Chapter 138: Praetorian Fortress

"What about my brother..."

"He has already been turned into a puppet for the Inquisition. There is no time for grief; I will outline the tactical situation during the extraction." Aurelia tied a tourniquet above her bleeding wound. "Where are the keys to those heavy iron shackles on your ankles?"

The Prefect pointed a shaking finger toward his neck instead. "They didn’t just shackle my legs. Tribune Severus explicitly locked this onto me."

Aurelia’s heart dropped upon seeing the collar locked around his throat...

It was engineered so that tampering with the lock without the precise key would instantly crush the prisoner’s windpipe.

"Do you know exactly where the Tribune secured the key?"

"He did not take it with him. He locked it inside the main security vault at the entrance of the cell block," Flavius whispered, his breath shallow.

It was obvious that after capturing the Lord of Noricum, the Praetorians had opted to utilize the most extreme restraints possible to ensure he could not be rescued by a standard infiltration team.

She would have to force the lock open to successfully extract the Prefect without alerting the entire fortress.

"We are moving to the security vault," Aurelia stated. "Stay directly behind me."

She grabbed the gladii from the dead Praetorians, and limped down the corridor.

Suddenly, a clanging of alarm bells shattered the silence.

"That is the general garrison alarm," Flavius said.

"I calculated they would realize I was here eventually," Aurelia whispered. "Our only chance of survival is to move with vastly more speed than the enemy."

The blaring alarm actually provided a minor advantage...

Every single guard stationed in the subterranean levels would immediately swarm toward the primary chokepoint at the stairwell, creating a condensed kill zone for her revolver.

She advanced toward the stairwell, raising her percussion pistol.

As the first wave of Praetorians rushed down the stairs, she pulled the trigger.

The lead ball pierced the first soldier’s breastplate and instantly struck the man behind him, splattering hot blood across the walls.

In the torchlight, the guards were clueless as to her exact firing angle...

After unloading her remaining five rounds into the bottleneck, no guard was left standing on the lower landing.

However, Aurelia knew these were merely the local garrison soldiers, and a fully armored cohort of the Inquisition’s elite executioners was undoubtedly marching down the corridor at this exact moment.

If she could not sever the iron collar before they arrived, establishing a viable extraction route would be impossible.

Flavius pressed his neck against the iron teeth of the vice, and Aurelia engaged the gears, furiously cranking the lever.

With the mechanical multiplication of the pulleys, the vice slowly warped the collar, creating just enough space for the internal spring lock to shatter.

At that exact moment, the clattering of Roman hobnailed boots echoed directly outside the vault doors.

"The infiltrator is trapped inside!" Tribune Severus roared.

"Lock shields! First rank, loose javelins!"

"Move!" Aurelia grabbed the Prefect by his robes and dragged him toward the door, but a volley of pilum javelins shattered the wood.

It was clear these elite Inquisition soldiers were trained to combat close-quarters ambushes.

They had hurled their first volley directly through the doorway to deny her the exit, while the second rank held their weapons in reserve...

They were patiently waiting for her to expose herself in the corridor.

As Aurelia pushed Flavius into the open, the second wave of javelins tore through the air toward them.

Is Aurelia heard the sickening whistle of the tips and shoved the Prefect behind her body, screaming, "Get down!"

A blinding impact slammed into her back, but she did not stop her forward momentum, tackling Flavius into the adjacent stairwell.

As they crashed onto the steps, Aurelia tasted copper in her mouth, likely from biting through her lip in pain. "Are you intact?"

"If a Roman noble gets impaled, he dies instantly, but I have superior armor." Aurelia reached behind her back and realized the silk Lucius had engineered into her trench coat had actually caught the iron tips... although her ribs felt as if they had been shattered by a blacksmith’s hammer, the blades had not penetrated her internal organs.

The elite Praetorians were advancing down the corridor.

They had calculated that no human could survive a direct volley without a shield, so they were breaking formation to secure the bodies.

This was her only window... Aurelia grabbed Flavius by his collar and violently dragged him up the stairs toward the outer courtyard.

Reaching the exterior, she pulled a flare gun from her harness and pulled the lanyard.

A red light shot directly into the blizzard, exploding into an intensely brilliant shower of magnesium sparks that turned the dark sky into daylight.

When the Forge Master had engineered this specific device, he had boasted that a single flare would instantly summon the wrath of the Syndicate to her exact coordinates.

Right now, Aurelia did not require an entire army; she only prayed that Silas had not abandoned his sniper overwatch.

Within seconds, a terrifying roar echoed from the ridge, and the portcullis of the courtyard was blown off its hinges.

Silas and Camilla charged through the blinding snow, Camilla utilizing her twin trench-knives to execute the confused guards at the gate.

"What... what in Tartarus is happening?!" Prefect Flavius stared in awe.

"Those are my extraction specialists," Aurelia gasped, her vision beginning to blur.

She instructed Silas to carry the exhausted Prefect, used the last ounce of her adrenaline to drag herself onto Silas’s horse, and spat a mouthful of blood into the snow.

"Execute full retreat."

"Understood." Silas kicked his horse into a gallop, disappearing into the Alpine night, leaving the burning Praetorian fortress far behind them.

...

High in the ridges of the Noricum Alps, Silas erected a tent deep within a secluded limestone cave, shielding them from the blizzard.

Aurelia sat by a coal brazier to thaw her limbs. She rolled up the leather of her trousers and examined her left shin.

The flesh surrounding the impact zone was swollen and deeply discolored.

She had not felt the crippling pain during the extraction, but now, as her heart rate finally slowed, she struggled to lift her foot.

It was incredibly dangerous to engage in high-speed espionage in her current condition.

Besides sterile cotton wraps and a small glass vial of distilled rubbing alcohol, she retrieved a paste explicitly synthesized by Dr. Tullia for deep blunt-force trauma.

Try as she might to maintain her stoic facade, Aurelia could not stifle a gasp and a grimace when the alcohol was poured into her open wound.

If the Forge Master had not lectured the officer corps that alcohol annihilated the bacteria that caused gangrene, she would have genuinely considered this a form of torture...

To Aurelia’s relief, the blinding burn was suppressed by the application of the chemical paste.

As soon as her leg was firmly wrapped in tight linen bandages, she felt a wave of comfort wash over her.

"Your spine..." Prefect Flavius said in a shaken voice, sitting across the fire. "Are you intact?"