By the time Oskar reached Southern Bauxi Town properly—after sharks, insects, mud, and the humiliating realization that this coastline had been designed by God specifically to punish human beings—the harbor was already alive with noise.
Four ships lay offshore in the gray-green water like dark animals waiting their turn.
Only two could fit the crude new docks at once. The harbor was still young—timber piers driven hard into wet ground, temporary bollards bolted down with optimism rather than certainty, cranes assembled from steel frames and pulley blocks that groaned whenever they were asked to lift something heavier than theory. Everything smelled of fresh-cut wood, wet rope, salt, oil, and rain.
So the unloading happened in waves.
Two ships in.
Two ships out.
A constant rhythm of labor filled the air: ropes creaking, chains clanking, winches groaning, men shouting orders through rain-thick air while cargo thumped onto slick planks. Crates of tools. Sacks of grain. Rails stacked like ribs. Cement. Coils of wire. Boxes of medicine.
And—new and precious—the machines that turned this place from a fever dream into something that could be forced into reality:
Trucks.
Motorcycles.
Portable generators.
Pumps.
Winches.
Steel sections meant for bridges that did not yet exist.
A city, delivered piece by piece.
Oskar stood at the edge of it—barefoot, rain-soaked, and absurdly out of place, a pale apparition of Europe in nothing but white underclothes—and watched the flow.
This was the real work.
Not speeches. Not decrees. Not arguments in warm rooms.
This.
He did not want to fight wars. He wanted to watch things grow—his children back home, Germany itself, and now to see his decisions reaching beyond Europe, shaping a place that had never asked for him and yet would never be the same again.
In his previous life he had studied engineering, had lost years to strategy games and city builders, had stared at screens and dreamed of systems. Here, those dreams had weight. Noise. Mud. Sweat.
Last year his investments in the Oskar Industrial Groups projects had been, more cautious than usual—deliberately so. Now, this new African project could just barely and somewhat comfortably be sustained.
And then Karl arrived.
The moment the gangplank dropped from the second ship, Karl emerged like an angry prophet.
Short. Broad-shouldered. Built like a barrel of stubborn intent. He wore tailored jungle clothes cut to old European lines—thick khaki fabric, reinforced seams, leather straps crossing his chest. A wide-brimmed field hat sat low over sharp eyes magnified slightly by round spectacles.
The effect was strange and unmistakable: a dwarf dressed like an explorer, an industrialist, and a man who fully expected the jungle to try to kill him—and intended to charge it interest for the effort.
Behind him came order.
Not a parade.
Not a colonial march.
The Third Company of the Eternal Guard disembarked in silence.
Fifty men in total, moving in disciplined clusters rather than rigid lines, spacing instinctive and practiced. At their head walked Company Captain Carter von Jonalright—tall, lean, posture relaxed but coiled, like a hunting cat that had learned manners.
No ornamental uniform. Only practical gear.
Muted jungle camouflage. Reinforced leather harness. A steel helmet painted in broken earth tones. A scarf at his neck, ready to be pulled up against dust or insects. His rifle hung at his side—not as a badge of rank, but as a tool.
His eyes never stopped moving.
Behind him, the company followed—five compact light-infantry squads, each led by a seasoned sergeant. Their equipment looked nothing like what the port soldiers or local auxiliaries had ever seen.
Proper packs, balanced and fitted. Rolled tent cloth and tools strapped neatly to the outside. Mosquito veils folded at collars. Gloves. High leather boots, darkened and treated against water and rot.
Each man carried the same compact, semi-automatic rifle—short, efficient, modern—slung low for jungle movement. Machine-gun teams moved together, assistants close. Medics were easy to spot by the heavier packs they bore.
Knives.
Machetes.
Folding shovels.
Tools for cutting paths—and ending fights at arm's length.
They did not look like soldiers from Europe.
They looked like something new.
And when they halted at the pier behind Karl and Carter, the effect was immediate. Dockside noise dulled. Conversations slowed. Eyes followed them.
This was not a colonial detachment.
This was Oskar's shadow, given flesh and steel.
Karl's eyes found Oskar at once.
He froze.
Then he marched forward with the expression of a man who had finally located the source of all suffering.
"Oskar," he said, voice shaking with disbelief, "why are you standing there half naked? Jesus Christ—don't you have any shame at all? Put some trousers on, you giant savage."
Oskar smiled faintly.
"But Karl," he said, rain running down his shoulders, "it's hot."
Karl looked as though he might actually expire.
The Eternal Guard politely pretended to see nothing. Dock workers suddenly found their crates extremely interesting. A family reuniting nearby turned their children's heads away with practiced speed.
Karl pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Hot or not," he hissed, "put on some pants before the camera crew behind me publishes photographs of you in your underwear across Europe. A mythological beast is bad enough—let's not add scandalous to the legend."
Oskar smirked and clapped Karl on the shoulder, nearly knocking him sideways.
"Welcome to Africa, my little man."
Karl sputtered.
Then reality reasserted itself.
He jerked his head toward the largest structure nearby.
"Come," he said sharply. "The administrator is waiting. And even if this is our first day here, I'd prefer not to die of a disease before sunset. I have a wife and three children at home."
The "town hall" of Southern Bauxi Town was neither palace nor proper municipal building.
Not yet.
It was a large, newly built timber structure reinforced with steel brackets and thick beams, roofed in corrugated metal, elevated on supports to keep it above the worst of the ground. Inside it smelled of ink, wet paper, cigarette smoke, and fresh wood.
Maps covered the walls.
Not romantic maps.
Engineering maps.
Survey lines. Elevation marks. Drainage routes. Soil notes.
On one table sat a wooden model of the island, carved carefully, with three marked points driven into it like nails:
Southern Bauxi Town — port and fortress by the sea.
Central Bauxi Town — river hub, industry and administration.
Northern Bauxi Town — final outpost, guarding the red earth itself.
Here, in the heart of the first city, waited the men responsible for Cameroon.
The former colonial administrator—now forced to relocate his entire center of control—stood stiffly, expression neutral by training. Beside him, the acting mayor looked exhausted already.
Around them clustered engineers, architects, foremen, logistics officers, medical men—faces pale with the shared knowledge that if this project failed, the jungle would swallow it whole and laugh.
They all rose as Oskar entered.
Some stared at his size.
Some at his eyes.
Some at the fact that he wore only green camouflage trousers, boots, and a belt—his upper body still bare, rainwater drying slowly on his skin.
Oskar did not sit.
He stood at the table, hands braced on its edge, and studied the plans.
"So," he said quietly.
He looked up.
"Show me what you've built."
They did.
And what they showed him was not a "town" so much as a set of bones laid carefully on hostile ground.
In a little over three months they had carved something out of nothing—out of swamp air, mosquito haze, and a coastline that tried to rot every nail the moment it was hammered in.
A skeleton city.
Two barracks already stood—hard rectangles of timber and steel bracing, each serving as both garrison and police station. Small holding cells were built into both, not because anyone expected crime yet, but because Oskar believed in the same rule everywhere:
If you build a system, you build it for the day it is tested—not the day it is calm.
Warehouses rose behind the palisade—simple, fast construction, roofed in metal. Cold storage pits had been dug deep enough to stay cool even in tropical heat. Smokehouses were already operating. Market halls stood half like barns and half like institutions.
And then there was the building the workers had started calling, with rough German practicality, the food warehouse.
It looked like a shop.
It behaved like a ministry.
Shelves. Inventory ledgers. Fixed prices. Distribution schedules—ration plans if needed. A structure designed so the town did not depend on luck, gossip, or individual hoarding to eat.
Oskar's eyes lingered on it the longest.
Because famine did not announce itself like a trumpet.
It arrived as a quiet failure in distribution.
About two hundred and fifty wooden buildings were finished or rising—simple homes, many raised on supports, some still being reinforced because the ground here shifted like something alive. The goal was three hundred and forty homes soon—enough to house roughly two thousand people properly once the next waves from the convoy were settled.
Not sleeping sheds.
Not colonial huts.
Homes with kitchens.
Homes with toilets.
Homes with clean water.
The obsession that had followed Oskar across two lifetimes:
Sanitation is civilization.
And—as in every European settlement since Rome—one building had been placed early where everyone could see it.
The church.
A Lutheran Protestant church near the harbor, timber-built but proud, its small bell already installed and polished as if the sound alone could scare off fever.
The administrator—Ebermaier—mentioned it with the careful tone of a man who understood that in colonies, churches were treated as flags that could sing hymns.
Oskar nodded once.
"Good," he said. "It will keep them sane."
Karl's eyebrows rose at that phrasing, but he didn't comment. He simply kept writing, as if trying to capture the difference between a normal prince and a prince who thought like a siege engineer.
Then Oskar turned the pages—past what existed now, and into what was coming.
The plan was simple in concept.
Insane in scale.
And every man at the table knew it, because Oskar had written it into their orders months ago in language so blunt it had sounded like madness until the first concrete arrived.
Southern Bauxi Town—and the next two towns to follow—would not become a typical colonial sprawl of wooden rot and gradual decay.
They would be fortress-cities.
Not romantic castles.
Modern bastions.
Concrete and steel blocks—thick shells with service corridors inside them like organs: pipes and wiring running through protected channels, accessible for repair, sealed against moisture and vermin. Sewage, drinking water, electrical lines—buried inside the bones of the city the way veins were buried inside a body.
The island and its connected banks would be treated like a machine.
Everything measurable.
Everything maintainable.
Everything designed to survive being cut off.
Green spaces would be threaded through the grid—not as decoration, but as function:
Gardens.
Fields.
Fruit trees planted in disciplined rows.
Edible hedges to mark paths and boundaries.
Courtyard plots of cassava, plantain, maize, and leafy greens—peaceful to the eye, but in practice a strategic reserve.
If supply ships were delayed, the town would still eat.
If a foreign fleet appeared on the horizon, the town would still eat.
If disease swept the coast, the town would still drink clean water.
This was not a "colony."
It was a sealed ecosystem with guns.
Water, as always, was the foundation.
So the first real luxury Oskar funded was not wine, not decoration, not a governor's mansion.
It was drilling.
Deep wells.
Water towers.
Filtered storage.
A system designed to pull clean water from underground reservoirs and keep it clean—not from surface water that carried fever like a curse.
Ebermaier spoke now with the practiced precision of a man who knew hunger could destroy even disciplined Germans.
Cassava for calories.
Plantains for steady yield.
Maize for bulk.
Groundnuts and beans for fat and protein.
Leafy greens for vitamins.
Medicinal plants cultivated under controlled conditions instead of prayer and luck.
Food security by design.
Not by begging the locals.
Because the policy Oskar had forced through in Berlin—and repeated again here, in this room—was simple:
They would not rely on natives.
Not for labor.
Not for taxes.
Not for survival.
The towns would be self-sufficient.
Trade would be permitted.
Dependence would not.
It was not freedom.
But it was the least predatory shape a "colony" could take in a world that did not reward virtue.
And the men in the room—especially Ebermaier—had to swallow something bitter as they listened.
Because Oskar was not merely adjusting policy.
He was repudiating decades of colonial habit.
To power all of it, the truly expensive work had already begun.
Two hydroelectric plants—planned on either side of the island corridor—were being surveyed and staked out. They were not only sources of power.
They were anchors.
Bridges.
Control points.
Civil energy and military access fused into one structure.
Each plant was projected at six to ten million marks—possibly more once the geology and flooding patterns revealed their ugly secrets.
Southern Bauxi Town itself was estimated at sixty million at minimum.
And everyone in the room knew it would climb.
In terrain like this, it would almost certainly reach a hundred million before the town was truly stable.
An absurd investment.
More money poured into this single patch of Cameroon than had been invested here in the colony's entire history.
Ebermaier's expression tightened when the numbers were spoken aloud.
Not because he doubted the need.
Because he understood what it meant politically:
This was no longer the government's colony.
It was Oskar's.
Oskar, meanwhile, did not flinch.
He had financed empires out of lottery tickets.
Money was not the issue.
Stability was.
He tapped the island model once with a thick finger.
"Good," he said. "Continue."
The men blinked.
That was it?
No shouting.
No criticism.
No long speech about civilization.
Oskar added only one line—quiet, almost conversational:
"This place is a death trap. Do not forget that. Build like the jungle is trying to murder you—because it is."
A pause.
"And don't worry about money. I'll handle it."
Several men swallowed.
Then nodded.
They understood him perfectly.
The meeting ended quickly after that.
Oskar did not linger pretending to be a governor. He had never been the kind of prince who ruled from a chair. If he wanted this place to live, he needed it to move—today, not in six months, not after committees finished polishing their excuses.
Karl departed at once, dragging engineers with him like a tide—toward harbor flow, storage allocation, drainage priorities, ship schedules. He was already muttering numbers under his breath, as if mathematics alone could hold back the ocean.
Oskar stepped out into the humid air instead, and the weight in his chest returned.
Because the truth was simple:
Money was not infinite.
Yes, he could build the skeleton—ports, barracks, warehouses, the first hard bones of the machine.
But hundreds of kilometers of roads and rail?
Bridges. Stations. Fuel depots. Truck fleets. Patrol routes.
The constant cost of medicine, replacement parts, wages, and shipping?
That would eat even him, if he wasn't careful.
Sooner or later, he would need an enormous loan—so large it would make Berlin choke.
And he already knew who could lend that kind of money without immediately wrapping it in political chains.
America.
He couldn't ask Britain.
Not without strings.
He wouldn't ask France.
Not without "conversation" that turned into influence, invitations, and those polite circles that wanted to claim him.
He could feel those hands already, smiling, reaching.
No.
When the time came, he would borrow from a country that sold money the way other nations sold coal—coldly, for profit, without pretending it was friendship.
But not now.
Not yet.
This crisis was future-weight. Not immediate weight.
So Oskar forced his mind away from it and into the present, where work was the only honest language.
The heat hit like a hand—wet, heavy, alive. Rain had eased into a fine drizzle, and the world smelled of sap and salt and rot, a perfume made of things that refused to die.
He looked north, toward where the second bridge would someday rise.
Toward the river corridor.
Toward the long inland spine that would make this port either a miracle…
…or a grave.
Then he headed straight for the clearing crews.
He found them where the jungle fought hardest—where the green didn't merely stand, but pushed back.
Men chopped. Men sawed. Men sweated beneath mosquito veils and goggles, faces half-hidden behind cloth, surrounded by the bitter haze of campfire smoke that tasted like burnt leaves and salvation.
The smoke wasn't comfort.
It was strategy—keeping insects off skin, keeping morale from fraying into panic.
They turned when they saw him approach.
Barefoot. Bare-chested. Still half in white underclothes, rain drying on his skin like a thin film.
Not the picture of an imperial prince.
More like something that had crawled out of the sea and refused to apologize for existing.
A half-mad giant stepping into the work line.
Oskar didn't announce himself.
He didn't ask permission.
He walked to the tool stack, took a heavy axe, and tested its balance with a single small movement—practiced hands, familiar weight.
Then he swung.
The blade struck a trunk thick as a man's torso.
Not a clumsy chop.
A precise, brutal cut that made the wood jump as if it had been hit by a cannon.
A second swing landed in the same notch.
Exact. Merciless.
A third.
The tree groaned—deep and ugly, like bone giving way—then cracked and fell with a wet, thunderous crash, shaking the clearing and showering leaves down like a second rain.
For a heartbeat, the men stood frozen.
Oskar stepped to the next tree.
Again.
Swing.
Swing.
Swing.
Wood split. Sap sprayed. Fibers tore like muscle. The air filled with the sharp scent of fresh-cut life.
And something changed.
Not because his arms mattered most, but because his presence did.
The pace around him accelerated—saws moving faster, shoulders straightening, eyes sharpening. Men who had been dragging their feet began pushing. Men who had been thinking about the heat and the insects suddenly remembered pride.
Because when the Crown Prince of Germany chopped jungle beside you in a hellhole at the edge of the world—
you stopped thinking about quitting.
And you started believing this place could be conquered.