The moon was a thin silver blade above the Roman castra.
Seigmer's strike team — twelve men now, the absolute elite of the fifty — moved like oil across black water. Faces blackened with soot and river mud. Soft leather soles wrapped over boots. Heavy crossbows slung low, short seaxes at hips, no metal clinking anywhere. They had practiced this exact movement for three nights in the valley: silent approach, breach, kill, extract.
Tonight was live.
The tribune Marcus Flavius Severus had served his purpose.
Every supply route, every patrol schedule, every weakness in the Roman command structure between the Rhine ford and Mogontiacum had been wrung from him over weeks of careful pressure — water, discomfort, promises of survival, the slow realization that Rome had already written him off as dead. He had drawn maps, explained signal fires, named officers, described guard rotations down to the hour.
When the last useful word left his lips, Seigmer had looked at him for a long moment.
"You kept your word," he said quietly. "I will keep mine."
Marcus had smiled — thin, bitter, exhausted.
"Then let it be quick."
Seigmer had nodded once.
That night the tribune was found hanged in the legatus's tent — rope around his neck, body still warm, feet barely touching the ground. The note pinned to his chest was written in perfect Latin on a scrap of his own cloak:
"He spoke. You did not listen.
The next one will be you."
The Romans would wake to horror and paranoia. A dead traitor in the heart of command. A message that even their own could turn — or be turned. Perfect psychological fracture.
But that was tomorrow's chaos.
Tonight was the harvest.
The castra was a rectangle of ditch, rampart, and palisade — standard marching fort, eight hundred men inside, but tonight only half awake. The legatus Flavius Aelius slept in the praetorium at the center, guarded by a contubernium of eight picked men and two sentries at the tent flaps.
Seigmer's team split at the northern ditch.
Four men stayed low, covering the approach with crossbows. The rest followed Seigmer over the rampart — one at a time, silent as ghosts, using the shadows thrown by flickering watch-fires.
Inside the camp they moved in pairs, hugging tent lines, avoiding the paths where patrols walked.
First target: the two sentries at the legatus's tent.
Seigmer crouched twenty paces away. His mind reached out — ten-meter radius, twenty-pound limit. He felt the leather cord of the nearer sentry's helmet strap. A gentle tug. The man's head jerked slightly. Before he could curse, Eadric's quarrel whispered across the gap and punched through the man's throat just below the helmet rim. The body sagged without a sound. The second sentry turned at the soft thump — too late. Another bolt took him through the eye.
Both dropped like sacks.
The team flowed forward.
Inside the praetorium tent the legatus slept on a camp bed, snoring softly. Two bodyguards dozed on either side, swords within reach.
Seigmer entered first — alone.
He crossed the tent in four silent steps. His hand clamped over the legatus's mouth while the other pressed a seax to the throat. The man's eyes snapped open, wide with terror.
"Quiet," Seigmer whispered in Latin. "Or your throat opens now."
The legatus froze.
Behind him, Ingvar and two others secured the bodyguards — one swift strike each to the temple with the pommel of a seax. Unconscious, not dead. They would wake with headaches and no memory of faces.
Seigmer leaned close to the legatus's ear.
"You are coming with us. Make a sound and your wife becomes a widow tonight. Nod if you understand."
Flavius Aelius nodded frantically.
They bound his wrists with rawhide, gagged him with a strip of his own cloak, hooded him with a sack, and half-carried, half-dragged him out.
The extraction was textbook.
They retraced their path — past sleeping tents, past snoring sentries who never woke, past dying watch-fires. At the rampart they lowered the hooded legatus down the ditch with ropes. Outside the palisade the covering team waited, crossbows trained on the dark.
No alarm.
No pursuit.
They were gone before the first rooster crowed in the Roman camp.
By the time the sun rose, the castra was in pandemonium.
The legatus's tent stood empty. Two sentries dead at the entrance — throats opened, no sign of struggle. The bodyguards unconscious with bruised skulls. And in the center of the tent, the tribune Marcus Flavius Severus dangled from a beam, neck snapped, eyes bulging, the pinned note fluttering in the morning breeze.
The surviving centurions read it aloud in shaking voices.
"He spoke. You did not listen.
The next one will be you."
Panic spread faster than orders could contain it.
Men whispered of ghosts. Of a boy with demon eyes who walked through walls. Of a war that had already been lost before the first legionary stepped across the Rhine.
In the forest five miles east, Seigmer's team moved at a steady jog, the hooded legatus slung between two men like a rolled carpet.
No one spoke.
No one needed to.
They had just castrated Roman command in the heart of its own camp.
Silent.
Swift.
Clean.
Seigmer ran at the front, heart steady, mind already turning to the next move.
He was no longer building a war-band.
He was building Tier 1.
A unit that would one day make Rome's best look like children playing at soldiers.
And the harvest had only begun.