Summer 1854
The summer sun scorched the Balkans and the Black Sea alike.
Dust hung in the air where snow and mud had once ruled, and armies moved with new urgency, for the campaign season was short and every empire knew it.
Elias had pulled his Iron Hand from the western front just in time.
Russian troops were already trickling out of the Balkans under diplomatic pressure, and Austria's quarter-million stood waiting for any excuse to "restore order" under their own flag.
The gamble was clear: stay in the Balkans, and his army would be ground down or interned in someone else's war.
Move east, to the Crimea, and he could dictate the fight to bleed the allies of even more losses, for the Ottomans would suffer far greater losses in the coming years when the true Balkan uprising occured to cast off the lingering opression of the Ottoman Empire upon the region.
The order had gone out through his system connection.
Within days, the Iron Hand vanished from the Romanian front like ghosts having provided fake orders from high command to reason away why they were being pulled from the front, leaving behind only burned supply depots and stripped villages.
What the Austrians would find, weeks later, was nothing but ashes and empty homes, a very scorched earth policy.
~
Their march took them southeast, sneaking across enemy lines to Varna, a port that had once been Ottoman, and now bristled with French banners from the arriving Foreign legions as the Great Powers loopholed themselves around legislation they themselves had signed into being.
Allied troops, eager to carve a reputation in this "great war of nations," had chosen it as their staging ground, thinking Russian defenses weak, and this to be an effective launch point to cross the black sea and invade the soft underbelly of Russia herself.
Instead, they found the Iron Hand, operating like spectres of death.
At dawn, Elias deployed his riflemen along the ridges overlooking the coast.
They dug in like wolves at the edge of a sheep pen.
Muskets cracked, then rifles sang, their rhythm precise and merciless.
French troops staggered on the beach, their columns broken before they could even form.
British marines tried to force a breakthrough, but Elias had anticipated them—hidden pits and sharpened stakes turned the sand into slaughter.
By noon the surf ran red.
It reached a point of mass confusion with the landing allies believing the russian had broken through the frontline and had already claimed the port city for their own.
Karl Marx, writing from London, would later remark in a bitter aside to a colleague:"There they are, the French, doing what they do best—dying. And the British helping them do it as fast as possible."
The quote spread quickly, repeated in Russian taverns and whispered by diplomats across Europe, the great joke born from the campaign as the inept leadership of the allies was spread having performed a landing operation on their own allied territory, and been repulsed.
The Iron Hand had stopped a French landing in its tracks, not with overwhelming numbers but with precision and guile, of course none of this was known to either side, as the Ottomans blamed the French who were landing, while the French blamed the ottomans.
For the first time, the Allies felt the sting of a new kind of war, though they wouldnt know its true cause.
~
The victory at Varna was short-lived.
Elias knew the French and British fleets would not stop there—the landings would continue and after the full transfer of dispatched forces they would load up and set out towards the Crimean Peninsula, the true prize of the war.
To meet them, he ordered embarkation.
His forces located and hired a series of ships to cart the 3,000 of their number again with false orders to be redispatched again, only once they were out to sea they mutinied.
Ships creaked under the weight of thousands of riflemen.
~
When the ships landed in the Crimea, the Iron Hand moved swiftly westward, leaving behind Sevastopol.
Their destination was Yevpatoria, a quiet port town on the steppe.
Historically this was the landing site for the Allies, and since history despite his intervention was proceeding as it had, Elias was not one to fight fate.
If they could turn it into a fortress—or better yet, a killing field—the Allies would bleed before they even reached the interior.
With months still to pass before the landings would actually take place this was a boon to the supreme commander.
Elias wasted no time.
Trenches were dug, hidden redoubts constructed, and sharpshooters stationed in church towers and farmhouses.
Entire streets were booby-trapped with powder barrels buried beneath cobblestones.
Engineers worked day and night, their tools ringing like church bells in the summer dusk, as bunkers were created, along with sandbag pillboxes.
Additional false orders allowed them to requisition hundreds of cannons off of a few Ship of the lines, to further fortify the landing ground, while the ships themselves were scuttled.
By July, Yevpatoria was no longer a sleepy port.
It was a blade waiting in the grass.
If it were up to him, Elias wouldve scuttled the entire Russian fleet to put thousands of cannons on the beach, but to do so would raise eyebrows not only with the navy but also high command.
~
It did not take long for the Allies to probe the defenses of the theoretical landing site.
French engineers, followed by a detachment of British officers, arrived under cover of darkness to survey the town.
They expected frightened villagers and maybe a token Cossack patrol.
Instead, they walked straight into Elias's net.
The Iron Hand descended like shadows, blades drawn.
Shots rang out, but none escaped.
Within minutes, the French and British officers found themselves in chains, dragged to the operation centre of the hand in a dimly lit cellar.
speaking through the Rifleman in charge, Elias interrogated the captives.
"You came to measure walls,"
Elias said softly, his words to the captives in perfect french, before he repeated them in English.
"Now you will help us build more."
The captives were stripped of their maps, their notes, even their uniforms.
With careful interrogation using futuristic techniques some that would eventually be outlawed, Elias drew out every detail of their orders—where the fleet would land, how many men were expected.
Then, with calculated cruelty, he turned their own skills against them.
Forged reports were crafted under their names.
False maps were seeded back toward Allied headquarters, painting Yevpatoria as weak, barely garrisoned, ripe for the taking.
The officers themselves were kept alive, hidden in underground cells, their fates uncertain.
Elias was not yet sure whether he would ransom them, parade them, or simply erase them.
For now, their silence was more valuable than their deaths.
~
By August, Yevpatoria simmered with anticipation.
The Iron Hand's trenches stretched for miles, and every farmhouse in the region had been converted into a strongpoint.
Russian allies arrived in trickles, impressed but unsettled by the silent efficiency of Elias's men.
In total they had roughly seven thousand men to defend this landing ground, while the allies were expected to land with fifteen to twenty thousand men.
Rumors spread by the Iron Hand had managed to pull forces to the small port, even though Russian intelligence still maintained that the primary landing site would be Katcha just north of Sevastopol.
Even if the russian did not believe him, with his superior three thousand his forces would be able to deal with the simple landing force, and in doing so cause the allies to withdraw or ramp up the invasion to secure their beachhead.
~
The war had changed since the snows of 1853.
What had begun as a clash of empires was becoming something else, something Elias alone seemed to understand.
He had bent battles with fewer men than anyone thought possible, turned victories out of ashes, and now stood poised to bleed the greatest powers of Europe before they even set foot on the steppe.
But he knew the danger as well.
The Allies would not forgive humiliation.
The Austrians had already moved in to secure the vacated principalities as Russia withdrew, meanwhile Russia herself began to prepare for invasion by three seperate Empires at once.
Elias's forces were still small so they acted with surgical precision, but give him a decade or two and his rising force would become a true threat to the nations of the world.