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Aizawa Shouta had never liked teenagers.
To him, teenagers were like caterpillars—annoying, but harmless. And just as Yamada Hizashi loathed caterpillars, Aizawa Shouta loathed teenagers.
He now taught at a school hailed as "the most evil, loudest, darkest establishment in the neighborhood"—a middle school—all because Hell operated on a contract system. As long as you reserved a human's lifetime temptation rights in advance, you'd receive a commendation letter after they descended to Hell, praising your outstanding contribution to increasing Hell's population. But more importantly, you'd get a paid vacation ranging from one year to several decades. It didn't matter whether the human was naturally rotten to the core and likely to torture small animals after class anyway.
Aizawa Shouta was now smack in the middle of just such bad seeds. One-third of the teenagers at this school would end up in prison as adults. Another third would become genuine hypocrites, groping their neighbor's thigh under the dinner table while pontificating about lofty ideals. The last third—the meek, decent pushovers—would spend a while hemming and hawing before finally summoning the courage to confront the evil deeds of the other two-thirds, at which point they'd get beaten to death. In short, this place was a breeding ground for fresh sinners and Aizawa Shouta's personal harvest field. With this school under his name, he could rake in hundreds of souls per year (sometimes thousands—teenagers died fast these days) without lifting a single finger.
Aizawa Shouta didn't look like a typical demon (or rather, he hadn't meant to become a demon at all—he'd simply overslept and missed the anti-Lucifer faction's rally, and God had kicked him out of Heaven). He had no curved horns, no wide hooves, no shifting eyes. Perhaps precisely because he looked so shabby (by demon standards), Satan himself had sent him up to the mortal realm.
"Just go up there," Satan had called him into his office in 3000 BC (admittedly, the concept of an office didn't exist yet—back then it was usually called "that room where nothing good happens").
"Why?"
"Hell doesn't need a negative nelly like you. Sleeping in the sulfur pools will ruin—corrupt—crush everyone's morale."
Aizawa Shouta didn't think the fallen angels had much morale to speak of. Nor was he entirely the negative nelly Satan made him out to be. Every fifty years (or whenever some Duke of Hell felt like picking on someone), he'd go down to report his performance—and his numbers were consistently the highest of the bunch.
He owed that to an agreement he'd made with Hizashi .
"I think I'm better at your job, and you're better at mine." In 350 AD, Hizashi had said to him half-jokingly. He'd just been permanently banished to the mortal realm to spread angelic gospel, convicted of the sin of "loudness" (which wasn't even one of the Seven Deadly Sins, Hizashi had complained indignantly, but his volume had made Aizawa sympathize with Heaven's leadership for the first time in his existence).
"Right."
"You weren't listening to me at all."
"I was listening. And I think it's a great idea."
Aizawa knew he wasn't good at doing evil. He'd limped through the last century by claiming credit for a few spectacular atrocities humans had cooked up on their own, then hit a creative drought. (Sometimes Aizawa wondered which was the true embodiment of pure evil—demons or humans. The wicked ideas that hatched in those tiny human brains—Aizawa couldn't have dreamed them up in eight hundred years.)
Hizashi, on the other hand, as an angel, was remarkably good at it.
Of course, he was an angel, and angels don't do bad things (Aizawa had his doubts about that). But the humans they influenced? That was another story. Yamada Hizashi favored outgoing, eloquent humans, much like old ladies favored spoiled, rolling-on-their-back Shiba Inus. Hizashi was too busy deafening his chosen mortals with the gospel to notice that if a person was eloquent and backed by divine miracles—God only knew what they'd get up to! By the time Hizashi realized he'd preached the gospel to a bad seed capable of inciting a nation into genocide, Aizawa had already sauntered down to Hell to claim his credit. In return, children in wartime would inexplicably wander out of the line to the gas chambers, and cannons would be stuffed with rubber ducks instead of lead shells—enough to let Hizashi file a decent report upstairs.
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Yamada Hizashi now worked for Angelic Gospel Radio.
This eighty-year-old station had been founded for Bible study and miracle-debunking, but somehow it had ended up as the number one rock radio station of the 1990s, beloved by housewives everywhere for its fervent dedication to spreading celebrity gossip. Yamada Hizashi was the station's first and only host. Three generations of his family had devoted their lives to this station (nobody knew why three generations looked exactly alike, and whenever anyone tried to ask, the question would slide off their brains like water off a duck's back).
This venerable radio host was now driving to the community school where Aizawa worked. It would be his first time setting foot in the place. Any angel with an ounce of common sense would steer clear of teenage gathering spots—which was precisely why Hizashi had never approached it before.
Aizawa called it "keeping a low profile," but Hizashi figured that since neither of their bosses had even noticed they'd shifted their operations from the US to Tokyo a century ago (they still got the occasional American assignment every decade or so, which those reliably self-sufficient Americans would complete on their own), there wasn't much of a profile to keep.
The school's security guard inexplicably felt a wave of drowsiness wash over him. In his dreams, he would receive the teachings of Angelic Gospel Radio (and somehow decipher a ton of 80s rock lyrics woven into them). Meanwhile, a figure swaggered right through the school gates.
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Aizawa was sleeping soundly, his dreams filled with well-behaved Hell-cats and endless paid vacations. The only imperfection was a drooling Hellhound on his right, gnawing gently at his sleeve.
Aizawa elbowed the thing on his right.
"Ow!" Hizashi yelped, rubbing his 1972 John Lennon replica leather jacket in distress (it looked strikingly like the original—even down to the coin scratch Paul Mccartney had left on it. Worth mentioning: last time Aizawa went down to Hell to fetch a new single from Lennon for Hizashi, Lennon had regretfully brought up the long-lost jacket).
"I told you not to sneak up on me."
"Did you have to hit that hard?!"
Aizawa rolled his eyes, grumbling as he wriggled out of his sleeping bag. His bright yellow sleeping bag sat like a fortress, towering in layered mounds on the wooden floor of the school's storage closet.
"I thought you'd stopped couch-surfing," Hizashi observed, eyeing Aizawa's grimy hair and the pitifully few belongings crammed into the corner of the room.
"Living at work doesn't count as couch-surfing."
When Aizawa had signed the contract with the school, the fine print clearly stated that housing and meals were not provided. But every time the security guard made his rounds, he'd miraculously skip the storage closet. (After being thrown out as a vagrant once, Aizawa had started greeting the guards on his way in—just enough to slip in a little spell—which had earned him the title of "that especially polite young man" among the average-age-60-plus security team.)
"Hizashi,What happened?" Aizawa rubbed his eyes and finally sat upright. For an immortal being, his sensitivity to danger was remarkable.
Hizashi shivered. He suddenly wasn't sure if he should say it.
Aizawa stared at him without blinking.
"You remember that whole devil-hunter business, right? Demon traps, holy water, all that?" Hizashi said hesitantly, stalling for time.
"Yes... I remember." Aizawa answered slowly, a bad feeling creeping in. Nothing good ever came of those lunatics. By the 17th century, witch-hunting had fallen on hard times. They'd visit every village and couldn't find a single burnable witch.
(The problem wasn't that witches were gone—they might never have existed at all. The problem was they weren't finding the right candidates. Give the village chief a few gold coins, and he'd tie up the oddest woman in town for them to burn—even if all she did was write things down instead of gossiping at the village square.)
The desperate witch-hunters decided to modernize. They set their sights on demons instead. Now they didn't have to scour the streets for wayward women—even men could be tied to the stake. (The clergy were deeply displeased—with devil hunters around, nobody was hiring them for exorcisms anymore.) Before every execution, out of righteous duty, they'd confiscate all the wealth the demon had supposedly tricked out of people. This was listed in the Hunter's Code as "the most important and indispensable step before execution—otherwise we don't eat, you morons!"
Aizawa had a terrible impression of the group. In 1935, they'd soaked his old sleeping bag with holy water, forcing him to buy a new one. But no sleeping bag since had ever matched the comfort of that 1930 department-store raffle prize. He'd hated devil hunters ever since. Hizashi said he was just being nostalgic.
Why had Hizashi suddenly brought them up?
"I thought their territory didn't stretch to Japan," Aizawa said, puzzled.
Hizashi traced circles on the floor with his toe.
"Well... you remember your student, Todoroki Touya?"
That little brat—how could Aizawa forget him? But he had no idea what Touya had to do with devil hunters. Otherwise he'd never have let that punk keep sneaking in through the back door of his classroom.
"The thing is," Hizashi said, wearing a guilty expression, "he and his little friend are planning to hunt you. And it's all because I posted your photo online."
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If "student representative" were meant literally, Todoroki Touya would have given many speeches at this "most evil, loudest, darkest establishment in the neighborhood"—a middle school. As the representative of this filthy cesspool, he was more than qualified. Touya had black hair with white tips at the ends, and his school uniform was less "worn" and more "hung" on his frame.
(The first time he'd dyed his hair and come home, he'd been thrilled to hear Endeavor call him "thuggish-looking." He never changed back to white after that, and added a few more piercings for good measure.)
This delinquent student representative was currently scaling the school's chain-link fence, which shuddered precariously under his weight.
"You better have something real to show me!" he yelled at the figure on the other side.
"You're the one who insisted on seeing it." Shimura Tenko said impatiently. He attended an elite school one block away. If Touya hadn't spent his entrance exam day setting off fireworks behind his father Endeavor's back, he'd be among those elites too.
Shimura Tenko's guardian, uncle Yagi, had repeatedly warned Tenko to stay away from Touya—not just because he was a notorious "bad influence," but because Touya's father and uncle Yagi didn't get along. Tenko had once caught Endeavor lurking around Yagi's house, just to make sure his own front gate was five inches taller than Yagi's.
Even though their fathers had both banned each other from their funerals in their wills, Shimura Tenko and Todoroki Touya were as thick as thieves.
(Not that they'd ever actually share pants—Touya had sworn he'd rather die than touch Tenko's dry, flaky skin, and Tenko said Touya's firework-burned ass was just as ugly.)
Ever since they'd thrown down in front of their elementary school over which Minecraft mob was cooler (Touya had never even played Minecraft—he just didn't like the look of that dark-haired kid), they'd never been apart.
"Do you have a teacher named Aizawa Shouta?"
"What kind of question is that?" Tenko knew every single one of Touya's teachers by heart—Touya cursed each of them out regularly, and Aizawa was the most frequently mentioned.
"Does he look like this?" Tenko handed over his phone. The man on the screen would have been mistaken for a vagrant if not for the textbook in his hand and the podium behind him.
"Yeah," Touya said dismissively. "So what?"
"Uncle Yagi immigrated from America, you know. He still has a whole family photo album—full of blond, blue-eyed Americans." Tenko wore ‘that expression’—the one that usually appeared when Touya stated something obvious, like the earth being round, Endeavor being an asshole, and Endermen being the coolest mob in Minecraft.
One eyebrow arched. Now Touya genuinely had no idea what Tenko was getting at. What did Aizawa Shouta have to do with America?
"I found your Aizawa-sensei in the family photo album!" Tenko paced excitedly, waving his hands in the air.
Touya stared blankly at him. "I, uh, I don't follow," he said.
"It means," Tenko's eyes sparkled, his expression exactly the same as when he saw a new devil-hunter game come out, "that your Aizawa-sensei is an undead creature. And we're going to hunt him!"