EMPIRES 1940+

The snow-choked ruins of Steelgrad burned for forty-three days.

General Setvanya Kiriyenko, twenty years old, stood on the frozen banks of the Volga with the imperial double-headed eagle heavy on her cap and coat. Order 227 had come down from the Tsar’s own hand: *Not one step back.* She read it aloud to her officers while Saxon artillery turned the city into a graveyard of brick and rebar. Then she signed the execution orders herself.

She sent wave after wave of her own soldiers forward with nothing but Mosin rifles, Molotov cocktails, and satchel charges. Boys no older than she was ran straight at Saxon Tiger tanks, flames blooming across steel as they died to clog the treads and blind the gunners. Entire regiments were marched into the meat grinder at gunpoint by their own commissars—her commissars—because retreat meant a bullet in the back. The river ran black with bodies. The sky stayed orange with burning fuel depots and funeral pyres.

Yet the line held.

By the final week the trap closed. One point nine million Russian dead bought the encirclement of seven hundred thousand Saxons. Setvanya watched from a half-collapsed factory roof as her last assault battalions disappeared into the smoke, then reappeared only as victory flares. Armored battle groups that had once rolled across Europe were reduced to scrap and corpses, their crews dragged out and shot where they stood. The Saxon Sixth Army ceased to exist.

When the last pocket surrendered, Setvanya did not cheer. She simply holstered her pistol, wiped the blood and soot from her silver-white hair, and walked back through the corpse-choked streets toward the field telegraph. Her blue eyes were empty, her voice flat as she dictated the casualty report to the palace.

“Steelgrad is ours, Your Imperial Majesty. The price was paid in full.”

Then she lit a cigarette with fingers that no longer trembled and waited for the next order, because orders were the only thing left that still made sense.