Giants of Flesh and Iron

Spring 1944 — Europe

Maxwell Marvelo had witnessed horrors no man was meant to see. But what emerged now from the laboratories of the Axis made even seasoned soldiers drop their rifles and pray.

Desperate to turn the tide of war, Germany and Japan fused ancient folklore with warped science and eugenic experiments. What they unleashed were no longer soldiers—they were abominations.

---

The Rhine Behemoth

The first emerged outside Cologne. It stood thirty feet tall, a grotesque giant stitched together from failed Aryan test subjects. Steel plating had been bolted into its skin, leaving only tufts of blond hair on its head and pale blue eyes sunken into a misshapen skull. Its arms were reinforced with iron rods and bone grafts, and its breath stank of chemical fuel.

The Rhine Behemoth roared as it crushed tanks and hurled American troops into the air like ragdolls.

Marvelo fell from the sky like a red comet, cracking the earth on impact. The behemoth turned.

"Another toy soldier?" it gurgled in a mangled German dialect.

Maxwell said nothing. He punched the beast through a supply depot, breaking its spine against a steel girder. He then tore its helmeted head free with both hands, dropping it in front of a stunned infantry unit.

---

The Pale Sisters of Kraków

They came at night, moving through the fog in pairs. Tall and thin, the Pale Sisters wore tattered hospital gowns stained with blood. Their eyes had been removed—stitched shut with barbed wire—and their mouths were stretched in permanent grins. Surgical blades extended from their fingers like claws.

They hummed eerie lullabies as they moved, using echolocation to hunt. American trenches outside Kraków were silent one moment—filled with screams the next.

When Marvelo arrived, he found piles of bodies and one trembling corporal clutching a crucifix.

The Sisters attacked, spinning and slicing through debris, walls, and steel like fabric.

Maxwell caught one mid-lunge, slammed her face-first into a tank tread, and used the machine like a rolling pin to flatten her. The second he grabbed by the scalp and swung into a telephone pole, her body snapping backward. The third fled—but a thunderclap overhead signaled her end. He had hurled her into the clouds.

---

The Oni Brigade

Born from Japan's Unit 731, the Oni were fused with stimulants, trauma, and twisted folklore. Each stood over eight feet tall, with red or blue skin cracked like scorched earth. Their horns were bone—sawed from actual oxen and fused into their skulls. Their mouths stretched unnaturally wide, revealing rows of mismatched teeth.

They howled like wolves as they stormed Allied prisoner camps.

Marvelo intercepted them outside a French village, watching one Oni hoist a wounded GI by the throat.

The monster turned.

"You... strong."

Maxwell rushed forward.

The battlefield exploded in blood and fury.

One Oni was pulped under a suplex. Another was dismembered mid-charge. The last attempted to breathe fire—a synthetic chemical reaction installed by the scientists—but Marvelo caught the flame with his cape and snuffed it out, wrapping the monster like a furnace and crushing its lungs within.

---

The Aftermath

American soldiers stared in horror and awe.

"What were they?" one whispered.

"No idea," another replied, "but he stopped 'em."

Marvelo didn't celebrate. His face was grim, his cape stained with blood and soot.

The monsters were gone. But he knew others would come. Somewhere, in labs still hidden by mountains or ocean, more atrocities waited.

And he'd be there to end them.