“Mommy! What’s that? That big thing?”
“Um… That’s the Tokyo Skytree.”
“Yeah. That’s where all the digital TV transmitters are. Thanks to
that
, Daddy has to pay for some stupid set-top box if he wants…”
“Don’t change the subject!”
The gondola swayed slightly at the shuddering impact of Emi’s voice.
Two gondolas behind, Rika and Ashiya were alone.
“Dehh… If we were just a little faster, we could see what was going on inside…”
They had successfully clambered into a gondola, but the booths were hardly see-through, and getting a clear vantage point on the gondola two places ahead was easier said than done.
“…………”
Rika sat opposite from Ashiya, eyes fixed downward around her feet.
Chiho must have gotten caught up in something. Rika thought she was with them, but the next thing she knew, she was alone with Ashiya.
“Is there something wrong, Ms. Suzuki?”
“Agh! Huh?!”
Rika, as loud and gregarious as she was a moment ago, was suddenly as quiet as a clam. Even Ashiya took notice.
“Uh, I, um, she, I’m sorry that—that I left Chiho, is all…”
“We were certainly in a great hurry, yes…”
Rika’s forced response was enough to put Ashiya’s mind at rest. With a sigh, he sat heavily on his seat.
“……!!”
The gondolas on the Ferris wheel weren’t exactly roomy by design. With someone as tall as Ashiya sitting down, it was unavoidable that they’d brush against each other with their knees or legs.
The sheer love for life Rika showed up to now was, in the end, something she could express mainly because Chiho was around to egg her on.
If a third party was there, touching bodies or being cramped in a tiny space was nothing that bothered her. But here, alone with a
man in an enclosed area, was something she had never experienced before in her life.
Especially if the man was Ashiya.
When they met a week ago, in the midst of all the furor surrounding Emi and Suzuno, she didn’t think of him as much more than kind of an off-kilter young man. In the past several hours of activity together, that impression only deepened.
“Are you all right? Your face is a little red. Did you get sunburned?” Ashiya asked.
“T-too close!”
“Hmm?”
“Oh! Um. No. It’s fine, it’s fine! I guess that sunscreen sure doesn’t work as advertised, huh? Yep.” Rika flailed her arms in response, pulling herself as far back as humanly possible.
Ashiya, paying this act no particular mind, began taking in the view outside.
The attendant said one ride around the wheel would take fifteen minutes, but to Rika, the sheer embarrassment was something she questioned how long she could withstand.
Meanwhile Chiho, seated on a bench at the gondola entrance, was brooding over a can of chilled green tea labeled “Yo! Tea!”
“So, what?! Are you talking? Are you not talking?! You want to die?!” Emi demanded.
“Give me some more
choices
, man! You’re gonna be a bad influence on this kid!”
The we-have-ways-of-making-you-talk ultimatum continued in the lead gondola.
“I mean, c’mon, does it really matter? It’s not like I
did
anything. I’m just fine with being Alas Ramus’s dad, okay?”
“Maybe
you
are, but I’m not! Didn’t you see her?! That girl in the white dress, standing right in front of me? She talked about the Heavenly Regiment or something! If you want to stay on my good side, you better spit out everything you know, start to finish, right now!”
“See her? See
who
?! And since when was I
ever
on your good side?!”
“I’m not talking about you! I’m talking about her!”
Emi’s eyes descended upon Alas Ramus, staring out the gondola window.
As the two of them watched the girl from behind, the gondola gradually reached its highest point on the wheel.
“…Someone gave it to me a long time ago.”
Maou sighed, resigned to his fate, his face a grimace.
“Back before I was Devil King… Really, I was just a snot-nosed little kid. Like,
maybe
I could’ve taken on a
goblin
.”
Emi, realizing that Maou was finally in the mood to talk, lowered her guard and sat down to listen.
“Back then…and I’m talking way before you were ever born…the demon realm was a real pile of crap. There were all these different roving tribes, and all it took was eye contact for them to start ripping one another apart. I was part of one of the weaker tribes—you could’ve blown us away with the flick of a finger. And one of them did. This huge, musclebound demon with a peanut for a brain annihilated us all by himself. He couldn’t cast any magic, but he didn’t need it. The first and last memory I have of my parents is watching them breathe their last on the dirt.”
The personal narrative began without warning. It was perhaps an even worse influence on Alas Ramus’s upbringing than anything Maou had done before, but Emi sat silently, not wanting to break the mood.
“The survivors were all slaughtered in a battle against another rival tribe. I was tossed out like garbage with the rest of them. I was pretty close to dying. But one person cared enough about a dirty little brat like me to save my life.”
Looking at some far-off point in the distance, Maou continued, his voice taking on a nostalgic twinge.
“That was the first time I ever met an angel. I’d never seen such pure white wings before.”
“Daddy, what’s that?”
“Hmm? Ooh, you got a good eye, Alas Ramus! That’s called a blimp.”
“Bliiimp?”
Alas Ramus stared up at the dirigible for a moment, mouth agape.
“Uh, where was I?”
“At the point where an angel saved your life…”
“Oh, right. Anyway, I was basically this goblin-level goon, so I tried taking her on, even though I was wounded. Looking back, she must’ve been a pretty high-level angel, but anyway, she didn’t even bother paying attention to me. Not that she killed me or anything, though. I was still a demon, more or less, so I would’ve healed by myself, but that bastard kept checking in on me, talking to me about all kinds of different crap. I wasn’t able to move much, so I was forced to listen to it all. She taught me about a lot of stuff I didn’t know.”
Emi was, if anything, surprised.
Given that he went around calling himself Satan the Devil King, she expected that he was born that way, part of a prestigious lineage of noble demons (assuming such a thing existed down there).
“So it took a pretty long time to heal, I think. I was pretty banged up, after all. And after a while, it finally dawned on me that this angel wasn’t gonna kill me. She kept on talking to me, no matter how much I hated it, so I started to learn a lot. But the more I heard from her, the more I realized there was no way angels should be going around helping demons. So I asked her: ‘Why are you helping me?’”
“…And?”
“…Don’t laugh, okay? If you do, I’m not saying any more.”
For reasons only he knew, Maou averted his eyes in embarrassment.
“She said it’s because I was crying.”
“Huh?”
“She said she never saw a demon crying before, so she just couldn’t let me be.”
It was hard for Emi to imagine a demon crying at all, for any reason. It made her realize for the first time how little she actually
knew about the collection of species her human compatriots called “demons.”
“What reason did you have for crying?”
Maou winced at the question. But, realizing she didn’t mean to poke fun at him, he resignedly continued.
“Well, a bunch of things. Like I said, I didn’t really care much about losing my parents or the people around me. If I had to put it in words… I guess I was just pissed. Pissed at how weak I was. Pissed at how unfair it was, just dying without even a whimper like that.”
Maou’s eyes were still averted from Emi’s, a side effect of retelling these bitter memories.
“But anyway, this angel took care of me until I was healed, and taught me about a lot of stuff, too. That was the first time I learned there was such a thing as the human world.”
“!!”
Maou had glossed past it, but to Emi, this was a shocking revelation.
Was an angel the root cause that ultimately led to the Devil King’s invasion of Ente Isla?
There was no conclusive evidence behind anything Maou said, of course. But if he wasn’t lying, this fact had the potential to shake the very core of what little peace Emi’s world clung to.
“And this girl…or the crystal she used to be, at least… She left it with me the day she went away. It was this beautiful violet crystal, shaped like a crescent moon.”
“No! I’m looking!”
Alas Ramus yelped in protest as Maou lifted her up.
Nothing was on her forehead at the moment, but that crescent-shaped mark must have been meant to symbolize her original crystal form.
“‘If you want to learn more of the world, take this seed. Plant it, and allow it to grow. Then, you will go far, Satan, my Devil Overlord.’”
“What?”
“That’s what she wrote in the note she left behind. Literacy, too—that was another gift she gave to me. A revolutionary way to convey
information, one that didn’t involve violence or crazed gibbering for a change. So I’ll gloss over the next two hundred years of glorious conquest, when I took the demonic rabble and forged it into a proper civilization, but there’s no way that ever would’ve happened without the knowledge she gave me. So that’s why I planted that crescent-shaped seed. I thought it would benefit me, sooner or later, even if I didn’t know exactly what it was. Then, when I planted this crystal on that angel’s command—get this—it actually sprouted into a tree. Kind of a letdown, you know?”
Now Maou’s eyes were focused upon a not-so-ancient point in his life. The Devil’s Castle—the original one, the symbol of the transformation he had engineered in the demon realms, built on the ruins of Isla Centurum in the center of the Ente Isla lands.
The Devil King, upon setting foot on a world that was not his own for the first time, planted the moon-shaped purple crystal in its soil, anticipating it would bud into a harbinger of the future.
He cultivated it inside a pot placed deep inside his personal chamber, fully exposed to the sunlight, in an area nobody but himself was allowed access to.
“I mean, it’s not like I was tutored and trained from birth to be Devil King. Back then, in the demon realms, you couldn’t spit without hitting someone whose name was Satan. We were taught that it was the name of some great demonic overlord, one who lived in an era before legend, blah blah blah. It’s really a miracle any kind of legends existed at all in that dump before I came around. I have no idea why that angel called me ‘Devil Overlord,’ but I guess that’s where I got my start. With her.”
Maou gave Alas Ramus a pat on the head, but the girl escaped from his hand, plastering herself against the gondola window.
“But, anyway, that sort of thing. In terms of the role I had in taking that purple crystal and making it into Alas Ramus, I guess you could make the case I’m her dad.”
“So would that angel be her true…?”
“It’d make sense, wouldn’t it? But it was just this plain old crystal
when she gave it to me, so… I dunno if you’d really call that an embryo or whatever.”
Emi, breaking out in a cold sweat as she felt her pulse rise and an ominous premonition loom over her mind, asked the obvious question.
“Who was it?”
Laila had disappeared from Emeralda’s sight. The woman in white knew Alas Ramus’s name. The crystal that produced Alas Ramus was gifted to the Devil King by an angel. That girl now saw Emi as her mother.
It couldn’t be.
A superstorm of anticipation, premonition, and anxiousness raced through Emi’s heart.
“Nobody you know.”
The storm dissipated into a light drizzle.
“…You aren’t trying to hide her from me, are you?”
“I’m not trying to, but I don’t think she’s anyone that famous. She didn’t show up in any of the sacred Church tracts or anything. Hey, but can you tell me why Alas Ramus is back to normal now? You know something about that, right?”
Emi found Maou’s sudden vagueness inscrutable. But she answered anyway, reasoning she had already learned enough about Maou’s past for today.
“She was healed by this girl dressed entirely in white. She put her hand above her, and that was all it took.”
“…Whoa, what’s up with that? Some kind of New Age deal?”
Maou must not have seen the woman. Emi pressed on.
“No! She was there when you got back! Didn’t you
see
her?! It was like, I think her ring glowed a little bit, and then Alas Ramus was right back awake! Like she was just having a dream or something!”
“I didn’t see anybody! What kind of ring?”
“Just a plain old ring. I think it had a purple stone in it, but…”
“…That’s definitely
not
plain
or
old.”
These occasional mental lapses on Emi’s part were enough to make Maou scream.
“Did you notice anything else?”
“Well, I didn’t have that much time before some idiot came in shouting at me like a crazy man.”
“C’mon.”
“Oh, and she said something about the Heavenly Regiment, and something about a…Yesod fragment? I think that’s what it—
ow
!”
Maou instinctively landed a karate chop on Emi’s hat-adorned head.
“Wh-what’d you do
that
for?! I’m gonna kill you!”
Emi quickly grew eager to ratchet up the conflict. Maou stuck to his guns.
“Look, are you
really
a knight of the Church, or what? I swear! Young people these days are so stupid! At least
try
to learn something for a change!” Maou bellowed as he held his head in his hands, hunching over in mental anguish. “Yesod… Yesod?! Not
that
, dammit! Jeez, of all the things that bastard could’ve pushed on me… So that thing before, too…!”
“Wh-what? What’re you going on about all of a sudden?”
“Man, when we get home, Suzuno is gonna call you
such
an idiot.”
“Huhh?!”