I Rule Rome with a God-Tier AI-Chapter 167: The Fire from Heaven

The silence that followed the first assault was a heavy, oppressive thing. The men of the Devota stood on the walls of Castra Umbrarum, the adrenaline of the slaughter slowly draining away, leaving behind a sour, metallic taste of exhaustion. They had re-armed, their crossbow magazines refilled from the fort's ample stores. They had eaten their rations of hard bread and dried meat, but the food tasted like ash in their mouths. The image of the carnage below, the sheer scale of it, was burned into their minds. It was a victory, their officers told them, a victory of unprecedented magnitude. But it did not feel like one.

Hours later, as the pale sun began its descent, they saw the horde moving again. From their vantage point on the walls, they watched as the enemy regrouped. There was no panic in their ranks, no sign of demoralization. They moved with the same eerie, silent purpose as before, like a colony of ants rebuilding a disturbed nest. The thousands of bodies they had left behind in the ditch were simply ignored, treated as meaningless debris. A new wave, its numbers seemingly undiminished, began to advance toward the fort.

The legionaries gripped their crossbows, their knuckles white. The tension on the wall was different now. Before, it had been the tense excitement of testing a new weapon. Now, it was the grim, soul-weary resolve of men preparing to do a terrible, necessary job.

As the second wave advanced, Pullo noticed a change in their tactics. They were learning. The front ranks now carried massive, crude shields made of thick timber planks and layers of stretched ox-hide. They advanced under this makeshift roof, a slow-moving testudo of wood and leather, attempting to protect the ladder-bearers from the worst of the crossbow fire. It was a simple, brutish adaptation, but it was an adaptation nonetheless. The enemy was not entirely mindless.

"Archers of the second rank!" Pullo bellowed, his voice cutting through the tension. "Aim high! A plunging arc! Drop your bolts behind their shields! First rank, pick your targets! Aim for the gaps! Let them feel the Emperor's wrath!"

The horde reached the ditch. The crossbows roared to life again, the now-familiar mechanical thunder rolling across the landscape. The plunging fire from the second rank was effective, bolts raining down on the less-protected warriors behind the shield wall, but the crude shields did their job. Many of the ladder-bearers were protected from the direct, horizontal fire. They reached the base of the walls. Ladders scraped against the concrete. The first of the enemy began to climb.

This was the moment Alex had planned for. This was the second phase of his brutal symphony.

"The pots!" Pullo roared. "Bring the fire from heaven!"

Along the parapet, legionaries rushed to crates filled with simple, unglazed clay pots, each one sealed with a plug of beeswax. They were surprisingly heavy. Inside was a thick, black, viscous liquid—the distilled coal tar from Celer's coking ovens. A short, treated cloth fuse was stuck into each wax plug.

"Light them! Throw them!"

Men with torches ran along the line, touching their flames to the fuses, which sputtered to life with a hiss. The legionaries then hoisted the heavy pots and hurled them over the side of the wall, down into the massed ranks of warriors at the base.

The effect was not the clean, instantaneous blast of Greek Fire. It was something far more horrifying. The clay pots shattered on the ground, on shields, on men, splashing the thick, sticky black liquid over everything. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the burning fuses ignited the tar.

A sudden, horrific eruption of fire bloomed at the base of the walls. It was not a clean fire that consumed and moved on. It was a clinging, liquid inferno. The coal tar stuck to leather, to wood, to flesh, and burned with a ferocious, oily heat. The first screams tore through the air. They were the first sounds the horde had made, and they were not human sounds. They were high-pitched, agonized shrieks, the sound of animals being burned alive.

The fire spread from man to man, the burning tar splashing and dripping onto those nearby. The crude wooden shields that had protected them from the crossbows now became their funeral pyres, igniting and adding to the inferno. The base of the wall was transformed into a moat of screaming, flailing, burning bodies. The smell was unimaginable, a sickening miasma of burning hair, cooking flesh, and chemical fumes that made the Roman soldiers gag.

This was a new kind of hell, a level of brutality that transcended even the bloody standards of Roman warfare. Firing crossbows from a distance was one thing; it was a mechanical act of killing. But this... this was intimate. The legionaries could see the faces of the men they were immolating, hear their death screams, smell their burning bodies. It was a horror that clawed its way past their discipline and into their souls.

A young legionary, no older than eighteen, after heaving his fifth pot over the side, turned away, his face a pale green mask. He stumbled to the back of the parapet, retched, and vomited violently onto the stone walkway. He stood there, trembling, his eyes wide with horror.

Pullo saw him. He strode over and grabbed the boy by the shoulder, his grip like a vise. He spun him around to face the inferno below. "Look at it!" he snarled, his face a hard mask of fury, forcing the boy to witness the horror he was inflicting. "The Emperor commanded us to show them divine fire! This is what it looks like! This is the price of their heresy! Do your duty, soldier! Pick up another pot, or by all the gods, I will have you thrown down to join them!"

He was forcing his men to become as ruthless as the war demanded, burning away their humanity with the same fire they rained down on the enemy. The young soldier, his face streaked with tears and vomit, stumbled back to the line, picked up another pot, and threw it, his eyes squeezed shut.

The second attack broke even more catastrophically than the first. No army, no matter how fanatical, could withstand such a horror. The horde retreated in disarray, leaving behind a smoldering, screaming landscape of death.

But as they pulled back, Pullo witnessed something that chilled him to the core. A disciplined unit of the horde, warriors who had not taken part in the charge, moved among the fields of their own wounded. But they did not carry stretchers or bandages. They carried spears. Methodically, emotionlessly, they walked from one writhing, burning comrade to the next and delivered a final, killing thrust, silencing their screams. It was not an act of mercy. It was an act of cold, inhuman pragmatism, like a farmer culling a diseased herd. They were cleaning up, erasing the evidence of their pain.

The battle was won, again, with an overwhelming and terrible force. But the victory felt foul, like a sickness in the soul. The Roman soldiers stood on their walls, shaken to their core, not by the danger they had faced, but by the sheer, unholy horror of the weapons they had been commanded to use. Titus Pullo stared out at the enemy, methodically murdering their own wounded, and he realized with a stark and terrible clarity that he was not just fighting an army. He was fighting an alien philosophy, a contempt for life so profound he could not begin to comprehend it.