"Suzaku?"
"Ah...!"
Suzaku stared at the girl sitting in front of him and found himself drifting, just for a moment, into a place between disbelief and grief.
Euphemia. The girl who should have been dead. The wound that had never stopped bleeding inside his chest.
"Still feels unreal, doesn't it?"
"Honestly... me too."
"I can't believe His Maje... that Lelouch could actually do something like this."
She swung her legs idly in the water, her expression caught somewhere between wonder and helplessness.
"To be honest, I'm a little lost myself."
"It feels like I've stepped into a world I don't understand."
"It's all so strange... and a little frightening."
She was alive. Truly, undeniably alive. But for Euphemia, that fact hadn't quite settled yet.
"But seeing that you're still here..." Her voice softened. "That alone makes everything okay."
"You haven't changed at all."
The anxiety in her chest dissolved the moment she looked at him.
"Yeah..."
The word came out quiet. He couldn't bring himself to say much more. The bitter, agonizing memories hadn't gone anywhere. They still lived inside him.
But Euphemia was here, breathing, smiling. And somehow, that made it feel like he could finally take a step forward.
There was no need to keep dragging the weight of the past behind him.
'I'll bring Euphemia back. And everyone else who was sacrificed.'
'Of course, to avoid causing a panic, I'll adjust people's perception accordingly.'
'But not yours. Not any of you. Unless you ask me to.'
Those had been Lelouch's words. Words so absurd that Suzaku, C.C., Kallen, and everyone who heard them could only stand there in stunned silence.
One man had conquered the world. And then, with the same casual authority, he rewrote it.
"I don't know what happened to Lelouch."
"But..."
Looking down at Euphemia's peaceful, smiling face, Suzaku found he could accept it. All of it.
After all, she had been brought back from the dead. He could hardly ask someone to die again.
It felt like a dream. But it wasn't one.
This was real.
"Tch."
Kallen walked toward the academy with her usual slice of bread clenched between her teeth, her eyes scanning the streets around her. Everything looked subtly different. The emotion sitting in her chest was hard to name.
A month ago, she had been fighting alongside the Black Knights under Schneizel's command, waging war against the Holy Britannian Empire led by Lelouch.
That war ended when Lelouch personally led a charge against Schneizel's forces and used Geass to bring it to a close.
'I was simply giving him a chance to challenge me.'
'After all, the difficulty of challenging a "god" and challenging an "emperor" are two very different things.'
'Beating him with nothing but human ability... well, that was a wish I've always wanted to grant myself.'
She remembered the enormous shift she'd felt in him at the time. He was almost unrecognizable.
And yet, deep down, Kallen knew that Zero had never truly changed. Not once.
That was exactly why, even after everything that had happened, she could accept his arrangements without resistance.
"Good morning, Kallen!"
"Oh... morning."
The orange-haired girl waved at her cheerfully from up ahead. Kallen was getting used to this. To this kind of ordinary, unremarkable life.
People who had died in the war were coming back, one after another. Apart from a handful who knew the truth, nobody seemed to notice anything was wrong.
It wasn't a dream.
The chains of hatred and conflict that had bound the world together were being corrected by Lelouch, one by one.
The source of all that turmoil had been severed.
Nation and nation stood at peace. No more bitter conflicts. No more bloodshed.
"We now bring you a live report. Empress Tianzi, Jiang Lihua, alongside the Emperor of the Britannian Empire, Nunnally..."
The broadcast played on the school's display screen. Kallen and Shirley both stopped walking.
Two small figures stood side by side, hands clasped together, flanked by familiar faces.
Jiang Lihua and Nunnally.
'Li Xingke's illness...'
When Kallen spotted the tall figure standing behind Jiang Lihua, she understood. He'd been pulled back from the brink too.
Then again, with Lelouch around, it would be stranger if Li Xingke had actually died.
That power of his. More outrageous, more incomprehensible than Geass ever was. Even now, no one fully understood it.
"It all feels like a dream... but it's not a bad one."
Holding onto that thought, Kallen let herself settle into her new reality. An ordinary person, living an ordinary life. No mecha. No battlefield.
"What's the matter? Finally free, but you can't figure out what to do with yourself?"
In the courtyard of a quiet countryside house, Lelouch sat in a chair, coffee in one hand, a book in the other, and spoke without looking up.
Beside him, C.C. sat hugging an oversized yellow plush doll, staring blankly at nothing.
"And whose fault is that?"
"You erased my Code and cleaned up every Geass fragment across the entire planet in one go."
"What exactly am I supposed to do now?"
She tilted her head to look at him, deadpan.
This man had effectively made her unemployed.
"If you're bored, try reading."
"How dull. You have absolute power over the world, and you're reading? You can literally have anything you want the instant you think of it."
Her flat, familiar tone. He was still the same confident, composed Lelouch she'd always known.
"I'm not using that power all the time."
"Most days, I live as an ordinary person. That's the entire point."
"I went through the trouble of remaking the world. The least I can do is actually enjoy it."
He answered at his own leisurely pace, voice soft.
In the public's mind, "Lelouch" was simply a former Emperor who had abdicated early. By changing his name to "L.L." and burying his identity, he'd become all but unrecognizable.
"You certainly had no problem telling everyone else that you're a 'god.'"
"And then forcing them to accept the world you remade."
"Honestly, you're worse than a Demon King."
That sharp, familiar tone of hers only made Lelouch laugh.
"I changed the world. Whether they accept it or not is up to them."
"If they're unhappy, they're free to kill the people I brought back."
"Or start another pointless war and sacrifice more innocents. It's their choice."
Hearing those domineering words, C.C. lifted her gaze to the sky.
Even now, Lelouch's transformation remained a mystery.
He never spoke about how he did it. He simply went on living the way he always had.
"You really haven't changed at all."
"But at least this time, you don't have to hide behind a mask to deceive anyone."
She let out a quiet sigh. She didn't hate this life. Far from it. Going from being a Witch back to being human, freed from the curse of immortality... that was something she'd wished for so desperately it had seemed impossible. And now it had come true.
The only downside was the idiot sitting next to her. A god pretending to be a man.
'You were the one who clung to me first, and now you're going to act like I'm a nuisance?'
'The world doesn't work that way.'
'Eventually, you might ask me to take back the power of Code.'
'You planned this all from the start, didn't you? Even if I said no, it wouldn't matter.'
'Hoh. As expected of you. You figured it out.'
That roundabout, stubborn excuse for a confession left C.C. thoroughly annoyed.
What kind of man pursued a woman like this?
But whether they stood as human and human, Demon King and Witch, or god and mortal...
Being loved like this was, for C.C., an entirely new experience.
And perhaps, not an unwelcome one.
[Translated and Rewritten by Shika_Kagura]
[TN: This chapter concludes Volume 1 of the story. The author notes that whether these characters will appear again remains to be seen. The next chapter begins Volume 2 with a new war, set in a well-known anime world, with characters that are somewhat interconnected. The author also hints that a certain unlucky individual will be thoroughly tormented by the various Master-Servant pairs.]