I Rule Rome with a God-Tier AI-Chapter 121: The Schism in the Ranks

The air on the Via Flaminia was stretched taut as a bowstring, vibrating with the unspoken threat of imminent, catastrophic violence. Alex sat on his horse, a lone figure in the vast, empty space between his own small party and the ragged, formidable line of the Plague Legion. He could feel the weight of thousands of pairs of eyes on him, a physical pressure. He saw the hatred in those eyes, the grief, the fear, but he had also, crucially, seen the flicker of desperate, impossible hope his offer had ignited. He had laid his gamble on the table. Now, he could only watch as the soul of a legion tore itself in two.

The Tribune Aquila, his face a mask of purple, apoplectic rage, was the first to break the spell. "Lies!" he screamed, his voice cracking with fury as he saw the resolve of his men wavering. "It is a sorcerer's trick! Can you not see? He holds us here with empty promises while his legions close in for the kill! He offers a cure with one hand while holding a butcher's knife in the other!"

As if summoned by his words, a new sound carried on the wind. The distant, unmistakable call of a Roman cavalry horn, sounding the advance.

Alex's blood ran cold. No. Not now.

On the crest of the rolling hills to their east, a line of iron and crimson appeared. Then another, and another. It was General Tacitus, with the two loyal legions Alex had dispatched from the north. They deployed from marching columns into perfect, gleaming battle formations with the brutal efficiency of a well-oiled killing machine. They had finally caught up. And their commander, seeing his Emperor standing seemingly alone and cornered before a mutinous army, had clearly made the only logical deduction a Roman general could: he was here to save him. In reality, he had just ruined everything.

The sight of the loyal legions cresting the hill was the spark that ignited the powder keg. The wavering hope in the eyes of the Plague Legion's soldiers was instantly extinguished, replaced by the stark, animal terror of a cornered beast. The trap was real. The Emperor had lied.

Aquila threw back his head and let out a wild, exultant roar. He had been proven right. "See!" he shrieked, pointing with his sword towards Tacitus's advancing lines. "The tyrant shows his true face! His cure was a lie! A trick to hold us here while his executioners moved in to butcher us like diseased cattle!"

He wheeled his horse around to face the terrified men of his legion. "We came here seeking justice and were offered only deceit! There is no hope for us! There is no cure! There is only the glorious death of a true Roman! We will not die here in a ditch, cut down from behind! We will die charging the very heart of the lie! We will die on the walls of Rome!"

He had them. The terror, the betrayal, the final, utter loss of hope—it was a potent, intoxicating brew. He rallied about a third of the legion to his side, a core of his most fanatical, most desperate, and most loyal followers. Their faces were masks of suicidal fury. They were no longer soldiers; they were a death cult, and their only remaining purpose was to inflict as much pain as possible on the world that had condemned them. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

But not all were swayed. The centurion Titus Pullo, his heart hammering in his chest, watched the scene unfold with a growing sense of horror. He looked at the wild, mad light in Aquila's eyes. He looked at the cold, implacable advance of Tacitus's legions. And he looked at the lone, unmoving figure of the Emperor, who had bared his own scarred shoulder and offered them a chance. Pullo was a soldier of fifteen years. He knew the look of a man leading his troops into a foolish, pointless slaughter. And he saw it now in the face of the Tribune.

"Hold, you fools!" Pullo's parade-ground roar, a sound forged in a hundred training fields and a dozen battles, cut through Aquila's frantic screeds. "Have you lost your senses? Are we soldiers of the Fifth Macedonica, or are we a barbarian mob?"

He drew his own sword and pointed it not at the loyal legions, not at the Emperor, but at Aquila himself. He was joined by a significant number of the older, more disciplined centurions and veterans, men who recognized the suicidal madness of Aquila's plan. They began to form their own ragged shield wall, a line of grim-faced, pragmatic survivors.

"Look with your own eyes!" Pullo bellowed, his voice straining with the effort of holding his crumbling legion together. "The Emperor stands before us, alone and unprotected! He offers a cure! General Tacitus, in his ignorance, offers us only a sword! What choice is there? To die for a chance at life, or to die for a madman's pride?"

The Plague Legion, once a unified, singular body, shattered. It was a schism, a brutal, instantaneous civil war of ideology. On one side stood Aquila and his thousand fanatics, burning with a suicidal nihilism. On the other stood Titus Pullo and the remaining three thousand soldiers, the majority of the legion, caught in a terrifying limbo of uncertainty, their hope warring with their fear. And advancing on them all was the implacable, disciplined might of two loyal Roman legions, ready to kill every last one of them. The Via Flaminia had become a three-way standoff, a stage set for a Roman tragedy of epic proportions.

Alex knew he had only seconds to act, to avert a bloodbath that would not only doom them all but would also unleash the plague across all of Italy. He spurred his horse forward, riding directly into the no-man's-land between the fractured mutineers and the advancing loyalists. He was placing himself directly in the line of fire, a single, fragile point of authority in a sea of chaos.

"Tacitus, hold your men!" he screamed, his voice raw with command. "Hold them, I say, on my supreme authority! This is not your battle!"

He then wheeled his horse to face Pullo's wavering faction. "Trust me!" he yelled, his voice a desperate plea and a solemn promise. "I gave you my word! Lay down your arms, and you will have your cure! I swear it on my own life and on the future of Rome!"

It might have worked. The moment was that fragile. Pullo's men were lowering their shields, ready to embrace the hope he offered.

But Aquila, seeing his chance for a glorious, historical martyrdom slipping away, made his final, insane move. He let out a final, piercing shriek of pure, nihilistic rage. "To Rome! For glory and for death!"

He ordered his fanatics to charge. But they did not charge the loyal legions. They did not charge the Emperor. They charged past them, a disorganized, screaming wave of death, aimed directly at the distant, vulnerable walls of Rome itself. They intended to breach the city in a final, apocalyptic act of spite, to carry their plague into the very heart of the empire that had wronged them.

Titus Pullo, in a split-second decision that would define the rest of his life, made his choice. He was a Roman centurion. His first duty was to the city.

"Shields!" he roared to his own men. "Form a wall! For the honor of the Legion! For Rome!"

What happened next was a scene of such horrific, tragic fratricide that it would be seared into the memory of every man who witnessed it. The larger, more disciplined force of Pullo's men slammed their shields together, forming a solid, desperate wall of iron and wood. Aquila's fanatics, their charge disorganized, crashed into them.

The Plague Legion erupted into a vicious civil war with itself, right on the doorstep of the Eternal City. Men who had been comrades, who had shared wine and fought back-to-back in Parthia, now hacked and stabbed at each other with a desperate, familial hatred. It was a chaotic, swirling melee of brother against brother, all while two of Alex's loyal legions stood on the hills above, watching in stunned, paralyzed horror at the madness unfolding below.