Time, as it often did around Oskar, refused to behave.
The year had turned.
The clocks had rung.
Fireworks had bloomed and died.
And yet, somehow, at eight in the morning, Oskar von Hohenzollern had not slept even a single hour.
The palace lay quiet now, wrapped in the soft exhaustion of celebration. The children were gone—spirited away to a separate wing under Heddy and Karl's watchful eyes, bundled in blankets, dreaming of noise and light and sugar.
Oskar's room, however, looked like the aftermath of a minor civil war.
Two women lay sprawled across the bed like victorious invaders.
Tanya—young, fierce, and utterly relentless—had claimed most of the blankets and one of Oskar's arms. Anna—older, calmer, and deceptively gentle—rested on his other side, breathing slow and deep, hair fanned across the pillow like she had simply decided this was where she belonged.
The air was thick with heat, sweat, and the unmistakable scent of exhaustion.
A small table lay on its side.
A chair had lost a leg.
The carpet had… suffered.
Oskar lay between them, staring at the ceiling, chest rising and falling like a bellows. He felt like a man who had just wrestled two very determined opponents and lost in the most pleasant way possible.
Eventually—eventually—even he had limits.
When both women were finally, undeniably asleep, Oskar carefully extracted himself from the wreckage. He stood there for a moment, massive and bare, surveying the room with the faint, dazed pride of a man who had survived something impressive.
"…I need a bath," he muttered.
The bathroom welcomed him with cool marble and silence. He turned the taps and let hot water pour into the tub, steam rising like mercy. His shoulders sagged as he leaned against the porcelain.
Peace.
Or so he thought.
Soft footsteps crossed the threshold.
"Your Highness?" came a gentle, uncertain voice. "May I… help you? Perhaps… wash your back?"
Oskar turned.
Cecilie stood there, wrapped in a towel, cheeks burning red.
She was tall—taller than most men—long-legged, slender, composed even in embarrassment. Yet standing before Oskar, she still had to tilt her head up, blue eyes shimmering with nerves and something far more dangerous than shyness.
Hope.
Oskar felt it instantly. He had felt it for weeks.
And for just a heartbeat, he wanted to give in.
Instead, he sighed.
"I'm sorry, Cecilie," he said gently. "I can't. Not right now."
The words landed harder than he intended.
She flinched like she'd been struck, turning away too fast, humiliation chasing her steps. He reached out immediately, catching her shoulder.
"No—no, not like that," he said quickly. "Please. It's not you."
She stood with her back to him, shoulders tight.
"…Am I not beautiful enough?" she asked quietly.
That one hit him square in the chest.
Oskar froze—then, of all things, let out a tired laugh and rubbed his face.
"No," he said honestly. "You're… very beautiful. It's just that—"
He hesitated, then shrugged helplessly.
"—my balls are extremely sore right now."
Silence.
Then—
Cecilie froze.
And burst out laughing.
Real laughter. Bright, startled, almost relieved.
"Oh," she said, wiping her eyes. "I see. So that's the situation."
He nodded, dead serious. "Anna and Tanya declared war."
She shook her head, still smiling. "Then… just a wash?"
Oskar considered it for exactly half a second.
"…Alright."
The bath became something else entirely—not lustful, not hurried, but strangely intimate. Steam curled around them as Cecilie washed his back with careful hands, her touch respectful yet unashamed.
At one point, Oskar leaned back and closed his eyes.
At another, Cecilie rested against him, her head against his chest, listening to his breathing like it was something solid she could hold onto.
He even drifted off for a moment, half-asleep in the water, the world distant and warm.
For the first time, royalty did not feel like performance.
It felt like shelter.
He knew why she was here.
Cecilie stood on the thinnest ice at court—her family watched, her father isolated, her future one scandal away from collapse. If the truth about the assassination plot ever fully surfaced, she and her child could lose everything overnight.
Oskar understood that kind of fear.
So for now, he let her lean against him.
Not as a prince seeking conquest.
But as a pillar she could rest on.
The moment didn't last.
Life rarely allowed him that courtesy.
Because January 1st came at him like a hammer.
Oskar's bath-time doze ended abruptly—not with a knock, but with the distant, rising noise of a city waking to something new. Bells, engines, shouting. Potsdam was already moving.
Muscle Motors had opened its doors.
The B-Class went on sale that morning.
By the time Oskar arrived—late, hair still damp, Eternal Guards fanning out around him like dark iron wings—the damage was already done. Or rather, the miracle.
At the Potsdam dealership, Adolf Hitler, last year's Employee of the Month and now general manager, was already deep in the chaos. Contracts were being signed faster than clerks could stack paper. Customers pressed against the counters, voices overlapping, money changing hands with the frantic energy of people who feared that if they hesitated, the future itself might sell out before them.
Oskar barely had time to make his opening announcement.
It didn't matter.
A glimpse of him—towering, calm, flanked by the Eternal Guard—was enough. The crowd roared. Some cheered. Some simply stared, stunned, as if a figure from the newspapers had stepped out of ink and into steel and flesh.
By nightfall, the numbers were absurd.
Ten thousand Muscle Motors vehicles—gone.
Not promised. Not reserved.
Sold.
Across Germany. Across borders. Cleaned out in a single day.
Hitler and the other salesmen, exhausted and half-delirious, were sent home with orders to sleep for a week. There was nothing left to sell anyway.
Half the vehicles vanished straight into government hands—imperial ministries, state administrations, police forces, postal services. The rest were devoured by industrialists, bankers, and merchants who understood status the moment it rolled past them on four wheels.
Thousands more buyers were left waiting.
And they were not patient.
Orders flooded into Muscle Motors headquarters in Stuttgart like young people into a bar ten minutes before closing. Telegrams stacked up. Clerks stopped pretending to keep things tidy. Paul Daimler stood over the ledgers, staring at the figures with the hollow expression of a man watching a dam fail upstream.
The good news was simple.
Demand was no longer a concern.
The bad news was terrifying.
To fulfill existing orders alone, Muscle Motors would have to scale production to fifty thousand vehicles per month—and that was before foreign markets truly opened their mouths.
After a brief, stunned consultation with Oskar, Daimler did the only rational thing a man riding a tidal wave could do.
He built bigger.
Construction of a new northern plant was accelerated immediately. Supply chains were stretched and then reinforced. Tooling orders tripled. Engineers stopped seeing their families. Nobody slept.
While civilian sales exploded, Oskar's attention shifted—inevitably—back to the military.
He became, much to the amusement of some and the irritation of others, a relentless salesman and an insufferable teacher.
He wanted the army to buy motorcycles.
He wanted them to buy trucks.
He wanted them to stop thinking in terms of marching columns and start thinking in terms of movement, supply, speed, and firepower.
He talked—endlessly—about motorised logistics. About why a truck that arrived on time mattered more than a battalion that arrived late. About why future wars would not be won by who could march the furthest, but by who could move, resupply, and strike the fastest.
Sometimes he spoke of trench warfare, sometimes of mobile warfare, sometimes of doctrines that did not yet have proper names. But the core idea never changed.
Replace muscle power with machine power.
Replace red blood with black blood—oil.
Profit mattered, yes. It always did.
But profit was secondary.
What mattered was survival.
The army of the future would need speed, armour, and quick firepower, or it would simply be chewed apart by the possible wars that might have been coming.
January 1st was only the beginning.
By late January, Oskar once more sat on a military demonstration field, high above the mud and wire, on a makeshift wooden viewing platform built for men who had spent their lives believing war should still look like parades.
The field below was wide and ugly in the way real modern training grounds always were: churned earth, patches of half-dead grass, bushes trampled flat, and mud everywhere. Stakes and barbed wire snarled in front of three crude trench lines carved into the ground like open scars. Inside the trenches, scarecrow dummies hunched behind parapets, wooden rifles and mock machine guns clutched in stiff hands, steel helmets pulled low as if waiting for bullets that would never come.
It was not a place for ceremony.
It was not a festival ground.
It was a rehearsal for a war no one in the stands truly wanted to imagine—
except Oskar, who imagined it constantly.
The last demonstration, with motorcycles, had been revolutionary but simple.
Today, he had brought something larger. Something heavier.
A reviewing platform had been erected at the field's edge, framed with thick timber, steel supports, and panes of crude bullet-resistant glass. It was not elegant, not courtly—but it was practical. Built to stop shrapnel, not impress wives.
The generals sat below it as before, arranged in orderly rows like students at a lecture. Old uniforms. Old medals. Old ideas, many of them.
Above them sat Oskar.
Massive. Calm. Unavoidable.
On his left knee sat his eldest son, Imperiel, bundled in warm clothes, clutching a bottle with both hands and drinking with fierce concentration. On his right sat Durin, Karl's boy, smaller but no less attentive, his bottle momentarily forgotten as he stared at the field with wide eyes.
Heddy sat beside Oskar, smiling despite herself, watching the two babies tolerate one another like small allies. At some point they had exchanged bottles, apparently deciding this was fair. Durin wore a thick wool outfit styled like a knight's armor—his cap shaped like a steel helmet despite being soft and harmless. Imperiel, by contrast, looked like a tiny tyrant, his cap crowned, his expression already judgmental.
Oskar's placement was not subtle.
It never was.
Some of the older officers pretended not to notice.
Some noticed and hated it.
None dared comment.
Standing guard around the platform—silent, immobile, unmistakable—was the second message.
The Eternal Guard.
Once, they had been little more than an experiment: two dozen men pulled from Oskar's personal protection detail, formed around Captains Conrad and Dieter. Now they were something else entirely. Oskar intended for each captain to command a full company one day—two hundred men apiece—but recruitment took time, training took longer, and background checks were merciless.
Every man had been handpicked. Chosen by the captains, reviewed by Oskar and his household, bound by loyalty, salary, and a discipline that made traditional officers uneasy. Even Priest Arnold had been involved—testing resolve, conviction, and willingness to stand between Oskar's family and death.
They were no longer a curiosity.
They were a formation.
Two full companies in the making, over a hundred men already, armored in gray steel, faces masked, movements synchronized. Squads and platoons aligned with mechanical precision.
Two captains stood at their core—pillars of Oskar's "new soldier" idea—men who looked less like palace guards and more like warriors borrowed from a future that had arrived early and without permission.
Then the horn sounded.
Not a trumpet.
A sharp, commanding whistle.
The field went still.
And then came the rumble.
Engines.
Heavy. Disciplined. Controlled.
The ground itself seemed to move as the sound rolled forward.
Five trucks crested the rise together, wheels biting into mud, bodies rattling with restrained power. They did not glide. They did not prance like horses. They advanced with the indifference of machines, unimpressed by grass, wire, spikes, or uneven terrain.
From hatches cut into the truck cabins, armored soldiers rose up, machine guns braced, voices shouting suppression as they opened fire on the trench lines. Blank rounds cracked and roared, echoing across the field.
Imperiel sucked excitedly on his bottle.
Durin dropped his entirely, staring in awe.
Heddy covered her mouth, stunned by the noise and the sheer brutality of the display.
There was nothing romantic about it.
Oskar did not shout.
He didn't need to.
His voice carried calmly through the platform, the tone of a man explaining something painfully obvious.
"Gentlemen," he said, hands clasped behind his back, "this is Muscle Motors' latest heavy-duty military truck."
Below, the trucks crushed through the first belt of barbed wire, flattening scarecrow dummies that stood exposed like heroes from older wars.
"It can carry heavy loads at speed," Oskar continued. "It can transport infantry, tow guns, and move supplies where railways end and roads stop pretending they exist."
The generals watched closely now. Many noticed the chains wrapped around the truck tires—designed to bite into mud and refuse to slip.
Some leaned forward.
Some sat rigid.
Moltke's face remained carved from stone, as if even acknowledgment were surrender.
Tirpitz, by contrast, watched with a thin, approving smile.
The trucks did not slow as they reached the second obstacle belt.
Wire snarled before them like teeth.
The wheels hit it without hesitation.
Chain-wrapped rubber and steel met barbed wire and stakes in a grinding clash. The wire buckled, snapped, dragged beneath the chassis. For a moment, machine and field wrestled—weight against resistance, torque against entanglement.
Then the field lost.
The trucks broke through.
And then the second phase began.
From the passenger seats of the trucks, men rolled down armored shutters and firing slits. Rifles cracked in controlled bursts, muzzle flashes stabbing toward the trench lines. Straw bodies jerked and collapsed as bullets tore through them. Grenades followed—short, practiced throws—tumbling into the dugouts and corners where a real enemy would have hidden.
Then the trucks braked hard.
Back hatches slammed open.
Figures spilled out.
The Eternal Guard moved with practiced rhythm—fast, controlled, brutally efficient. Not a mob. Not a charge. A system.
They spread out on both sides of the vehicles, weapons up, boots sinking into mud without hesitation, advancing into the trenches like men who had already accepted that war was ugly—and had decided to be uglier than their enemies just long enough to survive.
The dummies were straw and cloth, steel helmets perched on wooden necks, mock rifles clutched in stiff hands. The Guard treated them as if they mattered.
Rifles barked.
Grenades vanished into corners.
Bayonets ended what bullets began.
There was no shouting. No heroic posing. Only swift, efficient violence—like butchers who had been given uniforms and a timetable.
A few generals flinched.
Not at the killing of straw, but at the attitude.
They had seen hints of this before during the motorcycle demonstrations.
This was worse.
Colder.
More deliberate.
Unmistakably modern.
Oskar let the moment linger—then deepened the lesson.
Farther down the field, new trucks appeared.
Not loaded with men.
Loaded with purpose.
Two fuel trucks rolled forward, tanks full, valves cracked open just enough to leave a dark, glistening trail behind them. At the last moment, the drivers threw themselves clear—rolling into ditches and cover lines with the instinct of men who had been told, very clearly, that dying today would be counterproductive.
The trucks plunged into the trenches and lodged there.
Someone lit the fuel trail.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then the fire ran.
Flame raced along the ground like a living thing and reached the trucks. The field went silent—every man diving for cover—
—and then the world cracked open.
A wall of fire erupted upward. Smoke and heat punched the air. The shockwave rolled across the field, rattling the viewing platform, making even seasoned artillerymen stiffen at the raw, primitive force of sudden flame.
Imperiel dropped his bottle.
Faces glowed orange. Eyes widened. Mouths went dry.
Almost immediately, whistles shrieked.
More Guards surged forward, exploiting the gap—charging through smoke and fire as if the inferno were not a barrier but a curtain. The burning wreckage became cover. The chaos became opportunity.
Oskar was fairly certain he had instructed them to demonstrate refueling, not to perform what looked suspiciously like a coordinated immolation.
Nevertheless, his expression did not change.
"Fuel is power," he said calmly, as if commenting on the weather. "And fuel is danger. You can use it to move armies—or, as you see, to break an enemy's lines with excellent precision."
He let the fire burn.
Even men who hated Oskar's methods understood one thing perfectly in that moment:
The future battlefield would not be orderly lines of men.
It would be madness.
When the smoke thinned and the heat shimmered away, the Guard were already moving again.
More trucks rolled forward. They halted in disciplined lines. Men dismounted smoothly—platoons unfolding from steel boxes instead of scattering like herds.
They assaulted again.
Faster.
Cleaner.
Within minutes, the trench line was "cleared." Imperial flags rose above the churned earth, snapping in the cold air.
And there it was—the real point—hanging in the air like gunpowder:
A mechanized force could arrive, strike, and overwhelm before traditional formations had even finished arranging themselves.
Oskar shifted slightly on the platform, steadying the two wide-eyed babies on his knees, and looked down at the benches beneath him.
"Gentlemen," he said calmly, "this is Muscle Motors' latest heavy-duty military truck."
He paused.
"It carries one and a half tons at forty kilometers per hour. Or a full platoon of equipped soldiers. It tows artillery. It moves supplies where rail ends and roads stop pretending to exist."
The generals watched in silence.
"Germany has an excellent railway network," Oskar continued. "But that advantage ends the moment we cross borders. Western Europe is manageable. The East European Plain is not."
He let the words settle.
"If we ever campaign eastward, logistics will decide everything. Trucks will not win battles—but they will decide who gets to fight."
General Waldeck nodded slowly. "Impressive."
Moltke's expression remained hard. "Reliability. And fuel. Horses eat grass. Trucks do not."
Oskar met his gaze without blinking.
"No machine is flawless," he said. "But these are reliable. Minor faults are field-repairable. Major failures are unlikely. With trained mechanics, spare parts—and as you saw—fuel transport, losses remain acceptable."
Waldeck turned slightly toward Moltke. "One hundred trucks per division would change everything."
Moltke frowned. "Budgets are tight."
Oskar smiled faintly.
"Market price is eight thousand marks," he said. "For the army—six thousand five hundred."
Silence.
Not awkward silence.
Calculating silence.
Men adding numbers. Measuring futures. Deciding what kind of war they were willing to buy.
In the end, the Imperial Army did what it always did when offered progress with a price tag.
It compromised with itself.
After deliberation, the generals approved the purchase of twenty thousand trucks from Muscle Motors—paid in five installments, because even an empire could only tighten its belt so far before it snapped.
On paper, it was a triumph.
In reality, Oskar knew—
It was nowhere near enough.
If war came, Germany would not mobilize a few neat columns of men.
It would mobilize millions.
Three and a half million at least—likely more—an army alone pushing past three million bodies that would need feeding, arming, moving, and keeping alive.
That meant roads choking with wagons.
That meant horses dying in mud by the thousands.
That meant men starving while ammunition sat twelve miles behind them because a mule had gone lame and someone had miscounted oats.
Twenty thousand trucks was a start.
It was not a solution.
But the real obstacle wasn't arithmetic.
It was politics.
Moltke the Younger still held the reins of the army. The open war between them had cooled since their first clash, but the relationship remained what it had become: strained, careful, and cold in the way that made cooperation possible and trust impossible.
Getting Moltke to accept the scale of mechanization Germany needed was like asking a cathedral to change its architecture because the roof leaked.
He could do it.
Eventually.
But not quickly.
And Oskar—Acting Crown Prince or not—could not simply replace the Chief of the General Staff as if he were firing a foreman.
Not yet.
So he did what he always did when he hit a wall he couldn't break in one blow:
He built around it.
First: reserves.
He instructed Muscle Motors to produce additional trucks quietly—stockpiled under civilian categories, folded into "commercial" inventories that could be redirected at a moment's notice. If war came, they could be delivered immediately—sold, requisitioned, even loaned—with payment due after victory.
The army would feel less pain now.
And it would remember who saved it later.
Second: civilian saturation.
The more trucks that rolled into private hands—firms, farms, city councils, transport companies—the easier the next step became. When war began, the state could requisition civilian vehicles in the name of national defense and suddenly the army's "shortage" would be padded by thousands of machines already broken in on German roads.
It wasn't ideal.
But it was real.
And real was what won wars.
The navy—predictably—joined in as well, purchasing five thousand trucks.
To sailors, trucks mattered less. Coastal bases could move heavy goods by ship. But the navy had always been Oskar's most willing partner, and it understood the larger truth: supporting Oskar meant feeding the machine that fed them.
It wasn't friendship.
It was dependence.
By now, the German navy and Oskar were so intertwined that the line between policy and partnership had blurred into something dangerously close to complicity.
On the ride back to Berlin, Oskar and Tirpitz shared a Muscle Motors B-Class, the interior smelling faintly of leather, oil, and something unmistakably new—the future, still warm from the engine.
Outside the windows, late-January fields slid past in gray-brown bands. Inside, the car was warm enough that Oskar very nearly drifted off again. He hadn't slept properly in days. New Year's had been a siege, and his women had treated him less like a man and more like a national production facility clearly overdue for expansion.
Heddy sat close—close enough that their shoulders touched—so she could hold little Durin on her lap and let him reach across to Imperiel, who sat on Oskar's knee. Opposite them sat Tirpitz, who was making a heroic effort to behave as though this were a perfectly ordinary car ride and not an exercise in controlled absurdity.
Heddy herself still hadn't quite processed the situation: sitting in a private automobile with Prince Oskar, the richest man in Germany and her husband's closest friend—and across from the State Secretary of the Navy, who was pretending not to notice babies conducting diplomacy at knee level.
On Oskar's lap, Imperiel leaned against his father's ribs, wrapped in thick winter cloth, gripping a small braided rope with both hands as if it were a sacred relic. Durin promptly seized the other end.
A tug-of-war ensued.
Every time the car hit a bump, tiny fingers tightened and faces scrunched with offended determination, as if both children were preparing to declare war on physics itself.
Tirpitz glanced at them once.
Then again.
The corner of his mouth twitched, uncertain whether the correct response was admiration, concern, or prayer.
This, Oskar thought, watching the two infants wrestle with existential seriousness, is what the court doesn't understand.
This was his real empire now.
Not titles. Not speeches.
Babies. Women.
And the endless logistics of keeping everyone fed, alive, and not crying at the same time.
He'd barely survived New Year's. He was still barely sleeping.
Tirpitz turned his gaze back to the window and exhaled.
"Your Highness," he said at last, sounding more tired than his uniform allowed, "the army's demand is clearly far greater. Twenty thousand trucks will not meet what they will need."
Oskar's jaw tightened.
If he could, he would have dragged Moltke onto the demonstration field and sat him down in the mud until the lesson finally soaked through bone and pride alike: mechanized warfare was the future, and horses were nostalgia with legs.
But Oskar was not the Emperor.
He was acting.
The word still tasted like an insult.
"There's nothing we can do about the number today," Oskar said flatly. "Father trusts Moltke too much. I'll buy what I need myself—equip the Eternal Guard fully—and stockpile for later purchases."
Imperiel made a small, deeply offended noise at the mention of Moltke, as if even infants disliked the name. Durin scowled and yanked the rope harder. Imperiel let go.
The rope snapped back and smacked Durin squarely in the face.
For half a second there was stunned silence.
Then crying.
Heddy gasped. Oskar and Tirpitz both looked down—
—and then Imperiel did something no one expected.
He leaned forward and wrapped his arms around Durin.
Durin froze.
Then accepted the hug and continued sobbing—but now more quietly, face buried against Imperiel's shoulder.
Oskar instinctively drew Heddy closer under his arm so the babies could be nearer, patting Imperiel's back in quiet approval. Imperiel settled, still glaring at Durin with violet-eyed seriousness, as if forgiveness did not preclude judgment.
Tirpitz watched the scene from the corner of his eye.
He knew Wilhelm II well—brilliant in flashes, stubborn by habit, and dangerously blind when loyalty turned into fixation. When the Kaiser trusted a man, he trusted him hard, even when evidence began to rot.
After a pause, Tirpitz said carefully, "If the opportunity arises, I could raise the issue again with His Majesty. With his wisdom—"
"No."
The word was calm. Absolute.
Tirpitz blinked.
Heddy froze as well, as if afraid the word might echo through the car and all the way back into the palace.
Oskar kept his eyes on the passing fields, voice steady, calculation sharp beneath it.
"If we argue with him again, it will only offend him," Oskar said. "And the navy cannot afford that. You cannot afford that. Pressing the issue leads nowhere."
The closeness between Tirpitz and Oskar already made Wilhelm uneasy. If Tirpitz began openly criticizing one of the Kaiser's favored men, the crack would widen into something dangerous.
Oskar wanted Tirpitz focused on ships.
On steel.
On dreadnoughts.
On victory at sea.
Not eaten alive by court politics.
Tirpitz held Oskar's gaze for a moment, then inclined his head.
"As you wish, Your Highness."
A beat passed.
Durin let out a small, sleepy gurgle and pressed his cheek into Heddy's coat, apparently bored by strategy. Imperiel followed suit, eyelids drooping, drifting into sleep on Oskar's lap. Heddy, exhausted herself, leaned shamelessly against Oskar's side.
Then Tirpitz—perhaps to lighten the air, perhaps because he could never resist poking at court absurdities—asked casually:
"By the way… this year, on the twenty-seventh of July, you come of age, don't you?"
Oskar blinked.
Then nodded.
Twenty.
A milestone on paper.
In reality, his mind carried decades more—memories stretching past forty—while this body remained young, brutal, resilient, capable of absorbing punishment and healing with unnatural speed.
Five years in this world.
Five years since rebirth.
Five years of dragging the century forward by its collar.
He had strengthened the navy beyond history's pace.
Mechanized industry.
Become Acting Crown Prince through blood, chaos, and accident.
None of those years were wasted.
And yet—
He was tired.
Not the tiredness of idleness.
The tiredness of a man whose days now consisted of councils, factories, scandals, babies, women, and the constant sense that at any moment someone would knock and demand more.
Sometimes he didn't dream of war.
He dreamed of silence.
Of iron.
Of a barbell in his hands.
Of sleep.
Not another ceremony.
Not another crisis.
Not another woman with trembling eyes asking to be saved.
Cecilie's face flickered through his thoughts—beautiful, nervous, lonely, dangerously close to him without being official.
He liked her.
He cared about her.
But he could not save everyone.
And the thought of adding another weight to the storm already surrounding him made his mind quietly beg for mercy.
Tirpitz smiled, amused.
"I hear His Majesty intends a grand ceremony for your coming of age," he said. "Officials, elites… and," his eyes gleamed, "a great many young and beautiful noble ladies who will suddenly discover a profound interest in your thoughts on railways and poetry."
He chuckled.
"And while you already have… certain attachments," he added delicately—then abandoned delicacy entirely—"the court would be delighted if you took a proper noble bride. For your image."
Oskar stared at him.
For a moment he couldn't decide whether to laugh or strangle the man.
"The Empire," he muttered, "really does believe the solution to every political problem is to throw another woman at it."
Tirpitz laughed, unbothered.
Oskar felt the familiar pressure tighten around his ribs.
A public ceremony meant attention.
Attention meant questions.
Questions meant the fragile structure of his private life creaking under weight it was never designed to bear.
So, for the rest of the journey, he did what he always did when anger threatened to rise.
He redirected.
He spoke to Tirpitz about diet.
About training.
About sleep.
About sailors lifting weights so they wouldn't shatter their backs under recoil, coal, and stress.
He even mentioned—casually—that he intended to drag Karl to Pump World and rebuild the man from the inside out.
Tirpitz listened with amused curiosity, like a statesman being lectured by a mad prince who treated muscle as policy.
Outside, the January road ran straight toward Berlin.
Inside, Oskar planned—quietly, relentlessly—how twenty thousand trucks would become merely the beginning.
And, just as quietly, he planned something harder still:
How to steal a few hours of peace from women, babies, and empire—
and spend them under iron.
This year, if nothing else, he intended to claim that much for himself.