The sky above Poland was the color of ash, a bruised dawn smeared across the horizon as German columns surged forward. The invasion had begun with bombers shrieking overhead, artillery pounding villages into rubble, the earth trembling beneath the relentless advance of steel. To the Reich, it was triumph. To Christian, it was the sound of the world breaking.
He sat in the back of a rattling convoy truck, pressed between other Shadows, his uniform stiff, his pistol heavy on his hip. None of them spoke. Their faces were carved masks of discipline, but the silence was not pride; it was fear. Poland was their first true battlefield. The training yards and shadow games were over. Now they would kill or be killed.
Herr Müller rode in the lead car. His presence needed no announcement. Christian could feel it, a cold gravity that pulled at every man, keeping them aligned, keeping them afraid.
The convoy rolled into the outskirts of Warsaw by dusk. Smoke already rose from the city. Bombing raids had shattered entire blocks, houses reduced to jagged skeletons, streets littered with broken carts, broken glass, broken bodies. Christian stepped down onto the cobblestones, boots crunching over debris. The smell hit him instantly—smoke, blood, and something acrid that seared the throat.
"Welcome to the heart of resistance," Müller said quietly, surveying the ruins with eyes that glimmered like knives. "The city will resist longer than the rest. That is why you are here."
The Shadows were not frontline soldiers. Their purpose was more insidious: infiltration, sabotage, assassination. They slipped into cracks where armies could not reach. Müller split them into small units, sending each into different sectors of the battered city.
Christian was assigned three men—Bauer, Kappel, and Jansen. Jansen gave Christian a grim smile as they moved into the rubble-strewn streets. "Feels like the city's alive," he murmured. "Alive and screaming." Christian didn't answer. He kept his eyes sharp, pistol ready. Every shadow in the ruins seemed to whisper danger.
By nightfall, they reached their assigned quarter.
The orders were simple: root out Polish command nodes, disrupt communication lines, eliminate targets of value. Yet when Christian's unit settled into a bombed-out townhouse as their temporary post, Müller himself appeared in the doorway, his cane clicking against the stone floor.
"You four will listen carefully," Müller said, his voice low but searing. "The Polish army resists with courage. Too much courage. Your task is to carve holes in their spirit. Officers, messengers, priests—anyone who gives them strength. Cut them out."
His gaze fixed on Christian.
"And remember: the eyes of the Shadows are everywhere. Do not stumble. Do not falter. Or you will join Weiss in the dirt."
Christian stiffened, memories of the courtyard execution flashing before him. He nodded once, the motion tight. "Yes, Herr Müller."
Müller's lips curled into the faintest shadow of a smile before he departed.
The next days were a blur of fire and whispers. Christian moved through alleys, slipping past barricades, following trails of intelligence passed down from informants or gleaned from captured documents. He killed quickly, silently, with a pistol muffled by cloth or a blade between ribs.
But the city did not break. If anything, Warsaw seemed to grow fiercer with each death. Civilians carried water to soldiers. Children ran messages under shellfire. Churches opened their doors to the wounded. It gnawed at Christian. He admired their stubborn defiance, this refusal to crumble. But admiration was dangerous. To admire the enemy was weakness and weakness was death.
One evening, as the unit huddled in their ruined hideout, Jansen leaned close and whispered something reckless. "Have you heard the name Canaris?" Christian frowned. "The Admiral? Head of Abwehr?"
Jansen nodded, his eyes flicking to the doorway to ensure Bauer and Kappel were out of earshot. "They say he doesn't believe in all this. That he thinks Hitler's madness will drown the Reich. Some say he works to delay, to sabotage from within."
Christian's heart jolted. Whispers of doubt inside the Reich itself? It seemed unthinkable. Yet Jansen's expression was deadly serious.
"Careful," Christian said quietly. "Words like that could see you shot before dawn."
"I know," Jansen muttered, running a hand through his ash-dusted hair. "But sometimes I wonder… if men like Canaris are right, then what the hell are we doing here?" "Let's just do our jobs and go back home, okay?" came Christian's reply.
But the question lodged itself in Christian's mind, sharp as glass. He thought of Kristina, her pleading eyes when she begged him to run away. He thought of Müller, his cane tapping like a death knell, his warning that only death freed a Shadow. Between them, Christian stood on a blade's edge—duty on one side, love on the other, and no path to safety.
The battles intensified. Warsaw's defense hardened. The Polish forces dug in, refusing to yield despite the Luftwaffe's relentless bombardments. Each day, Christian's unit hunted officers and scouts, but each night he lay awake, staring at the shattered ceiling, wondering if Müller had been right: perhaps death truly was the only exit from this labyrinth of blood.
Still, something within him shifted. The brutality he carried out no longer shocked him. His hands were steady. His blade precise. A month ago, he would have flinched at Weiss's execution. Now, he barely blinked when his knife opened a Polish officer's throat. The Shadows were shaping him into what Müller desired: a creature who could move in darkness without conscience.
Yet in the depths of his mind, Kristina's voice remained like a fragile light. And Jansen's whisper of Canaris's doubt flickered beside it, dangerous but strangely hopeful.
The storm around Warsaw raged on, and Christian knew the fire consuming the city was only the beginning.
The nights were the worst. The guns never ceased, artillery thundering against the city walls like the heartbeat of a monster too vast to kill. Christian had begun to measure time not by hours or days, but by bombardments. The city lived in fragments: an explosion, then silence, then another explosion. Warsaw bled. Its people starved, yet they fought like wolves cornered and desperate.
Christian and the Shadows were ordered to grind them down.
A week into the siege, Müller assigned Christian to lead a covert raid on the railway lines still under Polish control. Intelligence suggested the Poles were using a hidden route at night to bring in supplies from the east.
Christian and three others crept through the shattered suburbs, their boots crunching on glass, the moonlight fractured through smoke. They moved like phantoms, their faces smeared with soot. When they reached the tracks, Christian spotted figures in the distance—civilians, not soldiers. Women unloading crates of food, children carrying bundles smaller than themselves.
He froze. The mission was clear: destroy the line, kill anyone nearby to prevent word from spreading. Jansen leaned close, whispering, "A few men guarding this area. Not Soldiers. Orders?" Christian's pulse thundered in his ears. Müller's voice echoed in memory: Doubt is weakness. Steel must not pity.
The decision came swiftly. "Do it," Christian ordered. Gunfire tore through the night. The civilians dropped where they stood, bodies crumpling in the dirt, crates spilling grain that glimmered faintly under the moon. The children never screamed; they were cut down too quickly. Christian laid the charges himself. When the railway line exploded minutes later, fire lit the corpses like grotesque candles. He watched the flames and felt nothing. Or perhaps he felt too much—so much that his body locked it away in some deep chamber he would never open again.
Two nights later, another order came. Polish couriers were slipping past German patrols, carrying coded messages to pockets of resistance. The Shadows were to intercept one. Christian stalked the cobblestone alleys until he found him—a boy no older than Christian himself, sprinting through the ruins with a satchel strapped tight across his chest. His face was pale, determined, eyes sharp with courage.
Christian gave chase.
The boy ran fast, dodging rubble, vaulting fences. But Christian was faster. He tackled him hard into the mud, pinning him down. "Please!" the boy gasped, fighting to keep hold of the satchel. "My family…" Christian silenced him with a blade to the throat. The boy's body stilled. Christian tore the satchel open and found letters, coded signals, orders for Polish units to regroup near the river. Another victory. Another ghost added to the crowd haunting him.
When he returned the documents to Müller, the older man studied him with satisfaction. "Efficient," Müller said. "Cold. You are learning."
Christian bowed his head. But later, alone, he could still feel the warmth of the boy's blood on his hands.
By mid-September, Warsaw still stood. German fury grew. Müller escalated.
This time, the Shadows were ordered not into secrecy, but into spectacle. Christian's unit was tasked with executing captured partisans in a public square—meant to terrorize the civilians into surrender.
The prisoners were dragged before them: gaunt men in ragged uniforms, dirt-streaked faces. They did not beg. They stood with their backs straight, eyes burning with defiance. A crowd gathered. Mothers clutched children. Old men spat curses in Polish.
Christian stood at the front, pistol heavy in his hand. "Do it," Müller ordered, his voice carrying across the square.
One by one, Christian raised the pistol and fired. The men fell. Blood seeped into the cobblestones. The crowd did not scatter. They did not scream. They stood silent, their stares heavier than any bullet, their hatred hotter than the flames devouring the city. For the first time, Christian felt the weight of eyes, not orders. He wondered if their silence would echo longer than their screams.
Christian's efficiency did not go unnoticed. Müller praised him in public, but in private his eyes lingered too long. As if searching for cracks in the steel he had forged. One evening, as Christian sharpened his knife by candlelight, Jansen leaned against the wall and whispered, "He's testing you."
Christian glanced up. "What do you mean?"
"These missions. The executions. The slaughter of peasants. He's not just using you, he's watching. He wants to know if you'll break." Christian said nothing. But deep down, he knew Jansen was right. Worse still, he knew Müller was not the only one watching. Rumors of Canaris, the admiral who whispered of doubts in the Reich, had reached even the lower ranks. Somewhere, someone else might be measuring Christian's silence, his hesitation, his choices.
And so he walked a razor's edge too obedient and he would become a monster, too hesitant and Müller would see him as weak, perhaps expendable.
The final mission of September came on the eve of Warsaw's collapse.
Christian and Jansen were ordered to infiltrate the city's last stronghold, an old fortress where Polish officers and civilians alike had gathered. The goal: identify and eliminate the commanding officer.
They slipped inside under cover of night. The fortress smelled of sweat, blood, and desperation. Families huddled in corners. Soldiers clutched rifles with trembling hands. Children slept on the floor beside dying candles.
Christian found the officer in a side chamber; a tall man with a ragged uniform and eyes like stone. He sat at a table, writing by lamplight. He did not look up when Christian entered. "You're the one they sent eh?" the officer said in accented German.
Christian froze.
The officer set down his pen and finally met his gaze. "I won't talk so don't bother asking any questions." "I didn't come to ask questions." Christian raised his pistol. His hand was steady. The officer noticed it and smiled faintly.
"Then, let's get this over with, shall we?" The officer did not flinch. He only closed his eyes, as if ready.
Christian pulled the trigger. The shot echoed through the chamber, followed by silence. The officer slumped forward, ink and blood spilling together across the page.
Christian stared at him for a long time before leaving. His chest was hollow, his mind a storm.
When he returned to Müller, he handed in the report. Müller smiled coldly. "Warsaw is finished," he said. "The Reich has triumphed. And you, Christian… you have become what I always knew you could."
But as Warsaw fell on September 27th, Christian knew the truth. He had not triumphed. He had not won. He had become the hunted and the hunter. He had become a boy lost in shadows, embracing the dark because the light had long since abandoned him.