Chapter 122: The Scroll

In the overcrowded streets of Rome, particularly in the impoverished slums of the Subura, plebeians walked with dead eyes and panicked expressions, acting as if they had given up on life.

Consul Valerian had recently passed the "Forge Tax" a draconian levy designed to feed the new private armies.

This tax alone forcefully stripped twenty percent of a plebeian’s grain and silver income.

Combined with traditional imperial tithes, the common citizens of Rome could barely survive the week...

Hoards of desperate, starving plebeians did attempt to riot against this oppressive taxation in the Forum, but the patricians did not negotiate.

On Valerian’s direct orders, armored Praetorians slaughtered the rioters, choking the Tiber River with bleeding bodies.

The massacres spread a paralyzing fear across the capital, while the Senate suppressed the information from reaching the outer provinces to prevent widespread rebellion.

If the situation in the metropolis of Rome was a living nightmare, the reality in the rural farming towns was an absolute descent into hell.

On the sun-baked outskirts of Capua, in a small, impoverished farming commune...

"Dominus, I beg you, leave us the winter grain! We are a poor family!"

"Mercy, Dominus, please! He is my only surviving son. What will I do if he dies in the snow?"

"Just give us a few weeks, I swear to Jupiter I will find the silver! Please!"

The weeping cries of the plebeian farmers echoed off the dry earth.

The villagers, already severely destitute from a brutal, low-yield harvest, were driven to despair by the arrival of the patrician tax collectors.

The collectors, backed by private mercenaries, demanded the Forge Tax be paid immediately in pure silver or grain.

But where could the farmers possibly get the coin?

However, the lead tax collector, a minor, arrogant cousin of the Julian house named Quintus looked upon their misery with hateful indifference.

He smiled thinly and suggested that if they simply surrendered their able-bodied sons to his family’s private legion, their tax burden for the year would be generously forgiven.

This extortion immediately sparked a wave of furious rage.

A young, starving farmer lunged forward, raising a pitchfork toward Quintus’s throat.

A mercenary stepped forward, drawing his spatha, and ran the blade through the young farmer’s chest.

The man collapsed into the dust, choking on his own blood, and the entire village square fell into a breathless silence.

The plebeians realized their situation was hopeless as the remaining Roman mercenaries drew their weapons.

This brings us to the current situation of weeping and begging in the dust.

Quintus, who was usually mocked by the inner circles of the Senate for his thin bloodline and lack of political acumen, felt a terrifying rush of power.

Now that his wealthy family actually required his brutality, he was eager to prove his worth and gain their respect.

Looking at the weeping women and the bleeding corpse at his feet, Quintus knew his moment to ascend had finally arrived.

"Pull the women aside," Quintus ordered coldly. "Those who brought silver may pay and return to their hovels. Those who did not will surrender their men to the military immediately."

The wailing in the square grew deafening, but Quintus didn’t blink.

The mercenaries, following his command, grabbed the weeping mothers and wives who were kneeling in the dirt, dragging them backward by the hair.

Consumed by thoughts of gold and military power, Quintus remained unmoved.

Within minutes, every single male plebeian between the ages of ten and forty was forcefully shackled in chains, dragged away from their ancestral homes as living compensation for the war tax.

This exact event was replicating itself all over the Roman Empire...

With the orders given by Consul Valerian, it was impossible for the provinces not to devolve into this brutality.

Valerian was obsessed with accumulating enough strength to confront the Forge Master, viewing the destruction of the Syndicate as his sole purpose in life.

In the wealthy province of Sicily, the powerful senatorial families were aggressively sweeping the streets of Syracuse, operating as state-sanctioned thugs, liquidating plebeian businesses to immediately convert the copper into private military strength.

In the estates of Macedon and Greece, the Greek houses were executing a localized bloodbath.

Warlords were openly slaughtering rival magistrates and commoners alike, hoarding enough gold and conscripts to become the ultimate kingmakers when the Syndicate inevitably clashed with Rome.

Even in the pacified regions of Hispania, minor governors were dragging screaming teenagers from their beds, perfectly willing to burn their own provinces to the ground to prove their worth to the Senate.

However, unknown to Quintus and his laughing mercenaries, their actions in the Campanian dust were currently being witnessed by someone with dead eyes.

Crouched in the canopy of a large olive tree overlooking the village square, a figure cloaked in gray wool.

"Veteran, now is the perfect time. Let me open his throat," the figure whispered.

As the operative, a lethal Umbrae assassin named Camilla, shifted her weight to drop from the branch, drawing a unique, blackened-steel trench knife, her wrist was suddenly seized by a strong hand.

"No, Camilla. Hold your blade," an older, gray-haired Umbrae veteran murmured, his grip pleading with her to stop. "The Forge Master explicitly ordered us not to intervene in the patrician conscriptions."

Camilla gritted her teeth, her eyes burning with frustration as she watched the chained boys being dragged away. "We are just going to let them build their armies?"

"Yes," the old veteran replied. "By the time Commander Valerius crosses the Alps, the plebeians will have already sharpened the knives for us."

With the command of her superior, Camilla reluctantly sheathed her blade.

Though she was unwilling to leave the weeping mothers behind, she melted backward into the shadows of the olive branches.

Their next destination was the rotting heart of the beast: Rome itself.

***

December 19, 221, Civitas Aurelia, Gallia.

Inside the walls of the Forge Master’s praetorium, Lucius, having recently returned from his extensive shipyard inspection in Massilia, sat in the candlelight to accompany Valeria.

Currently, he was sitting in a chair next to their bed, reading the final pages of *The Gilded Cage*, the memoir Valeria had spent the last several months writing.

Because the manuscript was condensed, focusing on the horrors of patrician womanhood, Lucius did not take too long to finish reading the scroll.