Rain fell in a steady curtain over the convoy.
It was not a storm, not yet, and there was nothing violent in it. It was simply the slow, patient rain of the tropics: warm, persistent, and impossible to ignore. It drummed softly against steel plating and canvas awnings, gathered along railings, ran down ropes in shining threads, and slid in thin streams toward the scuppers. Ahead of the ships, tugboats cut through the gray water, their black hulls hissing as they turned toward the harbor.
Oskar stood at the rail of the lead transport and, for a long while, did nothing but breathe.
It was not the shallow, habitual breath of command and planning, not the breath of a man already thinking of the next order, the next schedule, the next problem. It was a deep breath. A full one. The kind that filled the chest and settled there. The air was different here, thick with moisture and green life, heavy with the smell of wet earth, salt, leaves, and something older still, something that did not belong to maps, rail lines, ministries, or timetables. Rain slid down his face, soaked into his hair and uniform, and he let it happen while his eyes remained fixed on the dark, uneven line of land rising from the sea.
Behind him, the deck was alive with movement. Workers and their families crowded near the railings, their voices bright with excitement and nerves. Children pointed toward the coast and shouted questions no adult could properly answer. Men leaned forward, speaking in low tones about rivers, trees, heat, insects, and whatever waited beyond the shore. Farther back, the Eternal Guard of the Third Company stood in lighter jungle gear, helmets dulled, equipment stripped down to necessity, bodies steady even as the ship rolled beneath them.
And, because Karl had insisted on it, there were cameramen.
They moved carefully across the slick deck with tripods and equipment, wiping rain from lenses, adjusting angles, and capturing the arrival the way such journeys were always captured now: royalty abroad, industry advancing, Germany approaching the unknown. Yet beneath all of it—beneath voices, engines, rain, and the slow groan of metal—there was something else.
Quiet.
The jungle waited.
Oskar could feel it when he focused. Birds lifting somewhere beyond the canopy. Rain striking leaves so broad they turned water into music. A world breathing at its own pace, utterly indifferent to ships, flags, cameras, and plans. It was beautiful. Peaceful. And with a clarity that cut through all the noise around him, Oskar understood that this, too, was why he had come into this world.
Not to conquer everything. Not to smother the earth beneath rails, ledgers, factories, and ambition. But to change the path of history just enough that places like this might still exist in the future, not as ruins, not as footnotes, not as memories locked behind museum glass, but as living things. History would not change itself. Someone had to move first.
His gaze dropped to the water below.
Dark waves rolled against the hull. For one brief heartbeat, something broke the surface—a small fin slicing cleanly through the water before vanishing again.
Oskar straightened.
Then, without hesitation, he began to undress.
First came the boots. Then the belt. Then the jungle jacket, shrugged from his shoulders and dropped onto the deck with rain streaming from the fabric. The noise behind him faltered almost at once. Karl turned in the middle of speaking and froze.
"What are you doing?" he demanded, disbelief sharpening his voice.
People stared. Workers paused. Guards stiffened. Even the cameramen hesitated for half a second before instinct took over and the lenses began turning toward him. The Crown Prince of the German Empire stood tall in the rain, massive frame revealed as he stripped down to simple white underclothes. Water traced the hard lines of his shoulders, arms, and back as he moved. There was no display in it, no posing, no theatrical flexing—only the raw fact of a body built for endurance, violence, and motion.
Karl took a step forward. "Oskar—"
Oskar turned and smiled at him, not recklessly, not wildly, but with that familiar and deeply unsettling calm that always meant he had already decided.
"My little man," he said lightly, rain running down his face, "we are wasting time standing here."
He nodded toward the shore.
"You lead the men. Prepare everything as planned. I'll go ahead."
Karl stared at him as if the sea itself had just spoken. "You cannot possibly be serious. You're not thinking of—"
But Oskar was already moving. He stepped onto the rail and balanced there for one perfect moment, rain clinging to his skin, the jungle waiting ahead. The cameramen reacted on instinct, film beginning to turn.
"Oskar!" Karl shouted, gripping the railing. "Have you lost your mind? There are sharks in those waters!"
Oskar did not answer. He bent forward and dove.
It was a clean, effortless arc, headfirst and without hesitation, without panic, without the messy splash of a man losing courage halfway down. He cut into the sea with the precision of a spear, and the water closed over him as if he had never been there at all.
The deck erupted. People rushed to the rail. Guards surged forward. Cameramen leaned out dangerously, trying to catch a glimpse of him beneath the surface. Karl's voice carried over the rain, raw with disbelief.
"What are you—insane?"
Below, the ripples spread outward and then vanished. For a moment, from the deck above, it looked as though Oskar had simply disappeared.
He had not surfaced because he had gone lower.
The dive had carried him several meters down, deep enough for the world to become muted green, blue, and heavy silence. Above him, the rain became only a soft, distant drumming. The ship's shadow loomed nearby like a moving cliff, and bubbles slipped past his face toward the broken light. Then the sea moved.
Shapes appeared in the distance.
Small reef sharks, quick and curious, circled at the edge of sight. At first they were more silhouettes than bodies—triangles of motion in a world where everything living was either hungry, cautious, or both. One separated from the others. Not the largest, not the oldest, only the boldest. It was perhaps a meter and a half long, maybe eighteen kilos, fast enough to be dangerous and small enough to mistake bravery for intelligence. It angled toward the disturbance in the water, toward the warm creature that had fallen from the world above.
Oskar saw it coming, and instead of fear, something old, reckless, and almost embarrassingly human rose inside him.
So this is it, he thought.
The real world.
The reef shark accelerated, mouth parting slightly as instinct decided that anything splashing into its water must be prey. Oskar waited until the last moment, then drove his fist forward. It was not a panicked flail, not blind thrashing, but a clean hammer of motion, brutal even with the water fighting him.
His knuckles struck the shark's snout.
The animal jolted sideways, shock rippling through its body, its rhythm breaking as if the sea itself had slapped it. Oskar surged after it. Both hands shot forward and clamped onto the shark's body like a vise, one hand locking behind the head, fingers digging into cartilage and muscle, the other seizing near the base of the fin and crushing down with merciless pressure.
The shark exploded into motion. Its body whipped and twisted, tail lashing, water churning into bubbles and green blur. Teeth snapped uselessly at empty water. The animal thrashed with everything it had, its nervous system screaming that something had gone impossibly wrong.
Oskar felt all of it: the slick strength of muscle, the frantic vibration of life trying to escape, the resistance, and then the give. He tightened his grip, not suddenly, not theatrically, just more. A dull crack moved through the water, felt more than heard, as cartilage failed under pressure no animal had ever applied to it before. The shark's body spasmed violently, its rhythm breaking into wild, useless jerks.
Oskar twisted. His torso rotated with the motion, shoulders and core driving the movement like a hydraulic press. The shark's spine bent at an angle no spine was meant to reach. Something inside it tore, and blood bloomed through the water in a dark cloud. The thrashing slowed, then stopped. The reef shark hung limp in his hands, broken not by tools, not by cleverness, but by overwhelming force.
Around him, the sea changed.
The other reef sharks widened their circle at once. They did not scatter in mindless panic, but they did not come closer either. They watched because they had seen something they did not understand.
Prey that seized. Prey that crushed. Prey that killed a hunter in seconds.
Oskar stared at the ruined body in his hands, disbelief and exhilaration colliding in his chest.
Holy shit.
His fingers flexed slightly, and the torn body shifted, slack and ruined, as the water claimed what it could. He looked at his hands as if seeing them properly for the first time.
Did I really just—
Yes.
Yes, he had.
A sharp, ridiculous joy surged through him, hot and primal and utterly human. Then the water moved again, not quickly and not lightly, but heavily.
A vast shape passed beneath him, blocking the light like a living shadow sliding under the sun.
The joy vanished.
Oskar turned slowly.
It circled once, unhurried and confident, claiming the space with its mass alone. A bull shark. Big. Scarred. Thick-bodied, powerful, and ugly in the way only perfectly designed things could be ugly. Less an animal than a weapon shaped by time, muscle packed onto muscle, eyes empty of hesitation.
Oskar's mind dragged up the worst possible facts from memory.
Aggressive. Territorial. Not inclined to retreat.
The bull shark angled toward him. It was not charging yet. It was judging, drawn by blood, movement, and the simple certainty that something here should be eaten.
Oskar's heart slammed against his ribs.
Oh shit.
He did not pretend bravery now. He did something smart.
He released the ruined front of the reef shark, letting it drift away in a widening red haze, while keeping hold of what remained. The tail-end dragged behind him like a crude, bloody offering. The bull shark made its decision and came in hard.
The water compressed around its charge, a torpedo of muscle and teeth. Oskar snapped the carcass up just in time. The impact hit like a ram. The bull shark's jaws closed with terrifying force, ripping into the offering as if it were paper, and the collision drove a shock through Oskar's arms, bone-deep and violent enough to rattle his teeth.
He struck back with a brutal punch to the snout.
The blow drove through the water and into nerve and bone. The shark recoiled a fraction, but not enough. It shook its head furiously, trying to tear the food free, rage rippling through its massive body. Oskar hit it again, harder, then abandoned finesse entirely. He lunged in close and drove his fingers into the thick muscle near the fin, digging, twisting, levering pain the way he did against men in sparring, forcing the angle, forcing control, forcing the animal to understand that this thing in the water was not harmless.
At last, the bull shark recoiled.
Not defeated. Irritated. Agitated. Uncertain enough to circle instead of commit.
That was all Oskar needed.
He turned and swam hard, fast as he could.
Every stroke burned. His lungs screamed. His muscles flooded with fire. The shore was still far enough away to mock him, a pale strip beyond the rain-blurred water. Behind him, the bull shark followed. Sometimes close. Sometimes below. Always present.
Do not stop.
The words became his entire world.
Once, the shark drifted close enough that the water shifted around his legs, close enough to remind him how quickly this could end. Then, slowly, it peeled away. The red cloud behind them was easier, safer, and the shark turned back toward the simpler logic of the sea.
Oskar did not look back.
He swam until sand appeared beneath him, until the water loosened its grip and his hands scraped bottom. He dragged himself forward like a man crawling out of another world and collapsed onto the beach with a heavy, exhausted thud.
In his hand remained only a miserable prize, little more than torn flesh and tail.
For a moment he simply lay there under the warm rain, staring at the gray sky with his chest heaving. Then he laughed once, breathless and incredulous.
"Fuck," he muttered. "That was close."
Out at sea, the four ships were still approaching, tugboats guiding them in. On the decks, people had crowded along the rails. They were cheering, shouting, pointing. They had seen him emerge. Seen him make shore. Seen him live.
Oskar lifted one arm with theatrical slowness and gave them a thumbs-up.
The cheers doubled.
Somewhere aboard the lead ship, Karl clutched the railing and shook his head like a man watching a miracle performed by an idiot.
"Damn," he muttered, half horrified, half awed. "Crazy bastard…"
Oskar lay in the wet sand, rain cooling his skin, heart still pounding in his chest.
And in the distance, the jungle watched.