Reborn In 3rd Century Rome with Future Industry

January 25, 221 AD, Civitas Aurelia, Gallia.

A month had passed since the surrender of the capital.

Demetrios, the Greek shipping magnate, had departed down the Rhone River, his galleys racing south to fulfill the sulfur contracts that would fuel the Syndicate’s chemical warfare.

He would first report to his investors in Massilia, spinning tales of an empire rising in Gaul, but that was a headache for another day.

At present, Lucius Cassius was standing on the earth of the *Campus Martius*. The parade ground, located outside the walls of Civitas Aurelia, had been repurposed.

The statues of past emperors had been torn down, replaced by cranes, braziers, and the clang of blacksmith hammers.

Lucius had gathered his military staff... Valerius, Amalric, and the newly elevated captains of the *Custodes* artillery divisions.

Standing beside Lucius was Decimus. The master smith looked out of place among the armored commanders, wiping grease from his hands onto his apron. Resting on the grass in front of them was Decimus’s magnum opus.

It was mounted on a carriage pulled by two draft horses, giving it the mobility of a ballista.

However, the weapon itself looked like a nightmare...

It was a chain-driven torsion engine, featuring a hopper holding thirty quarrels!

Lucius stepped forward, raising his voice so the gathered artillery captains could hear him over the wind.

This address was designed to accomplish two things: validate his doctrine of meritocracy, and terrify his enemies.

"Commanders of the Forge!" Lucius projected, gesturing toward the smith. "You look at this man and you see a laborer. A man whose hands are stained with coal. But without his sweat, you would all be fighting the Roman Empire with sharpened sticks! Decimus is the heart of our sector. And today, he brings you the instrument of our supremacy. I present to you the Decimus Engine!"

The artillery officers leaned forward, their eyes tracing the lattice of brass gears and springs.

"It is a repeating torsion projector," Lucius continued. "It requires a two-man crew. One to aim, and one to turn the crank. It can loose thirty bolts in under sixty seconds! The killing range is a hundred and fifty paces. Let us demonstrate what that means."

At the far end of the proving ground, a formation of dummies had been erected.

They were draped in chainmail and locked behind a wall of *scuta* shields, mimicking a Roman testudo formation.

Lucius nodded to Decimus. The smith signaled his two apprentices.

One apprentice gripped the aiming handles, leveling the muzzle of the engine toward the targets.

The second apprentice grabbed the hand-crank on the side of the chassis and began to turn it.

As the crank turned, the chain-drive drew back the bowstring, dropped a quarrel from the hopper into the groove, and released the tension all in one cycle!

A blur of iron tore across the parade ground. The volume was staggering...

Thirty bolts slammed into the Roman formation in less than a minute.

The quarrels sheared through the overlapping rings of the chainmail, pinning the dummies to the earth in a pile of debris!

A silence fell over the gathered commanders... They had fought in the melee of the northern valleys. They knew how hard it was to break a Roman shield wall.

To see one evaporated in sixty seconds by a machine operated by two men turning a handle was paradigm-shifting...

Valerius was the first to react.

The commander began to clap, the sound of his gauntlets ringing out.

Within seconds, the assembly of artillery captains erupted into cheers and applause.

Lucius raised a hand, bringing the commanders back to a hush. He turned to the blacksmith.

"Because of your service to the Syndicate, Decimus," Lucius declared, "I hereby abolish your status as a freedman. I elevate you to the rank of *Praefectus Machinamentorum* Prefect of Machines. You now hold a voting seat on the Syndicate Council, and you are granted the manor of Guild Master Spurius in the upper city."

A gasp rippled through the commanders, followed by roars.

In the hierarchy of the Roman Empire, a laborer being elevated to the rank of a patrician Prefect was unthinkable. It was an insult to the nobility. But Lucius cared about output.

Decimus had proven that his mind was worth more than the bloodline of every Senator in Rome combined.

The blacksmith dropped to one knee, tears cutting through the soot on his cheeks as he bowed his head to the Forge Master.

The demonstration, however, was only half complete...

Lucius dismissed the artillery captains, ordering them to begin integrating the Decimus Engines into their batteries.

He then signaled for the frontline infantry squad leaders to step forward.

Isolda’s operatives had proven the effectiveness of the torsion repeaters during their sabotage of the capital.

But reloading the grooves with darts was a time-consuming process that left the user vulnerable in a melee.

Lucius gestured for Livia, the operative who had assassinated the garrison commander, to step onto the field. She was wearing her cloak, but the repeater was gripped firmly in her hands.

"The repeating crossbows have changed the way we fight in the streets," Lucius announced to the sergeants. "But manually feeding darts into the top groove is a bottleneck."

Lucius held up a box forged from brass. It was roughly the size of a man’s hand and packed with ten darts, held in place by a spring.

"This is the cassette," Lucius explained, tossing the magazine to Livia. "It replaces the need to manually load your weapons. The darts and the feeding spring are housed within the brass. Watch."

Livia caught the cassette. With a practiced motion, she slapped the box into the receiver on the top of her repeater.

It locked into place with a *click*.

"Instead of firing three darts a minute and fumbling in your pouches for ammunition," Lucius declared, "your vanguards will now fire twenty."

Livia raised the weapon, aiming at a row of straw targets thirty paces away. She racked the side-lever.

Thwack-thwack-thwack-thwack-thwack!

In less than five seconds, five darts buried themselves into the chests and heads of the dummies.

Livia hit the release catch, dropping the cassette into her palm, slammed a fresh one into the receiver, and fired another five darts!

The sergeants stared at the targets, their mouths hanging open.

A squad of twenty men armed with these repeaters could unleash four hundred projectiles into a charging enemy in under a minute.

It was a wall of lead and steel that no infantry charge could survive...

A wave of applause washed over the proving ground. The sergeants hammered their fists against their breastplates, screaming their approval.

The *Custodes* were already the most heavily armored and disciplined force in Gaul, but with these repeaters, they would be untouchable in close-quarters combat.

Lucius basked in the approval of his men.

If he could integrate the Decimus Engines and the cassettes into the ranks before Legate Rufinus marched his northern legions south, the civil war would be a massacre.

Yet, as he looked past the cheering soldiers toward the expanse of the Rhone River, a new puzzle began to form in his mind.

He could dominate the land, but the wealth of the Roman Empire flowed through the Mediterranean.

To secure the shipments of natron, iron, and sulfur required to feed his factories, he could not rely on the loyalties of foreign shipping magnates like Demetrios.

He needed a fleet. Not the oar-driven triremes of the imperial navy, but something entirely new.

Something clad in iron and powered by something more reliable than the wind.

Lucius’s ambitions were crystallizing into reality...

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