Kyou kara Ma no Tsuku Jiyuugyou! Vol 7 Chapter 4

So I didn’t make a post about this novel’s chapters that were already translated like I did for KittoMa and ItsukaMa because there really wasn’t anything worth making a post about.  The Chinese version stayed really faithful.  There were a few jokes that were cut out and some that it seems like Vivarina just didn’t know how to write in English (Like when Yuuri was imagining Super Saiyans because the Big Shimaron tournament is called the exact same thing as the Dragonball tournament ‘Tenkaichi Budokai’).  There were also times where it looks like she mixed up who was talking. Although, one time even I'm not really sure if it was Wolfram or Yuuri making the comment. It seems like it had to have been Wolfram because the next line was definitely Yuuri, but it also seemed out of character. It wasn't anything really important though so whatever ^-^

That being said, some of the names are a bit different because they got changed into Chinese phonology.  I'll list them at the beginning of the chapter if they come up.  The one in this chapter is:

Saismoya > Sizemore

Oh, and I got the picture for this chapter from Portrait of a Demon King.

Anyway, here it is!  Chapter 4 of Ten ni Ma no Tsuku Yuki ga Mau! (The Ma!Snow Dances in the Sky!)

Chapter 4

      “What’s up with that!?  He’s all weak too!”

      “He’s Lord von Bielefelt, right?  I don’t think he’s weak at all.”

      “He probably just underestimated you.  There we go!”

      “Hey hold up, Murata.  If you do that, then Wolf and the others won’t have anywhere to escape.”

      “To the death?  That’s a bit much.”

      As he stood by the window watching the scene outside, Murata let out a long sigh.

      At that moment, I understood.  He had taken out his contact lenses and was a black-eyed owner of Japanese DNA just like me.  There was a glitter that I had definitely seen somewhere before in his near-sighted eyes.

      My friend from the same class suddenly looked scarily old.  I can’t move my gaze away from the dark light in his irises, in his pupils, deep deep within.  As I gaze at the pinpoint, numbness runs up from my hipbone.

      “Stop.” Murata hurriedly covers my eyes with his right hand. “It’s dangerous.  You can’t control it on your own yet.”

      “Magic.  You and I have a very special relationship.  Used correctly it can even become a powerful weapon.  But it’s a double-edged sword.  One wrong move can end in tragedy.  Do you remember that rampage at the Gilbit estate?  That was really dangerous too.”

      I impatiently brush off the hand on my face.  It was only for just a brief moment, but the daylight’s brightness hurt my eyes.

      “It’s true.  You might not be able to believe it though.  You and I… to put it bluntly, the Demon King and I have a special relationship.  I am able to aide a king who has great power.  I was made for that purpose.  But you aren’t used to using magic yet.  If we mess up while working together, we won’t be able to stop the magic from running wild.”

      “Uh, um, in a video game that would be a tag-team combo?”

      It wasn’t the time for me to be praised for confirming the name of the technique.

      “… Maybe it’s because my brain isn’t calm right now… but you sound like you’re a human from this world.  Maybe not a human.  A demon maybe.  Either way, Ken Murata from Japan, a classmate from my hometown, was really someone from The Great Demon Kingdom! … Is what it sounds like.”

      With his arms loosely folded across his chest, he’s leaning against the wall.  Half of his body is in view of the window and only that part was obstructing the sunlight.

      He looked black with the light behind him.

      “I said so, didn’t I?  I’m Ken Murata.  I’m not anyone else.”

      “Then who are you?”

      “Your Majesty, aren’t you Yuuri Shibuya?  Aren’t you a baseball fanatic who lived on Earth as a Japanese high school student right up until just before your 16th birthday?  Aren’t you Yuuri Shibuya, the owner, catcher and captain of a grass-lot baseball team and a Lions fan?  Even if you ask me who I am, I am me and there’s nothing false or true about it.  I lived on Earth for 16 years too.  I lived as a perfectly normal Japanese person with relatively ordinary parents even though they work a lot so there are days when I don’t see them at all.  I was in a different school district so our elementary schools were different, but we were in the same class in middle school, right?  I was born with the name Ken Murata.  I don’t have any middle names or baptismal names.  I was there for almost 16 years.  I breathed the same air and was raised in the same world.  You wanna hear more?  We go to the same bookstores and convenience stores and we take a shortcut through the same park.  As a matter of fact, the ramen shop I went to after cram school in 6th grade was the same too.  Is that enough?  Can you be satisfied with that?  If you ask me who I am now, all I can tell you is that I’m me!”

      My voice is high-pitched.  I felt like the floor under my feet would disappear and I would just plunge into the ocean.

      “Yeah.  That’s, it’s a little extra something I remember from before being born.”

      “Yes.”

      “He embraced your soul and went to Earth and protected you with great care on the journey.  Until it was decided where you would be born.  My guardian was a ridiculous doctor, but he brought along Lord Weller, who didn’t know anything about Earth, and tried surprisingly hard.  You had a slightly troublesome pursuer and he needed to get away from them.”

      “Yeah, because you were the soul of the next Demon King.”

      “There’s no way I’d remember that.”

      The guy who insists he is Ken Murata squints his black eyes a little.

      “F-forget what?  Your past life and before that?”

      “I’m sorry.  I can’t really unders…”

      “Hey, um, when you say way back, does that mean about 500 years?”

      “Then 800, 1000 years?”

      “Seriously?  Then you remember all of the past 4000 years of Chinese history!?”

      “If you weren’t in China then where were you?  Did you wander around the world?”

      I had inadvertently imagined it and was on the verge of tears.

      “Hey wait, I wasn’t the one who died,” Murata said as he unfolded his arms and pounded his chest with his fist. “It was the previous previous previous owner of this soul who died.”

      “How can I explain it in an easier way?  For example, it’s kind of like remembering the main characters you empathized with in a few dozen movies.  Ah, World War I was pretty difficult wasn’t it?  The railroad engineer had a pretty wife, didn’t he?  It’s really great we have a cure for the bubonic plague nowadays, huh?  That kid really admired the Crusaders… and like that, I accurately remember the portrayals of main characters from movies from a bunch of different eras.  So, it’s not like I have gone through anything sad or painful myself.  Even though I have 4000 years of memories, I’ve only lived sixteen years.  I might cry over the pain of others or for disasters sometimes, but there’s nothing on par occurring in my own life.  Hey Shibuya, you paying attention?”

      No, not ‘who are you.’  Do people with memories of their past lives talk about them like that?  Murata is surprisingly objective.  What century were the Crusaders from?  I regret that I failed world history.

      “I saw the one with Elizabeth Taylor.  But during Cleopatra’s time, the owner of this soul lived in the land of the demons.”

      “It seems so.  At that time, the name of the country was…”  Murata lapsed into thought for a short while as if he was remembering something like in a scene in an old drama.  “Yeah, it has been here before.”

      When I first came to this world, a spiteful American Football Macho used an iron claw on me.  Thanks to that, the accumulated knowledge of the language stored in that gap in my soul came out. I found out that the previous owner of my soul was someone who lived in The Great Demon Kingdom.  They lived as a demon in that country before I was Yuuri Shibuya.

      “It’s a really strange… odd feeling.  Having a friend that I can’t clearly associate with either Japan or here…”

      Oh, Murata was born in Hong Kong.  I heard that his parents are Japanese though.

      “I have the important mission of assisting you, His Majesty the 27th Demon King.”

      “I’ll be happy if I can.  The reason I have the vast knowledge from the time I was called The Great Sage is to help you.”

      I haven’t eaten or drank anything, but there’s a round lump stuck in the back of my throat. After struggling and coughing for a bit, I realize that it’s air.  I was so amazed I forgot to exhale the air I breathed in.  Saliva went down the wrong pipe and my nose was burning.

      “Are you okay, Shibuya?  You want me to get some water?”

      The Twin Black Great Sage.  The sole person in this world who stood on equal ground with The True King.  It is said that if it weren’t for him, the demons would have lost in the battle against the Originators and would have been forced to wander without land or country.

      “You're that Great…cough … Sage… guy!?”

      As soon as Josak had called him Your Highness I should have realized that he was someone of a high position.  As a baseball brat who had bad grades in language class, ‘Your Highness’ was something I’d never heard before.  I probably wouldn’t have been able to read it without furigana and if you asked me to write it, it would have been impossible. I don’t even know how to use the word. (2)

      “Tha- wh-wh-what’s up with that?  Then for the time being, I’ll just tack ‘Lord’ onto your name and call you Lord Murata.”

      “… But, then that means that you’re a lot more knowledgeable about this world than I am.”

      “Even so, you were tricking me…”

      “But you didn’t tell me.  You even made an excuse that you could speak German when you were communicating that first time.  When you met Flynn and American Football Macho, you were pulling that half-baked deception that you were misunderstanding everything… All of that was to trick me.  That means you lied to me on purpose without any remorse.”

      “And not just in this world.  In Japanese high school life too.  While we played baseball on the weekends, when you brought me to the dolphin show, when you invited me to work at the beach, all that time you knew, didn’t you?  And then when I drowned at the dolphin pool you pretended to actually be worried.”

      “It’s too late for that now!  You knew where I went and what I was going through.  So what was all that with ‘it seemed like you might have gotten washed out to the sea wall?’  Agh, I don’t know what to think anymore!”

      “Shut up.  It’s just a whole bunch of lies.”

      Surrounded by a bunch of beautiful people I had never met before and being told that I was the Demon King starting today was so shocking I had nightmares because of it.  But the reason I was able to accept that was because everything was so bizarre.  Because everything here was so incredibly different than the world that I was raised in, I was able to sort out all of the new information.

      It’s hard to believe, but it’s different than just accepting new information and filing it away.

      “I wasn’t trying to trick you.  I just didn’t say anything.  I couldn’t say anything.”

      “Shibuya.”

      “Whatever, I don’t care.  There’s no point in getting this angry.  It’s just… I felt like I had to protect you somehow because you didn’t know anything about this world, because you didn’t know that Japanese black hair and eyes were dangerous… because you only had me... it’s like I was being an idiot.  No, not ‘like,’ I was being a genuine, bona-fide idiot… damn it, I’m so stupid… I’m such a joke.”

      I feel like crying now.  If I wasn’t so tired I would have already been wailing a long time ago.  I’d have grabbed a plate or a book or a pillow or anything I could reach and thrown it at him.

      How much did he laugh at me?

      On the other side of the window that I absently glanced at, the ‘skirmish’ (according to Josak) was about to happen.  No one had drawn their swords, but it was hard to call the situation calm.

      “… And?”

      “I got treated like a sick person.”

      “Even worse was when I was called a devil.  Ah, that time was really bad.  I almost got burned at the stake.”

      “Anyway, after going through experiences like that so many times, I realized it wasn’t smart to talk about the truth.  Not to anyone, not to my parents, and of course not even to my friends.  Not even to you… I was hesitating… over whether it was alright to tell you… right up until now.  But I thought if, as my last excuse, if you… if you confessed to me then I would confess too.”

      “I wanted to hear it from you, but unfortunately you never confessed.”

      “Yeah, it’s ridiculous.  No one would believe it.”

      “We’re sixteen, after all.”

      “Hmph.”

      When I playfully gave his shoulder a push, Murata pushed my shoulder back.  With the same strength.

      It’s the situation where guys would embrace and hug each other in a coming of age movie.  But neither of us will do those kind of exaggerated things in a situation like this.  We’re Japanese after all.
 

      “… I’m the Demon King.”

      “Even though I was born in Boston and raised in Japan, the soul I have is a demon’s and I was raised to become the Demon King.  It’s funny, isn’t it?”

      “History, management, stuff like that?  How to be a king?  No one taught me anything like that.  When it comes to stuff I know there’s baseball… ping pong and baseball.  Forget college, I hadn’t even gone to high school for that long.  But all of a sudden I’m the ruler of a country.  I have to govern over hundreds of thousands of people.  It’s crazy, isn’t it?”

      “What about you?”

      Because neither of us felt that there was anything unfortunate about the parts of our lives we didn’t talk about.

      But at the same time, I had cut off my one remaining, although narrow, escape route.

      “Hm?”

      Until now, I had met friends in a place that no one knew about and was the king of a country that no one had heard of.  The only proof I had was the Lion’s Blue pendant swaying on my chest.  If I had been surrounded by a bunch of doctors in a pure white hospital room in Japan on Earth and they told me that it was all a dream, that it was all an illusion that I had seen, I wouldn’t have had the confidence to defend myself.

      I have companions in this world and there is a friend who knows this on Earth.

      No one can doubt it.

      On the other side of the window pane, a silver flash cut through the air.  It was the flash of steel.  There’s only one thing I imagine it could be: someone had drawn their sword.  Hurriedly looking out the window, I see that even Flynn has appeared on deck.

      Five men in yellowish beige work clothes have come on board from the coast guard ship.  The one who drew his sword is a young man in the rear who seems to be an underling and looked like the least flexible of the bunch.  The others were grinning at Flynn rather than Sizemore and Josak.

      “Ugh, those guys are going on about some other stiff thing.  What’s wrong with a wife representing her husband?”

      “It’s obvious.  It's times like these that we ‘Let’s Norman Gilbit!’  It was really lucky for us that he was a masked man.” (3)

      “Huh, that’s weird.  Did I lock the door…?”

      “But they’re saying that they’re not going to let us through because Flynn is a woman!  It’s nothing all that dangerous.  I just have to make an appearance with Norman’s mask on and arrange for us to go on.”

      “Ugh, really!?”

      “Murata!”

      He doesn’t look prepared for something like that at all.  After hesitating for three seconds, I groan and grab the back of the chair.

      “It’s easier to throw around furniture than to hit a friend.”

      The leg of the simply designed chair smashes the thick glass loudly.  Perfect, I’ve always wanted to do this kind of classroom mayhem.  However, the sturdy wooden frame was still there and there wasn’t a space I could fit my body through.  Even if I kick or throw my shoulder into it, it won’t break.

      “… If you really are my best friend Murata,” the bronze key is sitting on his right hand’s index finger. “Then you wouldn’t tell me to keep my head down because I’m a king!  I don’t know about the Twin Black Great Sage though.”

      “Muraken would do this: he’d laugh and lift his head like this.”

      “I thought it would turn out like this.”

      He tossed the key over and it flashed red.  It comes flying at me in an arc over the short, 50 centimeter distance between us that I could have reached across.

      “Shibuya, the mask.”

      I pulled the tight mask over my head and tied the leather cord.  I put one foot on the window frame and stick out the top half of my body.

      Everyone’s gaze is immediately drawn to me.  Murata murmurs behind me as I pitch forward out of the window.

      The Great Sage was absolutely right.

(1)    At this point in the story, you’re supposed to have already put two and two together that Murata was born in Hong Kong and his previous life was a woman named Christine who also lived in Hong Kong because of what happened in ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’ in the gaiden KakkaMa that came out between novels 4 and 5. Or at the very least, be suspicious of that fact~ It was made fairly obvious in the last novel when Murata started talking about their guardians.  Everything that Murata has been saying regarding Conrad and Jose is from that side story.  Maybe I should have translated that first… But it’s really long! XD I promise I’ll get to translating that eventually!!

(3)    The ‘Let’s Norman Gilbit’ here was in English ^-^
(4)    This is what Conrad said all the time.

Chapter end