None of us choose our foundation. We only choose what we build on top of it.
From the beginning of this second life, Oskar had tried to turn his foundation into a fortress.
He had always thought of strength in simple terms: if a man could not carry himself through darkness, mud, hunger, and fear, how could he ever hope to carry anyone else?
If you wanted to drag a wounded soldier on your back for hours through rain and shellfire, if you wanted to keep moving while others screamed behind you and artillery searched the road ahead, then the body had to be more than flesh. It had to be a temple with walls thick enough to endure the storm.
Oskar had never thought of himself as a hero.
He thought of himself as a man who kept learning, kept pushing, kept grinding himself down and rebuilding himself harder, because being strong enough to help felt better than being helpless.
When he had first awakened in this world as a young prince trapped inside a weak, pale, half-dead body, he had understood one thing clearly: if he wanted to change the fate of nations, then the first thing that had to become stable was the thing inside his own ribs.
So he trained.
For a whole year he had pushed that body past reason, past comfort, past ordinary human caution, until the foundation beneath him felt less like bone and muscle and more like mountain stone.
Now, bleeding in the cold darkness of the park beneath the thin October moon, he finally understood how far he had pushed it.
By any normal measure, he should already have been dead.
His coat was wet and heavy with blood. His back burned. His palm was torn open. His ribs screamed with every breath. His vision blurred at the edges, and his legs trembled with the deep exhaustion of a body that had taken too much punishment too quickly.
And yet he was still standing.
He could not afford to fall.
Because if he fell here, in the mud and dark, everything he had built would begin to crack behind him.
In his mind he saw them: workers, widows, starving families, shivering children, old men in third-class carriages, miners coughing black dust from their lungs, women carrying babies through freezing rooms. People with no power. No justice. No shield.
A vast, frightened crowd staring at a single broad back.
His back.
He was not merely their prince anymore. He was an image they had chosen to believe in. A standard planted in the mud. A promise written in flesh and blood:
As long as I stand, you will not be trampled.
The weight of that faith settled across his shoulders like armor.
Fine, he thought.
Then watch me.
If these men had come to kill him, if they had come to drag him down before all those people could stand higher, then they would see what happened when the People's Prince stopped smiling and became something colder.
Not a saint.
Not a symbol.
Iron will in human shape.
A shadow moved ahead of him between the trees.
The nearest assassin stepped from behind a trunk, an old musket cradled in his hands, unaware that his target was no longer hiding from them.
Oskar was coming.
The man saw only a shape in the dark.
Too tall. Too broad. Moving far too fast.
Oskar did not speak.
He closed the distance in three brutal strides, drew back his fist, and struck.
The blow landed like a hammer against wet clay.
Bone collapsed. The man's face folded inward beneath Oskar's knuckles, and his body dropped without a sound, the musket slipping uselessly from his hands.
No pride moved through Oskar.
No thrill.
Only necessity.
He bent low, scooped up the musket, and turned.
Another figure appeared between the trees, pistol raised.
Oskar did not think.
He lifted the musket, aimed, and fired.
The old weapon boomed like a cannon in the enclosed dark. Smoke burst white from the barrel. The ball struck the man through the eye and punched him backward. He dropped like a puppet with its strings cut, pistol firing once into the dirt as his body hit the ground.
Oskar staggered.
His head swam. His ribs burned. Blood ran warm down his side. His wounded palm throbbed around the musket stock, leaving dark smears on the old wood.
He forced himself to move.
The dead man had dynamite at his belt.
Oskar knelt, fingers clumsy and slick, and tore one stick free. A match scraped. Flame caught. The fuse hissed to life.
Then he heard it.
Farther off in the park.
Gunfire.
Karl's revolver.
Oskar's heart lurched.
No time.
He jammed the dynamite between his teeth for one heartbeat, seized the nearest branch, and climbed.
Pain screamed through every limb. His torn palm left blood across the bark. His back burned where shrapnel had skinned him raw. His ribs protested with every upward pull.
He ignored it.
Branch by branch, he drove himself through the trees, not like a man fleeing, but like a wounded predator moving above the line of fire. The leaves and bare limbs shook beneath his weight. Blood pattered down the trunk behind him in small dark drops.
Below, an assassin was circling toward the tree where Karl had taken cover.
The man moved low and carefully, pistol in hand, circling toward the wounded little figure beneath the branches. He meant to flank Karl, but he heard the rustle above him too late.
He looked up.
For one frozen instant, he saw something vast and black dropping out of the canopy, wide enough to swallow the moon. He fired by reflex. The bullet tore into Oskar's side.
Then Oskar hit him.
They came down together, and the impact drove the assassin flat into the earth with a horrible snapping crunch. Bone gave way beneath Oskar's weight. Air burst from the man's lungs in a wet, strangled cough, and his pistol fired again, wild and useless, the shot vanishing into the branches overhead.
He tried to scream, but what came out was half curse, half prayer, in a language Oskar barely understood. The meaning was clear enough.
"Monster! Demon!"
Oskar ignored him. The dynamite fuse hissed shorter in his hand. He shoved the stick into the man's mouth, clamped his jaw shut for half a heartbeat, then rose and hurled him bodily toward the two riflemen rushing through the trees.
The body crashed into them like a thrown sack of meat.
One of them shouted in panic. "Scheiße—!"
The explosion cut him off.
A dull, brutal WHUMP rolled through the trees. Smoke, dirt, leaves, splinters, cloth, and flesh burst outward in a filthy wave. Two shapes went down screaming, rolling through the undergrowth as their rifles spun away into the dark.
Behind a bush, a third voice shrilled in accented German.
"What happened? What's going on?!"
The man with the two pistols. The one they had kept in reserve.
The shout gave him away.
A small figure moved in the shadows. Not tall. Not strong. Not untouched.
Karl.
He came out from behind his tree, limping, pale as wax, blood soaking one trouser leg, the revolver shaking in both hands. He fired once and missed.
The assassin ducked, then made the mistake of lifting his head to find the shooter.
Karl fired again.
This time the shot struck home. The bullet punched into the man's chest. He staggered back, eyes wide, both pistols falling from his hands before he collapsed into the brush.
Karl managed two more steps before his own legs failed. He sank to the ground, muttering something about being "just tired," and then went limp.
Oskar saw him fall.
Something cold and hard slid into place behind his eyes.
The two wounded riflemen were still alive, half-deaf from the blast and half-blind from smoke and dirt, crawling on their backs and clawing for their weapons. Every shadow had become an enemy to them. Every rustle was the prince. Every breath in the dark sounded like death approaching.
To them, he was a demon now, exactly what they had called him before they had truly seen him fight.
And the demon stepped out of the darkness.
At first they saw only the silhouette: enormous, uneven, coat shredded, shirt torn open, blood soaking the fabric, steam rising from him in the cold air. He moved slowly, not for drama, not to frighten them, but because his body was already at the edge of collapse.
One of the men dragged his rifle up by instinct and fired at Oskar's head.
Oskar swayed aside, almost lazily. The shot hissed past his ear and vanished into the night.
The other man tried to work his bolt, fingers numb and frantic.
Click.
Empty.
They both heard it. They both knew.
Then they screamed at him in Danish, Polish, German, and something else Oskar no longer cared to identify. The words had become noise. He heard only fear, rage, and the thin, rattling edge of men who understood that their courage had carried them too close to something they could not survive.
They swung their rifles like clubs.
Oskar stepped in, ripped the first rifle from a man's hands, and brought it down. Once. Twice. A third time.
After that, he stopped counting.
The world narrowed to motion and impact: wood on bone, metal on earth, ragged breathing, his own blood slicking the rifle stock beneath his fingers. There was no room left for language, no room for mercy, no room for questions about who these men had been, what lies they had believed, or who had sent them into the dark.
There was only one fact left in the world.
If they lived, Karl might not.
So Oskar moved until nothing beneath him moved anymore.
When awareness began to return, the rifle in his hands was half-broken. The stock had splintered. The barrel was bent. Blood ran down the wood in black lines, and the bodies at his feet were still.
The park was suddenly very quiet.
His ears rang. His heart hammered. His vision dimmed at the edges, the darkness folding inward like curtains closing on a stage. He wanted to fall. Every cell in his body begged for it.
But his legs refused.
He stayed standing, not by thought anymore, not by command, but by habit and stubbornness, by three years of training a stolen body as if death were always waiting around the next corner but never allowed to arrive tonight.
Somewhere inside him, something had already given way.
His mind slipped.
The world disappeared.
Oskar passed out.
But even then, his body refused to fall.
He remained on his feet, swaying slightly, eyes half-lidded, a statue carved from bruised flesh, blood, and stubborn will. A temple cracked and scorched, but still standing. Some ancient, impossible instinct rooted his feet into the earth. Some force deeper than flesh kept him upright.
So there he remained in the cold, broken park, surrounded by shattered bodies, drifting smoke, torn leaves, and the dead silence after violence.
Unmoving, Unyielding, Unbowed.
A man long unconscious, yet still standing.
An image of defiance. A pillar of iron will. The living shape of a nation that refused to kneel.
There he stood in the dark, utterly alone, the strength of Germany given flesh.