The wind whistled past Karl as he fell.
For one stomach-dropping instant, there was nothing beneath him but smoke, gunfire, and the ruined height of his own manor. The roof vanished behind him. The fourth-floor attic windows flashed past. The third floor rose into view. The ground rushed upward with such speed that every sensible part of his soul began screaming at once.
Then the eastern wind struck him.
Karl felt it hit the folded membranes beneath his arms, tugging, lifting, pulling.
"Now," he hissed.
The wings opened and black fabric snapped wide from wrist to ankle. Hidden ribs locked into shape beneath the strain, and the suit caught the morning air with a violent shudder that nearly tore his shoulders from their sockets. His fall became something else. Not flight, not truly. He was still dropping meter by meter, but now he was dropping forward, fast and low, carried in a controlled dive across his own burning yard.
The world blurred beneath him.
His front garden, once neat and beautiful, was now a torn field of craters, broken hedges, smashed trees, and smoking earth. Men of Second Company fired from behind shattered walls, garden stones, cellar vents, and ruined bushes, their black carbines cracking toward the palace gates. A shell struck a section of the outer wall ahead, blasting stone apart and throwing two men across the yard like dolls.
Karl aimed for the gap.
For half a second, he passed just above his own men, a dark winged shape bursting through smoke with the speed of a motorcar gone mad.
One Eternal Guard looked up.
"God preserve us!" the man shouted. "It's Herr Karl!"
Karl shot over the broken wall and out above the street.
The peaceful road of rich men and princes had become no-man's-land. Bullets crossed it in both directions, snapping through the smoke like angry insects. One cut past Karl's pointed bat ear. Another passed so close to his cheek that he felt its heat. From the palace walls, Royal Guards began to notice him and swing their rifles upward.
Karl shifted left, then right, throwing off their aim as much as he dared. The wings trembled. His arms shook under the strain. Below him, the street rushed past in a long, bright strip of death.
Ahead, the tank loomed near the palace gates.
It sat to his right like an iron beast, turret turned toward his manor, machine gun hammering in short bursts. Smoke curled from its barrel. Its main gun tracked the shattered house, searching for another shot.
Karl's right hand tightened around the round grenade. The pin was already gone. Only the safety lever remained beneath his fingers.
He was moving too fast to think in long plans. There was only distance, speed, and the terrible arithmetic of seconds.
Four seconds after release.
Less than one before he reached the tank.
Karl let the lever fly.
The road rushed beneath him. The tank filled his vision. He dropped lower, lower still, so low that for one wild instant he thought his belly would scrape across the turret roof.
Then he passed over it, his hand opened and the grenade fell.
It struck the rear engine grille with a sharp metallic crack, bounced once, skipped across the hot metal, and vanished into the narrow shadow behind the turret where the overhang met the engine deck.
Karl never saw where the grenade came to rest.
He was already past the tank, the wind roaring in his ears and the world rushing beneath him too quickly for thought to keep pace. The palace gates swept below. Dead men, fallen rifles, torn helmets, and churned earth blurred together as he shot into the front courtyard of the Royal Palace of Potsdam.
For the first time in his life, Karl passed through those gates not as a guest, not as Oskar's little man, not as a businessman in formal dress, but as a black-winged projectile hurled straight at treason.
Ahead, the long palace driveway stretched toward the main entrance, broken by smoke, bodies, and running men. Royal Guards crouched behind the central fountain. Others fired from hedges, overturned benches, garden walls, and shattered palace windows. To the eastern side, more men were rushing toward the Eternal Guard barracks, joining the assault under shouted orders and the crackle of rifle fire.
And there, near the bushes before the palace entrance, Karl saw the traitor Moltke.
The old general was half-sheltered behind clipped greenery, pointing with one hand while shouting orders to men running past him. Smoke curled around his uniform. His face was tight, pale, and furious as he tried to force the chaos back into the shape of command.
In that single moment, the whole battlefield seemed to narrow around the old traitor's face for Karl. The smoke, the rifle fire, the shouting men, the burning tank behind him—all of it faded into the edges of Karl's vision.
Then Moltke turned, as if he had felt the hatred aimed at him.
He looked down the driveway and saw a black-winged figure coming straight toward him through the smoke, low and fast, wings spread wide like some nightmare from an old German tale.
At first, Moltke did not understand what he was seeing. His eyes widened beneath his cap. His mouth opened slightly. For one moment, disbelief stripped away rank, age, and treason, leaving only an old man staring at the impossible.
Then recognition struck him.
"Karl?" he gasped.
Behind Karl, the grenade detonated.
It was not a grand explosion. It did not tear the tank apart or fling the turret into the sky. It was a hard, brutal crack of fire and metal behind the turret, a sharp internal blast that spat smoke and fragments from the rear deck. Shrapnel slammed into exposed fittings, bit through the engine grille, and hammered into mechanisms beneath the turret ring. The tank lurched under the force. Its machine gun stuttered. Smoke burst from places smoke had no right to be.
Karl barely heard the explosion behind him.
The wind was too loud. The gunfire was too close. The whole world had narrowed into speed, smoke, and the old man ahead of him.
But Moltke saw the blast.
He saw the tank lurch behind Karl. He saw smoke burst from the rear deck. He saw the black-winged little figure flying low across the courtyard with fire blooming in his wake, and for one instant all the discipline left his face.
"The dwarf!" Moltke screamed, pointing. "It is Karl! Shoot him down! Shoot him down!"
Rifles swung toward him.
Karl was only a few meters above the ground now, racing down the driveway so low that bushes whipped beneath his boots and scattered gravel flashed below his belly. Bullets cracked past him from the palace walls and from the men around the fountain. He leaned left to spoil one aim, then right to spoil another, his arms stretched wide in the bat suit, every correction pulling at his shoulders like ropes trying to tear him apart.
He dropped lower still. A meter and a half above the stones, maybe less.
Moltke stumbled backward, suddenly realizing that the little black shape was not merely passing over the courtyard. It was coming for him.
For one absurd, terrifying moment, the old general must have thought Karl meant to ram him like a suicidal little bat and break them both across the palace steps.
Karl bared his teeth as he roared, "This is for Oskar, you traitorous old dog!"
Then the eastern wind struck him hard from behind and below. It caught under his left wing, lifted him just enough, and shoved him westward toward the gardens. Karl felt the opening in the air and took it, twisting left with the gust.
But in that same instant, he made his choice.
To draw the revolver meant breaking the shape of the wings. To break the wings meant losing lift. Karl knew that perfectly well.
He did it anyway.
His right arm snapped down to his hip. The batsuit collapsed unevenly on that side, and the glide died at once. He was no longer flying in any meaningful sense. He was being hurled sideways by speed, wind, and stubbornness, a compact black shape flung across the courtyard like a sack of meat with heroic intentions.
But his hand found the revolver.
Moltke stood ahead of him, arm outstretched, finger pointed toward Karl as he screamed to the men around him.
"Kill him! Kill him now!"
The draw was faster than Moltke's old eyes could follow. One instant Karl's hand was empty. The next, the revolver was there.
The muzzle flashed.
The shot cracked across the front courtyard and struck Moltke's pointing hand first. His raised finger burst apart in a red spray, and the round carried on, deflected just enough to tear across the side of his neck beneath the jaw. Blood flashed over his collar. The ruined finger, torn free by the impact, snapped back across his face and sent his cap flying from his head.
Moltke spun as if yanked by an invisible rope. His hand flew to his neck, but blood was already spilling between his fingers. His mouth opened, but the order became only a wet, broken sound. Then his knees failed, and he collapsed backward into the bushes, disappearing beneath leaves, smoke, and his own blood.
Karl saw only that much, until the garden swallowed him.
He clipped a trimmed bush shaped like a bear, bounced off it, spun over a garden path, tore through the top of a hedge, and smashed into a flowerbed hard enough to send black soil and petals flying. For one mad instant he skipped across the ground like a stone across water. Then the world turned over, the sky vanished, and he crashed down with a brutal splash.
The pond was shallow.
Far too shallow.
Karl struck the smooth stones beneath the water with his back and shoulder, and pain exploded through him so sharply that for several seconds he could not breathe. He lay half in the cold water, half on the stony edge, wings twisted beneath him, revolver still clutched in his hand by pure instinct, as if the weapon were the only thing tying him to life.
The world spun.
His body felt heavy, wet, and possibly broken in several new and interesting places. A thin wheeze escaped him. Then he rolled onto his back, felt something in his ribs protest with a horrible little crack, and air finally flooded his lungs.
Above him, white clouds drifted across a brightening September sky. The sun was still rising somewhere in the east. It should have been a fine warm day. A day for swimming lessons with the children, perhaps, and Heddy smiling in that new bathing suit while pretending not to notice him staring.
Then reason returned.
"Oh yes," Karl muttered. "The garden." He blinked. "Wait… where am I?"
He turned his head.
The pond sat in a small enclosed garden, bordered by bushes and a narrow path. A large frog statue watched over the water with solemn stone dignity.
Then something croaked beside him.
Karl's eyes shifted.
A real frog sat on a wet stone near his face, staring at him with calm golden-black eyes, as if winged dwarfs crashed into its pond every morning.
Karl blinked through pond water.
"Oh. Hello there, Mister Frog." He coughed. "I do hope I did not crush your frog babies or anything. Terribly sorry."
Shouting answered instead of the frog.
"There! In the garden by the pond!"
"It's the bat demon!"
Karl almost corrected them. He was not a bat demon, but a Batman.
But this was not the time.
He shoved himself upright and ducked behind the frog statue just as a bullet struck the water behind him. The splash sprayed his back, and the real frog gave an offended croak before vanishing into the pond.
Karl dropped to one knee.
On the palace wall, a Royal Guard leaned over the parapet and brought his rifle to his shoulder. Karl fired at the same moment the man fired down. Both shots went wild, both men flinching from the other's aim. The guard's bullet snapped into the pond. Karl's round struck stone near the parapet and made the man jerk back out of sight.
That was enough.
Karl ran. He burst out of the little frog garden and down a narrow path between trimmed bushes. Bullets followed his small dark figure blindly through the greenery. They tore through hedges, clipped flowers, shattered a garden lantern, and kicked dirt around his boots. He was too low and too small for the men above to track cleanly, but not invisible enough to be safe.
Ahead, a large imperial statue rose from the garden.
Karl threw himself behind it just as machine-gun fire swept through the bushes like a gardener from hell. Branches shredded. Leaves burst apart. Bullets struck the statue's marble base and sent chips spraying across his batsuit.
Only then did he look up.
Kaiser Wilhelm II stood above him in heroic stone, chin lifted, chest proud, moustache stern, one hand resting on a sword as if he had personally decided to shield the garden from treason.
Karl pressed his back to the plinth and sucked in a painful breath.
"Oh. Hello, Your Majesty." He patted the stone. "Do not mind me. I shall hide here a moment."
More bullets struck the statue and whined away into the garden.
Karl ducked lower.
"And thank you. Very solid of you."
Voices were closing from the right. Boots crashed over gravel. Men shouted to one another, arguing over where he had gone. From the wall above, Royal Guards fired blindly into bushes and paths, unable to see him clearly through smoke, leaves, stonework, and the irritating fact that Karl was short enough to make their lives difficult.
But the men were spreading out, and if Karl stayed where he was, they would find him soon enough.
He pressed his back against the Kaiser's statue and looked toward the palace.
He had to get inside somehow. Oskar's family was in there, the palace was tearing itself apart, and Karl had not jumped from his own roof dressed like a lunatic bat merely to die in a flower garden.
The garden path split around the statue. One way led back toward the walls and the men hunting him. The other ran toward the palace itself. Ahead, the palace windows rose high above him, elegant, bright, and useless. Too tall. Too exposed. Too easy for every rifleman on the wall to see.
Then he spotted it.
Half-hidden behind a thick rose hedge near the base of the western wall was a low arched cellar window. It was narrow, dirty, iron-framed, and set barely above the ground, more ventilation opening than proper entrance.
Too small for a normal man, but perfect for him.
Karl snapped open his revolver and checked the cylinder. He had four rounds loaded.
Good enough.
He waited until the next blind burst from the palace wall tore through the bushes above him, then broke from cover.
Almost at once, someone saw him.
"There! There he is!"
A rifle cracked from above. The shot missed him by a hand's width and snapped through the hedge ahead. Karl ducked low and ran, short legs pumping, wet batsuit clinging to his body as he zigzagged down the narrow garden path toward the palace.
Ahead, half-hidden behind a rose hedge, the cellar window waited.
Then the path opened into a T-intersection, and Karl saw movement to his right.
A group of Royal Guards were coming down the side path toward him, rifles in hand, boots striking gravel. For one terrible instant they all stared at one another in mutual disbelief as they saw the soaked little bat-shaped figure bursting into the open before them.
One of the guards found his voice first, "There he is! The dwarf!"
"Oh, hell." Karl said as he fired his revolver mid run towards them.
He barely aimed. There was no time. The revolver bucked in his hand, and the nearest guard screamed as the round struck his knee and folded his leg beneath him. He dropped hard onto the path, clutching himself and howling. The others flinched, stumbling back toward the hedges as their rifles came up too late.
That heartbeat was all Karl needed.
He threw himself forward into a slide. The slick black suit carried him across wet stone and grass, faster than he expected. Rifles cracked from the wall behind him and from the path to his right. Bullets hissed over his head and tore into the rose hedge ahead, shredding leaves and sending red petals spinning through the air.
Karl lifted his revolver as he slid towards the cellar window. He fired once cracking glass. He fired again, the window shattered. He fired a third time, punching through what remained of the frame.
The revolver clicked empty.
Then Karl hit the rose hedge feet-first. Thorns scraped across his shoulders and mask. Branches whipped at his face. Petals, leaves, and broken stems exploded around him in a red and green cloud as he crashed through the roses and struck the low window.
The weakened frame gave way and darkness swallowed him as he fell into the cellar with a crash.
Something wooden broke beneath him. A crate split apart. Bottles shattered. Wine burst across the stone floor in a dark red splash, spreading under him like blood. Karl rolled through straw, splinters, broken glass, and spilled wine, knocked another bottle from its rack, and came to rest hard on his side.
For one moment, he could only breathe.
Outside, bullets struck the wall around the broken window. Glass fragments jumped. Dust fell from the stone. Men shouted in the garden.
"He went into the basement!"
"After him! He'll try to reach the royal family!"
Karl groaned and pushed himself onto one elbow, just as a cracked bottle rolled gently against his arm. Its label was old, noble, and somehow still readable.
1871, the year the Empire had been born.
Karl stared at it for half a second.
"Well," he muttered, "I am not paying for that."
More voices rose outside. Boots crushed through the roses. Someone was coming toward the broken window to look inside.
Karl forced himself to his feet.
Everything hurt. His back burned. His ribs protested. One knee felt as if a drill sergeant had tried to unscrew it by hand. But nothing seemed broken enough to stop him, and that was all that mattered.
He gripped the empty revolver like a club and staggered deeper into the dark.
The wine cellar stretched around him in long rows of barrels, racks, crates, and old dust. No lamps burned down here. No helpful light waited for him, someone had turned them off. So there was only the faint gray glow from the shattered window behind him, and now and then the flash of gunfire from the battle outside. The air smelled of stone, cork, old wood, spilled wine, and damp earth.
Yet despite the dark, Karl soon enough found the cellar door and pressed himself beside it.
He opened the revolver again and began feeding fresh cartridges into the cylinder from his belt, one by one, listening as he worked. But beyond the door there was nothing, no footsteps or voices. Only distant gunfire, muffled by thick stone until it sounded less like battle and more like thunder trapped inside the walls.
Although it did make sense, this after all was the western side of the palace basement. Too far from Oskar's family wing, and thus too far from the center of the fighting.
That was why no one was here. Everyone was east, killing or dying around the part of the palace that mattered most. Karl could not afford to linger. He had to move, had to find the right passages, had to reach the battle again before it was too late.
When the revolver was full, he snapped the cylinder shut and reached slowly for the door handle.
Then something shifted in the darkness behind him.
Karl turned instantly, revolver raised.
In the far corner of the wine cellar, half-hidden between shelves and barrels, an old figure sat clutching a bottle to his chest as if it were a weapon. A pale face emerged from the gloom: wide eyes, disordered hair, a coat dusted from hiding too long among the barrels.
For a heartbeat, neither of them moved.
Then the old man whispered, stunned, "Karl? My boy?"
Karl lowered the revolver.
"Father?"
Essen stared at him, taking in the torn batsuit, the pond water, the rose petals, the mud, the blood, and the broken glass clinging to him.
"What in God's name are you wearing?"
"I came to save everyone," Karl said. "Obviously."
Even in the dark, Essen looked as if he needed a moment to survive that answer.
Karl nodded toward the bottle in his arms. "And you?"
"The wine," Essen said quietly. "The Kaiser wanted something old brought up. Something proper. After dismissing Moltke, I thought His Majesty might need it."
Karl's mouth tightened.
"Yes, well, Moltke is either dead or still helping men shoot children, so the sentiment has aged poorly."
Essen flinched, then lowered his voice.
"I know. I came down before dawn, before the shooting began. There was a strange guard change in the night. Then engines outside. Trucks. Heavy vehicles. I looked from the cellar window and saw men entering the palace grounds."
His hands tightened around the bottle.
"And then I saw Wilhelm."
Karl went still.
"The mad prince?"
"The former Crown Prince, yes. He wore a hood, but I knew him. The way he moved. The shape of him. Though he seemed changed." Essen swallowed. "Moltke was with him. Others too. If this is truly a coup, then there is only one man a part of the Royal Guard would dare call their rightful master."
For a moment, the wine cellar seemed colder.
"So Wilhelm is inside," Karl said.
"I believe so. And if he is, this is larger than a mutiny. This is succession. Restoration. This is—"
"A disaster," Karl said. "Yes. I noticed when they started shelling my house."
Essen looked at him properly then, and something in his face shifted. He saw the pain in Karl's posture, the torn wings, the revolver in his hand, and the stubbornness that had already carried him too far to be stopped.
Karl reached for the cellar door.
"Hide here, Father. Help is coming. With luck, this will be over soon."
"Karl."
He paused with one hand on the handle.
Essen's voice softened.
"No matter what happens, remember this: you are my son, and I am proud to have raised you."
For half a second, Karl's face almost broke.
Then he nodded.
"Stay safe, Father."
He opened the door just enough to slip through. The corridor beyond was dim, smoky, and empty.
Then Karl vanished deeper into the western basement of the Royal Palace.
Outside, before the palace gates, the gift Karl had left behind finally showed its full worth.
For several seconds after the grenade burst, the tank did not seem destroyed. It did not explode. It did not burn like a bonfire. It simply sat there, ugly and smoking, its turret frozen at an awkward angle while the crew inside shouted over one another in panic.
Then the gunner tried to traverse, causing metal to scream.
The turret shifted barely a hand's width, ground against warped steel, and locked solid. The main gun no longer followed orders. The machine gun stuttered once, coughed, and fell silent. Black smoke pushed up through the rear grille in thick, dirty breaths.
The driver tried to reverse back into the palace grounds, that was the mistake.
Deep inside the engine deck, fragments that had been driven through the grille were shaken loose by the sudden strain. Something caught. Something tore. Fan blades cracked against metal that should not have been there. A line split. Hot oil and fuel sprayed where they were never meant to spray, and the engine answered with a coughing roar that turned almost immediately into choking smoke.
A thin flame licked up from the rear deck, then another. The tank was not dead, but it was crippled.
At the edge of Karl's ruined manor, Captain Dieter saw it.
He rose from behind the shattered garden wall, dust and blood streaking his black armor, and stared through the smoke at the iron beast that had been tearing his master's house apart only moments before. Its turret was jammed. Its engine was coughing. The crew inside was no longer hunting. They were trying to survive.
Dieter's eyes sharpened.
"Herr Karl did it," he breathed.
Then his voice rose into a command.
"Second Company! The tank is disabled!"
Black helmets turned toward him from windows, hedges, cellar vents, and broken walls.
"This is the opening he bought us!" Dieter roared. "Suppress the palace walls, keep their heads down! First section, with me! We move now!"
The answer came at once.
Karl's manor erupted in disciplined fire. Carbines cracked from the upper floors. A machine gun hammered from a reinforced corner window. Grenades burst near the palace gate and drove Royal Guards back. Men on the battlements ducked as bullets sparked from stone around them.
Dieter vaulted the broken garden wall first. Others followed.
Black-armored men of Second Company rose from the ruins of the manor and charged across the open street, not in a parade line, not in glory, but in a hard, low rush through smoke, dust, and splintered stone. Behind them, their brothers kept firing. Ahead of them, the crippled tank coughed smoke beside the palace gate like a wounded beast no longer able to turn its head.
The street that no man had been able to cross was open for one breath, and Dieter meant to spend that breath well.
"Forward!" he shouted. "Into the palace!"
And the Eternal Guard ran for the gates.