Chapter 200: Regicide Part II
Before Bruno realized it, the time had arrived. Today was the 28th of June, 1914... A day that would instantly be recognizable to an educated individual, one that would forever live on in infamy. Both in this life, and of course, Bruno's past life.
Gavrilo Princip was a name that a student of history should also instantly recognize. Not even twenty years old on this day, he was thus considered a minor within the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its boundaries.
He, along with five other students, had over the course of the last year or so been plotting the assassination of the Habsburg dynasty's heir apparent. They had been trained, armed, and given the resources necessary to conduct this attack by hidden elements of the Serbian Government.
In the previous timeline, the man in charge of the group known as the "Black Hand" was the leader of Serbian Intelligence, but Heidi had already dispatched the man to hell in years prior. No doubt, this was because of Bruno's actions in this new timeline, which had splintered off from the original as a result of the butterfly effect.
Even so, the sisters of fate were hard at work mending the rift between the two timelines, and as a result, an unlikely figure stepped forward to fulfill the role Apis had played in supporting these would-be assassins, whose common goal was the liberation and unification of a
Yugoslav state.
To put it simply, a member of the Serbian Royal Family had seized the initiative to strike back at the Habsburgs, whom he wrongly believed were responsible for the death of Apis and several other key Serbian government and military assets throughout the years.
However, things were not going according to how Young Bosnia and the Black Hand had initially planned. The original intention was to bomb the Archduke's motorcade, but due to a series of mishaps, the perpetrators had utterly failed to do so.
Worse yet, this had alerted the authorities to what they were trying to do. A less determined man would have called off any further attacks, choosing instead to regroup and reorganize for another attempt.
But fate demanded Franz Ferdinand's death. Because of this, Gavrilo Princip immediately planned to intercept the car carrying the Austrian Archduke as he tried desperately to return to the safety of his lodgings.
Just as in the previous timeline, the driver of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's car took a wrong turn—a wrong turn that directly led to precisely where Gavrilo Princip was standing at the moment they hit the brakes and came to a stop.
At first, the young student gazed in awe, almost as if the heavens were supporting him from behind the scenes. He then fumbled into his pocket, pulling out the FN Model 1910 semi- automatic pistol chambered in .380 ACP that the Black Hand had given him to accomplish the sinister deed.