Prologue
It had been months since Lelouch vi Britannia and Nunnally were taken from their home—political hostages, collateral in the Empire's relentless schemes in Japan. But that abduction wasn't the only scar the royal family would bear.
That night, when the estate was attacked by terrorists, another child was there.
Gunfire ripped through the walls. A bullet struck a lamp. The explosion lit the corridor in fire—and caught a 14-year-old boy in the blaze.
He lived. But he would never be the same.
Now he lay in a hospital bed, his body swaddled in gauze, lungs burned and barely functional. A respirator hissed steadily over his mouth. His face was wrapped completely, hiding the damage the flames had carved into his skin. His body, once athletic and noble, had become frail—a shell built from pain, silence, and survival.
His siblings visited. They smiled, spoke empty words. But they weren't the ones he wanted to see. His mother would have come.
If she hadn't died.
Their voices didn't reach him. Something deeper spoke louder.
Control. Order. The need for purpose.
Those thoughts became doctrine in his mind—guiding principles rising from the ashes of his old self. Where others saw disfigurement, he saw transformation. Suffering had burned away the illusions.
And what remained was clarity.
He walked now, slowly, wrapped in bandages like an echo of a forgotten soldier. His breath rasped beneath the mask. He stepped into the bathroom, marble and steel polished to a cold perfection. His reflection stared back—blanketed in gauze, hollow-eyed.
He didn't recognize the boy. That child had died.
What stood now was a man being born.
The fire had erased his identity—but given him purpose. Like Zero, the legendary spymaster he had once read about in archived Britannian records—an idealist crushed by war, reshaped into a strategist who realized that loyalty to individuals was a fallacy. Only systems endured. Only control could ensure peace.
And so, he would build one. A system to correct the world.
He looked down. A tablet lay on the counter, left on overnight. A file blinked on-screen—philosophical notes, behavioral programming theories, records of war economies, surveillance infrastructures, all under a single name:
The Patriots.
They had once existed in theory. Now, they would be real.
He tapped the screen with gloved fingers, eyes scanning rapidly. Patterns emerged. Concepts of eternal peace through absolute information control. A system without need for kings or heroes. A world where the past could be edited, and the future sculpted.
He stared at the screen, seeing his reflection ghosted in the glass.
Beneath the bandages, he smiled.