The bang exploded beneath the bridge, loud enough to punch against their eardrums and rebound from the stone arch above them.
For one jagged heartbeat, the muzzle flash painted the underside of the bridge in white fire.
But Oskar was no longer where his chest had been.
He dropped low.
Not clumsily, not in panic, but with the sudden, fluid violence of a body reacting faster than thought. Muscle, training, instinct, and the ugly lessons of two lives moved together. The bullet carved through the space he had abandoned, its hot passage brushing his cheek.
It screamed past Karl's head so closely it stirred his hair.
Karl shrieked, threw himself flat, and curled with both hands over his skull.
"Scheiße—!"
The "old man" in the wheelchair froze.
He had expected a large target. A slow target. A prince too stunned or too proud to move.
Not this giant dropping beneath the shot like he had been born in a training hall.
His eyes widened.
"Cholera…!" he hissed, Polish slipping out through clenched teeth. "Po prostu zdechnij, świnio—just die, pig!"
He did not get to finish.
Oskar, still low to the dirt, snapped his right leg out in a short, brutal arc. He did not aim for the man's chest or head. He aimed for the gun hand.
Leather met bone.
The crack was sharp and clean.
The assassin screamed as his wrist folded wrong. The revolver flew from his shattered grip, spinning through the air. It struck the underside of the stone arch with a metallic clang, then bounced down and landed in the dirt almost at Karl's nose.
"Strzelaj! Zabij go!" the assassin howled, clutching his ruined hand. "Shoot him! Kill him!"
The man behind the wheelchair jerked his head up.
The forgettable servant's expression vanished from his face. What remained was cold and focused.
He threw open his coat.
Beneath it, Oskar saw the dull outline of an old Dreyse needle rifle. The weapon looked as if it belonged in an armoury or above a mantelpiece rather than hidden beneath a coat. Old, clumsy, outdated.
But at this distance, still more than deadly.
Oskar's instincts, already screaming, took control again.
He planted both hands in the dirt, shoulders whipping forward, and drove both legs up and out.
It was not a graceful acrobat's movement.
It was a cannon firing sideways.
His boots slammed into the front of the wheelchair with jaw-dropping force. Old wooden joints exploded. One wheel sheared free and spun off into the darkness. The seat folded in on itself with a splintering crack.
The assassin in the chair did not simply fall.
He launched.
Oskar's double kick hammered into his chest. Ribs snapped under the impact, and the man flew backward like a sack of grain thrown from a cart, smashing into the second assassin just as he tried to bring the rifle up.
They collided in a tangle of limbs, wood, cloth, and steel.
The rifle was crushed between them and knocked from the pusher's hands. Both men hit the ground hard, skidding across the dirt beneath the bridge in a heap of broken chair and flailing coats.
A loose wheel bounced once, twice, then rattled away into the bushes beyond the arch.
For a second, everything was still.
Oskar rolled and surged to his feet, breathing hard, heart hammering. Only then did his mind fully catch up with what his body had just done.
He stared at the wrecked wheelchair and the two groaning men trapped among its remains.
"…What the hell," he whispered.
Even for him, that had felt like something out of a ridiculous martial arts film.
He turned to tell Karl to stay back.
But Karl was no longer curled in the dirt.
He had crawled forward on instinct, adrenaline burning through his exhaustion. His glasses were crooked. His hair was a mess. His coat dragged in the mud.
The revolver lay half-buried in front of him.
Karl grabbed it with both hands.
The two assassins were still struggling to untangle themselves, gasping and swearing, Polish curses mixing with broken German.
"Kur… plecy… moje plecy…!" "Dawaj, wstawaj! Zanim przyjdą inni—"
They looked up just in time to see a small, furious man coming at them with their own gun.
"Du verdammten Verräter!" Karl shouted, his voice cracking with rage. "You damned traitors!"
"Karl—!" Oskar barked.
Too late.
Karl raised the revolver, locked both elbows, and aimed.
At that range, even a bad shot could not miss.
Two sharp cracks split the night.
"Bang, Bang."
The first bullet punched into the nearer assassin's forehead. His skull snapped back; a dark spray struck the stone and shattered wood behind him. His eyes emptied at once, and his body went limp.
The second shot caught the other man just above the nose, driving his head back into the broken remains of the chair. He spasmed once and slumped sideways, blood beginning to pool beneath his hair.
Silence slammed back under the bridge.
Somewhere far away, a dog barked. A tram rattled faintly along distant tracks.
Under the arch, only Karl's breathing remained.
He stood there for several seconds, chest heaving, the revolver still aimed at the corpses. His hands shook, whether from recoil, rage, or shock, even he did not seem to know.
Slowly, he lowered the gun.
Then he turned and looked at Oskar.
Only then did the full weight of what he had done seem to reach him.
Oskar stared at him, stunned.
"Karl… you—"
"Don't," Karl rasped, cutting him off. "Don't say anything soft, Your Highness."
He swallowed hard.
"They tried to murder a prince of the Empire," he said. "They got off easy. A rope in public and days of humiliation would have been worse. This—" he flicked the revolver slightly, "—this was mercy."
He glanced at the bodies, then back at Oskar.
"And if you are about to say they might have had families, or were misled, or were products of their time, save it. They knew exactly what they were doing."
For a moment, Oskar saw another side of him.
Not the overworked bookkeeper. Not the furious little manager. Not the loyal friend who complained about paperwork and hunger.
A man who understood that survival sometimes came down to who pulled the trigger first.
Something from the modern world flickered between them, a shared truth reached by different roads.
Oskar exhaled slowly.
"…Right," he said.
Then, more firmly, "Thank you."
Karl nodded once.
Before either of them could say more, something short and cylindrical arced down from the darkness behind them, from the direction of the path they had originally come from.
It landed beside Oskar's boot with a soft, harmless little thup.
A fuse hissed.
Bright. Hungry. Alive.
Karl's eyes went wide.
"Is that—dynamite?!"
Oskar did not think.
He reacted.
His past life slammed through his nerves: grenades, drones, shells, nights spent running from things that fell from the dark. His body moved before his mind could form a plan.
He snapped his leg out and kicked.
The dynamite flew across the dirt, bounced twice, and vanished toward the outer edge of the bridge.
A heartbeat later, two more sticks clattered down around them.
Beyond the arch, shadows flickered near the park's edge. Hands struck matches. Fuses sparked. Small red-wrapped charges flew into the gloom like toys thrown by evil children.
"KURWA! SZYBKO, RZUCAJ!" "Hurry! Throw them!"
Karl screamed, "Run! Run!"
Oskar grabbed him by the back of the coat, hauled him upright, and sprinted.
Karl's short legs pumped desperately beneath him, fast only because terror made them fast.
They made it five, perhaps six metres from the bridge before Oskar felt it.
A flash of danger behind him.
The same awful certainty he had known in another life, a split second before explosions, drones, and shrapnel.
He did not have time to explain.
He shoved Karl forward with all the control he could manage—not hard enough to break him, but hard enough to throw him farther from the blast.
Karl stumbled, went sprawling across the dirt, and rolled.
Oskar turned back.
He planted himself between Karl and the bridge, arms spreading wide, body instinctively becoming a wall.
Then the world went white.
BOOM.
The first explosion struck his back like a sledgehammer. The force drove the air from his lungs and nearly folded him forward.
BOOM.
The second blast tore through the dirt path, throwing stones and splinters like angry hornets. Shards of rock slashed through his coat and bit into the skin beneath. His back burned as if a hundred knives had scraped across it.
BOOM.
The third hit closer still.
The concussion lifted him off his feet for an instant and dropped him hard to one knee. His upper uniform tore across the shoulders and back, the fabric shredding in black strips. Dust, earth, and fragments of bridge mortar rained down around him.
Then came a terrible quiet.
Smoke drifted beneath the arch in pale sheets. The night hummed with aftershock.
"Oskar!" Karl's voice cracked with fear. "Your Highness—are you alive?"
Oskar forced air back into his lungs.
His coat hung from him in tatters, half torn from his shoulders. His shirt beneath had been ripped open across the back, the fabric dark with blood and dust.
His skin felt flayed. His legs throbbed where stone had punched through cloth. His back burned like raw meat held too close to fire.
But he was alive.
Alive because of what this body was.
Alive because instincts sharpened in another war had moved before reason could.
Alive because he had turned himself into a shield before Karl could be torn apart.
He forced a grin through clenched teeth.
"Just a… flesh wound."
Karl let out something between a sob and a curse.
Oskar began to push himself upright.
CRACK.
A rifle shot tore through the air from down the path.
Karl screamed.
Oskar spun.
Karl was on the ground, the revolver still clutched in one hand. His other hand pressed hard against his thigh, where blood was already soaking through torn cloth.
"Karl!" Oskar's voice thundered under the bridge, raw with panic.
Karl gasped through his teeth.
"Left leg—hit—!"
Thirty metres away, beyond the settling dust, a lone figure stood in the clearing with a rifle braced against his shoulder. Around him, other shapes shifted in the darkness between the trees.
It was an ambush, and Karl had just been shot.
Realising this, something inside Oskar snapped.
He reached down and seized the heavier shard of the destroyed wheelchair: a broken wheel rim still attached to splintered wood and bent metal.
Then he rose to his full height.
The sniper worked the rifle bolt, chambering another round.
Oskar's arm whipped back, and he threw, not like a man.
Like a siege weapon.
The wheel sliced through the air with a vicious whir, almost humming from sheer velocity. It hit the sniper's skull with a wet, concussive crunch.
The man didn't even scream.
His head burst apart like a ripe melon. Brain, bone, and blood sprayed into the night as the body collapsed in a heap.
Oskar turned toward Karl, but two shapes burst from the settling dust behind him, sprinting toward him from under the bridge.
Knives glinted in each hand.
"À mort l'oppresseur ! Vive la France !" "Long live France! Long live Alsace–Lorraine!"
They were ragged-looking, desperate—yet fanatically determined.
They didn't charge like trained killers.
They charged like men who had decided they were already dead.
Oskar stepped toward them, towering over both.
His rage met their madness.
The first lunged.
Oskar ducked and swept his leg low and wide.
Both assassin's legs were ripped out from under them. Knives flew from their hands. They hit the ground hard, screaming.
The smaller one scrambled to rise.
Oskar grabbed him by the ankles.
The man kicked wildly, clawing dirt, shrieking French curses.
Oskar lifted him effortlessly up, until he was dangling upside down like a flailing rag doll.
The taller assassin rolled away, trying to escape, eyes wide with sudden terror, but too late.
Oskar swung the smaller man down, like a weapon, bodies collided. Bone hit bone. Skulls cracked.
The knife-wielders screamed together.
Oskar did not stop.
He lifted the smaller assassin again and drove him down a second time, smashing him bodily into the other man with the cold, mechanical violence of a hammer.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Until finally, the screams died, their bodies twitched once. Then didn't move at all.
Dust settled around Oskar's boots.
His breath steamed in the cold air. His eyes were dark, wild, almost feral.
He turned back toward Karl, and saw that the world under the bridge had changed again.
Further up the path, beyond the haze of dust, more figures were stepping out from behind trees and shrubs. Six of them. Some held rifles of various makes, some pistols. At a glance they could have been ordinary men in ordinary coats, but their silhouettes were thin, hard-edged, worn by hardship.
Off to the left, a woman in a long coat broke from the shadows and stumbled toward the fallen sniper whose head Oskar had turned into pulp. She dropped to her knees beside the corpse, crying out in a language Oskar recognised only by its shape, Hebrew.
"אוי אלוהים… אחי… אוי אלוהים…"
"Oh God… my brother… oh God…"
She lifted her tear-bright eyes toward him.
"You!" she screamed in German, voice cracking with hatred. "You demon! You'll die for this!"
The men behind the trees looked at one another, shocked by her raw grief. Then, as if that grief were a signal, they raised their weapons as one.
Six muzzles flashed.
Smoke and gunpowder exploded in the confined air, a rough, uneven volley. One sounded like an ancient musket coughing its last. Two were clearly modern rifles. The rest were pistols of varying quality.
Bullets hissed through the air around him, angry wasps in the dark.
Oskar moved.
He shifted sideways, trying to put more of his bulk between the shooters and Karl. Even so, one round found flesh, tearing through his right side just below the ribs.
It felt, for a second, like someone had pinched him very hard.
His hand went instinctively to the spot. It came away wet and warm.
Karl, on one knee, lifted the revolver and fired back once.
"Verdammte Hunde!" he shouted. "Damn you!"
Bang.
Oskar didn't see where the shot went.
The weeping woman with the pistol didn't care.
She surged to her feet and ran, cap pulled low, long coat flapping, small handgun clutched in both hands. She moved not like a trained shooter, but like someone who believed only distance and hatred could correct her aim.
"Shit—" Oskar hissed.
He had no desire to find out if her pistol was reliable at close range.
He grabbed Karl up by the collar again and ran, lungs burning, heading up the sloping bank toward the higher path that crossed over the bridge.
Behind them, shots cracked and whined. The assassins' weapons, old, badly maintained, or simply inaccurate, struggled to find range and rhythm. Each reload was clumsy. Each volley ragged.
Bullets still whistled past.
Oskar reached the top path, spared a glance toward the direction from which the dynamite had come, and saw three new shadows breaking into a run toward him: one with a long-bladed sword or machete, two with pistols already raised.
He was too open, too exposed.
He veered hard right, dragging Karl with him back into the cover of trees and brush.
Another shot slammed into him, grazing the left side of his neck. White-hot pain flared; his ears rang as though someone had struck a bell inside his skull. Blood ran warm down into his collar.
He didn't stop.
They ducked behind a thick tree trunk, half crouched in the undergrowth.
Oskar set Karl down.
Karl clamped one hand over his bleeding thigh, the other gripping the revolver with four shots left. He tried to say something, but Oskar's hearing was still half-muted by the ringing. The words were just shapes in the air.
It didn't matter.
Something else spoke louder.
That inner warning, that strange sense of incoming danger, flared like a bonfire.
Something bad coming from his left. He didn't see it, didn't hear it. He felt it.
And so he moved.
His body twisted, turning to face the left side of the tree, rising to his full height just as a figure lunged out from behind the trunk.
It was the woman.
Her cap shadowed her face, but her eyes glared at him with blue, hate-lit fury. She raised her small, single-shot pistol, the kind cheap revolutionaries could afford, and fired point-blank.
Oskar's right hand was already moving to grab the barrel.
The shot punched straight through his palm.
Bone splintered, flesh tore. The bullet burst out the other side in a spray of blood and fragments.
His ears rang anew. Pain flashed up his arm like lightning, but his hand still closed.
His fingers found her throat.
He squeezed.
She was light, thin. Rage kept her kicking for a second or two, boots drumming against his shins, fingers raking at his sleeve.
Her face flushed red, then purple. Her eyes bulged. There was a small, awful pop beneath his grip, and her body went suddenly limp.
He lowered her slightly but did not let go.
Because the man with the sword was already there.
He came in a frenzy, swinging the machete in wide, chopping arcs, screaming something half-French, half-savage.
"Pour l'Alsace ! Pour la Lorraine !"
The first strike took the woman's limp arm clean off at the elbow, spraying blood across Oskar's coat. The second sheared through her leg. The third thrust drove straight into her torso, blade punching through flesh and cloth, tip scratching the fabric over Oskar's ribs beneath.
She shielded him in death.
The assassin yanked his blade free, pulling her corpse half loose from Oskar's hand, preparing another swing.
"Bang."
The man jerked as if yanked by an invisible rope.
A hole bloomed in the side of his head. For a second his body remained standing, sword arm frozen midway through its arc. Then his legs gave out and he crashed down beside the woman's ruined body.
Behind Oskar, Karl lowered the revolver, barrel still smoking.
He had fired from his knees, thigh bleeding, teeth clenched.
Oskar glanced back at him, eyes wide.
Karl's face was pale, but his jaw was set.
In the trees ahead and to the flanks, Oskar saw movement, shapes shifting farther back, not advancing this time.
Halting.
Scared of the noise, of the sudden brutality, of the giant who took bullets and didn't fall.
They were thinking. Repositioning. Preparing to flank.
Oskar let the woman's body drop to the ground with a dull thud.
He didn't look at his wounds. He barely felt them through the adrenaline.
He looked at Karl instead.
"Stay here," he said, voice low and steady. "At the tree. Shoot only if you have to."
Karl swallowed and nodded once.
Oskar stepped away from the cover, into the dark between the trees, his senses straining, his blood running hot.
The ambush wasn't over.
But neither was he.