I Rule Rome with a God-Tier AI-Chapter 165: The War Council at Vulcania

The city of Vulcania was no longer a symbol of progress; it was a city at war. Alex arrived to a scene of controlled pandemonium, a hellish, breathtaking landscape of smoke, fire, and the ceaseless, deafening clang of industry. A permanent, greasy haze hung in the air, tasting of sulfur and hot metal. The hundred coking ovens now burned day and night, their black smoke merging into a single, dark pall that blotted out the sun. Thousands of men—conscripted smiths, legionary laborers, and the silent, grim-faced slaves from the new levy—toiled in shifts around the clock, their bodies slick with sweat and grime. This was the roaring, ugly, vital heart of his war machine.

Celer met him at the city gates, his face smeared with soot, his eyes red-rimmed from lack of sleep, but burning with a creator's fierce pride. He led Alex through the chaotic city, shouting over the din of the hammers. He showed him the growing stockpiles of new, superior steel plate, stacked in glittering piles. He pointed out the rows of crates, each stenciled with the mark of a legion, filled with the deadly, newly assembled repeating crossbows. Production was increasing daily, thanks to Sabina's ruthless decrees. But Celer's final report was grim. It still wasn't enough.

"They are a tide of locusts, Caesar," he yelled, his voice hoarse. "For every thousand crossbow bolts we make, they have ten thousand warriors to soak them up."

In the newly constructed command center—a stark, functional building of rough-hewn timber and stone—Alex convened his first true war council. The men gathered around a massive table, upon which was a detailed map of the entire Danubian frontier. There was Celer, the master of his industry. There was Titus Pullo, his zealous hunter, now a seasoned commander whose eyes held the cold fire of a man who has seen the true face of the enemy. And there was Vitruvius Pollio, the general temporarily in command of the Danube legions. Pollio was a cautious, traditionalist soldier of the old school, a man who believed wars were won with shield walls, discipline, and the steady, grinding advance of heavy infantry.

Pollio spoke first, his report laying out the grim military reality. "The horde is not a wave, Caesar. It is a tide. It is pressing against our entire line, from Pannonia to the Black Sea. They attack in small, disciplined groups, never larger than a cohort. They test our defenses, probe for weaknesses, and then melt back into the wilderness before we can mount a proper counter-attack. They fight with a silent, terrifying ferocity that unnerves my men."

He traced a finger along the blue line of the Danube on the map. "My legions can hold the river line. The Roman legionary is the finest soldier in the world. But we cannot sustain these losses indefinitely. Every skirmish costs us men, arrows, and morale. It is a war of attrition, Caesar, and they have more bodies to spend than we have arrows to shoot."

Alex listened, his expression unreadable. A war of attrition was a war he was guaranteed to lose. When Pollio finished, Alex dismissed his assessment with a single, sharp wave of his hand.

"We will not fight a war of attrition," he stated, his voice cutting through the smoky air of the room. "We will not play their game. A wall is a passive defense. We will turn our wall into a weapon."

His confidence was not a bluff. In the long hours of his journey north, he had been in constant, secret consultation with Lyra. He had fed her every scrap of intelligence from the frontier—the size and nature of the horde's probing attacks, their disciplined tactics, their seeming lack of independent initiative. Lyra's analysis was clear.

Enemy attack patterns exhibit high levels of organizational discipline but low tactical flexibility, her analysis had concluded. They rely on overwhelming local force and fanatical, direct charges. They do not react effectively to feints, complex maneuvers, or unexpected defensive strategies. A strategy that disrupts their command structure and exploits their predictable attack patterns to inflict disproportionate casualties would be highly effective.

Now, Alex translated that cold, data-driven conclusion into a radical new strategy for his human commanders. He laid out a new vision of warfare, assigning each man a role that played to his unique strengths.

He turned first to the traditionalist, Pollio. "General Pollio, your legions will continue to be our great anvil. You are right, we will hold the Danube line at all costs. But we will not be passive. You will begin immediate construction of a series of new, smaller forts, not on our bank of the river, but on the northern bank."

Pollio stared, aghast. "Caesar? Forts on their side of the river? They would be surrounded, cut off!"

"Precisely," Alex said. "We will build them on easily defensible hills and promontories, creating fortified salients, islands of Roman steel in their sea of bodies. Each fort will be garrisoned by only two centuries, but armed with our new crossbows. You will deliberately bait the horde to attack these forts. You will make them an irresistible target."

Before Pollio could protest further, he turned to Titus Pullo. "Centurion, your Devota, and every other unit we can arm with these new weapons, will be my hammer. You will operate from these new forts. When the horde attacks, you will not meet them in glorious battle at the gate. You will stay on the walls. You will use your superior firepower to slaughter them from a position of absolute safety. Rain down a hell of steel they cannot answer. Your mission is not to take ground or win honor. Your mission is to bleed them. To break their morale with relentless, untouchable fire until the river runs red with their blood."

Pullo's eyes gleamed with a grim understanding. He saw the brutal, divine logic of it.

Finally, Alex turned to Celer. "Master Celer, you will provide the true fire. The 'demon gas' from your coking ovens. The coal tar. I want your engineers to devise a new weapon. Something simple, something we can mass-produce. I want clay pots, sealed with wax, filled with the condensed, flammable tar, with a simple cloth fuse. I want thousands of them. Tens of thousands."

He looked around the table at his commanders, his eyes burning with a terrible intensity. "When the horde masses at the base of our forts, when they are packed shoulder to shoulder trying to bring their ladders to the walls, we will not just shoot them. We will burn them. We will give them a taste of true Roman fire."

The council was stunned into silence. Alex had just thrown out centuries of Roman military doctrine. He was not planning to meet the enemy in a pitched battle of shield walls and clashing swords. He was proposing a new and terrible kind of war: a brutal, defensive strategy of attrition, yes, but one where the enemy's greatest strength—their sheer, overwhelming numbers—was turned into their greatest weakness. A war of advanced technology, fortified killing zones, and horrifying incendiary weapons. It was brutally effective, and brutally un-Roman.

It was Pollio, the old traditionalist, who finally broke the silence, a look of dawning, horrified respect on his face. "It is... butchery, Caesar."

"Yes," Alex replied, his voice as cold and hard as the steel being forged outside. "It is. And it is the only way we will survive."

The council ended. The commanders, their minds reeling with this new, brutal vision of warfare, rushed to implement his orders. Alex stood alone before the map of the Danube, the weight of his decision settling upon him. He had just committed the Roman army, his army, to a new and terrible form of warfare, one that would save lives on his side but would inflict unimaginable horrors on the other. The long, bloody defense of the north had begun.