The road the Russians had marched down only the day before—proud, ordered, certain of victory—had become their road of terror.
Now they ran south upon it in blind panic.
The retreat stretched for kilometres as far as the eye could see: infantry on foot, officers on horseback, carts rattling under the weight of wounded men, ammunition boxes, torn supplies, and field gear thrown together in desperate haste. Some wagons still had horses enough to pull them. Others had been abandoned half in the ditch, wheels sunk in mud, while their drivers fled on foot.
The artillery of the Second Russian Army, so proudly brought forward to break East Prussia, was now mostly lost behind them—guns mired in mud, abandoned in the forests, or smashed apart by German shells.
What remained of the army no longer marched.
It fled.
And behind it came what the Russians had already begun to name in terror:
the Steel Reaper.
Some called him a monster.
Some called him a demon.
Others, with breathless awe and hatred, simply called him the Iron Prince.
Oskar rode at the head of the pursuit in full black armor, his great sword slick with blood, Shadowmane pounding down the road beneath him like some beast of judgment. Man and horse together tore into the retreating Russians without pause. Shadowmane drove men beneath his hooves and crushed them into the mud, while Oskar's blade rose and fell with dreadful regularity, cutting through fleeing soldiers as a reaper cuts wheat or as a mower rolls over grass.
Some died running.
Some died turning to look back.
Some died with their hands already raised.
Behind Oskar came the tanks.
They rolled down the road and across the fields on either side of it, steel tracks chewing through mud, fencing, and abandoned carts alike. Infantry squads rode atop their hulls, firing rifles and carbines into clusters of Russians who tried to scatter into the woods. Every so often a turret would swing and a main gun would flash, blasting apart another wagon, another team of horses, another desperate knot of men trying to reorganize.
Past the tanks came the motorcycles.
Heavy military machines with sidecars mounted with machine guns howled up the road, their gunners spraying fleeing Russians at close range while the drivers leaned low over the handlebars, racing toward the Vistula crossings before the enemy could reach them. Some Russians, seeing them, finally found enough sense to break off the road and run into the forest or into the fields.
Many did not.
Fear had hollowed them out too completely for thought.
They remained on the road because the road was in front of them.
And so they died on it.
Behind the motorcycles came the armored trucks.
Whenever groups of Russians peeled away into the woods, the trucks halted just long enough to disgorge Black Legion infantry squads, who plunged into the trees after them with rifles up and bayonets fixed. The forests echoed with scattered firing, brief screams, and then silence.
It was no longer battle.
Most Russians no longer even held weapons; many had thrown them away as they ran.
This was not war in the old sense.
It was a turkey shoot.
A slaughter.
And some of the men of the Black Legion, carried away by blood and speed and vengeance, roared as they advanced.
"Die! Die!"
"No mercy for the enemies of the Empire!"
"For the Iron Prince!"
"Crush them beneath the treads!"
Others laughed like madmen.
Others said nothing at all and simply kept firing.
Oskar heard them.
He did not join them.
He rode on, cutting down men toward whom he bore no real personal hatred. That was the worst part of it. He did not hate these Russians. Most of them probably had never even hated him until this war began. They were simply men—wet, terrified, exhausted men with only two real choices, either run like hell or die.
Ahead of him the road twisted through smoke, rain, overturned carts, and running men.
Behind him the Black Legion advanced like something built not for war, but for ending war by force.
And Oskar hated it.
Every instinct left in him from another life screamed that this was wrong. That fleeing soldiers should be given a chance, marched to the rear, counted, fed, and imprisoned.
That had been the rule of the world he once knew.
But that world had also taught him something else.
It had taught him numbers.
Cold, merciless numbers.
It had taught him that the men who came closest to conquering the world rarely did so by being morally upright. They did it by understanding arithmetic better than their enemies. They did it by accepting what others refused to accept. They did it by being logical where others wanted to be virtuous.
And Oskar knew exactly what it meant to take prisoners.
To take even one prisoner humanely meant food, water, clothes, shelter, medicine, sanitation, guards, and transport. It meant a place for him to sleep, someone to cook for him, someone to watch him, someone to clean up after him, someone to bandage him if he was wounded, someone to carry him if he collapsed. It meant resources. Constantly.
A single man was manageable.
A hundred meant guards and stores and wagons.
Thousands meant camp systems.
Tens of thousands meant a city of mouths.
And if he won the kind of victory he intended to win—if whole Russian armies collapsed before him—then the numbers would not be thousands.
They would be hundreds of thousands.
Perhaps more.
What then?
Would he peel away his strength—his precious, irreplaceable strength—just to watch over men who had come here with rifles in hand to kill Germans? Would he take food out of German mouths to feed the men who had crossed his border? Would he weaken his army, his logistics, his roads, his transport, his medical system, merely to preserve enemies who would, if released or rescued, fight him again?
No.
Because he knew another truth history had taught him.
Germany starved.
In another timeline, Germany had bled not only from bullets and shells but from hunger. Hundreds of thousands had died from shortages, and millions more had suffered. Even then, even under blockade, even under starvation, Germany had still tried to carry prisoners, camps, and occupied populations.
Oskar had built his Germany to feed itself.
But he had built it to feed its own people.
Not to humanely maintain vast oceans of captives from conquered armies while also fighting the largest land war in history.
And so there was only one answer.
Do not take prisoners in the first place.
The thought sickened him.
But it did not change the calculation.
He would not weaken Germany's food supply and watch German children starve for the sake of men who, given the chance, would burn their homes and kill them without hesitation.
He would not waste soldiers guarding captives.
He would not stretch the war for years simply because mercy was easier to imagine than necessity.
This was total war.
Most men used the phrase without understanding it.
Oskar understood it perfectly.
Total war meant that everyone who picked up a rifle and came against his people had already placed themselves inside an equation that ended one way or another. If he wanted this war ended quickly—truly ended, not paused—then he could not afford sentiment.
He had one hundred and eighty thousand men.
Not millions.
If he began peeling them away to garrison every village, guard every prisoner column, and police every captured district, his army would bleed itself thin. More men would need to be drafted. The war would lengthen. More innocents would starve. More cities would burn. More land would be ruined.
Another Russian stumbled into his path.
Oskar cut him down.
The blade came away red again.
He felt the same familiar sickness rise in his stomach—but the mathematics in his mind did not change.
Someone had to die.
And he had chosen.
Behind him the Black Legion widened its sweep.
Armored trucks rolled along shattered farm roads. Tanks crushed hedges and fences and turned eastward in a great hook designed to cut across the Russian flank. Officers shouted from moving vehicles. Signalmen with backpack radios relayed fresh coordinates to artillery batteries far behind them.
The trap was closing.
If they moved quickly enough, the southern flank of the Russian Second Army would collapse before it ever reached safety.
Oskar leaned forward in the saddle.
Shadowmane surged ahead.
Another knot of Russians ran before him.
He rode through them.
The sword rose and fell without pause, without hesitation.
The men behind him followed the example without needing orders.
Machine guns chattered.
Rifles cracked.
The armored column swept on like a steel tide rolling over the broken remains of an army.
But while Oskar led the I Corps of the Black Legion into total war against the fleeing enemy, the rest of the front fought a cleaner battle—or as clean as any battle in 1914 could be.
Elsewhere along the line, the Russians—unaware that the German Southern right flank was bulldozing forward—kept attacking.
They poured from tree lines and crossed the wet fields in dense waves, trying again and again to batter their way through the German defenses by sheer weight of numbers. Against most armies of 1914, such persistence, combined with their numerical superiority of men and artillery, might eventually have broken the line.
But the Black Legion was not a normal army.
Its front did not merely hold.
It answered with a wall of fire.
All along the southern and eastern sectors of East Prussia, the guns of the Black Legion thundered without pause. Russian assembly areas were smashed, artillery batteries suppressed, and reinforcements torn apart before they could even deploy. At the front, entrenched infantry—supported by mortars, machine guns, Grenade Launchers, and disciplined squad fire—held the Russians in place while the artillery devastated everything behind the Russian lines.
This artillery line existed because of one of Oskar's earliest reforms.
Instead of the lighter divisional artillery typical of European armies, each of the ten infantry divisions of the Black Legion carried a far heavier concentration of artillery guns.
Every division fielded:
54 × 75 mm quick-firing field guns
36 × 105 mm light howitzers
18 × 150 mm heavy howitzers
Across the army this meant:
540 × 75 mm field guns
360 × 105 mm light howitzers
180 × 150 mm heavy howitzers
This gave the Black Legion enormous firepower per division.
The Russians, by comparison, actually possessed more artillery overall. Between the First and Second Russian Armies, roughly 1,200 guns were available for the invasion of East Prussia. But the majority were the 76.2 mm M1902 field gun, with far fewer medium or heavy howitzers supporting them.
So while Russia had more guns in total, the Black Legion had far more concentrated firepower, especially heavy artillery, at critical points.
And numbers alone were not the deciding factor.
The Russians fought with artillery as most armies did in 1914—batteries dragged forward by horses, often scattered across muddy roads, firing when ammunition and communication allowed. Orders moved slowly through runners, signal flags, and telephone wires that were constantly cut by shellfire.
The Black Legion fought differently.
Forward observers and infantry squads carried radio backpacks, allowing them to transmit coordinates directly to artillery batteries. When Russian columns appeared or guns deployed, corrections could be sent immediately. German artillery could shift fire in seconds rather than minutes.
The Russians waited for runners.
The Black Legion spoke by radio.
That difference transformed the battlefield.
Russian formations advancing across open ground found shells already falling behind them before they even reached the German line. Batteries that tried to deploy were struck almost immediately. Columns attempting to regroup were hit again and again as German fire walked across the field.
Along the southern front, tanks, mortars, and infantry fire strengthened the defensive line.
Along the eastern front, the Black Legion air arm was now striking the First Russian Army, bombing artillery parks, strafing marching columns, and disrupting supply movements. None of the Russian soldiers had ever before faced aircraft in battle, and the psychological shock alone was beginning to shake the Russian 1st armies formations.
At the same time, back in Königsberg, the headquarters of the Black Legion had been alive with reports since dawn. Generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff, having returned from inspecting the front, had spent the entire day bent over maps, tables, radio summaries, and incoming situation reports. Clerks moved in and out without pause. Operators copied coordinates in feverish shorthand. Reserve battalions were shifted toward weak sectors. Ammunition columns were redirected. Orders went out one after another with scarcely a minute between them.
And the news, from most of the front, was good.
The Russians had taken the bait.
Seeing what looked like weak sectors and limited resistance, they had hurled themselves forward with the old confidence of a larger army convinced that numbers alone would crush the defender. Instead they had been caught in a machine of fire: artillery hammering from behind, entrenched infantry holding in front, mortars and machine guns breaking up local assaults, and all of it coordinated with a speed the Russians could neither predict nor match.
Again and again, the same pattern repeated.
Russian columns advanced.
German shells fell behind them.
German rifles, mortars, and machine guns broke them in front.
And all the while the air arm added its own terror.
Even inside headquarters, through the window glass and over the murmur of the radio and signal chatter, the men could hear engines overhead now and then—rising, falling, passing east in waves.
Reports from the air units had arrived all morning.
Bombing runs on artillery positions.
Strafing runs on marching columns.
Observation balloons brought down.
Supply trains scattered.
Command posts hit.
And, perhaps most importantly, the mere presence of German aircraft over the battlefield was already eroding Russian morale. Men who had never imagined war from the sky were breaking under the noise, the speed, and the sense that nowhere was truly safe.
The First Russian Army on the eastern sector was already beginning to feel that pressure.
Ludendorff, reading one of the latest reports, allowed himself a thin smile.
"They are rattled," he said. "More than rattled. They are beginning to lose coherence."
Hindenburg stood with both hands planted on the table, staring down at the map, heavy-jawed and silent for a few moments before nodding.
"They came expecting a small but elite army," he said. "They are finding something else."
Beside them stood Lieutenant General Rommel, commander of the 1st Armored Division of the Black Legion.
He was younger than either of them, younger than most men who would ordinarily have been trusted with such a role, and yet Oskar had chosen him. That alone had once been enough to make older officers skeptical.
Now none of them doubted he belonged in the room.
Spread before him on the map were the planned axes of advance for his armor.
The one hundred and fifty tanks of the armored division had been carefully positioned along the southern front. The plan was straightforward in outline, though ruthless in execution: mass the armored strength in the center of the southern sector, punch through with tanks and motorized infantry, and then fan outward—left and right alike—like iron petals opening, folding the Russians into pockets while motorcycles raced ahead toward crossings, roads, and retreat routes leading back toward the Vistula and, beyond it, Warsaw.
It was a plan built on shock.
On speed.
On the assumption that no army in Europe yet understood how to stop a concentrated armored breakthrough.
Rommel studied the latest reports before speaking.
"According to present reports, the Russians are still hammering themselves against our line," he said. "They must already be near the limit of their endurance. Their losses on the southern front alone will be severe—thousands certainly, perhaps much more."
Ludendorff looked up.
"And if you strike now?"
Rommel considered the map for another moment.
"If we strike now, I believe they will break," he said. "But I would still prefer to wait until the air arm finishes the present eastern sweep and turns south. Our tanks are powerful, yes—but they are not invulnerable. Field artillery can still kill them if given the chance. I would rather see the enemy batteries utterly shattered first. If their guns are crippled and their morale shaken, then the breakthrough becomes not merely possible but decisive."
Hindenburg glanced toward the window, where the distant drone of engines passed overhead once more.
"It is already past midday," he said.
Ludendorff checked the clock.
"We still have hours of good light," he said. "The aircraft should begin shifting back toward the southern sector within the hour. Once they do, the attack can begin."
Rommel nodded once.
"That would be best."
For a moment the three men stood over the map together, looking at the lines of steel and fire that were about to be unleashed.
Then the door opened.
A signal officer stepped in, breathing hard despite his effort to remain composed.
"Urgent dispatch from the southern right flank, gentlemen," he said. "From Lieutenant General François."
Hindenburg held out his hand at once.
"Here."
The officer crossed the room and placed the message in it. Hindenburg read the first lines.
Then his expression changed.
Ludendorff saw it immediately.
"What is it?"
Hindenburg looked up, disbelief plain on his face.
"His Highness," he said slowly, "has already broken through."
Rommel straightened.
"What?"
Hindenburg read further, eyes moving faster now.
"He has broken the Russian line on the southern right and is already driving southeast in a sweeping movement toward Warsaw."
Ludendorff took the dispatch from him and scanned it himself.
"What?" he muttered. "He did what?"
Rommel stepped closer, reading over his shoulder.
Parts of I Corps were already surging southwards. Other elements were wheeling east to fold around the southern wing of the Russian Second Army. The move they had only just been debating in theory had already begun in practice—and without waiting for the armored division's scheduled assault.
Rommel's brows lifted.
"He moved without waiting for us. And he actually managed to break the Russian lines with merely the right wing of the I Corps and it's 25 tanks?"
Ludendorff kept reading.
Then his mouth tightened.
"There is more."
Hindenburg looked at him.
"What?"
Ludendorff hesitated for only a fraction of a second.
"His Highness has given an order," he said. "No prisoners."
The room froze.
No one spoke for several seconds.
Hindenburg's face hardened, not in surprise alone but in the grim recognition of something he had hoped might remain theoretical.
"He spoke of it before," Hindenburg said quietly. "He sounded uncertain then. I thought he was testing the idea. Weighing it."
He looked back toward the map, toward the long eastern sweep already unfolding without them.
"So," he murmured. "He truly went through with it."
Rommel recovered first.
"Well," he said, with bleak dryness, "it seems our people's prince is now entirely the Iron Prince."
Then he looked from one older man to the other.
"What are we waiting for? If he has already committed the southern right, then we move with him. If he is turning the flank, then the center must strike before the Russians recover."
Hindenburg did not answer at once.
He stood still, weighing it.
Ludendorff tapped the edge of the dispatch once.
"And the order?" he asked quietly. "No prisoners?"
That hung in the room heavier than the rest.
Rommel said nothing now.
Hindenburg's jaw tightened.
"We do not openly spread it as his order," he said at last. "Not in writing."
Ludendorff looked at him carefully. "Then how do we word it?"
Hindenburg answered after only a moment.
"Tell the men that the Russians have already abused surrender and cannot be trusted. Tell them the enemy has been feigning capitulation to draw our soldiers close and kill them at short range."
Ludendorff's expression sharpened.
"That will serve."
Hindenburg nodded once.
"Then place the order under my authority for now."
Rommel glanced between them, serious now, any trace of dark humor gone.
"And the attack?"
Hindenburg looked down at the map, then at the reports, then toward the south as though he could somehow see through walls and distance to where Oskar had already hurled the army into motion.
"His Highness leaves us little choice, but this is also a great opportunity," he said.
He placed one broad finger on the center of the southern line.
"And so, even without the support of the air force we will move, and we will seize this opportunity to strike."
And the room, which only moments before had still believed it possessed the luxury of waiting, suddenly began to move.