-Chapter 3-

"Lelouch vi Britannia orders all of you... to obey me!"

After exiting the portal, Lelouch had found himself in an auditorium-sized room being stared by at least twenty demons. Instinctively, he had cast a Geass on the entire audience for them to obey his commands. To his immense relief, it worked. He didn't know what he would have done if it turned out that none of the demons understood English.

The bull-headed demon wasn't present. It seemed that he had left for another appointment before Lelouch had arrived. Lelouch wasn't exactly broken up about this.

Lelouch casually strolled around the room which had a layout that resembled the mission control center of the Britannia Aeronautics and Space Administration. However, unlike the BASA center he'd visited as a child, each work area was being manned by actual demons and the computers they were working on looked like they were at least twenty years out of date.

The room was also as dark as the inside of a movie theater. Only the light coming out of the monitors kept the room from being pitch black. Lelouch had told the demons to resume whatever it was they were doing before he had arrived, so he was currently looking over the shoulders of a toad-man and a tiger-woman as they typed on their keyboards.

Lelouch could feel his body healing itself as he walked around the room. He could see his sunburned, peeling skin knitting itself back together before his eyes. Death apparently had its benefits after all. It seemed that in a way he had gotten closer to his old accomplice C.C. He hoped that she was all right wherever she was...

"Explain to me what you're doing," Lelouch ordered after it became clear that he wouldn't be able to read the demonic script that appeared on their screens.

Lelouch listened carefully to their explanations. He learned that this control room was only one out of thousands and that each one oversaw the 'processing and maintenance' of human souls within its jurisdiction. The reason that these particular demons understood English was that this particular sector of Hell contained the souls of all humans who had died within the last ten years, and the majority of those spoke either English or Mandarin.

Because of the explosion in the human population during the Twentieth Century and subsequently the recent increase in the growing number of deaths, Hell had been struggling to find a way to efficiently deal with an average of 155,000 souls entering Hell each day while still giving each soul the personal 'attention' he or she deserved.

That average had been much higher than usual lately (Lelouch felt a twinge of guilt upon hearing that), so Hell's automated systems had been forced to shuffle the incoming souls into generic, pre-formatted punishments until the Interrogation Corps could follow up with them. Once that soul's records were properly sorted out they could then enjoy the full extent of Hell's hospitality.

"How do you determine who belongs here?" Lelouch asked. This question was motivated purely by curiosity. He had no doubts about his suitability for being here.

It was the tiger-woman who responded. She said, "Every type of sin leaves a particular mark on the soul. That's how the system recognizes whether a human was a murderer, a thief, or an adulterer and sorts them accordingly into the appropriate Hellscape. Every human accumulates the marks of sin throughout their lifetime. Once a certain threshold has been crossed, they are damned."

"Show me my records," Lelouch commanded.

This took a bit longer than he'd expected. Lelouch had not yet been formally registered in Hell's records, so the demons had to narrow their searches to male souls who had died on the day and at the time that he had. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on one's perspective, it was very easy to pick his record out of the remainder simply by looking for the soul record that listed the highest number of murders committed.

Now that they knew who he was, it was apparently simple for the demons to cross-reference his name with other records in their databases and compile a list of all the individuals who had died because of him.

"The list is not fully updated," the tiger-woman said apologetically. "The backlog of souls has caused some problems for our records-keeping divisions. The cataloging will take some time to complete."

Lelouch quietly asked to see an English translation of this list, and he sat impassively as he watched the list of names scroll across the screen. It was a very long list.

Lelouch fought back his rising gorge as the pile of names kept growing. He had never even met most of the people on that list, but he had killed them all the same. And this was only the incomplete version! He thought he had gotten over his sensitivity toward death a long time ago, but there was something about seeing his deeds in plain black and white that affected him more than he thought it would.

He had known intellectually that he had killed many people personally and through proxies. He had known that he was a monster, but he had not truly knownuntil the evidence of his folly was staring him straight in the face. Just like with the Narita incident. It seemed that he never learned.

For the first time since he'd died, he allowed his doubts about Zero Requiem to surface. He didn't doubt the success of his plan. The actions he had committed before his death and the plans he'd left in place for Suzaku to carry out after his demise ensured that the world would be at peace for the foreseeable future. In the guise of eliminating his competition, Lelouch had spent his two month reign as Emperor systematically conquering the world with a speed and brutality that would have made his father green with envy.

It went without saying that the collateral damage had been high.

While Schneizel would have been content to have the world remain in stasis under the threat of the Doom of Damocles, Lelouch had chosen to become the personification of Doom itself just long enough to show the world the horrors of total war. Then he had released the world with his death and the hopes of a better future.

With Nunally, Zero, and the Geass-controlled Schneizel in control of the only formidable military presence left on the planet, the recovery from the Demon Emperor's reign would be swift. The Britannian Empire, now much smaller and humbler, would be forced to make amends for its mad ruler under the eye of the reconstituted United Federation of Nations. The world would still be full of poverty, racism, and strife, but there was now a real opportunity to start creating a better world through peaceful means.

Lelouch was as certain now as he was then that Zero Requiem was an efficient and effective plan for recreating the world, but... had it been the best plan? If he had known Nunally was still alive, would he have created a different plan? Would a plan that took longer to come to fruition but took fewer lives have been better in the long run?

But there was no point pondering hypotheticals. He had done what was necessary to create the peaceful world that his sister had wanted. The ends justified the means, didn't it? Wasn't there even a story in the Bible about how God once nearly wiped out the human race in order to start the world anew?

But you are not God,Lelouch quietly said to himself.

Lelouch knew that he was being stupid by sitting here in this darkened room thinking about a past that couldn't be changed, but it wasn't like he had any pressing matters on his calendar. Where was he going to go? What purpose did he have now that he was dead and had lost everyone that he had ever cared about? It was not enough simply to survive. One had to have a reason for living, or in his case, existing. There was no point otherwise.

He had jumped through that portal out of instinct, but now he wondered if he should have just stayed on that cross. It hadn't been a pleasant experience by any means, but at least his existence had been simple. Now it was complicated again. Lelouch rubbed his eyes. He was just so damned tired.

"Attention! Incoming transport from Sector 23G. ETA is 20 seconds. Attention! Incoming..."

Lelouch ignored the loudspeaker even as the activity level of the demons around him increased. He wasn't concerned. He would just Geass whomever came through into forgetting that it had seen him and to continue on its merry way.

The portal flashed into existence and a dark figure appeared from its opening.

Lelouch stood up from his seat and thrust his right arm out dramatically as he said, "Stay where you are! Lelouch vi Britannia commands you to... oh, crap."

"Who are you, human? What are you doing here?"

Standing before him was the minotaur from the dessert. The one that he had already cast a Geass on before.

"Defend me!" Lelouch shouted as he saw the demon unsheath the axe on his back.

The obedient demons under his control tried their best, but despite their superior numbers they were desk jockeys- not a group particularly suited for combat. The bull-headed monster swatted them aside like flies. The demonic cannon fodder were managing to slow his attacker down, but they wouldn't hold him off for long.

Lelouch frantically tried to think of a way out of his predicament, but his strength was in creating strategies and there was no time to think of one. He probably wouldn't die from whatever the demon was going to do to him, but he definitely wasn't going to enjoy it either.

Lelouch squared his shoulders and stood with his back straight as the demon finally made his way over to him. He wondered if a part of him had wanted this to happen. Didn't he deserve whatever he had coming to him? Even so, he was repulsed by the idea of meekly submitting to his fate no matter how much he deserved it.

The demon hefted the axe over his head and smiled grimly. He said, "I don't know how you got in here, human, but-"

The demon's body was suddenly lying on the floor with no head.

Lelouch blinked in surprise. One moment he had been about to be slaughtered and the next moment he was looking at a corpse. There had only been those two moments. At least those were the only moments that he had perceived. Looking around and seeing that all the other demons in the room were lying dead on the floor only lent credence to the theory forming in his mind.

It was imposs- no, it was actually all too possible.

"Rolo?"

A young boy stepped out of the shadows with a welcoming smile on his face. He said, "Hello, Brother."

Lelouch was surprised by seeing Rolo in front of him, but he was not surprised at all to see that Rolo was a fellow inmate in Hell. He had mixed feelings at seeing his fake sibling again. He had despised the boy for daring to replace Nunally, but that had been an abstract hate. A irrational hatred that he would have directed toward anyone in Rolo's place. He hadn't given much thought about Rolo as a person, except for occasional feelings of grudging respect for the boy's abilities and contempt for his mindless loyalty.

Then Rolo had killed Shirley, and that irrational hatred became all too rational. Lelouch had spent countless hours thinking of gruesome ways for this pawn of his to die. He hadn't thought that he could hate someone as much as he hated his father, but Rolo had managed to earn his wrath.

And then Rolo had died for him, and Lelouch didn't know what to feel.

Lelouch had known about Rolo's twisted affection for him and that he was probably the closest thing that Rolo had ever had to a real family. Even so, he still would never have imagined that the child assassin would give up his life for a man that he had to have known on some level was just using him.

He had underestimated just how broken Rolo was on the inside. But Lelouch was also broken too somewhere deep down, and maybe it was that commonality that made them brothers even if they weren't related by blood.

Lelouch put a smile on his face that was only half-feigned. He said, "Thank you for saving me, Rolo. It seems that even in death I still need you to come to my rescue. But what are you doing here?"

Rolo looked at him with a puzzled expression as he said, "I'm here to help you to conquer Hell."