The European nations were in a frantic state. They were something of allies with Britannia now under Nunnally's rule. There was no doubt going to be a huge refugee crisis soon. Marrybell's announcement all but declared the fact a war was going to break out in a week's time, sooner if Nunnally, or her advisors, or someone locally on the ground in Europe, couldn't keep their temper in check. Aside from creating a general panic, anyone who could feasibly move themselves was likely already thinking about where to flee to. The sight of Cartagena burnt to the ground was going to be a powerful motivator to get as far away from Spain as possible.
Suzaku and Cornelia would have liked to be with Nunnally to try and calm her restive spirits, and perhaps if C.C. weren't around would have been. But in the moment their skills were needed elsewhere, coordinating the response and information gathering for this precarious nightmare. There was only so much anyone could do, however, to stem the floodgates if the empress got going. No instance like that had occurred in the five years she was on the throne, but the threat was there.
C.C. found herself in the unenviable, but capable, position of having to endure screamed derision at the state of affairs, screamed threats – hopefully only threats – of exceptionally violent and destructive retribution, cursing of the names of virtually anyone she could think to blame, and on glass thrown in frustration across the room when the only update she'd received so far was restate that Cartagena was the city that was lost, and that no other information was available.
"Please calm down, Nunnally." C.C. urged, holding the young empress' hands.
"Why!? Why is this happening!? Have I sinned so terribly to have this happen?" Nunnally asked at the point of tears. "Haven't I lost enough? Now I must lose my brother's dream too?"
"You haven't lost yet. I told you, didn't I? We'll figure this all out, we'll stop them, and you can get back to realizing Lelouch's dream."
"Frustrating… so frustrating," Nunnally seethed, her hands clutching into fists as if she were threatening to crush C.C.'s.
C.C. was always in the capital for the ceremony, but herself rarely ever attended. She snuck in with the crowd the first year, surprising Nunnally afterwards. She liked being there with Nunnally at this time, when Nunnally's emotions were most raw. As sad as it was to imagine, she and Nunnally were the only two people who knew Lelouch at any truly deep level. The only persons close to Nunnally now, Cornelia and Suzaku, were estranged or enemies of Lelouch for much of his lifetime. There was a limit to the perspective they could offer in her time of wanting to enjoy fond memories of her brother, while the rest of the world was wallowing in their derision of him.
When Nunnally's mood turned foul, there was one certain means of directing her attention elsewhere. C.C. would regale her stories of her past, and of Lelouch. Hearing stories was at first a surprising means of tempering the empress' mood for C.C. It seemed an awfully simple thing, too simple. Perhaps it was just that she was too accustomed to being around the insufferable sort who could not seem to find satisfaction until they committed some act of perversion or made some ludicrous quest out of their need to be entertained. That part of Nunnally was still very much child-like, though she hated being thought of as still a child. But, it was still C.C.'s fear that Nunnally would lose her childish side; lose that innocence that made her such a shining light even when the world seemed so bleak. Seeing how enraged she could become was a different child-like comportment, but one not foreign to full-grown adults either.
About an hour later, Suzaku entered. By now, C.C. had managed to just about get Nunnally's mind off the last few weeks and moreover from that morning. She almost wished Suzaku hadn't had to come and upset that by giving her what was likely to be bad news.
"Please tell me, Suzaku. What's happened?" Nunnally asked him with rigid determination. It was when she had to seriously contend with issues that Nunnally showed just how much of a regal monarch she'd become. Fear, apprehension, doubt, seemed to vanish from her entirely as she assumed a steadfast and deliberative countenance. But you could still see signs of her underlying emotions. Her eyes had become fierce, a far cry from the gentleness you couldn't help but see when she was forced to keep them closed, believing herself to be blind. Her hands gripped the armrest, tight enough to impress her hands, but still room to tighten further.
"Nunnally," Suzaku started, removing his helmet. "Nunnally," he repeated, hesitant in delivering the news to her. He spoke softly and deliberately, praying he wouldn't lose his voice partway through, or that she wouldn't ask him to repeat anything. "We were able to contact the Mediterranean Fleet, which was on its way towards Cartagena to refuel for the voyage back to Britannia. Due to the Memorial Day events, they remained out at sea, planning to dock in Cartagena about 24-hours from now.
"Their reconnaissance photos show that the entire city has been wiped out. They have sent aircraft and Knightmares to assist in search and rescue operations, and will soon be joined by support from Valencia and Gibraltar. Unfortunately, it appears that the mortality rate will be extremely high. So far, only a few dozen people have been found alive, almost all of them with second-degree burns or worse. Many areas are still on fire, so teams cannot get there until we can put out those fires. Judging from the scope of the destruction, it is expected that the death toll will surpass 400,000."
"4… 400,000?" Nunnally asked wide-eyed, an odd, manic, grin on her face. She looked ready to laugh at the absurdity of what had to be an inappropriate joke. "You say that's extremely high? Doesn't Cartagena only have a population of about 410,000 to begin with? That's not high; that might as well be all!" she screamed so loudly it was a wonder if the whole building hadn't heard her.
Suzaku had thought he'd braced himself for an outburst from Nunnally, but he'd never been good at girding for the cutting edge of Nunnally's rage. Receiving it was like a mix of pain and fear; as if you didn't know if to be cowed by the empress of the most powerful nation in the world berating you, or pained to know that the normally so quiet and mousy dainty figure was driven to such anger.
"We do think that there are people who were able to flee outside of the region once the attack began. Our impressions are based on very scattered reports, but it seems like no one who was fleeing was chased."
"I probably don't even need to ask, but did you get an explanation of what attacked the city?" C.C. posed.
Suzaku paused a moment, clearly doubting how much more he could say without Nunnally losing it completely. "It's being described as a dragon horde."
"A horde?" C.C. questioned again, in a bit of disbelief.
"It appears there were at least six black dragons. They were each smaller than the ones seen before, but generally seemed to be the same sort of creature."
"And Marrybell?" Nunnally asked, her eyes seemingly filled with fire of her own, and abyssal anger.
"We have no indication where she came from, where she went, or how she is moving at the moment. We suspect she is travelling on the back of a dragon, like the others have done, but we don't know for sure."
"She's going home." Nunnally said with a sudden tone as if of sage insight.
"Madrid? There's over three and a quarter million people there," Suzaku said, aghast at the prospects of the Cartagena scene being replayed in a city that size.
"No, not Madrid," C.C. solemnly said, her eyes cast down at the floor.
"Quickly, call the Prime Minister of Londinium. Tell him he has to evacuate the capital immediately." Nunnally demanded.
Suzaku didn't immediately understand. He was getting ready to push back against Nunnally's order. He'd mistakenly taken C.C.'s comment as a refrain of solace for the city. But he realized it was a pained denial. London was a city almost three times the size of Madrid in population density. The idea of evacuating the city was ludicrous on its face. But what else option was there? He rushed out the room, racing to the on-site headquarters they'd established to get a handle on this situation. He barely had the wherewithal to place his helmet back on.
"Damn it, we don't have enough time," he screamed in his head as he ran. "How long has it been already? An hour and a half?"
Suzaku flew by the guards and burst into the communications tent. Cornelia was there too, apparently assisting in the effort to ease the fears of the government officials around the world, and having a hard time of doing it, from the looks of her frustration. But he couldn't worry about that now.
He grabbed up a radio and made the call himself to London. The fact that he knew by heart how to reach them was a testament to how important the relationship between Londinium and Britannia had become. It also went to show how this fear that was impressed on him came to be.
"This is the office of the Prim…"
"This is Zero of the Order of the Black Knights. I have a priority message for the Prime Minister from the Empress of the Holy Britannia Empire, Nunnally vi Britannia. Connect me with the Prime Minister at once!"
"I-I apologize, but I can't do that."
"You don't understand! This is an emergency message!"
"You see, the Prime Minister is travelling at the moment. He's not in the offices, and the only way to contact him is through the SIS."
"Damn it, then get me one of his deputies! Anyone in charge! We don't have much time!"
"I can…"
Before an answer could be given, the line went dead. Suzaku called into the radio three or four times, desperately hoping to get a response. He tried radioing again, to no avail. By now the entire tent was looking at him, puzzled as to what had him panicked so much. The fear was almost palpable, though they weren't sure what they were afraid of. What was the desperation to reach London for?
His mind racing, Suzaku fought himself to find an answer as to what to do next. "Ireland, Scotland, the Netherlands… what forces do we have there? Someone answer, quickly!"
"N-not much, Lord Zero," one officer spoke up. "Maybe enough together to make up a single regiment, but not much more than that…"
"And the Atlantic, the North Sea?"
"There is a small fleet sailing through the North Sea on the way back home from Kristiansand, due to make a port call in Inverness in the next day or so. It's the end of their regular tour of duty." The same officer answered.
"Contact them immediately and tell them to sail as close to London as they can get, maximum speed! Hopefully there's something left by the time they get there…"
"Cancel that order." Cornelia interjected calmly but sternly. "The treaty that allows use of the port in Inverness quite clearly limits out movements in the North Sea. With everything else that we're dealing with, are you intent on starting a war with Londinium as well?"
"I'm trying to salvage Londinium," he loudly declared.
"I'm sure that's the message they'll receive when they see a Britannia fleet sailing towards their capital at full combat speed."
"Nunnally said Marrybell is going home." Suzaku told her.
"What does that have to do with…" With the same sort of realizing look as Nunnally's statement, Cornelia's expression darkened as she got closer to finishing her question.
"Going home" was a phrase that had a particularized meaning for the Britannia family. It had been less so with their father than it had been in past generations, but a major driving force behind the expansion and conquests of Britannia was a sort of engrained blood oath; a burning desire to redress an old grievance. It was the crusade of Napoleon Bonaparte, his assailing of the British Isles, that led to Queen Elizabeth III being briefly captured, forced to abdicate the throne, and the exile of the royals from England, that led to the formation of the Holy Britannia Empire through the remnants that survived the escape to the New World. "Going home" was the rallying cry that brought them together. It was the call that encouraged them and drove them to build the empire that they did. It was the determination they held on to, to push forward towards the ideal of one day being able to reclaim that crown jewel of their former home, their original seat of power, the British Isles.
"Even so," Cornelia picked up her statement, her expression solemn as stone, her voice gravely with emotion. "We will not go to London."
"Are you choosing to let all those people die? Be burnt to death, without us doing a thing to help them!?"
"I'm choosing not to send more people to feed those flames. Even if our fastest ship sails for London at top speed, it'll get there far too late to do anything but be convenient target practice for her and her beasts. It would only agitate a situation where we have no means of countering her. We shouldn't be sending our knights to face a pointless death just to save face.
"Hurry. Do whatever you can to contact Londinium; get them to evacuate as many as they can. Tell them to do whatever they must to survive this! If she wants them to surrender, then so be it! Better they live with their heads bowed than die without their heads." Cornelia ordered to the tent.
The affirmation of the order held little solace for its meaning. Her command held sparsely more value than did Suzaku's. A ship heading from Kristiansand to Inverness and a day out from there would probably not get even close to London for almost a day, at best. By then, whatever was feared to happen to London would be all but over. They would be showing up just to see the carnage, likely be made to be a part of it, on the losing side.
Ordering an evacuation of London was likely to save maybe a few thousand. It wasn't as simple as telling people to flee the city. Where were they to go? How far from the city? For how long? The fewer answers there were to these questions, the more likely you were to just cause gridlocked confusion and panic. The problem is that a few hours, how long Suzaku expected they had, was not enough to answer those questions. Either way it was likely little other than a bandage on a seeping wound. London would be her first target, the seat of Londinium. But the whole of the British Isles were Marrybell's goal.
The one-week timeline Marrybell gave for the capitulation of Euro Britannia was suddenly less of her assigning Britannia a deadline to consider her ultimatum. It was her statement of how long she was expecting to take in dealing with the other business she had in mind. She wasn't telling them they had one week to answer her. She was saying they had one week to watch what she would do before turning her attention to them instead. In other words, they were a secondary concern; a problem to be dealt with once more pressing matters were resolved. The cost of being told Britannia was second fiddle? They got to watch from the sidelines as one of the largest, most famed, cities in the world was turned to a manifestation of the nine spheres of hell.
For three days smoke blotted out the sun above Londinium. Dark humorists said it was just Londinium's luck that the only days they were to be free of fog they instead had smoke. Over the centuries, the world had seen atrocities of different sorts. The end of the last war was thought to be the pinnacle of hell on earth. It saw the development of the strategic heavy armament weapon Field Limitary Effective Implosion Armament, FLEIJA. It was a weapon that killed several dozen millions of people, including the vast majority of the Britannia royal family. Nunnally played a role in that, firing a number of those terrible warheads in the attack against Lelouch's forces in the fight between him and Schnizel.
That weapon, the FLEIJA, was a terrifying atrocity, able to destroy everything in a large radius in the blink of an eye, wiping out entire cities. But there was something worse about what Marrybell did. The population of the capital of Londinium was certainly below that of the casualty number in FLEIJA's worst single event – a massacre that saw 25 million casualties, some 10 million deaths. London's population was just under 10 million in the first place. But the death rate of Marrybell's ire was staggeringly higher – some 85% compared to the 40% in the FLEIJA's wake.
And there was something worse too about people being burnt alive, rather than the comparative immediacy of the incineration and shockwave deaths FLEIJA caused. To be sure, that warhead likely caused fires that killed quite a number of people, but nearly every death in Londinium that day came at the hot winds escaping the mouths of the black beasts under Marrybell's control.
It was… hell. No other words really fit, and no other event really matched up. It was a true hell where the meaning of being human was diminished to its very lowest point.
What was worse, if such a thing were possible, the Prime Minister was nowhere to be found. No one ever was able to get in touch with him. Some say he fled knowing his country was likely a near-term target. Some say he attempted to, but couldn't get out in time, dying with everyone else. Few suspect it was any sort of coincidence that no one could speak to him before Marrybell arrived. Ask if anyone really cared now though.
In many respects, those who were burnt alive were the lucky ones. Those taken prisoner by Marrybell, who chose to condemn her and spit hateful admonishment at her for what she'd done, instead of bow down and beg for her mercy, were forced into abhorrent acts. Some were left to be toyed with by her dragons; placed in an enclosed area with two dragons nipping at them as they ran about screaming for help, the dragons tearing the unfortunate soul apart when bored of that game.
Others were forced to face "Judgment Fire," a sort of ritual Marrybell suggested was done to gauge the wicked from the pure, by which the person had to walk nude through a walkway of supposedly cleansing flames different from all the other flames burning everything around them. If they made it to the other side without being burnt, they were worth forgiveness. So far as was told, none did.
Her other bit of depraved madness was a supposed trial of those who sought mercy. They had to prove themselves to her. That proof would come in the form of following her order to commit some act against one of her captives. In many cases she'd forced them to kill someone. In others she'd forced them to rape a captive for everyone to watch. In some cases she killed the one seeking her mercy anyway because she deemed their motives for following her orders as being impure, or gaining too much enjoyment from committing the acts she ordered them to.
How were these events known to the world? She told them. Or rather, she recorded many of them, had the victims attest to what was happening, and sent that out to the rest of the world. Most average folks had no knowledge of these acts, governments deeming most of it on the level of snuff films and barring it from being made publicly available. It would only serve Marrybell's purpose anyway, they believed, if the general public was sent to a panic and a frenzied fear of what Marrybell was doing and might do. Being unable to stop Marrybell in the face of all that she was doing would only make them look weaker than they already did for letting her do so much already.
With the fall of London, Marrybell declared the founding of Greater Britain. She then marked time northward from London, seeking to subjugate the rest of the island nation and have them swear fealty on pain of fiery death.
Sara sat in bed, the sheet pinned under her left armpit. One hand held her mobile device, the other covered her mouth. Her eyes were so wide and glassy you could probably watch the video she was viewing off her eyes.
The media writ large was terrified of heading anywhere near Spain or Londonium right now, so several outlets took to flying drones into the region to get a look at things in the hours and days to follow. What they got back was deemed by them to be unfit for broadcasting and they mothballed the footage.
Rumors were, nonetheless, that a couple folks squirreled away copies of some of what was captured and uploaded it to the GIN, while concealing their own identities of course. The videos were quickly becoming widely known as snuff films.
You might call it professional curiosity, but Sara couldn't quell her desire to see what the videos held. That's what led her to search them out online and to now sit in fascinated horror as they played across her dilated pupils.
"You know, you don't have to look so excited," Chris said with an only slightly masked disdain. He was laying down beside her, arms beneath his head as he stared up at the dark ceiling with a glum expression.
But she wasn't listening. She was so transfixed she wouldn't have realized if anyone but Nunnally walked in and pinched her nose. The sheer scope of devastation, the scenes of carnage, the images of depravity… it was so sickening that she had to jump up and run to the bathroom, puking her guts outs. Chris went with her, rubbing her back to comfort her.
After a couple glasses of water, Sara was calm enough to get back to bed. She sat there a few moments, her hand to her forehead, eyes closed. She was regretting watching the video now, the horrific scenes playing over and over on the back of her eyelids.
"I told you not to watch it," Chris said, bringing her another cold glass of water. "Do you want anything else? Aspirin or something?"
"N-no… it's fine," she said weakly, taking the glass and slowly sipping down the water. It was cool and refreshing, which only made her think once more about the searing heat shown in that video and how horrifying it all was.
"Is it really that bad?" Chris asked, distressed at seeing her so out of sorts.
She took a bigger gulp of water before answering him. "No scene from a warzone, no stories about hell, can match that. I don't know what kind of human could watch the whole of that, much less be responsible for causing it."
"Do you think the rumor's true?"
"Y- yeah…" she answered with apparent difficulty in keeping her stomach from churning up again. "All the camera angles, the way the whole thing was edited… only someone on the ground there would be able to put it all together. She clearly would've had to have known about the recording, so she probably forced someone to put it all together."
"Damn, that's really sick," he replied with disgust as he threw himself into bed. Sara finished the water and set the glass on her nightstand. "What's the point?"
"Propaganda, most likely," she answered, laying down with a heavy sigh. "She's basically warning everyone that this'll happen to them too if they get in her way. I can only imagine how Nunnally would feel watching that."
"About as bad as you, I guess. Anyway, let's just forget about all this, alright? I mean, we can't do anything, right? We don't get anything for torturing ourselves thinking about it."
"It's not like I could possibly explain it to you," she thought as she rolled over on her side, away from Chris. "Seeing that video… it wasn't about what happened there. It's because she certainly had to watch this too. If I want to understand her, if I want to capture her, I have to know what she experienced. Torture myself? As terrible as that experience was, the real torture would be not trying to understand what she is experiencing through all this."
Surely there were thousands of people who convinced themselves to watch those videos not too differently from the way Sara had. Just as human nature meant that events of significance had to be commemorated, regardless of their specific distaste, there was a draw to the unknown and the macabre. As much as Lelouch might have been hated, the mysticism around how he was able to accomplish what he did was too fascinating to be merely ignored out of hand. You didn't need to watch the videos of what happened in Cartagena to know how bad it was – there were plenty enough talks about it regardless. But the fascination of seeing the acts for oneself, no matter the extent of the horror, was too much for some to contend with. The very thought of witnessing such a scene repeating itself was too much to bear.