I Rule Rome with a God-Tier AI-Chapter 161: The Empress of Steel

The Office of the Industrial Treasury had transformed from an organized hub of commerce into the frantic, beating heart of a war machine. The usual, measured scratch of quills had been replaced by a constant, frenetic rustle of papyrus as messengers ran back and forth, their faces grim with urgency. The great map table was now a chaotic collage of overlapping charts showing troop movements, shipping manifests, and resource allocations. Sabina stood before a massive slate status board, a piece of chalk in her hand, personally tracking the flow of iron from Spain, tin from Britannia, and grain from Africa. It was a logistical nightmare of epic proportions, a symphony of supply and demand she was attempting to conduct in the middle of a hurricane.

Alex found her there, a whirlwind of controlled chaos, her expression a mask of intense concentration.

"Your war is expensive, Caesar," she said without looking up from her work, her voice sharp as flint. She made a new mark on the board, diverting a shipment of Spanish iron from the public works project in Rome to the ravenous forges of Vulcania. "Every legion you move from the east costs a million sesterces a week in food, fodder, and wages. Your 'holy crusade' against this northern horde will bankrupt the Empire before the first barbarian sets foot across the Danube."

She finally turned to face him, her eyes dark with the strain of her immense task. "Celer's reports from Vulcania are the core of the problem. The new coking ovens work, yes. The steel is stronger than ever. But the demands you have placed on him are impossible. You have asked him to triple the production of repeating crossbows. To do that, he needs to run the forges day and night. To do that, he needs thousands of skilled laborers—smiths, engineers, masons, carpenters. The legionaries can do the heavy lifting, the quarrying and the hauling, but they are not artisans. There are simply not enough free, skilled citizens in all of Northern Italy to meet the demand. Production is already falling behind schedule."

This was the great bottleneck, the single point of failure that could doom them all. They could have all the coke and iron in the world, but without the skilled hands to shape it, it was just rock.

Alex had anticipated this. He had tasked Lyra with creating a comprehensive demographic analysis of Northern Italy. He now unrolled the scroll for Sabina. It was not a list of names, but a cold, hard accounting of human resources: census data broken down by profession, guild memberships in every major town, detailed records of the great slave-holding estates and the estimated number of bodies they controlled. For Alex, it was an abstract planning document. For Sabina, staring at the numbers, it was a pool of untapped labor. A solution began to form in her mind, a solution that was brutal, efficient, and deeply, unforgivingly Roman.

She took a clean sheet of papyrus and began to write, her quill scratching with a fierce, decisive energy. "If the citizens will not come to the work," she said, her voice devoid of any emotion, "then the work must come to the citizens. By decree."

She drafted a new imperial law. It was not a request for pious donations or a call for patriotic volunteers. It was a document of cold, hard steel. She called it the Lex de Fabrica Armorum—the Law on the Production of Arms.

First came the conscription of the guilds. The law, she explained as she wrote, would declare a state of supreme military emergency. Under this emergency power, all registered members of the blacksmithing, engineering, and masonry guilds in the provinces of Northern Italy were hereby conscripted into state service for the duration of the crisis.

"They will not be enslaved," she clarified, anticipating Alex's objection. "But they will not be free. They will be paid a standard legionary's wage. Their families will be given a grain stipend. But they are forbidden from leaving their posts at Vulcania until the war is won. It is a military draft, not of soldiers, but of an entire civilian profession. They will be the legions of the forge."

It was a radical move, stripping thousands of citizens of their freedom of movement and profession. But it was the second part of her decree that was truly monstrous.

"This will give us the skilled hands we need," she said, her quill scratching faster. "But it does not solve the problem of the dirty, dangerous work. The hauling of raw ore, the manning of the new coke ovens with their poisonous fumes, the digging of new mines. This is work too hazardous and too grueling for citizen-laborers or our valuable legionaries." She looked up at Alex, her eyes like chips of obsidian. "So we will use the resource this era provides in abundance."

She wrote the final, brutal clause: the slave levy. The law would require every landowner, every senator with a latifundium, every wealthy merchant with more than twenty slaves, to contribute ten percent of their 'unskilled' slave population to a newly formed "Vulcania Labor Corps." These men and women would be marched north under military guard and put to work in the mines and at the coking ovens. Their lives, their bodies, were now a state resource, a raw material to be consumed in the forges of war.

Alex felt a wave of revulsion so strong it made him dizzy. It went against every 21st-century instinct, every ideal he still clung to. "Sabina, no," he said, his voice strained. "We can't do this. This is... this is monstrous. We can't build a new Rome on the backs of thousands of slaves worked to death in our mines."

Sabina put down her quill and rose from her chair. She faced him, her expression not one of cruelty, but of an unyielding, terrifying pragmatism. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

"Is it more monstrous than letting the horde pour across the Danube?" she asked, her voice dangerously quiet. "Is it more monstrous than watching them sack our cities and slaughter tens of thousands of Roman citizens, women and children included, because our legions ran out of arrows for their new crossbows? Is it more monstrous than losing this war, and your throne, and any hope for a better Rome, because you were not willing to do what was necessary to win?"

She stepped closer, her eyes boring into his. "We do not have the luxury of your future morality, Alex. That is a peace-Titus luxury. I am fighting a war for our very survival, and I will fight it with the tools this era provides me. In 180 AD Rome, slaves are a resource, like iron or timber. And right now, we need every resource we have. This is the price of your war. This is the cost of protecting your precious ideals. Are you willing to pay it?"

He was trapped. Her logic was a cage of iron. Every argument he could make, every appeal to a morality that did not exist in this world, sounded weak and hollow in the face of the existential threat thundering towards the Danube. To refuse would be to condemn thousands of his own citizens to death. To agree was to condemn thousands of slaves to a living hell.

He looked at the decree she had written, at the neat, elegant script that spelled out a new age of industrial servitude. He thought of the clean medical tent in the Subura, of the child Galen had said would live because of his actions. To save that child, and thousands like him, did he have to sacrifice these others?

With a heavy heart, feeling the full, crushing weight of his imperial power, he gave a single, almost imperceptible nod. He had made his choice. He would pay the price.

"So be it," he whispered.

He took the stylus from her hand and signed his name at the bottom of the decree, the letters a dark scar on the pale papyrus. Sabina had just solved their production crisis by implementing a ruthless system of forced labor, fundamentally altering the economy and social fabric of Northern Italy. She had demonstrated that in this new war economy, she was willing to make the hard, ugly, necessary decisions that he, with his lingering 21st-century conscience, still hesitated to make. She was no longer just the Empress of the Economy; she was the Empress of Steel, and her forge would be fed by human lives.