I Rule Rome with a God-Tier AI-Chapter 113: The Forge of Vulcania

Six months later, the remote foothills of the Carpathian Mountains were unrecognizable. A place that had been a quiet wilderness of ancient forests and winding rivers, home only to scattered Dacian tribes and the occasional Roman scouting party, was now the site of the most ambitious engineering project the world had ever seen. The air, once clear and smelling of pine and damp earth, was now thick with the haze of a thousand cookfires and the dust of excavated earth. The valley floor, once a carpet of green, was now a sprawling, organized scar of brown and grey, the nascent foundation of a city. This was Vulcania, and it was the physical manifestation of Alex's will.

Two full Artisan Legions, nearly ten thousand men, had been redeployed from their work in Italy and marched north. They were the tip of the spear of Alex's new domestic doctrine, and the construction of Vulcania was to be their ultimate test. The scene was one of monumental, disciplined industry. This was not the chaotic, whip-driven labor of slaves building a pyramid; this was the methodical, efficient work of a military organization. Entire hillsides of ancient forest were felled, the timber not burned, but processed with terrifying speed by water-powered sawmills that Celer's engineers had constructed along a newly diverted river. The river itself, its course altered by a masterfully built Roman dam, now drove the very machines that would build the city that tamed it.

The legionaries, wielding the advanced tools from the Institute, worked with a relentless pace that stunned the local governors who came to observe. They were not just laborers; they were engineers, carpenters, masons, and smiths, all working from a single, unified blueprint provided by Alex and Celer. They laid down paved roads where there had been only mud tracks, built sturdy wooden barracks, and dug the deep, formidable foundations of what would become the city's outer walls.

Alex was on site for the first month, his presence a constant, driving force. He traded his imperial purple for the rough-spun tunic and heavy leather boots of a field engineer. He stood with Lucius Vitruvius Celer over vast architectural plans laid out on trestle tables, their discussions a mixture of high-level theory and gritty, practical problem-solving. Celer, a man reborn, was in his absolute element. With an almost unlimited budget, a ten-thousand-man workforce of disciplined soldiers, and an Emperor who not only understood his designs but could improve upon them with flashes of impossible insight, he was experiencing an engineer's version of paradise.

But the true heart of Vulcania, the reason for its existence, lay in the blackened, smoke-belching complex being constructed in the city's center. This was the solution to the energy crisis that had threatened to cripple Alex's reforms back in Rome. Lyra's geological surveys, cross-referenced from Elara's data, had identified this specific region as being rich in a resource the Romans had always known of but had never truly understood or valued: coal. They called it lapis niger, the black stone, and had occasionally used it for minor heating, but had always preferred the clean fire of wood charcoal for their forges.

Alex, framing it as a "rediscovered technique from the time of the Greeks," demonstrated its true potential. He showed Celer how a furnace fed by coal and supplied with a steady draft of air from a massive, water-powered bellows could achieve temperatures far higher and more sustained than any charcoal fire. Coal was the fuel of an industrial revolution, and Vulcania would be its crucible.

Massive new forges and smelters, far larger and more efficient than the prototypes at the Institute, were constructed. Their tall, brick chimneys rose into the sky, belching thick plumes of dark, greasy smoke, a sight both awe-inspiring and deeply alien to the pristine landscape. This was where the mass production of Ignis Steel would now take place, on a scale sufficient to arm every legion on the northern frontier. This was the Forge of Vulcania, and it was the beating, fiery heart of Alex's new war machine.

During one of his inspection tours, Alex was visited by the aging governor of the neighboring province of Moesia, a traditionalist patrician named Caius Licinius. The governor, who had traveled for a week to see the Emperor's grand project, was visibly horrified by what he found. He stood on a hill overlooking the sprawling construction site, his face a mask of patrician disgust at the raw, industrial ugliness of it all.

"Caesar," he said, his voice tight with disapproval as he gestured to the smoke-filled sky and the river that now ran dark with coal dust and runoff. "What is this place? It is a wound upon the land. A scar. We are Romans. We build beautiful things—temples of white marble, elegant villas. This... this is a goblin-hold."

Alex looked out at the same scene, but he saw not a wound, but a crucible. Not a scar, but a shield. He turned to the governor, his own face illuminated by the distant, orange glow of a furnace being tapped.

"It is a shield, Governor," Alex replied, his voice calm but hard as the steel they were forging below. "A necessary one. The age of pretty marble cities and decadent country villas is ending. That is the Old Rome. It is a beautiful, fragile thing that we can no longer afford. The age of iron and the age of fire is beginning. The world is changing. A great, hungry storm is gathering in the north. Rome must adapt. We must become harder, stronger, more ruthless. Or we will be swept away by that storm and remembered only by the ruins of our beautiful, useless temples." 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

The governor stared at his Emperor, at the young man who spoke of the end of their world with such cold, dispassionate certainty. He saw no hint of the philosopher-prince his father had been. He saw only the hard, unyielding glint of a blacksmith, a master of a new and terrible kind of power.

Weeks later, the city was taking shape. Barracks were complete, walls were rising, and the forges were in full production. Celer, his face perpetually smudged with soot, his eyes bright with a creator's fire, summoned Alex to one of the new, massive armory workshops.

"It is ready, Caesar," he said, his voice filled with a craftsman's pride. He gestured to a long line of newly assembled weapons, each one resting on a wooden rack, gleaming with the dark, deadly sheen of fresh oil and Ignis Steel.

It was a Romanized, perfected version of the repeating crossbow, the polybolos. The original Greek and later Roman versions of the weapon had always been a novelty, too complex, too heavy, and too prone to breaking down to be of any real use in the field. But Celer, using his newfound mastery of geared mechanisms from the wagon project, and using the superior strength and precision-machining possibilities of Ignis Steel for the delicate internal components, had reinvented it.

The weapon he had created was a masterpiece of lethal engineering. It was still heavy, designed to be fired from a defensive position, but it could be operated by a single, well-trained soldier. A flat, ten-bolt magazine was inserted into the top. A hand-crank on the side drew back the powerful steel bowstring, dropped a bolt into the firing groove, and released the trigger in a single, fluid, circular motion.

Celer gestured to a series of targets—man-shaped straw dummies with Parthian-style leather armor—set up at the far end of the workshop. "Demonstrate," he commanded a waiting legionary.

The soldier, a brawny man from the Artisan Legion, hefted the weapon and rested it on a wooden stand. He began to turn the crank. There was a smooth, satisfying sound of gears clicking, of steel sliding on oiled wood. Then, a sharp thwack. A heavy iron bolt shot across the workshop and slammed into the chest of the first target with a force that would have punched through any shield. The soldier did not stop. He kept turning the crank. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. In less than thirty seconds, all ten bolts had been fired, each one striking a target with lethal accuracy up to a hundred yards.

Alex stared at the row of newly forged repeating crossbows, at the ten targets bristling with iron bolts. He had just witnessed the creation of the ancient world's equivalent of the machine gun. He now possessed the weapon that could break a cavalry charge. The weapon that could mow down a horde. The Forge of Vulcania had delivered its firstborn, and it was a creature of beautiful, terrible, and absolute death.