Boots, Blood, and Booty

218 BC. Hannibal's war is bleeding Iberia dry. Lu Sykes, a former U.S. Army operator and historian, wakes two thousand years out of her own time, dropped into the starving body of a Carthaginian war-widow by a desperate ritual to the goddess Tanit. Something answered that prayer. Now skills sharpen a hair too fast, wounds close a hair too clean, and a divine hand rests on her shoulder, no menus, no stat screens, just power that wears the mask of a goddess's favor. Is she a fraud, fortune's favorite, or something none of them understand? This world is gritty and merciless: lice and labor, raiders who prey on villages the war has stripped of men, corpses left for the crows. Lu doesn't fight like a hero. She fights like a rogue, dirty, fast, size-cheating, going for the eyes and the throat, ending men with a farm hook because that's what's in her hand. When raiders come in the night, the village watches her butcher them and stops seeing a woman at all. They see the Lady, come in blood and fire. A grimdark historical LitRPG about grief, survival, and the terrible birth of a legend, powered by a deity-driven, skill-based system with no screens and no mercy.