✦ ✦ ✦
All they had to do was fill in the required boxes, bring the document to the appropriate place, make an appointment for an “interview,” and parrot out the right answers. Then they’d be able to work.
There was just one snag. Neither Satan nor Alciel had any special skills that could be easily applied in this nation. Satan could hardly write “Job History: King of the Demon Realm; Hobbies/Abilities: World domination” on his résumé. Thus, the only option was to focus on jobs that touted “Beginners Welcome!” in their notices.
The two of them sat down and prepared several résumés.
Holding back the frustration and humiliation, dreaming of the day when they would defeat the Hero and regain their grasp upon all that lived and breathed on Ente Isla, they wrote their names down.
“Name…‘Sadao Maou.’ Perfect.”
“Name…‘Shirou Ashiya.’ That doesn’t sound odd, does it?”
“Little point whining about it now. That’s what we wrote into the census register, no?”
Thus, Devil King Satan (aka Sadao Maou, the surname of which was written with perfectly ordinary Japanese characters whose pronunciation just happened to be the same as “Devil King”) and Great Demon General Alciel (aka Shirou Ashiya) set off on their quest to reconquer Ente Isla, room 201 at the Villa Rosa Sasazuka apartments serving as their Devil Castle for the time being.
✦ ✦ ✦
The two of them had established a foothold in their drive to find the bare minimum of work for themselves, but they had little time to rest. Money would be needed for other things, too—electricity, water, gas, essentials.
A tear came to Satan’s eye as he recalled a time when he could gather the thunderclouds, summon mighty waves, and raze the land with punishing flame, all at the flick of a finger.
Now, Satan and Alciel were just Maou and Ashiya, two slow-looking unemployed young men, neither looking past their early twenties.
The Devil King and his erstwhile Demon General read through every job-listing magazine they could find. Soon they discovered the existence of something called “day labor.”
All they had to do was sign up with a given company, and they’d then be assigned short-term work. They would receive payment daily, between five thousand and ten thousand yen depending on the work, perhaps more if they performed well.
Tossing one of their few remaining ten-yen coins into the slot of a public phone, they set up an appointment time for an interview.
Traveling to the office in Shinjuku, they found it was less an interview and more a work-orientation meeting. They signed up at once, found the directors less than picky about qualifications, and work was promised to them before the day was through.
Since they were both inexperienced beginners, they were tasked with assisting a group putting up facilities for an outdoor event, performing their assigned work up to the salary agreed upon.
Staring at the seven thousand yen each of them had earned for the day’s work, Satan felt reassured in his convictions.
If they kept this up, they could earn the money they needed for now. And once they saved enough money, they could turn their focus toward finding part-time jobs to keep them working on a more long-term basis.
That mission, however, fell apart in a short two weeks.
They had performed their duties on a consistent basis, to the point where the salaried employees working up front were starting to remember their faces.
Then the company received a stop-work notice from the government, forcing them to leave the work-assignment business. It was a complete bolt out of the blue.
In poor spirits and with no money source, the pair made their way home. Passing by a TV playing the news, they took in more of the story.
The newscast condemned the firm, accusing it of assigning workers to illegal sites and skimming an outrageous amount off the top of their revenue.
Satan focused on the news report, wondering to himself why a great demon as himself had to lose his job because of some silly laws enacted by humans, of all things. Suddenly, he came to a realization.
“Hey, Ashiya, wait a sec.”
“I would prefer Alciel, please.”
“Our mission here is to conquer the human world, right? Not to spend every day of our lives scraping up enough cash to survive.”
“Y…yes. As you say.”
“Then how about you just focus on finding a way to restore our magic? I can hold down a job instead. I may have more physical and magical strength than you, but you—you’re the one and only strategist I have. I need you to find a source of magic for me, here, in Japan.”
“M-Maou…”
“It’s ‘Your Demonic Highness.’ But anyway, even if it may be more comfortable for us if we both worked, we must never lose sight of our goals. Demons and magic may not exist here, but the concepts do. And every concept has an origin. If we can root out the origin, then perhaps…”
“…perhaps we can find a way to regain that magic?”
Satan nodded sagely.
“Far preferable to the both of us stringing part-time jobs together, right? And there is no need to focus on just magic, either. Perhaps we could find some new power, something exclusive to this world. Then we could use that to dominate Ente Isla once more!”
Ashiya…er, Alciel fell to his knees, deeply moved by the first truly motivational speech from his master in many days.
“Absolutely, Your Demonic Highness! I will stake my very life to find a way back to Ente Isla; to find a method to restore my liege’s powers!”
“…Will you get up, Alciel? We’re in the middle of a crosswalk. You’re embarrassing me.”
Their fellow pedestrians stared as they walked past, not betraying a hair of emotion at the sight of Alciel suddenly kneeling down and shouting nonsense in the middle of the afternoon.
✦ ✦ ✦
The Devil King Satan, absorbing himself in the role of Japanese slacker Sadao Maou, gave every inch of strength to his work. He went through a lot of it. Traffic control at a road construction site. Order picking at a commercial warehouse. Assistant for a moving company. Rush-hour customer management at a train station. The variety, at least, was nothing to complain about.
Meanwhile, as Shirou Ashiya, Alciel devoted himself to maintaining the household, ensuring that Maou remained healthy and able to devote himself to work. In his spare time, he investigated the world’s magical possibilities, as well as strictly managing the pair’s financial situation.
Exactly six months after the two of them first touched down in Japan, Maou received an offer for his first long-term part-time job—MgRonald, the fast-food giant.
He returned from his first day at work with a pleased look upon his face, the bags in his hands groaning with deep-fried miscellanea. As he put it, “From this day forward, we will never have to worry about our food drying up.”
Ashiya, too, was glad to be rid of such concerns. At first. But eating all these burgers, all these French fries, all this fried chicken—all this high-calorie, additive-laden food, day in and day out, wore him out almost immediately. After a week, the heartburn was enough to make him never want to set eyes upon a fast-food container again.
But Maou carried on with this questionable diet, apparently taking a liking to the “cuisine” on offer.
Inevitably, Ashiya had to pay even more attention to their daily food habits in response. The result was that the demon’s valiant search for magic was getting absolutely nowhere. If he wanted to avoid a disastrous diet of junk food for every meal, Ashiya had to dash for the supermarkets just before closing time, keeping a careful eye on whatever day-old stuff was discounted the lowest each day.
At least Maou was devoted to his work. Within two months, he had already received a raise.
The day was one Ashiya would likely never forget. The sight of the Devil King, overjoyed at the concept of a one-hundred-yen raise in his hourly wages, was something nobody could bear to behold without their eyes tearing up.
Several more line promotions followed in the ensuing weeks. And before long, Maou had become an A-level crew member at the MgRonald location in front of the Hatagaya rail station.
His hourly wage was two hundred yen higher than when he joined half a year ago. This was, allegedly, exceptionally kind treatment on MgRonald’s part. Using any of his hypnosis magic would weaken him to a point that Ashiya would immediately recognize something was amiss, so everything Maou achieved must have been the result of honest sweat equity.
Eventually, a customer feedback form made its way to MgRonald headquarters, apparently full of praise for Maou’s service. That earned him the Crew MVP award for the month.
A marked change in attitude began to settle in. Here was the Devil King after work, talking about how right his boss was to praise him and how talented one of the new hires was proving to be. It was hardly the devious plotting of a would-be conqueror. His qualifications upon the Devil King role gradually shrank, to the point where he began claiming that surpassing his store manager would be the first step to world domination.
For someone like Ashiya, whose sole pleasure in life was to support the Devil King in his illustrious triumphs, the sight was growing increasingly disquieting as of late. It was becoming difficult to think in depth about the future.