None of us choose our foundations.
We are born into it: blood, bone, history, chance.
What we can choose is what we build on top of it.
From the first day he woke in this body, Oskar had seen his own flesh as exactly that — a foundation. A temple under construction. Not a gift, but a necessary tool.
In his first life, hauling wounded men through Ukrainian mud, he had learned a simple truth:
You cannot carry others if you cannot stand yourself.
So he had trained.
Like hell.
For an entire year in this new world, he had pushed until his lungs burned, his muscles tore and rebuilt, his bones thickened. And the strange, unnatural foundation he'd been given in this young princely body had responded almost greedily — growing faster, stronger, harder than any normal man had a right to.
He had never thought of himself as a hero.
He was just someone who hated seeing weak people crushed.
Now, in the cold, bloody dark of the park, with his coat in ribbons, bullets through his side, hand, and neck, he wasn't sure if he was still a "man" at all.
He only knew one thing:
He couldn't afford to die here.
If he fell, the world would march straight into the same abyss he remembered:
trenches, gas, mass graves, shattered nations.
Behind him — in his mind's eye — he saw them:
the poor he'd fed and housed,
the workers he'd tried to protect,
the children raised on his stories,
the injured, the outcasts, the desperate.
They stood behind him like a vast, silent crowd, eyes turned toward his back.
He was not just their prince.
He was an image they clung to — a symbol that things could be different.
The weight of that expectation pressed between his shoulder blades.
Now, the men who wanted him dead would feel the weight of it too.
A shadow stepped into his path.
One of the remaining assassins, creeping forward with an old musket cradled in his arms, trying to flank Karl's position. He likely thought he was the hunter.
He never saw the punch coming.
Oskar stepped in, arm whipping up with deceptive speed, fist rising and falling in a tight, short arc.
A hammer of flesh and bone.
The blow landed squarely in the man's face.
Skull and nose collapsed inward.
Bone tore through skin.
The assassin dropped as if someone had cut a string.
He never made a sound.
Oskar didn't pause to feel satisfaction. There was no room for pride now, only necessity.
He crouched, yanked the musket from limp fingers, and heard movement to his right.
Another assassin, pistol in hand, had come to investigate the noise, stepping through the brush.
Oskar turned, brought the musket to his shoulder, and squeezed the trigger.
The antique weapon boomed. Smoke belched from its muzzle.
The ball smashed through the man's left eye and blasted out the back of his skull.
He fell like a felled tree.
A stick of dynamite stuck from a pocket. Oskar snatched it, jammed the musket down into the dirt, and fumbled for a match with his good hand.
Gunshots cracked elsewhere in the park — Karl's revolver and foreign pistols answering each other.
No time.
He struck the match.
He lit the fuse.
It hissed.
There was movement in the trees above — a tangle of branches thick enough to hold him.
When he'd first arrived in this world, climbing trees had been a weird habit he'd picked up to calm himself when everything felt wrong. Now it felt as natural as vaulting a trench.
He jumped, grabbed a branch, hauled himself up with a surge that ignored the bullet wounds screaming in his flesh.
Below, a man crept through the underbrush, pistol in hand, trying to circle around to Karl.
He heard a rustle, looked up—
—and saw only a huge, dark shape falling toward him with something small and hissing clenched in its fist.
"Co to jest—? Potwór!!!"
"What is—? Monster!!!"
He fired wildly.
The bullet tore into Oskar's chest, another burning line of pain. Oskar's jaw clenched but he did not cry out.
He crashed down on the man with his full weight, driving the breath from his lungs. Something in the assassin's chest gave with a wet crack.
The pistol went off again, firing harmlessly into the night.
The man screamed in Danish-tinged German, "Du monstrum! Du dæmon!" — then switched back to his own tongue in a flood of panic and curses.
Oskar didn't care what language he used.
He rammed the lit stick of dynamite into the man's open mouth.
The assassin's eyes bulged, hands clawing at Oskar's arms as the prince shoved him away and kicked him toward two riflemen who were closing in from the path, rifles half-raised.
One shouted, "Scheiße, co on robi?!" — "Shit, what is he doing—?!"
The answer came in a roar.
BOOM.
Flesh, bone, and shreds of clothing became a storm of shrapnel.
The two riflemen went down screaming, rifles tumbling from their hands as fragments tore into their bodies.
A third assassin, deeper in the bushes, yelled in panic, "Co się tam stało?! Co się dzieje?!"
"What happened!? What's going on!?"
Karl heard him.
Bleeding, dizzy, but still stubborn as hell, he pushed himself up on his good knee behind his tree. The revolver shook in his grip.
He fired once.
Missed.
The assassin ducked, then peeked up to see where the shot had come from.
Karl fired again — his last bullet.
Bang.
This time the round caught the man square in the chest. He gasped, staggered, and dropped, bleeding out in the leaves.
Karl's strength finally gave out.
His leg throbbed, his head swam, and his lungs burned.
"…I'm just… going to rest a little," he muttered to nobody in particular.
He slid down the trunk, the revolver slipping from his fingers, and lay still.
Elsewhere, Oskar was already moving.
Through the fading smoke, he saw the two riflemen he'd wounded thrashing on the ground, firing blind shots into shadows, convinced every rustling leaf was a demon coming for them.
They had called him "demon" earlier as an insult.
Now, faced with someone who had taken bullets, explosions, and still kept coming, they meant it.
He stepped out of the trees, bleeding, limping, but upright.
The nearer assassin fumbled, raised his rifle, and fired wildly at Oskar's head.
The shot went wide as Oskar tilted his head an inch to the left.
The other worked his bolt frantically, pulling the trigger again and again with a dry, hopeless click.
Empty.
They looked up at him — eyes wide, whites showing, half-choked repetitions of the word "demon" spilling from their lips in tongues he didn't recognise and didn't care to.
They tried to use their rifles as clubs, swinging from their backs on the ground, desperate to bat him away like an insect.
Oskar stepped in, grabbed the barrel from the nearer man's hands, and wrenched it free.
He swung.
Once.
Twice.
Again.
The butt of the rifle crashed down on bone, breaking, crushing. Blood sprayed. Teeth snapped loose. One skull cracked open like rotten wood.
He pivoted and brought the rifle down on the second with equal force.
Again.
Again.
Soon it was no longer a fight.
Just work.
He roared hoarsely, each strike a release of pain and terror he couldn't afford to feel while moving. Flesh and bone gave way, smashing into the dirt, mixing with stone.
By the time he stopped, the weapon in his hands was split wood and bent iron, barely holding together.
There was no more movement from the bodies beneath him.
He stood there in the darkness.
Alone.
The only sounds were distant tram noises, people shouting, a dog barking far away, the fading ring in his own ears.
He didn't move.
His back was soaked with blood and sweat. His right hand was a ruined mess. Holes in his clothes marked where bullets had passed through. His legs trembled with exhausted rage.
But inside, something in him had already sometime ago given away.
His mind wasn't there, it had slipped.
He passed out.
But his body refused to fall.
He remained on his feet, swaying slightly, eyes half-lidded, like a statue carved of bruised flesh and stubborn will — a temple cracked and scorched, but still standing.
Some ancient, impossible instinct rooted his feet into the earth.
Some force deeper than flesh kept him upright.
So there he remained: a giant silhouette in the cold, broken park, surrounded by shattered bodies and drifting smoke.
Unmoving.
Unyielding.
Unbowed.
A man long unconscious, yet still standing —
an image of defiance,
a pillar of iron will,
the living embodiment of a mighty nation that refused to kneel.
There he stood in the dark, utterly alone…
the strength of Germany given shape.