Prologue

PROLOGUE

BEFORE THE BULLET, before the trenches, before the gas masks and the mud — Europe was a powder keg with a cigar in its mouth.

The 19th century had been a party. Steamships, telegraphs, railroads, factories, cameras, and colonies. The kings and kaisers of Europe had carved up Africa like it was a dessert tray, drawn borders with zero input from the people who lived there, and built glittering capitals on the backs of global exploitation.
The world was getting richer. At least the parts they cared about.

But underneath the marble and medals was a continent soaked in gasoline.

Every major power had picked a side, but the alliances were brittle and barely understood. Britain, France, and Russia were somehow friends. Germany and Austria-Hungary had formed their own little Empire Bros club. The Ottomans were collapsing, the Balkans were a mess, and Italy was just sort of chilling and waiting to pick the winning team.

Monarchs ruled by divine right, but most of them were insecure man-children with overgrown mustaches and mommy issues.
Wilhelm II was trying to prove Germany had a bigger navy than Britain. Nicholas II was cosplaying as a modern tsar while bleeding his people dry. Franz Joseph of Austria was a fossil. And behind the scenes, generals were drawing up war plans they’d never actually tested — with timetables no one was allowed to deviate from.

Meanwhile, nationalism was rising. Minorities wanted independence. Empires wanted expansion. Everyone wanted respect, revenge, or reassurance that they weren’t falling behind. It was a massive multiplayer trust fall — and no one trusted anyone.

It wasn’t if war was coming.
It was when — and who’d be stupid enough to light the fuse.

That would be a teenage terrorist in Bosnia.
But we’ll get to him in a second.

First, you need to understand something:

World War I didn’t happen because of one shot.
It happened because the entire system was already broken.

The continent wasn’t a chessboard. It was a Rube Goldberg machine of arrogance, paranoia, and unfinished business — and everyone had been slapping buttons like it wouldn’t blow.

They called it the Great War.

They had no idea how dumb it was going to be.