By the time 1933 came about, the second armored division finished training as well, and then departed for Oradea on the North-west to take charge of their new Ferdinand tanks, and trucks and so on.

Being a wise gamer myself, I did also create a mobile anti-air company for the armored divisions, 100 trucks with 23 mm autocannons on a flatbed, then also combat engineers, to lay pontoon bridges and fill up ditches, a maintance company to keep the division going and even a signal company dealing with radios, couriers, recon and other boring stuff.

The signal company was barely +20 initiative bonus in my game menu, radios in 1932 being rather crap and so on. But considering the French were still using messenger pigeons and signal flags for their tanks, I was still better.

By this time, Codreanu and his Legion of murderous Angels had almost cleaned up two entire counties, Brasov and Cluj, leaving behind a mess of assassinations, arsons and such.

Nothing special for Europe at this time, and wouldn't compare to the Crystal Night in Germany.

Cluj Napoca itself was quite important for its high level of education, meaning that advanced tech could be researched and produced here, everything from radios, encrypted telegraphs, early radio finding, even some prototype television tubes. Calling the place an Electronics Research Center was a bit much, but the game wanted one. So now we had one.

Constanta hosted a sonar and various other naval tech research centers, from dual-purpose guns able to shoot at aircraft and ships, to torpedoes and better engines.

Radar was not on the menu yet, but several tall towers along the coast could provide a few hints of things moving beyond the horizon.

Bucharest hosted a bunch more research centers, mostly for guns, machine-guns, artillery and tanks, while Brasov hosted the IAR plant for aircraft testing and tentative manufacturing. The Dutch company Fokker had been in a bind on the global market after one of its passenger planes crashed in America, and now a Fokker plant was being built at Brasov in order to provide 500 planes for the Romanian Air Force. They weren't Fokker_D.XXI yet, but any plane was better than no plane at all.

However, barely a month later, the Romanian Army mobilized partially, drawing 500 thousand soldiers into its ranks, and about 200 thousand women for supports roles like cooks, washing, medical services and so on. Using women was frowned upon in these times, even for non-combat roles, but it made more sense to pay women to do the easy jobs, than waste combat able soldiers for potato peeling and other such tasks.

Two months later, after the peasants received their guns and learned how to look menacing with them, Romania went to war again.

No allies, no fancy treaties, no bombastic declarations...well maybe a bit of the latter.

We did have a purpose in this war after all, and not just mindless slaughter. The Romanians living inside Hungary were being oppressed, and denied their basic rights like being named like a Romanian, speaking Romanian, going to Romanian schools and churches and so on.

With two armored divisions cutting through the feeble border defences, and the bulk of the army spreading out after them a bit more sedately, being on foot and using horse carts for logistics, the war barely lasted a month. Sure, 50% of the tanks broke down on the way to Budapest, as did 20% of trucks and planes, but it was never a question about being able to beat up Hungary, being 4 times smaller and less populated, plus much less armed.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

We even managed to trap several Hungarian divisions in a northern pocket, their backs agaisnt the hostile Slovakian border, allowing the Romanian Army to capture 50000 soldiers and their equipment mostly intact.

The only question was doing it quickly enough, that the Great Powers couldn't meet and decide what to do. Luckily we had an isolationist America, a hated-by-everyone Soviet Union and a friendly France, while Germany and Britain couldn't see eye to eye anyways.

Japan and Italy were non-factors for now, being too weak or otherwise ignored on the big players map.

Observers from France, Britain and Germany were invited post-fact to see what we were doing in occupied Hungary, meaning mostly rebuilding Romanian villages and towns, while exporting Hungarians back to their (now smaller) homeland.

Seeing as Hungary was mostly open plains and lakes, we established the new Romanian border on the Tisa River, while evicting non-Romanian people from our new lands.

And if a million gypsies and other undesirables also got evicted into the Hungarian Regency, it was better than having them burned alive by the Archangel's Legion, right?

A few bits in the North and South of former Hungary were also split off and bound to Romania proper, for historical, demographic or strategic reasons.

From the army, 20 infantry divisions remained in occupied Hungary while 10 of the damaged units were demobilized and sent home, while the best performing 20 divisions still left were re-deployed on the Bulgarian border.

Another 'puppeting' would require some rest and more tanks for the armored divisions, plus gathering more support internally and externally.

However, only 200 Wolf tank destroyers arrived from France before their government changed stance and out right denied us more armament imports, same as Britain and Germany.

Luckily, and perhaps wisely for us, I did wait until the derelict french dreadnought crash-landed in Constanta's port.

Not only the battleship's steel, but a lot of the technology present on the ship was still valuable, from range finders, optical telescopes, search-lights, under-water torpedo tubes and so on. The French did remove the more valuable radio finding and firing control calculators, but they forgot about the spares locked in a storage room, just like the Mossad network assured me they would.

The loot was divided among research centers, boosting our tech research by a decade at least. And of course, guns began to be poured down at Galati using the free steel, while the dreadnought's turrets were split up into three coastal forts along the Black Sea.

We also had designs and samples stolen from the Soviets, but those were rather trash compared to the first class naval tech of the French.

In Hungary, their vast aluminum deposits were already confiscated and put to use for various purposes, from making light canteens, spoons and splinter-proof vests for the army, to aircraft production and light boats. The total cost of the Hungarian war did reach 100 million dollars, a giant sum for this time, but I was also selling oil from Venezuela to the British and the French, so it kinda balanced out.

The world was not prepared for a rapid armored attack, even if only equipped with light tanks and trucks. I knew the Great Powers would become very interested in how we achieved our great victory so fast, even agaisnt a modest army like Hungary's.