AnimeCon Harem 14: The Masters Arrive (Patreon)

“Fresssh meat, fresh meat!” Chad hollered, slapping the hood of each parked car as they walked down the row. “How you wanna do this, faggot? Good cop, bad cop? Hell, how ‘bout we go in with the ‘yer a wizard, ‘arry.’ That’d be some top shelf shit, right there. Ain’t ‘xactly wrong, neither. Am I RIGHT?!”

Judas didn’t humor the kid with a response. The young Masters all seemed to be degenerate memelords, and enjoyed playing up a big persona for kicks. Chad in particular was the quintessential younger generation Master, in his estimation—each and every body modification the younger guys went for was as overt as possible, until their own forms looked like hypermasculine caricatures and their thralls ballooned out into bimbos.

Bimbos or worse, Judas suppressed a grimace. Least Chad isn’t one of THOSE. The whole ‘ahegao e-girl’ thing he’s into is nowhere near as bad as some of the genuine pedos—the Masters of the outer circle. You never want partnered up with one of those for a gig like this.

“C’mon Jewd,” Chad tried to cuff Judas on the shoulder with an enormous fist.

The punch missed—or rather, any kinetic threat to his body was going to miss. It would be stupid and sloppy not to wear your magic around yourself in that way for protection, and Judas didn’t particularly care to allow his suit to get rumpled by thoughtless frat-boy gestures.

“We’ve gotta haze the new guy a li’l bit, or what’s the point?” Chad spread out his hands. “I’ve got a great one this time, you just let me do all the talkin’. Trust me bro, I’ve got this.”

“You’re just here to look good,” Judas said. “Don’t open your mouth and ruin it.”

It was hard for him to say Chad looked good, but Chad’s oversized jawline opened and a ridiculous smirking grin appeared. Because Chad was seven feet tall and muscled like a poorly photoshopped body builder—down to the gray monotone colors—it was an unsettling smile. Chad simply didn’t do subtlety. The onset of nearly godlike power had cooked things like that out of his brain. Judas had only even convinced him to wear a shirt this time by remarking upon the fact that the singlets were colloquially called wife beaters, which Chad thought was hilarious.

“C’mon, don’t Jewd this up, Jewdy-pie,” Chad laughed, slapping another car hood. “Damn, still no fuckin’ alarm. The hell kinda people live here?”

“They’re soft,” Judas shrugged in annoyance. “Our boy here’s not shaping up to be much of a Master either, if he’s already put himself in the hospital.”

“Soft, that’s it—they’re soft!”

Chad took offense to the car alarm not going off, and dropped into a lower stance, musculature rippling, to shove the car back out of his parking space. The sedan’s parking brake was engaged, and its tires protested as the vehicle slowly skidded several feet out of line, to where it would block future traffic going through.

“Fuckin’ soft.”

It wasn’t unusual for the emergence of a new Master to make minor waves—that’s why the newbies that popped up were collected by a pair of veterans. A friendly faced knucklehead-type like Chad would take the new Master under his wing and keep him in line until he learned the Rules, and then the grunt work of wiping memories, clearing police reports, and keeping absolutely wild shit off the news fell to someone like Judas. It was work, a lot of work sometimes, but with his suit and tie, handsome face, and mirrored sunglasses, Judas’ entire demeanor screamed ‘government spook,’ which was plenty entertaining when you found the right people to intimidate.

Which he always did.

“Soft, sooooffft, mm-Mmm, though. Sometimes? Sometimes I do like ‘em soft,” Chad said, turning his rictus of a grin towards Judas. “He’s too soft though, then wheww-buddy! Boy, I’m gon’ butter his bread.”

“Uh-huh,” Judas said. It was best to just let Chad talk, sometimes, even when he didn’t seem to be saying anything of substance. The younger guys were like that, they loved to hear themselves talk. It was the worst when you got a bunch of them together at once, the mid-circle meets became unbelievably obnoxious. Their very nature meant that each of the Masters had their own sizeable ego to wield, and there was always going to be talk and posturing and ‘flexing’ on each other.

Talk stopped when it met the Rules, though, because when the Rules weren’t respected, things got violent in a hurry.

The pair passed the last car of the parking lot and stopped at a small driver’s loop before the entrance to emergency care, where cars were still going through. Or rather, Judas stopped Chad, raising a hand to prevent the maniac from simply walking into traffic with the stupid idiotic grin of his. Sure, cooking a few more brains to forget their car had plowed into an unmoving behemoth of a man who appeared to be from some internet meme was easy—the problem was, once you started zapping minds left and right, Chad would take that slack and run with it, getting up to increasingly annoying antics.

“Pssh, outta the way, faggot,” Chad smacked Judas’ hand out of the way and stepped onto the pavement, causing the next car to jerk to a halt with a screech of brakes. “Beep beep, mother fucker.”

The horn blared in response, and with a tired sigh Judas lifted an arm and pointed at the driver. It was a simple cantrip, and honestly his most practiced one—the driver, some guy in his late forties—fell into an immediate hypnotic daze of confusion. So long as the two Masters kept moving, they wouldn’t linger in his memory at all.

“C’mon,” Judas said. “Let’s go. Don’t make me have to point twice.”

“Don’t make me have to point twice,” Chad mocked in a high-pitched voice. “Faggot, you put more goddamned oomph into it, you’ll never have to point twice. Y’know what I’m sayin’? I look like I’ve ever once had to point twice? Ask me if I’ve ever had to point twice.”

“We’re wasting time,” Judas reminded the much taller man.

“My name’s JEWD~ASS and I say we’re wasting ti~me!” Chad taunted. “Gimme a fuckin’ break, bro. Some dumbass wants to come throw hands? Let ‘em.”

When they finally managed to get moving again and pass through the automatic doors, the decade-old ward set up by the Masters chimed loudly from the marker in Judas’ pocket. No one else but him could hear it, but he pulled the marker out anyways, revealing an old plastic hospital token from some vintage board game. With a surge of power into his fingertips the token was silenced, and Judas looked up just in time to see Chad strutting up to the front desk.

“Awww hey shawty, what’s cookin’?” Chad called, clapping a hand down on the counter. “Dayum, girl. You fat and ugly. Lotta junk in dat trunk though, why don’cha turn that big ol’ brapper around and gimme a look, huh?”

The woman at the front desk looked confused, and had no way of responding.

She registered his presence, but couldn’t quite identify his absurd appearance or make out exactly what he was saying—the obfuscation on Chad in particular was three hexes thick, rendering him into a bad memory but in real-time. Chad already knew this, and Judas knew that Chad knew this; the oaf was just being obnoxious as per usual. Judas was the face of this operation when it came to dealing with others; his half hex allowed him to talk to bystanders freely. Chad was here to make nice with the new Master and impress upon him the Rules, he would just be an unidentifiable blur of humanoid in recordings and for the most part just an unpleasant idea to anyone who actually met him unless they had the magic to see through a few hexes.

“C’mon girl, gimme kiss,” Chad leaned his massive upper body over the counter and into the woman’s personal space. “Lay it on me, gimme a big ol’ smackeroo. Right here. Gimme kiss!”

“Don’t demean yourself by engaging with the help,” Judas chided him in a dry voice. “Our man is this way, come on.”

It was hard to say whether sticking to a firm business-only stance with Chad helped keep him in line or if it just encouraged him to act out even more. The weight of those hexes already seemed to subconsciously push the psychopath to be as bombastic as possible. The man loved attention, and the shroud of magic further enabled him to play around. As they ventured on down the hospital corridor, the seven-foot-tall Chad swaggered, holding his chest high and thrusting his arms out in an exaggerated sway to each step.

“I’m comin’ back for her later, fuck it,” Chad laughed in his bassy deep voice. “Every hole is a goal. Soft all over, shiiit, I’ll get her lookin’ real nice. Be a good demonstration for the fresh meat.”

“I’m sure you two’ll have a great time homo bonding over… old hospital meat or whatever it is you find to fuck here,” Judas smirked as they stepped into the elevator. “Our man’s deeper in still, either second or third floor. I’ll have to sense around as we get closer.”

“HAH! Damn, son,” Chad tried—and failed—to slap Judas on the back, instead smacking the elevator wall hard enough to slightly shake the entire lift. “Old hospital meat, alright. That’s a good one. Shit.”

They found their target on the second floor, just past another smaller reception area and office, down a row of small individual wards for patients. This late at night the area was quiet, and impatience nearly prevailed over Chad’s need to grope the asses of a passing pair of women dressed in scrubs. After only a half-hearted pawing of their cheeks to check for quality, the Masters let the nurses stumble onwards in a rapidly evaporating stupor.

Judas frowned as he followed his magic sense to the correct door and then opened it. For someone incapacitated by some sort of injuries here, this new guy was strong. The currents of power bent and twisted towards their dumbfuck newbie as if he was a veteran of the middle circle already, someone already in possession of two or three long-term thralls. That was bad news, because according to his brief, no one in this area was unaccounted for.

The room was large enough for four beds, with all of the usual medical errata and apparatus for patients that were in for a longer stay, but to his surprise three of the four beds were empty. Their curtains were drawn back, and only their target—some young college-aged kid with short hair—was comatose in the remaining bed. By appearances the guy’d been severely beaten, with a crooked nose, massive bruises still swelling one side of his face until it was lopsided, and one of those nasal tubes ensuring he was getting more oxygen tucked just under his nose.

“Ayyy, there’s my handsome boy,” Chad bellowed, clapping his hands. “Aw, what’ve they done to you? What’ve they done to my handsome boy?!”

“Funny,” Judas grunted, crossing the room to snatch the patient readout clipboard hanging from the end of the bed. “Looks like his name is—”

Missing. There was a crumpled chunk missing from the details section of the chart, as if someone had bashed the clipboard into some corner accidentally and the paper had ripped. Judas didn’t believe in accidents when it came to Masters, however. Maybe the kid had picked up some archaic hex from somewhere that obfuscated his identity. Removing physical evidence from paperwork like this was certainly unusual, but—

“What the shit?!” Chad almost flinched into him.

A girl with silver hair and exquisite, too-perfect features was standing in the doorway behind them, staring with inhuman red eyes. Her gaze was clear and strong, which meant she was perceiving through their hexes somehow, and more to the point, she’d snuck up on them without a sound, which would have been a very difficult endeavor. As one of the older Masters and prone to paranoia, Judas had a tactile spatial sense of everything in his immediate surroundings whether he could see it visually or not… and he’d somehow never registered her approach.

“Huh,” Judas eyed the girl’s loose slacks and black dress shirt for a moment before dismissing her. “Looks like the stupid fuck here already made his first thrall.”

The girl arched an eyebrow.

“Damn, hey now! Hah! Aw damn, look at this li’l cutie pie—look at her, she thinks she’s people! HAH!” Chad hollered, putting his hands on his knees and stooping over as if to address a stray dog.

“Chad—jesus, don’t touch her,” Judas warned, turning his scowl towards the young guy in the hospital bed. “Leave it alone.”

“Hey, hey, what’s your name, little girl?” Chad ignored his partner, giving the silver-haired girl a little wave. “You wanna treat, girl? Huh? Aww, poor baby. Your dumbfuck Master went and got hisself a boo-boo, awwww. Look at you, bein’ all loyal an’ shit! You wanna treat? You wanna treat for bein’ such a good girl? Yes you do! Yes you do!”

“Seriously, don’t touch it,” Judas sighed. “Doesn’t matter how cute she looks—it’s fucking disgusting. Probably this newbie fuck’s first cum toilet. You don’t know where it’s been.”

“S’all good! Me and homeboy can be eskimo brothers,” Chad smiled, snapping his fingers over and over in an attempt to get the girl’s attention. “Hey, li’l girl! Can you talk? Can you use big human people words, like a big grown up girl? You gotta name? Na-me?”

“Quit fuckin’ around and put her to sleep or something,” Judas said, stepping over to the unconscious guy on the bed so he could better examine the damage. Fucking hell. Dumbass’s face is fucked up, got all sorts of busted ribs—looks like his one wrist got smashed, probably ran over by a car or something.

It wasn’t the worst mess he’d seen a newbie make of himself, but it also indicated this poor sod wasn’t the brightest. The young ones never were; incredible power blinded them to any and all consequences. Sure enough, seemed like every other emergent Master got caught with his pants down after mindfucking the wrong dude’s wife, or was a little too eager to dick down some stupid girl and got found out by her parents or something. Sometimes it was some full-on melodramatic high school bully revenge fantasy, sometimes it was that weird incest shit.

Judas couldn’t tell which it might be this time, and he honestly didn’t care.

“Aww, don’t be scared!” Chad continued to coo. “Ain’t gon’ hurtcha! What’s your name, girl? Na-me? Can you say your na—me?”

“Misandry,” the girl finally responded, leaving them a single word in an ethereal, soothing voice.

“Miss-an-dery?” Chad cocked his head at that and then chortled out a laugh. “The fuck? What the fuck kinda name is that?

“No, she said ‘misandry’,” Judas corrected, pinching his thumb and fingers together in a quick incantation and then drawing power up into his chest. Misandry.

Misandry, Judas heard his own voice sound out inside his mind, is the dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against men. Page 481, Colles and Reinhart Student Dictionary; blue cover, far side of the second shelf beside the desk in your office room.

“Means, she hates men,” Judas explained.

Of course, he’d known what the word misandry meant—or rather, he was pretty sure—and then after a quick reminder he was certain. Why leave any room for doubt? Especially when he spent several weeks a few years back magically imprinting entire reams of information into a clever memory formula table. Having encyclopedic knowledge of legal code and various law precedents was instrumental in intimidating people from the various governing agencies into believing he was a spook, it made for great theater, and when he did sometimes fuck up? Well, he could always mindfuck them into compliance, anyways.

With the amount of control he wielded, he didn’t have to be anywhere near as smart as he enjoyed deceiving people into thinking he was. After all, why bother? The power at his disposal was real enough.

“The fuck?!” Chad laughed again. “How’s she gonna hate men, when like, her only purpose is to be fucked by her homeboy, here?”

“I don’t know, maybe this dumb fuck’s into that,” Judas shrugged, yanking back the hospital blanket. “Wanted some haughty tsundere sorta thing. Anyways, get her out of here—I’ve gotta turn this fuck inside-out and then rightside-in again, and we don’t need her twigging out or trying to interfere.”

“Alright now Missanderly girl, c’mon, go night night,” Chad baby-talked towards the girl again. “You gonna be a good girl? Yes you are! Be a good girl and lay down! Be a good girl! You can do it! You wanna treat? You wanna treat for bein’ such a good girl?! Cum yourself stupid, whore.”

The familiar pressure of Chad’s magic filled the room with those words.

Starting to roll up his sleeves so he could get to work, Judas kind of wanted to see the poor bitch get fried. He’d seen cum yourself stupid plenty of times, and while it wasn’t exactly nuanced work, it was entertaining.

It was one of Chad’s favorites, the whole forcible ‘ahegao’ thing that made sudden shocks of continuous orgasm sap the intelligence from a girl. They would always hit over and over again, until she was cooked for good; a cross-eyed and drooling idiot for the rest of her life. Maybe Chad lobotomizing the newbie fuck’s thrall was a bit too far and would create bad blood between them, but Judas struggled to even care. If he was stupid enough to get himself mangled up and hospitalized so that they had to come put the pieces back together, the fuck deserved having some of his toys broken.

Besides, there was always something satisfying about watching those certain types— bitch-faced serious cunts, forced into making dumb expressions and writhing into obscene humping motions. Judas chuckled and decided to glance over and see before he started flesh shaping their new Master friend back into some semblance of health.

“Hrgh hrr hurrk—wait wherr—frrucCHhh—?!?!!” Chad choked out words and then simple grunting noises.

Frowning, Judas discovered that the silver bitch was still standing. Simply standing there, staring on with an unimpressed look as Judas’ hulking partner was instead shaking and spasming. The seven-foot-tall Chad seized up and gasped and then dropped down to his hands and knees in the middle of the floor as if he was being tased—but that was impossible. Completely impossible; Judas had seen Chad shrug off .357 rounds with that stupid toothy grin of his, and knew the guy could soak up more raw electricity than a kaiju stomping into Tokyo. Chad wasn’t the brightest crayon in the box, sure, but it definitely wasn’t like him to fuck up such a simple spell to the degree that there was any kind of severe backlash.

“...The fuck?” Judas hesitated.

Then, the silver-haired girl put a delicate foot forward as if to nudge the jerking Chad’s body with her foot—and instead punted the much larger muscle-bound man into the far wall. One of the beds was overturned with Chad’s passing, the meaty impact was loud, the nearest window cracked and the entire room shook. A container set on the stand beside the hospital bed clattered to the floor, the IV bag dangled wildly from its stand, and the sheer sudden force of movement displaced so much air that the suit blazer Judas was wearing flapped open as Judas held his hands up on reflex.

Shit shit shit—

He could see now that Chad’s eyes were rolled up as he dropped from the wall to the floor in a still-convulsing mess. The spell had rebounded somehow—Chad was fucked—and the simple thrall wasn’t so simple after all. As improbable as it was, this girl was empowered somehow, and Judas found himself absolutely furious. Now he was without support of any kind, and would have to not only put down the stupid man-hater thrall, but clean up the entire situation by himself and explain to those above him in the middle circle why he’d lost a fellow Master on a simple milk run.

Judas brought his hand up and immediately pointed two fingers at the girl in his other most practiced cantrip, willing the raw hatred of power into a tightly focused beam. The stream was invisible as it lanced from his fingertips across the hospital ward, but Judas could feel exactly where it was as—

—the disintegration ricocheted back before even crossing half the room, and caught his own raised arm. The sting of pain was almost too fast for Judas to register, throwing a stinking cloud of bitter ash and char out in a puff. Most of the limb vanished in an instant.

Shit SHIT FUCK SHIT— Judas swore under his breath as backpedaled into the far wall, clutching at the ragged and smoking stump of his own bicep. “Shit! Do you know who the fuck you’re—”

“The Masters?” The silvery-haired young woman didn’t sound impressed.

She crossed the room on those long legs of hers and was standing right in front of him faster than he could blink, and every magical sense he possessed fell silent. He realized in growing horror that his well attuned feel for how much more power he held was non-existent, the slight spatial grip he kept on his immediate surroundings was blinded to telekinesis, and each and every trained cantrip at his disposal was severed away. All of his magic, every fucking bit of it, was gone.

“Who—who the fuck are you?!” Judas recoiled, shooting a fearful glance towards Chad.

Chad was already a goner, brawny limbs sprawled out akimbo in the position where he’d landed. Dazed and vacant eyes stared out across the room, uncomprehending—he’d blown load after squelching load into his own pants from the spell reflecting back. This—this can’t be happening.

“Code-name Misandry,” the girl introduced herself again with a droll expression. “Witch hunter, anti-magic specialist, mage masher, inquisitor, whatever stupid name you Masters might know my kind by.”

“Sh-shit,” Judas cursed again as a blackened chunk of his scorched bicep fell to the ground and scattered into cinders.

The beautiful, horrifying girl crinkled her nose in disgust and raised a hand, splaying her fingertips. With obvious reluctance, she put her extended fingers on Judas’ chest. Then, the girl pressed with impossible strength, crushing him back into the surface and then up the wall. His polished shoes left the floor as the fingertips crushed into him with agonizing force. Judas grit his teeth and let out a hissing wail of pain as he kicked and his remaining arm flailed out, but the slight-figured girl was unfazed.

She might as well have been casually sliding a sheet of paper across a table.

“You’re interested in him,” the young woman gestured towards the guy in the hospital bed with her free hand. “I’m here to discourage your interest.”

“Thhe—thhe Masters do not negotiate, and the Masters do not tolerate being threatened!” Judas gasped out. “EVER! Lady, you-you have no IDEA who you’re fucking with! Do you understand?!”

“Can we stop the full might of ‘the Masters?’ No, probably not,” the young woman explained with an air of indifference.

She was slender to the point of appearing frail, but an iron grip pinned him to the wall now a full foot off the ground. The brilliant unnatural red of her eyes was stunning, and beneath the air of boredom she was putting on there was madness deep in the depths of those pupils, frantic hunger, a vivid insanity that nearly made Judas piss himself.

“What we can do is discourage you, strongly discourage you. Aside from myself, the team consists of a precognitive, two infiltrators, and a close quarter combat specialist. Some of us are vampires, some of us are not. As you might guess, any further attempts to interfere will become… extremely disadvantageous to the Masters. We’ll know any plan the Masters make long before you do, and my team is optimized to discourage everything the Masters will attempt. Do you understand?”

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