Emi followed after the pair distractedly, still lost in a fog.
The trio following even farther behind exchanged glances between Maou and the clothing store.
“I’ve never seen two people look so depressed over buying a hat before.”
“Yeah, who can say? Maybe it was really expensive or something.”
Prompted by Rika and Chiho’s chatter, Ashiya idly picked up a hat similar to the one Maou bought for Alas Ramus.
“Two…
thousand
, five hundred yen…”
He wheezed out the number, choking on each digit.
“He…he completely blew through the money we saved on that free pass…”
“Huh? Hey, Ashiya, you need something to drink? You don’t look too good.”
“Ha! Ha-ha-ha! No, uh, no worries! Onward, ha-ha-ha-ha!”
Hanging the hat back up with a strained, shrill chuckle, Ashiya beckoned Rika to leave the store with him. Chiho picked up a “New for Summer!” hat, peeked at the price tag, then wiped a tear away as she silently replaced it on the display.
“I gotta say, though, this is a lot more
normal
than I thought it was gonna be. Like, they’re acting all mature and stuff, you know? I thought I’d step in if they started fighting or whatever, but I guess they’re playing nice for the sake of the kid, huh?”
“Huh? What, so you weren’t here just to gawk at them, Suzuki?”
Chiho couldn’t resist asking an overly honest question.
“Oooh, Chiho, you shouldn’t look down on your big sis like that!”
Rika gave a judgmental pinch on Chiho’s cheek.
“Mmph, fthorry…”
“I’m not gonna deny that or anything, but, like, what else am I supposed to do with my time off, y’know? I just figured I’ve observe her and provide backup if need be.”
“Ffraffup?”
“Sure. That girl’s from Maou’s family, right? If the girl likes Emi that much, she’s gonna be awfully hurt once she goes away. At times like that, it helps a lot just to have someone to drink with you, right? Someone who knows what you’re going through to some extent.”
“Ffh… Right.”
Her cheek finally released, Chiho rubbed her face with her hands.
“And
also
, I’m kinda interested in how Emi acts when she’s out with a guy, y’know?”
“See? See? You’re just gawking at her! You pinched me for nothing!”
“I’m not
gawking
, Chiho. It’s kind of like being a voyeur, if anything.”
“That’s even worse!”
“Oh, are
you
one to talk, Chiho? You aren’t even related to Maou. Why’re
you
sneaking around him like that?”
“I-I-I’m not, that’s…”
“Aw, c’mon. I’m not gonna tell anyone. Just go ahead and tell your big sis what’s up.”
“…I am glad
someone
is enjoying this, at least.”
Ashiya began to grow weary of the two girls gossiping with each other to the rear.
“Aw, don’t be such a party pooper!”
“Agh!”
Ashiya yelped as he was suddenly reeled in by the shoulder.
“And you, too, Ashiya… I know Emi’s the indirect reason your company went out of business and all, but she’s not your enemy any longer, is she? She’s not gonna prey on you guys or anything, so why’re you acting so serious about this?”
She
was
their enemy, from head to toe, and it wasn’t that she’d prey upon them so much as she’d take their heads off and spit on their corpses, but there was no way he could say that to Rika.
“You know what, Ashiya? I think you should try reading some Natsume Soseki sometime.”
“What? Why? Where’d that come from?”
“Oh, I just think it’d have a lot to teach someone like you. Like, how not to act so tough and formal all the time, y’know?”
Chiho and Ashiya found themselves at the mercy of this unassuming call-center girl, one with an uncanny knack for diving into the inner recesses of people’s minds.
“Still…”
Rika continued at a whisper, away from Chiho and Ashiya as the pair blankly stared at each other.
“I do like that a lot more than taking the subtle approach, though.”
Alas Ramus, holding a clutch of colorful balloons, was in paradise.
She had begged Maou multiple times along the way for them. Apparently anything done up in bright, flashy colors immediately attracted her notice.
“Ugh… I can just see it now. The doting daddy, unable to say no to his daughter.”
Emi whined to herself as she drank some mineral water, using a paper fan passed out at Lagoon to keep cool.
Watching Alas Ramus shriek in delight on a small merry-go-round, Maou looking not so displeased himself atop a carousel horse behind her, Emi was plagued by an impulse to simply drop everything and return to Ente Isla right this minute.
Something Maou said a little while ago continued to ring in her ears.
Having the demon forces expelled by the armies of the human race filled her with nothing but pure, unadulterated happiness. It was, in her mind, the only conclusion to the battle she could ever accept.
Maou had a habit of hiding his true colors when it counted the most, so it was difficult to gauge his feelings for sure. But there was no sign of sadness or anger on his face as he theorized about how his former demon underlings were likely dead.
Something about his words, though, gave Emi the strangest sense that something she had taken for granted up to now shouldn’t be. Something she had taken as much for granted as breathing, or drinking water…
“…mi? …Hey, Emi?”
“…What? Oh, sorry. What is it?”
Lost in thought, she suddenly realized that Maou was off the merry-go-round and standing right next to her.
“Why’re you spacing out on me, man? Is the heat frying your brain?”
“It—it is
not
! Stop sidling right up to me like that! What is it?!”
“I think Alas wants to check this out.”
Maou pointed to a poster advertising the Tokyo Big-Egg hero show, arguably one of the park’s trademark experiences, tacked onto an information board.
Emi recognized the show from the TV ad she saw earlier, but something else also caught her attention.
“…Did you buy a TV or something?”
The show was apparently a grandiose crossover event, with a team of five acrobatic heroes (each identified by the color of spandex they wore) uniting with a group of similarly colorful magical girls. It was running a brisk business, no doubt aided by the sunny Sunday weather, but Emi couldn’t help but notice that these were all kids’ TV characters.
“A TV? No. The antenna on the roof’s still analog, even.”
The response Maou gave was predictable enough.
“But, I dunno, Alas Ramus really seems to dig all these rainbow colors. I don’t know if that rings a bell in her mind or something, but…”
Alas Ramus’s attention was absorbed in the poster outside the stage, depicting the live-action spandex stars shaking hands with the anime-style magical girl heroines—a fairly surreal piece of art, from a grown-up’s perspective.
“That’s fine with me, but it’s gonna cost you money apart from the Passport, right? Can you cover that?”
There was a fairly long pause before Maou could manage a response.
“…………I can apologize to Ashiya later. I already bought that hat anyway.”
Emi wondered why, despite being the Devil’s Castle’s sole breadwinner, Maou acted so cowed whenever the subject of his resident househusband reared its ugly head.
“…Well, whatever. I’ll cover Alas Ramus’s ticket, okay? You can find a way to cover yours.”
“
Thank
you!”
It would have taken a mountain of motivation for the Devil King to ever bow gratefully to the Hero like this.
But, from Emi’s perspective, the Devil King now owed a debt to her. That would be enough to cover what she owed Ashiya following the whole Suzuno thing. She even thought about claiming Maou’s part of that debt as covered as well, but relented. It seemed a step too far.
She headed right over to the nearby ticket booth, but the clerk meekly bowed to her in response.
“The next show’s sold out! It’s gonna be two hours until the next one!”
Emi yelled the report back to Maou.
“Seriously? Well, how ’bout we get tickets for the next show and have some lunch for now?”
“All right! In that case, two adults and one child.”
She went back to Maou.
“Here. One adult ticket. That’s fifteen hundred yen.”
“Got it.”
The pair exchanged the ticket for some cash from Maou’s wallet. Then, with Alas Ramus in Maou’s hands, they glanced at the park map and walked off toward a nearby restaurant.
“Boy, they’re getting really friendly with each other now, hmmmm?”
“……”
“……”
Rika, of course, was basking in the joy of getting Ashiya and Chiho to react to her commentary.
“One of those superhero shows, though, huh? I never went to any of those when I was a kid. Whaddaya think? Wanna go in?”
“That’s…a tad much.”
“I kinda doubt we’d get a lot out of it.”
“No? Why not?”
Rika’s brows furrowed in confusion at Chiho’s and Ashiya’s sudden lack of enthusiasm.
“Well, it’s kind of for little kids, isn’t it? It’d be sorta weird if the three of us went in by ourselves…”
“Wow,
somebody’s
behind the times. This isn’t just a father-son thing anymore.”
“Huh?”
“Even grown-ups like watching this stuff these days. All by themselves, even. You used to hear about the ladies going crazy for the handsome heroes in kids’ shows before they transformed into their
fancy outfits. This is kinda their chance to see those characters in real life, you know? Or their prerecorded voices, at least.”
“Huhhh?”
“And this anime here, with the girls…”
“…That’s
Pretty and Pure
, right? I used to watch that when I was younger, but there’s so many characters to keep track of nowadays…”
Magical Girl Pretty and Pure
was a long-running animated series featuring a group of fetching, magic-wielding young women fighting evil, often wearing outfits resembling lighter, frillier versions of what you saw in the spandex-hero shows. It was the current standout anime hit for young girls, to the point where theatrical releases came out on a yearly basis.
“Some people dig that show because they’re just anime fans, but a lot of the voice team have gone on to become successful actors, too, y’know? I saw a magazine article about how there’s this huge mass of male fans who go nuts for it.”
“Wow… So I guess it’s got appeal for men and women, young and old, huh?”
“No, I, er, I would hesitate to go that far, but…”
Ashiya hesitantly attempted to stop Chiho from building too inaccurate a picture of
Pretty and Pure
’s audience in her mind. Just then, the noise from beyond the wall indicated the stage show was under way.
It wasn’t visible from outside—not much reason to charge admission otherwise—but the cheers from the audience included a few deep, basso shouts that definitely were not prepubescent in nature.
Rika snickered as she noticed Chiho’s face freeze.
“How ’bout we go eat some lunch, too?”
Rika pointed out an open-air Italian café poised directly in front of the stage-show entrance.
Two hours later, Maou and his family sat down on a bleacher row relatively close to the stage.
“We got a pretty good position, huh? Pretty amazing to think it’s all advance tickets only. I mean, look at that stage. It’s so tiny.”
Sitting down on the long bench, Maou considered his surroundings. “I heard if they didn’t assign seats, the kids in the back wouldn’t be able to see the show.”
“Huh? Why not?”
“Well, y’know, there’re a lot of…folks out there, in the world.”
Even with the assigned tickets, these were simple bleachers, not cup-holder-equipped stadium seating. It would be impossible to avoid rubbing elbows with their rowmates.
Alas Ramus was there, and their assorted purchases were also between them, but to Emi, Maou was still sitting far too close for comfort.
Even amid a crowd of onlookers, there was no way she could withstand such intimate contact with Maou over a long period of time.
The stage show was another sellout, and with the sun beating down on them, it felt a good four or five degrees warmer than outside. After a short wait, the loudspeakers suddenly blasted out a loud theme song as smoke and fireworks zipped across the stage. The show was set to begin with the spandex-hero segment first, although the loud explosions were already enough to send Alas Ramus reeling.
Every iteration of these hero shows seemed to have its own theme, its own special finisher moves, and its own giant robot all the heroes combined to form, all of which was helpfully outlined in the opening theme song. This time around, the heroes were modeled after ninjas, it seemed.
A large tree prop stood front and center onstage, about the height of a two-story building. Each of the five heroes dropped down from it, one by one, all with their own trademark pose.
“Wow, they’re falling from pretty high up!”
“…Why are
you
so impressed? You’re the Devil King!”
“Do ninjas really go around in those colors, though?”
“It’s a kid’s show. Relax!”
The hero team had a few ninjalike moves between the flash and flair, but Maou had his doubts over whether a ninja in fluorescent pastel colors would be much good at stealth.
The tree prop was apparently going to be recycled for the
Pretty and Pure
segment, where it’d provide the “Earth-mother strength” the girls needed to fight.
“Dang! Those guys can really move! They should, like, join Special Forces or something.”
The enemies this remarkably conspicuous ninja team faced off against were, for some reason, a horde of space aliens.
A particularly loud cheer arose among the children in the audience once the aliens’ boss entered the stage.
“Oooh, rock on! The villain’s got a fan club!”
“They’re not cheering
for
him. They’re cheering about how he’s gonna get his ass kicked in a sec.”
“Oh, quit ruining the fun, man! Hey, Alas Ramus, which side are you—”