The lull of winter was both a reprieve and a test.
For weeks, Cetinje moved at a slower rhythm.
The roads iced over, wagons strained against snow-clogged passes, and the nobles found themselves confined to their halls, reduced to drinking, card games, and endless talk of war.
The bells tolled as always, but even their sound seemed muffled by the cold.
Elias, meanwhile, felt himself settling into the skin of his new life.
He had been here long enough that the rhythm of the nineteenth century no longer felt wholly alien.
The smoke of woodfires, the stench of unwashed streets, the slow clatter of hooves against frozen cobbles—these things had become his daily world.
And with familiarity came revelation.
Elias had always known history was brutal, but seeing it firsthand was something different.
He saw men beaten in the streets by tax collectors, their families dragged away when debts went unpaid.
He heard whispers of girls "sold" to wealthier houses as though they were livestock, not children.
And one biting December afternoon, he saw it himself.
The square was half-empty, wind knifing through cloaks and shawls.
A small knot of peasants stood huddled near the fountain, their faces gray with shame.
At their feet were three girls, no older than twelve or thirteen, their bare ankles red with cold.
A man barked prices, and the gathered crowd muttered, some averting their eyes, others calculating openly.
Families selling their daughters to survive the winter.
Elias froze where he stood, ledger under his arm, the system's glow quiet at the edge of his vision.
He had known.
Intellectually, he had known.
Poverty forced impossible choices, and survival bred cruelty.
But to see their hollow eyes, to hear the way the merchant called out bids—
It sickened him.
And it reminded him of something else.
This was just the way humans were, more openly about it in their barbaric past, but in the coming years slavery would be outlawed in most of the 'free' world, while they would also turn a blind eye to the slavery going on elsewhere since it caused them to gain profit.
But he had power.
He had more Dinar than anyone here could dream of, and more resources besides, as not only Elias, but an entire team of his summons worked tirelessly only spending the bare minimum on themselves and pooling the rest together for expenditure.
He had the means to stop this, if only in small ways.
The decision was made in seconds.
He stepped forward, his voice quiet but firm.
"I'll take them all."
The peasants looked up in shock as his voice rang out over the winter winds.
The merchant blinked, then smiled thinly.
A few murmurs rippled through the onlookers—this dull clerk, this invisible man, buying what no one else would?
It didn't matter.
Silver exchanged hands.
The families slunk away, half in relief, half in shame, and the three girls looked at Elias with wide, bewildered eyes.
He gestured for them to follow and led them quietly away from the square, away from the cold stares of the city.
That night, he stood before them in his small chambers, the oil lamp casting long shadows.
They were frightened, silent, their clothes threadbare. Elias knelt, meeting their gaze not as a master but as something else entirely.
"You won't be harmed,"
he told them softly.
"You'll have food. Shelter. A purpose. You will not be discarded again."
He contacted his men via the system, and arrangements were made.
Two of the girls would be sent discreetly to his first base, where they would be indoctrinated, educated, and trained for administration duties to work alongside the base personel.
The Iron Hand needed clerks as much as soldiers, and who better than those who had nothing left?
The third—Sonya—he kept with him.
She was older than the others, perhaps fifteen, with sharp eyes and a stubborn set to her jaw.
When asked if she wished to go, she shook her head firmly.
"I will stay."
So she stayed.
At first, she was little more than an attendant—helping with letters, fetching meals, keeping the hearth lit.
But Elias quickly realized she had a keen memory, an instinct for detail.
She began organizing his ledgers, cross-checking figures, even reminding him of minor appointments in the court.
She was quiet, efficient, and—perhaps most importantly—unafraid to challenge him with small questions.
"Why do you write so much?"
she asked once, watching him scratch tallies into parchment.
"Because numbers never lie,"
Elias replied, smiling faintly.
"And because sometimes, the only way to win a war is to know more than your enemy."
Her brow furrowed at that, but she didn't press further.
Through Sonya's presence, Elias began to see the city differently.
She knew its streets, its people, the hidden places a noble would never bother to look.
She told him stories—of boys press-ganged into labor, of widows scraping frost from their windows for water, of guards who turned blind eyes if enough coin was pressed into their hands.
It was a crueler world than he had imagined, but it was also one where he could shape things quietly, subtly.
His wealth and credits gave him leverage others lacked.
And for every girl he saved, every man he bribed, he felt the invisible threads of his influence deepen.
Still, the horrors weighed heavily.
He saw the way nobles spoke of peasants, as though they were cattle.
He overheard Austrian envoys whispering about "stability" as justification for oppression of those with different ethnicity.
He read reports of Ottoman raids where villages were emptied of men for slave labor.
And he knew—knew in his bones—that this was not an isolated cruelty.
It was the natural order of the century, before politicians started having to answer to their peoples, when rules of engagement were passed down as law, to protect the commonfolk when wars erupted.
And he was trapped in it.
That night, Eagle Vision flashed across his mind:
[Credit Reserves: 41,873]
[Daily Growth: 1,196]
[Force Strength: 3,314]
[Era Advancement – Pre-WW1: 500,000 Credits Required]
He had wealth.
He had soldiers.
He had mines and barracks, medics and engineers.
But standing in the winter streets of Cetinje, watching families sell their children to survive, he realized how vast the gulf remained.
It wasn't enough to fight wars.
If he wanted to shape the future, he needed to address the roots of power: poverty, hunger, ignorance.
In the short term these were not something he could change easily, perhaps with a tech advancement he could unleash motorized vehicles in their lesser forms to help mechanize the farming output to eliminate regional hunger, poverty however was something he could help with.
His engineers could use seed money to build up new construction companies, engineering firms, architectures, ways of not only employing more people, but in doing so gaining more money in the process.
Ignorance on the other hand was probably the hardest to deal with, since the way of the world was deeply rooted in pepoles minds, and to get them to look at it a different way would require time.
Children could be molded, but the adults... well they were almost all already to fargone.
So with his purse split, Elias sent the command to his men working in the Montenegro cities, to purchase any slaves they came across for sale, while his engineers would begin setting about the creation of new companies.
All while in far distant fields the Iron Hand waited around burning fires for spring to come and with it an increase to the bloodshed and spoils of war.