The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 5 Read Online Free PDF

You know our Jolly Meals? The ones that come with toys and stuff?”
    “Um, yeah, sure.”
    “Well, the toys are always either really hot, or really cold, in terms of popularity. This one time, we were doing these Pocket Creatures—y’know, Pokétures—toys, and this kid who couldn’t have been much older than eight or so comes up and orders a Jolly Meal. So I asked him which toy he wanted, and he was like…”
    Maou bunched up his eyebrows.
    It was a look of anguish, one not even Ashiya had seen in several months.
    “Gimme the one that goes ‘croak-a-loak’!”
    The sudden scowl, followed by the otherworldly cry, bewildered the rest of the room.
    “Yeah! You see? I felt, like,
exactly
what you must be feeling right now. What the hell’s this kid mean, the one who goes ‘croak-a-loak’? I didn’t even know that every monster in the game had their own unique cry like that, so I was totally clueless. And of course we had, like, ten different toys to choose from, so I couldn’t really spend the time guessing.”
    The others, unsure what the point was to this ripping yarn, could do nothing but sit tight and listen. Surprisingly, it was Urushihara who broke the silence.
    “I tried searching for it. Turns out it was from one of the movies,
Decahelios and the Path to the Sky King
. Decahelios is the mythical Pokéture in that one, and his basic
chibi
form is Dekalo, and
that’s
who makes it. He’s this little frog guy who lives in a bog somewhere, and eventually he evolves into a dragon.”
    “You are speaking in tongues, Lucifer.”
    To Suzuno, not very versed in modern Japanese subculture, Urushihara’s speech must have sounded like a runic inscription on the tomb of a long-forgotten ruler.
    “But, my liege, if his cry was ‘croak-a-loak,’ that would imply to me that the correct creature would at least look
somewhat
frog-like…”
    “Yeah, Ashiya, but you say that because you’ve been here on Earth for over a year now. Do the chickens say ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’ back in the demon realms?”
    Every language on Earth had its own unique ways of rendering animal cries and other bits of nonlanguage. The only person who had the right to take someone not native to Japan (or this world) to task for not knowing that
croak
was shorthand for “frog” was Mayumi Kisaki, Maou’s manager at MgRonald and a woman oblivious to his past.
    “So anyway, these Pokétures were mostly movie tie-ins who first got introduced in the plot, so at the time, all you knew about ’em came from the maybe five seconds they showed up in the trailer. The kid didn’t remember the name of that Dekalo guy or what he looked like. So I had no idea, and his mom was like ‘Oh, Shocksqueak is
fiiine
, son…’”
    Shocksqueak was the most well-known of Pokétures, a constant presence across the entire series and its merchandise.
    “The problem, though, was that Shocksqueak was the most popular toy and we had already run out of it. So his mom wound up leaving with this freaky toy that looked like a jellyfish with a bunch of magnets stuck to it.”
    “Jellyfish with a bunch of magnets stuck to it” provided little in the way of new insight to Maou’s audience of Pokéture neophytes.
    “…Okay,” Emi impatiently spoke up. “So what’s the point of this story?”
    “The point is, if I had a TV—if I saw some of the preview ads and knew at least a little bit about what we were selling to kids—I could’ve given that li’l guy what he wanted. It’s not my fault we were out of Shocksqueak, but we had all the other ones.”
    “…Took you long enough.” Urushihara eloquently summed up what everyone else was thinking.
    “But how does that connect with purchasing a TV?” Chiho asked. “Not to take Ashiya’s side, but you could still look that stuff up on the Internet if you wanted to.”
    Maou nodded at her.
    “Yeah, but I’d never see that kinda stuff unless I actively searched for it. I mean, failure breeds success and all