Spring 1854 had fully arrived in May.
The snow that once buried roads and rivers was gone, replaced with mud that clung to boots, slowed carts, and sapped the patience of armies.
Elias no longer sat in Montenegro's halls of nobility.
He had returned to the one place where he belonged—among soldiers, among maps, among the endless calculations of war.
In his quarters, lit by the faint light of oil lamps, he read late into the night.
Not only dispatches and reports from the front, but also treatises on administration, fragments of translated French works on statecraft, and Roman histories borrowed from whatever libraries he could plunder or bribe into giving up their tomes.
If he was to rule—not just command an army, but shape a nation—then he would need to be more than a tactician.
He would need to be an architect of society.
While he studied, the Iron Hand carried on its work in the field.
~
The Campaign in Dobruja
The Russians pressed their advantage, driving south across the Dobruja River.
They had expected a broken Ottoman resistance, yet each advance was slower than the last, the land itself turning against them.
Villages had been burned before they could be occupied.
Roads were little more than quagmires.
Ottoman irregulars harried the flanks, vanishing into the marshes as soon as Russian columns gave chase.
The Iron Hand marched at the center of this offensive.
Three thousand riflemen, their discipline as cold as the steel of their bayonets, gave the Russian generals a confidence they would not otherwise have dared to show.
Wherever the Iron Hand stood in the line, the Turks faltered.
Their needle rifles outpaced Ottoman muskets.
Their silence unnerved enemy officers.
And yet, even the Hand could not fight geography.
By late March, the russian army reached the remnants of Trajan's Wall—earthworks older than empires, refitted by Ottoman engineers into a line of defense.
Here the offensive ground to a halt.
Russian cannon thundered for days, but the walls held.
Ottoman fire raked across the plain, cutting down white-coated infantrymen by the score.
The Iron Hand meanwhile were stationed in the west, near the serbian borders, deep in the future borders of Romania, slipping into range under cover of mist, firing volley after volley to suppress the defenders—but even their precision could not break the stalemate, brought about by the defiant resistance of the ottomans.
Elias read the reports in silence.
The Hand had suffered light losses, but the Russians had bled heavily, as they always had, a nation fighting out of its weight class, with a population far higher than other empires and nations of the time, and yet only managed to eek out wins with human wave tactics sending thousands to their death each offensive, a strategy they seemed incapable of getting over even well into the 21st century of Elias's old life.
To his mind, this was proof of what he already knew: brute force would never bring victory.
Not here, and not in the future.
War needed brute force sure, but tempered by strategy, and hardened by tactics.
~
The Western Front – Vidin
While Dobruja stalled, the western front surged forward as the Ottoman generals pulled forces east to reinforce their losses against the heavy Russian assualt.
Vidin, a fortress-town on the Danube, became the new objective.
The Russians hurled men at its defenses, but it was the Iron Hand who shifted the balance.
Their night raids cut supply lines.
Their engineers undermined walls.
Their sharpshooters made Ottoman gunners afraid to man their cannons.
By April, the town fell—not to sheer Russian weight, but to the careful knives of the Iron Hand.
It was a victory that resounded far beyond the battlefield.
Russian soldiers sang of the Hand as avenging angels.
Ottoman prisoners whispered of them as demons conjured from the earth.
But victory brought new danger.
Austria massed a quarter of a million men near its border, threatening to intervene should Russia push too far.
Russian generals fretted, unsure whether to advance or entrench.
The Iron Hand, however, did not falter.
To them, Vidin was proof that precision, not numbers, would define the future of war.
They had afterall managed a victory that had never occured in history, and without Austria intervening Russia could keep up the offensive, allowing them to keep more of their conquested spoils without having the unwillingly hand them over to the Austrian Empire.
At first the Bulgarian and Serbian peoples had not risen up to rebel against their ottoman overseers, however with the victory at Vidin, public opinion was being swayed with belief that Russia would pull out the win this time, not opening the doors to open rebellion but they had public volunteers joining in the fight for a change.
~
Elias' Study
As his soldiers fought, Elias immersed himself in his own battles.
Sonya often found him surrounded by maps and books, scrawling notes in the margins, muttering half-formed ideas aloud.
He studied logistics as much as strategy, obsessed with the mathematics of supply—how many carts of grain could feed a regiment, how many soldiers could be housed per barracks, how many teachers it would take to raise a literate generation, and most importantly statecraft so he knew how to raise, groom, and puppet his nations future ruler.
He didnt want to just win his future wars, he wanted to make sure they stayed won, afterall nothing was harder to fight than an insurrection from within your own populace, the more you purged them the more the people were emboldened to join the cause.
The system hovered always at the edge of his vision, its promises both tantalizing and cruel.
Era Advancement – Pre-WW1: 500,000 Credits Required.
Each report of battlefield loot, each ledger of supplies taken from defeated Ottomans, brought him closer.
And yet he knew credits alone would not suffice.
To wield the power of a new age, he would need people ready to live in that age.
He would need a nation, one sculpted by his own hand, whose minds were trained to follow his ideology.
~
In the weeks that followed, Elias struck a balance between scholar and commander.
By day he drilled with his soldiers, testing new formations, refining tactics, and forming a proper body to stand as the valiant supreme commander, rather than his skinny previous form, his youth might remain eternal, but he wasnt about to let himself devolve into one of those despotic scions who were more fat than man thanks to self indulgence.
His 'teaching' was more for himself as the soldiers upon summoning had the basic combat tactics embedded in their heads upon arrival, they'd perform even better if Elias could summon a general or commander to assist him but for now, in the era they were in, even his limited command ability was still equal to or surpassing his allies and adversary's.
By night, he read and planned, drafting designs for schools, manufactories, even rudimentary rail lines.
And in the quiet hours, Elias let himself wonder: was this destiny, or simply stubbornness?
Had he been sent back for this purpose—to bend history—or was he merely a man chasing ghosts of progress in a world not ready for it?
The Iron Hand gave him no answers, only obedience.
~
By late spring, the situation grew more dangerous.
The Russians could not dislodge the Ottomans from Trajan's Wall.
The Austrians loomed like a stormcloud, their armies assembled in silence, their diplomats whispering threats in every court from Vienna to Paris.
Even the British and French began to stir, their fleets watching the Black Sea with wary eyes.
It was a war balanced on a knife's edge.
One more victory could tip the scales—or one mistake could doom the entire campaign.
Elias, reading the endless reports, felt the weight settle onto his shoulders.
His Iron Hand was feared, even legendary—but legends could be destroyed as easily as men if used recklessly.
But he gave them the command to pull back, even as far away as little Montenegro, news had arrived that the Austrians were attempting to broker peace between the empires, when this fails they would enter the war on the Ottomans side, and Russia would be forced to pull back, even considering to withdrawn from the principalities entirely.
having a headstart the iron hand, started looting even more voraciously than usual, sending anything of worth home, leaving nothing for the Austrians to find upon their arrival.
~
Spring was already fading and summer well on it's way, without orders Elias sent the command to his Iron hand, they would leave the western front, it was a lost cause now, instead they would head to the Crimea to aid the Russians in fending off the French, British, and Ottoman invasion of the peninsula.
Their absence on the Romanian front would be felt by the Russians but with their own withdrawl looming soon, their effectiveness would be limited far better to make the Allies bleed for every inch they invaded into the motherland, as the Holy Alliance breaks down leaving Russia to stand veritably alone.