Imperator: Resurrection of an Empire

Rain drummed steadily against the timber walls, washing the last of the blood from the mud-churned killing ground below the fort.

The smell still clung — copper and rot and smoke — drifting through the camp like a ghost no man could escape.

Julius stood in the watch tower, staring west toward the Francian lines.

Fires burned in the distance as the bodies they'd managed to claim were given funeral pyres rather than mass graves, the dull orange glow smudged by rain and mist.

Their enemy was not hiding.

The Francians never hid, to proud to fight a guerrilla war of survival.

Sabellus approached from behind, his armor newly polished but his face lined from sleepless nights.

"Reports from the scouts. They've pulled more men from the north. Another levy force is marching this way. Eight days at most until they arrive and try to run us over once more."

Julius didn't look away from the horizon.

"And we'll be ready for them."

"Ready to defend again,"

Sabellus said, his voice quiet but edged with steel.

"Or ready to end this?"

Julius turned then, the rain streaking his faceplate like tears.

"Defending hasn't ended it yet, and unless we're both willing to accept this war ending in a stalemate it never will."

By nightfall, the word had spread through the camp — the Emperor himself would address the legions at dawn.

Every cohort, every company, every man not bleeding in the surgeon's tents would gather in the great square outside Fort Varennes' gates.

For many of the newly arrived, this was the first time they would stand before the man whose name they had heard every single day since enlisting.

For the veterans, it was something rarer — the moment they knew change was coming, when they could get back to doing what they did best.

As the rumors spread around the camp Julius was busy flitting into one medical tent after another.

Taking a pose within the center of each, before activating his skill.

[Holy Nova]

The men who were injured within would awake the next day to find their injuries had been healed.

None having any clue that it was their very own emperor who'd healed them, and returning them to the ranks to get their revenge against the Francian dogs who bore their fangs at their new masters.

~

Dawn

The rain had eased but the clouds hung low and heavy, as if the sky itself had stopped to listen.

More than twenty thousand men stood in formation, shields slung, helms tucked under arms, spears and swords grounded in the mud.

Julius stepped onto the raised wall overlooking the rank and file legionaries before him.

No gilded armor, no cloak of state — only his weather-stained plate and a sword at his hip, and two more strapped to his back.

His presence was enough without the filleries of statehood.

He let the silence stretch, his gaze sweeping the faces before him — scarred veterans who had bled for months in foreign soil, fresh-faced recruits whose first battle had baptized them in terror and blood just the other day.

When he finally spoke, his voice carried like the toll of a great bell.

"You know why I am here. You know what we have faced."

A murmur rippled through the crowd.

"For weeks, we have held this line. For weeks, we have met them in the mud, behind the stakes, under the rain. We have held while they threw wave after wave of their own people into our steel. And we have won every battle."

His tone hardened.

"But tell me — has it brought us victory? Has holding here brought us an end to this war?"

There was no answer.

Only the sound of rain pattering on armor.

"It has not. It will not. The Francians bleed and call it glory. They bury their dead and come again. They do not fear our fort walls. They do not fear our trenches. They only fear what they have not seen since winter broke, Romanus marching forward unrelenting once more."

A few voices shouted agreement, and Julius's gaze sharpened.

"So I ask you now, soldiers of the Empire — do you wish to stand here until your brothers are ground down to nothing? To watch the war rot into stalemate, until our blood runs as freely as theirs?"

A low growl of "No!" came from the front ranks, then echoed through the square.

"Or,"

Julius said, voice rising,

"do you wish to take the fight to them once again? To break them on their own ground? To show them that no wall, no faith, no saint will save them from the hand of Romanus, as we take their villages, towns, and cities that they drawn their numbers from?"

The answering roar shook the walls.

Twenty thousand voices, veterans and green alike, thundering as one:

"Forward! Forward!"

The blades stuck in the earth were raised high, before they were slammed against their broadshields.

BAM

BAM

BAMBAMBAM

Again and again like a thunderclap the legion, sounded out both in chorus of voice and steel.

Julius raised his sword high, the rain dripping from its edge.

"Then we march. Not tomorrow. Not in a week. Today. The line moves west, and it will not stop until Tournelle is ours. Until their banners burn in their own streets, we will break their armies before new levies can arrive, take the enemy bit by bit rather than all at once on their terms."

The roar rose again, louder, a wall of sound that carried beyond the fort, into the wet fields, into the enemy lines.

By midmorning, the legions were in motion, leaving only a garrison force behind to tend to the fort, and critically wounded who even after receiving Julius's blessing could not regrow their missing limbs.

Standards swayed above the armored tide, trumpets calling orders across the columns, as a cadence of drumbeats had the men keeping a steady marching pace.

Siege engines, dormant for weeks, were rolled from their shelters.

The ground trembled under the synchronized step of twenty thousand men like an earthquake roaming the land.

Sabellus rode beside Julius at the head of the column.

"You realize the cost will be higher,"

he said quietly.

"Yes,"

Julius replied.

"But the cost of standing still is higher still."

Caetrax, further ahead, glanced back over his shoulder.

"And when we reach their lines?"

Julius's eyes narrowed.

"We break them. Every levy they call, every barricade they build — broken. We do not stop for prisoners. We do not wait for their courage to grow again, as we did in Greecia so shall we do again here."

~

Afternoon

Two miles away from the Francian campground, the legion shifted from a travelling column formation into a broadsweeping row formation, in preparation of meeting with their enemy.

The rain had turned to a mist that clung to the skin.

The Francians had fortified the rise before Tournelle — ditches, wooden palisades, sharpened stakes, simple fences around their camp compared to the formal fortitifactions created by their romanus adversaries.

Behind them, another mass of francian levies waited, most having survived the other days battle while others had been filtering into the camp as reinforcements coming from all over the country, banners of the fluer-de-lis with a celtic knot fluttering in the damp wind.

The Romanus line fanned out into battle order, formation rows deep, cavalry flanking, artillery wheeled forward behind.

Julius rode to the front, sword in hand, and looked over the enemy works.

Scoffing as he did so, like children building a sandcastle mimicing their parents building a house.

Romanus could stand agains their repeated assault, but Francia... Francia would not last even an hour before their camp walls fell.

"Sound the advance,"

he said.

The horns blared, deep and resonant, and the line surged forward.

Siege engines loosed stones into the palisades, splintering wood and sending defenders tumbling.

Arrows hissed in great black clouds, cutting down men before they could even raise their shields.

The barely trained Francian levies had not put a proper watch on the surround, allowing them to be caught completly off guard, with men scrambling in the cold and damp rain to come to action and fight for their lives to the last man.