"Damn it."
"Damn Britannia."
Lelouch could all but guess how Suzaku would explain himself: the wrong path could never lead to the right result, so he would rather wear the enemy's uniform and climb from within the system.
"You idiot."
Anger surged up first, as though his friend had betrayed their childhood promise, as though Suzaku had already taken a stand against his mother, Nunnally, and Area 11.
But once the anger passed, those same words remained.
Suzaku Kururugi was the boy who had carried Nunnally through the ruins, shared his last half of a biscuit with Lelouch, and once tearfully vowed that he would change the world.
Lelouch watched the test footage again, leaned back in his chair, and forced his emotions down.
Nunnally needed treatment, and Suzaku needed to be pulled out of an imperial system that was growing ever more adept at exploiting his guilt.
He decisively closed Suzaku's suitability assessment and opened the military records Great Han had made public over the past month.
Li Xingke was in the Southern Ocean, while Tōdō Kyōshirō and the Four Holy Swords remained in Luoyang, undergoing adaptation training for new KMF models and joint operations.
Aside from a few units of routed soldiers that had just completed reorganization, the only truly renowned core of the Goryeo special enclave's standing defense force was Kallen Kouzuki and her recently formed Red Lotus Separate Division.
Britannia had clearly noticed this gap as well.
At first, Lelouch had only wanted to confirm Suzaku's whereabouts through the Lancelot's procurement chain. As he continued investigating, however, he found an anomaly in a batch of aviation fuel contracts unrelated to the Hover Unit.
Through three civilian companies, the Colonial Affairs General Bureau's East China Sea Special Section had temporarily leased twelve long-range transport aircraft and six