Elias leaned back in the iron-framed chair of his command chamber, the steady hum of the base's power plant vibrating faintly through the floor beneath him.
The familiar sound was comforting, a reminder that unlike the flesh-and-blood soldiers of the world outside, his war machine was tireless, mechanical, and wholly his.
The Crimean War was finished.
His men were returning home.
And now came the part Elias enjoyed most—the reckoning.
The system's interface flickered into view before his eyes, listing columns of figures, allocations, and stockpiles.
Cold numbers, but behind each number was something tangible: the ore pulled from the mines, the credits minted by sweat and machinery, the soldiers and spies conjured into being through his will.
Two bases operational.
Ten miner teams each.
Average credit intake: 25,000 per month.
The system displayed the results in neat tabulations, fluctuating slightly with the yield of copper, tin, iron, and silver.
Sometimes more, sometimes less, but always enough to maintain momentum.
He scrolled further down.
Reserve credits: 423,922.
The number gleamed like treasure.
He had started with scraps barely pulling in a hundred credits in a month, he had gambled in the blood-soaked fields of Romania and Crimea, and now he held a war chest one capable if he so chose to summon forth a 10,000 man strong rifleman corp, a force large than the entire armed force of the nation he currently was sheltered within.
Much of it came not from the miners but from the Iron Hand's ruthless efficiency in the war's early years.
Loot from Moldavia, Wallachia, and captured Allied stockpiles—goods that in another history would have vanished into chaos—were instead siphoned directly into the system.
Even after his expenses—fortifying the bases, raising networks of spies, reinforcing Montenegro's army—the numbers continued to climb.
Another three months, he estimated.
Three months, and he could pay the staggering upgrade cost to drag his forces forward in time—from the 1850s to the 1870s.
Increasing his system rank by 1, though it would wipe out his entire reserve to do so.
Elias's lips curled faintly at the thought.
Bolt-action rifles.
Early electrical systems.
Combustion engines.
The leap would be nothing less than revolutionary.
He remembered the battlefields of Crimea—the rolling volleys of musket fire, the choking clouds of powder smoke, the artillery that roared and then fell silent for long minutes as crews swabbed and reloaded.
Even with his advantages, the Iron Hand had bled heavily in that world.
A casualty rate of 75% after a mere 24 months of war.
But bolt-action rifles would change everything.
Volley fire would become obsolete.
Single soldiers could dominate with precision firepower.
Early machine guns and repeating carbines would turn cavalry charges into suicide.
Steam and combustion engines would break the tyranny of the horse.
And electrics—rudimentary though they would be—would transform his bases into something beyond the comprehension of the powers around him.
It would be, Elias thought, like stepping from one century into the next in the span of a single season.
And he would be the only man who walked that path.
Still, numbers alone did not win wars.
He turned the interface aside and unrolled the parchment maps on his desk.
Montenegro's rugged terrain sprawled before him in ink and contour lines—jagged ridges, steep valleys, and narrow passes that had thwarted empires for centuries.
The Ottomans would come.
That much was inevitable. The Sultan could not ignore rebellion on his doorstep, nor allow Montenegrin defiance to become an example for others.
But the Ottoman army of the 1850s was not the terror it had once been.
Corruption, uneven training, and overextension gnawed at it.
Montenegro, for all its valor, was a fragment compared to the empire.
Its people fought with passion, but passion alone could not overcome rifles and artillery, and while the gains were great, what if Montenegro had fielded more than 4,000 in their battle for Grahovac?
Not to the point of fielding thousands more but if they could push back the greater numbers of the Ottoman garrison causing even greater harm to come to them, the great powers would be forced to recognize that Montenegro was a soverign nation, one who had long declared independance but only now would that be recognized, having won in their battle the gains were great, where in the past they gained territory now they stood to gain so much more.
That was where Elias would come in.
Already he had seeded agents among the Montenegrin elite, learning their plans, fixing the mistakes, and enhancing their vision to expand beyond their mere declaration of independance and instead lead a full independance movement on behalf of all south slavs.
His spies watched Ottoman garrisons, charting their strengths and weaknesses.
His surviving Iron Hand veterans, could be folded into the Montenegro forces, providing real world experiences into their otherwise glamorous lives.
But Elias was not content merely to repeat history.
He intended to bend it, when the war came, not only would Montenegro expand to include all their formerly gained territory from Elias's world, along with territory of future northern Albania.
He set down his quill and considered the ledger once more.
423,922 credits.
The number was power, but also limitation.
He could raise more armies—thousands of soldiers, trained and equipped in the style of the 1850s.
He could scatter spies across the capitals of Europe, weaving webs of influence and information.
He could pour resources into Montenegro, turning it into a fortress state bristling with guns.
Or he could wait.
Three more months.
Hold steady, expand his reserves, and then leap forward into the 1870s.
It was a gambler's choice.
To fight the coming war with the tools of the present—or risk delay and fight with the weapons of the future.
Elias weighed it carefully.
If he armed Montenegro with bolt-actions, even in small numbers, the effect would be staggering.
An Ottoman assault, expecting musket fire, would instead be torn apart by precision volleys.
A single Montenegrin rifleman could hold a ridge against ten foes.
A company could annihilate a regiment before the bayonet ever drew blood.
But the upgrade cost was immense.
Even with his mines working day and night, even with his reserves, he could not afford both the upgrade and the immediate mustering of a great army.
The choice was one of quality versus quantity.
For a long moment, Elias stared at the flickering figures in the system.
Then he made his decision.
He would wait.
The Ottomans were slow to move.
The Balkans were a tangle of loyalties, rivalries, and distractions.
The storm would not break immediately.
And when it did, he would meet it with weapons a generation ahead of their time.
The candle on his desk guttered low, casting shadows across the maps.
Elias leaned forward, tracing the ridges of Montenegro with one fingertip.
Each valley, each pass, was an equation.
How many rifles to hold it?
How much powder to supply it?
How many men to bleed the enemy dry before pulling back to the next ridge?
The Ottomans would bring numbers.
He would bring precision.
And behind it all, unseen, his bases would continue their work, turning rock into metal, metal into credits, and credits into the tools of a new age.
The Crimean War had been his proving ground.
Montenegro would be his experiment.
If he succeeded there, the world would begin to change—not in whispers, but in thunder.
Elias closed the ledger, extinguished the candle, and sat back in silence.
In the darkness of his chamber, only the hum of the base remained, steady and eternal.
He smiled faintly.
The world thought the Balkans a backwater, a place of petty wars and forgotten peoples.
But soon, here in the mountains, the future would be forged.
And it would be his future.