CHAPTER 196: THE COMMANDER’S RECKONING

The hours that followed the mission’s collapse were a silent, controlled storm inside the Emperor’s praetorium. The frantic energy of hope had been replaced by the cold, methodical rigor of damage control. The laptop screen, once a window to victory, was now a coroner’s report, a scrolling list of names that flickered from green to red to a final, soul-crushing grey. SIGNAL LOST. It was a sterile, digital epitaph for the best men in the Empire.

Alex did not rage. He did not despair. The part of him that was a 21st-century project manager, the man accustomed to cascading system failures and catastrophic budget overruns, took command. Grief was a luxury. Action was a necessity. He sat ramrod straight, his face a mask of cold composure, his eyes fixed on the screen as if he could will the names back to life through sheer focus.

"Lyra," his voice was low, devoid of emotion, a tool being used for a task. "Isolate all active transponders. Map their current locations relative to Rally Point Gamma. Calculate optimal evasion routes that avoid the highest concentrations of chaotic enemy activity. I want a rescue corridor. Now."

"ACKNOWLEDGED. MAPPING RESCUE CORRIDORS. PROBABILITY OF SUCCESSFUL EXTRACTION FOR DESIGNATED SURVIVORS: 17.4%."

Seventeen percent. He didn’t flinch. He turned to a waiting aide, a nervous young aristocrat named Flavius who was trembling in the presence of such palpable, icy authority.

"Flavius," Alex’s voice was sharp, cutting through the young man’s fear. "Relay this to General Maximus and the watch commanders. This entire sector of the front is on lockdown. No one in or out without my direct authorization. Censor all outgoing dispatches, military and private. The official report for the morning briefing is that we are conducting a major, pre-planned legionary repositioning. Information security is now our primary weapon. I want total control over what is said, what is heard, and what is believed. See to it."

The aide stammered a "Yes, Caesar," and practically fled the tent, grateful to escape the oppressive atmosphere. Alex was building a wall of silence around the disaster, buying himself time, seizing control of the narrative before it could control him. This was not the act of a defeated man; it was the instinct of a ruler fighting on a new front.

The tent flap opened again, and Titus Pullo entered. The Prefect of the Devota, normally a monolith of unwavering faith, looked like a statue that had been struck by lightning. His face was ashen, his eyes haunted. The failure of the mission was not just a tactical defeat for him; it was a theological crisis.

"Caesar..." Pullo began, his voice rough with emotion. He stopped, swallowed, and tried again. "The survivors... the few who have made it back to the outer pickets... they tell impossible stories. Madness. The horde turning on itself. And our men... our best men... gone." He looked at Alex, his eyes pleading for an explanation that would make sense, that would mend the crack that had just appeared in his faith. "The men in the camps are asking questions. They don’t understand. The mission was divinely guided. It was your will made manifest. How... how could it fail?"

Alex met the centurion’s gaze. He knew this was a more dangerous battle than the one Caelus had just lost. If he lost the faith of men like Pullo, he lost the Devota. If he lost the Devota, he lost his most loyal legion. He took a slow breath, forcing the project manager to recede and the Emperor-God to emerge.

"Prefect," he said, his voice imbued with a somber, resonant authority. "The gods do not test us with easy victories. Any man can hold a spear when the path is clear. True faith is tested in the dark, when the path is lost." He rose from his chair, his shadow looming large against the tent wall.

"They did not guide our spear to the beast’s heart tonight, because that was not the lesson we needed to learn. They lifted the veil. They allowed this chaos to erupt to show us the true, mindless nature of the thing we fight. We thought we were fighting an army. We were wrong. We are fighting a plague of the soul."

He placed a hand on Pullo’s shoulder, the gesture of a priest comforting a parishioner. "Your faith is not a guarantee of success, Titus. It never was. It is the shield you must hold when you fail. It is the strength that allows you to rise again from the mud and the blood, when a lesser man would stay down. Go to your men. Tell them to mourn their brothers. They have earned that right. And then," Alex’s voice hardened, turning from priest to commander, "tell them to sharpen their swords. The true test has just begun."

Pullo stared at him, his turmoil slowly giving way to a renewed, if grim, resolve. The Emperor had not given him an answer; he had given him a purpose. He nodded, his back straightening. "I understand, Caesar. It will be done." He saluted and left, his faith battered but not broken.

Alex watched him go, the performance draining the last of his emotional reserves. He sank back into his chair, alone again. The mask fell away, and for a single, private moment, he allowed himself to feel the crushing weight of his failure. He clenched his fist, his knuckles white, and slammed it silently onto the oaken table. Dozens of men were dead. Dozens of families would receive scrolls bearing the worst news imaginable. And it had all happened under his command.

He took one deep, shuddering breath. And then he put it away. He turned back to Lyra. The detective took over.

"Lyra," he said, his voice flat once more. "The anomaly. The ’Resonance’ signal you detected in the west. Pinpoint the exact timestamp of the peak energy spike."

"TIMESTAMP IDENTIFIED: 22:47:18 ZULU TIME."

"Now," Alex ordered, "cross-reference that timestamp with the biometric and communication logs from Caelus’s team. I want the exact moment their mission went critical—the first detected injury, the first aborted communication."

"CALCULATING... CROSS-REFERENCING... CORRELATION COMPLETE. THE ONSET OF MISSION FAILURE, MARKED BY THE FIRST ’TRANSPONDER LOST’ SIGNAL FROM SERGEANT Gnaeus, OCCURRED AT 22:47:21 ZULU TIME. THE PEAK OF THE DETECTED ENERGY EVENT AND THE FAILURE OF THE MISSION ARE FUNCTIONALLY SIMULTANEOUS. CORRELATION COEFFICIENT: 0.9998."

Alex stared at the numbers. 0.9998. In the world of data, that wasn’t correlation; it was causation. "So it wasn’t my plan," he whispered to the glowing screen. "It wasn’t a failure of intelligence. Caelus didn’t make a mistake." His mind raced. "Something else happened. Something out there... broke the horde’s control system and threw everything into chaos."

He was no longer just a defeated general. He was a detective who had just found the murder weapon. He didn’t know who had wielded it, or why, but the shape of the event was beginning to form in the darkness.

Just then, the tent flap flew open. Two Praetorian guards entered, supporting a third man between them. He was caked in mud and blood, his leather armor torn to shreds, a crude bandage wrapped around his head. He was one of the scouts from the strike team. Alex recognized his face from the mission briefing. It wasn’t Caelus.

The scout’s eyes were wide, unfocused, staring at horrors only he could see. He was barely conscious, delirious with fever and exhaustion. As they lowered him onto a cot, he began to mutter, the same words spilling from his lips over and over again, his voice a hoarse, broken whisper filled with the pure, undiluted terror of what he had witnessed.

"Not a battle... not a battle... a slaughter... they went mad... the whole valley... mad..."

To be the first to know about future sequels and new projects, follow my official author blog: https://waystarnovels.blogspot.com/