Indigenous people from different tribes had been forcibly thrown together; mutual wariness and suspicion were inevitable.
When the Austrian Empire's Colonial Army swept in, everything dissolved into chaos. Some fought on their own, some fled over one another in panic, and some tribes even broke into armed clashes among themselves.
Before long, Franz's desk was piled high with victory reports from the colonies, often claiming tens of thousands of enemies annihilated while their own losses numbered only in the dozens, or even single digits.
Franz was not surprised. After all, this was Africa, and there was no telling how much water those victory reports had mixed into them.
Many colonies burned indigenous corpses on the pretext of preventing epidemics. To improve efficiency, even the remaining bones were hauled away by private colonial groups and rendered into fertilizer.
Most of the prisoners, meanwhile, were divided between the Kingdom of Dahomey and the Oman Empire. The Austrian Empire had not taken part in slave trading; it had merely handed prisoners over to those willing to pay ransom.
In truth, many people throughout the Austrian Empire wanted in on that business. Directly trading slaves was far more profitable than handing prisoners over to the Kingdom of Dahomey and the Oman Empire.
The Austrian Empire's naval power was more than sufficient to support such trade, and Austria's allies had even prepared the markets—for example, the United States, Brazil, and the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata.
Yet Franz still had no intention of entering that line of business. On one hand, it would make it easy for other countries to seize evidence against Austria; on the other, it could easily create path dependence, greatly harming the colonies' long-term development.
Besides, the Austrian Empire had signed anti-slavery agreements. Skirting the edges was one thing,