I Rule Rome with a God-Tier AI-Chapter 166: The Bait is Taken

The fort stood on the north bank of the Danube like a clenched fist of defiance. It had been built in less than a month, a brutalist masterpiece of Celer's most pragmatic engineering. It had no name, no history, no decorative flourishes. The soldiers had taken to calling it Castra Umbrarum—the Fortress of Shadows—for it stood alone in the shadow of the great, dark forest that blanketed the lands of the enemy. Its walls were thick, unadorned concrete, angled to deflect projectiles and too high for conventional ladders. A single, heavily reinforced gate of iron-banded oak was its only entrance. Projecting bastions at each corner created overlapping fields of fire, ensuring there were no blind spots. The entire structure was surrounded by a deep, wide ditch, its sides steep and treacherous. The fort was not a home, nor was it a symbol of Roman glory. It was a machine, designed for the singular purpose of killing.

Inside, Centurion Titus Pullo stood on the windy parapet, watching the horizon. He and two centuries of his best Devota—two hundred men who had survived plague, heresy, and the whispers of madness—were the bait in the Emperor's new, terrible trap. For days, they had watched and waited, the silence of the vast wilderness pressing in on them. Then, they saw it. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

It started as a dark line on the horizon, a smudge against the grey sky. But it grew, minute by minute, resolving itself not into a column or an army, but into a moving landscape. It was the horde. A sea of bodies, a trudging, numberless ocean of humanity flowing over the low hills, their sheer mass seeming to suck the very sound from the air. There were no war horns, no shouting, no rattling of weapons. The only sound was a low, continuous rumble, like distant thunder, the sound of hundreds of thousands of feet trampling the earth.

Pullo felt a cold knot tighten in his stomach, but his face remained a mask of hard-bitten calm. He had faced down death in a dozen different forms, but this was something else. This was a geological event, an inexorable force of nature. He watched as they flowed around the fort, splitting like water around a rock, their numbers so vast that they seemed to have no end. They had no siege engines, no great towers or catapults. Their only siege weapon was their own flesh. Thousands of crudely made ladders were passed forward through the ranks, enough to assault every foot of the fort's perimeter simultaneously.

Pullo, the zealous hunter, had been forged into something new in the fires of Vulcania and the mind of his Emperor. He was a commander now, his faith channeled into a cold, efficient purpose. He moved along the walls, his voice steady and clear, a rock of certainty for his men to cling to.

"First rank, to the firing slits! Second rank, stand behind them, ready to trade places!" he commanded, his voice carrying easily in the eerie silence. "Remember your training! The lever is your friend! Do not rush! A smooth action is a fast action! First rank, you will fire into the ditch. I want every bolt to find a home in the front line of the enemy. Second rank, you will fire over their heads, into the mass of bodies behind them. Do not waste a single prayer to the Emperor's wrath on empty ground! Make every shot count!"

He was implementing Alex's brutal, mathematical strategy perfectly. The men, their faces pale but set with a grim determination, took their positions. They cradled their new repeating crossbows, the weight of the polished wood and cold steel a comforting reality against the unbelievable tide of enemies before them.

The horde surged forward. They did not run in a wild, chaotic charge. They advanced at a steady, relentless trot, a wave of bodies moving with a single, unified will. They reached the defensive ditch at the base of the wall, their front ranks stumbling and sliding down the steep earthwork, creating a bridge of their own bodies for those behind them to cross. They began to place their ladders against the concrete walls, the scraping of wood against stone a grating, unnatural sound.

Pullo let them come. He waited until the ditch was filled with a struggling mass of bodies. He waited until he could see the vacant, emotionless expressions on their faces. He waited until the first of them began to swarm up the ladders. Then, he raised his hand, held it for a beat in the silent air, and brought it down with a sharp, cleaving motion.

"IGNIS!" he roared, the single word of command unleashing hell.

The sound that erupted from the walls of Castra Umbrarum was a new and terrible sound of war. It was not the single, heavy thwack of crossbows firing in a volley. It was a sustained, deafening, mechanical roar, the sound of two hundred steel levers being worked in a furious, continuous rhythm. It was the clatter of a factory, a symphony of industrial death.

The hail of steel bolts was relentless, a horizontal storm that tore into the packed ranks of the horde. It was not a battle; it was an industrial process of extermination. The front ranks of the enemy, those struggling in the ditch and climbing the ladders, simply disintegrated. Bodies were pierced by three, four, five bolts, slammed back from the ladders, and tossed about like bloody dolls. The men behind them pushed forward, clambering over the corpses of their comrades, only to be met by the same unceasing storm of steel. The crossbows never stopped. As soon as a man in the first rank fired, he would step back, and the man from the second rank would step forward to take his place, his own weapon already loaded and aimed, while the first reloaded his with a single, smooth pull of the lever.

The Romans were untouchable, firing from the safety of high walls and narrow arrow slits. The enemy could not reach them. They could not fight back. They could only die. The Devota, men who had been trained their whole lives for the brutal, intimate shield-wall combat of the legions, found themselves transformed into something else. They felt not the hot-blooded thrill of victory, not the desperate fear of battle, but a sickening, cold, mechanical sense of duty. They were workers on a production line of death. Load, aim, fire. Load, aim, fire. The world narrowed to the small rectangle of the firing slit, the satisfying click of the loading mechanism, and the endless sea of targets below.

The brutal mathematics of Alex's new warfare were undeniable. The horde's fanatical, predictable charges were a death sentence against the new weapons. For all their numbers, for all their terrifying silence, they had no answer to this storm of steel. After ten minutes of horrific, one-sided slaughter, the attack finally faltered. A ripple of confusion seemed to pass through the attacking wave. They stopped their advance, then began to retreat, leaving behind a carpet of thousands of dead and dying, a choked, writhing moat of bodies piled high in the defensive ditch.

A stunned silence fell over the battlefield, broken only by the low moans of the wounded and the metallic clicking of the last few crossbows being reloaded. The men of the Devota stood on the walls, their arms aching, their ears ringing, looking down at the field of carnage they had created. They were victorious. They had not suffered so much as a single scratch. But there was no cheering. No triumphant shouts to the gods. There was only the vast, profound silence of the aftermath, as they surveyed the sheer, unbelievable scale of the slaughter they had inflicted.

Titus Pullo stood on the parapet, his own crossbow still warm in his hands. He felt a grim satisfaction course through him. He had followed his Emperor's orders. He had proven the divine strategy correct. But as he looked out at the thousands of bodies, at the red-tinged earth, he felt a sliver of something else creep into his heart. A sliver of horror. He was beginning to understand the terrible, soul-numbing price of this new kind of war, a war won not by courage, but by a more efficient machine for killing.