Oskar remained where he had landed.
For a moment he did not move.
One gauntleted hand was driven deep into the wet soil, fingers clawing into the mud like iron talons. His massive sword stood planted beside him, buried half a foot into the earth. Steam rolled from the joints of his armor as his breath forced its way through the skull-helm, hissing softly into the cold air.
Around him the Russians hesitated.
They stared at the black figure kneeling among the bodies.
None of them understood what they had just seen.
Then the earth detonated.
Oskar ripped the sword free of the ground with such monstrous force that it did not merely come loose—it erupted, dragging half the field upward with it. Mud, stones, roots, and blood-soaked clods of earth blasted forward in a fan like grapeshot from a cannon. Russians in front of him threw up their arms too late as wet soil and shattered rock smashed into faces, eyes, and teeth, blinding them for the fraction of a second that decided whether a man lived or died.
It was all the time he needed.
The blade moved.
Not like steel swung by human muscle.
Like a piece of siege machinery had been given rage.
Oskar turned at the waist and the sword carved out in a full circle around him. The swing came with such obscene kinetic force that the air itself seemed to burst outward. Men closest to him were not simply cut—they were taken apart. One was severed clean through the chest so violently that both halves spun away in different directions. Another lost his legs and one arm in the same stroke. A third was hit so hard that the upper half of his body was flung backward through the mist while his lower body folded where it stood.
And behind the edge itself came the pressure.
A heavy, brutal wall of displaced air slammed into the next rank, knocking men off their feet, hurling caps, rifles, and loose gear away, staggering those who had not even been touched by the blade. Faces snapped aside. Men stumbled backward in panic as if struck by an invisible hammer.
Before the bodies had even landed, Oskar moved again.
Ahead of him a cluster of Russians dropped to one knee, rifles already rising, fingers tightening on triggers.
They never fired.
Oskar launched forward.
It was not a leap a man in armor should have been able to make. It was not a leap a man without armor should have been able to make. Nearly three hundred kilograms of black steel, bone, and fury exploded off the ground at once. His boots tore divots from the wet earth, and the force of the launch itself burst mud outward from under him in a circular spray.
He crossed the distance in a blur of black armor and red cloth.
The sword came down.
A Russian soldier vanished beneath the descending edge, split from shoulder to waist so completely that the two halves of him peeled apart before they had time to fall. Oskar did not stop with the impact. He twisted through it, hips, shoulders, and torso rotating as one, dragging the monstrous blade through a second arc.
The return swing hit the next men like a locomotive.
One was taken through the ribs and thrown bodily into the air.
Another was cut across the stomach and folded around the steel before being flung away.
A third was only clipped by the outer part of the arc, yet even that partial contact smashed him sideways with such force that he spun through the mist and crashed into his comrades like a broken puppet.
Bodies flew.
A third soldier lunged at him with a grenade clutched in his fist.
Oskar did not bother with the sword.
His armored fist slammed forward.
The blow lifted the man off his feet and hurled him backward like a rag doll. He crashed into the soldiers behind him just as the grenade detonated, tearing the group apart in a thunder of smoke and blood.
Oskar was already turning.
The sword rose again.
One swing left.
Another right.
Four more Russians collapsed in pieces, the force of the strikes so violent that fragments of torn cloth, flesh, and mud sprayed outward.
Behind him rifles cracked.
Russian soldiers were trying to form another firing line.
Then they were thrown into the air.
Shadowmane returned.
The massive black stallion burst through them like a living avalanche of steel and muscle. Men were flung aside as the armored horse crashed into their ranks.
One soldier screamed as Shadowmane's jaws clamped down on his collarbone. The horse shook its head violently, snapping bone, then hurled the body into another cluster of Russians.
The stallion's rear hooves lashed out.
Another man folded beneath the kick.
Blood ran freely from the wounded leg where the machine-gun rounds had struck, but the beast did not slow. Shadowmane roared and drove forward again, scattering men in every direction.
Seeing his rear secure, Oskar surged ahead.
He thrust forward with the sword.
The blade punched straight through a Russian soldier's chest and lifted him into the air like a trophy. With a twist of his wrist Oskar flung the corpse aside and continued moving.
He jumped again.
This time the leap carried him several meters through the air.
When he landed, the sword spun with him, carving through another cluster of soldiers in a brutal rotating strike. Bodies fell apart under the spinning blade as he rolled through the mud, crushing one man beneath the weight of his armor before coming back to one knee.
Gunfire erupted.
Bullets came at him in a ragged storm, hissing through the fog, snapping off the mud, striking his armor in bursts of sparks. One round glanced from the skull-helm with a metallic shriek. Another hit the breastplate hard enough to jolt his whole body.
Oskar did not slow.
He drove forward through the fire, black armor gleaming wet in the pale light, but the distance between him and the next Russian soldier was still too wide. Too much open ground. Too many rifles. If he simply charged straight through it, even he would take too much punishment before reaching them.
So he changed direction in an instant.
The sword slammed point-first into the earth.
Mud burst upward.
Oskar's whole body folded and then uncoiled around the buried blade. For one impossible moment the weapon became a pivot, a lever, a siege hook driven into the world itself. Then he hurled himself off it.
He did not jump like a man.
He launched.
The sword tore free with him and his armored body flew up through smoke and rain in a black arc, cape snapping behind him. Russians ahead looked up in disbelief, rifles halfway raised, mouths open beneath wet moustaches and pale faces.
Too late.
He came down among them like a dropped engine block.
The first man vanished under the impact as Oskar landed. Another was smashed off his feet by the sheer collision. The sword came around before the rest could react and cut one soldier cleanly through the middle. Oskar twisted with the strike, drove his armored shoulder into another, then backhanded a third so hard the man spun through the air and crashed into his comrades.
He did not pause.
A Russian lunged at him with bayonet fixed. Oskar caught the rifle barrel with one hand, wrenched it sideways, and drove his fist through the man's face and skull in the same motion. Another stepped in from the left and was met by a horizontal sweep of the sword that opened him from ribs to hip and flung what remained into the mud.
Bodies fell around him in pieces.
Then more shots came from the tree line.
Fresh Russians were pouring out of the smoke there, some kneeling, some standing, rifles already leveled, eyes full of madness and desperation. Muzzle flashes flickered through the mist in a long ragged line. Bullets snapped around him again.
Oskar moved at once.
The sword punched into the ground before him and he dropped behind it in one motion, crouching with the broad slab of steel angled toward the incoming fire as if it were a shield. Rounds slammed into the blade in hammering rings. Others sparked from his pauldrons and vambraces. Dirt kicked up around his knees.
Then he lifted his left arm.
The metal bulge mounted along the forearm shifted.
Six black launch ports stared toward the tree line.
His right hand reached across and found the trigger assembly built into the left gauntlet. He braced, aimed, and fired.
THUMP.
The first grenade arced low through the smoke and burst in the kneeling rifle line. Men, mud, and splintered wood erupted upward.
He fired again.
THUMP.
Another blast tore through a cluster of soldiers trying to form around an officer.
And again.
THUMP. THUMP.
Two more grenades in brutal succession walked across the tree line, exploding through brush, bodies, and stacked ammunition boxes. A machine gun opened up from deeper in the woods just as the fourth burst hit, bullets ripping toward him in a dense stream. They hammered his sword, his armor, his shoulder. One impact dented a plate near the collar. Another struck his upper arm hard enough to crack his armour.
He answered with the last two rounds.
THUMP.
THUMP.
Both grenades disappeared into the smoke and forest shrubbery where the machine-gun was firing from. The explosions came a heartbeat later—one low, one high. A pine tree split and toppled over with a cracking groan. The machine gun stopped.
For a few seconds the ground around Oskar was nothing but wreckage and noise—smoke rolling low, bodies broken across churned mud, Russians running one way, others still stumbling forward toward the German line as if they had not even seen the black giant tearing a hole through their flank.
That was the truth of it.
For all the carnage he had caused—despite Shadowmane rampaging nearby like a wounded demon horse, despite the corpses and shattered men and torn ranks—he and Shadowmane were still only two black specks on a battlefield full of noise, fog, dust and the chaos of thousands of men fighting for their lives.
He could deform a point.
Break a section.
Terrify a local line.
But he could not alone decide the whole field so easily.
He felt that now.
His breath came harder. Steam hissed from the helm with every exhale. His heart hammered against the inside of his armor. Deep within his chest, the core pulsed—feeding him power, forcing more strength into exhausted muscle, pushing more life through a body already straining at the edge of what it could bear.
He could feel the drain now.
Not weakness.
Not yet.
But cost.
The battlefield tilted slightly as he stood there, sword still rooted in the ground before him, his gauntlet tightening on the hilt.
Then he heard it.
A deep rolling thunder.
Hoofbeats.
Many of them.
He turned.
Through the drifting fog, down the two roads cutting the field, riders were coming.
Cossacks.
Hundreds.
Lances leveled. Sabers drawn. Horses stretched into full charge as they poured off the roads and spread into the open like floodwater.
Behind them, Russian infantry roared in renewed hope.
Oskar ripped the sword from the earth.
Mud sprayed from the blade in a dark arc.
Then he straightened, slow and deliberate, alone between the trench line and the forest, alone between the German defenders and the Russian flood, and turned to face the cavalry.
They were coming hard.
Not wavering. Not slowing.
Their cries carried through the fog in savage bursts of "URAAAH!" mixed with the shrill barking of officers trying to keep some shape to the charge.
At their head rode one of the fiercest.
A broad-shouldered Cossack on a powerful dark horse, his lance locked under one arm, moustache soaked with rain, steam rolling from his beard with every breath. A black papakha sat low over his brow, a curved saber hung at his side, and in his face there was no fear at all—only hunger. The wild, greedy certainty that he was riding down not a man, but a prize. A legend. A victory with flesh on it.
He saw Oskar.
And committed.
The horse lengthened its stride.
The lance dipped lower.
The rider bellowed as he came in, aiming straight for the black giant standing alone in the field.
And then in a flash of light and the violent thunder of an explosion the battlefield changed again.
The lead riders were swallowed in sudden flashes and bursts of flying mud as shells landed among them. Machine-gun fire tore in from behind the German line, ripping across the charge. Horses screamed. Men vanished from saddles. One entire knot of riders seemed to come apart at once under the impact of steel and blast.
Oskar turned his helm slightly.
From behind him, from the streets of Soldau itself, came a new sound.
A deep metallic growl.
A grinding, clanking, rattling thunder unlike horses, unlike wagons, unlike anything the Russians had yet learned to fear properly.
Oskar smiled.
The tanks had arrived.
They came out of the town in a line of iron beasts, twenty-five of them, rolling down the streets, smashing aside wreckage, then descending the slope beyond the German line. Their tracks bit into the wet earth and churned it into black ruin. Turrets turned. Main guns flashed. Machine guns opened in hard, stitching bursts.
For one heartbeat the Russians simply stared.
Then the shells began to land among them.
One Cossack vanished in a blast of mud, horseflesh, and iron fragments. Another was hurled sideways with his mount in a tangle of limbs and shattered lance wood. Farther back, machine-gun fire scythed into the charging riders and into the infantry masses behind them, tearing open formations that had seemed solid only seconds before.
The tanks did not slow.
They rolled over the barbed wire, crushing it flat beneath their tracks. Russians who had been huddling behind the coils screamed and tried to crawl away, only to be caught beneath the advancing iron weight. Bodies disappeared under the treads with a wet grinding crunch. Flesh, cloth, and splintered bone were dragged into the links and carried forward.
The field became panic.
Men who had been pressing toward the trenches now turned and ran from the machines.
Others fired wildly.
The tanks kept coming.
Their main guns boomed into the tree line, blowing apart Russian machine-guns and sending brush, timber, and men flying together into the air. Their smaller guns raked the field without mercy, mowing down clusters of infantry too slow or too stunned to move.
And amid all of it, Shadowmane still ran.
The wounded black stallion moved like some beast vomited out of a nightmare—biting, kicking, trampling, seizing men in his jaws and hurling them aside while blood streamed from his wounds.
Then, through smoke and thunder and chaos, one Cossack still reached Oskar.
There was no more time for thought.
The lance came in low and hard.
Oskar, ever the animal welfare advocate didn't use his sword. Instead he drove his sword point-first into the ground and stepped into the charge.
The impact was monstrous.
One gauntleted hand shot up and caught the lance shaft. The other slammed into the horse's chest. The full force of horse and rider crashed into him and drove him backward through the mud, his boots carving trenches through the wet earth as steel, muscle, and fury strained against the mass of the charging animal.
For a moment it looked impossible.
The horse screamed.
The Cossack bellowed and leaned into the thrust, trying to force the lance through by sheer momentum.
Oskar stopped.
His heels dug in.
Mud exploded around his boots.
Then, with a roar that seemed to shake the fog itself, Oskar twisted the lance aside, ripped it from the rider's grip, and got both hands beneath the horse's chest and shoulder.
The Cossack's face changed.
For the first time, there was fear in it.
Oskar lifted.
The horse rose.
Not cleanly. Not gracefully. It came up in a violent, kicking heave, all the weight of animal and rider tilting over the black-armored giant as though the laws of nature had simply broken for one mad second.
Then Oskar threw them.
Horse and rider flipped over him and crashed down back-first into the mud with a bone-snapping impact. The Cossack was crushed beneath his own mount. The horse thrashed once, shrieking in pain—stunned, not yet broken like its master, but alive.
Breathing hard, Oskar turned at once.
More horsemen were already upon him.
And Shadowmane returned without needing command.
The black stallion slammed in beside him, wild-eyed and bleeding, yet still obedient, still terrible. Oskar seized the saddle and vaulted up in one motion. As Shadowmane surged forward, he reached down, tore the sword free from the earth, and raised it high again.
Then beast and rider plunged back into the charge.
A lance struck Shadowmane's armored head and skidded off in a burst of sparks.
Oskar answered with a single sweep.
Horse and rider came apart together, cut so savagely that the halves of the horse crashed in different directions while the rider's torso spun from the saddle trailing blood.
Another lancer hit Oskar square in the chestplate.
The impact rang like a hammer on an anvil.
The lance point skidded, bent, and snapped aside, unable to bite into the black steel. The recoil was so violent that the lancer himself was ripped backward from the saddle and hurled beneath the hooves of the men behind him.
Then Oskar was among them.
Sword rising.
Falling.
Stabbing.
Cutting.
A rider lost both arms and toppled screaming from the saddle. Another was taken through the ribs and flung clear off his horse. A third tried to slash down with his saber and was opened from jaw to sternum before the blade ever landed.
Shadowmane bit one horse in the throat and dragged it sideways into another.
The cavalry charge dissolved into a nightmare of collisions, screams, torn horses, shattered lances, and men trying to fight something that moved like a knight out of a fever dream.
And still some Cossacks pushed on.
Whether from courage or madness, many of them broke past Oskar in the chaos and rode straight at the tanks.
They hacked at the armored hulls with sabers.
They stabbed at vision ports with lances.
They fired revolvers and rifles at steel plates and got nothing but sparks for their trouble.
One rider forced his horse alongside a tank and tried to drive his blade down into some imagined weakness.
The tank did not even slow.
Horse and rider crashed against the armored flank, were dragged under, and vanished beneath the tracks in a wet grinding ruin before being spat out behind as broken meat and bone.
Another group tried to circle behind the machines, searching for blind spots.
German infantry squads from the trench line tore into them before they got there.
The tanks halted halfway down the field, just long enough to dominate everything.
Turrets turned.
Main guns flashed.
Machine guns stuttered and roared.
German artillery from farther back began dropping shells over the battlefield into the Russian tree line, blowing apart reserves before they could even form properly.
What had begun as an assault had become slaughter.
And through all of it rode Oskar.
Black armor drowned in rain and blood. Red cape whipping. Sword rising and falling like an executioner's banner. Shadowmane lunging and trampling beside the iron beasts that now ruled the field.
The Russians began to break.
First in clusters.
Then in sections.
Then almost all at once.
Officers screamed at them to hold.
Some tried.
Most did not.
From the rise behind the line, Lieutenant General Artamonov stared through his binoculars in open disbelief.
At first he could not make sense of what he was seeing.
The tanks.
The horse.
The rider.
The impossible strength.
The cavalry breaking apart against him like surf against rock.
His lips trembled.
"No…"
He lowered the glasses, then raised them again as if the second look might restore reason to the world.
"No. No, that is not…"
His voice cracked into a ragged shout.
"That is not a man!"
Around him his staff stood pale and stunned.
Artamonov's face had gone grey beneath the mud.
"That thing—" he pointed wildly toward Oskar, who was still cutting through horsemen in the field, "—that thing is no man! That is a monster!"
His eyes flicked to the tanks again, then back to Oskar.
"This is sorcery. Some trick. Some damned German trick!"
Another explosion tore through the tree line behind him.
A shell burst close enough to shower the command group in dirt and bark.
That broke him.
"We need reinforcements!" he screamed. "More guns! More men! We cannot hold against this!"
He turned and began stumbling back through the forest.
"Fall back! Fall back to Warsaw!"
His officers ran after him, shouting conflicting orders as panic spread through the rear.
"Retreat!"
"Retreat and warn them!"
"Warn them what is coming!"
And with that, the Russian line in front of Soldau finally shattered. What began in one sector spread to the next and then to the next again, panic racing faster than any orderly command ever could. Men threw down rifles and ran. Others stumbled with their hands raised, falling to their knees in surrender as Germans rose from the trenches cheering and surged forward to gun down those still trying to flee.
The tanks pushed toward the tree line and fired into the backs of the retreating enemy. The German right flank had held.