I Rule Rome with a God-Tier AI-Chapter 125: The Devoted Son

While the ancient political currents of Rome swirled and realigned themselves around the new gravity of Lucilla's power, a different and stranger evolution was taking place on the Empire's harsh northern frontier. Weeks after their departure from the city, the first dispatch arrived from the Legio V Devota. It came not by a standard military courier, but by two grim, scarred legionaries who had ridden with a speed and endurance that seemed almost inhuman. They delivered their report directly to Alex, a message from their de facto commander, the centurion Titus Pullo.

Alex read the report in his study, a growing sense of profound unease settling over him. On the surface, the news was excellent. The Devoted Legion had marched into the untamed wilderness north of Vulcania and had begun their great work of penance and reclamation. Pullo's report detailed their progress with a soldier's blunt pride. They had already surveyed and begun construction on a new military road, pushing deeper into barbarian territory than any Roman force before them. They had established two new fortified outposts, built of timber and earth, with a speed and efficiency that was, in Pullo's own words, "a miracle of labor." They were working with a feverish, almost inhuman energy, driven by a singular, unifying purpose. 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

It was the source of this purpose, however, that sent a chill down Alex's spine. The report described, with a pride that bordered on religious fervor, the new culture that was emerging within the legion. Bound together by the shared trauma of the plague and the mutiny, and by the "miraculous" cure their Emperor had personally delivered, the men of the Devoted Legion had become deeply, fanatically religious.

But they were not worshipping Jupiter, Mars, or any of the familiar gods of the Roman pantheon. Their worship, their entire spiritual existence, was now centered on the one event that had defined their new lives. They worshipped the "Divine Scar" that every man now bore upon his shoulder, the mark of his salvation. And by extension, they worshipped the man who had given it to them. The dispatch was filled with disturbing, capitalized references to the Divine Alexius-Aesculapius, the Emperor-Healer, the God of the Second Life.

They had developed their own strange, syncretic rituals and a rigid moral code. The former medics of the legion had become a new priesthood, their medical knowledge now intertwined with mystical rites. They held nightly services where they would chant hymns of praise to their distant Emperor-God. The men who had died from the plague in the quarantine camp were now revered as the legion's first saints and martyrs. Pullo even reported that the legion had commissioned a new standard from the forges at Vulcania. They had laid aside their traditional Eagle, which they felt they had disgraced. Their new standard, which they now revered with a terrifying piety, was a silver serpent coiled around a gleaming Ignis Steel gladius—a symbol representing both the healing god Aesculapius and the martial power of the new Rome.

They were, Alex realized with a growing sense of horror, becoming a military-religious order. A legion of warrior-monks. A cult of personality with five thousand swords.

Titus Pullo, a good, simple, and brutally effective soldier, did not see this as a problem. He saw it as the ultimate solution to the issue of morale. Their fanatical devotion, he wrote, had burned away all their past shame and had forged them into a single, unbreakable instrument of the Emperor's will. They no longer fought for pay, or for glory, or even for Rome. They fought and worked and bled for their living god. They truly believed they were on a holy crusade to tame the wilderness and convert the barbarians in the name of their Caesar.

Alex let the parchment fall from his hand. He had wanted loyalty, a tool he could use to secure the frontier. He had inadvertently created a death cult. This was the exact kind of irrational, fanatical thinking he was trying to steer the Empire away from. He was trying to build a new Rome based on logic, reason, and law. And on his most dangerous frontier, a new, mystical religion was blooming in his own name. A legion that worshipped him as a god might be unswervingly loyal now, but their fanaticism was a double-edged sword. A force driven by divine revelation rather than military orders could not be reliably controlled. What if a new, charismatic 'priest' in their ranks claimed to receive a new vision from the Emperor-Healer? What if their holy war decided to turn on the 'unbelievers' within the Empire itself? He was losing control of his own narrative, of his own name.

The dispatch contained a final, chilling request from Pullo, a testament to the centurion's complete and utter devotion to his new faith.

Caesar, he had written, my men are the shield of the Empire, but we are few in this vast, dark land. The local Dacian tribes are warlike and deeply suspicious. They have fought our legions for generations. However, a strange thing is happening. They do not see us as conquerors. They have seen our tireless work, our strange rituals, our immunity to the winter sicknesses that plague their villages. They see us not as soldiers, but as holy men, as men touched by a powerful new god. Several of the younger, more ambitious tribal chieftains have come to our outposts. They are in awe of our strength and our divine purpose. They have offered their own sons to serve in our ranks, to learn our ways.

Pullo's final lines made Alex feel physically ill.

I therefore request your divine permission to form a new auxiliary cohort, recruited from these barbarian youths. They are strong and eager. We will teach them our engineering, our discipline, and our faith. We will initiate them into the Cult of the Scar. They will receive your divine mark and become your devoted sons, just as we are. We can build an entire army of the faithful out here, an army of barbarians made Roman in your holy name.

Alex stared at the message in utter horror. Pullo, in his simple, fanatical loyalty, was proposing to do the unthinkable. He was asking for permission to spread the Aeterna Ignis 'cure'—the live, cultivated smallpox virus used for the variolation—to the native barbarian population. He wanted to create an ever-expanding, fanatical, multi-ethnic military cult on the frontier. He saw a way to create an endless supply of loyal soldiers for his god-emperor. Alex saw a man, with the best of intentions, about to unleash a biological and religious plague upon the world, a force that could one day grow so powerful, so fervent, and so independent, that it could turn and consume Rome itself. His tool was evolving, growing a mind and a faith of its own, and he had no idea how to stop it.