Re: Blood and Iron

Chapter 635: The March of Titans

The torches rose with a sound like judgment, roaring into life at either side of the marble gate, fifty meters tall and belching flame into the summer night.

Their light bathed the stadium in a golden-white glare that turned stone to ivory and shadows to ink.

If Olympus had been reborn on Earth, it would have looked like this, fashioned not by gods, but by men who dared to reach higher.

Every flag in the world flew, but none so high nor so steady as the crimson-white-black of the Reich, commanding the wind like a general commands silence.

And silence there was, rolling across the stands not out of respect, but reverence, a hush born in the pit of the stomach, the kind of silence one gives only to things far larger than themselves.

The announcer’s voice echoed across the stadium in four languages, but only one message mattered: the Games had begun.

The German team emerged onto the field.

They did not march like athletes. They advanced like a phalanx, shoulders square, heads high, legs moving with perfect, collective discipline.

There was no drift in their line. No glancing around. No swagger. Just purpose.

Their uniforms were blindingly white, trimmed in black and silver. The cut was practical, reinforced in key seams, experimental mesh beneath for moisture and movement.

Leading them was Heidemarie Weiss, fencing champion and decathlete, tall and whip-lean.

Her hair was braided tight beneath her cap. Her right hand, scarred and calloused, gripped the flagpole not like a banner, but like a spear. Her face betrayed nothing.

Behind her came the others, boxers, archers, wrestlers, gymnasts, swimmers, men and women shaped by three decades of uninterrupted cultivation.

There were no wasted bodies. No weak links. No genetic coin-flips. This was a generation not born, but engineered.

They did not wave.

They did not smile.

They arrived, and the stadium shuddered with it.

High above, in the Imperial Box, Bruno sat in full dress uniform, medals conspicuously absent.

He wore the simple, field grey of the General Staff, and yet he outshone every gold-dripping marshal in the row. His presence was not celebrated. It was understood.

He did not watch with pride. He watched with calculation. This was not a victory. This was an opening move.

To his left, the Japanese delegation murmured behind folded fans. To his right, the British ambassador stared hard into his brandy, as if looking for answers in the glass.

Across the stadium, FDR sat stiffly, his hands folded tight beneath the table, knuckles pale. He did not applaud.

An aide leaned into Bruno’s ear.

“French journalists are already calling it the March of Titans, sir.”

Bruno’s lips twitched. Not a smile. Something colder. Sharper.

“Then let the world tremble.”

Down below, the final torchbearer, a fifteen-year-old cadet, third-generation Academy, sprinted up the steps to the torch platform.

His posture was flawless. His face was flushed, but his expression was carved in stone.

He planted the torch, and flame spiraled into the sky, not orange, but white and blue, chemically engineered to burn hotter and brighter than any in history.

The crowd gasped.

A new anthem swelled through the stadium, not the national hymn, but the Imperial Cadence March, commissioned to commemorate the victory in Spain. B

Brass and drum, regal but relentless, echoed through the night.

The flame roared. The march played. And across five continents, a single, terrible understanding took root:

Germany was not just prepared for war.

It had raised a generation trained from birth to win it.

The torch had barely settled into its towering cradle of flame before the crowd’s reverent awe turned to something far more primal.

They wanted blood.

Not in the crude way of lesser nations, with screams for violence and broken bones.

No, this was a more civilized hunger, an appetite for supremacy made manifest. They didn’t want sport. They wanted to see someone fold. And they would.

The lights dimmed until the stadium was nothing but a ring of white flame and silence, carved from the darkness like an arena for gods.

In the red corner: René Dupré, France’s great hope in the middleweight division. Tall, athletic, confident.

Draped in the tricolor and burdened with expectation.

His face was the sort that played well in newspapers, sharp-jawed, photogenic.

His mouth had gotten him there as much as his fists.

In interviews, he had called Germany’s Olympic program “an assembly line of trained dogs” and dismissed their dominance as the result of “discipline without spirit.”

He might have believed it. For a moment, the French did too.

In the blue corner: Rainer König, champion of the Reich. Shorter. Thicker. Dense in a way that made every movement seem slower than it truly was, until it wasn’t.

His stare never wavered. His gloves never twitched. He stood like a man waiting for the bell not to begin a fight, but to end one.

High above, seated in the Imperial box, Bruno watched from the center seat, shoulders square, expression unreadable.

He was flanked on either side by his daughters, Eva, aglow in silver with that eternal wolfish grin, and Elsa, ice-pale and inscrutable, her expression somewhere between mild amusement and glacial disinterest.

“Well?” Eva asked, casting a sly look across her sister. “Fifty marks says the Frenchman folds before the second round.”

Elsa blinked once. “You’re married to the future Kaiser and you still care about a year’s worth of our old allowance?”

Eva’s grin grew wider. “That’s exactly why I care. Nostalgia.”

Elsa rolled her eyes, as if the very idea were immature. “It’s practically pocket change to you now.”

“Then give it to me,” Eva said, smirking.

Elsa sighed, already regretting this. Yet her eyes were cold and calculating.

“I’ll up the stakes and double the wager. I doubt he’ll last beyond the first minute.”

Bruno said nothing, but the corner of his mouth ticked upward. This wasn’t the first time.

In fact, the scene played like a memory, like a ghost pressing its weight onto the present.

He was back in 1918, watching two girls in cadet skirts squabbling over their first serious wager.

Eva, convinced that a match couldn’t possibly end in seconds. Elsa, already seeing the rhythm of it unfold long before the bell.

And just like then, Elsa had won.

The bell rang.

René opened fast, jabbing with textbook form. Clean. Sharp. His footwork crisp. His weight balanced. Most would’ve applauded it.

König didn’t bite.

He didn’t dance, didn’t feint. He simply walked past it, slipping punches in a way that made him ever closer with each moment.

He didn’t parry. He invaded. The kind of forward pressure most fighters avoided, because you had to be better to use it. König was.

The Frenchman kept firing. He wasn’t used to someone walking through clean technique like it was nothing.

König slipped inside.

The first real punch was a hook to the ribs that landed like a crowbar through drywall.

René’s face twisted in confusion before the pain even caught up. Then it did. He reeled, coughing, his hands dropping instinctively.

Too low.

König answered with a short, sharp uppercut. The Frenchman’s head snapped backward, nose erupting in blood.

The crowd gasped. French officials rose to their feet, panic thinly veiled. The referee hovered like a man already writing the ending in his head.

René tried to clinch. König shoved him aside, pivoted, and drove an overhand right straight into his temple.

René dropped like someone had pulled the plug. Dead weight. Lights out.

The referee didn’t bother counting to ten.

The stadium erupted.

Back in the box, Eva stood, stunned. Her mouth hung open. A minute had been generous.

Elsa, ever the ice queen, extended her hand without even looking. The gesture was silent but said more than words ever could.

Eva flushed, scowling as she reached into her bag and slapped a hundred marks into Elsa’s palm.

“You’re insufferable.”

Elsa slipped the notes into her purse with practiced ease. “And you’re predictable.”

“You’re both louder than the crowd,” Bruno said flatly, though not without a hint of amusement. His eyes never left the ring.

Across the stadium, a French general stormed out of his box without a word.

A British attaché scribbled furiously into a leather-bound notebook. An American industrialist whispered into his aide’s ear, pale beneath his Panama hat.

Elsa watched them all like a predator beneath the surface ice.

Bruno finally leaned back in his seat, hands steepled once again.

He wasn’t watching the match anymore. That was over.

The real battle was happening elsewhere now, in the minds of those who’d just witnessed the champion of a sovereign nation get beaten unconscious in front of a hundred thousand spectators and half the diplomatic corps of Earth.

“They’ll ask if we’re ready now,” he said, mostly to himself.

And as the crowd surged and roared and the French boxer was carried off the mat like a broken toy, Bruno closed his eyes for the briefest second.

“And they’ll know we are.”