Surviving as a Prince of Britannia

The following is a side story from the protagonist Lysander’s childhood, featuring his younger half-siblings, Lelouch and Nunnally, and his stepmother, Marianne vi Britannia.

Holy Britannia Empire

Imperial Capital Pendragon

The Imperial Palace

It had been a dreadful seven years.

All I had done was doze off for a moment while working overtime at a soul-crushing company, only to log out of life from overwork.

And of all places, I had reincarnated into a twisted variation of that trainwreck anime I had been watching, Code Geass.

The years after birth, when my mind was perfectly conscious but my body refused to obey me, were humiliating enough.

Maids, ladies-in-waiting, and sometimes even Marianne herself had to handle my bodily needs.

That shameful record lasted only for a while.

One year later, my younger half-brother Lelouch was born to Marianne and Charles.

Three years after that, my younger half-sister Nunnally was born.

And before I knew it, I had become a nursery teacher.

Boom!

Boom!

“Kyaaaaah!”

“…The Roman army, led by the wicked dwarf Napoleone(*), had chased Elizabeth all the way to the ship as she tried to escape!”

“No! Eli… zabeth!”

“‘And just then—the bomb thrown by a brave sailor struck Valarus the Lanky(*), the evil little Napoleone’s right-hand man, and knocked him off his horse.’”

“…I have memorized it too, Elder Brother.”

At the moment, I was reading to three-year-old Nunnally from a children’s biography of the emperors, specifically her favorite volume : Elizabeth II.

And six-year-old Lelouch, who had interrupted midway, was already unable to hide his genius.

Not only had he finished the children’s edition, he had also devoured the adult history of the Empire that I had angrily slammed shut halfway through.

These days, he was obsessed with chess.

“Yes, that’s right. Thanks to that, Elizabeth was able to board the ship by the narrowest of margins.”

“Phew… she survived…!”

“Elder Brother, how about a game of chess today?”

“Sounds good. Princess, could you move this knight over here?”

“Okay!”

Rustle

Rustle.

…So, what exactly was the problem, you might ask?

Everything!

More precisely, everything except my birth, status, and wealth.

Ah, since Marianne was still alive and well, the chunibyo prince and the wheelchair-bound girl with a brocon filter were also growing up in a stable environment.

One of them was growing up a little too brilliantly, but still.

That much made it a perfect 100.

However—

Click

My father was Charles zi Britannia, a man with more than one hundred wives, and whose number of children—whether three digits or four—had become a betting topic in noble salons.

Minus fifty points.

Click

On top of that, aside from the miracle panacea known as Sakuradite and Knightmare Frames, this world’s history was far too different not only from my original world, but even from the original canon world.

Minus fifty points.

Click

Total score: zero.

“Checkmate, Elder Brother.”

Wait.

When did that happen?

Tap

“I lost, Lelouch.”

“I am simply no match for you.”

“Still, you defended much better than last time.”

“What was your secret?”

“Hmm… perhaps my prayers to my patron saint, Richard the Lionheart, were answered?”

“Hahaha!”

“Haha!”

“You are quite amusing, Elder Brother.”

No, really.

I mean it!

Richard was worthy of respect in this world!

Unlike in my original history, here he was the hero who retook Egypt from the Ayyubids during the Crusades.

I admit it.

The man was already a monster in original history, but once the butterfly effect was added to him, he was a fish back in water.

The problem was that at least four or five people had twisted history even further, in several different senses.

The first among them was Barbarossa, Frederick I of the Holy Roman Empire.

In my original history, he had been the Kaiser of the Holy Roman Empire who drowned while crossing a river during a Crusade to the Holy Land.

In this world, he did not die.

On the contrary, he displayed the vigor of old age, defeated Salah ad-Din at the height of his power, and retook Jerusalem.

From there, history began to warp in a chain reaction.

The emboldened West—or more precisely, the Holy Roman Empire—moved its capital to Rome altogether.

The House of Hohenstaufen was even Latinized into Altocastarenis, and they began calling themselves the “New West Roman Empire.”

What happened to France, you might ask?

Inspired by Richard the Lionheart’s reclamation of Egypt and Barbarossa’s reclamation of Jerusalem, they hastily organized their own Crusader expedition, only to be destroyed by a storm in the Mediterranean.

The city-states of Italy and the princes of Germany?

They were integrated into the New Western Empire through marriage, persuasion, threats, excommunication, and territorial wars.

The Pope?

At this point, he was little more than the Archbishop of Rome, appointed and dismissed by the will of the Imperator-Basileus of the New Western Roman Empire!

Was that the end?

No.

Constantine XI, the last emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire who had fallen in my original history, did not ascend the throne here.

Instead, he adopted his maternal family name, Dragašis.

He then swore fealty to the New Western Emperor of that time, offered Constantinople and Morea, and became his son-in-law.

Afterward, he not only recovered Jerusalem—which had been lost during the chaotic years following Barbarossa’s death—but also reclaimed Alexandria and Antioch as well!

He played a major role in reuniting the divided eastern and western branches of Christianity, leading to the birth of the Unified Church.

However, he died in battle during the Persian expedition.

Anyway, after his death, Dragašis was canonized by a unanimous decision of the five Archbishops of the Unified Church: Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch.

Greatest of All Time.

Dragašis.

…So, what happened to the weird EU from canon?

Why did that thing disappear, only to be replaced by a monster called the Senatus Populusque Romanus?

Anyway, you might be wondering how exactly our nation, Britannia, survived against that monster.

Let us put the Chinese Federation aside for now.

Even excluding Richard the Lionheart, there was another, even more astonishing singularity.

A person who did not exist in my original history : Edward VII, also known as Eduardo I.

The refounder of our Empire.

In this world, Felipe II and Mary I actually had a son, and that son was this man.

Because of him, Elizabeth—his aunt, who rebelled in an attempt to seize her nephew’s throne after his mother died and was burned at the stake—became an unusable name.

Even though Eduardo I tried to dilute that by naming his daughter Elisabeth, no one dared to claim the name “Elizabeth” until the Elizabeth II from the fairy tale I had just read to Nunnally appeared.

Instead, the dynasty later produced the bizarre sequence of Mary II and Mary III.

Anyway, how impressive was this man?

Starting from England, he annexed Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Portugal and Spain, all of the American continents, West and South Africa, Australia, and even the Orient—Philippines, Melaka, Macau, Sri Lanka, Goa, Dejima, and Sakai.

As if he had foreseen the rise of Napoleon, he even built the planned city of Pendragon in advance, on what would have been Baltimore in my original history.

He also introduced autonomous parliaments—though now, thanks to the realities of imperial politics, they had become noble salons for the county gentry of Area 1—and permitted local self-government not only on the European mainland, but also in the American colonies : Pendragon, Mexico City, Havana, Lima, and São Paulo.

To prevent puerperal fever, he supplied midwives, doctors, and barbers with distilled water and wine, made handwashing mandatory, established royal medical colleges everywhere, and even introduced bureaucracy and the division-of-labor factory system.

And so many other feats.

A wise king.

Master of the Golden Griffin.

But not a saintly king.

Why not saintly?

First, because Pendragon was built under royal direction, using the blood and tears of Black slaves captured from West and South Africa.

Second, because in order to avoid fighting the SPQR, which controlled most of Europe, he arranged a political marriage between his son Richard and his daughter Elisabeth.

At least they were half-siblings.

Was there resistance?

He did not bulldoze his way through like Henry VIII.

He carefully won over the priests, succeeded in forcing the matter through with convenient scriptural passages, handed out bread and festivals to the people, and even performed a foot-washing ceremony as public theater.

He was meticulous.

Did the consequences of incest not appear?

Well… up to the next generation, Richard IV, also known as Ricardo I—Eduardo I’s son and Elisabeth’s husband—they endured well enough.

He rescued galley slaves and unpaid sailors by granting them either New World land as severance pay or military offices.

Thanks to him, talents like Dumas and Gannibal could have served under the Old Britannia Empire.

However, in his attempt to check the old caudillos of Latin America, he dropped the bomb of equal inheritance, which effectively opened the door to polygamy.

Hmm

And then there was the final one.

Elisabeth the Lioness.

The woman who was both the daughter and the sword of Eduardo I.

The female general who crushed Felipe III—Eduardo I’s half-brother, born from Felipe II’s Portuguese wife, which made him her uncle—three times, in the decisive battles of Badajoz, Toledo, and Zaragoza.

Those victories enabled Eduardo to annex all of Iberia and Latin America, along with the Philippines, Melaka, Macau, Sri Lanka, and Goa.

Not only that, she also beheaded the Imperator-Basileus of the SPQR in the Battle of Hastings, briefly throwing the SPQR into chaos, and then landed in France—which had become Provincia Gallia of the Senatus Populusque Romanus at the time—in a counteroffensive.

She swept through Normandy, Brittany, Île-de-France, and Orleans, only to be defeated and killed by Wallenstein, a great general from Provincia Germania of the SPQR.

That was the life of Elisabeth, Eduardo’s daughter and Richard’s older half-sister.

…Were these people reincarnators, transmigrators, or Geass users?

I do not think even Lelouch, Charles, or no, even C.C. herself could have pulled off this much!

…But my internal delusions soon came to an end.

Partly because I had stopped reading the history book after that point, feeling my blood pressure rise at how absurdly different this world had become.

But more importantly, because an unexpected guest had arrived.

“Is everyone having fun?”

“Mommy!”

“You have come, Mother.”

Nod

“Mother.”

My stepmother.

The birth mother of Lelouch and Nunnally.

The only woman Charles had ever loved.

Marianne the Flash had arrived.

“Come to think of it, Lai?”

“Yes, Mother?”

“Your birthday passed recently, so you are seven now, aren’t you?”

Flinch

…What was this?

An extra birthday present, perhaps?

As always, life was not so kind.

Thud

“T-this is… a combat suit, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. I prepared a Knightmare just for you. Put it on and come outside.”

“…Pardon?”

“You have grown enough. It is time you learned how to pilot. Until you can endure my attacks longer than Knight of One Sir Bismarck, I will personally spar with you.”

What did you just say?

“Waaah! Mommy, me too! I wanna try too!”

“Good luck, Elder Brother.”

No.

I cannot withstand this flow.

Stop!!!

p.s. Napoleone refers to Napoleon, and Valarus the Lanky refers to Joachim Murat in OTL. In this world, both served as generals of the Senatus Populusque Romanus.

Author’s Note :

Eduardo I, Elisabeth the Lioness, and Ricardo I are loosely inspired by characters from "I, the son of Bloody Mary, have become a king of 6 realms", an alternate-history web novel I previously translated into English with the original author’s permission.

Dragašis is loosely inspired by the protagonist of a Korean alternate-history/Roman Empire web novel. Unfortunately, I do not know of an English translation for that one.