Tafari had never seen a jungle like this in all his schematics and maps. Thick vines braided the trees together into a living wall; damp earth swallowed boots; sunlight fought its way through a dense, dripping canopy. It was the kind of place where sound went to die and men went to be lost. Yet here, in the green heart of the borderlands, Mengesha had chosen his ground — or so he thought.
Tafari rode at dawn, wrapped in a cloak that hid the cut of his shoulders. He had not come to meet fate like a boy chasing glory. He had come with years of reading, remembering, and practicing. The books from his first life — treatises on logistics, campaign journals, tales of Adwa — all came back to him now like a tutor at his shoulder. He thought of hills, of chokepoints, of how armies collapsed when their bellies were empty and their orders muddled. He thought of how a disciplined volley could stop a charge, how a hidden flank could slaughter confidence. He was a historian wearing a general's face.
His column moved quiet as smoke along the service road he had built: wagons laden not only with rifles and powder but with sacks of flour, tools, and spare barrels. Supply, he had learned, was the true power. The Harar-1s rode in leather rolls by the wagons; men checked bolts and primed cartridges with a measured ritual. The Harar rifles had become as common to his companies as hoes once were. They were lighter than the Italian guns Mengesha had bought; they were made to be maintained by anvil and file, not by exotic tools. In the muddied reality of the jungle, that would matter.
Scouts slipped ahead in pairs, moving like ghosts. Tafari kept his ear close to their reports. Mengesha's scouts had been arrogant; they sent back boasting letters that Tafari's spies intercepted. They believed themselves masters of the border hills. What they did not know was how carefully Tafari had studied the map of their march, how he had folded the roads and the tracks into his plan. He would not face Mengesha in open plain. He would pull the battle into the jungle, where discipline and preparation would count more than numbers thrown like dice.
The first contact came at noon. A company of Mengesha's men—ragged, confident, musket-smoke in their beards—poured through a narrow trail where two trees leaned close enough to touch. They fired at a pair of Tafari's pickets. The crack of Italian muskets answered the quiet report of Harar-1s. The jungle swallowed the noise. Birds scattered.
Tafari watched from a fold of shade. He had expected this. He raised one hand, then another; his field commanders moved like cogs in a machine. He ordered a controlled withdrawal — not panic, but a carefully staged pullback designed to draw the enemy into a trap. The men fell back, firing measured volleys that forced Mengesha's riders to slow and press forward. The jungle funneled them. Vines and roots turned their horses into awkward beasts. Their confidence, talismanic until now, began to knot.
A historian's trick Tafari loved: make your enemy read yesterday's victory and think it will be theirs tomorrow. Mengesha remembered battles where momentum was everything. He charged. He thought speed would shatter a cord of defenders. Tafari let him.
As the enemy passed a bend, drumfire rolled from three concealed positions — two companies hidden behind thick undergrowth, one in trees above with ropes and trained marksmen. Volley fire, disciplined and repeated, stitched the air with a mechanical rhythm. The Harar-1s sang: short, clean reports that did not foul, that allowed steady reloading. Mengesha's men, wielding a scattered mixture of Italian muskets and a few Carcanos, met a storm they had not expected. Their shots sputtered; mud clogged barrels; confusion spread fast.
Tafari did not merely depend on firepower. He had prepared the ground. He had his sappers cut false trails the week before; they had placed low-lying pits hidden with leaf and brush at likely dispersal points. When a cavalry squad tried to wheel, horses fell into those traps, hooves trying for purchase on hiding rot and slick mud. Men tumbled, rifles clattered away, and Tafari's second echelon, moving with silent rope-and-ladder training, closed the net.
The fighting was close, brutal, and green. Men slashed at each other with knives and bayonets where the trees crowded; bullets thudded into trunks; the smell of powder mixed with the damp scent of leaves. Tafari moved among the lines, not with reckless exposure but with the steady, bright authority of a commander who knew where each bite would fall. He shouted a command here, adjusted a formation there, ordered a flank to widen to trap the enemy between two fires. His knowledge of past sieges told him how to conserve strength: rotate units, keep supply wagons off the main track but reachable for resupply, and never let a man fight on an empty stomach.
At one point, a column of Mengesha's muskets attempted a counter-formation in a small clearing. Tafari walked to the edge of the brush, stood tall, and pointed. His men knelt and fired a single, synchronized volley. The effect was devastating: the clearing littered with men who had believed in the dullness of numbers. Discipline won where brute force had expected to.
The battle stretched into the long, humid afternoon. Mengesha's generals sent in reinforcements; they tried to flank Tafari's positions with a group moving beneath the canopy. But Tafari had set a rearguard of marksmen trained to move quietly in pairs—his historian's touch again: small units, trained to operate like the guerrilla bands he had read about, but under the discipline of an army. They slipped into the trees and poured a withering crossfire into the flank, turning the would-be envelopment into a rout.
At dusk, Mengesha gave the order to retreat. It was not the thunderous flight of an ordered withdrawal—rather, it was the collapse of morale. His lines dissolved into the jungle, men swallowed by darkness and disorientation. Tafari held his position until he was sure the flight was real, then gave the command to pursue in measured squadrons. They harried the rear; they took prisoners; they seized weapons. The Harar-1s that had once been barrels in workshops now lay in the hands of men whose courage had been disciplined into cohesion.
The cost had been real. Tafari counted the dead by the light of lanterns—friends and farmers who had learned to shoulder a rifle, smiths who had taken up arms beside their anvils. He tasted grief bitter as iron in his mouth. But he also knew the shape of the victory: Mengesha's banners were broken, his supply lines choked, his allies scattered in the court that watched with fevered attention.
That night, Tafari bivouacked under the dripping leaves. He wrote reports by lantern light, not only of troop movements but of lessons: maintain unit cohesion in close terrain; make every rifle repairable at a village forge; never let a soldier go hungry; hide your cards and play them slow. He thought of Adwa and other battles, folding old victories into new practice. The historian in him catalogued; the general in him applied.
Word of the clash reached the palace by the next day. Courtiers who had once mocked the "boy-prince" now had less to say. The emperor, hauled from his bed on uncertain legs, listened to the dispatches with a wan smile. Tafari was summoned quietly. He came in dust and leaves, his cloak streaked with the day's mud, his face tired but composed.
"You have done well," the emperor said, voice low. "You have shown that the wheel of this country can turn if evils are met squarely." He coughed, and his hand shook. "But take care—victory feeds envy as much as loyalty."
Tafari dipped his head. "I know, Majesty. I will hold what we have gained. I will guard it with steel and with law. And I will teach our men to be more than fighters; I will make them keepers of roads and of grain and of schools."
As Tafari left the emperor's chamber, the jungle's sweat still clinging to him, he felt the double current of triumph and responsibility. The battle had proved his army, his rifles, and his tactics. It had shown that a modern mind, tempered by knowledge of the past, could bend the raw chaos of war into something that protected more than a throne—it protected a people.
In the villages, children would tell the tale differently: of a prince who walked through the green and came home with flags and food, not simply blood. In the courts, nobles would whisper of new limits. And in the cold rooms in Rome, generals would mark the names of rifles and rivers on maps and curse the fact that a quiet historian had learned how to make a nation fight.
Tafari lay awake that night, listening to the distant creak of wagons bringing in the wounded and the rustle of soldiers mending their rifles. He patted the Harar-1 beside him as one might touch an old friend.
History had taught him how men fell. Tonight he had done his best to ensure they did not fall in vain. The jungle had been a crucible—and from it, a new kind of army had emerged: iron-forged, fed, taught, and ready to keep the roads open and the granaries full. The storm was not over. It had only changed shape. But Tafari had won the first, most dangerous test.