Night fell like a black cloak over the forested road.
Seigmer's detachment — twenty-four shadows now, faces blackened with soot, bodies wrapped in dark wool — had already struck twice since dusk.
The first hit came at moonrise: heavy crossbow bolts from high branches took out the Roman pickets and the new standard bearer who had foolishly tried to rally the column. The second strike, an hour later, was a single volley of clay grenades lobbed into the marching camp the cohort had hastily thrown up. The explosions were small but perfectly placed — shattering near supply wagons, igniting pitch barrels, sowing panic without committing to a full fight.
Each time, the fifty melted away before the Romans could organize a counter-attack. No prolonged engagements. No glory charges. Just precision cuts, then silence.
But the third strike would be different.
Seigmer crouched behind a fallen log at the edge of a narrow defile the Romans would have to pass through before dawn. His men were spread in a loose crescent above and along the choke point — some in trees, some in shallow scrapes, all with crossbows ready and small leather pouches at their belts.
Inside those pouches: the night's true weapon.
Seigmer had prepared it in the Forge hours earlier, working by lamplight with wet leaves, dried chili peppers crushed fine (gathered from a raided Roman outpost garden), and hot coals from the fire. He had packed the mixture into clay pots with small holes drilled near the top — crude, but effective.
Rudimentary tear gas.
The moment the Roman vanguard entered the defile, Seigmer signaled.
Fuses were lit — this time with telekinesis, his invisible fingers guiding flame to wick without exposing a single man. Pots sailed down in a gentle arc, landing among the legionaries' feet.
The first pots cracked open on impact. Wet leaves and pepper met glowing coals. Thick, acrid white smoke billowed upward in choking clouds, carrying the searing bite of capsicum straight into eyes, noses, throats.
Men coughed. Eyes streamed. Shields dropped as soldiers clawed at their faces. The disciplined testudo formation disintegrated into a heaving, retching mass.
"Fire!" Seigmer hissed.
Heavy crossbows thrummed from every angle. Bolts punched through mail, through gaps in helmets, through the soft flesh of necks and thighs. Men fell without a sound. Others staggered blindly, coughing blood-flecked foam.
The Romans tried to rally — a centurion (one of the few survivors) roared orders, trying to form a defensive knot — but the smoke was everywhere, burning lungs, blinding vision. Shields wavered. Spears pointed at nothing.
Seigmer's men did not stay.
After the first volley they shifted positions — sliding down ropes, crawling through underbrush, climbing new trees fifty paces away. By the time the Romans managed to loose a ragged counter-volley of plumbatae and arrows, the branches they had fired from were empty.
The discipline unnerved the legionaries more than the smoke.
"Ghosts," one Roman gasped between coughs. "They're ghosts in the trees."
Another strike came twenty minutes later — another wave of pots, another choking cloud, another silent hail of bolts. Then silence again.
The cohort — once four hundred and seventy strong — was bleeding out in pieces. Dead in the road. Wounded crawling into ditches. Routed men fleeing back toward the Rhine ford, discarding shields and helmets in terror.
By the time the sky began to pale in the east, only about eighty Romans remained in any semblance of order.
They knelt in the middle of the defile.
Hands laced behind heads.
Weapons discarded in a pile.
Eyes red-rimmed and streaming, faces swollen from pepper smoke, armor dented and bloodied from unseen bolts.
They had no officers left to give orders. No standards to rally around. No will to fight invisible enemies who struck and vanished like smoke itself.
Seigmer stepped out of the trees at last, heavy crossbow slung across his back, short sword at his hip. His bandage from yesterday's splinter cut was still clean — no new blood on him or his men.
He walked down the line of kneeling Romans, boots crunching on spent quarrels and broken clay.
One legionary — a grizzled optio with a fresh gash across his cheek — looked up through streaming eyes.
"You… are not men," he rasped in Latin. "You are demons."
Seigmer crouched in front of him, voice calm.
"We are men who think. You are men who march in straight lines and die in straight lines. There is a difference."
He stood and signaled.
His twenty-four emerged from cover — silent, disciplined, crossbows lowered but ready. Not a single casualty among them. Not even a serious scratch.
In the distance, horns sounded.
Reik Hans and the main Suebi war-band were approaching — hundreds of warriors on foot and horseback, axes gleaming, boar shields raised.
They crested the ridge and saw the scene below:
A shattered Roman cohort reduced to kneeling survivors.
Eighty men on their knees, hands behind heads, surrounded by Seigmer's silent, blackened ghosts.
The Reik reined in his horse, staring.
Then he laughed — a deep, rolling sound that echoed through the trees.
"My son," he bellowed, dismounting with earth-shaking steps. "You said you would soften them."
He looked at the kneeling Romans, at the smoke still drifting lazily from cracked pots, at the bodies littering the road.
"You did not soften them. You broke them."
Seigmer met his father's eyes.
"I gave you victory without a single man lost in open battle. That is the new way."
Hans clapped a massive hand on Seigmer's shoulder — hard enough to stagger a lesser man.
"The tribe will sing of this night for generations."
Seigmer allowed the praise to wash over him.
But inside, the colonel calculated.
Eighty prisoners. A captured tribune already in the Forge. A cohort destroyed without a pitched battle.
Power.
Not borrowed from his father.
Earned in smoke and silence.
He looked at the kneeling Romans, then at the rising sun.
The war in his name had just claimed its first true surrender.
And Rome would remember the taste of pepper and fear.