Chapter 37: The Anvil and the Flame
By the spring of 1938, storm clouds had gathered with unmistakable clarity across Europe. Victor Delcroix watched from his villa above Leopoldville as news of the Anschluss reached his desk: Hitler had annexed Austria. The German war machine was no longer a threat in potential; it was a reality in motion. Delcroix, who had warned Belgian officials about Hitler half a decade earlier, now found his warnings fully vindicated. But there was no satisfaction in being right. There was only time to prepare.
The Congo, under Delcroix's invisible empire, had been transformed into a continent within a continent. At its heart was an industrial military complex that outmatched anything on the continent. Beneath the jungle canopy, vast underground foundries produced alloys never before seen in Europe. Automated assembly lines, modeled after prototypes from the 1940s and 50s, constructed tanks with composite armor and aircraft with turbocharged engines. Secret factories in Katanga and Kivu refined uranium and processed exotic materials that no European intelligence agency yet understood.
In March, Victor authorized Directive Obsidian, a full-spectrum mobilization of his private army. Recruitment drives across Belgian immigrant communities and newly integrated Congolese universities tripled the size of his standing forces. Military academies expanded, creating an officer corps educated in modern tactics, logistics, and mechanized warfare. Every new soldier was equipped with lightweight bullet-resistant vests based on synthetic fibers Victor had introduced a decade early. Their rifles were semi-automatic, far superior to the bolt-action standard still dominant in Europe. Some elite units were even beginning to trial early forms of night vision, a technology that remained secret to the world.
But war would not only be fought with guns. It would be financed, traded, and sold. Delcroix knew this. And so he ordered the construction of a sprawling "Neutral Export Zone" near the port of Boma—a vast industrial harbor capable of loading hundreds of tons of military supplies onto ships under neutral Congolese flags. Officially, the Delcroix Group was a private multinational based in Africa. In practice, it would soon become the arsenal of democracies and tyrannies alike.
By June, dozens of countries were quietly contacting Congolese intermediaries for access to weapons, fuel additives, medical supplies, and advanced communication equipment. Delcroix instructed his advisors to sell indiscriminately—but to track every sale and plant invisible safeguards in critical technologies. The Congo would profit from this war. But it would not be caught unaware.
Meanwhile, the Belgian government grew increasingly anxious. Intelligence reports from Brussels hinted at a growing consensus that something had to be done about Delcroix. But their options were vanishingly few. Any attempt to nationalize his holdings would destroy Belgium's already fragile economy. Any military incursion into the Congo would be suicidal.
Victor responded with silence—and by building faster.
By the end of the summer, the Congo's industrial output surpassed that of Belgium itself. Civilian industries continued to expand, but the focus was now clearly martial. Submarine hulls were being tested on Lake Tanganyika. Jet-assisted fighter prototypes roared above the rainforest canopy. And deep in the Ituri Forest, a facility known only as Project Erebus began refining fissionable material into forms that no other nation would possess for nearly a decade.
At the same time, Victor launched a new immigration initiative. Recognizing the looming refugee crisis and the coming devastation, he issued open invitations to all civilians from countries threatened by war—Poles, Czechs, Austrians, Jews, Germans opposed to the regime, and others. A network of ships and trains, quietly coordinated through neutral ports and agents, began ferrying thousands of skilled workers, scientists, teachers, and families to the Congo.
In Belgium itself, a subtle but powerful propaganda campaign took root. Posters and editorials evoked the horrors of the First World War, reminding citizens of the German invasion and the destruction it wrought. New leaflets asked haunting questions: What if history repeats? Where will you run? Beneath them, the answer was printed boldly: To safety. To prosperity. To Congo.
The results were dramatic. Within six months, an exodus had begun. Belgian families, afraid of another German advance, sold their homes and boarded steamships bound for Africa. By winter, the demographics of the Congo were shifting rapidly. French, Flemish, German, Polish, and Yiddish could be heard on the streets of Leopoldville. Schools opened in multiple languages. And among the new arrivals were hundreds of talented engineers, doctors, and artisans eager to serve the Delcroix vision.
As Europe edged toward war, Victor Delcroix had already begun to forge a new world. One where the Congo would be the arsenal of the earth—and a haven for those who saw the fire coming. His empire, born in the shadows of the old, would shape the course of history with steel, science, and the silence of strategic patience.
Chapter 38: Minds of Silicon, Eyes Beneath the Waves
Autumn 1938 brought a quiet intensity to the halls of the Delcroix Scientific Directorate. Victor, now the undisputed architect of a new world order emerging in Africa, retreated from the public eye for a full week. His advisors thought it political. His engineers suspected a classified project. In truth, Victor had withdrawn to use his gift—the power that had once awakened in the ruins of his former life. He placed his hand upon a sleek metal casing in the secure vault of his private research wing: an early Congolese-built computation engine, crude by modern standards, but enough.
The surge of knowledge came in waves. When it was over, he possessed a full understanding of computing systems as they would exist two decades into the future: transistor-based logic gates, operating systems, programming languages, parallel processing, error correction, and above all, cryptanalysis.
He emerged from seclusion with detailed blueprints and a vision. Within weeks, the Directorate was mobilized under Project Prometheus, a vast initiative to develop advanced computing centers deep within the Congolese highlands. Engineers, many of them recent immigrants from Europe, worked feverishly to fabricate semiconductors and assemble logic modules. Cleanroom protocols and fabrication methods were reverse-engineered from the future Victor had glimpsed.
By early 1939, the Congo housed three operational transistor-based computers—each the size of a room but infinitely more powerful than anything on earth. One specialized in scientific modeling, another in encrypted communications, and the third in live military decryption. Using intercepted radio traffic from across Africa and Europe, Victor's machines began decrypting the strategic ciphers of both Axis and Allied powers. French, German, Italian, and even Soviet traffic passed through Congolese servers long before they reached their intended destinations.
Victor named the decryption system Mimir, after the Norse wellspring of wisdom. Its work was fed directly to his intelligence chief and military logistics command. With Mimir, Delcroix was no longer just watching the war unfold. He was inside its veins.
But the war would not only be fought in code. It would be fought on water.
Having foreseen the submarine menace that would once again ravage the seas, Victor turned to maritime defense. He used another monthly charge of his gift to study sonar as it would exist in the 1950s: phased-array hydrophones, active-passive hybrid detection, acoustic stealth profiling, and automated target discrimination.
The result was Project Leviathan. Delcroix's naval engineers refitted all military and civilian vessels under his banner with advanced sonar systems capable of mapping undersea terrain in real time and detecting threats at ranges that rendered enemy submarines useless. Each ship also deployed a suite of countermeasures: magnetic decoys, noise generators, and even prototype underwater drones to patrol dangerous shipping lanes.
The Congo's trade arteries, once vulnerable, became ghost paths—unseen and untouched. His vessels moved silently through the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, carrying war materiel, medicines, and refined fuels to nations willing to pay. Not a single ship was lost.
By the spring of 1939, the world stood unknowingly upon a technological fault line. While Europe edged closer to war with its boots mired in the doctrines of 1918, the Delcroix Empire had leapt a generation ahead. It could see and hear what others could not. It could think faster, move deeper, strike earlier.
And at the heart of it all was a man who had died once already, shaping history not with speeches or banners, but with circuits, sonar, and silence.
Chapter 39: Union in War
On September 1st, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. The machinery of war, long predicted and meticulously prepared for by Victor Delcroix, lurched into motion. Within forty-eight hours, Britain and France declared war on Hitler's Reich. The world, as it had in 1914, plunged once more into conflict.
In Brussels, panic and uncertainty rippled through government halls. Belgium had declared neutrality, as it had before, but the specter of 1914 loomed large. Victor, reading the moment with clinical precision, acted swiftly. Within days, he dispatched an official emissary to the Belgian Prime Minister with an unprecedented offer.
The Congo would support Belgium in full—militarily, industrially, and financially—in exchange for formal recognition of the Delcroix Group's control over Congolese territory. The colony would no longer be administered directly by the Belgian state, but would remain under the same flag. Victor proposed a structure akin to the British union: two nations, one sovereign crown, with internal autonomy. The Congo would manage its own economy, defense, and laws, but swear allegiance to the Belgian monarchy and coordinate foreign policy in times of war.
The Belgian cabinet debated furiously. Some saw it as a betrayal of sovereignty. Others, more pragmatic, saw a lifeline in the storm. Intelligence reports made it clear: the Congo, under Victor Delcroix, was not a colony—it was a titan. To spurn its support would be suicide.
On September 6th, 1939, the Treaty of Kinshasa was signed.
Henceforth, the Belgian Congo was renamed The Federal Territory of Congo, an autonomous partner within the Belgian Kingdom. The flag of Belgium would be flown above Leopoldville, but the Delcroix emblem was added beneath it—a stylized phoenix of gold and black, wings spread across the southern horizon.
In return, Victor mobilized. Ten divisions of mechanized infantry and armored regiments began preparing for deployment to the European theater. Fleets of transport ships were outfitted with Leviathan sonar arrays and naval escorts. Air squadrons of jet-assisted fighters, designated Stratos, were deployed to Belgian airfields in secrecy. Alongside them came medicine, refined fuels, and encrypted communication gear far beyond anything the Allies had.
Delcroix himself issued no public statement. But through his intermediaries, he ensured the world understood the new reality: Belgium would not be overrun again. And it would not stand alone.
The world took notice. British and French generals were stunned by the precision and speed of Congolese mobilization. American intelligence quietly redoubled efforts to understand how a former colony could outpace Western nations in both technology and production. German spies, operating out of neutral embassies, desperately sought access to the new allied partner—but found only dead ends and disinformation.
In Congo, the announcement of union sparked celebration in the cities and a quiet pride in the countryside. Schools held flag-raising ceremonies. Factories ran at triple shifts. Immigrant communities from Poland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia now cheered as the country of their exile declared its intent to fight back.
As autumn fell, the first Congolese divisions landed in Ostend. Camouflaged vehicles with sleek armor rolled across Belgian soil under the joint banners of the new union. Local villagers, still haunted by the memory of German boots two decades earlier, wept and waved as dark-skinned soldiers in modern combat gear passed through their streets.
Victor had wagered everything on unity through strength. And as the war began, his empire was no longer merely the shadow of Belgium's former colony. It was its shield—and perhaps, one day, its savior.
Chapter 40: The Ardennes Stand
In May 1940, the German war machine surged westward in a thunderous storm of tanks, trucks, and dive-bombers. Operation Fall Gelb had begun. Once more, the Ardennes forest became the corridor of invasion, bypassing the formidable Maginot Line and plunging directly into the heart of Belgium.
But this time, it was not the same Belgium.
The Wehrmacht expected light resistance. Instead, it encountered an entrenched shield of steel and fire. In the hills near Bastogne and the valleys around Liège, Congolese mechanized divisions—nicknamed the Phoenix Guard—met the enemy with weapons and tactics a decade ahead of their time. Jet-assisted fighter craft roared overhead, engaging the Luftwaffe with blistering speed. Armored vehicles with composite plating and magnetic mines crippled panzer spearheads. Communication lines remained unbroken, encrypted and relayed by advanced relay towers modeled after satellite uplinks Victor had envisioned.
But the numbers were not in their favor. Victor had known it was a gamble: deploying ten divisions from the Congo was a logistical feat in itself. The rest of his forces—hundreds of thousands strong—were still undergoing rapid training in Africa, and Belgian military units were only beginning to integrate new weaponry and doctrine.
In the chaos of blitzkrieg, timing was unforgiving.
The Phoenix Guard could hold the eastern corridor—briefly. They slowed the German advance, disrupted logistics, and even forced the retreat of multiple panzer columns. But beyond their perimeter, traditional Belgian units collapsed under the weight of the assault. Antwerp was evacuated. Brussels, though defended valiantly, fell after days of brutal street fighting. Civilian convoys clogged the roads west, fleeing the iron tide.
Victor, monitoring the war room in Leopoldville, watched the map with steely silence. He knew this wasn't the true war. Not yet. This was a race to delay.
His logistics officers worked day and night to prepare a second wave of forces—fully trained and equipped with Delcroix weapons. Congolese instructors drilled thousands of Belgian soldiers in the use of new arms: semi-automatic rifles, advanced radios, and shoulder-mounted rocket launchers. But it took time to change a military's soul, and time was in short supply.
Seeking to bolster the Allies, Victor sent representatives to London and Paris with an offer: advanced tanks, jet fighters, communication systems, and precision munitions. But the response was tepid.
British generals, still scarred by the Great War, feared chaos in the ranks from untested foreign equipment. French command, bound to rigid doctrines, refused to deviate from standardized matériel. The war had only just begun, and in their eyes, experimentation was a luxury.
Victor's envoys returned frustrated. He issued new instructions: continue selling to smaller nations willing to adapt quickly. Begin stockpiling what the Allies refused.
By June, the German army reached the French border. The Phoenix Guard had fought with honor and brilliance, but their numbers had dwindled. Those who survived fell back in good order, delaying the invaders long enough to evacuate over a million civilians and crucial government personnel.
Belgium, battered but not broken, was again a battlefield. But this time, it fought with allies who could learn, adapt, and rebuild. The Congo, watching from across the sea, had seen its glimpse of the war to come.
And Victor Delcroix, seated beneath the rising sun of Africa, prepared to make the world regret ignoring the future.