Chapter 380: A Clever Enemy

"My scouts are dead?"

Inside the command tent, a tall, muscular man with gray hair and matching eyes raised an eyebrow in confusion. He wore legionnaire armor, his centurion helmet placed neatly on the desk before him. Beside him stood a younger man, blonde-haired, dressed in similar steel and crimson.

"Yes, general," the blonde answered, voice tight with unease.

Mars didn't need his men to tell him this—the system had already sent the notification. He simply enjoyed playing the role. That was part of the fun for him, after all: immersion. The blood, the sweat, the reports from subordinates—it gave the game a taste of real war. Sometimes he even disabled notifications entirely, just to let the tension and uncertainty drag on.

Two dead scouts meant nothing. This was the beginning of the match, and in the beginning, scouts always died. The only purpose they served was to probe enemy movements and discover the camp. Killing and being killed were inevitable.

"Which scouts?" Mars asked, scratching at his short beard.

"The western ones, general."

"Hmm," Mars grunted. "And the others? East? North?"

"They are still reporting in, General," the blonde said quickly. "But… no news of the enemy's camp yet."

Mars narrowed his eyes, gaze sliding over the glowing map stretched across the table. Small figurines marked his claimed nodes, while the rest of the forest lay under a thick veil of fog.

"General," the blonde continued, hesitating, "since some of the northern and eastern nodes have already been spotted and claimed, I can, with ninety-five percent certainty, say the enemy's camp must be to the West."

"..." Mars fell silent for a moment, thinking.

Because this game mode is simple and focuses on realism, the system notified him when his soldiers died, but it gave no details. No cause of death. No enemy names. Just the cold fact of loss.

For a moment, Mars smiled faintly. It was the smile of a predator who had finally scented blood.

"So, West," he murmured. His fingers closed into a fist over the map. "Then I know where to march."

"General?!"

"No." Mars' voice cut like a blade, sharp and absolute. "The Romans do not wait. We crush, its in our blood."

"Yes, general." The blonde slammed his chest.

Mars rose to his feet, broad shoulders straining against the leather straps of his armor. He reached for the centurion helmet, lifting it slowly, reverently, before placing it atop his head. The iron plume glinted in the lantern light.

"Ready the legion," he commanded. "Double the spearmen at the front, swords at their flanks. Archers behind. And send word to the engineers—I want catapult parts ready for transport within the hour."

The blonde hurried out of the tent, his boots thudding against the packed earth, leaving Mars alone with the map's faint glow.

Mars exhaled slowly, savoring the weight of the helmet pressing down on his brow. He flexed his hands, imagining the clash to come—the screams, the iron, the blood, the chaos. It had been too long since he felt a worthy challenge.

"West…" he whispered again, his voice low, dangerous. But he paused studying the map more. Something didn't feel right to him; his gray eyes kept shifting from west to north searching for an answer to what bugged him.

Mars wasn't just a god of war; he was also a god of the battlefield and strategy, which meant that his ability to analyze was far greater than that of the average god of war.

But since his worshipers were the Romans and their fighting style usually involved marching straight at the enemy and crushing them by sheer numbers, his strategic side wasn't known to many even after thousands of years from his great ascension.

Yes, Mars is an ascended god; he was once a human from Earth. A Roman general who died honorably defending his homeland, and through his sacrifice, Rome survived.

Jupiter, the god-king of the Roman pantheon, or 'Dii Consentes', like some prefer to call them, was moved by Mars' selfless sacrifice of dying for the empire and not for his own personal glory, so he helped the man ascend as the new Roman god of war.

"I don't like it."

After studying the map for a few minutes, Mars couldn't help but narrow his eyes in suspicion, and an uncomfortable feeling began growing stronger.

"Now, if it were me, I would attack the farthest scouts from my camp and leave the rest to create the illusion that my camp is nearby."

What Mars failed to realize was that his assumption was true. And Morgana did exactly that. Attacking the scouts in the west to lure him into thinking that her camp was in the western part of the map, she even allowed him to capture two nodes in the north just to completely confirm his belief.

"This game will be a lot harder than I had expected," Mars muttered. All of his previous opponents were far below his skill, and their strategies were nothing impressive. They'd always preferred to face head-on, which was unacceptable to Mars.

He was the Roman here, marching straight to the enemy was his right as a general of the great Rome, their most honorable and patriotic act. No one is allowed to do the same.

But after years of the same playing style, he got bored and needed a change.

"A clever enemy," he muttered. "Perhaps too clever."

His jaw clenched. He could feel it now, the nagging pressure in the back of his mind—a battlefield instinct honed over decades as a mortal, sharpened even further by centuries as a god.

The Romans might have worshiped brute force, but Mars himself was never blind. He had bled for Rome, died for it, and in his death earned godhood not by arrogance, but by clarity of thought.

"This reeks of deception," he said softly, though no one was left to hear him. "Strike the farthest scouts, leave the closest alive… make me think the camp is west, when in truth it is not."

"If it were me…" His words trailed, the thought unfinished. But the answer was obvious—because it was him. His opponent thought like he did.

Mars' grin returned, colder this time. He leaned over the map, both fists braced on the wooden edge. "So you want me to march west. You want me blind to the north. Clever… too clever, Morgana."

"General!" The tent flap stirred as the blonde returned, saluting sharply. "The spearmen are in formation. Archers stand ready. The engineers—"

"Silence." Mars cut him off with a single word, not raising his voice, but the weight of it made the younger man freeze mid-breath.

Mars slowly straightened, his silhouette immense under the flickering light.

"Cancel the march."

"Cancel?" The blonde's eyes widened. "General, but the men—"

"The men will wait." Mars' voice rumbled like distant thunder. "If we march west now, we step into their jaws. I will not give my enemy the satisfaction of springing their little trap."

The blonde swallowed hard, nodding quickly.

"North, east or west—it does not matter. They bleed the same. But this foe…" He smirked, the faintest curl of amusement tugging at his lips. "…this foe has teeth."

For the first time since entering this so-called "game," Mars felt the ember of something he had long thought extinguished: anticipation.

"Good," he whispered, tightening the straps of his armor. "Very good, Morgana."

Mars had one advantage over Morgana; he claimed too many nodes, 25 in total, and with his command tent, 300 resource points per minute was quite a threat; it allowed him to upgrade the standard spearmen into legionnaires, and construct the workshop to build his favorite, the catapults.

There was nothing better than the destructive power of a well-placed siege weapon.

"AHHH!"

"!!!" Suddenly, a horrifying scream cut through the night. Mars immediately stormed out of his tent, spear in hand, and found two men standing immobilized in shock.

"What happened?" Mars barked.

"B-Blood," One of them managed to utter, raising a shaking finger to the sky.

"Hmm?" Mars followed the pointing finger, and what his eyes saw was a terrifying sight.

One of his men was suspended in mid-air, thrashing, his boots kicking uselessly against the night sky. His scream gurgled, cut short as a pale figure clung to his throat like a bat to fruit. Fangs glinted in the torchlight, blood streaming in thick rivulets down the soldier's chest.

The legionnaires below roared in outrage, but none dared move closer. The man's body convulsed violently, then went limp—dangling like a butchered pig—before being ripped apart in half, an explosion of gore and crimson that rained down on the torches below.

"Form ranks!" Mars bellowed, his voice booming across the camp. His spear was glowing golden as he leveled it forward. "Shields up!"

The order came just in time. Shadows poured from the tree line. Dozens of them, sliding over the ground like liquid night. The torches flickered wildly as the figures took form—men and women with glowing crimson eyes, mouths smeared with gore, their movements jerky and inhumanly fast.

Vampires.

Just as they were about to clash with the shield wall, the vampires dissolved into screeching clouds of bats, wings slicing through the night like black knives. They poured over the line, around shields, into helmets—biting, clawing, tearing chunks of flesh before reforming into pale, red-eyed horrors within the very ranks of the Romans.

The camp erupted in chaos. Legionnaires screamed as their comrades dropped beside them, throats ripped out, eyes gouged, faces chewed into pulp. One man tore off his own helmet, shrieking as bats crawled down his throat, bursting from his mouth in a spray of blood.

"Hold! Hold the line!" Mars roared, his voice thunder, but even his command could not bind terrified men who saw shadows killing shadows, who saw monsters materialize inside their formations.

"Damn it," He cursed, raising his spear up, gathering his divine energy, before slamming it three times against his shield. "FOR ROME!"

Immediately, a massive golden barrier covered the whole camp, pushing the vampires away from the Roman lines. That's when Mars was able to get a clear picture of his opponents.

Or at least the one in the front.

"Morgana?" He was shocked to see the silver-haired goddess with bat wings, even more surprising that she actually had the balls to directly attack his camp with only six units.

"Hello~Mars, missed me?"

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