While the thunder of musket fire echoed through the valleys of Vilusi and Grahovo, Elias's shadow army moved like a knife across the map.
Two thousand men marched swiftly down the hidden tracks, their uniforms black, their packs laden with rations, ammunition, and medical supplies.
Unlike the Montenegrin levies, Elias's force carried no family burdens, no hesitation—they were professionals, bred and drilled for this very purpose.
Their discipline gave them speed, and by the time the first reports of the great northern battles reached Podgorica, Elias's vanguard was already at its gates.
The city, nestled between mountains and rivers, had little defense left.
Its garrison had been stripped to bolster Hussein Pasha's advance northward, leaving only a token force of a few hundred Janissary remnants and conscripts.
Still, those who remained fought with grim resolve.
Muskets cracked from the walls, and Ottoman cannon fired blindly into the night as Elias's men encircled the city.
The assault was merciless in precision.
Sharpshooters silenced the cannon crews, while small detachments slipped into the suburbs, cutting supply lines and setting fire to outposts.
By dawn, Elias's men had slung Montenegro banners over the walls.
Podgorica had fallen.
Elias wasted no time.
A garrison of three hundred remained behind to hold the town and guard its stores, while the main body pressed further south.
To the Ottomans, this was no mere raid.
It was an invasion.
Koplik resisted harder.
Here, an Ottoman detachment of nearly a thousand held the approaches, dug into earthen redoubts.
They knew the Montenegrins were fighting in the north, and they believed they had time to bleed any raiding force dry.
But Elias's men were not raiders.
The black-uniformed soldiers advanced in ordered ranks, rifles firing by command, volleys rippling down the line like thunder.
Ottoman defenders, accustomed to traditional skirmishers who fought from cover and fled under pressure, were stunned to face a foe that marched directly into fire, reloaded in unison, and answered every volley with one deadlier still.
For six hours the fight raged.
The redoubts changed hands twice, bayonets flashing in the morning sun, men screaming as they grappled hand-to-hand in the trenches.
By afternoon, Elias himself ordered his reserves forward.
The final push shattered the Ottoman line.
Few surrendered.
Most fought until cut down, their corpses heaped among the earthworks they had sworn to hold.
When the smoke cleared, Koplik was his.
Yet it was not the victory in arms that mattered most, but what followed.
His men passed through the village streets like river water around a rock.
The townsfolk watched from doorways and rooftops, their faces tight with fear.
They had lived under Ottoman rule for centuries.
Every "liberator" they had ever known had come as a looter in disguise.
But Elias had prepared for this moment, his men bred from the system were not drawn by greed, or lust like normal men and while it is true to looted in the Crimean war, here they did not, these would become their people afterall, why rob from their own.
Instead of taking spoils, his soldiers opened their supply carts.
Food—dried meat, flour, salted fish—was distributed freely.
His medics set up tents in the village square, tending not only to his own wounded but to Ottoman prisoners and civilians alike.
Blankets were handed out.
Children were given bread.
A rumor began to spread before the day was over.
These men were not conquerors.
They were liberators.
By evening, old women came forward bearing candles and prayers, and young men whispered offers to guide the army further south.
The soldiers did not accept citing that they wished no harm would come to civilians and that this was a military affair.
Kindness was not weakness—it was strategy.
A fed people resisted less than a starving one, but he still did not want then to join his forces march.
The march to Shkodër was swifter.
Word of Koplik's fall had reached the great fortress-city by the time Elias's banners appeared on the horizon.
The garrison there numbered in the thousands, but they were militia and irregulars, far from the disciplined cores sent north.
Worse, morale was already cracked by rumors: of Montenegrins slaughtering armies in the passes, of black-clad ghosts taking Podgorica in a night.
Shkodër's gates closed, and its cannons thundered.
But Elias had no intention of storming its massive walls outright.
Instead, he besieged it.
His men cut the roads, seizing villages and river crossings, isolating the city from aid.
He deployed his engineers, building gun pits and trenches, a spectacle that bewildered the townsfolk—Montenegrins had never before conducted siege warfare with such method.
Within days, the beseiged city was at his mercy, the gates held but only just, each time a defender popped up to look out their life was reaped.
Inside, food dwindled.
The Ottoman commandant swore he would never yield—but when civilians began throwing rocks at soldiers hoarding bread, his authority faltered.
It took just a week for Shkodër to fall.
Not in a final bloody assault, but in quiet surrender, its leaders opening the gates under cover of darkness in exchange for guarantees of safety.
Elias granted it.
No sack followed.
His soldiers marched in silent order, their discipline once again unsettling the populace.
Bread and medicine followed.
The city was his. And with it, the northern half of Lake Shkodër, while the remaining ottoman forces we sent off under the goodwill of the Iron Hand commanders graces, the force left but if they had turned back hours later they could have retaken the city, cause aside from more garrison forces, the main army once more marched on.
Lezhë was the last.
There, resistance burned fiercest.
Ottoman loyalists, tribal militias, and even wandering Albanian mercenaries gathered to make a final stand.
They fought in the streets, from rooftops, from alleyways.
Every house became a fortress, every window a gunport.
Elias's soldiers paid in blood for every step.
Whole companies fell taking a single street.
Cannon fire tore gaps through the town center, and still the defenders came on, women and boys among them, hurling stones and boiling water.
For two days it raged—a brutal, close-quarters struggle that echoed the sieges of medieval centuries.
One when his men led a midnight final push did the defenders finally break.
Few surrendered.
Most lay dead where they had stood.
But in the days after, as in Koplik and Shkodër, Elias enacted his policy.
Supplies were distributed.
Wounded civilians were treated as tenderly as his own.
Grain was sent to starving families.
His officers walked the streets in pairs, forbidding looting under penalty of death.
Slowly, grudgingly, the townsfolk softened.
They had seen their husbands and sons die.
They had watched their walls breached.
But in the faces of these soldiers, they did not see the greed of conquerors.
They saw iron discipline, a strange severity that carried its own promise: order.
And order, in the chaos of empire, was rare enough to be mistaken for mercy.
By June, Elias's campaign had carved a swath of conquest that stunned even Prince Danilo when reports reached Cetinje.
Podgorica, Koplik, Shkodër, Lezhë—the entire basin of Lake Shkodër was in Montenegrin hands.
On maps, it seemed impossible.
Montenegro, long a rocky sliver of resistance, had suddenly swelled to control ports, valleys, and fertile plains.
But Elias knew better.
This was no miracle.
It was the design of years, now unfolding.
He stood on the ramparts of his fortress one evening, beneath the moon, and allowed himself a moment of satisfaction.
These lands, seized in war, would become bargaining chips in peace.
And in those bargains, Elias would demand what he had long prepared for: noble titles, estates, ports, recognition.
Not just for Montenegro.
For himself.
His army had come south not only to fight.
They had come to plant the seeds of sovereignty.
And now, among the ashes of Ottoman rule, those seeds were beginning to take root.
And the battle itself was still not over, not by a longshot.