The month of July did not arrive quietly.
Where June had closed with treaties and triumphs in council halls, July opened with a stream of rebuilding, mixed with pomp and circumstance as the victors paraded around, reveling in their spoils, only for the month to come to an end with fire in the north.
The Ottomans, reeling but not broken, launched desperate maneuvers across the rugged spine of the Balkans, hoping to reclaim some shred of dignity in the eyes of Europe, by pulling forces into the region and stabalizing the growing dissent.
One such attempt unfolded around the strategic town of Kolasin.
It was there that Elias's hidden hand reached once more.
He dispatched one thousand of his best—disciplined men in commoners garb over their black uniforms who now moved beneath Montenegrin banners, indistinguishable from "rebels" in the eyes of foreign observers, joining together with another 5,000 or so who acted not under the command of their Prince but of the common men, perhaps under the authority of the Grand Duke, the princes brother.
Their presence was meant not merely to tilt a battle, but to ensure that the Ottoman humiliation remained absolute, visible to every consulate from Vienna to St. Petersburg.
The hills around Kolasin rang with musket fire.
Ottoman forces were harried and harrassed, their commanders reporting this to be a commoner force without proper commmand or weapons.
Instead, they faced ordered volleys, bayonet charges delivered with a precision that should not have belonged to highland irregulars.
The Montenegrin levies, emboldened by these strange comrades, pressed harder than they ever had before.
Songs of vengeance echoed down the slopes as Ottoman formations collapsed in confusion.
By dusk, the battlefield was a slaughterhouse.
Hundreds of Ottoman soldiers lay scattered in ditches and along the riverside, their banners trampled into mud.
Kolasin remained in Montenegrin hands, and the news carried fast: the Sultan's legions could not even hold the fringes of their frontier.
The shock spread further still.
Along the Ottoman borderlands, "rebels" rose in imitation.
Villages that had bent the knee for generations now smoldered as garrisons were butchered, supply depots torched, and roads cut.
To the Sublime Porte, it seemed as though the entire frontier had erupted.
To Europe, however, it looked like the empire's control was rotting away from within.
Elias had wanted exactly that.
Every rebel torch, every corpse hung in defiance, was another nail in the coffin of Ottoman prestige.
Montenegro's armies did not need to move—the empire was unraveling at its own edges, with Elias's hand pressing quietly on the threads.
Yet while his shadow war bled the Ottomans, Elias himself turned to a different battlefield—the soil and stone of his new baronies.
The villages granted to his "noblemen" were little more than rustic hamlets.
Dirt tracks wound through the fields; houses sagged under the weight of centuries; markets were no more than a few wooden stalls set up by the roadside.
Such places had survived by clinging to tradition, but tradition would not be enough for what Elias envisioned.
He summoned his medics and engineers, men drilled as thoroughly in construction and healing as others were in musketry.
Under his guidance, the first wave of transformation began.
Roads were cut straight through the valleys, lined with stone to resist the rains.
Bridges replaced fords across mountain streams.
In town squares, wooden posts rose bearing oil lamps, bringing light to places that had never known more than a flickering hearth after sunset.
New structures followed—barns with mechanized pulleys, mills with reinforced gears, workshops capable of producing more than simple tools.
Elias's engineers introduced implements foreign to most peasants: seed drills to spread grain evenly, plows reinforced with iron to bite deeper into the soil, simple threshing machines that cut the labor of harvest in half.
The effect was immediate.
Where once families had wrestled with the land for survival, now they coaxed it into abundance.
By midsummer, harvests were already looking to be abundant.
Granaries would be filled faster than they could be built.
For the first time in memory, whole villages would speak of surplus, of food enough not only to survive winter but to sell at market.
And in the midst of this bounty, Elias's medics moved.
They set up small clinics, tending wounds from the war but also ailments that had been endured for generations.
Fevers, infections, broken limbs—all treated with efficiency and care that left peasants staring in awe.
Word spread: these baronies were blessed, watched over by lords who brought not only order but miracles, meanwhile 'liberated' peoples immigrated in from the destroyed villages in the north.
In truth, Elias knew it was not miracles but method.
Prosperity bound men more tightly than fear.
Loyalty forged in gratitude would outlast loyalty forged in terror.
And every improved road, every new storehouse, every healed child became another strand in his growing web of power.
Meanwhile, wagons arrived at his hidden headquarters laden with trophies from the spring campaigns.
Muskets, bayonets, and cannon barrels—the refuse of Ottoman defeat.
At first the Montenegrins had assumed the weapons lost to retreat.
But Elias's men, methodical in their looting, had collected and hidden them, waiting for transport.
Now the stockpiles filled his refinery.
Great fires roared as metal was melted down, smelted into nothing, and then absorbed into the System.
Each musket barrel fed the unseen mechanism.
Each cannon yielded its weight not in shot but in credits.
Elias could feel the numbers rising within his mind, a balance of power invisible to every man around him.
The influx was immense.
With the captured arms alone, he secured the resources to expand his army yet again.
Hundreds more could be trained, equipped, and prepared—not merely to fight in the Balkans, but to march when he turned his gaze across the ocean.
That thought lingered as he walked the refinery floor one night, sparks flying around him like fireflies.
Montenegro had been a crucible, a place to test his designs and anchor his power.
But it was not the end.
America called—vast, fractured, brimming with conflict that would shape the century.
His strength here would buy him the means to shape it there.
By the end of July, Montenegro stood stronger than ever.
Its frontiers guarded by victories like Kolasin, its villages swelling with prosperity, its prince basking in the adulation of a people who believed him the architect of their fortune.
But in the shadows, Elias knew the truth.
The Ottomans had been humiliated, yes—but humiliation was not the same as death.
They would return in time, with armies rebuilt and allies courted.
And when they did, Montenegro would be tested again.
Until then, Elias's work continued.
Roads stretched further each week.
Crops piled higher.
Soldiers drilled under banners now recognized by Europe.
And in the quiet nights, while peasants celebrated their new age, Elias calculated, planned, and prepared.
Montenegro thought it had won independence.
Elias knew it had been woven into something larger—a foundation for a power yet to come.
And as the month closed, with fires still burning on the Ottoman frontier and new granaries rising in the valleys, he allowed himself a single thought:
The empire has been shamed.
The people have been bound.
The land is awakening.
Now, the world will follow.