Meanwhile, in the temporary staff room at the Goryeo Special Settlement, Lelouch had been sitting for seventeen hours straight.
The Southwestern Front situation map before him showed little beyond postwar reorganization and the transfer of wounded personnel. Few matters still required immediate decisions, yet when the theater casualty system expanded a personnel list beneath an Indian division that had lost its organizational structure, he still did not close the interface.
On a chessboard, once a piece left its square, that was the end of it. Real armies were infuriatingly more troublesome than chess pieces-and so much more precious that it left him unable to breathe.
Lelouch raised a hand and closed the final casualty report. He paused beside the desk, then suddenly slammed his fist into the wall.
The dull thud made the guard outside glance back. After confirming that no one inside was calling for help, he straightened again.
"Damn them."
He spoke under his breath.
"Damn them all."
The first curse had been aimed at the BETA. With the second, even he could no longer tell whether he was cursing Britannia, Charles, himself, or this world that forced him to rethink everything.
He had once thought his goals were very simple: destroy Britannia, uncover the truth behind his mother's death, make his father pay, and create a world for Nunnally where there would be no more war, where no one would ever again treat her as a hostage or a disposable pawn.
Those goals interlocked like an unquestionable proof. Britannia had taken everything, so Britannia had to be destroyed; Nunnally needed peace, so he had to obtain enough power to destroy the empire.
But the things that had fallen from the skies over Kashgar had no idea what Britannia was.
They would not attack Pendragon first because Charles