Wild Dragon of Rome 50 (Patreon)

Scouting during the daytime was always a challenging affair even with all my new abilities. When we had bypassed the checkpoints, we were moving through the passages that were supposed to be impassable. Quite different from dealing with alert mages who were actively searching for me.

I kept a tight hold on my mana as I moved around, carefully erasing our tracks and laying false tracks. It was a slow, time-consuming affair, especially since I had to worry not just about the physical tracks, but also smells and mana residue.

I had to mix several herb mixtures that would conceal the smell without being too overpowering, which was a trick process. It slowed me down even more, but making sure the enemies wouldn’t have a track to follow was more important than understanding exactly who we were dealing with.

No matter how much it rankled me due to my teachings.

While my childhood training had been extensively on magic and combat, it was never to the point of neglecting the military training. My grandfather taught me a lot about military tactics, claiming that even a bastard of a Scipio family had to understand the basics.

Of course, what he considered basics was very different than what other people might have believed. Just like his magical training, his military training was nothing short of torture. But, as I started to catch the signs of the enemy, I was glad for it.

At this point, the only enemy I was able to feel was half a dozen shifters, each with wolf legs that made them move faster. Two of them had distorted faces as well, constantly sniffing. But, the pattern they spread, and the way they moved strongly implied that they didn’t fear any threat from behind them.

“So, the auxiliary scouts rather than some kind of raiding party,” I muttered to myself even as I approached. It was not good news. Having two enemies was better than having one. But, it wasn’t something I could change.

Instead, I circled around them, careful not to let them smell my presence, watching them operate. It was inconvenient that they were speaking in German, which prevented me from eavesdropping them. Still, I stayed, watching as they operated.

I was trying to understand just how good they were, so that I could adjust the quality of the false tracks I was laying. Those tracks needed to be obvious enough for them to catch it easily, yet subtle enough for them not to suspect foul play.

As I observed, I started taking note of their habits and tendencies, which cost me another precious hour. But, warfare was not the domain of the impatient. Everything depended on making them believe that we were moving deeper into the valley, and not outside.

Only after shifters actually believed those false tracks and started to move deeper, I retreated. I took a wide circle, checking Astrid and Lillian from a distance. They were still bickering, but not enough to actually make them careless.

I didn’t show myself to them. Instead, I moved in the opposite direction. Admittedly, even with my abilities, I wasn’t feeling entirely confident approaching an army. Particularly when that army was a Roman Legion.

Not a full legion, hopefully, but even a cohort was not something I wanted to tangle. One aspect of my very detailed military training. I knew exactly what I was facing, and it scared me.

There was a reason that the Roman Republic expanded when others had fallen despite their greater advantages. A legion was a dangerous combination of military and magical competence. Even the common soldiers would be signed for a fifteen-year term, summers spent fighting while winters spent training. Forty-eight hundred men, all living together, trained for one purpose.

And, while Rome had many faults, a commitment to meritocracy was not one of those mistakes. Any legionnaire that showed an aptitude for various types of magic had been allowed to train, and provided with resources from the legion coffers.

While they couldn’t match the potential of someone who had been trained since childhood, making a breakthrough to third order relatively rare, it still meant that even the weakest legion had more than a hundred mages, often more.

Add in the fact that they were led by a legate that was sent from Rome, which was either from a patrician family, or from a plebeian one that had enough political power to make them practically nobles, and always experienced sorcerers…

There was a reason I was tense.

I didn’t know just how much force they had committed to the valley, but the number of scouting parties I stumbled upon as I moved closer, I believed that they had committed at least a full-sized cohort. Four hundred and eighty soldiers, which didn’t count the auxiliary scouts and other servants.

Hopefully, it was not one of the cohorts that was led by a sorcerer, but merely a peak mage.

Knowing what I might face intimidated me somewhat, but not enough that I stopped moving. I traversed the forest, glad that I had spent a lot of time exploring the valley. That gave me a good path to avoid the risk of discovery or a sudden encounter with the scout parties.

Another half an hour of careful travel, I met with a secondary scouting party, this time legionnaires, their armor quite distinct. ”That’s not good news,” I muttered as I saw them at a distance. Twenty-four people, which meant three full teams.

It was not good news, for two reasons. First, assigning twenty-four soldiers to one scouting party was excessive unless they were expecting immediate combat. Moreover, from their search pattern, it was obvious that they were not the only scout team in the second wave. Their pattern suggested at least ten more.

Which was half a cohort. So, either they were led by someone totally incompetent, deciding to send their full force to search the valley without surrounding the place, or I was dealing with far more than one cohort.

I grimaced. As much as I wanted the first one to be true — as incompetent centurions were not exactly unheard of — I had a feeling that the second was far more likelier.

A deep breath later, I moved to the side, making sure to put some distance with the scout group. From such a great distance, I couldn’t be sure whether they had a dedicated scout mage. Depending on their method, I might get caught.

I stayed hidden, watching the way they moved and reacted to the threats. It was not too difficult as long as I was willing to commit some time. I stayed behind a rock, watching them from a great distance. I didn’t even need to arrange a distraction. The valley was teeming with enough second-order beasts for it to happen soon.

A large snake approached their group a little too close before they noticed, but a large bear, they noticed easily. Just to confirm, I moved closer to their group with soft, silent steps, but it went unnoticed.

An earth mage, detecting the approach through vibrations. A good method for a thick forest in a deep valley, as it didn’t rely on visibility. Unfortunately for him, I was agile enough to fake the gait of a beast. Soon, I circled around them safely, bypassing the second scout party.

“Now, I just need to find a nice vantage point,” I said as I moved to a location I remembered. It was a thick portion of forest near a spring, with trees around much taller. More importantly, it was sufficiently out of the way not to have any scout nearby, and the main army would be far away from it due to a lack of flat space nearby.

A perfect target for me to carefully observe them without being discovered in turn. However, that didn’t mean I could afford to be hasty. I climbed the tree, careful not to ruffle even a branch until I was high enough to see the entrance of the valley.

The moment I saw that, a curse escaped my mouth. It wasn’t the number of soldiers I could see at the entrance. I could count three hundred, which was already in my calculations. It was their main camp, and I could see the military standards of two cohorts, each belonging to the 11th Legion, but there was no legion standard.

Meaning, the deployment was ‘merely’ for a thousand soldiers. Nowhere near the worst case.

No, I cursed for a different reason. The moment I looked at their main camp, anger hit me hard. I could have suppressed it easily, but before I could do so, the dragon heart flared, filling my body with a dangerous amount of mana, too thick for me to contain it properly.

As for who was responsible for it.

A group of soldiers, displaying a standard with a sigil of a black snake. And, at the center, an unknown man who earned my fury for a simple reason. On his back, there was a familiar weapon.

The Spear of Scipio.