Oskar exhaled slowly as he pulled the last pieces of his uniform into place with his large, clumsy fingers. The Prussian military coat looked cool and fit—technically—but it clung tighter than it should have, stretched across his chest and shoulders as though it had been made for someone considerably smaller. The fabric resisted whenever he moved, the seams quietly straining beneath the moonlight. It was new, made specifically for his birthday—the birthday he had very deliberately avoided in an effort to save himself from the embarrassment of having to actually celebrate it.
He forced himself to focus as he adjusted the collar and rolled his shoulders once, trying to make the tightness feel at least somewhat wearable. The belt followed, pulled firmly around his waist, and then the white gloves, which he slipped only halfway onto his hands as though some part of him still wasn't quite ready to step fully back into the role waiting for him inside the palace. Behind him, the lake had already gone still again, black and flat beneath the stars as though he had never been there, while ahead the gardens stretched away in perfect order: trimmed hedges, straight paths, trees placed with deliberate precision, and beyond it all the pale, quiet mass of the Neues Palais, every line controlled and every window dark.
It was beautiful, and somehow that made it feel wrong.
Oskar dragged a hand through his damp blond hair and let out another breath. "Yeah," he muttered. "Perfect place for a prince. Not for an Asian truck driver who got famous for not getting blown up by drones." The joke didn't even land with himself, so he sighed and started walking, his black leather boots crunching over the gravel as he headed toward the palace. His posture remained loose, but his eyes were restless. The night was too quiet, too clean. In another life, quiet like this had often meant something was wrong—the calm before another artillery barrage, another incoming strike, or something worse.
Without consciously thinking about it, he looked up. The sky was clear and scattered with stars, completely empty of movement, yet his eyes searched it anyway. Once, that same empty sky had lied to him. Something could be up there watching from so far away that he would never see it, sending coordinates down to machines that came fast and rarely missed. Drones, always the damned drones, and above them satellites that could see almost everything and guide far worse things toward targets thousands of kilometres away. Standing in a royal garden in 1904, he still found himself wondering whether something might be looking back at him from the darkness, even though he knew perfectly well that the thought made absolutely no sense.
Then a sharp metallic clang cut through the night. Somewhere off the path, a gardener cursed as a bucket struck stone, and Oskar didn't think. He only heard the sound and reacted. "GRENADE!" he shouted as he dropped instantly, hurling himself off the path and crashing into the hedges with his arms thrown over his head.
The world snapped around him. The garden vanished, and sound came first: mortars screaming through the air before slamming into the ground in violent bursts, throwing dirt, mud, and burning fragments in every direction. Gunfire followed, sharp and frantic, accompanied by men yelling over one another through the chaos. Somewhere nearby someone screamed, "DRONE! DRONE!" and when Oskar opened his eyes, the earth beneath him was no longer neat palace gravel but a wet, muddy treeline. He wasn't Oskar anymore. Black gloves covered his hands, a helmet pressed against his head, a bulletproof vest and modern camouflage weighed down his body, and an AK-205 was already locked between his hands.
He rolled onto his back and aimed toward the night sky, where flashlights and streaks of tracer fire briefly illuminated the shape buzzing overhead. The drone came low across the treeline, tracer rounds cutting around it as Zhang-Ge steadied the rifle and fired in controlled bursts. A tiny spark flashed against its body, then another, and smoke began spilling from one side before the machine spiraled downward and disappeared beyond the trees, crashing somewhere in the field beyond in a brief flash of fire. Someone shouted for them to move, and the smell came almost immediately afterward—smoke, fuel, wet earth, blood.
Zhang-Ge moved without thinking, staying low and fast through the trees toward the distant glow of fire while keeping the rifle tight against his body. His two medic teammates followed close behind, hunched beneath their equipment as they pushed through the darkness. Another buzzing sound suddenly cut through the gunfire, and Zhang-Ge reached up, pulled the night-vision device down from his helmet, and switched it on just as one of the men shouted, "There! Nine o'clock!"
The drone came in fast, angling through a gap between the trees directly toward them. All three men opened fire at nearly the same time. Sparks jumped from the machine as rounds struck its frame, and the drone jerked sideways before slamming into a tree and exploding violently, sending bark and shattered branches flying through the darkness. "Good hit! Move! We get them out now!" one of the medics shouted, but Zhang-Ge was already running.
A trench appeared ahead of them, and all three men jumped down into it, their boots splashing into thick mud as the weight of their packs dragged at them like anchors. Just beyond the edge of the treeline stood the burning wreck of a T-series tank, flames pushing from beneath the turret and spilling orange light across the mud. Farther down the trench, just behind the tank, was the position where the wounded were supposed to be waiting for evacuation.
Before they could reach them, the tank's hatch slammed open.
A man crawled out screaming, half his clothing already burning as he dragged himself over the edge of the hatch and across the turret. For one terrible moment he looked like a human torch against the night before he lost his grip and dropped heavily to the ground beside the tank. Zhang-Ge stopped for half a second as one of the medics shouted behind him, "Leave him! He's done! Let's move to the others!"
Zhang-Ge heard the words. He understood them. But all he could see was a man burning alive and screaming in pain, and before thought could catch up with him, he hauled himself out of the trench and ran toward the tank anyway. He had barely broken out of the treeline and made it halfway across the mud when the buzzing returned. Another drone was coming, and this one was coming fast.
He looked up and saw it diving directly toward the tank. "NO—!" he shouted as his teammates opened fire behind him. Zhang-Ge raised his own rifle and fired with them, and two sparks flashed from the drone's body, but the machine never stopped. It slammed beneath the turret.
The explosion came instantly. A violent wall of fire and pressure swallowed the burning man and hurled Zhang-Ge backward into the mud. For a moment he could only stare through the heat as the tank's turret tore free from the hull as though it weighed nothing, thrown high into the darkness and spinning end over end before beginning to fall in a great arc directly toward him. "Oh fuck—!" Zhang-Ge twisted and rolled hard to the side.
His body kept moving even though the battlefield was already disappearing around him.
He rolled again, sprang upward, and drove himself forward with everything he had, pure instinct taking control before his mind had time to realize that his boots were no longer tearing through mud but across palace gravel. He lunged ahead, eyes locked forward, still expecting fire, still expecting impact, still expecting several tons of burning steel to come crashing down behind him.
There was nothing there, and then he hit something very hard.
His face slammed directly into stone with a dull crack, pain exploding through his nose and skull as his vision flashed white. The impact knocked the breath from him, his legs folded beneath his weight, and he collapsed awkwardly onto the ground. For a moment everything went dark, and when his senses returned, the war had disappeared completely. There were no mortars, no burning tank, no gunfire, and no drones circling overhead—only the garden again, cold air against his skin, gravel beneath him, and silence stretching through the hedges.
Oskar groaned under his breath and dragged a hand across his face, rubbing his nose while blinking hard enough to force his vision back into focus. His head rang from the impact, but his mind was clear now, painfully clear in a way it had not been only seconds earlier. When he finally looked up, he froze.
Towering above him stood a statue of Kaiser Wilhelm II, its chin raised proudly beneath a mustache so enormous that it looked as though someone might use it as a handlebar. The posture was perfect, the stone uniform immaculate, and the entire figure had been carved into that same rigid, unshakable image of authority and control his father seemed determined to project whenever other human beings were nearby. Even as a statue, Wilhelm looked as though the world existed exactly as it should beneath his gaze.
"…Father?" Oskar muttered, the word slipping out almost instinctively before he blinked again. "Oh."
Reality settled in properly this time. He was sprawled in the dirt at the feet of a statue with leaves stuck to his coat, one white glove hanging halfway off his hand, his boots scuffed, and his breathing ragged as though he had just sprinted across a battlefield that did not exist yet. He quickly turned his head and scanned the garden in both directions, searching for servants, guards, gardeners—anyone who might have witnessed what had just happened. Luckily, the paths were empty and the hedges silent. There was no one there to see Prince Oskar of Prussia throw himself into a bush, scream about grenades, sprint across the garden, and headbutt a statue of his own father.
"…Oh my God, like what the fuck," he muttered beneath his breath.
He dragged himself upright into a sitting position, ran one hand through his hair, and smacked the side of his own head once as though that might knock whatever remained of the battlefield loose. "Come on, Oskar. Focus." He drew a sharper breath and forced himself to slow down. "You're not Zhang-Ge anymore. You're not an Asian guy." His eyes dropped briefly toward his pale hands before he exhaled. "You're a prince. A white man. So act like it."
His jaw tightened as he stared down at the gravel. "Ten years," he muttered. "You've got ten years before the world tears itself apart. So think. Do something. Anything." He pushed himself back onto his feet and brushed dirt and leaves from his uniform in quick, irritated motions, straightening the coat as best he could before standing beneath the statue for another moment and forcing the chaos in his head to settle into something useful.
"Think, Oskar… think."
And then, without drama or revelation, he simply remembered the diary.
His little red book was hidden beneath the pillow in his bedroom like a secret he didn't quite know how to use yet. Nearly a year's worth of thoughts lived inside those pages—ideas, sketches, half-formed plans, and whatever nonsense had happened to seem important at the time, all written in whichever language came most easily in the moment. Mandarin when he thought quickly, English when he wanted to structure something properly, occasional bits of Russian, and broken German scattered throughout wherever he had tried—usually badly—to practice.
It was an absolute mess, but everything was there. Battleships with improved armor layouts. Tank concepts decades ahead of their time. Infantry weapons, artillery improvements, logistics systems, early radios, cleaner factories, better roads, industrial zones, airplanes, airports, hospitals that actually worked, sanitation, antibiotics, nylon, and even rockets. He had one page where he had drawn something that vaguely resembled a moon landing and written beneath it: Germany First, or China. Depends how things go.
Another page contained plans for fast-food chains. Another had clothing brands. One was simply labeled Future Money Machine, while somewhere deeper in the diary was an idea titled Sexy Idea do Not Show Anyone. He had no memory of what mood he had been in when he wrote that one and was increasingly afraid to check.
The point was that Oskar had ideas. Some were brilliant, others were probably completely insane, but there were hundreds of them, and every one was equally useless while trapped inside a notebook beneath his pillow. That was the truth of it: he didn't lack knowledge, imagination, or things he wanted to build. He lacked a way to turn any of them into reality.
His expression darkened as he started toward the palace again, his boots crunching softly against the gravel. "I can't even fill out a damn form…" he muttered.
That was the real problem. It wasn't a lack of vision or knowledge, but basic functionality. He still couldn't properly read German, couldn't write it cleanly, and couldn't explain anything complicated without sounding noticeably strange. How was he supposed to create companies, factories, military systems, or anything else if he couldn't even survive ordinary bureaucratic paperwork without exposing himself as completely incompetent?
"Yeah," he muttered dryly. "Genius with a notebook."
He let out an irritated breath and continued walking, but only made it a few steps before another thought arrived. Oskar slowed, frowned, and then stopped completely. "…Wait. Why couldn't I just make my little man Karl do it?"
For several seconds he stood motionless as the idea settled into place. Then, slowly, he smiled. "Yeah," he said. "Why not? Let's try that. If anyone can make my ideas into reality, then it's Karl, right?"
By the time he reached the palace wall, his mood had improved considerably. He grabbed the rope of knotted bedsheets hanging from his third-floor window and wrapped both hands around it. The fabric groaned the moment he put his weight on it, tightening beneath his grip as he planted his boots against the stone. "Don't break on me now," he muttered before pulling himself upward.
The sheets creaked and strained, and the knots dug into his palms, but they held. His body moved almost effortlessly, arms, shoulders, and back working together as he hauled himself steadily upward. He was heavy—absurdly so—but the body carrying that weight was equally absurd, and once again he felt that strange disconnect between himself and the strength he possessed. He had never earned any of this muscle, not really, yet somehow it answered him as naturally as if he had spent his entire life inside it.
Oskar smiled faintly as he climbed. "Alright… not bad."
Not everything was figured out. Not even close. But he had something now: a body capable of carrying him almost anywhere, a head packed with ideas from a century that hadn't happened yet, and perhaps, finally, someone who could help translate those ideas into something real. "First learn German… get the money… then make something big and stop people from fighting," he muttered as he climbed. "One step at a time."
His grip tightened around the sheets. "I have to start soon… or it'll be too late."
The makeshift rope creaked again as he hauled himself higher, the stone wall sliding past beneath his boots while the window drew steadily closer. When he finally reached it, he hooked one arm over the sill, shifted his weight, and hauled his entire body through. The wooden frame rattled beneath the strain before he dropped heavily onto the floor inside.
The landing wasn't particularly loud, but it was heavy enough to make the floorboards flex beneath him and release a long, offended groan—the sort of sound that made it perfectly clear that this was not how a prince was supposed to enter his own bedroom.
Oskar straightened—and immediately stopped. He wasn't alone.
Sitting on the edge of his bed with perfect composure was Karl, his personal assistant—a dwarf and a remarkably small man with a remarkably large talent for looking professionally disappointed. His legs were crossed neatly, his posture straight enough to shame a ruler, and he wore a perfectly pressed formal suit as though he had been sitting there for hours preparing to be taken seriously. His blond hair was immaculate, his glasses perfectly aligned, and his entire presence radiated order, discipline, and quiet judgment.
In his hands rested Oskar's diary, the red one.
The one with the black cross on the cover and DO NOT TOUCH written across it in aggressive, heavily underlined German that Oskar was now suddenly and painfully aware might not even have been spelled correctly.
His stomach dropped.
Karl calmly turned another page, finished whatever he was reading, and then looked up as though finding his prince climbing through a third-floor window in the middle of the night was an entirely ordinary occurrence. "Ah," he said mildly. "Your Highness. Back from your midnight… lake excursion."
Oskar moved immediately. "HEY—! That's private!"
Karl lifted the diary higher, clearly intending to keep it out of reach.
Unfortunately, Karl was Karl.
The book rose to approximately Oskar's shoulder.
Oskar reached forward and took it from him with almost no resistance, plucking it from his hands like a parent retrieving something from a well-dressed child. Karl's arms remained suspended in the air for a moment before he slowly lowered them again, apparently deciding that dignity was preferable to pretending height had ever been on his side.
"Relax," Karl said coolly. "I only reached page forty-seven. Though I must ask why there are pandas wearing military helmets, and why there is a drawing labeled 'bikini.' What, precisely, is a bikini?"
Oskar clutched the diary against his chest as though it contained state secrets—which, in a certain sense, it did—and simultaneously realized that hiding it beneath his pillow might have been one of the stupidest security decisions of his entire life.
But that wasn't even the immediate problem.
The immediate problem was that Karl had just spoken proper German, quickly and cleanly, and Oskar had understood perhaps half of it. Most of the sentence had passed straight through his skull before his brain could catch up, leaving him desperately searching through the wreckage for anything familiar.
One word survived.
Bikini.
Good enough.
"Ah yes, my man," Oskar said, nodding slowly while buying himself another second to assemble something resembling German. "Bikini, you see… very good. Swim clothes. For pretty ladies. Less cloth, more sunlight. Very… modern." He made a vague motion with one hand, as though this somehow clarified the matter. "But it not your business. Bad small man. Bad."
He finished with a firm nod, as if he had just delivered a perfectly normal sentence.
Inside, he knew it had sounded like complete garbage.
Karl pinched the bridge of his nose. "You know what's bad, Your Highness? You climbing out of your window, down three floors, then bathing naked in the palace lake like a feral animal." He gestured sharply toward the open window. "And yes, I saw all of it. From your window. As did, most likely, several servants, because it is not particularly subtle when a bear-sized prince is splashing around outside past midnight."
Karl stopped, closed his eyes, and inhaled deeply through his nose before looking back at him with exhausted precision. "Do you even understand what I'm saying?"
Oskar considered the question very carefully.
"…Ah yes, my little man?"
Karl dragged one hand slowly down his face.
No amount of sarcasm could save him from the reality sitting in front of him. His prince was built like a hero from some ancient saga, climbed palace walls like a lunatic, possessed what appeared to be a manifesto disguised as a diary, and barely understood the language spoken in his own country.
Oskar suddenly thrust the diary toward him like a weapon. "No! Bad small man! You do not read panda plans!"
Karl immediately threw both hands into the air. "I did not want to read about panda infantry, Your Highness! I came here for business. All your ridiculous secrets are safe with me."
Oskar froze at one word.
"…Business?"
Karl nodded, and some of the humor drained from his expression. "Yes. Political business."
Oskar went pale. "…I was a good boy today, yes?" he whispered. "I didn't do anything wrong… I think?"
"Not yet," Karl replied flatly. "But His Majesty is calling for you."
Oskar stopped breathing for a moment. "Karl…" he whispered. "Why? Why would the Emperor want me?"
Karl gave a small shrug, an economical movement carrying the unmistakable message that this was far beyond his pay grade. "You are well past the age where one can continue doing nothing," he explained calmly. "Eventually, even you must be assigned somewhere useful. The subject of your education has arisen. Specifically…"
Karl hesitated and visibly braced himself before continuing.
"…the Naval Academy, Your Highness. You'll be going there."
Oskar blinked at him.
Nothing.
Karl sighed.
Realizing words had failed, he pointed toward a bookshelf crammed with thick, unreadable volumes, then toward a painting of steamships and ironclads hanging on the wall. Finally, he mimed sitting stiffly at a desk and writing furiously across an imaginary sheet of paper.
Oskar understood immediately.
His face drained of color. "Karl… no. No, no, no. There's no way. I can't—I won't—the language, the exams—I'll die of shame!"
Karl reached forward and patted Oskar on the leg in the same manner one might use to calm a nervous horse. "Shh. Shh," he said patiently. "Just speak with him, Your Highness. Perhaps it's ceremonial. Perhaps you're enrolled officially but not actually expected to study. Maybe you only appear for parades and smile."
"No," Oskar breathed. "I will be disowned."
Karl exhaled through his nose. "Well, panicking won't change anything. His Majesty wants you in his study." He paused, giving Oskar a meaningful look. "And you know how he gets."
Oskar immediately shoved the diary deep inside his uniform coat like contraband. "Karl," he whispered urgently, "walk with me. Please."
Karl rolled his eyes. "You're not a child anymore," he muttered. "But fine. I'll escort you. I simply can't enter with you."
He turned toward the door, already preparing to leave, but stopped halfway and glanced back. "And Your Highness, your rope is still hanging out of the window. If your personal maid Tanya sees it, she'll panic. And if that other maid—the one who scrubs the floors at night, Anna, I believe—finds it first, she'll need half the guard to pull the thing back inside. Please… deal with it."
Oskar didn't catch every word, but he caught rope.
He turned, jogged back toward the window, and seized the bedsheet line with one hand. A few smooth pulls were enough to haul the entire length back inside, the knots sliding through his grip as though the sheets weighed almost nothing. He tossed the whole bundle onto the bed in a loose heap like ordinary laundry.
Karl watched with only mild interest.
After nearly a year of seeing his prince transform from a confused young man into something built like a living weapon, feats of raw strength had lost much of their novelty.
They left the bedroom together and entered the palace halls. The corridors stretched long and echoing before them, illuminated dimly beneath the nighttime lamps. Oskar walked with uneven steps, his breathing shallow and his shoulders tight, while Karl moved beside him with perfect confidence, hands folded neatly behind his back and posture immaculate—the picture of a miniature Prussian officer escorting a giant toward battle.
Every few steps, Karl murmured the same quiet reassurance. "You'll be fine, Your Highness."
Oskar didn't believe him.
But Karl seemed to believe it, and somehow that helped a little.
Eventually, they reached the guarded doors of the Kaiser's study, and Oskar stopped dead. He stared at the doors for several seconds before looking down at Karl, panic beginning to leak into his voice. "Karl, my man. What if—listen—what if we make big business? You and me. Lottery. Big bills. LOTS of money. And then—no school for me?"
Karl stared up at him.
The guards stared at him.
Karl slowly closed his eyes, drew in a long breath, and then cleared his throat. "Ready?"
"No."
"Well," Karl said calmly, "too late."
One of the guards raised a hand and knocked twice against the door.
From somewhere inside came Wilhelm II's booming voice.
"ENTER!"
Oskar swallowed hard and stepped forward. Karl remained outside with his hands clasped neatly behind his back, small and immovable as the heavy doors began to swing inward. Just before Oskar crossed the threshold, Karl leaned slightly closer and whispered softly enough that only he could hear.
"…Good luck, Your Highness."
The doors closed behind him.
And history, patient as ever, waited on the other side.