The war's end came not with fanfare but with a dull, weary silence.
Across Europe, the news spread unevenly—first whispered in diplomatic salons, then shouted from broadsheets, and finally muttered in cafés and taverns.
The Crimean War, once heralded as a crusade to halt Russian ambition, was finished.
For the Iron Hand, it meant recall.
Elias gathered his men through the system, the summons pulling them back from the shattered ramparts and smoke-blackened bastions of Sevastopol.
Where once four thousand had marched at his command into Wallachia, now scarcely over a thousand returned from their final positions in Russia.
The rest had returned to the systems embrace, claimed by musket fire, and cannon blast.
Elias did not weep for them.
Yet he remembered them.
Each death was etched in the system's cold ledger, a reminder of what he had asked and what it had cost.
They had bought time, they had altered fate, and in their sacrifice lay a lesson more valuable than any sum of credits.
For though the system rewarded him little beyond the looted spoils from the conquests in Romania, Elias had gained something far greater: knowledge.
He now knew his summoned men were not mere phantoms doomed to follow history's script.
They could bend it.
They could break it.
Fate, that tyrant which held so many bound, was not absolute.
The thought lingered with him as he dismissed the battered regiment back into the fold of the system, their weaponry and outfits still emaculate even after years of combat.
For now they would rest, awaiting the next campaign he would call them to, while further spreading word of what 'real' combat was like to the other summons.
Europe, meanwhile, took stock of the altered peace.
The treaty, though couched in diplomatic niceties, revealed a sharp divergence from the path Elias remembered.
In this world, Russia had not lost Moldavia.
The principality, battered but intact, remained under the Tsar's shadow.
Wallachia, however, was drawn into Austria's grasp—yet not as an annexed territory.
Vienna had attempted outright control, but the effort proved too costly, too divisive, and too dangerous to sustain.
Under pressure, Austria released it back to Ottoman sovereignty, albeit as a carefully managed protectorate, a buffer meant to shield Habsburg lands from Russian pressure.
Everywhere else, the war returned borders to their prewar state.
Territories captured by Russia or the Allies were restored.
On paper, nothing had changed—save for Moldavia, which the Russians held as though by right.
Yet appearances deceived.
This outcome, with Sevastopol unbroken and the Allies exhausted, looked far more like a Russian victory than the balance achieved in another timeline.
The Tsar's prestige was not shattered.
His armies, though mauled, were still feared.
His claim to stand against the Western powers remained credible.
And while Austria had clawed for influence in Wallachia, they left the war weaker in stature, distrusted by both St. Petersburg and Constantinople.
Elias's work had already altered the map.
Not by much—not enough to redraw Europe—but enough to shift its balance.
And that was enough to confirm the truth: he could change history.
When Elias read the reports carried back by his agents in Vienna, Paris, and London, he saw not just diplomacy but opportunity.
Britain reeled under criticism of its government, its military leadership savaged in Parliament, its public weary of foreign adventures.
France simmered with discontent, Napoleon III's gamble turning sour as promises of easy glory dissolved into lists of the dead.
Austria, meddling and cautious, had achieved little beyond alienating its neighbors.
Even the Ottomans, who should have been the victors, emerged as pawns in a game played by others.
Only Russia had salvaged honor from the mire—and that because Sevastopol had not fallen.
Because of him.
Elias allowed himself a thin smile when that thought came.
Not pride, not joy, but recognition.
A step had been taken, and though small, it confirmed the path ahead.
He had tested his hand against history's weight and found it malleable.
Now he could plan the next stroke.
The Iron Hand itself was gone, their thousand survivors slowly returning to Montenegro, and would arrive in just over a month two at the latest, but Elias was not idle.
Through his agents he extended his reach, planting men in embassies, ministries, and courts wherever he could afford to.
The peace gave them freedom to travel, to whisper, to listen.
He gathered information like a miser hoards coin—on the Balkans, on the Austrians, on the Ottoman provinces restless beneath foreign rule.
His gaze turned southward, toward the mountains of Montenegro.
In the year 1858, war would come again.
A small war, in the eyes of Europe, yet one with currents that could shape larger tides.
Montenegrin peoples, proud and fierce, would rise against Ottoman authority to reclaim lands historically under their sphere, and the Sultan's hand would be expected to reach once more into the Balkans to fend off another foreign assault nibbling away at his waning power.
There, Elias thought, would be the next field to test his strength.
Not with four thousand, not with an army sprawling across valleys and coasts, but with precision.
With chosen men, with agents and soldiers placed where they might break the chain of events and reforge it anew.
The war in Crimea had taught him endurance, patience, and the cost of attrition.
But Montenegro would be different.
A war of mountains and skirmishes, of diplomacy and maneuver, where small forces could decide the fate of nations.
It would be the perfect crucible for what came next.
Elias sat at his desk within the Main Base HQ,
The candle burned low, its wax pooling in a brass dish scarred with scorch marks.
His fingers traced the Black Sea's coast, then the Danube, then the jagged ridges of Montenegro where another storm brewed.
In the silence he allowed himself a rare moment of reflection.
Four thousand summoned, one thousand returned.
The numbers weighed upon him.
Not as guilt, but as a calculation.
What he had asked of them was brutal, and what they had given was beyond price.
Yet he could not stop.
For if fate could be altered once, it could be altered again.
And each alteration brought him closer to the future he sought.
Not for Russia, not for Austria, not for any empire or nation.
But for himself.
The system had given him power.
War had given him knowledge.
Now, with both, he would shape what was to come.
The world thought the Crimean War had ended with peace.
But for Elias, it had only just begun.