For the Glory of Rome: Chronicles of an Isekai'd Legion-Chapter 7B2 : A Battle of Wits (And Ballistae)

B2 Chapter 7: A Battle of Wits (And Ballistae)

The next day, Quintus stood at one end of the practice field, a century of handpicked men at attention behind him. Across the way loomed a towering gray wall, thirty feet tall and set behind a deep ditch. Atop it waited a matching century of Legionnaires headed by Tiberius.

Quintus locked eyes with the Legatus and nodded. Then, he called over his shoulder. "Positions!"

The men split into groups, the majority remaining on the field as others rushed to man the siege towers that stood ready to move. He heard Tiberius give a similar order. In no time at all, a group of the Legatus’s men had positioned themselves defensively atop the wall. The rest had ducked out of sight—presumably behind the fortifications.

"We are ready," Tiberius called, his deep voice booming across the field. "Primus?"

He gave one last look over his men before responding. "Ready!"

Tiberius nodded to the officers standing off to the side—the arbiters of this match. One of them raised a horn to his lips and blew, the resonant bellow signaling a start to their contest.

Immediately, Quintus turned and began issuing orders. "Advance!"

The groups sprang into action—those on the ground quickly fell into a testudo formation and rushed toward the wall as the siege towers began to rumble inevitably forward.

After agreeing to Tiberius’s challenge, the men had convened with the officers to lay out a more specific structure for the test. They obviously couldn’t stage an actual assault on a fortified position, after all—not without subjecting their men to pointless risks.

It was decided that two assaults would be carried out instead: one utilizing the Legionnaires themselves, and one utilizing artillery. They would be performed separately, just to ensure that they didn’t fire catapults or ballistae at their own men needlessly—or bring the wall crashing down on them. If Quintus successfully took the wall within a defined timeframe, then he would be victorious.

Fortunately, those precautions meant that Quintus could leverage his men’s skills to their full effects.

Quintus’s infantry reached the ditch dug at the wall’s base. A few men retrieved shovels from their backs and began digging, rearranging the ground with supernatural speed as the formation adjusted to protect them from the defenders’ attacks—theoretical ones, in this case. They’d held off on using arrows and pila, also because of the risks they posed to their men. But it was best to keep good practices even if they weren’t really under assault.

As some of the men continued working to fill the ditch for the siege towers, others began raising ladders against the wall, each of which was quickly populated with Legionnaires as they climbed with blinding speed.

Some of the defenders worked to throw the ladders off, only for the climbing Legionnaires to stab metal hooks straight into the stone and stabilize them. The hooks didn’t go very deep, but they didn’t need to—especially not with so many of them. It was enough to keep the ladders from being repelled for the moment.

As the men swarmed up the wall, Quintus saw movement at the top. Something large was being wheeled toward the ladders—and he suspected he knew what it was.

"Climbers, evade!" He shouted in warning. A moment later, giant vats of boiling oil began pouring down on the climbing Legionnaires, aiming to drown them in a deluge of liquid death.

Well, it would have been boiling oil if this was a real assault. For this spar, they found lukewarm water to be an appropriate substitute. It was understood that any man who became sufficiently drenched would be counted as dead—or at least disabled for the battle.

But Quintus had seen this coming. And they’d taken measures to prevent it.

As the water came pouring down, the men climbing the ladders leapt off to the sides. But rather than fall to the ground, they produced metal pitons and began slamming them into the wall’s surface. They swung from the anchor points, adding more and more as they began climbing upward like monkeys and taking advantage of those placed by their brethren.

They didn’t need ladders. Those had just been to lull the enemy into a false sense of security. This, however… this could give them unheard of flexibility in their assaults.

It was only moments before the first of his men reached the top. The Legionnaire drew his weapon and leapt over the edge of the wall, ready to assault the defenders as more followed right behind.

All of their weapons had been neutered, of course—and not just with the usual blunted practice varieties or cloth coverings. The Legion’s trainers had discovered a skill that rendered all blows from one’s melee weapons nonlethal. There were a number of conditions, the main one being that one had to consent to being affected by the skill. There was also the dodgy matter of testing that nonlethality, something that few men were eager to volunteer for. But it worked well enough for their purposes.

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Quintus watched as the surface of the wall swarmed with Legionnaires, their armor-clad forms swinging from pitons or flying up the damp ladders. The men on the ground finished filling in their portions of the ditches, allowing the siege towers to move forward and butt up against the wall. He watched as they got ready to drop their gangplanks and overwhelm the strangely calm defenders manning the fortifications—

—Which gave him a perfect view of when things went wrong.

Out of nowhere, small slits appeared in the wall’s surface—murder holes. Only, these weren’t the evenly-spaced openings along the top of the wall that he’d seen before. These holes seemed to appear haphazardly across the cement’s surface.

No, not haphazardly, Quintus realized. Their placement was quite intentional. They had opened right where they’d placed their metal hooks and pitons.

The improvised handholds fell right out of the wall, taking the climbing Legionnaires with them. Worse, the previously secured ladders went toppling backwards as the defenders pushed on them—from both atop the wall and behind the holes.

It all happened in an instant, before Quintus had time to shout a warning, much less figure out a counter. A few of Quintus’s Legionnaires were able to salvage the situation and continue upward, either with mighty leaps or by using the murder holes themselves as brief handholds. But most of the men went tumbling to the ground, their comrades and the support staff rushing to soften their falls and tend to their wounds. freёwebnoѵel.com

Quintus swore. His attention turned to the siege towers, only for his heart to sink even further. The gangplanks were being repelled. Engineers atop the wall were building onto their fortifications to prevent the gangplanks from fully settling into place—sturdy ones that his men were having difficulty breaking. It wouldn’t have been the end of the world—his men at this point were perfectly capable of simply leaping across, even if it meant taking on additional risk—if not for the other measures the defenders had taken.

The Primus Pilus watched as the defenders raised panels of wooden "spikes" all along the top of the wall, each acting as a fence against his men. The Legionnaires in the siege towers attempted to set them aflame, only to find the wood damp—far too damp to catch.

They then attempted to pull them down with long hooked poles, only for the defenders to release the panels readily—sending them falling toward the men below. A warning from Quintus sent them scattering even as the defenders produced yet more panels out of seemingly nowhere to replace the first.

Without support, the few Legionnaires who had made it to the top were quickly subdued. Worse, the remainder of his forces were in absolute shambles trying to recover.

The men that weren’t taken out of commission by surprise murder hole attacks or the constant streams of water pouring down from the walls fought valiantly, trying everything they could to gain an edge. But try as they might, they simply could not break through.

The horn blew again, signaling the end of the test. The defending Legionnaires roared in triumph as the attackers slumped over with exhaustion—the ones that remained on the field, that was.

Quintus shook his head in dismay at the result even as the officers and other assorted onlookers cheered. He had lost. Despite all of his planning, unorthodox tactics, and efforts to field the right men for the job… he had lost. Tiberius had outplayed him.

Hopefully the second test would go better.

***

The second test had gone much the same as the first. Despite his best efforts, the latest artillery innovations from their engineers, and even skills that caused projectiles to split or even explode, Quintus had been unable to break through the Legatus’s defenses.

He’d damaged them, of course. Quite severely. But Tiberius had not only constructed the fortifications out of concrete, but evidently discovered a way to amplify the self-repairing properties of that concrete to ridiculous levels. The material could render an artillery barrage’s effects moot in only a few minutes.

"You fought well, Primus."

He looked up to see Tiberius approaching, a pleased expression on his face. Quintus knelt, setting his helmet on the ground and offering up his sword. "Thank you, Legatus. Although it seems I was no match for you. It seems that I underestimated our defensive capabilities after all."

Tiberius hummed thoughtfully, his eyes crinkling in what might have been a suppressed smile. "Indeed. Do not take the loss personally. My old age has endowed me with more than a few useful tricks. Perhaps being the elder has its benefits after all."

The comment elicited a small chuckle from Quintus. "Old age and treachery, is it?"

"Exactly so."

Quintus sighed, reaching out to clasp Tiberius’s hand. "Thank you for honoring me with this opportunity."

Tiberius waved him off. "Think nothing of it. In fact, this exercise has given me much to think on as well. The tactics you employed may prove to be a good starting point for our future assaults. But first…"

Tiberius turned to the Legionnaires that had participated in the battle. "The victors will have their promised respite in the coming days. But for now…" He swept his gaze over the entire group. "You are all dismissed. Do as you will."

A cheer erupted, louder than the one that the victors had cried mere moments before. Quintus hid a smile. The Legatus knew how to earn his men’s loyalty. He knew as well as anyone how those words would be taken—as permission to go to town and get drunk.

"Legatus Tiberius!"

A messenger rushed toward them, skidding to a halt before Tiberius. At his gesture, the Legionnaire continued. "Sir, an envoy has arrived at the town and is causing quite a stir. He has requested an audience with you…"

Quintus began to stand as his stoic commander followed the messenger away. He looked across the practice field at the groaning men that lay there, unable to rush off with their brethren due to injury. It seemed their resident [Healer] would have her hands full very soon.