Liyue Harbor
Earth Time: April 2nd, 1941
The Lantern Rite preparations had transformed Liyue Harbor as it had always done every time that Aether and Paimon arrive to the holiday that nation of geo celebrated. Paper lanterns in amber, crimson, and warm bright honey gold hung everywhere that the two could see. There were lanterns hanging on shops on the commercial street stands, on the windows of buildings, and nearby vessels that were docked. The amount of lanterns were so heavy that the evening sky was barely visible from where Paimon and Aether stood. Festival vendors had staked out their territories along the waterfront in the docks with the precision that equaled military commanders and the stalls forming a wall of steam with colors and noises. The smell of jueyun chili and roasting matsutake drifted through the streets in waves so thick that Aether could practically taste the air with Paimon salivating on her lips.
However, she quickly redirected herself after a minute. Under normal circumstances, Paimon would have mapped every food stall within a three-block radius wanting to taste all the food that she get her tiny hands on. This was different now, Paimon just floated beside Aether in silence as they walked past the stalls without stopping for a second afterwards. Since they had left Fontaine, Paimon had been unusually quiet as if she was deeply troubled by something weighing her mind. Aether did not question it as he immediately knew the exact reason for Paimon's silence. She could not stop thinking about the submarine that left with those Chao Cores and Circuits….about the Fatui bringing trouble to another world….to the crazy tyrannical moustache man yelling about one leader, one nation, and whatever nonsense came out of his toothbrush mouth. Those thoughts probably had a weight that was so heavy that not even a Lantern Rite lantern would lift them up and away from here.
They walked over to the Third-Round Knockout which was quieter than the streets around them somehow, they could hear the sizzling of food at the nearby Wamin Restaurant where Xingliang worked at with her father. There were a set of round tables with chairs placed on the entrance patio of the place, where they saw many people silently enjoying the holiday. One table had a Millelith Officer that looked to be off duty and sat along reading a newspaper from the Steambird on it was the title:
FATUI SIGNS PACT WITH FOREIGN POWER BEYOND TEYVAT
Paimon stared at the headline for a moment as they passed the officer's table, her narrowing as if the words had offended her personally.
"Even the Steambird knows," she muttered, "The whole world knows and nobody is doing anything about it."
"That's not entirely true," Aether replied quietly as he scanned the patio, "People are doing things, but not the right things yet."
Eventually, he found who he was looking for at table furthest from the entrance at a large circular table and seated with on a chair as his back faced Wamin Restaurant was a man. This man was tall with fair skin and wore a dark brown tailcoat over a beige dress shirt and vest. Although, Aether could not easily see the man's face as he too had a copy of the same edition of the Steambird article about the Fatui alliance. But no one else in Liyue Harbor or the nation of contracts wears the kind of outfit that he does, so it could be no one else. On the table beside the man was a steaming fresh cup of tea.
Aether cleared his throat to get the man's attention, which worked as the man folded the newspaper and set it on the table. His amber eyes with glowing pupils that were the shape of diamond looked at Aether. A small smile could be seen on the clean face of the man as he inclined his head once.
"Traveler and Paimon." was the words that the man said as he carried a level of measured cadence.
"Zhongli," Aether said as he pulled out the chair across from him and sat down, "Thanks for meeting us on such short notice."
"It is no trouble at all. Lantern rite provides many reasons to be here," Zhongli replied as he set the newspaper aside though his eyes lingered on the headline for a moment longer before fully letting it go, "I trust your Journey from Fontaine was uneventful."
"Took some time, but the cargo ships are faster than they used to be," Aether said.
"Paimon wanted to stop at like six food stalls on the way here," Paimon said as she settled onto the edge of the table with her legs dangling off the side, "But Paimon showed incredible self-control, which should show you how serious this is."
Zhongli regarded her for moment with what might have been the faintest trace of concern. Probably because in all the time that he had known Paimon, her voluntarily bypassing food was an event roughly as common as the Jade Chamber falling from the sky twice.
"I took the liberty of ordering osmanthus cakes," Zhongli as he gestured to a small plate at the center of the table that Aether had not noticed, "and a plum juice for you, Paimon."
A moment later the Plum Juice arrived and was set down by a waiter without ceremony. Paimon wrapped both hands around the cup, but did not drink and just starred at the surface of it for a moment. She looked up at Zhongli with an expression far more serious than any plum juice had a right to inspire.
"Zhongli," she said softly, "We saw some really bad stuff in Fontaine. Stuff that the Steambird probably didn't include, because of what it really doesn't know."
Zhongli's gaze moved briefly to the folded newspaper on the table, "I suspected as much. The article is thorough for what is publicly observable but it reads like it is trying to describe the shape of the mountain by mapping the valley around it."
Zhongli looked at aether for a moment as he continued, "Your message said that the matter was urgent and I do not hear that word from either of you often. So tell me what you know and weighs you down."
Aether took a long breath and began in telling everything that he knew with no piece of information being left out. He laid out the dream through Nahida about the Iriminsul, the memories of the trenches, and the rally with tens of thousands of people chanting for a man under a crooked black cross and a terrible mustache. He described the events that occurred at the Fontaine film festival with the German propaganda film that played there and the tensions that the Germans had about the fact that their film did not win. He continued about U-66 at Romaritime Harbor where it legally somehow through the Fatui is transporting ruin machine parts like cores and circuits to the otherworld for purposes that concerned Aether and Paimon.
Then came the part about Yelan, where the Qixing was aware of the Alliance before the article published and sent Yelan to document the shell companies and purchase patterns. The blueprints that were exchanged for the U-boats and something called 'Panzers."
"And that's now even the surprising part," Paimon said as she took a sip of her juice, "Yelan told us that Tartaglia recently vanished from every intelligence channel and that she believes he has been transferred for military operations in Earth. But there is chatter about him in actually diplomatic roles in something in that world."
Zhongli had not moved throughout the telling, but did not sip his tea or shifted his chair. Instead, the retired Geo Archon did what he normally did and that was listen completely still with full attention that absorbed everything like a stone absorbs rain.
"You are certain about the Ruin components," Zhongli said at last.
"Yes, Yelan documented everything." Paimon repeated.
"I see." Zhongli said as he held a finger to chin as if thinking of the implications of what he was being told.
Aether could tell that Zhongli was trying to piece together all of the information that he was now receiving in bulk and make a decision on what to say to them. After a minute, he must have made a decision as he looked at the pair with eyes that starred into Aether's soul.
"Tell me," he said, "what do you understand about the nature of the barrier between Teyvat and this other world that the Germans are from?"
"Nothing really," Aether admitted as he had to consider the question.
Zhongli sighed and then lifted his tea with both hands, held it for a moment, and took a small sip as he set it down again.
"When Khaenri'ah fell," he began as Aether noticed that his voice had dropped, "the destruction was not contained to a single nation. Khaenri'ah's ambitions had reached further than most in Teyvat realize. Their technology probed the very boundaries of this world in ways that even the Archons did not fully comprehend until it was too late. For example, the Cataclysm was not merely a war but a a rupture and like all ruptures it left scars."
"Scars in what?" Paimon asked as she drank her juice.
"In the structure of reality itself," Zhongli replied, "Imagine Teyvat was not a world floating in an empty void, but a single chamber in an enormous building. The walls of the chamber had been damaged five hundred years ago, but just like most cracks that existed it sealed itself over time. But some did not and merely became places where the wall is not fully gone but no longer solid."
"And Fatui found that place," Aether said.
"Well, more than that, but yes." Zhongli said as something shifted behind his eyes, "They learned to widen and stabilize them. Maybe at first enough to watch, but someone on the other end found those cracks and opened them wide for the Fatui to cross. The resources and knowledge required realistically would not be something that any nation in Teyvat could develop."
"Except Snezhnaya," Aether said.
"Except Snezhnaya," Zhongli agreed.
Paimon set her juice down. "Okay. So the Fatui poked holes in reality, found a whole other world that's already in the middle of a giant war, and now they're sending Chaos Cores and Harbingers through those holes to make it worse."
She looked between them, "Did Paimon miss anything?"
"You have summarized the situation accurately," Zhongli said, and there might have been the faintest trace of approval in his voice, "But you have not yet asked the question that matters most."
"Which is?" was Aether's response with an eyebrow raised.
"Why."
The word sat between them on the table. Outside the patio, someone set off a test firework as a single streak of gold climbed into the darkening sky over the harbor and burst into sparks that drifted. The crowd along the piers of the city cheered briefly and then went back to what they were doing.
"Paimon figured it was because the Fatui are the Fatui," Paimon said, "They do bad stuff. That's kind of their whole deal."
"The Fatui do not act without purpose," Zhongli replied with a level of firmness that straightened Paimon posture on the table, "They are not treasure hoarders raiding for prize. Every action that the Tsaritsa sanctions serves a larger design. The collection of the Gnoses was not random nor were the embassies in almost every nation in Teyvat. And their announcement of their alliance was not random either, I suppose."
"Then what are they after?" Aether asked.
Zhongli was quiet for a long moment as the sounds of Lantern Rite filled the gap where vendors were calling prices and children chasing each other with paper dragons past the patio.
"I do not know the precise objective," he said, "But consider what is being combined. Khaenri'ah's technological remnants and this Earth's industrial capabilities of building things like vessels that can go underwater. And, now, a Harbinger whose combat abilities have no equivalent on Earth, sent to a world that has no way of understanding what he is."
He paused and let those pieces sit on the table between them. The folded Steambird and the untouched osmanthus cakes suddenly felt very small next to the picture that Zhongli was quietly assembling with his words.
"This is not an alliance of convenience, Traveler. This is a synthesis. The Fatui are combining the knowledge of two civilizations in ways that neither achieved alone. And whatever the end result is meant to be, I believe it requires something that no single nation in Teyvat could ever provide."
"What's that?" Paimon asked.
"Scale," Zhongli continued, "Millions of human beings organized into an unknown number of nations with industries that could put Liyue to shame if combined, and armies that move in concert that die for the same things."
Aether felt the weight of those words settle over the table and thought about the rally that he saw through Nahida's dream. The tens of thousands of people that were giving that hand salute and cheer to that man. How many of them were now fighting to achieve that man's goals? Goals that Aether did not fully understand but the way that he looked that the mustache man, he just had the sense that they brought nothing good at all.
"Can we stop them?" Aether asked sincerely.
"Not from here," Zhongli said plainly, "Unless you can get to the gate that the Fatui control."
"But we have to find a way." Paimon said.
Zhongli looked at Paimon for a moment and then back at Aether. It was a look that suggested he had been waiting for them to arrive at this point in the conversation on their own rather than leading them to it.
"There is one person," Zhongli said, "who may possess both the knowledge and the capability to help you cross without using the Fatui's gates."
Paimon perked up immediately, "Who?"
"Her name is Alice."
Paimon's expression traveled through several stages in rapid succession. First came recognition, then excitement, then confusion, and then something that landed squarely on alarm.
"Alice?" she repeated, "As in Klee's mom Alice? The lady who wrote the Teyvat Travel Guide? The one that made the Golden Apple Archipelago for Klee?"
Aether remembered Alice very well and how could anyone that knew Klee could not? Alice is the reason for Klee's explosive nature to put it mildly at that.
Zhongli nodded with a smirk on his face as if he was recalling a memory, "The very same. She traveled further than any mortal I have encountered in my existence. When I first meet her, she mentioned things that do not sound like they belong in Teyvat, so I have suspected that her journeys took her beyond the normal boundaries of this world entirely."
"But nobody knows where she is," Aether said. "She shows up when she wants and disappears the moment she gets bored. We can't exactly send her a letter, we tried the Dodocommunication Device on the way here. However, we have been getting static when waiting for a response."
"No," Zhongli agreed. "Alice does not operate on anyone's schedule but her own. However, there is someone who can reach her. Someone she trusts completely, and someone who would understand the technical nature of what you are asking."
Aether thought about for a moment on who Zhongli could be referring to until it clicked.
"Albedo," Aether said.
Zhongli smirked as he reached into his coat and for a brief absurd moment, Aether expected him to produce his wallet. Instead, Zhongli withdrew a small coin made out of Jade that was inlaid with characters different from Liyue script.
"Give this to Albedo," Zhongli said, placing it on the table between them, "and tell him that Rex Lapis considers this matter urgent enough to warrant disturbing his adopted mother's travels."
Aether nodded as he picked up the token and noticed that it was warm to the touch and heavier than any other jade.
"Will that be enough?" Aether asked.
"Someone like him will understand the importance of the nature of the situation when he receives that token through you." Zhongli answered as he drank his tea.
Paimon looked between Zhongliu and Aether with her expression cycling through several emotions before landing on silent determination.
"So we're going to Mondstadt," she said, "To Dragonspine and talk to Albedo about calling his scary adventurer mom so she can help us get to a world that's on fire."
"That is a reasonable summary," Zhongli said.
"Cool….Cool…cool….cool." Paimon grabbed her plum juice, drained what was left in one long gulp, and set the cup down with a thunk, "Paimon is going to need more juice."
Zhongli reached into his coat, then paused with the expression of a man who has just remembered something mildly inconvenient.
"Ah," he said, "I appear to have forgotten my wallet."
"Of course you did," Paimon muttered with a roll of her eyes.
Aether paid as always, because some things didn't change even when the world was falling apart.
Dragonspine, Mondstadt
Earth Time: April 7th, 1941
Paimon and Aether stayed for one night at Lantern Rite for Liyue and then went onto the road to Albedo's lab up on Dragonspine mountain. They took awhile as they had to get up the mountain by taking a short cut by taking a path between Mingyun Village and the Entombed City Outskirts, where they had to take a day in sleeping in the freezing cold of Dragonspine. Throughout the entire journey through the mountain, Paimon could not stop complaining about her possibly becoming a Paimonsickle…again. Aether just rolled his eyes as he walked over to a frozen pond that he had broken using his Geo abilities and refilled his canteen with fresh cold water. Nearby the pond was two sleeping bags that they had set up near at a ruin brazier that activated with a orange glow due to their proximity to it kept it running all night. This method was helpful or else, the pair would have actually become popsicles. Although, Paimon actually had some experience in being a ice cube long ago by Signora. Although, they had the serenitea pot from Madame Ping for use of shelter, Aether was concerned on what would happen if someone found it and moved it away from their destination.
"Paimon still hasn't forgiven that lady for that, by the way," Paimon muttered as she pulled her sleeping bag tighter around herself like a cocoon, "Getting frozen once is a life experience. Getting frozen twice is just rude."
"You can add it to the list," Aether said as he shouldered his pack and checked the trail ahead noting the path on the right that they had to take. He noted how the clouds shifted from dark gray to a slightly lighter gray which told him that they had another three or four hours of walking and climbing before they reach the camp.
Paimon groaned as she extracted herself from the sleeping bag and with reluctant energy packed everything up into Aether's bag. They began to walk the rest of the journey where they only encountered a few hillichurls, but oddly enough the Fatui were silent in this area with them not constantly seen walking around as the area usually had Fatui Skirmishers, Cicin Mages, and even Legionnaires. The numerous camps that the Fatui had were gone with even the tents as well.
Paimon noticed too. "Hey, Aether? Is it just Paimon, or is Dragonspine weirdly empty today? Like, Paimon isn't complaining, but usually we'd have fought at least two Skirmishers by now."
"They've been moved somewhere," Aether said.
"Moved where?"
Aether didn't have an answer, because he honestly didn't know. However, considering the recent events with the Fatui and this alliance that they have in that other world, it probably was not good.
After a couple of hours, they arrived at the cave where Albedo's lab was located, just as they found it last time. Different sorts of Alchemical apparatuses like flasks, burners, samples in labeled jars, and literature were placed in different parts of the cave. A large table was on the right side of the cave with some apparatus there. At the back was the board that Albedo uses for notes, experiments, and whatever else comes to his mind. However, examining some sort of chemical on the table was Albedo with his shoulder length blond hair. His teal eyes with three dots in each looked at the pair of explorers with a blank look.
"Traveler," he said. "Paimon."
"WARM THING," Paimon screamed as she pressed herself as close to a nearby furnace as she could without making contact, "Paimon will say hello after Paimon remembers what it feels like to have fingers."
"She's been like this for two days," Aether said.
"I would expect so. The southern approach through the Entombed City Outskirts has no reliable shelter between the frozen pond and this cave." Albedo said as he set the vial of the chemical down onto a stand, "You took that route rather than the main trail, which means you were either in a hurry or avoiding something."
"There wasn't time to send word," Aether said.
"And you'll notice that the Fatui patrols that would normally slow anyone down on the main trail are gone," Albedo added, as if confirming something he had already been thinking about., "Every camp on the mountain has been stripped. Tents, equipment, personnel…all of it. Removed within the last ten days. I have been monitoring the withdrawal from here."
He paused as if thinking of something and decided to continue, "It is the largest redeployment of Fatui forces I have ever observed, and no explanation has been offered to the Knights of Favonius or anyone else. Jean was very concerned about the possibility that the Fatui were planning to invade Mondstat all of a sudden."
"Oh, they are probably about to invade somewhere alright. But it's not Mondstadt for sure." Paimon said as she moved closer and closer to the heat source.
Albedo's teal eyes sharpened as he replied, "You know where they went."
"Yeah," Paimon said, "Well, Paimon has an idea on where they went relatively, but the exact location depends on what they are doing and outside of what Paimon knows."
Albedo looked at Paimon the way he looked at experimental results that contradicted his predictions. In all the time he had known her, Paimon on Dragonspine meant complaints about cold, demands for food, and an almost gravitational pull toward the nearest source of warmth. Paimon on Dragonspine without asking about food within the first five minutes was data that did not fit the model.
"Sit down," he said to Aether, "Both of you."
Aether sat on the bench near the worktable but did not start with words. He reached into his coat and his fingers found the jade token that still felt warm in his hands after days of travel through the coldest terrain in Mondstadt. He pulled it out and set it on the worktable between a rack of vials and one of Albedo's open notebooks.
Albedo curiously looked at the token, then at Aether, and then back at the token as he picked it up. His reaction was unlike anything that Aether had ever seen from the composed and silent type of man that Albedo is. His eyes for a moment and his lips parted. He turned the token over with a care that bordered on tenderness as his thumb traced over the characters as if reading it through touch.
"Where did you get this?" He asked with his voice quiet and controlled in the way that meant it was working to stay that way.
"I got it from Zhongli in Liyue during Lateran rite. He told me to bring it to you." Aether admitted.
Albedo held up the token to a candle for a moment and continued, "This is a Rex Lapis Contract Seal from the Archon war Era. The token holds geo energy that is over six thousand years old and has not degraded at all as most do as most of the purposes of the Contract Seals lose wear when the task asked by Rex Lapis is completed."
"So it's like Rex Lapis asking you for a favor?" Paimon asked as she finally floated away from the heat and closer to Albedo.
"Exactly," Albedo said with a nod until his teal eyes turned toward Aether, "What was the message?"
"Rex Lapis considers this matter urgent enough to warrant disturbing Alice's travels," Aether spoke the words exactly as Zhongli had given them and a tone of importance of the task being asked.
Albedo did not speak for a long time, but when he did finally it was measured and deliberate.
"He has never used one of these on my mother," Albedo said, "Not once. Not during the Cataclysm….Not during the fall of Khaenri'ah…..Not when Osial threatened Liyue Harbor. The fact that the seal is not degraded means the contract or task it represents is unfilled at the moment."
"Correct." Aether confirmed as he explained everything from the Fatui's alliance with Germany in another world, a world called earth that experience a terrible war and was having another with this Germany involved, and the purchase of Chaos components to be transported to a city called Hamburg. In addition, and most importantly, the need to cross to earth and stop the Fatui. He explained the need to get a hold of Alice through the Dodocommunication Device, but got static.
Albedo nodded as if this confirmed something. "The Dodoco device operates through elemental resonance. Within Teyvat, its range is functionally unlimited. Alice could receive a message from Klee in Mondstadt while standing in the deserts of Sumeru. If my mother is outside Teyvat's elemental field entirely, it would be like shouting into a room she already left."
"That's what Zhongli thought too," Aether said, "When I told him that I'd already tried the Dodoco device, he said that it wouldn't be enough even if it could reach her."
"Enough in what sense?" Albedo asked.
"Enough to make her come," Aether said. "Zhongli said that Alice gets messages all the time. From Klee, from us, from whoever else has a way to reach her. A message through the Dodoco device, even if it could reach her, is a request. The contract seal is something else."
"A summons," Albedo said quietly as the understanding settled across his face. He looked at the token in his hand and then at the Dodoco Communicator still sitting on the worktable.
"Zhongli said the difference between the two is the difference between a letter and a declaration," Aether continued. "Alice might ignore a letter. She won't ignore a six-thousand-year-old contract seal from Rex Lapis delivered through her own adopted son."
Albedo went silent as he processed this, then he walked toward the back of the cave where he kept his board. Along his usual notes and diagrams, Aether noticed a section that he he hadn't seen on previous visits that seemed to be pages torn from a well-worm book pinned alongside annotations that he had Albedo had written. Aether could make out a few that seemed to be about the Fontaine chapter with circles on about a name about some place called Paris and an Eiffel Tower.
"The Teyvat Travel Guide," Albedo said, noticing Aether's eyes on the board, "My mother's book. I have spent years trying to reconcile certain passages with Teyvat's known geography. Lands with different constellations. Technology that operates on principles foreign to alchemy, elemental science, and even Khaenri'ah engineering. I always suspected that some of her journeys took her beyond this world entirely and what you have told me confirms that suspicion."
"So does that mean you will help us?" Paimon asked, begging him to say 'yes'.
Albedo looked at Paimon for a moment, then back at the board. His eyes lingered on the circled passage about Paris and the sketch of a tower that looked like nothing any architect in Teyvat had ever designed, where it contained a standing iron lattice structure of impossible height that his mother had drawn in the margin some text that Alice wrote that said: It was built for a celebration, but it was only might to be temporary. Isn't that just like them?
Albedo had spent years wondering exactly who 'them' referred to.
"You misunderstand, Paimon," Albedo said as he turned back to face them. "I am not deciding whether to help you. Rex Lapis has invoked a contract seal that has waited six thousand years for its purpose. My mother is somewhere beyond the reach of anything in Teyvat. And you have just told me that an entire world that she had visited and found interesting is being used as a testing ground for the Fatui."
Albedo closed his eyes with a smirk as he spoke, "The question of whether I will help was answered the moment you set that seal on my table. But if we are to accomplish this goal, then we will need to head to Mondstadt for it."
Meanwhile on Earth in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia
Since its coup on March 27th, the nation of Yugoslavia was deploying its forces throughout every part of its borders to defend every territory. No strongly coordinated by the new government under General Dušan Simović, who as its new Prime Minister, refused all suggestions to build a defensive line that involved the defense of only its southern territory. However, as Frederick the Great said nearly two centuries ago, 'He who defends everything defends nothing.' The result was that the entire Yugoslav army was spread across a perimeter of nearly two thousand kilometers from Austria to Bulgaria with a planned attack on Italian Albania. The issue at hand was that the multicultural and young kingdom are still being mobilized for a fight to survive that they believe would come in another month or two, where men are still trying to be clothed and armed in their garrisons.
On the morning of April 6th, 1941, Palm Sunday, the city of Belgrade awoke to clear skies but the forecasts could not predict the devastation that would come. At 7 am, the Luftwaffe began to filled the skies above the city with over 300 aircraft that ranged from the Ju 87 Stukas with some fitted with jerrichos horn screaming and medium bombers like the Do 17 as well as the Ju 88 protected by a strong fighter escort. As the bombings began, there was no declaration of war or ultimatum delivered to the Yugoslav foreign Ministry. The only signs that told them that the young nation was at war with the Axis was the destruction of the city of Belgrade being saturated with bombs with its 320,000 people trying to take refuge. For almost one hour and 30 minutes, the city was being hit by waves and waves of bombs from the sky.
The Royal Yugoslav Air Force, a mixed fleet of outdated Hawker Fury biplanes alongside a small number of more modern Messerschmitt Bf 109s purchased from Germany itself before relations deteriorated, was outnumbered at a ratio that military historians would later calculate at roughly ten to one.The center of the city was hit as the communications between the Yugoslav high command and the forces in the field are cut off while the general military staff of the nation escaped the wreckage. When the attack is over, 4,000 people are dead under the ruins of Belgrade. However, the bombings are only the first immediately visible deadly sign of the invasion that has started as the Axis forces began on a move into the young nation.
Along the Austrian frontier, General von Weich' s Second Army crossed into Yugoslav territory through the Drava valley passes at approximately the same hour that Belgrade's air raid sirens began to sound. The advance followed the standard German doctrine of blitzkrieg with panzer spearheads of the 14th Panzer Division supported by motorized infantry moving fast towards the valley roads towards Maribor and Ptuj. This was blitzkrieg as the world had come to understand after Poland and France that involved a fast, violent, and terrifyingly efficient thrust.
The only thing that changed was that before the Panzer came something else entirely that would change the course of earth's pitiful style of warfare. As they advanced on the Yugoslav positions were the 38th Infantry Regiment of the Dravska Division positioned along the border in a defensive position and inadequately prepared for battle even in a conventional threat. At 5:45 in the morning, about 45 minutes before the first bombs fell on Belgrade came a fog that rolled through the Drava valley passes. The sentries outside Maribor noticed it first, but in April fog was not unusual. But the fog came from the north, from Austria, rolling downhill through the passes with a density that seemed wrong to the men who had spent their lives in these valleys and knew how the weather behaved in the area.
Then a sudden temperature drop caused their rifles to be coated in ice, where the temperature fell twenty degrees in less than ten minutes. Rifle bolts that had moved smoothly at dawn began to resist the hands that worked them. A film of formed on the gun barrels and on the steel helmets for the troops that wore them. Breath that had been invisible in the cool morning air became thick white clouds. The fog reached the Yugoslav lines at 5:53, but seven minutes later the first shots would be fired. The 38th Regiment would enter into a battle that none of its training, doctrine, or experience had prepared it for.
The first thing that Colonel Miloš Petrović's men encountered was fire that came not from any artillery or other conventional incendiary weapons that he and his veterans of the last war understood well. This weaponry was different as from the fog came bursts of superheated energy that struck the forward positions with the accuracy of aimed rifle fire, but it burned with an intensity that no chemical compound could produce. Soldiers that were hit by these blasts did not simply just fall. Instead, their uniforms and equipment ignited instantly as if they were paper. Men who had been standing at their posts seconds ago were engulfed in flames. Then came the cold as on the left flank of the regiment, a different attack struck the machine gun positions. Weapons that had been firing steadily seized without warning with the bolts and oil lubricant of their Chauchats and Czech built ZB-37 machine guns jamming.
Petrović, watching from his command position on the ridge above the forward line, understood within the first five minutes that he was facing weapons that did not exist in any army he had studied. He did not yet understand how wrong he was about the scale of what was coming.
Meanwhile, at 6:08, the demolition charges failed that the regiment set up on the bridges across the Drava. When Petrović gave the order to blow the bridges and deny the valley crossings to the advancing enemy, nothing happened. The engineers that survived to report what found described charges that had frozen in their housings with the detonation cord becoming brittle as glass and snapped when touched. At 7:15, the first Panzers of the 14th Panzer Division crossed the Drava over bridges that should have been rubble at the bottom of the river.
Between 6:08 and 7:15 was the destruction of the 38th Regiment as a fighting force that was not understandable and could not be resisted effectively. The sequence of events was almost methodical as it occurred. From within the fog, figures in uniforms that bore no resemblance to Wehrmacht field gray advanced on the yugoslav position ranging from a fire-like red to icey blue. Some of these figures carried staffs or a form of a rifle that he could not identify through his field glasses. As he watched, one of them drove a staff into the ground and then a wall of solid stone with seams of dark yellow covering it appeared in front of the advancing column. Not piled stone or stacked sandbags, a two meter tall wall placed there by a crane that did not exist.
"What the hell is that? Did they just make a wall of stone out of nowhere? God help me!" was the words being yelled through the ranks of the regiment.
The men behind this wall began to advance as the Yugoslav weapons that did work started to fire on them with no effect. As the unknown troops reached the wall, consolidated behind it, and then another wall rose from the ground twenty meters ahead. They advanced to the next wall and then another appeared where the pattern repeated in a leapfrog of impossible fortification. Not even grenades or any rifle from the standard issue M1924 Mausers used by his men. However, the stone held as if it was solid rock that had not been there thirty seconds ago and absorbed punishment that would have leveled any conventional fieldwork. From the stonewalls, the red unformed men fired a blast of hot flaming shots at their positions in three rapid bursts. The shots again lit some yugoslav troops on fire in a painful blaze
The nearby Škoda 75 mm Model 1928 artillery guns had already started to fire on the stonewalls with some shots over or under the stonewall, but the shots that did hit had done nothing to it at all. The most that the Colonel could see was a small crack at most, but nothing else showing that his guns were having serious effects on the enemy fortifications. Then they went silent all of a sudden at once. Behind the lines of the regiment near those pieces of field guns were blue walls and stepped out tall women that trapped the guns and their crews in a prison of watery glass then killed them through falling splashes of pressurized water from the air. The crews had about perhaps eight seconds of confused struggle before the water collapsed inward. The destruction of the 38th Regiment's artillery battery of 4 guns and 32 men took less than 3 minutes. Once the guns were silent, the women in blue moved to the next target with unhurried precision. The only targets that were in front of them were the company command posts, signal sections, and a reserve platoon held in the tree line behind the ridge. A runner that witnessed the whole event in shock ran to the Colonel to report what he saw and what was coming.
At 6:31, every radio in the 38th Regiment's sector went silent and ceased to function. Signal stations that had been relaying messages to divisional headquarters stopped transmitting mid-sentence. The regimental signals officer who survived reported to Colonel Petrović that small purple luminous creatures or insects swarmed the radio equipment in dense clouds of crackling electrical discharge. These creatures caused the vacuum tubes to be burnt out, fused internal wiring, and left every piece of communications equipment in the sector a smoking ruin within seconds of contact. Within ninety minutes of the invasion's start, Yugoslav communications across the entire northern front had collapsed completely. Petrović's regiment was blind, deaf, and alone.
As the strange men moved up and the situation for the regiment started to worsen by the minute, there was a column of five vehicles moving up and these vehicles were even stranger than the men moving forward. The vehicles were smaller than a panzer 1 that Colonel Petrović had seen from newsreels and photos from the Spanish Civil War, but just likes these men creating walls and bursting fire from their rifles, they were strange. On the top were machines that spun and a symbol painted on it of that supposed eight-pointed star that belongs to that Snezhnayan nation that recently joined the German alliance months ago. Petrović and many other officers had dismissed them as a diplomatic curiosity of no military significance. These floating vehicles fired bursts of bullets like a machine gun that pinned his regiment's troops down from making any move. These bullets were just like the ammunition of the red-uniformed infantry as men who had raised their heads above cover were driven back by the volume and sandbags turned into slag while wooden revetments set alight. Colonel Petrović watched the five armoured vehicles advance up the road behind the unknown enemy infantry line and understood with a veteran's instinct that the situation had moved beyond recovery. Communications gone, artillery killed, and his forward line being pushed by an enemy that can instant manufacture its own fortifications.
"Fall back!" Petrović ordered through the only means left to him which was his voice that as he shouted down the line from position to position for the men to pass the command down,"Secondary positions! South along the Ptuj road!"
The withdrawal of the 38th Regiment was not a retreat in any sense of military doctrine, but instead it was a collapse. As the men moved in scattered groups abandoning equipment and carrying the wounded through whatever means possible. They stumbled south toward the road to Ptuj and whatever safety might exist beyond the reach of the fog as unit cohesion dissolved within minutes with platoons fragmented into squads then squads turned into pairs and individuals. Officers found it impossible to command men over the noise of their own terror.
Then as the men started to retreat, the road to Ptuj was worse than the battle. At 8:15 am, the first wall across the road as solid stone over three meters tall that was identical to the wall that had helped the enemy advance and blocked the road completely. The men who reached it found no handholds, no gaps, no way over or through as it was even hot to touch. Before they could turn to find another route, a second wall rose across the tree line to the west and then a third to the east along the Drava River. The stone operatives who had spent the entire battle building cover for the advance for Maribor were no longer supporting an attack but were sealing a cage. Within this cage came the terrifying pursuit as the tall ones arrived first being a couple of heads taller than the largest man in the regiment where they moved with speed.
Some wore massive gauntlets that cracked with air in teal-colored light and held no other weapons. The use of weapons from them was not needed as a single strike from the gauntlets produced a concussive blast of displaced air that launched men off their feet and sent them tumbling into trees, stonewalls, and even each other. The sound from each impact was a deep thump that soldiers reported feeling in their ribs twenty mentors away. Men struck indirectly where they were thrown but not broken to find that another type of tall figure was charging them.
Crackling electrical purple radiated from the next tall man with a helmet that covered his eyes carrying hammers of such size that no man could lift them or even swing them in combat. The hammers crackled with a purple electrical discharge that was even visible to daylight. One survivor described watching the purple tall man with the hammer walking through barbed wire without carry or pain, then swung the hammer across a secondary position where the wire snapped against the figure's chest like thread. The man reached a foxhole where three men were sheltering and brought the hammer down on the frozen ground beside it, where the shockwave of electrical discharge sent three men from the hole flying.
Then came the pair of fat ones working together carrying a pack mounted weapon connected to a tank on their backs where one had a dark blue outfit and another had an icy white blue outfit. They both had top hats of their uniforms color and wore a metal mask with an glowing their color. The dark blue one sprayed men in painful bursts of pressurized water and the white blue one fired sprays of icy air like a flamethrower that instantly turned any retreating men or wounded begging for mercy into frozen statues of ice. Wet wool froze solid against skin with boots becoming blocks of ice that rooted men onto the ground. Fingers that had been gripping rifle stocks were locked in position by ice formed faster than the hand could release.
Soldiers were frozen where they stood either in mid-stride or in mid-fall. Some were locked in the act of turning to face the sound behind them, heads twisted, and eyes wide in shock. Some had dropped their weapons and raised their hands in the universal gesture of surrender with their palms open, arms-up. This posture was recognized by every army on earth as a plea for mercy. They froze that way. The road to Ptuj from Maribor became a gallery of statues that the morning sun could not easily thaw, because the cold that held them did not answer to natural warmth. The Solovenian locals who eventually found the courage to walk it again would call it Cesta Ledenega Pakla or The Road of Icy Hell.
After the battle, if it could be called that, the 38th Infantry Regiment was no more as 14th Panzer Division marched not far behind to see the results and men in the regiment started to surrender to the Wehrmacht in preference of the known protocols of German captivity to whatever the strange forces ahead of them might do.
Colonel Petrović was captured on April 8th near Varaždin by a Wehrmacht patrol from the 14th Panzer Division. The German lieutenant who took his surrender was very professional where he offered Petrović water and a cigarette. During his subsequent interrogation by Wehrmacht intelligence, Petrović gave his name, rank, and serial number as he smoked his cigarette. When asked to describe the circumstances of his regiment's destruction, he looked at the German officer across the table for a long moment.
"We were prepared to fight the German army," he said, "We were not prepared for what came with it."
The pattern of elemental warfare that destroyed the 38th Regiment repeated across every front where the Fatui were deployed in Yugoslavia, as in the Bulgarian border General List's Twelfth Army pushed into southern Serbia with its own Fatui column attached. The Vardar Division near Kumanovo mounted a counterattack on April 7th that briefly drove back elements of the German 9th Panzer Division. The counterattack lasted four hours before the fog came from the east, the division's ammunition reserves detonated in their storage points without explanation, and by dawn on the 8th of April was when the Vardar Division existed only as a name on an organizational chart. Even in the Italian advance, similar events occurred where Italian commanders wrote self-congratulatory dispatches to Rome claiming credit for an advance they had contributed nothing to achieve.
By April 9th, three days into the invasion, the Yugoslav army had effectively ceased to exist as a coordinated fighting force north of Belgrade. The capital itself, already shattered by three days of bombing that had killed thousands of its people beneath the rubble of their own city, lay open to the advancing columns from the north. In the south, List's Twelfth Army was turning its attention toward Greece, where the next act of the campaign was already being prepared with the same combination of Wehrmacht steel and Fatui fog that had broken Yugoslavia in less than a week.
In Graz, the officer coordinating the Fatui operations reviewed the campaign's progress in the quiet of her requisitioned suite and composed a single dispatch to Snezhnograd. The message, transmitted through channels that no intelligence service on Earth could intercept, contained no celebration and no sentiment. It read:
Metel Directive: Phase One complete. All objectives achieved ahead of schedule. Fatui casualties: seventeen. Enemy casualties: under assessment. Recommend immediate transition to Phase Two on Greek Theater. Awaiting Authorization.
Knave.
The authorization came within the next day, but by then the lesson would slowly start to be delivered in cities like London, Moscow, and Washington on the strength as well as existence of the 2,500 Fatui in the Balkans and the will of Her Majesty the Tsaritsa.