PROLOGUE: THE WILL OF ZERO
Months have passed—months like monuments, each one a mausoleum—since Lelouch vi Britannia and Nunnally vi Britannia were taken, torn, traded from their home to be used as bargaining chips in Japan. Political pawns. Disposable princes.
But this was not the only tragedy to befall the royal family that day. Not the only sacrifice on the altar of imperial ambition.
During the terrorist attack, another family member was present—a fourteen-year-old boy with ordinary black hair and extraordinary dreams. When gunfire struck a lamp, flames erupted. The inferno swallowed him whole, consuming flesh and future alike.
Now he lies in a hospital bed, a breathing monument to failure. His body: swathed in bandages. His face: hidden behind white wrappings and a hissing respirator. Some siblings visit—duty disguised as devotion. His mother would have come too if the world had any justice left. If she weren't ash and memory.
Despite their visits, something darker has taken root within him. Not mere revenge—revenge is crude, common, base. No. What grows in the ruins of his burned body is far more dangerous: vision.
The vision of a world without chaos. Without a chance. Without the accidents that maim boys and murder mothers.
Time passes. Tick. Tock. Transformation.
Though he can walk again—step by stuttering step—he still wears the bandages like a second skin. The breathing mask covers his nose and mouth, a mechanical metronome marking each damaged breath. The fire took his lungs beyond full recovery. The fire took everything except his will.
One evening, as artificial light bleeds through reinforced windows, he leaves his luxurious medical prison and makes his way to a bathroom. The fluorescent hum fills the silence—a sound like surveillance, like systems watching, waiting, weighing.
In the window's reflection, he sees himself: a figure wrapped in white, barely recognizable as human. A ghost. A cipher. Zero.
For a moment, he simply stares at this stranger in the glass. Then rage floods through him—no, not rage. Clarity. Cold. Crystalline. Absolute.
His father, who sent them away. His siblings, who played their games while the world burned. His entire kingdom, rotting from the crown down with corruption, incompetence, and the cancer of chaos.
He blames them all.
But blame is just the beginning. Blame is a diagnosis. What he needs—what the world needs—is a cure.
His fist crashes through the window. Glass shatters outward, glittering as it falls—a thousand fragments catching the light, each one a future unmade. The shards sing as they descend: a crystalline cacophony of breaking, breaking, broken.
He watches them fall. Watches the blood bloom across his bandages like roses, like revolution.
Control through information. Order through observation. Peace through power.
He returns to his bed, breathing hard behind the mask—in, out, in, out—each breath a promise, each exhalation an oath. There's a book on the bedside table, probably left by the doctors to combat his boredom. How quaint. How naive. As if books could bore a boy who has glimpsed the abyss and found it liberating.
He picks it up. Not some medical text or royal romance. No.
It's a philosophical treatise on systems theory, on networks and nodes, on the architecture of control. Someone—some well-meaning fool—has left him the tools of transformation.
He turns a page. Then another. His eyes—the only part of him still visible—scan the words with hungry intensity.
The text discusses organizational structures. Intelligence networks. The flow of information is the ultimate weapon, the final arbiter of history. One passage in particular arrests his attention:
"The Patriots: an ideal of perfect order achieved through perfect information. A world where context determines all, where will shapes reality, where chaos yields to the invisible hand of absolute awareness."
He reads about the philosophy—how knowledge is power, yes, but more: how controlling knowledge is control itself. The greatest ruler is the one who shapes what people know, what they believe, and what they can believe. How true peace requires not freedom but direction. Not democracy but design.
The world is in chaos. His burned body is proof. His murdered mother is proof. His exiled siblings are proof.
But chaos can be conquered. Will can triumph over chance. Order can emerge from entropy—if one has the vision, the conviction, the will to impose it.
Beneath his bandages, he smiles. It hurts—the damaged skin protests, the healing flesh cracks slightly—but pain is information too. Pain is data. Pain is the world teaching him what he needs to know.
He will learn.
He will become.
The breathing mask hisses. In. Out. In. Out.
Like a machine.
Like a system.
Like the future.
He closes the book and places it carefully on the bedside table. Outside, the compound hums with activity—guards patrol, doctors consult, politicians plot their petty schemes in their petty corridors of power.
They don't know it yet, but they're all pieces on a board. Pawns in a game they can't see.
And somewhere in this bed, wrapped in white, breathing through plastic and determination, lies the hand that will move them.
Not a king.
Not a knight.
Zero.
The one who will reshape the world—not through violence but through vision. Not through force but through form. Not through chaos but through the cold, clear, crystalline architecture of absolute control.
His mother taught him that the world needed heroes.
His father taught him that the world devours heroes.
He will teach them both a final lesson: the world needs neither heroes nor tyrants.
The world needs a cipher. A symbol. An invisible hand is guiding humanity away from the abyss.
It needs zero.
And Zero needs nothing—nothing except the will to make it real.
The respirator hisses its mechanical rhythm. The bandages bind his broken body. The darkness gathers around him like a coronation robe.
And in that darkness, wrapped in white, burning with cold fire, the boy who was begins to die.
So the man who will be can be born.
Zero.
.