Chapter 120: The Last Gamble
Lucilla's expression, as she processed Alex's desperate plea, was a masterpiece of controlled emotion. He could see the flicker of triumphant, predatory glee in her eyes, the sudden, sharp intake of breath as she realized the sheer magnitude of the power he was offering her. But on the surface, she was the very picture of a noble Roman matron, her face a mask of shocked, patriotic horror at the news of the city's peril.
"A militia, brother?" she said, her voice a soft, tremulous whisper. "Our people... armed? To fight a Roman legion?" She played her part to perfection, the reluctant leader forced by circumstance to take up a terrible burden. She allowed him a long, agonizing moment of silence before her resolve seemed to harden. "If the city is truly in such danger... if the Emperor commands it... then I will not shirk my duty. I will speak to the people."
She had agreed. The die was cast. In the days that followed, Rome was transformed. Lucilla, seizing the opportunity with a political brilliance that Alex had to grudgingly admire, became a veritable warrior-queen. She did not just raise a militia; she ignited a crusade. She stood on the steps of temples, her dark robes whipping in the wind, and spoke to the crowds with a fiery, passionate eloquence that brought the city to a fever pitch. She spoke of hearth and home, of protecting their children from the coming darkness, of the sacred duty of every citizen to defend the walls of Rome. She was a new Boudica, a new Zenobia, and the city, terrified and desperate for a hero, fell completely under her spell.
The men flocked to her banner. Veterans who had been grumbling in taverns now proudly strapped on their old armor. Young men whose only battles had been street brawls were organized into disciplined cohorts. Lucilla's "dove's nest" at the Widows' Fund became the central command post for a new, fanatically loyal private army.
While his sister rallied the city, Alex was engaged in a different, far quieter, and much stranger war. He had effectively barricaded himself in the Imperial Institute, transforming Celer's engineering workshops into a makeshift laboratory. His city was in a panic, preparing for a siege, but Alex was not focused on the walls. He was focused on a single, impossible goal. He had to defeat the Plague Legion not with swords, but with science.
He had been working frantically, day and night, with the Greek physician Philipos and a handful of other trusted medical minds. Their project: to mass-produce an effective variolation serum. The greatest risk had been acquiring a live, stable culture of the virus. Weeks ago, with grim foresight, Alex had sent a secret medical team to the quarantine camp at Seleucia, long before the mutiny. Their mission had been to tend to the sick, but their true purpose was to gather samples—fluid from the pustules of recovering soldiers, men whose bodies had successfully fought off the disease and developed immunities. These precious, deadly samples had been carefully transported back to Rome in sealed lead vials.
Now, in the guarded workshops, Alex and his team worked to cultivate this invisible enemy. It was a dangerous, painstaking process. They used live chickens and pigs as incubators, a crude but effective method of keeping the virus viable. It was a grim, bloody business, a world away from the clean, sterile laboratories of his own time.
The greatest gamble had been the human trials. Alex knew he could not ask another to take a risk he was unwilling to take himself. He would be the first test subject. Under Philipos's terrified supervision, he had a small, controlled amount of the cultivated, weakened virus introduced into his own bloodstream through a series of small scratches on his shoulder.
The week that followed was a private hell. He endured the full, agonizing cycle of the disease, his strong, healthy body wracked with fever, chills, and the painful eruption of pustules. He quarantined himself, allowing only Lyra and a masked Philipos to attend him. He rode out the storm, his 21st-century constitution and Lyra's constant medical monitoring the only things that saw him through. But he emerged on the other side, weak, scarred, but alive. And, most importantly, immune. He had proven it could be done. The "divine scar" was real.
Now, his team worked in a frantic production line, inoculating hundreds of loyal Praetorian guardsmen and volunteers, creating a small but growing core of immune soldiers who could act as his medical corps.
His plan was insane, a gamble of such epic proportions that it made his charge against The Silent King look like a cautious skirmish. He would not wait for the Plague Legion to arrive at the gates of Rome and begin a long, bloody siege. He would go out to meet them. Not with an army, but with a medical convoy.
He gathered the five surviving members of the Fire Cohort. They, having already survived the plague in its most virulent form, were now completely immune. They would be his personal guard, their monstrous appearance and legendary strength a terrifying and effective deterrent. He commissioned every fast horse and cart Sabina could find and had them loaded, not with weapons and armor, but with medical supplies: thousands of carefully sealed needles for inoculation, vials of his new "vaccine," vast quantities of clean water in sealed barrels, and nutrient-rich, concentrated food rations.