The Russians kept coming.
Funnelled toward the blasted gaps in the barbed wire, they rushed the openings in knots and clumps, while others tried to climb directly over the coils where bodies already hung tangled. Some made it across only to be shot down at once. Others became trapped in the wire itself, thrashing and screaming as bullets and fragments tore through them.
At the gaps, German grenades and disciplined gunfire turned every opening into a killing pit.
Still, the Russians did not break.
Those who could not advance pressed themselves into the churned mud and began clawing at the earth with bare hands, trying to scoop out any shallow scrape that might hide them from the storm of bullets. Men stacked up before the wire in layers—dead, wounded, crawling, crouching—while behind them the field was already thick with bodies. Flags snapped weakly in the damp morning breeze. The sun was climbing now, pale and cold behind broken clouds, while a fine rain drifted down over the battlefield as if heaven itself had no better answer.
The Russians were under terrible strain. They watched comrades cut down in rows, saw men blown apart, heard the shrieks of the wounded—and still they were driven onward by officers who screamed, struck, and threatened from behind.
But the Germans had their own terror to master.
Even with all their firepower, they could feel the pressure building. The Russians were everywhere—at the wire, in the shell holes, pouring out of the mist in fresh waves. The thought crept into every trench: what if too many reached the line at once? What if the storm of bodies finally made it into the trenches and the battle became bayonets and shovels and knives in the mud?
German machine guns hammered until their barrels smoked and glowed and had to be swapped out. M1 rifles cracked again and again. Grenade launchers thumped shells into the advancing masses and into the tree lines beyond, blowing apart Russian machine-gun nests hidden among the bushes. Mortars kept dropping bombs into the rear of the assault. Yet the Russians still pushed forward through fog, smoke, sunlight, and rain.
And they were not without answers of their own.
Grenades—few, precious, but still present—began flying over the wire. Some were old stick grenades, others improvised and ugly things, but enough landed in the trench to matter. Explosions burst against the earthworks, showering defenders with mud, splinters, and fragments. Timber supports cracked. Dirt rained down into faces and onto helmets. The battlefield thickened into a grey blur of smoke, wet earth, and screaming men.
The pressure kept rising.
In this one narrow section before Soldau alone, the dead were already in the thousands.
And still the fourth wave came.
They burst from the tree line through the smoke of German counter-battery fire, while behind them the last Russian guns were being smashed into twisted metal by the German artillery. Farther out, down the two roads leading toward the town, cavalry was also beginning to move—dark shapes forming beyond the drifting mist.
Inside one section of the trench, a young German soldier hurled a grenade toward the wire, where bodies already lay across the coils and fresh Russians were trying to climb over them.
For a moment he only watched it spin.
Then it exploded.
The blast tore apart three young Russians and flung pieces of men already dead even farther into the air. Flesh, cloth, wire, and mud flew together in one filthy spray.
A bullet hissed past his head.
He flinched and ducked low against the trench wall, suddenly aware of his own body again.
His hands were shaking.
He had never killed anyone before.
Now his mind was full of torn men, blown-open faces, bodies collapsing under his fire. Worst of all was the ease of it. Point. Shoot. Another man drops. He felt sick with it. Sick with the image of his own hands doing it.
And as the Russians roared and came on yet again, that endless charge began to feel unreal inside his mind, like a nightmare. They saw their friends die. They saw men explode, drown in mud, hang in wire—and they still kept coming.
It was madness.
And it sent a cold shiver through his whole body.
For one terrible moment they seemed unstoppable.
There was no victory here, he thought.
Only waiting to die.
He knew he should rise. He knew he should return to the firing step and help the men beside him. But his legs would not obey. He pressed himself deeper into the wet earth, breathing hard, trying to drag air into his lungs while bullets cracked over the lip of the trench.
Then he saw it.
Beside him lay the machine gun.
And gripping it were hands that no longer had a body attached to them.
His mind took a moment to understand what he was seeing. Those hands—those strong, calloused, trained hands—had belonged to his friend. The rest of him was scattered in chunks along the trench floor, thrown apart by a Russian grenade only moments earlier. One arm still clutched part of the shattered grip. A strip of uniform clung to the mud nearby. The rest was meat and bone and ruin.
It had been his friend.
His teammate.
The man who had carried the heavy weapon as though it weighed nothing at all. The man who had laughed with him only days ago.
Now he was torn flesh on the trench floor.
The soldier swallowed hard.
His vision blurred.
For a moment he was no longer in East Prussia.
He was back in Germany.
Back in the training yard.
Back in Pumpworld in Königsberg, where the young men of the Legion had trained like beasts preparing for war. He remembered sweat, laughter, iron weights, the roar that went up whenever someone broke a record. He remembered how they had forged themselves there—shoulders, chests, and backs built into weapons under the eye of their Prince.
They had joked about wives.
About girls watching them train.
About medals. About glory. About how good life would be when this was over.
Life had seemed enormous then.
Endless.
And now his friend lay beside him in pieces.
The thought made his whole body tremble.
Why was he here?
Why were any of them here?
Another blast shook the trench. His sergeant was shouting something at him, but he could not hear the words. He only pressed himself deeper into the mud.
Then he heard something else.
The ring of bullets striking metal.
The hammering of hoofbeats.
And with it came a strange pressure, something that made the air itself feel heavier.
He looked up.
At first he did not understand what he was seeing.
There, above the trench line, through drifting smoke and fog and the dim wash of rain-silvered light, loomed a black shape.
Armor gleamed.
Bullets struck it and spat sparks from broad shoulder plates.
A huge black horse, armored and steaming in the cold morning air, stood above the trench like some beast from a darker age.
And on its back sat a knight.
A black knight.
A skull-faced helm. A blood-red cape. A body so large that for a moment the soldier's mind refused to believe it could belong to a man at all.
Then the light shifted.
And he knew.
There was only one figure in all Germany who could look like that.
The skull-face turned toward him. For a moment those hollow sockets seemed almost empty—then he saw, deep within them, the faint cold gleam of pale eyes.
A massive armored gauntlet touched the black breastplate once, firm and brief, as if in recognition of him, of his fear, of his friend lying in pieces beside the gun.
And in that instant he understood.
It was Prince Oskar.
Here.
In the front line.
Standing with his men.
"Your Highness…" he whispered, and without even thinking he struck his fist to his chest.
Oskar did not speak.
He only looked.
That silent, skull-faced gaze passed over the trembling soldier, over the shredded remains of the dead machine-gunner, over the trench itself—mud, blood, fear, and steel. Then the Prince gave a single slow nod.
Approval.
Recognition.
The soldier felt it go through him like fire.
All the doubt vanished.
All the fear went with it.
The trembling stopped.
Before him stood not merely a man, but something greater—a leader he would gladly die for, a beast of iron and will who had come to stand beside his soldiers in the very mouth of battle.
Then Oskar reached back.
The enormous sword came free with a shriek of steel.
The blade was monstrous, broader than a shovel, longer than many men were tall, and as it swept forward it seemed to drag the light with it.
Shadowmane answered.
The black stallion roared.
It reared high upon its hind legs, towering above the trench, and then crashed back down so hard the earth itself seemed to tremble.
Then beast and rider surged forward.
The soldier scrambled up to the firing step just in time to see it.
The horse ran.
Mud sprayed behind it as it thundered down the slight slope beyond the German line. It came to the barbed wire without slowing—
And Shadowmane cleared it in one dark leap, like a shadow flying over steel.
Oskar swung.
The sword cut through two Russian soldiers at once, shearing them apart so violently that the upper halves of their bodies spun away into the mist while the lower halves collapsed in the mud.
And the Prince did not stop.
He drove onward alone.
Straight toward the advancing Russian masses.
The soldier stared after him in disbelief.
Then, without fully realizing he was doing it, he seized the machine gun.
And stood up to fire.
Shadowmane hit the slope like a falling siege engine.
Horse and rider together weighed more than a ton of iron, muscle, and fury, and the wet earth felt it. Hooves sank deep into the mud, but only for an instant. Shadowmane's colossal strength tore them free again and drove him onward, faster, harder, each stride hammering the field like a war drum.
Bodies already littered the ground before the German line—Russian dead tangled in wire, Russian wounded clawing through the mud, men crawling, men dragging themselves forward by elbows slick with blood.
Shadowmane ran over them.
Not around them.
Through them.
A wounded Russian looked up just in time to see the black horse descending upon him. Then the armored hoof came down and the man vanished beneath it, ribs and spine crushed flat into the mud with a wet snapping sound. Another tried to roll aside and failed; Shadowmane's rear hoof caught his skull and stamped it into the earth like rotten fruit.
Above the carnage rode Oskar.
He did not look human anymore.
Black armor sheathed every inch of him. Rain slid off the steel in thin silver lines. The skull-faced helm gave him no face at all—only death's hollow stare. His red cape snapped behind him like a strip of living blood.
And in his hands the sword moved.
Not like a sword.
Like a guillotine ripped free from its frame.
Like a slab of falling iron given will.
He swung once to the right.
The blade cleaved through a Russian soldier from shoulder to hip so cleanly that for half a heartbeat the man remained whole before bursting apart, the two halves of him flung in different directions. The air pressure behind the swing hit the men behind him like a wall, knocking one off his feet and hurling another backward into the mud.
Oskar swung left.
Three men went down at once.
One lost both legs.
Another was cut through the chest and folded backward around the steel.
The third took the edge low across the belly and simply came apart, blood and entrails spraying into the rain.
Shadowmane thundered forward.
Bullets hissed around them. From behind, from the German trench, rifles and machine guns had opened up in a frenzy, roaring to protect their Prince. Sniper shots cracked from the castle towers. Oskar knew what that meant without needing to see it. Third Company had seen him ride out. Carter must have been raging. The Eternal Guards on the walls and towers would be firing as fast as hands could work bolts and reload magazines, trying to tear open the Russians around him.
Sorry, boys, Oskar thought grimly.
Had to be done.
Ahead of him, through mist and smoke and sunlight, the fourth Russian wave was still coming on—a broad mass of men with bayonets fixed, officers waving pistols, flags whipping in the wet air. Mortar blasts burst among them. German bullets tore lanes through them. Still they came.
Good.
Come on, then.
His gauntlets tightened on the sword hilt.
And then he roared.
The sound tore from him like something dragged out of a furnace.
"COME ON, THEN!"
It rolled across the field louder than gunfire, louder than the horses, louder than the screaming wounded.
"COME AT ME, YOU MAD BASTARDS!"
The Russians ahead faltered.
"COME MEET YOUR DEATH!"
He lowered the sword.
"COME MEET YOUR NIGHTMARE!"
For one impossible instant it felt as though the whole battlefield had heard him.
Men looked up.
Men slowed.
Men stared.
And Oskar drove straight at them.
Some Russians, seeing him properly now, broke.
They tried to turn, to run, to throw themselves flat, but there was no time.
Oskar's sword punched through one man's chest and lifted him clear off the ground, the point bursting out through his back in a spray of blood. A second man was caught an instant later, skewered through the throat. Oskar ripped the blade upward and both bodies rose with it for a moment like butchered animals on a hook before he hurled them aside with a brutal twist.
Another man lunged at Shadowmane with a bayonet.
Oskar's backswing took his head off.
The body ran two more steps before collapsing.
The Russians began shouting now, panic racing through them faster than orders ever could.
"Demon!"
"It's a demon!"
"Shoot it!"
"Shoot the horse!"
They dropped to one knee, raised rifles, and fired in ragged volleys.
Shadowmane moved.
For something so huge he turned with impossible speed, darting left and right, cutting across the field in savage, uneven bursts that threw off every aim. Bullets sparked off his barding. Others hissed past Oskar's helm. One struck a shoulder plate and ricocheted away in a flash of steel.
Then Shadowmane leapt.
Not a horse's jump.
Not natural.
He surged upward through smoke and rain, a black mass of steel and muscle rising high enough that Russian soldiers beneath him stopped firing and simply stared.
For a heartbeat horse and rider hung against the pale sky.
Then Shadowmane came down into the Russian line.
The impact was catastrophic.
Men were smashed flat under the horse's weight. Others were flung aside like dolls. Bones snapped. A rifle flew end over end into the fog. Oskar swung as they landed and the blade carved a low arc through the packed Russians, cutting through flesh, cloth, belt buckles, and bone as if all of it were wet paper.
He rode through them.
Not among them.
Through them.
And then, from the edge of the field, from the tree line where Russian supports were still feeding men forward, a machine gun found its mark.
A hard burst rattled across the slope.
Most of the rounds sparked uselessly off barding.
But several slammed into Shadowmane's lower foreleg, where the armor did not fully cover the joint.
The stallion screamed.
Not whinnied.
Screamed in rage.
His whole body reared violently, front legs clawing at the air as blood sprayed from the wounded limb.
Then the great horse began to fall.
Oskar did not let himself be thrown.
He launched.
He kicked free of the saddle with explosive force, turning the fall into a leap, and for one impossible instant he was airborne above the Russians, a black-armored giant with a monstrous sword spinning in his hands.
Then he hit them like a storm.
The sword turned with him in a brutal arc, and as Oskar came down he cut through a knot of Russian soldiers in a spinning hurricane of steel. One man lost his arm and half his face. Another was split collar to groin. A third vanished under the whirling edge in a red burst of flesh.
Oskar struck the ground hard.
The impact alone knocked nearby men off their feet.
He rolled once, twice, a mass of three hundred kilograms of steel, bone, and fury, and every man unlucky enough to be under that roll was crushed into the mud.
Then he stopped.
One gauntleted hand drove into the earth.
The sword bit deep beside him.
Fog and smoke drifted around the black figure.
For a moment nothing moved.
The Russians nearest him had stumbled back.
Those behind them stopped as well.
The circle widened.
Men just stood there, staring.
Staring at the black-armored giant kneeling in the mud among broken bodies.
Staring at the skull-faced helm.
Staring at the thing that had just fallen out of the air and butchered a path through them.
No one fired.
No one shouted.
For one stunned heartbeat, the battlefield around Oskar seemed to freeze in pure, animal disbelief.