The third wave of Russians burst from the southern treeline and down the roads leading toward Soldau like a flood of humanity, roaring as they came despite the mortars and artillery shells bursting among them and tearing gaps through their charge.
At the wire, the same relentless pressure continued. The Russians kept pushing forward through mud, bodies, and barbed coils, funneled toward the blasted gaps in the obstacle where the fighting was at its worst. Men rushed those openings in knots and clumps, while others tried to climb directly over the wire where dead and wounded already hung tangled in it. Some made it across only to be shot down at once. Others became trapped in the barbs, thrashing and screaming as bullets and fragments tore into them. At every opening, German grenades and disciplined gunfire turned the ground into a killing pit.
Still, the Russians did not break.
Those who could advance threw themselves onward. Those who could not pressed flat into the churned mud and clawed at the earth with bare hands, desperately trying to scrape out some shallow shelter from the storm of bullets. Men were stacking before the wire in layers now—dead, wounded, crawling, crouching—while behind them the field was already thick with bodies. Flags snapped weakly in the damp morning air. The sun had climbed higher, pale and cold behind broken clouds, and a fine rain drifted over the battlefield as if heaven itself had no better answer.
The Russians were under terrible strain. They watched comrades cut down in rows, saw men blown apart, heard the shrieks of the wounded, and still they were driven onward by officers shouting, cursing, threatening, and striking from behind.
But the Germans had their own terror to master.
Even with all their firepower, the pressure was becoming impossible to ignore. The Russians were everywhere now—at the wire, in the shell holes, pouring out of the mist in fresh waves. The same thought crept through trench after trench: what if too many reached the line at once? What if the storm of bodies finally spilled into the trenches and the battle ceased to be a matter of rifles and machine guns and became instead bayonets, entrenching shovels, and knives in the mud?
German machine guns hammered until their barrels smoked and glowed and had to be changed. M1 rifles cracked again and again. Grenade launchers thumped rounds into the advancing masses and into the tree lines beyond, blowing apart Russian machine-gun nests hidden among the brush. Mortars kept dropping bombs into the rear of the assault. Yet the Russians still came through fog, smoke, sunlight, and rain.
And the Russians were not entirely without answers of their own.
A few grenades began coming over the wire, though nothing like the compact weapons carried by the Black Legion. Hand grenades were still scarce in the Russian Army, and most of those reaching the trenches were heavy Model 1912 weapons—awkward things with box-like metal heads and wooden handles, cumbersome enough that a man had to put his whole body into the throw. Only a handful of soldiers carried them, but at such close range even a few were enough to matter.
One came tumbling awkwardly over the parapet and vanished into the trench before bursting with a heavy crack. Another struck the earth short of the defenders and exploded harmlessly against the outside wall, while a third landed among a German firing position and sent men throwing themselves aside. Mud, timber splinters and fragments filled the trench. Supports cracked, earth rained from the walls, and for several seconds an entire section of the defence disappeared beneath smoke.
They were crude, heavy things compared with the grenades of the Black Legion, and there were far too few of them to change the battle by themselves. Yet whenever a Russian managed to reach throwing distance of the wire, the Germans suddenly had another danger to fear. A single grenade landing correctly inside a crowded trench could do what a hundred rifle shots from the field could not.
The pressure kept rising.
In this one narrow sector before Soldau alone, the dead were already in the thousands, and still fresh Russians were pouring from the southern woods.
Inside one section of trench, Noah snatched one of the Black Legion's own compact grenades from his equipment, armed it and hurled it toward the wire, where bodies already lay across the coils and fresh Russians were trying to climb over them.
For a moment he watched the small dark shape disappear among them.
Then it exploded.
Three Russians vanished into the blast, and pieces of men already dead were thrown from the wire with them. Flesh, cloth, mud and fragments scattered together across the field.
A bullet hissed past Noah's head.
He flinched and dropped against the trench wall, suddenly aware of his own body again.
His hands were shaking. He had never killed anyone before. Now his mind was full of torn men, blown-open faces, and bodies collapsing beneath his fire. Worst of all was the ease of it. Point. Shoot. Another man falls. He felt sick with it, sick with the knowledge that it was his own hands doing these things.
And as the Russians roared and came on yet again, the whole thing began to feel unreal to him, like some nightmare from which he could not wake. They saw their friends die. They saw men explode, drown in mud, hang in wire—and they still kept coming.
It was madness. And it sent a cold shiver through his whole body.
For one terrible moment they seemed unstoppable. There was no victory here, Noah thought. Only waiting to die.
He knew he should rise. He knew he should get back onto the firing step and help the men beside him. But his legs would not obey. He pressed himself deeper into the wet earth, breathing hard, trying to drag air into his lungs while bullets cracked over the lip of the trench.
Then he saw it.
Beside him lay the machine gun. And gripping it were hands that no longer had a body attached to them.
For a moment his mind refused to understand what he was seeing. Those hands—strong, calloused, practiced hands—had belonged to Felix. The rest of him was scattered in chunks along the trench floor, torn apart by a Russian grenade only moments earlier. One arm still clutched part of the shattered grip. A strip of uniform clung to the mud nearby. The rest was meat and bone and ruin.
It had been Felix.
His friend.
His teammate.
The man who had carried the heavy weapon as though it weighed nothing. The man who had laughed with him only hours before. Now he was blood and scraps in the mud.
Noah swallowed hard.
His vision blurred, and for a moment he was no longer in a trench at all. He was back in a peaceful Germany, back in the training yards, back in Pumpworld in Königsberg, where the young men of the Legion had trained like beasts preparing for war. He remembered the smell of sweat and iron, the shouting, the laughter, the roar that went up whenever someone broke a record. He remembered how they had forged themselves there—shoulders, backs, and chests built into weapons under the eye of their Prince.
They had joked about wives. About girls watching them train. About medals. About glory. About how good life would be when this was over.
Life had seemed enormous then, endless. And now Felix lay beside him in pieces.
The thought made Noah tremble all over.
Why was he here?
Why were any of them here?
Another blast shook the trench. His sergeant was shouting something at him, but Noah could not make out the words. He only pressed himself deeper into the mud.
Then he heard something else.
The ringing clang of bullets striking metal. The hammering of hoofbeats. And with it came a strange pressure, something that seemed to make the air itself heavier.
He looked up.
At first he did not understand what he was seeing. There, above the trench line, through drifting smoke and fog and the dim wash of rain-silvered light, loomed a black shape.
A black knight of skeletal steel sat astride an equally fearsome armoured horse, both gleaming darkly in the rising sun as bullets struck and spat sparks from plate and mail. The great horse stood above the trench like some beast from a darker age, steaming in the cold morning air. Upon its back sat a rider so massive that for a moment Noah's mind refused to believe he could be a man at all—a skull-faced helm, a blood-red cape, black armour layered broad and immense.
Then the light shifted, and Noah knew. There was only one figure in all Germany who could look like that.
The skull-faced helm turned toward him, and for an instant its hollow sockets seemed completely empty. Then Noah caught the faint, cold gleam of pale blue eyes buried deep within them. A massive armoured gauntlet rose and struck the black breastplate once over the heart, firm and brief, almost as though the giant rider were acknowledging not only the terrified young soldier crouched in the mud, but Felix as well—the severed hands still tangled around the ruined machine gun and the bloody remains scattered across the trench around them.
It was Prince Oskar.
Noah stared upward, struggling to understand why the Crown Prince of Germany was here at the very edge of the battle while bullets hissed overhead and Russian shells continued falling across the fields. "Your Highness..." he managed, striking one fist instinctively against his own chest.
He wanted to say more. He wanted to tell Oskar to get down, to take cover, to go back behind the trenches where a prince belonged. Some absurd part of him even wanted to protect the enormous armoured figure towering above him, as though there were anything Noah could possibly shield such a man from.
Oskar gave him no chance.
The skull helm turned away from him and toward the Russians. One arm disappeared beneath the folds of the blood-red cloak, and the enormous gauntlet closed around the hilt rising behind his shoulder.
Then Oskar drew.
Steel screamed against steel as the great sword came free with such violence that the air itself seemed to burst around it. Rain, smoke and loose earth slapped across Noah's face in the sudden rush, forcing him backward against the trench wall. He dropped onto the firing step and stared in stunned silence at the impossible weapon now in Oskar's hands, a broad slab of blackened steel nearly as tall as an ordinary man, its cruel edges framing the winged skull at the guard.
A chill crawled down Noah's spine.
Shadowmane moved.
The enormous stallion gathered himself beneath Oskar, muscles bunching under layers of black barding as horse and rider seemed to compress into one terrible mass of steel and flesh. Then, without a word from the Prince, Shadowmane launched himself forward.
Noah ducked instinctively.
Horse and rider sailed over him.
Shadowmane cleared the trench and the outer wire in one tremendous leap, more than a tonne of living muscle, armour and weaponry hanging impossibly in the morning air. Two Russians were climbing across the coils directly beneath him, one standing upon the body of a fallen comrade while the other struggled to pull himself over the final strand.
Neither had time to understand what was descending upon them.
Oskar swung while Shadowmane was still airborne.
The sword passed through both men in a single sweeping arc. One was torn apart through the middle and spun away from the wire, while the second was struck through shoulder and chest with such force that his body was ripped free of the barbs and hurled several metres into the mud.
Then Shadowmane landed among the Russians.
The impact seemed to shake the field.
His forehooves punched deep into the saturated earth. One soldier disappeared beneath them with a wet crunch, while another was struck squarely by the stallion's armoured shoulder and thrown backward into the men behind him. Shadowmane tore his hooves free and surged onward before the Russians around him could recover.
Oskar's sword began to move.
He struck to the right, and a Russian vanished beneath the blade, cut so violently that what remained of him was thrown aside rather than merely allowed to fall. Oskar reversed the stroke almost immediately, the enormous sword sweeping across Shadowmane's left flank and tearing through another pair of men before the sheer force of the swing flung them spinning into the mud.
It was not swordsmanship as any ordinary soldier understood it.
It was demolition.
The blade did not seem to meet flesh so much as pass through it, and the bodies it struck were caught by so much momentum that even severed limbs and broken torsos were hurled clear of horse and rider. Rifles shattered when men tried to parry. Bayonets snapped or vanished beneath the edge. One Russian thrust desperately toward Shadowmane's neck, only for Oskar to bring the sword down through rifle, arms and chest in one descending blow.
Shadowmane thundered through the opening.
Men already lying wounded in the field fared no better than those standing before him. The stallion could not pick his way delicately through a battlefield packed with bodies, craters and struggling men, and he made little attempt to do so. One wounded Russian looked up just before an iron-shod hoof drove his chest into the mud. Another rolled too slowly and caught a rear hoof across the skull, his head collapsing beneath it with the softness of rotten fruit.
Those still standing began recoiling. Some fired. Others attacked with bayonet or sabre. Many simply tried to get out of the way.
Shadowmane struck them like a living battering ram. His armoured chest hurled one soldier backward as though the man weighed nothing, while another vanished beneath his shoulder and was trampled before he could recover. Oskar towered above it all, the black sword rising and falling on either side of the stallion, every stroke opening another path through the mass of Russian infantry.
An officer appeared ahead of them with a revolver in one hand and a sabre in the other. He fired twice. One bullet struck Oskar's breastplate and vanished in sparks; the second rang from his shoulder.
Oskar answered with the sword.
The point drove straight through the officer's belly and burst from his back. The impact lifted him completely from the ground, his revolver falling from his hand as his boots kicked uselessly beneath him. He was still alive, choking and clawing at the immense blade buried through his body, when another Russian lunged in from the side with his bayonet lowered.
Oskar thrust again.
The sword carried the impaled officer forward and punched through the second man high in the chest, driving through flesh and ribs until both Russians were skewered upon the same monstrous length of steel. For one impossible moment they hung there together, suspended above the mud, screaming and struggling against one another. The first man clutched desperately at the blade protruding through his stomach while the second kicked and coughed blood across his comrade's back.
Then Oskar lifted the sword, and both men rose completely clear of the ground.
The Russians nearest him simply stared.
Two grown soldiers writhed upon the blade like animals upon a butcher's spit, boots thrashing uselessly in the air as Oskar held their combined weight one-handed above the battlefield.
Then he swung.
The enormous sword came around with such violence that neither body could withstand it. The first Russian tore open around the wound, his abdomen splitting as he was ripped from the blade. The second came apart through the chest a heartbeat later. Blood, entrails and half-digested remnants of the morning's breakfast spilled across the mud as pieces of both men were flung into the soldiers around them.
For a heartbeat nobody moved.
Then Shadowmane surged through the gap. Horse and rider drove south.
Behind them, the Black Legion seemed to wake anew.
Noah dragged himself back onto the firing step and seized Felix's abandoned machine gun. He forced himself not to look at the hands still caught around the ruined grip or at the pieces of his friend beneath his boots. His body was still trembling, his stomach still twisting at everything he had seen, but the sight of Oskar charging alone into the Russians had broken something inside the fear that had paralysed him.
Around him the trench erupted again. Machine guns swept the gaps in the wire. Carbines cracked from firing steps. Grenade launchers thumped explosive rounds into clusters of Russians trying to follow the Prince's path, while marksmen farther back in Soldau and the old castle searched for officers and machine-gun crews attempting to organise fire against him.
Noah pulled the trigger. The weapon hammered beneath his hands.
Through smoke and rain he could scarcely see Oskar anymore. He caught only fragments—the black mass of Shadowmane, the flash of that enormous sword, the red cloak appearing for an instant before disappearing again among men and smoke.
The Russians could see him well enough.
Their fire began converging upon the black rider. Bullets struck Oskar's armour with ringing blows and flew away in sparks. Others snapped from Shadowmane's barding. One round struck the side of the skull helm hard enough to twist Oskar's head, but the Prince scarcely seemed to notice.
Shadowmane kept moving.
For something so enormous, the stallion possessed terrifying agility. He cut left around a shell crater, then drove sharply right when Russian riflemen began predicting his course. Whenever they thought they had him lined up, the great horse shifted again, his hooves tearing deep trenches through the wet soil and flinging clods of black earth behind him.
They had already crossed perhaps a quarter of the field when Oskar looked south and saw what was coming.
The third wave.
Thousands of Russians were advancing through the smoke and mist, grey-green uniforms stretching across the field, Mosin rifles carried forward and bayonets flashing whenever the pale morning sun caught them. Their great cry rolled northward in broken waves.
"URAAA!"
For a moment Oskar stared.
Once, perhaps, he might have found something magnificent in the sight: thousands of men overcoming fear together, officers leading from the front, soldiers marching beneath their standards despite knowing exactly what awaited them.
Now he saw only madness.
More men, more lives, more sons, fathers and brothers being poured into a field already buried beneath the dead because someone behind them had decided another wave might accomplish what the previous one had failed to do.
His hands tightened around the sword.
You mad bastards.
Still they came.
A knot of Russians ahead dropped to their knees and fired. Shadowmane lunged sideways as the volley cracked past, then drove forward before the soldiers could properly work the bolts of their rifles.
The stallion gathered himself and leapt.
Horse and rider rose through smoke and drifting rain, the enormous armoured body hanging above the Russians for one impossible instant before crashing down among them. Shadowmane's forelegs struck one man across the shoulders and drove him into the earth. Another vanished beneath the stallion's chest, while a third was caught by the side of the barding and sent spinning through the mud.
Oskar swung before Shadowmane had fully recovered his stride.
The sword swept low through the men beside him. One Russian lost both legs. Another was opened through the waist, and the blade continued into a third with enough force to drag the body sideways before tearing free.
Blood washed across the black armour.
The Russians recoiled.
"Demon!"
"Devil!"
"Shoot him!"
"Kill the horse!"
The cries spread through the ranks as more riflemen turned away from the German trenches and toward the solitary rider smashing through their formation. Officers pointed with revolvers and sabres. Men knelt and began aiming lower.
At Shadowmane.
The first volley came raggedly. Most rounds missed or struck armour and glanced away. Shadowmane responded with an enraged scream and accelerated.
Then a Russian machine gun found them.
It had been dragged onto a slight rise near the southern tree line, high enough that its crew could fire over the heads of the infantry pouring north beneath it. From there the gunner saw the black rider plainly through the mist: too large to miss, advancing almost alone while thousands of Russians surged around him.
The Maxim opened fire.
Its hammering joined the massed crack of Mosin rifles until the air between the Russian line and the solitary rider seemed filled with steel. Bullets came from everywhere now, passing over the shoulders of advancing men and converging upon Oskar and Shadowmane in a ragged hail.
The first impacts struck like hammer blows.
Rounds sparked from Oskar's breastplate and shoulders, some flattening against the reinforced steel, others leaving fresh dents and bright scars across the black surface. Several struck almost together, hammering his armour like dozens of small fists and forcing his enormous body back against the saddle. One hit the side of his skull helm with a brutal clang and snapped away into the smoke. Another struck near the ribs of his breastplate hard enough to crack the blackened finish and leave the plate beneath visibly dented.
Shadowmane took worse.
He was the larger target, and the stream of Russian fire rang across his barding in rapid succession. Bullets struck his armoured chest, neck and flanks so quickly that sparks seemed to dance across the black steel. Plates dented. Rivets strained. One overlapping section cracked near its edge under repeated impacts, while another was driven inward against the muscle beneath it.
The stallion screamed in fury but kept coming.
Oskar could feel every strike travelling through the animal beneath him. Shadowmane twisted, changed direction and drove onward while Oskar's sword continued cutting through the Russians in their path, but there were too many rifles now. Men knelt as they advanced, fired, worked their bolts and fired again. Behind them the Maxim kept hammering from the rise, its gunner walking the stream of fire after the enormous black horse.
The bullets followed.
Clang, crack, clang.
Shadowmane staggered beneath another cluster of impacts, recovered and smashed through a group of Russians ahead. Oskar barely had time to turn before another volley struck them from the side. Rifle rounds sparked from his shoulder and forearm, one impact hammering his gauntlet hard enough to numb his fingers around the sword.
Still they drove south.
For several astonishing moments it seemed that sheer mass and armour might carry them all the way into the approaching third wave.
Then the Maxim gunner lowered his aim.
The next burst swept beneath Shadowmane's barding. Rounds ripped through mud around his hooves before climbing into the partially exposed joints of his forelegs. One punched through above the fetlock. Another tore into the softer flesh behind it. A third struck higher, where overlapping armour had opened with the stallion's stride.
Shadowmane screamed.
Blood immediately streaked down one black leg.
His stride faltered, yet he forced himself onward, slamming his wounded hoof into the earth and driving through another knot of Russians while Oskar's sword cleared the men from his path.
The machine gun followed him.
Another burst came in low.
Bullets tore through mud, bodies and grass before striking Shadowmane again. One hit the already wounded foreleg. Another entered beside it. A third struck the opposite leg near the edge of an armoured joint.
Shadowmane stumbled.
For the first time since leaving the German trench, the great stallion lost his rhythm. He tried to plant the wounded leg beneath that immense combined weight, but it buckled. His other foreleg caught him for half a stride while his hindquarters drove desperately forward through sheer instinct and fury.
Then the damaged leg failed completely, and Shadowmane went down. His armoured chest struck the soaked earth with tremendous force, and momentum carried him forward through mud, corpses and shattered equipment. Russians hurled themselves aside as the great black horse ploughed into the battlefield and rolled into the smoke.
Oskar was torn from the saddle.
For an instant there was nothing beneath him but grey sky, smoke and the blurred shapes of men. Then the earth struck back.
His shoulder hit first. Several hundred kilograms of man, armour and weapon smashed into the saturated field and rolled through it, throwing mud in every direction. He crashed through a corpse, struck a wounded Russian hard enough to send the man tumbling aside, and continued onward while the enormous sword carved a deep furrow through the earth beside him.
Once, twice, then he stopped.
Behind him came the tremendous crashing of armour and hooves as Shadowmane thrashed somewhere inside the smoke. Oskar heard the stallion scream, heard Russians shouting and scattering around that immense struggling shape, and then one of the surviving Russian field guns fired.
A shell burst between them.
Mud, smoke and fragments climbed into the air, swallowing Shadowmane completely.
Oskar could no longer tell whether the stallion had regained his feet, rolled farther down the slope or lay wounded somewhere beyond that wall of smoke.
There was no time to find out. The Russians were already around him.
Some had recoiled from the place where Shadowmane had fallen. Others stood scattered through the churned field with rifles and bayonets in hand, staring toward the black figure that had been hurled into their midst. Beyond them, through drifting smoke and rain, the third wave was still coming north in its thousands, grey-green infantry filling the field from one side of Oskar's vision to the other.
For a strange moment, everything seemed to slow.
Oskar remained where he had fallen. One knee rested deep in the mud. His left gauntlet was planted against the wet earth to support his weight, fingers buried into the soil, while his other hand still clutched the great sword. He drove its point down beside him until the massive blade stood embedded in the ground like a black iron stake.
Blood and rain ran together over his armour. Fresh dents and bright scars marked the plates where bullets had struck. Mud coated the skeletal steel from shoulder to boot and dripped steadily from the blood-red cloak hanging behind him.
He did not rise.
He simply lifted his head.
The skull-faced helm turned toward the approaching Russians.
Around him, men hesitated.
Hundreds stood near enough to see him clearly. Thousands more were coming behind them. Rifles were raised. Bayonets pointed toward him. Officers shouted somewhere through the smoke, trying to push the advance onward.
Yet for that one suspended instant, nobody seemed willing to be the first man to step closer.
Oskar stared at them.
He hated them for coming.
He hated the officers who had sent them.
He hated himself for everything he had already done upon this field and everything he knew was still waiting to be done.
Most of all, he hated the whole damned world for always finding its way back here—to war, to blood, to men casting away lives that could never be returned.
His heart hammered beneath the battered breastplate.
Something deeper answered. Red, hotter than ever.
The Russians farther back continued roaring as they advanced.
"URAAAA!"
Oskar's gauntlet sank deeper into the mud.
His grip tightened around the sword.
"You mad bastards!"
The words burst from the skull helm with such force that the men nearest him visibly recoiled. Several stopped outright. One lowered his bayonet without realizing it. Another took half a step backward before the ranks behind pressed against him.
Oskar remained upon one knee.
He looked across the sea of men coming toward him, sword planted beside him, one hand braced against the blood-soaked earth.
"You want death?"
His voice grew deeper.
The Russians nearest him stared.
Then Oskar roared.
"THEN COME AND TAKE IT!"
The sound rolled across the field like the roar of some enormous beast.
For one heartbeat, the Russian line recoiled.
And there, surrounded by an army, the Iron Prince remained upon one knee in the mud, waiting.