The first batch of black powder hissed like an angry serpent.
Seigmer stood thirty paces back, behind a thick oak trunk, watching Ingvar light the slow-match on the small clay pot. The fuse sputtered, sparked, then raced down the saltpeter-soaked cord.
Three… two… one—
BOOM.
The pot shattered in a dirty orange flash, sending a cloud of white smoke and a few iron scraps whining into the trees. The ground trembled. Birds exploded from the canopy in panic.
Ingvar staggered back, ears ringing, a stupid grin splitting his bearded face. "By the All-Father… it works."
The five men Seigmer had trusted with the test stared at the smoking crater like it had opened into the underworld. One of them made the sign against evil without thinking.
Seigmer stepped forward, calm as if he had just tested a new spear. "It is not the All-Father. It is chemistry. Charcoal, saltpeter, sulfur. Learn the ratios. We will make more. But never speak of it outside the Forge."
He did not tell them the rest: that this weak, smoky blast was only the beginning. That larger charges in iron shells would one day crack Roman gates like eggshells.
Next came the heavy crossbow.
The prototype rested on a wooden stand Seigmer had built himself. The laminated yew prod was thicker than a man's thigh, the stock reinforced with iron bands scavenged from Roman lorica. A cranequin ratchet allowed one man to span it in thirty seconds instead of three strong warriors pulling together.
Seigmer nodded to the youngest sniper he had been grooming — a quiet, hawk-eyed warrior named Eadric.
"Two hundred paces. The centurion effigy."
Eadric cranked the cranequin, seated the heavy quarrel, shouldered the stock, exhaled.
Thwack.
The bolt left in a flat, vicious line. It punched through the straw torso, through the wooden spine behind it, and buried itself halfway into the oak thirty paces farther on.
The men roared.
Seigmer allowed himself the smallest smile. With his telekinesis he had given the bolt the tiniest invisible nudge at the apex of its flight — nothing they could see, just enough to correct for the morning breeze. Ten-meter radius, twenty-pound limit. Enough for now.
He was about to order a second shot when a rider thundered into the valley.
The scout slid off his lathered horse before it had stopped.
"Roman cohort!" he gasped. "Four hundred and fifty, maybe five hundred. Crossed the Rhine ford at first light. They are burning every village that will not pay immediate tribute. Heading straight for the main camp. Reik Hans has summoned every warrior. He demands the fifty return at once for a glory charge at dawn tomorrow."
Seigmer's mind calculated faster than the men could react.
A glory charge. Exactly what he had feared. Five hundred disciplined Romans against three or four hundred scattered Suebi warriors in open ground. Bloodbath. Waste.
He turned to the fifty, who had gathered around the heavy crossbow, still buzzing from the test.
"We will go," he said.
Cheers rose — until he raised a hand.
"But not to charge like fools. We will move out tonight. We will go in front of the main warband. We will soften the Romans as they approach."
Ingvar frowned. "Soften how?"
Seigmer's voice was ice and iron. "High-value targets. The standard bearers — kill them first. The centurions — the real officers who keep the cohort moving like a single beast — drop them from two hundred paces before they even know we are there. And the tribune, their commander… we take him alive."
Dead silence.
Eadric's eyes widened. "Capture a Roman tribune?"
"Yes." Seigmer met every gaze. "A live tribune is worth more than a hundred dead legionaries. He knows their supply routes, their signals, their next moves. With him we can bleed this cohort for weeks instead of dying in one glorious afternoon."
He did not say the rest aloud, but the words burned in his skull:
And with a captured Roman officer I gain leverage. With leverage I gain power. With power I no longer need to ask my father's permission to build what I need.
The men looked at one another. Some were pale. Others grinned like wolves who had just smelled blood.
Ingvar finally spoke for all of them. "You ask us to do what no war-band has ever done — strike the head instead of the body."
"I am not asking," Seigmer said. "I am ordering. This is why we trained. This is why we learned to read maps and count bolts and think instead of screaming and charging. We are not the hammer. We are the scalpel."
He pointed at the heavy crossbow.
"Three of these will be ready by midnight. The snipers will ride with me. The rest will carry extra powder pots and crossbows. We move light. We hit from cover. We disappear. When the main tribe arrives, the Romans will already be bleeding from a hundred invisible cuts."
He let the silence stretch, then added the hook they could not resist:
"And when the Reik sees what we have done, he will understand that the future does not belong to the loudest warrior. It belongs to the smartest."
One by one the fifty began to nod. Then to grin. Then to cheer — low, disciplined, hungry.
Seigmer watched them and felt the old colonel's satisfaction settle in his chest like a loaded magazine.
They still thought they were fighting for the tribe.
They were fighting for him.
By the time the moon rose, the Forge was emptying. Fifty men slipped out of the valley like ghosts, heavy crossbows wrapped in hides, small clay pots of black powder tucked carefully in padded bags, eyes gleaming with new purpose.
Behind them, the watchtowers stood empty for the first time.
Seigmer rode at the front, the largest heavy crossbow across his saddle, a single powder pot heavy at his hip.
The Romans were coming.
And for the first time in four hundred years, a cohort of the Eternal City was walking straight into a war that had a new name.