VILLAIN'S HAREM IN OTOME GAME

The plaza surrounding the Grand Menagerie looked like a chaotic show.

Smoke poured from the auction hall, staining the yellow morning fog to charcoal grey. Down on the flagstones, pure chaos reigned. Dozens of mercenaries fought in desperate, swearing skirmish lines just to keep the escaped monsters from overrunning the central commercial artery.

Silas stepped down from his carriage, his expression was carved from frozen slate, his monocle reflecting the fires.

He saw the lord of death leaning casually against an overturned cart twenty yards away.

Vane had an unlit match between his teeth and was casually twirling an iron throwing dagger by its tip, watching his own place get mauled by rampaging beasts with detached amusement.

"Vane!" Silas shouted, approaching.

"You absolute incompetent degenerate. You declared a hunt like a carnival barker! Now Branagh is dead, his entire vault is running loose! Why weren’t those two contained?!"

"Whoa, take it easy, Silas," Vane said, flashing a carefree grin as he tucked the dagger into his combat belt. "And hey, I told the boys to hunt ’em. I never said the rats wouldn’t bite back. Frankly, Branagh was getting entirely too fat anyway. Guy had an awful fashion sense."

"The Lord of Flesh is dead!" Silas roared, veins bulging against his stiff collar. "He consumed The Substance, reached hyper-adaptation, and they tore him apart! Do you understand what this means for our sovereignty?!"

"I’d say it means the market for rare meat just experienced a hostile takeover," a soft, androgynous voice murmured from the shadows beside them.

Silas stiffened. Vane merely grinned wider.

From the swirling smoke of an adjacent alley stepped a slender, nondescript figure draped in a patchwork mantle of shifting, muted silks that seemed to blur under direct light. He was wearing a cloth mask, hiding his lower face.

The Lord of Information.

"Took you long enough to crawl out of your nest, Whisper," Vane chuckled, clicking his tongue. "Did your little birds catch the show?"

"Every excruciating second with my familiars used to spy on Branagh," the Lord of Information replied, voice layered with subtle resonance, carrying neither age nor gender. "Two combatants. One possessing a terrifying mastery of compressed mana and immense raw strength. The other wields pure divine mana. Together, they used divine mana to override Branagh’s mana."

Silas turned toward the newcomer, his monocle gleaming. "Then you have their dossiers. Who are they? Imperial inquisitors? Valdorian holy knights?"

"That," the informant sighed, folding gloved hands into wide silk sleeves, "is the fascinating part. I have nothing."

Silas stared in disbelief. "Nothing? You boast that not a fly sneezes across two empires without your ledger recording the mucus density! How do you have nothing?!"

"Because they are entirely blank canvases," the Lord of Information explained calmly.

"My familiars saw both targets from multiple angles. Their faces distorted. They are using Perspective Illusion Magic. Their facial planes, minor bone structures, and voices are subtly shifting every few seconds to human eyes and magical beasts alike. To anyone looking at them without breaking the spell, they appear merely as a generic youth and an anonymous masked person."

"Professional grade," Vane whistled softly, a spark of genuine delight igniting behind his eyes. "I like ’em even more now. They got flair."

"Cease your idiotic praise!" Silas snapped, turning back on Vane. "The syndicate will demand blood for this failure! The Substance distribution chain is fractured—"

"Oh, speaking of the syndicate," Vane interrupted, waving a dismissive hand as he leaned forward. "The big bosses are terrified."

Vane raised an open palm, slowly closing his fingers into a tight fist.

"The bounty isn’t a hundred thousand anymore," Vane whispered, his charismatic voice dropping into a heavy, suffocating gravel. "They bumped it to five hundred thousand. And the order changed. The syndicate doesn’t just want their corpses anymore. They gave explicit, unconditional orders: they need their true faces unmasked."

Silas’s breath hitched. Five hundred thousand was enough to fund a standing continental legion for a year.

"Half a million..." Silas murmured, adjusting his monocle, his mind instantly tallying the catastrophic stakes.

"Yup," Vane beamed, casually popping his neck with a loud crack as he turned toward the smoke-filled streets. "So no more playing around with local bums and lime-kiln mercenaries. Whisper, do your thing."

***

Eren sat loosely on an upturned wooden crate. On his lap, the Shadow Cat cub was aggressively tearing into a strip of dried meat. Its twin tails lashed in cautious contentment, letting out tiny, rumbling purrs between violent chews while its eyes stayed cautiously glued to Eren’s face.

"Easy there," Eren murmured, casually scratching the fur behind the cub’s left ear with his thumb. "Chew your food. You’re giving yourself digestive distress."

Gold knelt slightly in front of him, both of her hands trembling as they hovered over Eren’s bare chest.

A golden-white mana pulsed from her palms. Sweat clung to her brow.

Seventy-two hours without sleep, back-to-back fights, the sprint through a collapsing cavern, and a desperate duel against a ten-foot abomination had pushed her reserves to the brink of collapse. Her breath shuddered, her vision swimming.

With a final, faint shimmer, the jagged claw gashes across Eren’s chest finally knit together. The torn muscle fibers sealed, leaving behind three thick scars that laced his chest like lightning strikes.

"That’s... that’s all I have left. Your injury healed, but the deep flesh on your chest hasn’t fully fused. Don’t push yourself or you’ll tear yourself wide open from the inside."

She glared at him through the narrow slits with a mixture of sheer exasperation and genuine, unsettled bewilderment.

Eren glanced down at the fresh scars, lightly prodding the skin with an idle knuckle. He gave her a warm grin, his blue eyes crinkling.

"Thanks for the stitch-work, Goldy."

Baron Kiliyan rubbed his jowls.

"D-Divine magic..." Kiliyan stammered, staring at Goldy. "An assassin in a gilded skull... wielding the Holy See? And you two... you slaughtered the Lord of Flesh?! Branagh was an untouchable sovereign nightmare! He commanded a thousand killers! How in the gods’ names did you two brats—"

THWACK!

Before the nobleman could finish the sentence, Gold’s hand chopped down with brutal precision against the side of Kiliyan’s fleshy neck.

The Baron’s eyes rolled back into his skull with a muffled squeak, slumping sideways into the dust, snoring softly against the stone floor.

Eren raised a brow, not even flinching as the cub jumped down to sniff Kiliyan’s limp boot. "Bit aggressive, don’t you think?"

"He doesn’t need to hear our conversation," Gold rasped coldly, leaning her back against the sarcophagus as she shook the numbness from her trembling knuckles.

She turned her gaze squarely onto Eren. The exhaustion in her eyes hardened into pure intensity.

"Now talk," she commanded, her voice dropping into a deadly, unyielding whisper. "Who the fuck are you? And what is your connection to Violet?"

Eren tilted his head, resting an elbow comfortably on his knee.

"You know, shiny. I actually have better questions for you."

"What is your relationship with Violet? And how does an assassin running around with a skull faceplate possess the sacred light of the Holy See?"