Montenegro — Winter 1871
Snow had come early that year, heavy and relentless.
It blanketed the Black Mountains in silence, muffling the echoes of what the world would later call The Vengeance Winter war.
Every hearth in Montenegro burned not for warmth, but for war.
The Prince was dead, and the nation was reborn in fury.
In the capital of Cetinje, the coronation of Prince Danilo II unfolded under skies the color of steel.
The bells rang through the valleys, their sound mingling with the distant rumble of cannon fire from the east.
Inside the cathedral, Elias stood among the shadows at the edge of the ceremony, observing the spectacle he had so carefully arranged.
Danilo's young face was pale, his expression uncertain beneath the golden crown.
He looked like a lamb dressed for a hunt.
But the people—oh, the people believed.
they shouted his name, swore vengeance, raised their hands as if invoking heaven itself.
Elias allowed himself a rare smile.
The first act of the plan was complete.
Montenegro was united, aflame with purpose.
And that purpose was war.
By dusk, as the coronation feast began, Elias's true army was already on the move.
No nation in Europe would dare march in winter—roads frozen, rivers blocked, fields barren.
But Elias's soldiers were not ordinary men.
They did not tire.
Their provided equipment was perfect.
And their weapons maintenance free thanks to the system that summoned them.
Each soldier carried rations sealed in wax tins, but upon consuming them more would just appear, nothing all to tasty but to a moving army unable to replenish supplies any food even tasteless and bland was better than the option to starve.
Sporting thick winter coats of leather, and animal furs, and weapons unfamiliar to any other European army—breech-loading percussion rifles and lightweight repeating carbines.
Elias's army was no longer an imitation of Europe's; it was its evolution.
The orders had been simple, and absolute:
First Prong — The Northern Retribution.
Ten thousand men under Commander Jin would march north toward the ruins of the last battle.
Their mission: avenge the fallen prince.
But vengeance was merely the excuse.
The real goal was to push the Ottoman border back to the point where they were only defending Belgrade, where the 'Serbian capital' could be claimed in a seige that ends both the Ottomans and the serbian rebels who fought valiantly.
Stationing a garrison force before a splinter moves to secure the remaining serbian lands for protection and to control unrest, only to eventually use their presence in the region as a means to annex the lands into Montenegro itself.
Elias's strategy was elegant: by "rescuing" the Serbs, he would claim their land, and their loyalty, getting their revenge alongside Montenegro's.
Montenegro would cease to be a mountain principality and instead become a regional kingdom, while striving to expand into an Empire forged in war.
~
Second Prong — The Ionian Advance.
South of Tirane, the Southern Army under Commander Kovec marched along the frozen coast.
The Ionian wind bit at their faces, but the men moved like clockwork, stepping through frost and mud as if it were dry ground.
Their route wound down starting from northern Albania, driving south into the occupied Ottoman zone of Southern Albania.
By design, Elias's fleet shadowed them from offshore—an ironclad squadron that moved silently through winter seas, black smoke trailing low against the horizon.
The army's objective was to sweep down the coast until reaching the Greek frontier, claiming the rest of Albanian territory and cutting the Ottoman access to the Adriatic sea before turning east toward Thessalonica and Macedonia, capturing these aincient kingdom territories while forming a territorial wall blocking Greece to their holdings.
If the plan succeeded, Montenegro would control nearly the entire western flank of the Balkans, and no Ottoman army would be able to move west without passing through Elias's guns, not that they would have the forces to spare to send west while dealing with the massive army grouped against them in the north.
~
Third Prong — The Eastern Spear.
The true strike force.
Twenty thousand strong, led by Commander Captain Rex himself, seasoned veteran of the Civil war, and one of Elias's most trusted summons.
His armies orders: were to move swiftly through Kosovo, secure the passes, and continue eastward with merciless speed.
They would seize Skopje, then drive toward Adrianople after cutting through what wouldve become South Bulgaria—and, if all went as intended, they could sieze Istanbul itself.
While the Russians, Bulgarians, and Romanians battered their way trying to break through the northern fronts, bleeding themselves white against Ottoman fortresses, Montenegro's hidden army would cut straight through the underbelly of the empire.
A dagger to the heart while the bear mauled the limbs.
Being unique in being able to move through the winter as well as the summer, Elias's force even while small on the surface held the advantage, not only in logistics, and weaponry but also in terms of strategy.
They could storm positions like ghosts quickly overwhelming the local legions and garrisons as they huddled for warmth staving off the cold.
And while the military good captured were seized Elias could refine them into credits, allowing for the further expansion of his forces as the Barracks, and War factories began churning out new units to either replace those left behind as garrisons, or send straight to the front as reinforcements.
But for the Ottomans who viewed the eastern Balkan territories as a low priority only collectively stationed at most 40-50 thousand troops across the whole east.
But that wasnt one single force, instead they were spread out all over, making Elias's 15|15|20 forces easily be able to deal with them one by one, while slowly peeling off forces to control areas now under their occupation.
Thanks to the expected contributions looted from the fallen Ottoman forces, Elias sought to build up his Balkan forces expanding his already sizeable 50,000 men into a true imperial army capable of holding off against the Neighboring Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman remnants as the Balkan Empire begins to form.
Once the balkans was unified under his command, Elias would need to quickly enlist a sizable army.
Even after a defeat the Ottoman empire should still have roughly a million men available to serve within the remains of the empire, while Russia might be smarting about the loss of possible territory, but that could be solved by granting their fleets access to the Mediterranean.
The sole real threat to their newly claimed empire would be from Bulgaria, and Austo-Hungary.
Combined the two could effectively field roughly half a million men, and with Montenegro having only recently expanded the frontline would be the entire border from the Adriatic to the black sea.
Though being the time and age that it is, even if he only had a couple hundred thousand or so on the border, the line could hold with hundreds of thousands, at least until tech advances could allow the Austrians to call upon larger ordenances and means to break the Balkan lines.
But hopefully by then Elias would have reached the point where he could upgrade the system rank once again and enter the WW1 tech range.
Even though the marching speed of the armies was slowed due to the snow and poor season of year for it, but even still the Eastern spear had managed to reach Prizren within Kosovo and managed to besiege the city.
The same was true for the other two forces.
Thanks to General Winter, being on 'loan' from the Russians, Elias's forces were able to march utterly unimpeded by anything other than the snow, quickly marching through South Albania, Serbia, and Kosovo.