Chapter 98: Hierarchy

December 28, 221 AD.

The frontier city of Lugdunum.

A few months prior, the settlement had been paralyzed by the dread of the Roman Senate. Located close to the Alpine passes, the citizens had spent their nights listening for the march of loyalist legions coming to burn their homes.

But the Forge Master’s revolution had changed all that completely...

Water-powered trip hammers slammed into steel across the riverbanks. Concrete walls, poured using Lucius Cassius’s hydraulic forms, had risen around the city perimeter in weeks, creating a fortress that made Roman palisades.

The markets were flooded with the Syndicate Notes, and foreign merchants were begging for access to the industrial surplus.

Lugdunum had transitioned from a border town into a fortified staging ground.

It was into this stronghold that Lucius arrived...

His convoy consisted of four suspension carriages, surrounded by an escort of *Custodes*.

Lucius had come to the northern front for a specific purpose.

Legate Rufinus was mobilizing three legions across the Alps, and the Forge Master needed to finalize the vanguard that would greet them.

Inside the courtyard of the *Castrum*, ten thousand infantrymen stood in silence.

Lucius walked down the gravel path.

He bypassed the infantry, his gaze locking onto two detachments standing at the far end of the courtyard.

The first group, consisting of five hundred men, wore armor that absorbed the sunlight. Lucius had ordered his engineers to abandon the polished steel plates of the infantry.

Instead, these operatives wore carbon scales layered over boiled leather and silk.

The silk was a modification Isolda had insisted upon, designed to catch the heads of Roman arrows before they could pierce organs.

Their faces were obscured by iron half-masks, and they carried a shortened variant of the Decimus Engine designed for close-quarters slaughter.

Lucius stopped in front of the formation. He clasped his hands behind his back.

"I have stripped the finest killers from every cohort in this province to forge this detachment. You have mastered the repeating arbalest under duress. You represent the edge of the Syndicate’s military supremacy."

The men remained still.

"You will not fight in the open fields where the bards can sing of your victories. You will operate in the mud, in the dead of night, behind the lines of the military apparatus on this earth. Your objective is to bleed them until they drown in their own terror."

Lucius gestured to his left, and a quartermaster stepped forward holding a box.

"Step forward, Silas," Lucius commanded.

A man at the front of the formation stepped out of line. Silas was a gladiator who had murdered his Lanista and fled to the mountains before the Syndicate had formed.

Lucius opened the box, retrieving a steel dagger.

The blade was blackened, possessing a serrated spine designed to shatter bone, and the hilt was stamped with the anvil of the Syndicate.

"I hereby establish the *Umbrae*," Lucius announced, holding the blade out. "And you, Silas, are elevated to the rank of Prefect. You answer exclusively to myself and the Director of the Shadows. Break the Roman vanguard."

Silas took the dagger. He did not offer a Roman salute. Instead, the gladiator-turned-Prefect took two steps back, raised the blade into the air, and roared a command.

"Iron and Blood!"

Instantly, the five hundred men of the *Umbrae* moved.

They raised their shortened repeating arbalests to their chests.

Five hundred steel cranks were racked back, locking strings into place.

Lucius offered a smile. He turned on his heel and walked toward the second detachment.

These men were giants... They carried boarding axes and lead-weighted nets.

"Commander Valerius," Lucius said, acknowledging the veteran standing at the head of the detachment. "The Iberian war is stabilizing. I require your pragmatism elsewhere."

Lucius reached into his cloak, withdrawing a silver medallion bearing the insignia of a warship cutting through waves.

He tossed it to the veteran.

"I am establishing the **Classis Ferrea** the Iron Marines. You will serve as the breaching infantry for our armored fleet. When the ironclads ram a Roman trireme, your men will cross the gangplanks and ensure that not a single imperial sailor draws breath long enough to swim."

Valerius caught the medallion, a grin splitting his face.

He had spent decades fighting in the mud; the prospect of slaughtering Roman naval officers on the high seas was a promotion he relished...

"The ocean will run red with their patrician blood, Forge Master," Valerius promised, slamming his fist against his breastplate.

The Marines behind him mirrored the gesture.

With the elite ground forces formalized and armed, Lucius did not waste time with banquets.

He left the *Castrum*, flanked by his guards, and boarded his suspension carriage.

He needed to reach the drydocks of Massilia by nightfall.

The *Umbrae* were prepared to bleed the Roman infantry in the northern passes, but the Senate was mobilizing the Egyptian and Syrian fleets to blockade the Gallic coast. The Syndicate’s ironclads were constructed, but they required a commander capable of executing Lucius’s naval doctrines.

After hours of travel over the paved concrete highways, the carriage rattled into the guarded port of Massilia.

Lucius bypassed the harbor master’s villa, walking out onto the piers where the steel-plated hulls of the *Isolda*-class ironclads bobbed in the water.

Waiting for him under the light of a pitch torch was a man no older than twenty-two.

Felix was a smuggler who had spent his youth running contraband through the straits in the empire.

When an imperial patrol fleet had cornered him near Corsica months ago, Felix hadn’t surrendered.

He had used the shifting tides to bait three Roman triremes into a shallow sandbar, grounding them completely before sailing away.

Isolda’s intelligence network had flagged him immediately.

"They tell me you are arrogant, insubordinate, and possess no respect for Roman naval tradition," Lucius said, stepping into the torchlight and staring down the smuggler.

Felix offered a shrug. "Roman naval tradition dictates that you row in a straight line and pray your hull is thicker than the other guy’s. It is a doctrine designed by idiots, Dominus."

Lucius stared at him for a moment before a smirk touched his lips.

"You are promoted to Fleet Admiral," Lucius declared, shocking the smuggler into silence. "You have twenty ironclads and eighty cruisers."

Felix stared at the warships looming in the water behind Lucius. "They will not know what hit them, Forge Master."

The naval hierarchy secured, Lucius prepared to pivot back to the primary theater of war...

Legate Rufinus was three days away from the Alpine passes. The Forge Master needed to establish his forward command post near the snowline. However, Isolda’s spies had confirmed that Roman assassins were tracking the movements of Lucius’s mahogany-and-glass carriage.

Under the cover of midnight, Lucius ordered his driver to take the empty suspension carriage in the opposite direction, sending it down the western trade routes as a decoy.

Meanwhile, stripped of his tunic, Lucius wrapped himself in a blanket and climbed into the back of an iron-ore wagon.

As the decoy carriage drew the eyes of the imperial spies to the west, the Forge Master rattled toward the northern mountains in the dark, unseen.

High above in the passes of the Alps, Prefect Silas and the five hundred men of the *Umbrae* buried themselves in the mud and frost.

They waited in the darkness, their fingers resting on the triggers of their repeating arbalests, listening for the approaching march of the Roman vanguard...