The screams had long since faded into memory, but the taste of smoke still clung to his tongue like a lover's betrayal.
Months. Months since Lelouch and Nunnally were ripped from the palace like toys from a child's grip, cast into the political wasteland of Japan as living bargaining chips. The empire called it diplomacy. He called it weakness—the first crack in Britannia's gilded facade that would soon shatter completely.
But they weren't the only casualties that night.
The fourteenth prince of Britannia—forgotten, scorned, invisible—had been in the east wing when the terrorists struck. While his siblings cowered behind their bodyguards, while his father's voice boomed orders from his throne room, the boy with midnight-black hair had been alone. Always alone.
The explosion came without warning. Glass became shrapnel. Marble became missiles. And fire—God, the fire—had embraced him like a starving beast, searing away weakness and leaving something far more dangerous in its wake.
Now he lay cocooned in sterile white, his fourteen-year-old frame wrapped in bandages that felt more like a chrysalis than medical necessity. The steady beep... beep... beep of monitors counted down the seconds until his metamorphosis would be complete. Each shallow breath through the oxygen mask sent tendrils of something dark and electric coursing through his damaged lungs—not healing but changing them into conduits for power beyond mortal comprehension.
His siblings came. Of course, they came. Duty demanded it.
"Poor little brother," Cornelia had whispered, her hand briefly touching his bandaged knuckles. "Rest now. Father sends his... regards."
Regards. Not love. Not concern. Regards, as if he were a distant acquaintance rather than blood of their blood. But as her words faded, something else whispered in the spaces between his heartbeats—a voice that promised retribution, that sang of violet flames and absolute domination.
The voice sounded remarkably like his own.
Weeks crawled by with agonizing slowness. His body mended, but his mind... his mind had found something magnificent in the darkness. When the doctors finally allowed him to walk, he moved with predatory grace, each step calculated, and controlled. The breathing apparatus they'd strapped to his face had become a tool for focusing the energy that now pulsed through him like liquid lightning.
Tonight, he stood before the mirror in his private bathroom, methodically unwrapping the gauze from his face. The reflection that emerged was a revelation—sharp cheekbones carved by suffering, eyes that gleamed with violet undertones in the lamplight, and a smile that belonged on a conqueror's lips rather than a victim's.
He was beautiful in the way a blade is beautiful—elegant, deadly, and utterly without mercy.
"Weak," he whispered to his reflection, but the word carried no self-loathing. It was an epitaph for who he used to be. "Pathetic. Forgotten."
His fist moved with inhuman speed, and the mirror exploded in a cascade of silver fragments. But it wasn't the impact that shattered it—it was the wave of psychic energy that erupted from his knuckles, painting the bathroom walls in dancing violet light. The power felt like molten gold in his veins, like the first breath after drowning, like the moment a god realizes his own divinity.
He laughed—a sound like breaking glass and distant thunder.
Returning to his quarters, he found it waiting on his nightstand: a leather-bound journal that hadn't been there before, its cover embossed with a skull wreathed in flames. The pages within spoke of legends—of a man who had transcended mortality through pure, undiluted will. Master Bison. The Lord of Shadaloo. A figure who had built an empire not through birthright, but through the simple, elegant application of overwhelming force.
"Power is not given," read one passage, the words seeming to burn themselves into his retinas. "It is taken. The strong devour the weak, and the weak exist only to serve the strong's ambition. This is the natural order—not the lies of kings and constitutions, but the truth written in blood and victory."
Each page turned brought new revelations. Psycho Power—the dark energy that fed on negative emotions and transformed them into a pure, destructive force. Techniques that could crush minds as easily as bodies. The philosophy of absolute dominance recognized no law save strength.
And there, in the journal's final entry, a prophecy that made his pulse quicken:
"When the old world burns when the weak kingdoms crumble beneath their own corruption, a new master will arise. He will be born from suffering, forged in betrayal, and crowned with violet flame. And in that day, Shadaloo shall rise again—stronger, more terrible, and utterly without mercy."
The boy closed the journal with trembling fingers, but his trembling was not fear—it was anticipation. The forgotten prince, the scorned heir, the invisible child was dying with each passing second. In his place, something magnificent and monstrous was taking shape.
He could feel it in the way the shadows seemed to bend toward him. In the way his heartbeat had synchronized with some cosmic rhythm of conquest and domination. In the way his very breath had become a weapon waiting to be unleashed.
The fourteenth prince of Britannia pressed his bandaged palm against the journal's cover and felt Psycho Power surge through the leather like a living thing. When he lifted his hand, the skull emblem glowed with violet fire.
"Master Bison," he whispered, and the name tasted like destiny on his tongue.
Outside his window, the lights of the Britannian capital twinkled like stars—beautiful, distant, and utterly unaware that their new god had just awakened. Soon, very soon, they would learn to fear the darkness that had been born in their midst.
Soon, they would all kneel before the power that had chosen him as its vessel.
The prince smiled beneath his breathing mask, and for just a moment, his reflection in the dark window showed not a boy's face, but the terrible visage of the dictator he was destined to become—cape billowing with otherworldly energy, eyes blazing with psychic fire, and the entire world spread before him like a chessboard waiting for its master's first move.
Let the games begin.