"You still haven’t answered my question."

Werner narrowed his eyes.

"How are you here, Paul? How did you know I would be here?"

Paul’s gaze remained fixed on the night sky.

"I never told you, did I?"

Werner frowned, trying to decipher the meaning behind those words.

"Told me what?"

Paul remained silent for a moment.

"So you don’t have them." He exhaled quietly. "And I suppose James didn’t either."

"Just what are they?"He murmured.

Werner’s expression darkened.

"What are you talking about?"

Paul finally lowered his gaze.

"Visions."

Silence.

"Visions of the future." His voice remained calm, almost detached. "Of things that haven’t happened yet."

He looked back toward the dark sky.

"They’ve guided me all the way since Spain."

"Visions?" Werner asked, shaking his head in disbelief.

A bitter laugh escaped him.

"You truly have gone mad."

His expression twisted.

"You’ve become so obsessed with power that it finally consumed your mind."

Paul met Werner’s eyes once more.

"You don’t believe me?" he asked in an eerily calm tone.

Werner shook his head.

"I suppose you don’t need to," Paul whispered, somewhat sad.

Werner stepped forward, tears streaming down his face.

"Even if I did..." His voice trembled. "It would only strengthen my resolve."

"And what is it?" Paul asked. "What is your resolve?"

Werner’s expression darkened.

"This world..." He paused, his voice breaking. "This world deserves peace."

He looked directly into Paul’s eyes.

"Peace from us."

Silence.

"From James. From me. From you."

His jaw tightened.

"From omnipotent manipulators who play with this world like it’s some goddamn doll."

Werner’s voice shook violently now.

"I want to protect this world from you."

His hand slowly disappeared into his coat pocket.

Tears mixed with rain across his face.

"I WANT TO DO ONE RIGHT THING IN THIS CURSED LIFE!"

He pulled out a pistol.

Paul widened his eyes.

And for the briefest flicker of a moment, something unbearable appeared within them.

Sadness.

Unspeakable sadness.

At the very same time

"We have arriv-"

Heydrich nearly kicked open the car door, stepping onto the wet cobblestones of the bridge before him.

His eyes darted around frantically.

"Where?!"

He turned sharply.

"WHERE?!"

His voice echoed through the rain.

No one stood on the bridge.

No Paul.

No Werner.

The rain pressed heavily against him as desperation slowly crept into his expression.

He turned back toward the car.

The driver.

The Gestapo officer.

"WHERE ARE THEY?!"

Somewhere in the darkness, an owl cried through the night.

"I... I don’t know..." the Gestapo officer whispered.

Heydrich ignored him.

Restlessly, he paced from one side of the bridge to the other before leaning over the cold stone railing.

Below him, the Rhine flowed endlessly, rain droplets joining the current.

His leather-clad hands dug into the stone.

Slowly...

He raised his head.

His eyes narrowed into the distance.

Then—

They widened.

Far away, two lonely silhouettes stood upon another bridge.

Two figures that did not belong there.

One of them held something in his hand.

Heydrich froze.

"The wrong..."

His breathing halted.

"The wrong bridge."

He spun around.

"GIVE ME THE COFFER!!!"

Back at the bridge.

Werner’s hand trembled as he looked down at what he had pulled from his pocket.

The pistol.

His fingers shook.

"You know, Paul..." His voice cracked. "Tonight... I was ready to kill myself."

"With this weap-"

"It won’t change anything," Paul interrupted.

His voice sounded utterly exhausted.

Tired.

Empty.

"It won’t change anything," he repeated.

"It won’t change me. It won’t change Germany."

A pause.

"It won’t change this world."

His expression darkened.

"And it certainly won’t stop them."

Werner froze.

The muscles in his face tightened.

Slowly, the color drained from it.

"Whom?" he asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

Then louder:

"Stop whom, Paul?!"

Paul let out a tired smile.

He slowly raised his hands.

"It’s over."

His eyes wandered toward the horizon.

"We’ve already won-"

"ANSWER MY QUESTION!"

Werner’s voice shattered through the rain.

Paul finally looked at him.

"Bombers."

"At any moment now, they will strike the United States."

Werner stopped breathing.

Paul’s voice remained terrifyingly calm.

"Carrying the one thing that will end this war beneath them."

Werner violently shook his head.

"You’re lying!"

His voice cracked.

"There is no way!" He stepped forward. "There is no way you finished it!"

"There’s simply no way!"

"You are too late, Werner," Paul said quietly. "Killing me won’t change a thing."

They stood there in near total darkness, the lamp behind them flickering weakly in the rain.

Sometimes the world was swallowed by shadow.

Then, for a moment, light returned.

And then darkness again.

As if even the night itself could not decide what it wanted to be.

And then....as if fate itself had aligned...

the lamp flared brightly for a single instant.

So powerful that its light was reflected in both men’s eyes.

"Prometheus dropped."

Far from the cold bridges of Cologne, over the east coast of the United States of America, an alarm sounded.

It was rare.

Almost nonexistent in American history.

An air raid siren.

In the distance, countless flak batteries opened fire into the sky, tearing it apart with bursts of light and smoke.

Turning the night into a fractured canvas of war.

Some ran.

Others stayed frozen in place.

"President, quickly! Inside the bunker!" a Secret Service agent shouted, shoving the President forward through the partially open blast door.

President Henry A. Wallace ran through the concrete tunnels beneath the White House.

Above him, hundreds of others would not be granted that same luxury.

But it was already too late.

For the rich man.

For the President.

For the ordinary man.

It was all the same.

Too late.

No concrete.

No bunker of this age.

Nothing built by human hands could protect them from what was coming.

The German pilots had long since released what they called Prometheus, already turning back toward home.

Far behind them, the city of Washington D.C. faded into the distance.

For a moment, it almost felt peaceful up there.

Then the light returned. Just like the flickering street lamp.

From below.

It was bright.

No.

Brighter.

Brighter.

Brighter.

A light so intense it robbed the pilots of their vision entirely.

And then—

silence.

Eerie, absolute silence.

And then it came.

A tide.

A monster.

A calamity rising into the sky.

A terryfing cloud of dust and debris, forming into a towering mushroom that climbed thousands of meters upward.

A man-made horror.

One that erased any sense of what had come before it.

Any understanding of what was even possible.

On this day, the world changed.

On this day, humanity entered the age of atomic warfare.

"It appears like I won after all."

Paul’s distant voice cut through the silence.

Absolute.

Heavier than the impact of Prometheus itself.

"Noo!" Werner shouted.

Paul tilted his head to the side, his gaze landing on another distant bridge.

In that moment, something formed in Paul’s eyes. A water that did not come from above.

"Through those visions...I have seen it...your fate....Werner Lehmann."He whispered.

At the very same moment, Heydrich exhaled as he looked through his scope. His finger coiled around the trigger of his sniper rifle.

"I will kill you, Paul!" Werner roared, his finger also on the trigger, his left hand supporting his right.

Slowly, Paul averted his gaze from the distant bridge.

One boot.

The leg.

The lower body.

Quietly, Paul turned around.

"What are you doing?!" Werner shouted, madness in his voice, his fingers pressing more and more against the trigger.

For a moment there was nothing. Then Paul’s hand slowly rose to his face, touching his cheek. Between the countless drops, a single one was not foreign.

"I too am a coward, Werner."

BOOM.

The sound of the sniper rifle shattered through Cologne, ripping the night apart like a final judgment.

For a fraction of a second, the world simply stopped existing.

Paul closed his eyes.

Behind him—

a splash.

A body hitting wet cobblestone.

"Hah..."

A breath escaped him.

Or maybe it didn’t.

His lungs refused to understand the concept anymore.

He could breathe.

He just couldn’t.

Air no longer obeyed.

His knees buckled.

Slowly.

Like something inside him had finally given up the right to hold him upright.

Paul dropped to one knee.

His breathing turned ragged, fractured, as if every inhale had to fight its way through something.

Nothing reached his lungs.

Nothing came back out clean.

The rain kept falling.

Indifferent.

Unstoppable.

And then tears.

A collapse of them.

Rolling down his face, dissolving into the storm, becoming indistinguishable from the rain itself.

Behind him, the lamp had stopped flickering, shrouding the world around him in the sweet embrace of darkness.

"I am sorry. I am so sorry my dear friend."

Broken.

Slumped.

The Führer of Germany.

-------------------------------------

Who is it? The coward...

With this, the story of the Three Travelers comes to an end... only one remains. Now, all that is left is the end itself.

Thank you all for the support! I appreciate every Power Stone, comment, and review.