Pushing their respective bikes, Maou and Chiho walked from Sasazuka Station toward the neighborhood of Hatagaya. Even though they were walking down the same street, even though they were both headed to the same area, they had different destinations—Maou to work, Chiho to the test prep center.
Emi had been acting unusual when they’d split up. Maou was acting a bit odd himself. And based on that, Chiho felt strangely tense as they walked along silently for a bit.
“Hey…”
“Y-yes?”
“Ms. Iwaki came to make that delivery, didn’t she?”
“Um, yeah. I think she picked up on a lot of it.”
“Ah… Really? Well, unlike Ms. Kisaki, she’s probably not gonna wheedle us about it later, so that’s fine.”
“Y-yeah.”
Then a bit more silence. Things were clearly different from usual, so every beat of the conversation wound her up more.
“Speaking of which, not to change the subject, but you own a bicycle, Chi?”
“I do. It’s been a while since I took it out, but…”
“Why use it all of a sudden?”
It wasn’t strange or anything, but he had never seen it before, and it wasn’t like her test prep was located far from her workplace. Maou couldn’t help but wonder why she had it.
“Didn’t Libicocco tell you? Some guys approached me after test prep the other day.”
“What? Some guys?!”
Maou’s eyes opened up in shock.
“Yeah. They were kind of pushy with me, but Libicocco chased them off.”
“H-he did?”
“But I can’t rely on Libicocco all the time, you know? So I decided to take my bike back and forth instead.”
“Oh… The test prep center isn’t that far from MgRonald, is it? Why didn’t you use it before now?”
“You’re asking me that now?”
“Huh?”
He thought it was a normal question to ask. But Chiho frowned, slightly peeved.
“It’s because I don’t have to worry if I’m going to test prep.”
“Worry? Worry about what?”
Chiho pointed straight at Maou’s face—or to be exact, she pointed two fingers at his eyes.
“If I’m riding a bike, my bangs get all messed up, all right?”
Not even Maou was dull enough to say “Yeah, so?” to that. The wind messed up anyone’s hair on a bike. Of course, she’d be going into the changing room at work and making herself as bland-looking as possible in a moment. But for just that minute—for just those few seconds—between dismounting and going through the door…
“Look, don’t you think it’s about time you realized how hard I’ve been working?”
Naturally, there were some shifts where everything was so busy that Maou and Chiho wouldn’t even have a single second to take a look at each other. If anything, her efforts were probably fruitless more often than not. But still:
“I’ve been trying to make my bangs cute so maybe you’d see them, Maou.”
“…I’m sorry?”
“And I never rode to your apartment because I didn’t want the food I bring to get mixed up in the basket, and someone always walked me home afterward anyway.”
Chiho was no longer in the same place as him. Not in their jobs, and not on the battlefield. Maou had lingered too long, and now they had drifted away.
“You know, Maou…”
“Hmm?”
The more they walked, the closer they’d get to their destination. So Chiho laid out her approach.
“Why did you keep my memories intact for me?”
“Ack…”
That yelp might have sounded like a half-hearted reply—but between him stopping and where his eyes were pointed, Chiho could tell it wasn’t.
They were at a large intersection now, and to their left, one cross street away, was the Koshu-Kaido road, the Shuto Expressway spanning above it.
“Chi, did I ever tell you about when I founded the Devil King’s Army in the demon realms?”
“No. I’ve never heard about it from you.”
“So from Ashiya or Urushihara, then?”
“From Ashiya, a little.”
“Really? Did he say anything weird about it?”
Maou winced, like a teen whose mother was showing off an old family album to one of his friends.
“I don’t think anything about it was that strange. He told me up to when you and he became friends. The Malebranche hadn’t shown up yet.”
“Oh, up to that point? So did he tell you that the first guy I recruited was Urushihara?”
“Wasn’t it Camio and his Pájaro-something tribe?”
“Ahh, they… They weren’t ‘friends’ exactly.”
Chiho didn’t ask what the difference was, but if what she knew about Maou’s past was correct, it seemed fair to assume Maou thought of Camio like a member of his family.
“Well, maybe it didn’t come up, but the clan I come from doesn’t have any survivors left besides me. Laila saved me, that old guy raised me…and once I grew up and became the Devil King, I looked for other members of my clan, but there was nobody left exactly like me.”
“Exactly like you?”
“Like, you know how Libicocco and Ciriatto look pretty different, even though they’re both Malebranche? That sort of thing. Our mob, they were called the Blacksheep clan, but whenever I thought I’d found someone like me, the horns or the fur would be all different, and stuff.”
“Oh… Really?”
“So first I convinced Urushihara and Adramelech to join me. Then, a while later, I took in Ashiya and the Iron Scorpions…and a lot of other stuff happened, but the point is, I always selected my companions of my own free will.”
That generally lined up with what Chiho had heard.
“Now, there was a lot of infighting between us and the Malebranche, Malacoda in particular. There’d occasionally be offshoot forces we had to put back in line. In the end, they stormed Ente Isla and lost to Emi’s forces, but…”
“Right.”
“And I’m sure you know my history after I came to Japan, but after a lot of twists and turns, I got a job at MgRonald, and then you applied there, too, right?”
That was the highly abridged version, but to Maou, those two facts were at the crux of his story.
“I was the guy handling most of your training…and, you know, that was the first time I ever trained someone.”
“Oh, was it?”
Maou didn’t tell her at the time. And quite a bit of the crew around Chiho had learned at least a thing or two from him as well.
“Like, training someone solo, I mean. Man to man. I did it together with Mae a few times, or I’d just teach a few things to someone I shared a shift with, but that was my first one-on-one experience. Right after your interview, Ms. Kisaki came up to me and said, like, ‘Okay, she’s all yours.’”
That made Chiho a little happy to hear. She thought she had blown the interview pretty badly—so much so that she didn’t even remember much of it. But learning that Kisaki approved of her immediately afterward, despite it being so long ago, gave her an ever-so-slight sense of pride.
“So I was glad for that. You know, having Ms. Kisaki leave a new hire in my hands. I always had a lot of respect for her, and I figured I’d never be brought on full-time if I never trained anyone. So…”
Maou looked at Chiho and smiled warmly.
“I’m wanna, I—I mean, I’m gonna be working here starting today! My name’s Chiho Sasaki! Good to meet you!”
“So I was really into this assignment. Like, ‘I’m gonna totally make a great crewmember out of this girl.’”
“Mmm…” This sounded a bit odd to Chiho. “You mean you wanted to score points with Ms. Kisaki?”
“Well, at the time, yeah, I’m sure there was some of that.”
Maou didn’t recall his exact feelings back then. But putting words to his memory like this, it likely wasn’t far from the truth.
“But in all my life, that was the first time a superior believed in me enough to entrust someone else to me.”
“You’re making me sound like I was a preschooler or something.”
“Well, I meant to treat you as carefully as one anyway.”
“You meant to?”
“Ahh, stop pressing me,” Maou said, lifting up his hands in surrender. “But to me, Chi, you were the first human being I viewed as precious.”
“Is that something I should be happy about?” she asked, knowing the answer.
“I’m not the judge of that. I’m a demon, despite it all.”
“That’s true. Despite it all.”
She decided to let go. To be frank, it was all in the past.
“And I know I’ve been going on for a while, but my point is, I didn’t want the people I held dear to forget about me. If I let that happen, and they just gave me this blasé look starting the next day… Well, I didn’t want to imagine that. I had a few coincidences happen in my life, and then I started thinking about things that way.”
“If I can take the opportunity to ask what kind of coincidences…?”
“Having Emi there.”
“Ah, it was her, huh?”
“Yeah. I put you through all kinds of hell, and part of me was, like—just because I don’t want you to forget about me, should I really leave you be? But if I did that, the only human who’d know everything I did was Emi.”
Maou winced—an emotion from the bottom of his heart.
“And it was, like, anything but that. So…”
He stared straight at Chiho.
“Not wanting someone you hold dear to forget about you… I guess that’s part of loving someone, isn’t it?”
“…Huh?”
This was unexpected. She’d already concluded this would be like any other chat—that he’d try talking his way into another deadline extension. For a moment, she forgot to breathe.
“I’ve been thinking about a lot of things. I’m a demon, but over the past year or two, I’ve come to realize that my feelings—my spirituality—they aren’t that different from any other human being’s. But when it comes to loving the opposite sex, I really do know nothing about that. I didn’t have any parents or friends to show me the ropes, and physically speaking, I’m not sure if demons even have the capacity. But…”
Maou didn’t take his eyes off her. Chiho, feeling her palpitations grow stronger, couldn’t reply.
“And to be honest, I’ve been kind of sick lately, and…after a series of improbable events, Sariel visited to take care of me.”
“What? You’ve been sick?! Huh? And Sariel took care of you? What?!”
It was shock on top of shock. Chiho exclaimed far more loudly than she’d intended.
“And I didn’t have anyone else to ask, so I asked him. Like, what does ‘love’ feel like? He’s had the hots for Ms. Kisaki since forever, y’know—but if things go naturally, Ms. Kisaki’s absolutely gonna reach her natural lifespan before him. Same with Laila and Nord. They’re destined to leave the people they love in the past. So it’s, like, how can they have those kinds of emotions?”