Chapter 109: Glory!

Tribune Claudius eagerly spurred his horse deeper into the ravine.

As he marched his three thousand men forward, Claudius’s mind was already wandering to the magnificent triumph he would undoubtedly receive in Rome.

He pictured the Senate praising his unmatched tactical genius. He imagined the vast tracts of fertile Gallic land he would be awarded, the prestige he would bring to his ancient family name, and how Legate Rufinus would be forced to publicly salute him.

He would be the brilliant hero who broke the Syndicate’s elusive flank, while the rest of the army slogged through the mud.

"Push forward!" Claudius shouted. "The rebels are breaking!"

The shouts of the supposedly fleeing rebels grew louder. Claudius rounded a sharp bend in the rock wall, fully expecting to see a bloody melee where his forward scouts had successfully cornered the Syndicate snipers.

Instead, he saw something that made him pull his reins in utter confusion.

There were no dead bodies. There was no desperate melee.

Sitting on a large boulder in the middle of the mountain path were two dozen *Umbrae* operatives.

They were just watching the Roman column arrive.

Except for one.

A single operative was standing in the center of the path, waving a broken wooden spear in the air.

"Oh, mercy! The terror!" the operative wailed, clutching his chest dramatically and stumbling backward as if struck by an invisible sword. "The sheer might of Rome has broken our fragile spirits! We are but humble, unwashed peasants fleeing before your absolute glory! Ahhh!"

The seasoned Roman auxiliaries stared in silence.

Even the other *Umbrae* operatives were staring at their comrade with collective exhaustion.

"Ahhh, the unbearable pain of defeat!" The operative dropped to his knees, throwing his head back and actually managing to force a fake sob. "My spleen! Jupiter save me from this flawless tactical maneuver! I am undone!"

If the Forge Master were here, he might have commended the man’s profound theatrical dedication.

But Silas’s second-in-command merely walked over and kicked the operative sharply in the shin.

"Get up, you idiot," the lieutenant hissed. "They’re right there."

The operative blinked, snapped out of his dramatic reverie, and looked at the heavily armed Roman column standing barely thirty feet away.

His face flushed visibly red under his dark ash camouflage. He quickly dropped the broken spear, coughing awkwardly and dusting off his knees in profound embarrassment.

The bizarre pantomime finally shattered Claudius’s delusions of grandeur.

Centurion Bato had been absolutely right...

"Retreat!" Claudius screamed, his voice cracking. "It’s an ambush! Fall back!"

But it was far too late. The rear of the Roman column was already bottlenecked in the narrow gorge.

While Claudius panicked, Centurion Bato, the cautious Illyrian veteran, had already anticipated the disaster.

He had held his personal guard back near the wider opening of the ravine, refusing to commit his men blindly.

The moment Bato saw the theatrical trap unfold ahead, he ordered his men to scatter and secure a defensive perimeter, abandoning the doomed Tribune to his fate.

However, it was exactly Bato’s competence that marked him for immediate death...

From his perch high on the cliff walls, Silas had been tracking the Illyrian Centurion.

Silas knew that if Bato survived to organize a disciplined fighting retreat, it would inevitably cost Syndicate lives.

The Tribune was a loud fool who would likely trample his own men trying to escape, but Bato was a genuine military threat.

Using the narrow canyon walls as leverage, Silas sprinted horizontally across the jagged surface.

When he was directly above Bato’s position, he pushed off the wall, dropping twenty feet through the air like a diving raptor.

Mid-descent, Silas drew his twin steel *pugiones* combat daggers specifically designed by the foundries to punch through plate armor. Gravity provided the terrifying force.

Silas landed squarely on Bato’s shoulders.

Before the Illyrian veteran could even raise his spear, Silas drove the twin blades down with blinding speed.

The steel punched cleanly through the leather gaps in Bato’s shoulder armor, severing his clavicles.

Without pausing, Silas wrenched the blades outward, paralyzing the Centurion’s arms, before delivering a devastating strike to the back of Bato’s neck.

The spinal column severed. Bato collapsed into the dirt, dead before his brain could even register the pain of the impact.

Silas hit the rocky ground hard, the sheer force of the drop shooting a sharp, numbing pain up his shins.

He grunted, forcing himself to walk a tight circle around the corpse to regain the feeling in his legs. He frowned, annoyed by the splatter of arterial blood soaking into his boots.

The Illyrian guards, recovering from the shock of seeing their seasoned commander executed from the sky in under two seconds, roared in collective fury.

A mob of fifty heavily armed veterans leveled their spears and charged directly at Silas.

An *Umbrae* sniper waiting on the ridge aimed his arbalest, signaling a silent request for supporting fire.

Silas sharply waved him off. He didn’t want his men wasting expensive iron bolts in the dark when he had a much more efficient solution.

If they had fought as a unified force, trusting their veterans instead of scrambling for individual glory, they might have stood a chance.

Instead, their greed had fractured them perfectly into isolated pockets of slaughter.

"How pitiful," Silas muttered, looking down at Bato’s body.

The only competent man in the legion, dead because he was forced to follow a fool.

The furious Illyrians closed the distance, their spears thrusting forward. Silas didn’t brace for a melee. He sprinted straight toward the rock wall, leaped, and used his momentum to scale the jagged limestone, pulling himself onto a high ledge just out of spear range.

He reached into his canvas satchel and pulled out three fist-sized spheres of explosive chemical clay.

He struck a modified flint. The fuses immediately hissed, sparking in the dark.

As he ran along the ledge, Silas tossed the spheres down into the packed Roman ranks below.

*Twang! Twang!*

Syrian archers fired arrows up at him, but the darkness and the awkward vertical angle ruined their aim.

Instead, the sudden flash of the flint and the bright sparking of the hissing fuses blinded their night vision.

The clay spheres dropped right into the center of the furious Illyrian mob.

A few of the braver soldiers stepped forward, poking the burning fuses with the tips of their spears, ignorant of what a chemical payload was.

*BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.*

The confined space of the ravine exponentially amplified the concussive shockwaves.

The triple explosion ripped through the Roman ranks, turning the narrow gorge into a horrific meat grinder.

The soldiers who had foolishly investigated the spheres were instantly vaporized into a fine red mist, while the rest of the charging mob was shredded by rock and lethal iron shrapnel.