The smell hit Marcus first.
It wasn't the sulfur of the Green Fire anymore. It was the stench of forty-seven thousand men packed into a space built for eight thousand. Unwashed bodies. Fresh burns. Fear-sweat. And the overwhelming, stinging reek of the urine-soaked blankets that had saved them.
It was the smell of a cage.
Marcus tried to push through the throng in the central courtyard. He couldn't.
He was pinned against the side of a supply wagon. To his left, a Praetorian guard. To his right, a terrified legionary from the traitorous Fourth Legion. They were pressed shoulder-to-shoulder, chest-to-back.
The heat was suffocating. The air was thick and wet, recycled through thousands of lungs.
WARNING, JARVIS flashed in Marcus's vision, the text jagged and red. OXYGEN LEVELS DROPPING IN LOWER SECTORS. AMBIENT TEMPERATURE: 41°C. CROWD DENSITY CRITICAL.
"Make a hole!" Narcissus roared from somewhere ahead.
The giant gladiator shoved a man aside. The soldier flew back, knocking into three others. There was nowhere for them to fall. They just rippled like a disturbed pond, held upright by the crush.
Marcus gasped for air. This was his doing.
He had opened the gates. He had chosen mercy.
Mercy? The Ghost of Commodus whispered in his ear. This isn't mercy. This is a slow death. Look at them. Cattle in a pen. You should have let them burn.
"Move!" Marcus shouted, shoving a centurion out of his way.
He needed to get to the command tent. He needed to organize water distribution before the thirst turned into a riot.
But the riot was already starting.
Ten yards away, a scream cut through the murmuring crowd. A fistfight erupted.
A soldier from the Fourth Legion had tried to lift a waterskin. A Praetorian had grabbed his wrist.
"Traitor scum!" the Praetorian shouted. "That water is for loyal men!"
"We are all Romans here!" the traitor screamed back. He headbutted the Praetorian.
Blood sprayed. The crowd surged. The pressure wave hit Marcus, slamming his ribs against the wagon wheel.
Iron flashed. A dagger was drawn.
In this crush, a knife fight wouldn't just kill two men. It would trigger a stampede. Thousands would be trampled to death in the panic.
"Enough!"
The roar didn't come from Marcus. It came from General Varus.
The traitor general stood on the tongue of the wagon. He was stripped of his armor, his tunic torn, his face smeared with soot. He looked like a beggar king.
He didn't hold a weapon. He just held up a hand.
"Drop the blade," Varus commanded, his voice cracking with smoke-damage. "Or I will drown you in the latrine myself."
The soldier hesitated. He looked at his former commander. He looked at the Praetorians surrounding him.
He dropped the knife.
The tension broke, but only slightly. The crowd settled back into a simmering, hateful silence.
Narcissus finally cleared a path to the wagon. Marcus climbed up beside Varus. The view from the high ground was terrifying.
A sea of heads. From the wooden palisades to the command tent, there was no ground visible. Just iron helmets and desperate faces. They were standing on every inch of the hill fort.
"You kept order," Marcus said, his voice low.
Varus didn't look at him. He looked out at the misery of his men. "I kept them from killing each other for five minutes, Caesar. They are thirsty. They are scared. And they are standing next to the men they tried to murder this morning."
Varus turned to Marcus. His eyes were hollow.
"Why did you do it?" Varus asked. "Why open the gate? You know we are a liability. We eat your food. We drink your water. You should have let the Alchemists purge us."
Marcus looked at the HUD scrolling across his retina.
FOOD STORES: 2 DAYS. WATER: 18 HOURS.
Logic agreed with Varus. The Ghost agreed with Varus.
"I didn't do it for you," Marcus said coldly. "Valerius is still out there. He has chemical weapons. I can't stop flamethrowers with philosophy. I need bodies. I need meat to throw into the fire so the fire doesn't reach me."
He leaned in close. "You aren't men to me, Varus. You are ablative armor."
Varus stared at him. He didn't get angry. He nodded slowly.
"Good," Varus whispered. "I can follow a bastard. I can't follow a saint. Saints get everyone killed."
Below them, near the wheel of the wagon, Crixus was tightening the ropes on the prisoner.
The female Alchemist—the one they had pulled from the wreckage of the gate—was awake. Her leg was crushed, the bone protruding through the leather trousers. She shouldn't be conscious. She should be screaming.
Instead, she was laughing.
It was a wet, bubbling sound. Blood foamed at the corners of her mouth.
"Shut her up," Narcissus growled, raising a heavy boot.
"Wait," Marcus said.
He jumped down from the wagon, landing in the mud beside her. He grabbed her by the hair, forcing her head back.
"What is funny?" he demanded. "Your unit is dead. Your fire failed."
The woman smiled. Her teeth were stained red.
"The fire was never meant to kill you," she wheezed. "It was a sheepdog."
"A sheepdog?"
"To herd the sheep," she whispered. Her eyes drifted past Marcus, staring fixedly at a puddle of muddy water near his boot. "To pack them tight. To make them heavy."
Marcus looked down.
The water in the puddle wasn't still. It was vibrating.
Ripples formed concentric circles, pulsing with a rhythmic, deep thrum. It wasn't the footsteps of the army. It was coming from deep below.
ALERT.
The text in Marcus's vision turned from red to a blinding white.
SEISMIC ANOMALY DETECTED. SUBSURFACE RESONANCE.
CALCULATING MASS LOAD...
TOTAL WEIGHT ON SURFACE: 3,800 TONS.
ESTIMATED LOAD BEARING CAPACITY OF HILL STRUCTURE: 900 TONS.
ERROR. ERROR. GEOLOGICAL FAILURE IMMINENT.
The blood drained from Marcus's face.
He looked at the Alchemist. "You undermined the fort."
"We didn't just dig tunnels," she rasped, her grin widening until the skin of her lip split. "We pulled the supports. We waited. We just needed you to add the weight."
She looked at the forty thousand men packed shoulder to shoulder.
"Gravity is the weapon, Roman."
"MOVE!" Marcus screamed.
He didn't specify where. There was nowhere to go.
A deafening CRACK split the air. It sounded like the spine of a god snapping in half.
The vibration stopped. For a split second, everything was perfectly, horribly still.
Then the ground beneath the central courtyard vanished.
It wasn't a slide. It was a drop.
The earth simply opened its mouth. The parade ground, the command tent, the supply wagons, and three thousand men were instantly swallowed by the dark.
Marcus felt his stomach lurch into his throat. The mud under his boots dissolved into dust.
He reached out, grabbing blindly. His hand closed around the strap of the Alchemist's leather harness.
She shrieked as they fell together.
The world became a blur of falling debris, flailing limbs, and screaming men. Dust choked the air, turning the daylight into instant night.
Marcus slammed into something hard—a wooden beam. It shattered under his weight. He kept falling. He hit a slope of loose dirt and rolled, tumbling violently into the blackness.
THUD.
He landed hard on stone. The impact knocked the wind out of him.
Debris rained down from above. Rocks, timber, bodies. A wagon wheel crashed down a few feet away, crushing a soldier who had just survived the fall.
Marcus curled into a ball, covering his head, coughing up dust.
BODY INTEGRITY: 88%. BRUISING DETECTED. ADRENALINE LEVELS: MAX.
The roar of the collapse slowly faded, replaced by the groans of the dying and the shifting of unsettled earth.
Marcus wiped the grit from his eyes. He was alive.
He pushed himself up. It was pitch black. The air was thick with dust, making it hard to breathe.
"Narcissus!" he rasped. "Crixus!"
"Here," a deep voice grunted from the dark.
A spark flared. Then a flame.
Narcissus stood up, holding a torch he had scavenged from a fallen sconce. The flickering light revealed the horror of their situation.
They weren't in a natural cavern.
They were standing in a wide, man-made tunnel. The walls were shored up with fresh timber. The floor was leveled stone.
Above them, twenty feet up, was the jagged hole they had fallen through. Daylight filtered down, choked by dust.
Around them lay piles of broken bodies. Men who had been crushed by the fall or by the debris that followed.
Varus pulled himself out of a pile of loose dirt. He was bleeding from the scalp, but he still had his sword.
"It's a mine," Varus coughed, spitting mud. "They dug right under the parade ground."
"No," Marcus said, looking down the tunnel. "Mines are dead ends."
He pointed into the darkness.
Fifty yards away, deep in the tunnel, another light flared. Then another.
Torches.
Shadows moved in the orange glow. Not broken men. Not survivors.
These men were standing tall. They held pickaxes, short spades, and gladii. They wore leather masks to filter the dust.
They hadn't been crushed. They had been waiting.
The Alchemist prisoner lay near Marcus's feet. Her back was broken, her body twisted at an unnatural angle. She was dying, but she turned her head toward the enemy lights.
"The worm..." she gurgled, blood bubbling from her nose. "...has teeth."
From the darkness ahead, a horn blasted. A guttural, echoing sound that bounced off the stone walls.
The enemy sappers raised their weapons and began to run toward the survivors.
Marcus drew his sword. His hand was shaking, not from fear, but from the sheer, crushing weight of the trap.
He had saved the army from the fire, only to drop them into the butcher's shop.
"Shields!" Narcissus roared, stepping in front of Marcus. "Form up! We fight or we die in the dark!"
THREAT ASSESSMENT: 40+ HOSTILES.
TACTICAL OPTION: NONE.
SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: 11%.
Marcus stepped up beside the gladiator. The Ghost of Commodus flexed his fingers, hungry for the violence.
"Kill them all," Marcus whispered.
The sappers charged.