Alexandra Adenauer rubbed her eyes with two fingers, giving a deep sigh and leaning back in her chair at the long, rich wooden conference table. The walls of the room were stainless steel, for the most part, and gave way to three screens in the room. The largest one, on the wall to the left of the Chancellor, was currently the one that had everyone's eyes affixed to it. It showed a satellite view of Western Nekulturnya with grey, crisscrossing grid lines overlaid on the satellite images. It was heavily marked up by arrows and unit markers, a result from the full debriefing by the Defence Minister, who now leaned against the wall opposite the screen. There was a tangible tension in the room. Not from hostility, but from a shared concern and bated breath.
To many of them, this was going to be the beginning of the end. While the Chancellor herself had only been a young girl during the wars of the 1980s, she had been plenty old enough to have lived through the War of 1998. The entire nation had celebrated and rejoiced in relief at the end of that conflict, erroneously believing the threat to be gone. That they had won. But they hadn't won- the fighting of the past decade had proved as much, and to leave the status quo would have made the nearly 200 fallen to have died in vain.
This, though, this was the true beginning of the end. After it was all over, they could then truly say that they had won. Stamped out the threat for good. Under the leadership and guidance of Chancellor Adenauer, the mortal enemy of their Fatherland would be eradicated, once and for all.
The thoughts of that alone made it all seem so surreal.
Their troop movements would be, at the very least, noticeable to anyone who bothered to keep an eye on them. The shifting of nearly of well over just several thousand troops and vast fleets of vehicles and aircraft and tons of military equipment in a short timespan would certainly raise a few eyebrows. The scope of their invasion was built upon the tactics the German nation had utilised for over a century of warfare, in which the terms Blitzkrieg and Sturmkrieg had become synonymous with the Vyrsarian conduct of war. Their movements and advances would be precise, swift, and awe-inspiring in their wake.
Put simply, they would leave no time for anyone to react.
Not that there was anything that anyone else could really do in attempt to stop them that wouldn't seem like a relatively invalid act of war. After all, West Nekulturnya did belong to them already, in practice. It was under their administration, their protection. The provisions of the Five Nations' Treaty left little in details in the way of what the occupiers could or couldn't do. With the Prussians and the Nordics agreeing to allow the Wehrmacht to take their place, everything was set.
Solingen, Aarberg, Vyrsar
The sounds of vehicle engines, machinery, and shouting dominated the air in the newly established military camp set up near the small town of Solingen. The town with a population of 2,319 had been subject to what reminded many of the older residents of the 1980s- of the Third Vanikh War and the Red October War, when Solingen had been a passageway for military convoys traveling to the front. Now, though, they experienced the familiar sight that they had managed to go without for nearly sixteen years. Tons of military equipment and vehicles, running through the entire day with every piece of kit one could imagine. Self-propelled artillery, tanks, armoured personnel carriers, with transport and cargo helicopters buzzing back and forth above. Older, large trucks transported troops through the town, and for the moment they seemed to half occupy the small town, coated in the first winter snows.
It struck young Michail as odd. At only fifteen years old, he had not experienced what it had been like to be subject to the Nekulturnyan threat. His father, he knew, had fought them, though the man refused to talk about it with his children. Now he stood on the street with several other of his classmates, bike by his side, waiting to cross. He probably would have, if not for the rumbling tanks and trucks passing with the Iron Cross emblazoned on their sides, headed toward the woods that separated the military camp from the town. All of them watched with a sort of awe, while the adults watched with a certain worried and concerned expression. Sure, they'd experienced a few helicopters or a convoy passing through once or twice a year on the way to the Nekulturnyan border. But for all the eight years they had been fighting the insurgents in Nekulturnya, they had never seen anything like this. This looked like the preparations for an all-out war. An invasion. As though the sleeping dragon of the Vyrsarian war machine had been lying dormant for the past sixteen years, and was only now being awakened to bare its sharp and murderous teeth.
