Chapter 146: Mobile Suit Gundam: Siscon Flash
In front of the throne of Britannia's palace, Lelouch looked down at the pair at the bottom of the steps with a dozen soldiers aimed at them simultaneously, just waiting for their new king to give the word. Ange also aimed her rifle at Nunnally, showing no concern for her current situation. Two bodies lay strewn across the top and bottom of the steps, the pungent smell of blood rattling everyone's nerves.
"Brother, stop, this will only make the situation worse." Nunnally stood up to stop Lelouch, "Mr. Lingus, please give me five minutes to speak. I will find a way to prove that my brother is still of use, this is not the best time to remove the hidden danger."
"For the sake of our friendship, I won't begrudge the five minutes. Of course, no problem." Ade readily agreed, "If this is your last request, are you willing to bear the consequences of everything that happens after this?"
Nunnally looked down in contemplation for five seconds and finally shook her head reluctantly, "Five minutes are meaningless, there's no way I can convince you. So let me put it another way, if you kill my brother here, I will refuse to continue working with you and the Moon will become hostile with Britannia."
"Nunnally, you're Newtype," Ade shrugged, "and so am I."
Ange thought for a moment and suddenly reacted, pinching him hard on the waist. It turns out that with SuperSolenoid, he still felt pain. Ade showed his teeth very covertly.
"There is another way," Nunnally met his gaze, "I am willing to go to the moon as a hostage in exchange for my brother's survival. If my brother betrays, you could deprive me of my-"
"I object!" Ange said ahead of everyone else, "I reject this proposal on behalf of Ade's entire family!"
"So what the hell are you guys playing at? Why does he, a foreigner, have the right to decide the life and death of his empire's emperor?" Kururugi finally couldn't help but interject, "Is this the time to do this? Nunnally, where is Euphemia? You promised!"
"Punk, shut up!" Nunnally shouted impatiently, "There's no time for a petty character like you to make a point right now."
"There are only two people, a scholar and a woman." Kururugi strode towards Ade and Ange as if he didn't hear Nunnally's words, "Why don't let me restrain them? Everything will be solved in that way."
"Wait," Nunnally's eyes widened in horror, "You idiot, I order you, stop!"
"I'm so sorry, I refuse to obey that order." Kururugi's footsteps grew faster and faster, eventually turning into a trot, "I almost forgot to tell you that Lelouch's Geass was accidentally deactivated during the battle just now."
Kururugi ran fast at Ade and his fierce and unparalleled fist slammed into Ade's face, hitting the invisible barrier with a loud bang. Seeing the first blow failed, Kururugi didn't stop but continued the punches, and the crowd present even had a delusion that the ground was shaking.
"Are you a humanoid angel?" Ade was speechless and gave Ange a wink, "Don't get him killed, he's still useful to Nunnally."
Ange grimaced unhappily and nodded imperceptibly. Then the AT field suddenly disappeared, and Kururugi stumbled forward as his fist hit empty space and lost his balance. Ange came forward and kicked Kururugi in the chest. Kururugi flew a dozen meters to the ground, and struggled to get up again.
"That's enough!" Nunnally shouted, "I'm going with you!"
"No one even asked you to come, okay? Don't talk like Ade is here to steal a marriage!" Ange looked at her with anger, "Flast chest junior high school student, don't shamelessly come to our house!"
"Don't mess this up. We're playing a very serious conspiracy and tergiversation." Ade flicked Friday's forehead, "Don't participate in the discussion if you have a low IQ. Look, you and Kururugi have brought the atmosphere here off the right route."
"Don't flick my forehead again." Friday covered her forehead as if no one was there, seemingly glancing at Nunnally, "Yes, my IQ is low. The more you flick me, the more stupid I am. I'm telling you, it's against the law to sleep with a retard."
"Have you guys made enough of this?!" Lelouch finally couldn't stand the absurd atmosphere and roared out, "What do you take me for? A puppet to be slaughtered? Lingus, I swear here in the name of the emperor, you are not allowed to touch even a hair on Nunnally, or the entire Britannia will take revenge on you!"
"Brother, don't make trouble!" Nunnally waved her slender arms hysterically, "I've managed to bring the conversation off to his greatest weakness, and now it's all over! Do you think I'm a bitch? It's not for me, it's all for you!"
Lelouch suddenly calmed down. He grabbed his sister's flailing arm and calmly locked eyes with her, "My pride won't allow me to just watch you make sacrifices for me, Nunnally, I love you."
"Hey?" The sudden confession left Nunnally frozen in place.
"Charles is dead, and I, Lelouch-Vi-Britannia am now the king of this empire." Lelouch let go of Nunnally's hand and said in a loud voice, "The king must kill, march alone, open roads in adversity, and create a future in despair."
"Brother?" Nunnally looked at him in disbelief. Such Lelouch was somewhat strange to her.
"Nunnally, you've done enough for me, it's my turn to do something for you." Lelouch turned his cheek sideways to his sister and said tenderly, "I am a king, how can I be sheltered by others? If the king does not act, how will the ministry follow?"
"Brother, what are you going to do?" Nunnally grabbed Lelouch's sleeve nervously, "Don't you be impulsive!"
"Lingus, a cowardly man like you is worried about having trouble controlling me, and even wants to get rid of me for that reason." Lelouch pulled his sister's hand away and slowly walked down the steps with a disdainful smile on his face, "I can understand that, after all, with your shallow intelligence and narrow-mindedness, it is impossible to make a high-minded and arrogant king like me to be pleased with you."
"Reverse psychology?" Ade raised his eyebrows, "That's what you came up with? Using the reverse psychology on a rational person?"
"Reverse psychology? You look down on me too much." Lelouch let out a loud laugh and went to stand in front of Ade, "I might as well tell you that my Geass has a limitation, that is, I must look at a person's eyes straightly. Even a pair of sunglasses will make my Geass ineffective. You are an NT, if you doubt it, you can ask Nunnally for confirmation."
"I know this, Nunnally has already reported it to me." Ade looked at him with interest, "Go on."
"Hm, then we might as well make the deduction that there is a certain situation where I would be unable to use Geass even if I held it, such as—" Lelouch reached out his middle and second index fingers and thrust them violently into his eyes. The fragile eyeballs ruptured in response, and blood flowed out from the eye sockets, "like this."
"Brother!" Nunnally exclaimed and darted to Lelouch's side, holding him in her arms as tears came out of her eyes in anxiety, "Doctor! Kururugi, go get a doctor!"
"I cannot confirm whether my Geass can be restored by transplanting an eye, but I can promise that I will not try to restore my eyesight in any form. This is the promise of being a king, and you can always confirm it in the future." Lelouch held his sister and shook his body, "Please don't hurt Nunnally, I am willing to pay any price for my sister."
Looking at the crying Nunnally, Ade hesitantly said in her mind space, "I'm sorry."
"Come on, let me stay with my brother for a while." Nunnally's voice choked with a heart-wrenching sob, "Our cooperation continues, you just did what had to be done, I… don't blame you."
Ade sighed wordlessly and twisted his head away with Ange. The cockpit door slowly closed, and Unicorn and Villkiss flew to the air. He opened the communication channel and asked, "Friday, did I just look quite like a villain?"
"A villain would not ask such a question." Ange's reassuring voice rang out, "Besides, even if you were given another chance, I think you would still make the same choice."
"That's true."
"Ade, I'll try to be less jealous of C.C." Ange said abruptly, "I probably understand a little bit now that without her, you are really going to become another Yang Wen-li. When I think about it, I feel … a little bit scared."
"He was suffering endocrine disorders, resulting in mental ill-health, and I'm a successful person with a happy family. How can we be the same?" Ade smiled relieved, "Let's go, last stop of the day."
The two MSs flew out of the palace to a certain sparsely populated location on the outskirts of the imperial city. Britannia's troops received the order and did not do any interception of them. Ade circled around in the sky for a while and fired two shots at the ground with its beam magnum. The high-energy particle stream melting the metal floor under the camouflage and revealing the concealed space below.
"The other NT sensed is here, I'll go down and check it out." The Unicorn Gundam landed slowly on the ground and he jumped out of the cockpit, "Friday, keep watch outside."
What was blown open was a winding passage downward, Ade briefly judged the terrain and headed downward. After a series of twists and turns, and easily breaking a number of simple electronic locks, he finally arrived at a huge laboratory, and what appeared in front of him was—
"Who are you? How did you get in here?" The bald old man looked at him unsuspectingly, "Where's Charles? Did he send you over to deliver the food? It's not mealtime yet."
"Aeolia, it's amazing that a prideful man like you is brainwashed like this." Ade pulled out a small, very technological device from his arms and handed it to the other party. It was a miniature λ-drive he made, unable to produce a stable AT field, instead, it was utilized as a side effect of the λ-drive, "There's a button on this, you must not press it."
"Are you kidding me? Why should I follow your order?" Aeolia took the small device and pressed it, then his body froze. After about ten seconds, he suddenly asked in a deep voice like a new person, "Lingus, are you a friend of Diana?"
"The number of Current MSs online: 0."
"Give me half an hour, and we'll go back to the moon immediately after I pack up the information." Aeolia was controlled but the memory was still there. After he confirmed Ade's identity, he immediately analyzed the current state, returned the miniature λ-drive to Ade, and started copying the data, "Amazing work. The new overthrow the old. I'm too old."
"Overrated, you are the one who is really great, the one I admire the most in this world." Ade gave him an overview of Britannia's current situation, "… that's probably how it is out there, although Britannia is now an ally, there are unstable factors and they can't be fully trusted. "
"No one ever really understood what I meant except for Ray and Vist." Aeolia sighed a little, "Although Diana didn't understand either, it's a good thing she met you, so we could have this conversation. By the way, thank you for coming to Loran's aid, I owe the couple so much."
"What?" Ade glanced at the progress bar, there was still a long time before the copy finished, "Please, details?!"
Aeolia didn't think too much, just thought he was concerned about his friends, and he explained, "At that time, I had the idea of innovator — I will tell you what the innovator is later — But I needed to experiment with the effects of TurnA nanobot on the human body. Loran and Diana volunteered to be the material for the human experiment."
"Then there was an experimental accident." Ade nodded, "I'm familiar with this routine."
"Exactly, the technology was not mature at that time. In an experimental accident, the couple's bodies were eroded by nanobots. I preserved their souls with Lilith's bodily fluids. While creating new bodies for them that were more resistant to nanobots, individual chromosomes of Loran's body disintegrated because of the immaturity of the technology." Aeolia guiltily lowered his bald head, "In an emergency, I had to use Diana's chromosomes to complete his genes, and as you can see, the consequences… I am sorry for them."
"See what consequences?" Ade looked at him dumbfounded and suddenly sucked in a breath of cold air, "Crap."
"That's it." Aeolia sighed, "This is a lifelong knot in my heart, and since I now have the opportunity to return to the moon, I must make up for this mistake."
"… of course. This is what he deserves." Ade exhaled heavily, "I'm his friend, a fairly close and common friend, so I'm very happy for him at the moment."
"That's great, let's go." Aeolia packed up the data disk and fully formatted the mainframe, "There's so much to say, let's talk slowly when we get back to the moon. I trust Diana and Loran, since they trust you, I trust you too. Not to mention that Ghingham is an NT. You can't be a bad man."
"By the way, NT," Ade reminded him, "I found this place because I sensed an NT, and it was in this room."
"I know, she's going to leave with me too." Aeolia walked over to the cooler, opened the door, and took out a tube of orange liquid, "For your information, this is my best assistant back then, Ikari Yui."
