I Rule Rome with a God-Tier AI-Chapter 122: The Queen’s Men

From the highest watchtower on the northern battlements of the Aurelian Walls, the chaos on the Via Flaminia was a distant, horrifying pantomime. Sabina stood on the stone platform, a small, still figure against the vastness of the sky, a spyglass pressed to her eye. The reports that had been arriving via frantic military couriers were confused, contradictory. All she knew for certain was that the Emperor was out there, caught in the heart of a storm he had created. She watched the distant clouds of dust, the glint of sun on steel, the horrifying sight of Roman legionaries fighting Roman legionaries, and felt a profound sense of powerlessness. Her control, so absolute within the city's walls, ended at the gates. She could manage a treasury, sway a guild, and outmaneuver a senator, but she could not command a battle.

Lucilla, however, felt no such powerlessness. She stood on a nearby section of the wall, not alone, but surrounded by the command staff of her new militia. The sounds of battle, the distant roar of men in combat, was not a source of anxiety for her; it was a call to action. She saw not a crisis, but an opportunity, a stage upon which a new kind of power could be demonstrated. Her 'Sons of the She-Wolf,' as the most ardent of her followers had begun to call themselves, were mustered along the northern perimeter. They were a force of nearly five thousand men, a hodgepodge of grizzled veterans, eager youths, and grim-faced artisans, armed from the city's armories. They were not a professional legion, but they were disciplined, they were motivated, and their loyalty to her was absolute.

While Sabina frantically tried to get clear intelligence from the field, trying to manage the city's internal defenses and prepare for the grim possibility of a siege, Lucilla acted. Her sharp, aristocratic eyes, honed by a lifetime of observing political and military displays, saw what the frantic couriers could not report. She saw the schism in the Plague Legion. She saw the smaller, more fanatical group break off. And she saw their new, terrifying trajectory. They were not fighting to win. They were charging the city.

They were charging her city.

A runner, dispatched by the nervous commander of the city gate, arrived breathless at her position. "Augusta! A force of the mutineers has broken through! They are charging the Flaminian Gate! My men are too few! We need Praetorian reinforcements!"

Lucilla looked towards the palace, towards the place where Sabina, the acting regent, was no doubt deliberating, weighing options, sending for reports. She knew that by the time the Praetorians were mustered and marched from their barracks, it would be too late. The fanatics would be at the walls.

She made a decision. She did not send a request for orders. She did not wait for permission from the Emperor or from his proxy. She turned to her own commander, a grizzled ex-centurion whose loyalty she had bought with a generous pension for his widowed sister.

"Commander," she said, her voice as calm and clear as a winter morning, "sound the alarm. Man the walls. You will deploy the archer companies to the battlements above the Flaminian Gate. The artillery crews will man the ballistae. Tell the men their mothers and children are behind these walls. They will not yield a single stone."

The commander, accustomed to her charitable works but not to her military command, hesitated for a fraction of a second. He looked into her eyes and saw not the soft, compassionate Mater Dolorosa, but the hard, unyielding gaze of her father, Marcus Aurelius. He saw an Empress.

"Yes, Augusta!" he barked, a lifetime of discipline taking over. He turned and his orders echoed along the wall. Horns blared. Men scrambled into position. Lucilla's militia, the private army she had built under the guise of civic duty, became a real, functioning fighting force.

The battle was short, brutal, and utterly one-sided. The Tribune Aquila's thousand fanatics, their ranks already thinned by their clash with Pullo's men, charged towards the gate, a screaming wave of suicidal rage. They were met not by the small gate guard they expected, but by a storm of iron and death.

Lucilla stood on the battlements, a stark figure in her dark robes, refusing to take cover. She watched as her men, her soldiers, performed with a disciplined fury that made her heart swell with a fierce, possessive pride. On her command, the archers unleashed disciplined volleys, their arrows falling like a black rain upon the charging mutineers. The ballistae, their heavy arms groaning, fired in sequence, their massive iron bolts punching through the fanatics' shields and armor, tossing men aside like broken dolls.

Aquila's charge faltered, their rage turning to confused panic as they were savaged by a well-defended, well-commanded position. They were caught in a deadly crossfire, still harried from the rear by Pullo's men, and now being systematically annihilated from the front by the city's new defenders.

The Tribune himself, screaming curses at the Emperor, at Rome, at a world that had betrayed him, was struck squarely in the chest by a ballista bolt. The force of the impact lifted him from his horse and slammed him to the ground, a broken, twisted effigy of his own mad fury. His death broke the last of his followers' morale. They threw down their weapons, falling to their knees in surrender, their apocalyptic charge ending in a bloody, ignominious defeat at the hands of a citizen militia.

Lucilla had just won her first military victory. She had, through her own decisive, independent action, saved the city from a direct assault.

When the dust of the brief, savage battle settled, a great, rolling cheer went up from the citizens and militia members on the walls. It was a sound of profound relief and adoration. But they were not cheering for the distant Emperor, who was still a mysterious figure out on the field. They were not cheering for the unseen armies of the state. They were cheering for the woman who stood before them, the woman who had not flinched, the woman who had saved their homes.

"Ave, Augusta!" they roared, the chant starting with one man and spreading like fire along the battlements. "Ave, Victrix! Hail, Empress! Hail, the Victorious One!"

Sabina watched it all from her high tower in the palace. She saw Lucilla stand there, accepting the adulation of the crowd, her hand raised not in a wave, but in the solemn acknowledgement of a triumphant general. A cold, heavy dread settled in Sabina's heart. Alex had asked his sister to raise a militia to defend the city. She had done so, and in the process, she had forged them into her own private army and had been hailed by the people as a conqueror in her own right. She was no longer just a populist with a charity fund. She was a proven military commander with thousands of fanatically loyal, armed men at her back, right in the heart of Rome.

The immediate crisis on the road may have been averted, but Sabina knew, with a chilling certainty, that a new, far more dangerous political reality had just been born on the city walls.