The humming intensified, a low, gut-wrenching thrum that vibrated up from the soles of their sandals, seeming to emanate from the very bones of the mountain. The silence of the valley was a memory, replaced by the sight of a flowing, inexorable tide of black-armored warriors pouring down the snow-covered slopes. They moved with a silent, disciplined purpose that was a horrifying mockery of a Roman legion on the march. There were thousands of them.
Legate Servius Galba, for all his stubborn pride, was a veteran of twenty campaigns. He had faced the screaming hordes of the Chatti and the thundering charge of Sarmatian cataphracts. Fear was a familiar, manageable companion. In the face of this perfectly sprung ambush, his lifetime of training took over, a bedrock of Roman discipline in a sea of rising panic.
"Sound the call to arms!" he roared, his voice cutting through the rising hum and the first terrified cries from his men. "Form testudo! First and Second Cohorts, to me! We will form a defensive orb! Heavy infantry to the perimeter, archers to the center! We will show these creatures of the dark what a Roman shield wall is made of! We will die like Romans!"
His centurions, men forged in the same traditionalist fire, responded instantly, their voices barking out the familiar, comforting orders. The chaos of the marching column began to resolve into the beautiful, deadly geometry of a Roman defensive formation. Legionaries locked their great, curved shields together, creating a seamless, 360-degree wall of painted wood and banded iron. The men in the inner ranks raised their shields over their heads, forming a shell-like roof. It was the testudo orb, the fortress of flesh and steel, the ultimate expression of Roman defensive warfare. A thousand men became a single, bristling, impenetrable beast. It was a sight that had broken the spirit of countless barbarian armies.
Gaius Maximus watched them, a profound and sorrowful admiration in his heart. It was a perfect formation, executed with flawless discipline. It was also a coffin.
He screamed to his own men, the legionaries of the Tenth and the Norican cohorts, who were further back in the column. "Break for the rocks! To the western slope! Find cover! Do not form a line!" His order was chaos, the antithesis of Galba's, and his men, bewildered but trusting his command, began to scatter, seeking refuge among the large boulders and crags that dotted the valley floor.
The Conductor, the silent, patient intelligence that commanded the Silenti, did not throw its warriors away in a mindless, suicidal charge against the shield wall. That is what a barbarian chieftain would have done. The Conductor had spent months dissecting the mind of a Roman soldier. It did not think like a barbarian. It thought like a Roman engineer, analyzing a structural problem. And it had designed the perfect tools to solve it.
From the northern ridge, a new type of Silenti warrior appeared. They were massive, hulking figures, larger than the normal warriors, and they were armed not with swords or spears, but with colossal, two-handed mauls, their heads great, brutal blocks of dark, unidentifiable metal. They were the breakers, the siege engines of flesh and bone, designed for a single purpose: to smash shields and shatter the integrity of a Roman line. They began to lope down the slope, their heavy footfalls shaking the ground.
From the southern ridge, another group emerged: hundreds of archers. But they did not fire in the arcing, high-trajectory volleys of barbarian bowmen. They fired in disciplined, coordinated ranks, their aim flat and direct. Their arrows were long, heavy shafts tipped with wicked, bodkin-like points, designed not to slash, but to punch through armor. They were not aiming for the center of the shields; they were aiming for the small, unavoidable gaps in the testudo—the eye slits, the places where one shield locked against another.
And then, from the eastern slope, came the most terrifying innovation of all. Small, coordinated teams of Silenti began to roll large, sealed clay pots down into the valley. The pots were not filled with pitch or fire. They tumbled into the snow near the Roman formation and shattered with a dull crack, releasing thick, heavy clouds of a sickly, yellow-green gas.
Maximus, watching from the relative safety of the rocks, felt his blood run cold. He knew, from Alex's strange, future-born lessons, what that gas was. He knew its name. He knew what it did to the soft, wet tissue of human lungs.
The Conductor was not just using Roman tactics against them. It was using a 21st-century understanding of chemical warfare.
The anatomy of the kill box was now complete. It was a symphony of systematic, intelligent slaughter. The archers fired their armor-piercing volleys, forcing the men in the testudo to hunch down, to tighten their formation, making them a more compact target. Then, the maul-wielders hit the line. Their great hammers rose and fell, not with wild abandon, but with a focused, relentless rhythm. A maul struck a shield, and instead of being deflected, it shattered the thick wood, breaking the arm of the man holding it. Another blow, and another. Holes began to appear in the perfect, unbroken wall of shields.
Into these breaches, the regular Silenti warriors now poured, their short swords finding the soft flesh of the men inside. But it was the gas that was the true killer. The heavy, yellow-green clouds, denser than the air, hugged the ground, seeping under the bottom edge of the shield wall. It filled the enclosed space of the testudo, an invisible, choking poison.
Men began to cough, at first a simple clearing of the throat, then a deep, racking, desperate hack that brought tears to their eyes. Their lungs burned as if filled with fire. They gasped for air, but every breath was another draught of poison. Their discipline, the very thing that was supposed to save them, now doomed them, holding them in place inside their self-made gas chamber. The perfect formation began to waver, men collapsing to their knees, dropping their shields, their faces turning blue as they suffocated.
Legate Servius Galba stood at the heart of his dying cohorts, a magnificent, tragic figure. He fought with the fury of a cornered lion, his gladius a blur of motion, cutting down one silent warrior after another. He saw his men dying around him, not from honorable wounds, but from this cowardly, invisible weapon. He saw his perfect, beautiful battle line being dismantled, piece by piece, by an enemy that refused to fight fair, that refused to fight like any enemy he had ever known.
A great, maul-wielding creature smashed through the shields of the men beside him. Galba met it with a roar, plunging his sword into its chest. The creature barely flinched, its own life a meaningless resource to the Conductor. As it died, it swung its great hammer in a final, sweeping arc. The blow caught Galba on his shield, shattering it and the arm behind it. He was thrown to the ground, his vision swimming, his lungs burning from the gas.
He looked up, and through the swirling smoke and gas, he saw Gaius Maximus, not trapped in a dying formation, but directing small, fluid groups of his own men in a desperate, running battle among the rocks. They were scattered. They were disorganized. They were fighting like barbarians. And they were alive.
In his final, lucid moments, a look of profound, horrified understanding dawned in Legate Galba's eyes. He had been so wrong. The Emperor, the boy, he hadn't been trying to destroy the legion. He had been trying to save it. The old ways, his ways, they were not just obsolete. They were a death sentence.
A Silenti warrior stood over him, its face a blank, impassive mask. Galba met its gaze, and with his last breath, he did not curse. He whispered a single word of surrender to a truth he had understood too late. "Magnificent."
The sword fell, and the last, great traditionalist of the Roman army was dead.
To be the first to know about future sequels and new projects, google my official author blog: Waystar Novels.