s fully stocked zombie apocalypse survival bunker. 
“I…I can’t…” 
If she kept letting the holy force pour out of her like this, she’d run dry in a matter of moments. 
“Nh!” 
With a groan, she thrust her hand into a pocket and took out her bottle of 5-Holy Energy ?. With a single thumb whip, just like in the TV ads, she uncorked the cap and downed the entire contents on the spot. 
“Whoooaaa, that thing, huh?” 
Urushihara, right next to her, grinned in wonder, like a squirrel discovering a new acorn. 
Suzuno was expecting to use the Light of Iron to jump down off the building once the job was done. That was on the back burner now. She had to use her recharged power to hang on until she picked up a response. 
“…There!!” 
Finally, the ring of Holy Seeker light came through for her. 
Running through the wave of holy force, an unseen sensation, like a mild electric shock, shot across the Dokodemo Tower antenna and into Suzuno’s body. 
At that moment, she let her concentration break, heaving a mighty sigh as the sweat poured down her face. 
“There’s one about four miles southeast of here…two about nine miles east-northeast…one very faint reaction just southwest of here.” 
Urushihara eyed the map in hand disapprovingly as Suzuno gasped out her report. 
“Southwest of here is Sasazuka. I don’t know why it’s so weak, but that’s gotta be Sariel. Four miles southeast would be Tokyo Tower, I’m pretty sure, and nine miles east-northeast is near the Skytree. If Emilia and Alas Ramus are one of the Skytree blips, then… Yeaaaah, better call Maou. Someone’s gotta be in the—” 
“And…one more…” 
“Huh?” 
The sweat streaming down her body, Suzuno deftly extracted the large pin holding her hair in place. With a flash of light, it transformed into a gigantic hammer, settling into Suzuno’s graceful hands. 
Urushihara reared back for a moment, fearful that Suzuno’s patience for being ordered around without explanation had finally wore a little too thin. But she paid him no mind as she approached the edge of the antenna installation. 
“Here.” 
“Dude?!” 
“Brace yourself, Lucifer. Something, I know not what, is approaching.” 
Suzuno probed the night scenery of Yoyogi below with her eyes. 
There was a light among the cars, just slightly stronger than their headlights. With a flicker, it zoomed upward, following the contours of Dokodemo Tower’s outer wall. 
“It’s coming!” 
“Wh-what is?!” 
Urushihara was about as unprepared to battle as any demon could be. Suzuno reared back from the edge and steeled herself, ready for whatever this attack could bring, ready and able to bash whatever confronted her in the head with everything she had as she focused her remaining holy force. 
Her foe was closely hugging the building’s wall. She might have to prepare for aerial combat, given that. 
Then, the whooshing of the wind changed in tone. 
“…!!” 
Suzuno was left speechless. 
Urushihara was similarly frozen, his frenzied panic now a thing of the past. 
Someone they weren’t expecting in a million years was now floating in front of them. 
The wide-open eyes of the figure, surrounded by a faintly glowing golden light, were also a change of pace from usual. 
They were purple, like Urushihara’s or Sariel’s. 
But any otherworldly mystery these deep-violet eyes might have projected to the viewer was somewhat ruined by the flowery light-pink pajamas and the green slippers with faded golden lettering on them that read SEIKAI UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL. 
“Ch-Chiho?!” 
“Dude, what the hell?!” 
It was Chiho, right where she really shouldn’t have been. 
“Oh! Hi, guys!” 
The two “guys” were shocked, to be sure, but Chiho didn’t seem to anticipate running into them, either. With a hand to her ear, she began talking to…someone. 
“This isn’t the right place! …Huh? Oh, uh, really?” 
They had no idea who she was addressing. Urushihara began to wonder if Chiho, clearly enveloped in holy force, had unlocked some latent magical ability he didn’t know she had. 
“An Idea Link?” 
“Huh? Oh, not that! I got some earbuds from Socket City with a mike attached to them. It was kinda weird going in the store in this outfit, but…” 
“…Oh.” 
Urushihara, finally noticing the black cord wending its way from Chiho’s pajama pocket to her ears, fell to his knees. Suzuno, now agitated to the point where she was spitting out her words, addressed Chiho. 
“That doesn’t matter! Chiho, what on Earth has happened to you?!” 
“Um, I don’t really have time to explain! Was that you who fired that sonar shot from here, Suzuno?” 
“Y-yes.” 
Suzuno barely managed a nod. Having Chiho glowing a radiant gold as she asked the question was causing both of them serious confusion. 
“Okay, uh, I guess you probably shouldn’t do that? Like, it’s kind of bad, apparently?” 

“Huh?” Suzuno replied. 
“She’s saying you shouldn’t rock the world’s balance from one side only, or else everything’ll get all messed up.” 
“Dude, Chiho Sasaki, who’re you talking to?” The sharp-eyed Urushihara focused squarely on Chiho. “There’s no way you should know about that. Who’s on the other end of your line?” 
This question, oddly enough, made Chiho rear back a little, obviously reluctant to answer—almost in tears about it, it seemed. 
“Um, she…she told me to tell you ‘take a hike, you total dimwit.’” 
“Huhh?! What the hell?!” 
“It-it’s not me! She’s, um, she’s telling me what to do through this thing…” 
The rare sight of Chiho half-hysterically trying to defend herself against Urushihara brought order back to Suzuno’s mind. 
Between Chiho’s ring and what Emi had said earlier, it was clear that whoever overloaded Chiho’s power with all this holy force without any ill side effects couldn’t have been on Gabriel’s side. 
But the Chiho who greeted them wasn’t under anyone’s control. She was Chiho Sasaki, the same one Suzuno knew well by now. 
So she, along with whomever she had on the phone, must be here on some sort of mission. But instead of asking for an explanation, Suzuno lifted her hammer, and in the blink of an eye, brought it down. 
“Wave-Rending Light!!” 
“Eek!” 
A shock wave whizzed past Chiho as she balled herself up out of fright. Suzuno, following her own salvo, leaped off the Dokodemo Building into the night sky. The wave released by her hammer, so deftly handled by her dainty arms, flew in from the darkness…and effortlessly blew away the four balls of light that were, just then, rapidly advancing upon Chiho’s back. 
“…The Heavenly Regiment!” 
“Ohhh, yeah, guess Gabriel was coming and all, huh?” 
Urushihara and Suzuno glared upward at the four shadows in the air, in the direction the balls of light came from. 
“None of you move!” 
The Regiment, the soldiers of heaven and servants of Gabriel, had their swords at the ready, floating defiantly in the air as they tried to deter their opponents. 
“…Chiho. Once you do what you must here, you may safely leave these men to us.” 
Suzuno’s hammer remained at the ready. 
“Oh, uh, but…” 
“What mission brought you here, and granted you that power? …I suppose we have no time to discuss it in detail, however. And I doubt you have gained the powers of a first-tier warrior in the course of a single evening. The Devil King and Alciel are at Tokyo Tower. Emilia is at the Skytree.” 
“Um… Okay!” 
Chiho, glowing gold, brought both arms in front of her. 
The area between her palms lit up for a moment, and then Chiho spread them out to her sides. 
She pulled her right hand all the way back behind her ear, bringing her left out front at just about the same height, pointer finger extended. 
Urushihara noticed that the ring on her left index finger was glowing the same shade of purple as her eyes. 
Then, from thin air, Chiho produced a silvery bow of light. 
Her pose, the kai stage of traditional Japanese archery that signified the final moment before the arrow was released, would remind onlookers of a lunar goddess from mythology if it weren’t for the flower-print pajamas and slippers she had technically just stolen from the hospital. 
“Maou’s at Tokyo Tower, you said?” 
She was turning to Urushihara for confirmation. He nodded. A small smile found its way to Chiho’s face. 
“Seelku etulo louseetoh!” 
In her voice, in a language she couldn’t possibly have understood, Chiho fired an arrow of light toward the Dokodemo antenna, just as Suzuno had done a moment prior. 
It was the light of Holy Seeker, one infused with enough holy power to make Suzuno’s seem like a children’s game. She had spoken in Holy Vezian, using words that meant “Holy Seeker” in the sacred language. 
Arcing streaks of gold light, each retaining a clear shape in the dark landscape, spread out from the Dokodemo Tower into the sky. 
Unlike Suzuno’s, the light streamed out across the heavens, never losing its luster or brilliance as it radiated across the Tokyo nightscape. 
“I’ll explain everything later! Just be careful for now!” 
And with those parting words, Chiho shot like a comet east-northeast toward Tokyo Skytree. 
“Halt!!” 
The Heavenly Regiment attempted to give chase. They did not get far. 
“You are here to fight me!” 
In the air above the Yoyogi Dokodemo obelisk, Suzuno stood strong against the four pairs of wings. 
“You aimed those spheres of holy light toward Chiho, did you not? And your eyes, as you even now attempted to give chase, were nothing I would ever call angelic. What are you possibly doing?” 
Suzuno, a ferocious grin on her face, looked up at the “angels” she once prostrated herself before. 
“If you act against mankind, wearing the mask of all that is holy…then it is time for me to correct this!!” 
“Uh, Bell, if I could, uh, say something…” 
Suzuno stopped Urushihara before he could continue from his perch next to the antenna. 
“I know,” she said. “But if you attempt to lead a flock doing only what you are told to do, you never truly feel the pain of your errors. You cannot regret your mistakes in any true fashion.” 
“Uh, what?” 
“Their actions hurt innocent people and caused untold damage to other worlds. This is an error that no angel would ever dare commit. Thus, I must correct it.” 
The four angels in the Heavenly Regiment, clearly ready for battle, couldn’t help but look confused at this. 
“Sheathe thy weapon, human! We are the Heavenly Regiment, in the service of the archangel Gabriel! Thy foolish behavior goes against the will of our God and the teachings of the holy—” 
“Silence, vulgar philistines!” 
“…?!” 
Being called “vulgar philistines” by a human clearly agitated the Regiment. 
But one didn’t have to be Suzuno to break out that sentiment. They looked suitably angelic during the previous visit to Villa Rosa Sasazuka, but now, with their T-shirts and hoodies clearly visible under their togas, the way they were half-acclimating to Japanese culture presented a less-than-divine image. 
Perhaps the angels knew it. Perhaps that was what agitated them the most. 
“Do not speak to me about the will of our God! Our God speaks of loving thy neighbor! How would he dare allow an innocent girl, and the peaceful land she lives in, to face this pointless violence? And you, so freely using the divine as an excuse to hurt someone…” 
Then, Suzuno planted a foot on the obelisk and flew into the Shinjuku night. 
“Who do you think you are?!” 
Hammer in hand, her internal holy power burning, the former Death Scythe of the Council of Inquisitors all but overwhelmed the four angelic servants facing her. 
“Fall back, Heavenly Regiment! Your judgment begins now!” 
She pointed her hammer straight toward the angels ahead, her long hair shining dully in the air. 
“One! Thy master’s behavior has hurt innocent people and property. By the values of justice the Church is rooted in, I beseech thee to take proper atonement! Two! Provide one good reason why you have attempted to harm sensible, God-fearing Church members without warning! I have laid these two sins bare before the face of our God as I shall attempt to make you atone for—Hoh!” 
The Regiment did not bother to listen to Suzuno’s oratory to the end. 
Wordlessly, they drew the same swords they had challenged her with once before and lunged forward. 
Not panicking, in full control of herself, she stopped the swords with the hilt of her Light of Iron. 
These were not that same as Emi’s holy sword, Sariel’s great scythe, or Gabriel’s Durandal. These were made of simple tempered steel, completely normal in nature. 
Urushihara, watching from the Dokodemo Building roof, whistled his admiration. 
“Dang. Pretty intense.” 
“You? The child of a human, laying judgment upon the servants of heaven? You make me laugh!” 
“Oh, do I? An archangel, one formerly of your ranks, came begging to me for confession, for holy mercy! But, regardless…” 
Suzuno grinned as she swung her hammer to deflect a sword away. 
Using the resulting recoil to spin her weapon around, Suzuno aimed it squarely at the back of one angelic soldier. 
“Star-Rending Light!” 
“Krahh!” 
It did not send the soldier flying. Instead, the explosive force from her body sent him up in the air, eyes lolling lazily as he fell on to the roof where Urushihara was standing. 
“Let your guard down, and even the child of a human can defeat you.” 
Suzuno swung her hammer three times in the air before letting it come to rest on her shoulder. 
“I am using my holy force to overload my physical form. I created this move in the hopes of quelling the demon hordes, originally…but so be it. Who will be next? Or will you instead meekly accept my judgment and admit to your mistakes with—Oh, I suppose not, hmm?” 
The remaining three soldiers attacked as one, the gist of the question already clear enough to them. 
Their swords, coming from three different directions, were all blocked by the round edge of Suzuno’s hammer. Then: 
“Wha!” 
“Yow!” 
The soldiers and Urushihara let out a simultaneous cry of surprise. 
She wrapped up the blades in her kimono, grabbing them all with her bare hands, then kicked them with the heel of a sandaled right foot that brimmed with holy power. 
Her assailants found their allegedly galvanized swords, along with most of the bones around their right wrists, thoroughly shattered. 
“We had best take our garbage with us. Sharp fragments falling from this height could cause serious injury.” 
Suzuno looked almost serene as she deposited the now-useless blade and scabbard shards into a sleeve. 
“Now. I have given you two chances to relent. There will not be another one. The great Buddha that is found here is willing to forgive people’s sins three times. Myself, I am not so patient. Twice is all I have time for.” 
She readied her hammer with both hands and let out a small breath. 
“!!” 
The angels had no time to react. 
A holy-power-infused heel kicked through the air, making a sound like a mortar. The noise took them by surprise, drawing their attention away from Suzuno. While it did, the kimono-clad cleric in front of them suddenly veered behind their backs. 
The next instant, after alighting behind them, Suzuno leaped once more, showing her own back to the soldiers in the blink of an eye. Her foes, expecting a hammer strike, blinked helplessly as they felt nothing more than a passing wind against their bare skin. 
Suzuno, slicing the wind with her hammer as she used her free left hand to wrangle her hair back into a recognizable shape, returned her Light of Iron to its hairpin form like a samurai returning his sword to its sheath. Then, with a caress of her hair, she clicked it back in place. 
“Dance of Light: Phoenix Transcending.” 
Everything changed. 
Three shock waves of holy light echoed across the Shinjuku night sky. 
The three angels, unable to withstand the wave of force from within, were knocked out instantly, just as the one before them was. As a group, they fell to the Dokodemo Building roof, directly next to Urushihara. 
“Do not take humans lightly. Taste the pain of living.” 
“Ooh, scary.” 
Urushihara was very unironically shaking. 
Ignoring him, Suzuno wiped the sweat of battle from her brow. She extracted a piece of debris from under her sleeve and examined it. 
“But…how am I to think of this? What are angels, in the end?” 
There was no Holy Silver gilding the swords these warriors of heaven wielded. It was not some mystery supermetal beyond human reckoning. 
It was plain old iron. A metal Suzuno interacted with on a daily basis. 
“Hey! Bell! Is there something else coming?!” 
Suzuno turned, puzzled. 
“…?” 
She looked up, folding a sleeve so that its contents did not fall out. 
Something was drawing toward them, from the faraway edges of the sky. 
It looked like one of the bolts of light Chiho had unleashed a moment ago. But something was accompanying it. 
What Chiho unleashed differed in appearance from Suzuno’s, but it was a sort of sonar all the same. Then, perhaps, this was the “reaction”—a signal that the caster had found to indicate what he or she was looking for. 
But was the signal it carried…within? 
“Ngh…!” 
Suzuno instinctively steeled herself. It couldn’t be. 
Chiho had fired a bolt of holy force just now. That was undeniable fact. And yet. 
“Demonic force?!” 
The belt of golden demonic power extending above the dumbfounded Suzuno’s and Urushihara’s heads flew southeast. 
“…Huh?” 
As the streak passed them by, Suzuno felt something small—trivial, perhaps, but clearly malicious—lift itself from her body. 
 
“What in the hell did Urushihara just do?” 
Maou and Ashiya were standing in front of a bathroom mirror inside Tower Leg Town, a shopping complex spread out underneath Tokyo Tower, around the main elevator to the observation deck. 
Ten or so minutes after Urushihara hung up on them, Maou and Ashiya felt an ominous premonition as their hair stood on end once more, as if someone was playing some static electricity-oriented practical joke on them. 
“Any messages, my liege?” 
“No, nothing.” 
Neither of them were vain or greaser-y enough to carry a tub of gel around at all times, so the two of them were now in the john, trying to wet their hair down to socially acceptable levels. 
Nobody knew what was going on. That went double for Ashiya, who had been struck by Suzuno’s sonar twice in the course of a day. 
“Eesh. Emi isn’t calling me, Raguel’s nowhere to be seen… Why did we even come here?” 
The two of them moaned at each other as their hair finally calmed down a little. Gloomy, they left the bathroom as they looked back at the Tower, which they had just spent far too much time going up, then back down, to no avail. 
The masses around the tower still showed zero sign of dissipating. The idea of having to find someone in this crowd without knowing what he looked like filled them with fatigued irritation. Then: 
“…Hey, Ashiya, do you sense that?” 
“Yes… I have a bad feeling about this.” 
The pair exchanged uneasy looks. It was just like the last time their hair went all pointy—a sense of dizziness mixed with dread, not unlike unrelenting seasickness. 
Then someone from the crowd pointed at the sky. 
“Whoa, what’s that? A shooting star?!” 
Maou and Ashiya joined the rabble as they all looked upward. A single streak in the sky was coming in from the south. Maou’s Devil King experience helped him spot it right off. 
“Holy energy… Was that what made me go all tingly? Emi?” 
“Your Demonic Highness, if Emi ever heard you say her presence made you ‘all tingly,’ it may very well be your head. Besides”—Ashiya pointed his own finger upward as he enigmatically chided his leader—“I think the source of our consternation might be behind that, actually.” 
Maou knew what he meant well in advance. 
A streak of gold was coursing along behind the shooting star, zooming downward as if ready to envelop all of Tokyo Tower. 
As it eddied around the tower, it gradually formed itself into an enormous circle of light. 
This was nothing natural. Yet, there couldn’t have been any spellcaster left in Japan capable of unleashing it. 
“W-wow! What kinda trick is that?!” 
“The northern lights?!” 
“There aren’t any northern lights in Tokyo! Maybe it’s fireworks or something!” 
Maou steeled himself, ready either for a fight or for the crowd to erupt in panic. But despite this cataclysmic turn of events, the sheer beauty of it all kept anyone from acting remotely concerned. 
“Dahh, did Gabriel try pulling something stupid again?” 
“Hrgh?!” 
Maou spotted it. Someone in the crowd around them said that, while the rest were pointing at the sky. He looked around in a panic. 
Then he realized there was a man behind him in sunglasses and a punky Afro. 
“Agh! You…” 
“Hmm? Oh, what a coincidence! The man from the udon shop.” 
Maou was stopped cold at the sight of the familiar man, dressed like some relic from the American 1970s but now, oddly, speaking perfectly fluent Japanese. Before he could react, Ashiya stepped in between them protectively. 
The man tilted his sunglasses a bit, sizing up the pair. He had, for some reason, a toothpick in his mouth. 
“My liege, his eyes…” 
The low growl from Ashiya made Maou take a closer look. 
“Purple…?” 
“Mm? Something up with my eyes?” 
The man’s toothpick bobbed up and down as he spoke. Then he removed his sunglasses, giving them an up-close-and-personal look at his eyes. 
“The udon at the ground-floor cafeteria here, y’know…not too shabby! And I think I’m startin’ to get the hang of those stupid chopsticks, too!” 
“Uh… Wait, you’re…?” 
Maou began to quiver. It was hard to tell whether it was out of anger or due to the mystery ring of light approaching them. 
Taking a closer look at the man, he could see that his Afro wasn’t fully black after all. There was one shock of purple, as if he decided to get a bit fancy with the hair coloring in the shower. 
“You’re Raguel?!” 
“Ohh? I’m not sure I quite remember stating my name to you…” 
The Afro-bedecked man’s eyes opened wide in abject surprise. 
“Oh, for eff’s sake, you really were eating at the ground floor?!!” 
Just as he spoke, the ring made contact with Tokyo Tower’s antenna, bathing the structure with an enveloping shower of light. 
“…Oh!” 
“Huh?!” 
“Oooooh! Ahhhh!” 
Maou, Ashiya, and the man who was apparently Raguel all voiced their exclamation. 
The moment the exploding particles of light made contact with the Tokyo Tower floor, now filled to the brim with onlookers, the glowing dots suddenly swirled together and made a beeline for two young men. 
The shower made a direct hit on Maou and Ashiya. The Afro man covered his eyes at the resulting shock wave. 
The sense of discomfort that greeted them instantly afterward, along with the job it did on their hair—making the guy’s Afro look like amateur hour at the hotel nightclub—were both things the pair had no time to comment on. 
Instantly, the transformation took place. 
Within the whirlpool of gold, a darker, more sinister light was welling up from the two of them. 
“Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!” 
The scream absorbed the golden shine, shattering it to pieces among the jet-black rays of darkness and instantly dispelling Tokyo Tower’s subdued illumination. 
The red-and-white tower, a constant watchman over a mighty age in human history, found itself with a seemingly endless flood of darkness emanating from beneath its chandelier of light. 
A bloodcurdling voice of evil made its way out from the darkness. What it had to say, however, was not quite as foreboding as its sound. 
“If you were on the ground floor, you could’ve told us, man! We had to waste so much money going up there!” 
The world was now filled with a green hue, emanating from underneath the Tower. 
The next moment, the green light covered all of the area around Tokyo Tower, freezing everything within. 
Just like the demonic barrier that was triggered over Sasazuka once, all people and things in the green light were both there and not there, in another realm and protected from all destruction taking place within the sphere. 
From afar, the aurora-like barrier probably made it look like Tokyo Tower was all done up for St. Patrick’s Day. 
The lone demon behind this phenomenon, his eyes brimming with enough anger to put anyone they gazed upon into cardiac arrest, glared at the Afroed man. 
“I’m gonna make you inhale soda up your nose!!” 
At that moment, the Devil King Satan and his Great Demon General Alciel descended upon Tokyo Tower, the demonic force tucked inside the golden light firmly ensconced within their bodies. 
“What are you talking about, man?!” 
The Afro man tossed his sunglasses aside and returned a snide stare. But, when he opened his mouth, he did not address the demons. 
“Eesh, Gabe, did you know these guys were in Japan?” 
“!!” 
The Devil King Satan’s UniClo T-shirt, stretched beyond all reasonable limit, opened up a new tear as he turned around, quickly growing as battered and bruised as his one missing horn. 
“Yeah, sorrr-eeee. Didn’t think they’d get involved, all right?” 
Since when was he here? 
There, within the Devil King’s barrier and looking none the worse for wear from the demonic force flowing around him, was the proud angel who once tried to take Satan and the Hero’s child away from them. 
It was Gabriel, the “shooting star” who had chased the streak of light all the way to Tokyo Tower. 
 
“…Mommy?” 
“……” 
“Moooommmyyy…” 
In a corner of the Tokyo Skytree observation deck, Emi was balled up on the floor, hands on her knees. 
Alas Ramus tugged at her, her face wavering toward tears as she steadfastly refused to let her alone. Emi did not respond. 
Emilia’s father was alive. 
She remembered when they were separated, five years ago. The sight of her father standing before her, hazy through the tears. It transformed in her mind into sadness and anger, and it was what kept her fighting. 
Compared to that, the story of how angels were not supernatural beings at all seemed like a mere triviality. Nothing about Lucifer or Sariel, certainly, suggested they were supernatural at all. If anything, it made it clearer what heaven really was—a powerful organization that saw her as its enemy. Nothing more, nothing less. 
But more important than that, her father was alive. 
It should have been ample cause for joy and celebration, something she hoped and wished for more than anything. 
But her legs were too jittery to prove much use. 
There was little chance Gabriel was lying about it. He had nothing to gain personally by deceiving Emi about Nord’s health. 
One of the issues that made heaven “pretty well cut in two,” as Gabriel put it, no doubt stemmed from the fact that Laila and Nord had a child in the first place. It had the potential to muddy the waters so deeply, to rob heaven and the angels of their invincible holy aura, that they probably saw that as a danger. 
Heaven, and its denizens, were the target of worship and adulation precisely because people believed they were supernatural, beyond human comprehension. If they realized they were just another race, of sorts—a culture with a different civilization from theirs—that would be the end of the gravy train, so to speak. 
Ente Islans, after all, were capable of miracles just as astonishing as those in heaven could conjure. The only difference, really, was the scale involved. 
No, if Gabriel wanted to lie, he would’ve said Nord was dead, no longer part of this or any world. 
Then he could have manipulated the world’s image of her father, the father of the Hero Emilia, any way he wanted. He could have revealed to Ente Isla that Nord was a simple wheat farmer. He could say that he enjoyed a place in heaven, or was appointed an angel. Anything. It would have been twisting the knife. 
And before that, it was only natural to hate someone for killing your parents. Emi was hardly friends with Maou at first. If Gabriel had confirmed that Nord was dead, it would have made Emi hate the Devil King Satan all the more. In fact, it could have even helped heaven quash two annoying mosquitoes at once. 
But Gabriel hadn’t said that. He’d said Nord, her father, was alive. 
That, in itself, enshrouded the road ahead in fog. She turned her head up a bit, only to find Alas Ramus’s pained expression sizing up her own. 
“Mommy? Are you okay? Your tummy hurt?” 
“…No. I’m fine. I’m fine, but…” 
She smiled weakly and buried her face back between her legs. 
“…I’m just trying to…you know, figure out what I should do.” 
“What do you want to do?” 
It was something she was fully aware of from the first time she stood on the battlefield as a Church knight, but the one reason she savored the most, the single greatest inspiration she had to defeat the Devil King’s army, was in order to exact revenge for her father. 
Since arriving in Japan, she had admittedly gotten rather chummy with the Devil King—purely because of circumstances beyond their control, certainly nothing voluntary about it—but not once had she seem him as anything other than an enemy she must slay sooner or later. 
But. 
“Is this someone who shouldn’t matter to me anymore? Just because my father’s alive?” 
A man of the land, her father certainly had muscle, but he couldn’t have had much in the realm of battle training. Seeing the strength and cruelty of the demon hordes for herself, seeing the charred remains of what was once her village, all she could imagine was that Nord died a helpless, ignoble death. It was the only conclusion to make. 
So she spent the next five years contemplating the idea of having the Devil King taste her father’s pain, her father’s bitterness. It was always on her mind. 
The fact he was now alive, of course, didn’t make all of that hate disappear like a candle flame. 
He might be ill or injured, for one. And there was no wiping away the pain and anger of seeing her peaceful upbringing destroyed before her eyes. 
Not even as the Hero, but as just another Ente Islan, she could never forgive any of the pestilence and tragedy the Devil King’s army had exacted upon her native land. 
But with one of the larger gears in the clockwork that drove her to set off against the Devil King now popped out of its socket, there was no denying that her heart was now beating to a different rhythm. 
And the gears that remained were clueless as to how they should mesh together any longer. 
All that remained in the room was the can of low-sugar coffee Gabriel had left on the floor as a souvenir. 
Around the point that he suggested her father might be in Japan, Gabriel started pressing her for payment—in the form of how Chiho was doing. 
Emi was shaken. She had zero intention of divulging anything about a friend as precious as Chiho, but now a part of her heart was literally playing devil’s advocate for her, suggesting that spilling the beans might get her that bit closer to her father. 
But time did not allow Emi to waver. 
Below her, as her mind foundered between her desires and her conscience, an enormous mass of energy zoomed by. 
“Ah, crap crap crap crap.” 
The easy grin on Gabriel’s face disappeared. He finished off the remaining coffee. 
“Okay, that’s all for now. I kinda gotta cover my ass for the time being, so this little confab’s over. Let’s call that info I gave you a freebie, all right? Feel free to pay me back next time. With interest!” 
“W-wait a—” 
“Though I s’pose it ain’t easy for you, but…” 
His face had an uncharacteristic somberness to it. Then he used one magic or another to float right through the walls and windows, and then he was flitting outside the observation deck. 
“…it’s not like everybody in heaven uses their job title as carte blanche to do anything they want, y’know? We just don’t wanna die, like everybody else. And maybe I don’t, like, show it off much, but I know full well that folks down there are worshipping us.” 
And soon, he left, flying toward the mystery blob of energy. Both of them traveled south. Something must be happening at Tokyo Tower, where Maou is. 
But it still couldn’t make Emi move. 
Who should she be fighting? What reason did she have? What did she have to protect? It was all chaos in her mind. 
“Hey…Alas Ramus?” 
“Oo?” 
“I think this Hero stuff’s too much of a load on my shoulders. I used to be a simple farm girl, just like all the others around me. Maybe if I had some better schooling from a younger age, I could’ve had some more resolve. Like, forget about the little details, just slay the Devil King! That kind of thing.” 
“No Hero? You don’t like it?” 
She couldn’t understand some of the loftier concepts, but it was remarkable how Alas Ramus grasped at the crux of it, beautifully encapsulating what Emi wanted to say. 
“I used to. I did. But if I was never the Hero, I probably never would’ve run into you, so I don’t think it’s so bad now.” 
“Nee-hee!” 
“Alas Ramus?” 
“Yeahh?” 
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” 
Alas Ramus blinked a couple times at the question. Must be too young for that talk, Emi figured. 
“I wanna be Rewax-Berr!” 
Or not. Her eyes twinkled as she raised two triumphant arms in the air. 
Emi wasn’t expecting an actual occupation, but the response she earned threw her for such a loop that silence reigned for a few moments. Then, a soft smile came across her face. 
“You want to be Relax-a-Bear, huh?” 
“Yehh! And, and…” 
Alas Ramus climbed up on Emi’s body. It was an effective debating tactic. 
“…cuwwy!” 
“Huh?” 
Emi furrowed her brows. She had never fed curry to Alas Ramus before. 
The Devil’s Castle promised they were feeding her age-appropriate food as well. Curry would’ve been out of the question. So why was it her favorite thing now? 
“Mommy love Rewax-Berr and cuwwy! I love Mommy, too! When I grow up, Alas Ramus, Rewax-Berr! Cuwwy!” 
“…Oh.” 
When she grew up, she wanted to be the things Emi loved. 
Emi could feel the tears coming. She hugged the little girl close, in order to distract herself. 
“I’m sorry. Guess Mommy’s turning into a wimp, huh?” 
“Eat cuwwy?” 
“Once Chiho’s all better, let’s all go eat some together.” 
“Okeh!” 
Alas Ramus shot her right hand upward in approval. 
“Mph.” 
And hit Emi in the nose. 
“…Heh. Maybe I needed that, huh?” 
The tears came back, for a different reason this time. Emi finally found it in her to stand back up. 
“Not like it’s the first time I’ve decided to procrastinate large decisions. Right now, I’ve gotta take action to protect what’s in front of me. What happens later…I can think about then.” 
For now, as long as Raguel was clearly hurting Chiho, Laila, and Japan in general, he was undoubtedly Emi’s foe. 
Gabriel had just let slip that he was trying to avoid interference between Raguel’s sonar waves from the Tokyo Tower and the digital test broadcasts from the Skytree. 
Which meant that the main field of battle was clearly going to be Tokyo Tower—Maou, Ashiya, and Raguel, all in one place. 

And if they were going to take on Gabriel or Raguel in combat, they had zero chance of winning. Beyond that, there was the danger of the Devil King being taken back to Ente Isla, as Suzuno suggested. 
“I still don’t know how to deal with this…but I can’t have him that far away from me!” 
She felt safe in exclaiming it out loud. Nobody from the ground was going to pick on her about it. 
So she retraced her steps, running through the same service corridor to reach the observation deck’s roof. It was right when she focused on her legs in preparation for a full-strength leap that she was interrupted. 
“Ooh, not right now. Tokyo Tower’s shut away in Maou’s demonic barrier. If you try to force your way in, that’ll break the barrier and probably hurt a lot of people and stuff.” 
“…Ngh! Wh-who’s there?!” 
Nobody should have been in the Skytree except for Emi and Alas Ramus. And Alas Ramus was fused within her. 
“I sure am glad to see you, though! Good to see everybody’s still here in Japan, too.” 
The light was streaming down from above Emi’s vantage point on the roof. 
The form within it continued speaking to the speechless Hero. 
“Let’s go together, okay? I’ll make an entrance for you.” 
“Ch-Chiho… Why are you…” 
“Are you ready, Yusa?” 
Chiho, bathed in a holy golden light, didn’t wait for Emi’s response as she loaded a holy-force arrow into the silvery bow of light she summoned out of thin air. 
“…!” 
Then, with a sudden release of concentration, the silver air penetrated the night sky, sending Chiho and Emi southward through the air on its light trail. 
Their forms were lost in the dazzling light. All that remained to break the silence was the blustering wind beating against the scaffolding. 
 
“Oooh, things’re getting fun now, huh?” 
Gabriel defiantly looked down upon the two demons within their world of green light. The Afro man, between Satan and Alciel, sullenly glared at his heavenly partner. 
“No. Not at all, they’re not! Why’d you come all the way here from the other tower, Gabe?! Sonar’s all about precision! You’re gonna screw it all up!” 
Behind this man, roughing it in his Afro, preworn denim, and T-shirt, two unexpected and rather out-of-place wings emitted a soft, glowing light. 
“Yeah, well, Emilia distracted me. But we don’t need sonar any longer, no? No way any normal guy could make that energy wave just now. We could find it right now if we looked a little.” 
“Look, did you think that didn’t occur to me or something? Think about it.” 
Raguel and Gabriel locked eyes for one uncomfortable moment. 
“You think this guy’s gonna let me go anywhere right now? I mean, look at those eyes. They’re demonic.” 
“Would you expect anything else?” 
The dark voice seemed to rumble upward from beneath the ground. Its power, like the guttural growl of a death-metal front man, was enough to keep both archangels riveted in place. 
“You bastards better not even think of taking one step outside this barrier.” 
“……” 
Devil King Satan, accompanied by the Great Demon General Alciel. 
Two angels and two demons, facing off at Tokyo Tower, locked into a proverbial steel cage of demonic force. 
“That, and… Come onnn, I thought there wasn’t any demonic force in this world! This is totally Devil King Satan right here, isn’t it?! I dunno who that muscly weirdo next to him is, but…Gabe, could this be any different from what we first talked about? Huh?” 
“Yeah, yeah, sorr-eeeee. I wasn’t really lying, though! I really didn’t think they’d bother getting involved at all. Pinky swear! It’s just… It’s all that thing’s fault.” 
Gabriel used his hands to simulate the events of the past few minutes—the hail of light, along with Satan and Alciel’s sudden appearance. 
“Pretty cute light show, but the ending needs some work, no? If you ask me, Laila must’ve stumbled onto something we don’t know about.” 
“Uggghhh… Look, can we just make this simpler for all of us? She’s kicked out of heaven anyway. We deploy the entire Regiment, we wipe out anyone who knows anything about this, bada-bing, bada-boom. Like we care about what happens to this nation anyway—” 
“Not gonna happen.” 
“……” 
Gabriel shot a look at Satan’s face. But before he even had time for that, Raguel had already fixed his ire upon the Devil King. 
“And what’s with you, besides? Transforming into a human, all struttin’ your stuff and showing off your English skills to everybody… You completely tricked me! And why are you messing with us, anyway? You coulda just sat there and slurped up your udon, like a good little boy! I know you and Gabe have kind of a past, but I didn’t even do anything to you guys! You mind butting out of heavenly affairs a little?!” 
It was a full-on diatribe. Bits of spittle flew out the edge of his mouth as he ranted. Gabriel, watching on, grimaced in awkward embarrassment. 
“Uhh, Raguel? I know that’s, like, the case and everything, but if you say that to them…” 
Jets of black flame shot up from behind Satan and Alciel. 
“…See? I knew you’d piss them off. I knew it!” 
“Your inane squabbling with each other… It hurt one of our friends.” 
The darkness advanced, the light edging backward. 
“If you’ve changed your doctrine so it’s okay to rule over the world with violence now…well, hell, I could’ve still respected that. That was kind of my plan when I invaded the human world myself. I’m evil. I force people to do my bidding under the threat of violent harm. So when I see anyone like you two… It makes me want to pummel you.” 
Satan was now within point-blank range of Raguel. Then, the next instant, he sent a fist sailing toward the side of his slack-jawed face. 
“Oghh?!” 
With an eerily off-putting groan, Raguel was thrown against the Tokyo Tower scaffolding. 
“Nhh… That was fast…” 
“His Demonic Highness never hesitates to land the first blow.” 
“You were too slow, all right?” 
It was becoming unclear whose side Gabriel was on. 
“Trampling all over people like it’s your prerogative, acting like it’s all for some great cause… You won’t find anyone that low, even in the demon realms. You know what we usually like to call ourselves… Gabriel?” 
“…‘Demons,’ right?” 
Gabriel sounded oddly proud of himself, although he took care to remain poised for battle. 
“Yes. We are demons. We are evil itself. We cannot live without preying upon someone. The lowest of the low!” 
Satan, King of the Demons, sounded like he was at a confessional. 
“And if you aren’t prepared to live with the sins you commit, then stop bitching about it to other people! This is the world of humans! A world where you have to live with everything you’ve ever done! It’s all weighing upon your back!!” 
“…Uh, so are they gonna fight us, or what, Gabe?” 
“Kinda lookin’ like it, yeah.” 
Satan’s fist had about as much permanent effect on Raguel as his tirade just now. Despite how far he had been blown, there wasn’t a single bruise on his face. 
The scaffolding he was thrown into was similarly unscathed, protected by Satan’s demonic barrier. There wouldn’t be any repeat of the Shuto Expressway near-disaster of time gone by. 
“You take ’em, Gabe.” 
“Oh, I knew this would happen…” 
“You were expecting something else? Combat wasn’t really in my job description. I told you that right at the start! That I’d have my hands full tracking down Laila!” 
Not pausing to hear Gabriel’s response, Raguel flew up toward the topmost antenna of Tokyo Tower. 
He was trying, in other words, to break Satan’s barrier. The border between himself and the sky above him was closer than the boundaries covering the ground at either side. 
Then several things happened at once. 
Satan chased behind Raguel—who made it up to Observation Deck 1 in the blink of an eye—at supersonic speed, attempting to land a dark, flame-infused punch on his body. 
Gabriel, traveling even faster than Satan, flew between him and Raguel’s back to stop him. Alciel, watching on from his original position, released a telekinetic wave straight toward Gabriel. 
But as Gabriel stopped the Devil King’s attack cold: 
“Syahh!” 
Using nothing but his eyes and sheer force of will, he brushed off Alciel’s beam attack. 
The Great Demon General, who had the power to effortlessly move countless gigantic boulders around during the Battle of Sasazuka before, didn’t even make the guardian angel of Sephirot break a sweat. 
“Guyyyys, don’t you remember? Even during the Devil King’s heyday, he still probably couldn’t have beaten me, all right?” 
Satan attempted to pull his fist away. Gabriel refused to let it budge an inch. 
“I’ve got a job here myself, y’know. It’s not like transdimensional combat is my hobby or something. And I really feel for that girl, too. Seriously! It’s just… Maybe it all seems totally nutso to you all, but to us, it’s kinda life or death.” 
“!!” 
Satan, feeling the holy force well up from Gabriel’s palm, boosted his own body’s demonic power. 
“Ooh, perceptive of you. Bit late, though.” 
An alien form of energy penetrated through the demonic force and under his skin. 
It was the all-time mother of sonar bolts, packing an untold amount of holy power—far more than what Suzuno jabbed into Ashiya for fun at the hospital. 
The holy force within Gabriel’s vessel coursed past Satan’s demonic life energy, rankling his body as it robbed him of strength like snake venom. 
There was nothing flashy to the attack, but it was enough to make the King of All Demons’ vision blur. 
However, Gabriel had no follow-up attack in mind, it seemed. Satan made a mighty leap backward, away from his foe, his breathing labored from the excruciating pain. 
“Head on out, Raguel. You can probably sniff out Laila’s trail once you’re outside. I can take these guys alone.” 
Gabriel pointed at the ceiling. Raguel flew off without another word. 
Like any wall, if a force was applied to Maou’s barrier that outclassed his demonic force, it would crumble apart. A single hole wasn’t enough to bring the whole thing down. But it had to hold. It had to keep the battle from leaking to the outside world, and it had to cage up two archangels at the same time. 
But if Gabriel gained the upper hand all by himself and Raguel escaped, all was lost. 
“Ashiya! Stop him!” 
Alciel was already in motion before Satan bellowed the command. Approaching from Gabriel’s blind spot, he fired six simultaneous shots of telekinetic force at Raguel—two from his eyes, two from his hands, and two from his dual-tipped tail. 
“Try again!” 
A blast of wind raked across Alciel. 
Gabriel, facing Satan until just a moment ago, now had something resembling a sword in his hand, using it to shrug Alciel’s telekinesis away. 
The blade must have been quite a bit longer once. A closer look revealed that, considering the size of the hilt, the blade was astonishingly short. 
“Durandal…” 
Alciel angrily spat out the name. 
It was Gabriel’s sword, spoken of in legends but shattered into pieces by the Better Half once Alas Ramus fused with it. 
“Mm-hmm! Never really could rematerialize the end of it, though. It looks so lame, doesn’t it?” 
Now the sword, which looked like it was chopped in two about halfway down its length, was zooming its way toward Satan, Gabriel lunging behind. 
“!!” 
Satan, feeling something silently swoop toward him, tilted his head a little. 
Despite the distance between them, there was now blood oozing out of a scratch on his cheek. 
“Funny thing is, though, it still cuts just as good as it always did! And I don’t care how good the material on your UniClo wardrobe is—it ain’t gonna put up much resistance to this, you know?” 
“…So try it.” Alciel refused to falter. 
Flying toward Gabriel, he began to launch a flurry of strikes with his tail and the claws on each hand. 
“Wh-whoa, whoa, look out! You’re gonna get your fingers chopped off with this… Huh?” 
Gabriel, not wanting to permanently maim Alciel, prepared to strike him with the butt of his sword. But something seemed off. It was strangely heavy in his hand. 
There was no room to swing Durandal between the attacks. 
“Oh? Oh? Ohhh?” 
“…! …! …!” 
Gabriel had one sword. But Alciel had three methods of attack. And while it took time, the silent barrage of strikes with his claws and the hook-like spikes on his tail gradually began to swipe against Gabriel’s body. 
“Ow! Dahh! Jeez, that tingles!” 
“That stoic act isn’t just for show, man. He means it.” 
Gabriel, unable to handle Alciel’s bombardment, now had Satan behind his back. 
“Gehh?!” 
He noticed a moment too late, as Satan took his enormous hands and grabbed his head from behind. 
“Who do you think put up with the humans’ incessant resistance until the very end?” 
“Agh! W-wait, wait a—!” 
“Ashiya—the Great Demon General Alciel’s body is the toughest in the Devil King’s Army. No greater defensive genius out there. You could hit him with Emi’s sword, and he still won’t get hurt that easy.” 
“Die!” 
“Nnhh!!” 
Alciel’s claws dug their way deeper into Gabriel’s flesh, penetrating skin. Even an archangel could find its match against the strength and demonic force of the Devil King and his right-hand man. Or, for a moment, so it seemed. 
“Still, nice tryyy!” 
Despite being all but disemboweled, Gabriel shed not a drop of blood as he vanished like a white vapor, his head disappearing in Satan’s hands. The two demons were left bewildered. 
“I love fighting you guys. Emilia, too. So direct and to the point!” 
The voice came from behind Satan. 
There was no time to turn around. The edge of Gabriel’s palm thudded against Satan’s back, with what seemed like no great force. 
“Bang!” 
“Gaaaahhhh!!” 
But even that was enough to send Satan flying. Even barreling into Alciel didn’t stop him from tumbling helplessly to the ground, fully vulnerable. 
“Wh-what…?” 
“Eesh. You don’t have to look that surprised, guys. It’s nothing that world ending. Just a little trick with afterimages, all right? This whole time, ever since I deflected that telekinesis Alciel threw at Raguel, you guys have been fighting my stunt doubles, so…” 
Then, apropos of nothing, Gabriel put his hands together in prayer. 
That seemed to signal a group of angels to materialize in the air like popcorn, each the spitting image of a simpering Gabriel. 
“So basically, the two of you put together can juuuuuust about take on one of my fakes. So just knock it off, all right? Nobody’s gonna criticize you for it. I’m not gonna do anything bad to you, either.” 
“You…you think we’d actually say yes to that, you bastard…?” 
Satan glared at Gabriel as he arduously brought himself back to his feet. 
“Did you do something to Emi?” 
“Hmm?” 
“That ‘girl’ you talked about,” Satan continued. “How come you know something happened to Chi?” 
“…Uh, hello? Anyone home? You just said we hurt one of your friends, bro.” 
“That coulda been Urushihara, it coulda been Suzuno, it definitely coulda been Emi. How’d you know it was the one girl least likely to be involved in this?” 
“Oh. Yeah. …Okay, guilty as charged, I heard it from Emilia. We met over at Skytree a sec ago.” 
Gabriel shrugged his shoulders, plainly ruing his mistake. 
“But all I know is that Raguel’s sonar knocked her out, all right? She didn’t tell me about anything else. Boy, I had all kinds of juicy info I coulda leaked out to her, too…” 
“What?” 
“’Course, what I did give her kinda made her lose the will to fight, maybe, soooo… But you really oughta thank me, don’tcha? There’s one enemy of yours outta the picture, at least.” 
“What did you do to her…?” 
“Hey, whoa, whoa, nothing! Nothing that much. I just told Emilia her dad’s alive somewhere, that’s all.” 
“!!!” 
The first reaction from Satan’s brain was to recall the Hero Emilia pointing the Better Half at him, screaming about revenge. After that came Emi Yusa, scratched and bruised after falling down his rickety staircase, condemning Sadao Maou through teary eyes about what he had done to her family. 
“My liege…?” 
Alciel, ever sensitive to his master’s behavior, noticed something was off. By now he had at least a vague sense of what lay at the root of Emi’s deep-seated, monomaniacal hatred for Satan. But why would that bother Satan at all? It never had before. 
“Gabriel…has anyone ever told you you really suck at picking up on social cues?” 
“Yeah, I seem to remember someone in here calling it a ‘B-movie act’ not long ago, no? I’m not gonna say no to that, though, so…yeaaahh, maybe.” 
“Is that fun for you? Taking people’s emotional supports and swiping them out from under them?” 
“Oh, totally! But not as fun as it is watching you worrying about your sworn enemy Emilia, though!” 
“…Lowlife.” 
Gabriel’s smile weathered the hateful assault Alciel spat at it. 
“Ooh, quite the honor! But if I could get in a word here real quick, I think it’d be nice if she’d knock off that boring ‘slay the Devil King’ mumbo-jumbo. Take a broader view of things, y’know? The big picture. Whatever crutch she’s leaning on… That’s just getting in the way, if you asked me.” 
“…?” 
Satan stopped for a moment, unsure what to make of this. He didn’t have long to ponder over it. 
“Gaaaaaaaaabe!!” 
Raguel interrupted the proceedings from his perch far above the fight, near Observation Deck 1. As he did, a powerful light burst forth from Tokyo Tower’s antenna. 
“Aww, this was just getting fun, too…” 
Gabriel dejectedly resented his supposed friend and partner’s appearance. 
“A sonar bolt come in, or what?!” 
“I dunno, man, I don’t have a TV…” 
Satan and Alciel, helplessly pinned down by Gabriel, had no idea what Raguel was trying to do. 
“Okay, uh, Gabe, I think we got trouble!” 
“Huh?” 
“I can’t flyyy-y-y-y…” 
“Huhh?” 
The voice zoomed by, falling past Gabriel’s, Satan’s, and Alciel’s astonished eyes. 
“……” 
There, on top of Observation Deck 1, like a duck shot by a rifleman, Raguel lay sprawled on the roof. 
“Still safe, huh?” 
Another voice came, this one from above where Raguel had fallen from. Craning his neck, Satan saw a familiar sight—in a way, that was. Compared to an angel falling from the sky like an artillery shell hitting him, almost anything seemed normal. Especially her. 
Emilia, eyes of scarlet and hair of blue-tinged silver, looked down upon the two demons, a perplexed look on her face. 
But everyone—Satan, Alciel, even Gabriel—was transfixed by the person next to her instead. 
“Ch-Chi?!” 
“Ms. Sasaki…” 
Her hair, already saddled by bed head, tore about wildly in the wind, framing her pink flower pajamas and green hospital slippers. 
She was supposed to be in a hospital bed, in fact. But now Chiho Sasaki—enveloped in an aura of shining holy energy and holding a bow made of silvery light—was standing alongside the Hero of another world at the peak of Tokyo Tower. 
“Maou! Ashiya! Are you okay?!” 
“N-no, uh, I mean, I don’t…? Are, are you okay, Chi?! I mean, what’s ‘okay’ even mean anymore?! What happened to you?!” 
One could look up flabbergasted in the dictionary and see a photo of the King of All Demons, shot at this very moment. 
“Devil King! We’ll talk later! Just stop Raguel, now!” 
Emilia still made sideways glances at Chiho from the corner of her eye as she attempted to stir Satan into action. 
“Just save all your stupid questions for after this and figure out a way to get those meddling angels out of the picture!” 
With a kick against the antenna, Emilia was instantly between Gabriel and the demons. Her back was turned to Satan and Alciel. 
“Wow. Pretty quick recovery. I figured you’d need to see a therapist or something, no?” Gabriel’s attention was still chiefly on Chiho as he spoke. 
“…Look,” Emi snapped, “with all this ridiculous crap going on, I just decided that I can save the thinking for later!” 
“Ooh, that’s gonna bite ya later, I think. I mean, saving all the hard stuff for tomorrow? That’s pretty much Lucifer’s philosophy, isn’t it?” 
“I don’t care right now! Ashiya! Let’s stop Raguel! I don’t want to blow this like I did with Sariel! Once the Gate’s open, I’ll toss him halfway across the universe!” 
“By all means!” 
It was clear from their last meeting that Gabriel couldn’t beat Emi in a fair fight. 
The demons knew what they had to do. One, leave Gabriel in her capable hands. Two, keep Raguel from launching any more sonar bolts. 
They surrounded Raguel as he shakily got back up, each taking one side. The sight set Raguel off on another trademark rant. 
“What is with you pricks, anyway?! Is Laila that important to you?! Would you mind not sticking your necks into human-world affairs for a change?! Just go away and take over the world or something! The entire future course of events in heaven depends on whether we catch Laila or not! So butt out!” 
“Y’know, I don’t remember her being all that much of a big-shot angel. Not exactly the guardian angel of Sephirot or anything, right? Just a single mom with kind of a fancy job title. What’s got you so riled up over her?” 
“I’m not touching that question with a ten-foot pole! If I answer that, you’ll know exactly what I don’t want all of you to know! These are heavenly affairs! No outsiders allowed!!” 
“Ooh, that’s not going to work.” 
An arrow of light landed near the raving Raguel, triggering a small explosion. 
“Whoa?!” 
They looked up to find Chiho, bow still at the ready after firing her initial salvo. 
“That was a warning. Your behavior is disrupting the balance of power in this world. Stop using your sonar and leave at once!” 
Satan, for the first time, noticed the glowing ring on Chiho’s left hand, the one currently holding the bow. 
Raguel looked down where the arrow struck, gnashing his teeth. 
“Silence! I don’t know if you’ve possessed that human girl or learned how to control her from afar, but now that you’re here, it’s time to earn my salary! Once I trace your trail of holy energy, my job here is done!” 
“They have salaries up in heaven?” 
“……” 
“…Hey, say something.” 
Unlike Shirou Ashiya, Alciel in demon form never bothered reacting angrily to Satan’s terrible jokes. It disappointed the Devil King a tad. 
“Seelku etuloo—oooohhh?!” 
Raguel attempted to lob something at Chiho, who was above him. Satan and Alciel reared back in a panic, but Chiho refused to budge. 
Not even the bow in her hand moved an inch, as if she were expecting the attack the whole time. 
It sounded as if Raguel chanted some kind of magic…but he gave up midway. Suddenly, he fell to his knees, like a puppet with its strings cut. 
“Wha, wha, what is…” 
Staring at his hands, Raguel stammered in utter confusion. But struggle as he did, he no longer had full control of his body. Even standing was too much of a challenge now. 
“Why do you think your wings disappeared just now?” 
Chiho breezily floated down to the observation deck roof, joining Satan and Alciel down below. 
“This Yesod fragment may not be the whole thing, but the next time it strikes you, I can’t guarantee you’ll function as an angel ever again. So just go home before that happens, all right? You are not my enemy. In a world far, far away, we are friends.” 
“Kah…hah…” 
“Wh-what on…?” 
Even Satan could see it. The stream of holy force leaking out from Raguel’s back. 
The flash that occurred when Emilia and Chiho appeared must have been the light from Chiho’s first arrow striking Raguel’s wings. 
“Ai yai yai, that ain’t good… Hooph!” 
Gabriel, attempting to take on Emilia as he watched Raguel, brought his hands together. The next moment, a ball of light enveloped him, and he disappeared from Emi’s sight. 
“?!” 
Following her sixth sense, Emi spotted Gabriel, now next to the curled-up Raguel. It was nothing short of instant teleportation. 
Satan and Alciel immediately took flight to separate themselves from him. Even Chiho kept a respectable distance. But Gabriel just stood there, showing no sign of wanting a fight. 
Then, for reasons only he was aware of, he removed the T-shirt from under his toga and began waving it above his head. The rippling upper-body muscles he exposed to the world as he did would send any would-be bodybuilder into fits of jealousy. 
“’Kay, I’m out! No más! Fat lady’s sung! This is gonna have to pass for a white flag, all right?” 
“Huhh?!” 
“Agh, Gabe, what’re you—Gahh?!” 
Gabriel placed his palm on the head of Raguel, curled into a ball but still willing to fight. 
“What are you…?” 
That was enough to cut the strings for good. Raguel was now sprawled on the roof. 
The shocked Emilia and demon crew to his side, Gabriel tossed the languid, likely unconscious Raguel on one shoulder. Emilia, watching this bizarre act, had trouble figuring out what to do next. 
“What’re you trying to do?” 
“Ummm, well, how to put it? Now that Emilia’s in the picture, I’m startin’ not to like my chances so much, y’know? That other girl’s some kinda phenom, too, apparently. But you know Raguel’s not gonna listen to a word of it. I mean, I’m not really in a position where I can go double-crossing heaven all the time, but that doesn’t mean I wanna die fighting for ’em or anything. Although…” 
He turned his eternally simpering grin toward Chiho, floating in the air. 
“Watching you and everyone else on Earth… I’m startin’ to want to see my own world change, too, you get me? So here’s hoping you can keep everything going smoothly over here. Betcha do it too, huh?” 
“……” 
That last sentence was aimed at Chiho. 
“…But anyway. Me and her, we got to that conclusion via two completely different paths, so no funny ideas about that, are we clear? Just have fun chewing over all the little hints I’ve been dropping at you. I bet Raguel’s gonna be pissed later, but don’t worry—I’ll make sure him and the Regiment get ferried back home safe, all right? Adios!” 
“Agh! Hey!!” 
“Wait!” 
Emilia and Satan had no chance to stop him. 
The ball of light covered them in an instant. In another, they were both completely gone from sight. 
Satan expected another strike from some unexpected blind spot. But, after several seconds of silence, no attack seemed forthcoming. 
The fact that the faintly glowing, green demonic barrier that protected everyone and everything inside had not even the slightest scratch on it was, if anything, a blow to Satan’s pride as a warrior. 
That was because, although he’d constructed it to keep the pair of angels from escaping, Gabriel had just revealed that he could teleport himself out of it anytime he wanted. 
“…Deh. Treating me like some kind of idiot…” 
Satan clenched his teeth, along with his fists. Emilia’s eyes arced downward as she stared at the space Gabriel and Raguel had previously occupied. 
“What was Gabriel trying to do…? If he wanted to, he could’ve helped Raguel finish his mission long before any of us were involved.” 
Alciel’s eyes were elsewhere. 
“…Our enemy’s gone. I don’t feel them anywhere nearby…and there’s something more important on my mind, too.” 
Satan and Emilia found themselves following his gaze. 
“Yeaaah, um…” 
The three of them were sizing up the even greater enigma that remained. Chiho, somehow blessed with a new and massive power, was in front of them. 
The aura of holy force, easily the equal of Emilia’s, still surrounded her. A blast of demonic force had put her in a coma before, but none of the evil power tossed around at the base of Tokyo Tower seemed to faze her now. This sudden, rapt attention from the others caused her to fidget and blush a bit. She bowed meekly. 
“I-I’m sorry! I don’t think this’ll last much longer…” 
The apology, and the body language, were both classic Chiho. 
“H-hey!” 
“I know I kind of ragged on Raguel and Suzuno about it, but I had to throw the world’s energy balance off a lot to build up demonic force for Maou and Ashiya, too. It sounds like I have to rebalance it pretty quickly, so… Uh, uh, okay! All right, I understand! I’ll be right there!” 
Chiho put her hands to her ears and shut her eyes, like someone was shouting right next to her. 
“Wh-what’s going on?” 
“Um, she said she doesn’t know, and that’s the bad part about it!” 
“Who said? Chiho, is there someone talking in your…?” 
Then Emilia realized it. There was a pair of black earbuds, with mike, in her ears. Chiho wasn’t being possessed or controlled by anyone. Right now, she was moving by her own free will, borrowing someone else’s power as she did. And there was only one person she could have borrowed it from. 
“…My mother?! Is it my mother?!” 
“Uh, uhm, Yusa, I’m really sorry, but the way she’s putting it, we’re really, really short on time, so…” 
Emilia’s probing query flustered Chiho a bit. Quickly, she readied her bow again. 
“Maou, Ashiya, get back down to the roof of the deck! It’s too dangerous for you!” 
“Dangerous? What is?!” 
“Ch-Chiho! What’re you doing?! Please, could you lend me your phone for a—” 
“Nngh, I’m sorry…!” 
Chiho grimaced at the group’s disparate reactions. Still, with a light kick of her own against the Tokyo Tower antenna, she propelled herself yet higher into the night sky. 
“Chihoooooo!!” 
“I’m sooooorrrrryyyyy!!” 
The divine presence of Chiho, coupled with her not-at-all-divine apology, fired a silvery arrow straight down at the antenna below her. 
“Whoaahh?!” 
The moment it struck the spire, the whole process began anew. 
Sadao Maou’s transformation into Satan took place in total reverse, as if some god up above was rewinding the tape on him. 
The green demonic barrier melted away, while Satan and Alciel felt the demonic energy ebb from their bodies. 
Emilia was unaffected, but still had to steel herself to keep the gushing flow of force from blowing her skyward. 
“Ah!” 
“Argh!” 
Once the barrier was fully gone, Satan and Alciel were back to Sadao Maou and Shirou Ashiya, lying on the roof of Observation Deck 1. 
Chiho must have focused all their energy back upon a single point. Emilia could see that much. The demonic force concentrated itself upon the antenna, and then: 
“Rain, rain, go awaaaaaayyy!!” 
With Chiho’s signal, a long, thin belt of light shot out in all directions from the tower, bathing Tokyo in an aurora-like glow. 
Now that no demonic barrier was stopping them, the crowd at ground level continued to marvel at the festival of light. 
The fallen angel and cleric on top of the Dokodemo Tower in Yoyogi joined them, as did the King of All Demons, his Great Demon General, and the Hero of the Holy Sword atop Tokyo Tower. 
The teenager in pajamas, growing more self-conscious by the moment, gradually sidled back down toward Maou. 
“…! Chi!” 
“Chiho!” 
“Ms. Sasaki!!” 
Emi and Ashiya hurriedly ran up to her. 
A smile erupted upon her face as she fell into Maou’s arms and passed out. 
“Uh, hey, Chi? Chi? What’s up? Are you…um.” 
The cold wind was beating upon them once again, but not even that was enough to muffle the sound coming from her. 
“…She’s asleep.” 
Chiho was happily snoring in Maou’s grasp. 
Her expression was one of pure contentment. The overwhelming presence that had stunned the warriors of another planet into silence was now replaced by a warm, baby-like smile.