I Rule Rome with a God-Tier AI-Chapter 112: The Council of the Horde

The mood in the war room was as grim and cold as a winter fog off the Tiber. The initial relief at the Parthian victory had long since evaporated, replaced by a deep and gnawing anxiety. Pertinax's dispatch, with its stark warning of a new, massive threat gathering in the north, lay on the great map table like a death sentence. The triumphant generals who had so recently celebrated their victory now stared at the map of the northern frontiers with the weary expressions of men facing a problem for which there was no easy solution.

A nomadic horde. The very words were a specter that haunted the Roman imagination. It conjured images of chaos, of endless waves of horsemen, of a war without battle lines, without fortresses to besiege, without a capital to conquer. It was a war against a human river, a fluid, unpredictable enemy that fought by no rules a Roman could comprehend.

"We must reinforce the Danube legions immediately," General Tacitus argued, his voice a low, serious rumble. He was a man who had spent his entire career on the Rhine and Danube, a master of defensive warfare. His instincts were clear. "Double the garrisons at Singidunum and Aquincum. We must strengthen the forts, build new watchtowers along the entire frontier. We will build a wall of stone and steel and dare them to break themselves upon it. We will meet them on our terms, on our ground."

The other generals nodded in agreement. It was the traditional Roman response. When faced with a barbarian threat, you hardened the border. You built a wall. It was a strategy of containment, of defense. It was the prudent, sensible path.

Alex stood before the great map, a picture of calm, almost serene authority that was a stark contrast to the grim tension in the room. He let the generals debate amongst themselves for a moment, listening to their familiar, predictable strategies. Then, he raised a hand for silence.

"You are thinking like Romans, Generals," he said, his voice quiet but carrying an immense weight that instantly commanded their attention. "You see a frontier to be defended. You see forts to be garrisoned and walls to be built. To defeat this enemy, you must learn to think not like a Roman, but like a nomad."

He walked to the map, his presence drawing all eyes. "Your walls and your forts will be useless," he stated, a declaration so absolute it bordered on heresy.

He tapped the vast, open plains north of the Danube, the lands of Dacia and Pannonia. "A horde of this size is not an army seeking to conquer a city. It is a nation seeking a home. It is a river of hungry people, and a river does not smash itself against a dam if it can flow around it."

He began to trace a series of flowing, red lines on the map with a charcoal stick, his movements guided by the cold, hard logic of a thousand years of future history, of the migrations of the Huns, the Goths, the Mongols—all synthesized by Lyra into a terrifyingly accurate predictive model.

"They will not throw themselves against your fortified frontier in a suicidal charge," he declared, his voice taking on the quality of a grim prophecy. "That is not their way. Why would they? The lands to their north are vast, fertile, and largely undefended. They will pour into these plains like a flood." He drew arrows showing the horde bypassing the main Roman fortresses, their movements fluid and decentralized.

"They will not fight your legions. Not at first. They will do what they do best. They will outmaneuver you. Their horsemen will be everywhere and nowhere. They will raid your farmlands, burn your villages, and slaughter your colonists. They will destroy your food supply and live off your land. They will bleed you, legion by legion, outpost by outpost. They will starve you out and force your heavy infantry to march out into these open plains to fight them."

He looked up, his gaze sweeping across the faces of the stunned generals. "And when you finally meet them in the field, on the flat, open ground that is a horseman's paradise, their superior numbers and mobility will give them the ultimate advantage. A defensive war against this enemy is not a strategy for victory. It is a slow, bleeding death."

The clarity and terrifying logic of his analysis left the council speechless. He had, in a few short sentences, completely dismantled a century of Roman defensive doctrine. He seemed to understand this new, unseen enemy with an impossible, almost supernatural intimacy. 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

"Therefore," Alex concluded, his voice ringing with a new, hard-edged purpose, "we will not wait for them to come to us. We will not huddle behind our walls and wait to be starved out. We will meet them in the field. We will take the war to them, on ground of our choosing. But we cannot fight this new kind of war with our current army. Our legions are designed to fight other legions. We must build a new kind of army for a new kind of war."

He let that sink in before he revealed the true, breathtaking scope of his ambition. He turned back to the map and pointed, his finger landing not on a known city or fortress, but on a remote, strategically chosen region on the northern border of Dacia, in the rugged foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. The area was rich in resources, controlling the major passes that led from the northern steppes down into the Danubian basin.

"Here," he said, his voice now filled with the fervor of a creator. "This is where we will make our stand. But we will not build a simple fort. We will build a city. A new legionary headquarters for the entire northern frontier. A new industrial heartland that will supply our armies and project our power deep into the barbarian wilderness. We will not build a wall of stone that they can simply ride around. We will build a wall of fire and iron."

He took the charcoal and, with a bold stroke, drew a symbol over the spot—the sign of a volcano, the sigil of Vulcan, the smith god.

"We will call this city Vulcania," he declared. "And it will be the anvil upon which we will shatter this horde."

The generals stared at the map, then at their Emperor, their minds reeling. This was a plan of staggering, almost insane ambition. He was not just proposing a defensive campaign. He was proposing the industrialization of the frontier itself. He was planning to build a new Ravenna, a new Mediolanum, in the heart of the wilderness, as a forward base for an entirely new wave of Roman expansion, all under the guise of simple defense. They had come into this room expecting to plan a border action. They were leaving it as the architects of a new Manifest Destiny for the Roman Empire. The Unforeseen War had just become the Great Northern Crusade.