It had been a bad 2 months for the girl called, variously, Liliana Lamperouge (Lily), Liliana vi Britannia, and Zero The Man of Miracles, and it perhaps said quite a lot that finding out she was expecting was the least of it.
Firstly, the REASON she was pregnant, beyond the obvious. It's troublesome enough to be running a burgeoning rebellion against an empire that rules a third of the world without also managing, in a wine fueled haze thank you so much Milly Ashford, to screw your half sister's boyfriend one of the primere soldiers of said Empire.
Second, that precise half-sister, the Now-Late Third Princess Euphemia Li Britannia, nearly did what her elder sister Cornelia couldn't do with all the military might of the Imperial Colonial Forces couldn't. Through sheer, utter naivete Euphemia had offered a way free forward, reforms she believed would break the colonial class barrier of the Numbers system and allow the Elevens to be Japanese again. Lily saw this for the poison pill that it was, but Euphemia believed it and so did many of the Japanese that formed Lily's, Zero's, rebel army. If the terrorist sister didn't join hands with her still royal sibling, morale would collapse, while accepting the offer surrendered momentum. In the end, Lily agreed to aid her sister. The sister she had already betrayed once...
...And would betray again, leading to the next and greatest weight on the revolutionary's soul: the Special Administrated Zone Massacre. Careless words from Lily's own mouth, along with the devilish power granted to her by the witch C.C. had led to the gentle Euphemia leading a genocide against her own will. A genocide Lily was forced to stop by killing (another) sibling. A sibling whose brainwashing and death she would go on to exploit.
Exploiting genocide, betrayal, and kinslaying turned out to be wonderfully effective. Lily's Order of the Black Knights and the Six Houses of Kyoto raised their banners and declared independence, with countless flocking to the cause across the Japanese Archipelago. They fell upon the heavily fortified Britannian occupied Tokyo and quite literally destroyed it from the foundations. Lily had even captured the elder Cornelia, Imperial Viceroy, and extracted from her much desired answers... though they only raised more questions themselves.
And now... And NOW...
"What do you MEAN Nunally's been taken?" she growled at her erstwhile companion.
The immortal witch replied simply, "She's being taken to Kamine," without further elaboration.
The teen terrorist rushed back to the cockpit of her gigantic knightmare, the Gawain, and roared into the voice distorting communication system. "Ashford Command, where is Ougi?! Come in Ashford Command!"
After a second of static, a reply came, "This is Ashford Command, Zero, Lt. Commander Ougi's been shot sir."
"WHAT? By WHO?"
"Unknown sir, but primary suspect is a Britannian woman who we found on-site. He met with her and dismissed his guards. He's stable but out of commission now."
I am hearing far too much about guards being dismissed today, the girl thought bitterly. "What about the captured school children?"
"...All the kids escaped while we were aiding the Lt. Commander sir."
"YOU LOST A BLIND GIRL IN A WHEELCHAIR?"
"S-sir, it's chaos over here, we need someone on site."
Lily's world stood still. Nunally was taken and my command is falling. But I have Cornelia... But I can't let Nunnally go, or what was this for? But I can't let this fail or what did Euphie die for? A thousand 'Buts' clashed in the span of a second, until finally she laid her hand on her stomach. But... I have to finish what I started.
After informing command post she'd arrive soon, Viceroy in tow, she turned to C.C. "Help me gather up Cornelia, we're securing the city."
The green haired woman rarely was surprised, and less rarely showed it, but her eyes turned to saucers at that. "You're giving up on Nunnally?"
"Never," came the hissed reply. "But I'll be best situated to do something about this when we've secured ourselves a country. Now, get out and-"L never got further, as at that point a tremendous presence made itself known, that of the Knight Giga Fortress Siegfried. Theirs would be, in the end, the last great battle of the day.
-
Super weapons rose, buildings fell, losses accumulated, retreats and captures were made on both sides, but all of it, everything from the massacre at the SAZ, to the flocking of hundreds of thousands of fighters from countless resistance cells to the banner of the Masked Man, to the destruction and occupation of the Tokyo Settlement, to the negotiated ceasefire between Zero and the Chancellor and Second Prince Schneizel and withdrawal of Brit forces via Osaka, and finally the formal declaration of the Japanese Free State by the Black Knights would be recorded in history as the Black Rebellion.
But it was only the beginning of the true bloodshed.
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