The King of Hungary stood in his war room. Gone were the generals, and maps of battle lines representing future goals of conquest.
Instead, he was surrounded by architects, engineers, city planners, and a wide variety of other experts in building infrastructure, rather than siege fortifications.
The map in front of him showed the current developnts of the neighboring German Reich, from the southernmost reaches of Alemannia and Illyria to the northernmost region of Schleswig-Holstein.
The German Reich had built an interconnected empire where the trains ran perfectly on ti.
Naturally, he had been among those invited to the conference in Hanseong, and there he had agreed, like the others, to the grand ambitions of Bruno to connect all of Europe through infrastructure and transportation.
He had gathered the greatest minds of his realm for his own participation. Accountants, treasury officials, engineers, planners. There they debated fiercely about their contribution, how things could be built, and how Hungary might best serve the project.
But it wasn’t Germany’s borders that drew his interest.
Romania held the last territorial ambitions of Greater Hungary. It was a matter he had never truly been capable of resolving; even after eting Bruno and Karl in Vienna.
The two had given him only a single answer.
"Your wars are yours alone."
At the ti, he had taken it as indifference. Bruno was a man who had fought his entire life to win his wars, the wars that consolidated the German Reich into the superpower it was today.
He had thought perhaps Bruno no longer cared for his allies and their own ambitions. I an, the man had shown up so casually to a diplomatic eting and requested it at a restaurant in Vienna. But now... Now... he understood.
Bruno and Karl had denied him support not because they no longer had the will or capacity to wage war. But because they no longer needed to do so.
His gaze lingered on the map, but he no longer saw rail lines or cities. He saw borders that would never move. He had imagined them differently once.
Imagined banners planted in Transylvania. Imagined borders redrawn not by treaty, but by steel. And he had imagined himself succeeding where generations before him had failed.
Now those ambitions felt... distant. As Europe ca together to build a continental system of rail, comrce, and cities modeled after Germany, he realized sothing with a clarity that left no room for doubt.
His ti had passed. The age that would have rewarded his ambitions no longer existed.
For a long mont, he said nothing.
The room around him continued as if unchanged. Voices debating routes, costs, materials; but it all felt distant. As though he were listening from behind a wall he had not realized was there until now.
He had spent his life preparing for a different kind of world.
One where strength was asured in divisions and artillery. Where borders were earned not through speeches and majority decisions, but with blood and iron.
And for a ti, that world had been real. He had seen it in the trenches; he had witnessed it through the thunder of guns and the millions of bombs dropped from the sky.
But now...
Bruno had ended it. Not with a single war. But by building sothing that made those wars unnecessary.
That was the part he had failed to understand in Vienna. It was not that Germany refused to help him achieve his ambitions. It was that the very concept of those ambitions had already been left behind.
The King sighed heavily, shaking his head as he muttered beneath his breath; so quietly that only he could hear it.
"Perhaps... it is better this way."
His attention was drawn away by an economist stepping forward, papers in hand.
"Your Majesty, my departnt has reviewed the calculations three tis. The numbers remain unchanged. Our contribution to the project will be less than initially considered viable. In fact... we will require German or Russian labor to compensate for the shortages if we are to complete our portion on schedule."
He closed his eyes briefly and sighed once more. He already knew the reason why. The Balkans had always been a difficult prize.
Hungary dominated everything east of Illyria and west of Epirus, and to their credit, a common language had been enforced across the realm.
This was in stark contrast to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which preceded his realm. But language alone did not create unity.
Catholics ruled, while Orthodox populations endured. Old tensions lingered beneath the surface; Croats fought against Serbs, Serbs fought against Sorbs, and Slovenes? They fought against everyone who wasn’t one of their own.
It was as Bruno had once predicted, even as the Muslim populations had been displaced eastward, the Balkans still found a reason to bleed.
Cooperation was slow, and trust was thinner still. Centuries of warfare between the various groups were not easily forgotten. Especially when those wars were still only a few decades removed.
As a result, security costs remained high, and coordination across regions was inconsistent to say the very least.
Even with vast manpower and resources, Hungary struggled to match the efficiency of the more cohesive states of Europe.
Nations which were smaller and more war-torn than they had been, still managed to find a way to pull their weight for the projects of their future. But not Hungary, not the Balkans.
It was not failure... But it was still not enough. For a nation that prides itself on once being the most powerful of the minor powers, they now found themselves struggling to keep up with their lesser.
But there was nothing to be done about this; there was no imdiate solution to this question. And so the King exhaled slowly, the weight of it settling into his voice.
"Then we inform Berlin... and Saint Petersburg."
The room fell silent as eyes wandered toward one another. This was neither a question nor a suggestion. It was necessity.
None spoke in protest. Because this was a surrender that cost them nothing, and yet, everything. There would be no shift of the borders no borders. No armies would find themselves annihilated.
Only sothing far less tangible would be taken from them...
Pride.
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