Published at 10th of December 2025 9:44 am

Chapter 777: The Web

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The situation room emptied slowly, each general and advisor departing with the measured steps of men afraid to turn their backs.

Roosevelt did not dismiss them with words, only a curt wave of his hand, a gesture sharp enough to cut conversation short.

When the final door clicked shut, silence swallowed the room.

Roosevelt remained still for several seconds, his knuckles white on the armrests of his wheelchair.

The dim light cast long shadows across the scattered reports, cables, intercepted communications, and intelligence summaries spread across the table.

The projector, left on, flickered with the last image it had shown: a burning U.S. tank in Sicily, its turret torn open like the shell of a crab.

He stared at it as if the machine itself had personally betrayed him.

Then he spoke, barely audible.

"...1905."

The word trembled.

Roosevelt turned another page of the confiscated financial reports, his eyes frozen on the date stamped in bold ink at the top: 1905.

He swallowed hard.

"Bruno von Zehntner was twenty-six," he whispered. "Just twenty-six."

The words sounded absurd, impossible... The room felt too small.

"At twenty-six I was barely finding my voice in New York politics..."

He laughed bitterly.

"At twenty-six most men are still trying to understand who they are."

He flipped to the next document.

Rail acquisitions: 1904.

Industrial metals: 1906.

Agricultural supply conglomerates: 1907.

Telegraph lines: 1908.

Roosevelt’s fingers began to tremble.

"He was younger when he started this," he said, voice cracking.

Roosevelt flipped to the last document in the folder. A page the OSS had flagged as "historically interesting but strategically irrelevant."

He froze.

It was a patent certificate stamped in Prussian Gothic script, dated 1901.

Filed by the Zehntner Waffenwerke, the Zehntner family’s old arms consortium, but the inventor ’s name... The inventor name made Roosevelt’s skin crawl: Bruno von Zehntner, Age 21.

He read the title aloud, his voice barely a whisper.

"...’A lightweight 60mm infantry mortar with portable baseplate.’"

His hand trembled as he traced the design sketches, a modern mortar system over a decade before the Great War.

"This can’t be real," Roosevelt breathed. "He would have been... just a boy. Twenty-one? Twenty-two?"

But the document was authentic, certified, filed, approved by the Prussian Patent Office, and then sold to his family’s arms conglomerate.

The official analysis by the OSS claimed it was merely a nepotistic gesture to give a young lieutenant some extra income.

But Roosevelt turned the page, another patent, then another... and another.

Water-cooled machine guns, an early loader-assisted self-loading rifle mechanism, a functional submachine gun prototype, recoil-dampened field artillery carriages.

All dated 1901–1902, all sold to Zehntner Waffenwerke, and all hidden from the public until the Great War.

Roosevelt felt his heartbeat pounding in his ears.

"These were... his designs?"

He looked at the sketches again, precise, elegant, decades ahead of their time.

"This wasn’t nepotism. This wasn’t charity. This wasn’t a stipend."

His nails dug into the paper.

"This was funding."

The realization struck like lightning.

"He sold his own inventions to fund his rise. To seed money into his shell companies. To buy into American industry. To enter Russian markets. To influence the German army. He started consolidating continental power at twenty-two years old."

He stared at the patent with wide, horrified eyes.

"This is the earliest trace of him... twenty-two years old... already designing weapons the world wouldn’t see for decades... already selling them to fuel his personal ambitions..."

He swallowed, throat dry.

"And nobody saw it, not the OSS, not the Bureau of Patents, not the Navy Department, and certainly not the War College."

He let out a shaking breath.

"They thought it was luck. Or nepotism. Or coincidence. A talented noble son from a family of war industrialists."

He slammed the folder shut.

"No. No. This was the first web. The first strand. His first move in a game we didn’t know existed."

The air in the room felt suffocating.

Roosevelt whispered, voice hoarse with dread:

"At twenty-two... he wasn’t thinking like an inventor. He wasn’t thinking like an officer. Or a politician. Or even a businessman."

His hands shook.

"He was thinking like a man who intended to reshape the century."

He stared into the darkness with hollow eyes.

"We weren’t fighting a general. Or a statesman. Or even a tyrant."

A pause.

"We were fighting a mind that never thought like normal men."

He leaned back, utterly defeated.

"And he began building our downfall while I was still in college... before I took my first office... before I even knew what the world truly was."

Roosevelt closed his eyes.

"Twenty-two years old. Twenty-two... and already plotting the disassembly of nations."

He whispered one final word, a confession, a surrender, an epitaph for the American century.

"...monster."

And the room swallowed the sound.

Another intake of breath.

"How does a man that young conceive a plan spanning continents? Decades? Empires?"

He leaned forward, staring at the papers as if they were an alien language.

"What twenty-something plots the destruction of a nation he has never visited? A nation that has shown him no hostility? A nation most Europeans barely understood?"

He pressed his palms into his eyes.

"It wasn’t the mind of a general... it wasn’t the mind of a politician..."

His voice shivered.

"It was the mind of a conqueror."

He let the folder fall shut.

"He thought like Alexander. No... worse. Alexander wanted the world he could see."

Roosevelt stared into the flickering light of the projector, a tremor twisting through him.

"Bruno wanted the world he hadn’t lived to see yet."

A silence settled, suffocating.

"He foresaw our rise before we rose, he foresaw our arrogance before we displayed it, he foresaw our industrial strength before it existed, he foresaw our ideological ambition before it took shape."

Roosevelt’s voice fell to a hollow whisper.

"And he decided, at twenty-six, to begin the process of dismantling us before we even began to truly learn how to walk on the world stage...."

He laughed a broken, disbelieving laugh.

"How do you fight a man who plans wars before his beard has finished growing?"

The room offered no answer, only the slow unraveling of a President who finally understood that he was not fighting a country...

...but the lifetime vision of a man who began planning America’s death before America ever noticed him.

His breathing grew shallow.

"After we seized his shell corporations... after we put down that revolt... we found all of it. Every ledger, every false name, every quiet acquisition."

He looked up toward the ceiling as if searching for an answer written in the rafters.

"He caused us to stay out of the Great War."

He said it slowly, tasting each word like poison.

"He manipulated our elections, he funded the pacifists, supported isolationists, and ensured America stayed neutral long enough for public resentment to harden... so that when he propped up the war-hawk candidate two decades later, the American people revolted. Exactly as he predicted."

Roosevelt grabbed the arms of his chair and pulled himself forward, his voice rising.

"He understood Americans, damn him. He understood their pride... their contradictory nature... their fury at being told what to do. He played us like a violin."

His gaze swept across the room, haunted.

"He knew that if America stayed out of the first war... and then joined the second... the backlash would be catastrophic. A nation unaccustomed to bloodshed enraged at suddenly losing hundreds of thousands of sons."

He slammed a fist onto the table.

"And he used it all! Every spark, every fracture, every grievance."

The projector clicked, the image stuttering. Roosevelt stared into the flames on the screen.

"He understood our industrial potential," he murmured. "Knew that if left unchecked... we would one day become the greatest threat the German nation has ever faced."

His jaw clenched. His eyes twitched.

"We were a threat even without showing our fangs."

His voice fell to a whisper.

"And that... that is why he began destroying us before we even realized we were a threat."

Roosevelt’s breathing turned ragged.

"How? How could one man foresee so much? Prepare so far in advance? How could he weave a web across oceans, decades before he held any power?"

The questions spiraled, unanswered.

His hands trembled.

"He doesn’t want territory. He doesn’t want cities. He doesn’t want our land. He wants the idea of America dead."

He shut his eyes tight.

"He looked at our volatile politics. Our factionalism. Our arrogance. He saw an existential threat not in who we were... but in who we were guaranteed to become."

His voice grew hoarse.

"And so he chose to cut down the tree before it bore fruit."

Roosevelt leaned back, trembling violently now, his composure unraveling piece by piece.

"This war... this catastrophe... it isn’t a conflict between nations. It’s the execution of a sentence passed forty years ago."

He laughed, a hollow, broken sound.

"All our victories... all our sacrifices... all our industry... all our sanctions... all our speeches... all meaningless."

His voice turned hollow.

"We were defeated before the first shot was fired."

The projector finally went dark.

Roosevelt sat in the black silence, staring into nothing, consumed by a revelation that would have crippled a lesser man, or perhaps Roosevelt was a lesser man now, hollowed out by the weight of understanding too much, too late.

Only one thought remained clear:

Bruno had not out-fought America, he had out-thought it, from the beginning.

Roosevelt whispered into the darkness:

"...why?"

No answer came, only the echo of a nation collapsing, one thread of Bruno’s web at a time.

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