This is the bonus chatper for reaching 300 Powerstones.
Next Goal = 500 Powerstones.
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The command room on the second floor of the Crimson Dawn main hall had fallen into a heavy silence.
Tax Bro chewed on a cigarette—he bought them from the shop for 50 Imperial Coins—the smoke slowly spiraling upward in the dim light.
His fingers holding the cigarette trembled slightly, the cherry flaring and dimming with every breath.
The dozen or so people around him had all lit up as well. Amidst the swirling smoke, their faces appeared blurred and solemn.
"So..." Tax Bro's voice was hoarse. "Now, you really can't log out of the game, Zeke??"
Paul calmly nodded.
Seated in a specially elevated stone chair, his 8 feet frame still loomed massively over everyone else.
"Wasn't this within our expectations?"
After the Astartes vocal cord augmentation, his voice was a deep, resonant rumble, though he kept the volume deliberately low.
He looked around the rough-hewn stone table at the fifteen core officers.
These were the trusted members who had passed a month of life-and-death trials and rigorous evaluation:
The four Chapter Masters, Blood Angel, G Bro, Soul of Cadia, Have You Been Loyal Today?, I Finks It Works, and a few others.
Schrödinger Bro spoke slowly. "Then why didn't you discuss it with us before agreeing?"
He paused, offering a helpless smile. "Oh, right, I forgot. You didn't really have the option to discuss it, did you? But aren't you gambling with your life? Even though you have the Perfect Respawn trait, what if you can never finish that quest to save humanity in the Mecha Universe? What do you do if you can never go back? Are you just going to stay in this cesspool of a world forever?"
A few suppressed sighs echoed in the command room.
Paul swept his gaze over the group.
"No need to be so pessimistic." He said, "I know the plot, and I have your help."
"We know exactly what's going to happen over the next ten thousand years. The Horus Heresy, the Siege of Terra, the Emperor sitting on the Golden Throne, the War of the Beast, the Great Rift, Guilliman's resurrection... there's so much room to maneuver."
He stood up and walked over to the massive map of Aurelian IV on the wall, his Black Carapace rippling faintly beneath his skin.
"There's no point worrying about things so far in the future."
Paul tapped his finger against the map, producing dull thuds. "Right now, we need to focus on how to conquer Aurelian IV!"
Cogboy finally spoke up. His mechanical eye blinked with a rhythmic blue light, and the servo-motors in his arms hummed softly. "What's done is done. There's no point dwelling on it. All we can do is put everything we have into helping him complete the quest."
He pulled out a projector and cast a holographic data display into the air.
[Current Comprehensive Combat Assessment of Crimson Dawn]
[Total Players: 5,000]
[Average Enhancement Level: Type-II Basic Physique 62%, Type-II Sensory/Neural Reflex 41%]
[Number of Psykers: 513 (B-Rank or higher: 27)]
[Mechanically Augmented Players: 891]
[Heavy Weaponry: Lasgun popularization rate 83%, Heavy Support Weapons (modified stubbers, heavy las) 142 units]
[Vehicles: Modified Transport Trucks 34, Standard Transport Trucks 60, Armed Assault Tractors 12, Engineering Mechs 2]
[Native Workers: 2,137 (Militia reserves currently in training: 816)]
[Imperial Coin Reserves: Total Chapter Account ≈ 4.7 Million]
Cogboy's voice was completely flat. "With Zeke's current power as an Astartes and a Storm-Tier Psyker… combined with our current Imperial Coin reserves and player combat strength, we could easily conquer not just small towns, but even some of those minor Hives."
White Scars' eyes lit up. "Then what are we waiting for? The main forces of the four major factions are currently pinned down by Daemons in the industrial zone. This is the perfect time to strike! Let's pull off a massive heist while they're distracted!"
"That's exactly the problem." Cogboy shook his head. One of his mechanical arms traced a red circle in the air, highlighting the Aru Hive cluster. "Because they are being pushed back by the Daemons, we absolutely cannot attack the Hives."
Blood Angel looked thoughtful. "You mean... they'll...?"
"Call for reinforcements." Cogboy pulled up the intel compiled by the workers and recon squads. "The Aru Hive cluster has a total population of 550 million. They aren't going to just hand it all over to Daemons. If the Daemons reach their gates and they realize they can't hold them, what will they do?"
Soul of Cadia drew a sharp breath. "They'll beg for help from the Navis Imperialis, or even... an Astartes Legion."
"Exactly." The blue light in Cogboy's mechanical eye flared. "If we attack the Hive now, we expose our scale and motives too early, putting ourselves right in their crosshairs."
"When the Astartes Legion arrives, all the four major factions have to do is hand them a report claiming Crimson Dawn is an allied faction of the Chaos rebellion and the inside men for the Daemon invasion."
He paused, a rare note of gravity creeping into his voice. "If that happens, we will be added straight to the Astartes Legion's purge list. With our current strength, even if we grew ten times larger, we wouldn't stand a chance against a fully equipped Astartes strike fleet. We're talking about thousands of Space Marines, backed by Battle Barges, cruisers, and orbital bombardment arrays."
The command room went dead silent.
Tax Bro took a drag of his cigarette, then ground the butt out hard against the stone table. "Fucking hell... these game devs are dogs."
"We can't attack the Hives, but if we don't attack, we have no resources to develop."
"That's why we stick to the original plan." Paul's finger traced across the map, bypassing the red icons denoting the Hives, and came to a stop over dozens of grey markers scattered across the wasteland. "Using the towns to encircle the Hives."
He looked at the group. "In the short term, the returns might look incredibly low. A small town has a few thousand to tens of thousands of people, limited resources, and a weak industrial foundation."
"But as long as we play our cards right, we can snowball. In the window between the Daemons clashing with the four factions and the arrival of Imperial reinforcements, we can quietly complete our primary accumulation of power."
White Scars frowned. "But the towns have weak defenses. It's easy for us to take them, but hard to hold them. The main forces of the four factions might be pinned down, but they can still spare mobile strike teams to wipe us out."
"That is a tactical issue." Paul smiled. It was an Astartes smile—harboring an almost inhuman, chilling rationality. "We don't raise our flags."
"We don't claim occupation. We intervene under the guise of mercenaries, a wandering warband." He tapped three locations on the map. "Red Town. Merida Town. Bordeaux Town."
"These three towns form a triangle. All three are within a hundred to a hundred-and-fifty-kilometer radius of our base."
"We know Red Town. Chaotic, impoverished, indirectly controlled by the Aru Group."
"Merida Town survives mostly on scrap metal recovery. The actual rulers are local gangs."
"Bordeaux Town is the most unique. It houses underground manufactorums leftover from the Blaec House era. It's currently occupied by a massive bandit syndicate called the Iron Claws. The town has over ten thousand residents living as semi-slaves."
Paul tapped hard on Bordeaux Town. "These three towns share one thing in common: they are on the very fringes of the four factions' control, and have never truly been integrated into their management systems."
"The Aru Group only has a single tax-collecting consul and a few hundred guards stationed in Red Town. The gangs in Merida Town pay an annual tribute to the Atens Knight House. And the bandits in Bordeaux Town... they don't answer to anyone, but they're smart enough not to provoke the major factions."
"So, our strategy is this." He looked around the room. "In one day, we are going to take all three towns."