"Advance."
The word was still rippling outward across Thrace—boots striking churned earth, rail engines screaming awake, signal flags snapping into motion—when it arrived in Bar.
Not as sound.
As confirmation.
Deep beneath the mountain, in the command hall where the map table still glowed beneath lantern light and low-burning arc lamps, the system pulsed once—firm, decisive, irrevocable.
Elias felt it settle into place.
He had carried the system for decades, long enough to know the difference between issuing orders and committing history. Sending commands to a thousand summoned soldiers during the American Civil War had been a test of scale. This—this was orders of magnitude beyond that. Tens of thousands now moved because he had spoken. Entire rail schedules rewrote themselves. Supply depots emptied. Ammunition tallies ticked downward in perfect synchrony.
On the table, aides began adjusting markers with careful hands. Red arcs slid eastward in measured increments. Reinforcement symbols appeared behind them, drawn from western bases and surplus garrisons in the central Balkans. Lines that had been theoretical minutes earlier were now trajectories with mass and inertia.
The Eastern Army was fully in motion.
Elias watched without blinking.
He had chosen to roll the dice.
The central regions—newly conquered, barely pacified—still carried fear like a lingering sickness. The local populations had learned quickly what resistance brought, and that lesson had not yet faded. Uprisings were unlikely in the immediate term. Unlikely, but not impossible.
And while the system's soldiers were replaceable in theory, Elias had never allowed himself to see them as disposable. Each one was a thinking, adaptive being. They learned. They grew. They carried forward the doctrine he had spent decades refining.
They were not numbers.
His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly as his eyes drifted westward across the map, where garrison markers thinned to feed the advance. For a brief moment, he considered releasing the reserves—calling forth a full replacement complement to backfill the central Balkans while simultaneously reinforcing the eastern push. The system would allow it. The credits were there.
But the thought stopped where it always did.
The promise.
Those reserves were not for wars like this. They were the threshold. The final accumulation required to force the system to advance again—to unlock another age entirely.
He would not squander that for convenience.
"Now," Elias said, breaking the silence, "we wait."
Marin frowned slightly. "Sir?"
"For the first response," Elias clarified. "Not from the Ottomans. From the world."
He stepped away from the head of the table and began walking its length, boots echoing softly against the stone floor. Each step matched the pace of the advancing columns far to the east.
"They will deny it first," he continued. "London will request clarification. Vienna will assume exaggeration. St. Petersburg will suspect manipulation."
He stopped at the western edge of the map.
Once, Montenegro's borders there had been so small they barely warranted a marker. Now they were traced in thick, confident lines, pressing outward into regions that had never before known a stable ruler.
"By the time denial becomes impossible," Elias said, "Constantinople will already be starving."
Sonya closed her folio and held it against her chest, her knuckles whitening just slightly.
"And King Peter?" she asked quietly.
Elias did not answer at once.
"He will be informed once the army reaches the outskirts," he said at last. "Not before."
"To allow him to—"
"To arrive when history requires a witness," Elias finished.
A low rumble passed through the mountain then—not an explosion, not a tremor, but the distant vibration of rail engines beginning their relentless pull eastward. The sound was faint, but unmistakable. Even here, buried under stone and steel, the movement of an empire could be felt.
Elias turned back to the map.
King Peter was useful. Necessary, even. The image of a crowned monarch standing at the gates of Constantinople would resonate in ways no system-generated proclamation ever could. A Balkan emperor ordained not by treaty tables, but by conquest—by presence.
A new Napoleon, some would whisper.
That comparison would raise alarms.
If a Balkan king could shatter an empire that had endured six centuries—one that had fought Russia, Austria, Britain, and France repeatedly and survived—then what stopped him from doing the same to Europe itself?
Nothing, they would conclude.
And they would be wrong.
Elias had no interest in becoming a continental conqueror. Europe was not the prize. Europe was the accelerant. He needed its industries to grow unchecked, its rivalries to sharpen, its armament races to spiral until war became inevitable.
Industrial war.
Only at that scale would the system's next evolutions truly matter.
His gaze drifted inward, not in thought but calculation, as credit tallies scrolled invisibly at the edge of his awareness. The third rank loomed like a distant summit.
Fifty million credits.
Ten times what the second rank had demanded.
And unlike before, simple extraction would not suffice. Iron, coal, copper—once invaluable—now yielded diminishing returns. Rank two had revalued them downward. What had once fueled meteoric growth now barely sustained it.
War spoils helped. The American Civil War had been lucrative. The Balkan campaigns even more so. Daily inflows now numbered in the thousands—sometimes tens of thousands.
But there was a line he would not cross.
Not yet.
The Balkans would not be strip-mined for short-term gain. Those resources needed to remain available. Controlled. Replenishing. State ownership would wait until bases were planted, until extraction could be moderated, until future ranks demanded deeper yields.
Otherwise, he would become a parasite—forced to abandon exhausted lands and hunt for new growth zones.
And he already had one.
Across the ocean.
The Native Autonomous Zone in North America sat quietly on the edge of his awareness, far from the cannons and telegrams of Europe. Twenty thousand system-born soldiers patrolled its vast spaces, blending seamlessly among indigenous populations, defending against bandits and opportunists.
The next mobile construction vehicle was already earmarked for it.
A satellite base.
The Rockies would provide what the Balkans could not—depth. Minerals untouched by industrial frenzy. Room to grow without scrutiny.
Even now, diplomatic feelers extended quietly through the plains. Settlers spoke of autonomy. Ottawa debated restructuring the Northwest Territories. Treaties guaranteed native land rights. Provinces whispered their own names into existence.
Alberta. Saskatchewan.
If they broke away, they would not confederate under Canada.
They would look south.
And west.
Elias's attention snapped back to the present as a junior aide approached with a stack of fresh reports—telegraph intercepts, rail updates, confirmation of movement across every eastern node.
He did not take them.
"Mark it," he said simply. "No reversals."
The aide hesitated only a fraction of a second, then nodded and relayed the order.
On the map, the red arcs thickened.
There would be no pause now. No adjustment. No retreat disguised as prudence.
The dice were already rolling.
And far to the east, the road to Constantinople was filling with men who would not turn back.