Grocery Shopping
I bought a floor map on a whim and set out to find Makina and Sugar, who had to be somewhere in the supermarket. We'd come to shop for groceries, plain as anything, so the food section was the obvious bet.
My eyes drifted, unbidden, toward the phone in my pants pocket. Should I just call? Ringing each other to meet up inside the same building, though—that didn't sit right.
If I'd had the Authority of Space. One teleport, and I'd have been standing right beside Sugar and Makina. But what can you do. Of the Demon God's two Authorities, Space and Pride, the one bestowed on me at a clean fifty-fifty was the Authority of Pride.
I kept my feet moving through the idle thoughts, and a conspicuous pair came into view in the distance, drawing every stare in the place. Sugar, wings on her back, went without saying. Makina's black hair was ordinary enough, but those strikingly golden eyes of hers were pulling looks all the same.
"Hey. Shopping go all right?"
Finding them, my gaze slid naturally to the cart Sugar was hauling. A few snacks. Cuts of meat that still held a red flush of blood, long dead though they were. And the vegetables, sole keepers of anything green in the whole cart. They'd stocked it so thoroughly I could hardly believe I'd sent only the two of them.
All of that, of course, accounted for only half the volume. As for the other half—
Frozen pizza. Frozen chicken. Frozen pork cutlets. Frozen dumplings.
They'd packed that half so thriftily with frozen food it looked like they'd swept the entire freezer aisle bare.
"Everything frozen comes out. Except the dumplings."
Sugar's mouth fell open. With a look of pure horror, she threw her body over the frozen goods and shielded them.
"Eeeeh?! B-but why? They're such delicious-looking little things that just looking at them makes my mouth water!"
The way I saw it, every frozen food except dumplings was nothing but a stand-in for delivery. Dumplings earned a pass, since there are times when delivered dumplings are actually worse than the frozen kind. Pizza, chicken, pork cutlets—the rest of them? Ask whether anyone who can get delivery would still choose frozen, and the head shakes on its own. That's just how it is.
"And there's something we need more urgently than frozen food. So there's no room for it."
"What is it?! What on earth could be more urgent than our frozen babies?!"
Why is this kid suddenly like this? Was she the one who loaded the frozen food into the cart? If you'd put something in because you wanted to eat it, and that something was about to get evicted, protesting was only natural. Unfortunately for Sugar, she was up against an opponent who was simply too strong.
"Salt. Sugar. Spices."
Sugar went silent.
You might wonder what a household of living people could possibly have done to run out of salt and sugar, but until Sugar arrived, we'd never once tried to cook. Delivery had kept us alive. Delivery, and only delivery. Even when we ordered something that needed salt—blood sausage and the like—they sent the salt along without being asked.
In the end, Sugar had no choice but to admit that salt and sugar mattered more. Tears in her eyes, she put the frozen foods back where they belonged, and empty space opened in the cart.
Salt, sugar, and the rest of the spices were all that remained, and then this shopping trip would be over. I quickened my steps, and Sugar suddenly stared straight up at the top of my head.
"Um, but—what is that crown on your head? From what I can see, you aren't wearing it because you're a king, or royalty, or anything like that."
"Why are you only asking that now?"
Usually you ask about something odd in a person's appearance right away, don't you? Then again, asking the moment you meet might be a bit much. So maybe not.
"Well! Of course I assumed Lady Ragna was a king—or if not that, then someone precious and noble!!"
"What'd you say, brat?! I am a precious and noble person, I'll have you know. It just has nothing to do with this crown."
Not that it truly had nothing to do with the crown. There was a connection—faint, granted, but there.
"So what is that crown, exactly? It really is just to look stylish, isn't it."
"What are you talking about. This crown is the Demon God's sacred relic."
"Ehh?! That is?!"
The crown on my head was the Demon God's sacred relic. More precisely, he was still wearing the original even now, and mine was nothing but a replica of it. Lights poured down on it from the supermarket ceiling, countless of them, and still the crown drank every ray so that nothing could reflect. Even in broad daylight, the thing was pitch-black.
A replica, yes—but a sacred relic of the Demon God all the same, which meant I could pull its information through the System.
Might as well check.
Once called the Crown of the Arrogant. When the Constellation, the Demon God Beyond the Heavens, ascended as the sole god of the demon realm, this sacred relic transcended its grade alongside him. It possesses a function that assists the Authority of Pride. Its wearer transcends all laws and concepts. (However, a replica cannot reproduce the transcendence of all laws and concepts.)
Nothing but a replica, not the original, and still the System had handed it an SSS-Rank without a second thought. If a replica performed below the original, then the original in the Demon God's possession had probably received the EX-Rank spoken of only in legend.
We'd reached the seasoning aisle before I noticed. I grabbed sugar and salt and dropped them in the cart, then soy sauce, pepper, stock powder—the other essentials of cooking—and the cart, hollowed out and roomy after losing half its load, filled out once more.
"You handle checkout. Come back when you're done."
Everything we needed was settled, so I sent Sugar off alone to pay. The money was coming out of my account anyway—the family's, strictly speaking—so what did it matter who stood at the register?
The Constellation, 'Demon God Beyond the Heavens,' says to just buy a pack of gum.
"Hey! The Demon God says to buy some gum!"
I called it out toward Sugar, but she trudged off to the checkout pretending not to hear. Fine. She could play deaf all she liked. When she came back, the gum would be in the bag.
Above all, it wasn't just anyone who'd asked. It was the Demon God. Sugar might have only just come to Earth from another floor, but any being living in the Tower would have heard plenty about his infamy. Fail to bring back gum he himself had ordered—and by her own fault, no less? Death would be waiting, or a punishment close enough to pass for it.
I turned from Sugar, already setting items on the counter in the distance, and looked at Makina beside me, eyes on her phone.
"Makina, could you open a gate home?"
"Yeah! Of course."
As I'd mentioned, Makina had received the Authority of Space from the Demon God. The Authority of Space—the power to manipulate space itself and dominate it, a disgustingly broken cheat, and not a soul alive would argue otherwise. It felt a little wrong to even call the next part a drawback, but if it had one, it was this. The one using it was still Makina, so she couldn't travel anywhere she hadn't been, or anywhere she couldn't detect.
Well. That was only true of Makina as she was now.
Even I, past lives and all, still hadn't mastered the Authority of Pride. Makina, on a perfectly ordinary first playthrough of life, had that much further to go. Someday she'd probably open gates by will alone, no information required.
"Nnnnngh!!"
Makina scrunched her face, fixed her eyes on empty air, and groaned. Slowly an oval gate took shape, and through it the inside of the house came into view.
The Constellation, 'Demon God Beyond the Heavens,' looks upon his Incarnation.
The oval forming the gate was about halfway done when the Demon God's message appeared—and all at once, the gate completed itself.
Did the Demon God help? I doubted that arrogant Demon God would truly lift a finger for his own Incarnation. And yet the circumstances left no room for doubt. He had.
"Thank you! Lord Demon God!"
Makina tipped her face up toward wherever he might be watching us and smiled, bright and guileless.
The Constellation, 'Demon God Beyond the Heavens,' shrugs, as if to say it's nothing.
The gate finished, and right on cue Sugar appeared in the distance, a plastic bag in each hand.
"Hey! Hurry up! The gate's closing. If it closes, you're just a lost kid on the Demon Continent. You know that, right?"
"A-ah, I know! Honestly, though—rushing me when you won't even help carry..."
"You have any idea how much taller you are than me?"
If I took the bags Sugar was holding, they wouldn't even clear the ground. I'd be dragging them along the floor.
Makina passed through the gate first and into the house, then I followed, and Sugar came last of all. With that, the long shopping trip drew to a close.
Sugar set the bags she'd carried alone onto the table, and I spoke to her.
"Put those away. And make dinner."
Her eyes went wide with shock. Before she could get so much as a word out, I was gone—straight to my room, like the wind.