CHAPTER 191: A RIVAL DOCTRINE

Lucilla’s war council in Virunum was a microcosm of her new, hybrid world. Roman officers in polished scale armor sat beside barbarian chieftains in wolfskin cloaks. The precise Latin of military reports mingled with the rough, guttural dialects of the Norican tribes. At the head of the table, Lucilla presided over it all, a bridge between two worlds, her mind absorbing information from both with a cold, analytical focus.

Today, the subject was the Emperor’s war. One of her newly trained Exploratores, a scout who had spent a week shadowing the Devota’s operations near the Danube, was giving his report. He was a young, sharp-eyed Norican named Alaric, and his words painted a picture of brutal, static slaughter.

"It is as the rumors say, my lady," he reported, his Latin accented but clear. "They do not leave their new stone forts. The horde comes, the Romans kill them from the walls with their thunder-bows and their pots of black fire, and then the horde retreats. They have killed thousands, but they have not taken back a single inch of land. They do not pursue. They do not patrol. They are butchers in a slaughterhouse, not warriors."

Lucilla listened, her fingers steepled before her, her expression turning from curiosity to a deep, intellectual contempt. When the scout finished, she dismissed him and turned to her assembled commanders and chieftains.

"This is not war," she declared, her voice ringing with a conviction that filled the room. "This is pest control. It is the strategy of a terrified farmer who builds a high fence and hopes the wolves starve to death outside. It is a strategy of fear, of hiding behind walls and hoping the problem solves itself. It cedes the countryside, our countryside, to the enemy. We are Romans. We do not hide in our forts. We find the enemy, we fix them, and we destroy them. We conquer."

She rose and walked to the great map of the northern provinces that dominated one wall. It was the same map Alex used, but her interpretation of it was fundamentally different. Alex saw a defensive line to be held. Lucilla saw a battlefield, a landscape upon which to maneuver and kill.

"My brother’s strategy is flawed at its very core," she announced, outlining her own, alternative military doctrine. It was not a defensive, attrition-based plan designed to minimize Roman casualties. It was a proactive, mobile, and utterly ruthless search-and-destroy doctrine, born from a classic Roman mindset fused with the guerilla tactics of her new barbarian soldiers.

"The enemy is a great serpent," she explained, her finger tracing the vast, amorphous shape of the horde’s territory. "Its body is a million strong, a mindless, scaled beast of warriors. My brother is content to stand at a safe distance and chop off pieces of its tail, over and over again, hoping it will eventually bleed to death. A slow, costly, and uncertain strategy."

Her finger moved, jabbing at the map. "I intend to hunt its head. But not with a single, desperate spear thrust into the dark." The implied criticism of Alex’s rumored ’special operation’ was clear to everyone in the room. "We will dismantle the beast, piece by piece. We will starve it. We will blind it. And then, when it is weak and confused, we will kill it."

She laid out the core of her rival doctrine. "We will use my new legion, the Legio II Norica, as they were meant to be used: as hunters. They will not engage the main body of the horde; that would be suicide. Instead, they will operate in fast-moving, independent cohorts. They will move through the deep forests, along paths my brother’s legions do not even know exist. They will seek out and destroy the horde’s foraging parties, their supply convoys, their smaller, isolated camps. Every wagon we burn is a thousand warriors who will go hungry. Every foraging party we annihilate is a thousand more mouths with nothing to eat. We will not attack the serpent’s body; we will attack its veins, cutting off the flow of blood that gives it life. We will starve the great beast."

Her strategy was a direct and fundamental challenge to Alex’s. His was centralized, technology-dependent, and defensive. Hers was decentralized, reliant on human intelligence and deep-terrain knowledge, and aggressively offensive. She turned to the assembled Norican chieftains, men who had spent their lives in the very forests the horde now occupied.

"Your people know these lands," she said, her tone shifting from a commander to a collaborator. "You know the hidden paths, the secret springs, the old hunting grounds where the horde will be seeking game. I do not have a god whispering secrets in my ear. I have you. Your knowledge, your eyes and ears, will be our greatest weapon."

She was building a network of human intelligence, a living map of the wilderness that was far more detailed and up-to-date than anything Alex’s AI, with its topographical data, could provide.

She decided to put her new doctrine to the test immediately. One of the chieftains, an old, grizzled warrior named Brennus, had brought her a valuable piece of intelligence. His scouts had observed a major supply convoy of the horde, hundreds of wagons carrying grain and smoked meat, moving slowly through a narrow, forested valley two days’ march to the north. It was a perfect target for an ambush.

"Assemble the first and second cohorts of the Norica," Lucilla commanded her senior centurion, a grim veteran of the Urbana named Cilo. "And support them with a century from your own legion. I want a hundred of our heavy infantry to be the anvil. Your Noricans will be the hammer."

Her orders were precise and intelligent. The Romans would block the valley pass, a solid, immovable wall of shields and steel. The Noricans, moving silently through the high ridges on either side of the valley, would descend upon the trapped convoy from the flanks and the rear. It was a classic Roman ambush tactic, but executed with the unique skills of her new, hybrid force.

The raid was a stunning, brutal success. Two days later, the strike force returned, not with the grim, haunted expressions of the Devota, but with the triumphant, savage joy of victorious hunters. They had lost only a handful of men. The horde’s convoy had been completely annihilated. They had slaughtered over a thousand of the enemy’s guards and support troops and put hundreds of wagons of vital supplies to the torch. They brought back captured weapons, enemy standards, and a dozen terrified prisoners for interrogation. The smoke from the burning wagons, they reported, could be seen for fifty miles.

Lucilla had proven her point. Her doctrine worked. She had established a powerful and effective rival theory of warfare, one that was aggressive, mobile, and deeply appealing to the traditional Roman offensive mindset. She was not just building an army; she was building a new military philosophy, a direct ideological and strategic challenge to Alex’s methods.

As her victorious soldiers paraded their captured trophies through the cheering streets of Virunum, she knew she had done more than just win a skirmish. She had demonstrated to the people of the north, and to the Senate in Rome, that there was another way to fight this war. Another leader to follow. The stage was now set for a future clash, not just over a mountain pass, but over the very soul of the Roman military and the future of the Empire.

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