I Rule Rome with a God-Tier AI-Chapter 98: Forging a Fortress

The defiant roar in the great hall of Garni faded, replaced by the clang of hammers and the shouts of work crews. Resolve, Alex knew, was a fleeting emotion; it had to be hammered into a tangible shape, given form in stone and timber. He could not afford to let the new, fragile alliance wither while they waited for The Traveler to make his next move. He had to channel their renewed purpose into immediate, practical action. The fortress of Garni was transformed from a royal refuge into a frontline Roman military outpost.

Alex had become the chief engineer of their desperate enterprise. With Celer, his true master of mechanics, half a world away, Alex had only Lyra's knowledge and his own wits to rely on. He spent the days striding along the fortress battlements, his scribe's cloak perpetually dusted with stone dust, his hands, once soft, now becoming calloused from handling rough-hewn timber and gritty maps.

He started with the basics, applying the hard-won principles of Roman military engineering to the ancient Armenian fortress. "Your walls are strong, Prince Tiridates," he explained to the young royal, who now shadowed him with the devotion of a prize student, "but they are built to repel men with ladders. We face an enemy of unknown capabilities. We must assume they can strike from above and below."

He set the Armenian soldiers and his own men to work side-by-side, a conscious decision to forge them into a single, cohesive unit. Under his direction, they dug a new, deeper ditch around the fortress perimeter, its outer edge sharpened with angled stakes. They reinforced the main gate with a cross-braced iron portcullis, a design Alex sketched from memory and Lyra's schematics. On his instruction, they constructed timber hoardings, covered wooden galleries that jutted out from the tops of the stone walls. These would allow archers to shoot almost straight down upon any enemy at the base of the walls, a simple but effective innovation that the Armenians had never seen.

But the bulk of their work was focused on the unique threat posed by the Unfallen. "Their armor shatters under blunt force, but their speed is their greatest weapon," Alex explained to a council of his commanders—Maximus, Cassius, and Tiridates' most trusted captain. "We cannot allow them to use that speed. We must control the terrain. We must turn the ground itself into a weapon."

His solution was a classic Roman tool of area denial, but applied with a new and vicious sophistication: the caltrop. He took over the fortress's small, smoky forge, and under his demanding supervision, the Armenian smiths began to churn out thousands of the wicked, four-pronged iron spikes. These were not the crude caltrops of past wars. Guided by Lyra's input on material stress, Alex had them made smaller, sharper, and from a harder grade of iron, designed not just to lame a horse, but to punch through the sole of a thick leather boot and cripple a foot soldier. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

He then worked for hours with Maximus, whose frontiersman's eye for terrain was invaluable. They studied maps of the narrow mountain passes and valleys that were the only viable approaches to the chrono-crystal site. They were not planning a battle; they were designing a series of deadly gardens.

"Here," Maximus would say, his finger tracing a line on the map. "This pass narrows. The ground is soft shale. A perfect place for them to try and rush through."

"Good," Alex would reply. "We will seed the entire bottleneck with a dense field of caltrops, hidden under a light layer of dirt and leaves. We'll leave a single, narrow, clear path through the center. It will look like a safe passage."

"A trap," Maximus would grin, catching on. "They will be channeled into the clear path..."

"...where your archers, hidden on the cliffs above, can turn them into pincushions," Alex would finish.

This became their doctrine: not to stop the enemy, but to control their movement, to break the momentum of their charge, and to funnel them into pre-prepared kill zones.

Their other major project was just as simple and just as brutal. Alex, remembering historical accounts of naval battles, commissioned the construction of a dozen massive nets. They were woven from the strongest ropes the Armenians possessed, the knots reinforced with strips of raw hide. At the edges of the nets, they tied heavy, fist-sized rocks.

"What is the purpose of these, Lord Decius?" Tiridates asked, watching as the hulking men of the Fire Cohort tested one of the nets, heaving it into the air.

"The Unfallen are fast and strong individually," Alex explained. "But they fight as a unit. We drop one of these from a cliffside onto a group of them, and their speed means nothing. They will be entangled, immobilized by the weight of the rocks. A tangled enemy is a helpless enemy." He glanced at Cassius. "And a helpless enemy is a perfect target for your men."

It was low-tech, brutally effective, and tailored specifically for the unique combination of their own strengths and the enemy's weaknesses. Alex worked tirelessly, moving between the forge, the walls, and the map room. He earned a new name among the Armenian soldiers. They no longer saw him as a mere scribe. They began to call him the 'Architect,' a man whose mind saw traps and defenses where they saw only rocks and trees. He was teaching them to see their own homeland not just as a place to live, but as a weapon to be wielded.

One evening, as Alex was reviewing the day's progress with Maximus, a commotion at the gate signaled the return of a scouting party Prince Tiridates had sent to patrol the region near the chrono-crystal site. They rode into the courtyard, their faces pale and agitated. They had not come back alone. They brought with them a prisoner, a man huddled in a ragged shepherd's cloak, his hands bound.

"He is not an enemy!" the scout captain reported, dismounting and hurrying to Tiridates. "He is a local goatherd. His flock grazes in the high peaks. He was taken by The Traveler's forces three days ago, but managed to escape in the night."

The goatherd was brought into the main hall, a terrified, trembling old man whose face was a mask of pure, unadulterated horror. They gave him wine and bread, and slowly, coaxed by Tiridates' gentle questions in their shared native tongue, his story came out.

He told them of the strange, silent army that had overrun his ancestral pastures. He described the Unfallen, calling them 'men of shadow and glass.' But it was what he said they were doing that made Alex's blood run cold.

"They are not making a camp, my prince," the old man whispered, his eyes wide with the memory. "A camp is for resting. These creatures... they do not rest. They work, day and night." He shuddered. "They are... digging. Deep into the heart of the mountain, at the place where the old stones hum. They are pulling things from the earth."

"What things?" Alex interjected, stepping forward, his voice sharp.

The goatherd looked at him, his fear palpable. "Pillars," he stammered. "Great, dark pillars of that same black glass as their spears. They are bringing them to the surface and arranging them in a great circle. It is not a camp they are building, my lord. It is a temple. A great, terrible machine aimed at the sky."

Alex felt a jolt, as if he had touched a live wire. He exchanged a look with Maximus. The Traveler was not just marching to the power source to absorb it. He was constructing a device. A device to channel it, to amplify it, to focus it. For what purpose, Alex could not guess, but he knew, with a chilling certainty, that they were no longer in a simple race to a location. They were in a race to stop an event, a ceremony, a moment of terrible rebirth. And the clock was ticking faster than he had ever imagined.