Kent Hive, the plaza before the Governor's Palace.
All decorative fixtures and structures had been completely cleared from the plaza.
The perimeter was secured by exactly one thousand PDF soldiers. These warriors wore standardized dark grey uniforms, with the Crimson Dawn insignia—a cogwheel and a stalk of wheat supporting a rising sun—pinned over their left breasts.
Their flak armor consisted of the newest plasteel-insert plates, and their lasrifles were standard-issue weapons manufactured on the assembly lines hauled over from the Crimson Dawn base.
But more importantly, their eyes.
Resolute and focused, they carried a reverence bordering on religious devotion.
These men and women all hailed from the Aurelian Youth League—the very first batch of local forces recruited by Crimson Dawn after implementing their new policies in Kent Hive.
The entry requirements had been stringent: aged sixteen to thirty-five, in good physical health, possessing a clean criminal record, passing a strict political screening, and completing basic military training.
They had sworn an oath: "To fight for the defense of Aurelian, and for the ideals of Crimson Dawn."
The rewards, however, were equally substantial: three guaranteed meals a day, a salary three times the hive average, priority medical care and educational resources for their families, and... dignity.
"Look sharp, everyone!"
Aska, a former worker and now the Captain of the Youth League's First Company, patrolled back and forth in front of the defensive line, looking sharp in his crisp officer's uniform. "The Chapter Master is about to speak! This concerns the very survival of our planet!"
"Yes, Captain!" the soldiers replied in unison, their grips tightening slightly on their weapons.
Most of them had come from the absolute bottom of the hive. They had been miners, menial laborers, nameless nobodies who could have starved to death in a gutter at any moment.
Until one month ago, when Crimson Dawn arrived. When the Governor named Cage Lawrence enacted new policies, and the giant named Paul established the Youth League.
For the first time in their lives, they had full bellies. For the first time, they received their wages in full. For the first time, they felt like... like they were actually human beings.
So now, upon hearing that some people intended to destroy all of this, that corruption sought to swallow their home...
These hive citizens, who had once been numbly waiting for death, gripped their rifles tight.
–
In the center of the plaza, five thousand players had already assembled.
Paul walked out from the main doors of the Governor's Palace.
He wore his power armor, the Crimson Dawn sun insignia painted on his right pauldron.
He stepped onto the raised dais, his gaze sweeping over the more than four thousand faces below.
These were his brothers. Souls from another world who had started right alongside him as slaves in an industrial zone.
Together, they had lived through riots, built a base, achieved genetic ascension, played political games with a Primarch, taken over a hive city, and pulled off a massive heist...
And now, they stood here.
Standing on a world about to be devoured by Chaos, standing at the turning point for thirty billion lives.
"Brothers," Paul spoke, his voice booming across the plaza through his armor's external vox-casters. "From the moment we arrived on this damned planet... from the moment we opened our eyes in that abandoned factory... we have constantly been challenging the world."
"We challenged the breathing tax. We challenged starvation. We challenged oppression. We challenged the scum who treated us like lab rats, and we challenged the consuls who wanted to turn us into slaves."
He paused, the pentagram in his eyes beginning to rotate, the light of the five traits flashing deep within his pupils.
"And we won."
"We survived. We built a base. We saved lives. We even... legally obtained the administrative rights to a hive city from an Imperial Primarch."
Low chuckles rippled through the crowd below.
It was true. Just two and a half months ago, they had been stressing over a daily breathing tax of 0.3 Imperial Coins. And now?
Crimson Dawn controlled a hive city of nearly a hundred million people, with two hundred and seventy billion requisitioned Imperial Coins sitting in their account.
Not even riding a rocket could describe how fast their game progression had been.
"But now, a new challenge has arrived," Paul's voice abruptly turned freezing cold. "Chaos has invaded the City of the Holy Anthem. A mass corruption of psykers has occurred, a Warp rift has torn open, and daemons are swarming out like locusts. Sanguinius is assembling his fleet. He is going to purge the City of the Holy Anthem; he intends to rip it back from the clutches of Chaos."
He took a step forward. "But can we completely trust him?"
"He is an Imperial Primarch, a cold, calculating Legion Master. He holds the launch codes for cyclonic torpedoes in his hands. He can initiate Exterminatus at any moment and turn this entire planet into glass."
The chuckles in the plaza died down instantly.
"I cannot trust him," Paul continued. "Because Sanguinius has too many options. He can purge, he can bombard, he can even... retreat."
"But we do not have those options."
He spread his arms wide, as if attempting to embrace the entire hive city, to embrace this world they had personally saved and rebuilt.
"Behind us are over twenty thousand brother workers we brought out of the Crimson Dawn base. There are ninety-eight million citizens of Kent Hive who are just now learning what the word 'dignity' means. There are thirty billion humans on Aurelian IV who haven't given up hope yet."
"If we run, what happens to them?"
"If we put our faith in Sanguinius, and he chooses to initiate Exterminatus, what happens to them?!"
Paul's voice grew louder, heavier, until he was practically roaring.
"Therefore, I am telling you this: we cannot pin all our hopes on someone else! We must possess the power to protect this planet ourselves! We must possess the strength to make Sanguinius hesitate before he even thinks about pushing that button! We must possess the capital to carve out our own path, right between Chaos and the Imperium!"
He took a deep breath, the starlight in his eyes blazing brilliantly.
"I promised you all before that everyone would have the opportunity to become an Astartes."
"Right now... that promise can be fulfilled."
The crowd below instantly exploded.
"Seriously?!"
"Holy shit!"
"I wanna be a Space Marine! I wanna pilot a Dreadnought!"
"Bullshit! Dreadnoughts are for critically wounded veterans! I wanna be a Knight! I wanna pilot a Titan!"
Amidst the uproar, a player named [I Want to Become a Steel Behemoth] pushed his way to the very front, craning his neck and shouting up at the dais.
"Paul! I just wanna pilot a mech! I only got tricked into playing this because of that opening cinematic! That red mech was too fucking cool!"
A player next to him instantly grabbed him in a headlock and burst out laughing. "Bro, you really wanna pilot a Dreadnought? Once you're strapped into one of those, you never come out! You eat, sleep, and shit in there! It's a literal walking coffin!"
"A Dreadnought is fine by me!" [I Want to Become a Steel Behemoth] shot back. "Even a Dreadnought is way better than a tin-can Space Marine! At least I'll have an autocannon! And missiles! And a power claw! What do you guys get? A bolter and a chainsword! You look like street thugs having a gang war!"
A wave of laughter rippled through the surrounding players.
Paul smiled as well. He recognized this player. In reality, he was a massive Gundam fanatic who constantly whined in the regional channel about when he'd finally get to pilot a mech.
"You can."
Paul nodded, his voice suppressing the clamor through the external vox-casters. "You can choose any path of augmentation you desire: Space Marine augmentation, Tech-Priest cybernetic conversion, Knight pilot, or even a Titan Princeps. But there are two conditions. First, all augmentation costs are clearly priced in the system store. A full Space Marine augmentation starts at six million Imperial Coins. A standard Contemptor Dreadnought is thirty million. An Armiger-class Knight is eighty million. A Warhound Titan... five hundred million."
A collective gasp echoed across the plaza.
"Second, you will bear the cost of your augmentations yourselves, or more accurately, it will be an advance," Paul said, holding up a second finger. "Crimson Dawn will provide you with zero-interest loans, but you must repay them through future missions. Killing daemons, completing objectives, recovering resources... In short, you must prove your worth."
He looked directly at [I Want to Become a Steel Behemoth]. "A Castraferrum Dreadnought costs thirty million Imperial Coins, which is equivalent to the augmentation costs of five Space Marines. Are you absolutely certain?"
The player answered without a shred of hesitation. "I am absolutely certain! Paul, in reality, I'm just a draftsman. I collect tons of mech models, but I'd never get to touch a real mech in my entire life. But here... I can pilot a Dreadnought! I can fight daemons! I can protect the people we've saved! Don't just say thirty million Imperial Coins—so what if it was a hundred million?! At worst, I'll just log in every single day and hack daemons to pieces! I really just want to pilot a mech so badly... Let me pilot a mech! Just once. I... want... it... so... bad!"
A player next to him named [Six-Flavor Emperor Pill] piped up, "Oh no, his mech-addiction is acting up again. Step aside, my piss is yellow, let me hose him down and wake him up!"
Paul took a deep look at [I Want to Become a Steel Behemoth] before turning back to the crowd. "Did you hear that? He is willing to wager his entire future in this world for his dream, and to protect hive citizens he has never even met. Therefore, I am announcing that Crimson Dawn's total militarization begins right now! The cap for biological augmentation loans is ten million Imperial Coins! The cap for mech augmentation is thirty million! Slots are limited, first come, first served! But the only non-negotiable requirement is this..."
Paul looked at the crowd. "For the first phase, the liveries of all augmented units must adhere strictly to Imperial Legion standards. We are going to protect this planet, but we cannot do it under the name of Crimson Dawn."
He glanced down at Cogboy, Schrödinger Bro, and Blood Angels' Second Emperor below the dais. "Because right now, Sanguinius is still watching from orbit. Because right now, we are still too weak. We must hide in the shadow of the Imperium. We must use their colors, their insignias, and their name to do what we must do."
Paul clenched his fist, the revving of his chainsword suddenly spiking. "When the day comes that we are strong enough that we no longer need to hide... When the day comes that we can make Sanguinius sit down and listen to us speak... When the day comes that we earn the right to raise our own third banner of dawn between Chaos and the Imperium... On that day, I will personally paint the rising sun, the stars, the cog, and the wheat of Crimson Dawn upon your armor. But right now... let us begin forging the foundation of that future."
Paul leaped off the high dais, kicking up a ring of dust as he landed. "Go to Cogboy for registration. Go to Tax Bro and White Scars for training. Three days."
He looked at all the players, at the brothers whose eyes were now burning with fire. "In three days, I want to see an army. An army powerful enough to make Sanguinius hesitate, to make Chaos tremble in fear, and to let this dark universe know... that this is an army of humanity that has not given up hope."
The crowd erupted into deafening cheers.
The five thousand players surged toward the registration booths at the edge of the plaza like a bursting dam.
Cogboy was instantly swamped. His mechanical eye whirred frantically as the application queue on his data-slate refreshed at lightning speed.
"I want to be a Space Marine! Give me Salamander gene-seed!"
"Give me White Scars! I wanna be cavalry!"
"Tech-Priest! I want my left hand swapped for a power claw and my right hand for a melta gun!"
"Do you have anything spicier? Like... Grey Knights? Or Custodes would work too!"
Amidst the chaos, Schrödinger Bro quietly slipped over to Paul's side and lowered his voice. "Paul, the Blood Angels fleet in orbit has already begun to move. Countless transport ships are ferrying massive numbers of auxiliary troops toward the City of the Holy Anthem."
Paul nodded, casting his gaze skyward. His psychic perception pierced through the hive's dome, visualizing the warships mobilizing in orbit. "Let them fight first. The Blood Angels against the Tzeentchian daemons, a Primarch against corrupted psykers... this war won't end that quickly." He turned back to Schrödinger Bro. "How many of our undercover operatives are still in the City of the Holy Anthem?"
"Seventeen," Schrödinger Bro replied. These were the players who had infiltrated earlier and chosen to hide in place after the Chaos outbreak, rather than dying and respawning back at the base. "I'll tell them to stay deep undercover and gather intel. By the way, the players searching for lore offline sent back a message. Just like how they can't find any record of this planet, they also can't find a single record of a massive Chaos contamination outbreak on a world at the tail end of the Great Crusade."
Paul looked back up at the sky. "It seems we really have become just another line of text in the background lore of countless planets. But that's normal. After all, in the lore, this universe is simply too vast, and there are too many worlds. But since we are here, we might as well go all out. We'll carve out a piece of the sky that belongs to us, a land forged by the convictions of Crimson Dawn."
He looked down at the rowdy, laughing players and smiled faintly.
--
Deep within the Warp, inside the blurred divine realm near the Astronomican, Lucian watched the rapidly growing players and Paul, offering a calm smile.
"This is merely a single probing move among countless possibilities by Him. It is a test for you, and a test for me. As expected of the Big Blue Bird, He is far too cautious. To catch a fleeting glimpse of the players' anomalies across countless possibilities, and to immediately lay down a scheme in an unrealized timeline... He even factored me into His calculations. But let's see if everything truly goes according to Your plan this time!"
With that, his figure grew extremely indistinct, and the presence of his blurred divine realm diminished to the absolute limit!
--
Goal = 250 Powerstones.
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