Aurelian IV. Kent Hive.
Twenty-four years ago, this former mining hive was nothing more than a bleak, gray jungle of steel.
Today, it was completely unrecognizable.
Genetically optimized vines crawled all over the hive's massive exterior walls. The old industrial smog stacks had been overhauled into massive air filtration vents, steadily pumping out fresh, purified breezes. Tens of thousands of viewing windows dotted the hive's surface in a neat, deliberate pattern. Through those crystalline portholes, you could spot brilliantly lit corridors bustling with people.
The privilege of natural sunlight—once exclusively hoarded by the upper-hive nobility—was now a basic right for every citizen of Aurelian.
Up at the very peak, the old aristocratic district had been gutted and repurposed into a massive public observation deck. It was dusk. The setting sun cast its dying rays from the west, painting the entire hive city in a warm, golden-red hue. Citizens strolled in small groups across the deck or kicked back on benches to chat. Kids chased each other across the open plazas, their laughter carrying on the evening breeze.
Down below, over a hundred ground-level cities sprawled across the planet's surface. Their layouts were perfectly structured, boasting wide, sweeping streets and plenty of green spaces. A massive transit network tied them all together like arteries. Maglev trains glided silently along their tracks, shipping both people and cargo to every corner of the globe.
All of this was the miracle Crimson Dawn had built with their own bare hands over the last twenty-four years.
The Governor's Mansion.
Once the disgustingly lavish estate of the Kent Hive Governor, it had been completely overhauled to serve as Crimson Dawn's administrative hub on Aurelian IV. While the exterior kept its imposing, classic Gothic architecture, the interior had been dragged kicking and screaming into the modern era. Massive floor-to-ceiling windows had replaced the cramped stained glass, letting natural sunlight flood into every room.
The pompous portraits of past governors were long gone. Instead, the walls were lined with photos and memorabilia documenting the arduous reconstruction of Aurelian. Everything was recorded here: from their very first scrappy outpost out in the Redblaze Wasteland, to the hard-fought liberations of Red Town, Merida Town, and Bordeaux Town, leading all the way up to the total takeover of Kent Hive and the founding of the hundred-plus ground cities.
Right now, over a hundred people were packed into the mansion's largest conference room. They sat around a massive, ring-shaped table carved from native Aurelian timber, its surface polished until it gleamed like a mirror. Gathered around it were one hundred and eight admin-class players, all totally committed to running Crimson Dawn's logistics machine.
Their player IDs glowed a faint crimson under the overhead lights.
Cogboy sat at the head of the table.
Crimson Dawn's chief tech director, former ruler of Kent Hive, and current Planetary Governor of Aurelian IV was dressed in a sharp, dark-gray administrator's uniform. It was impeccably tailored, sporting the Crimson Dawn emblem over the left breast: a rising sun breaking over the horizon, framed by wheat stalks, a gear, and a constellation of stars.
He still had the same painfully average face of a hardcore tech nerd. But right now, his mechanical augmetic eyes gleamed with a profound sense of pride—the kind of look a man only gets when he's admiring something he built from the ground up.
Blood Angel took the seat to his left. The guy in charge of Crimson Dawn's ideological operations wore the same standard-issue uniform, though his usually rock-hard, serious face actually sported a faint smile for once.
Schrödinger Bro sat on the right, looking as ridiculously put-together as ever in his crisp gray uniform.
A few seats down, [Paradox Player Not a War Criminal] was slouching in his chair. The veteran player, famous for his razor-sharp strategic analysis, was currently bored out of his skull, spinning a pen between his fingers as he scanned the room.
The room fell dead silent the moment [Studying Med is Worse Than Falling to Chaos] stood up.
The female player in charge of the entire medical system wore a pristine white lab coat, the badge of the Aurelian Central Hospital pinned neatly to her chest. Despite her totally meme-worthy username, she was dead serious right now.
"Over the last few months, I've been doing on-the-ground inspections to run a comprehensive evaluation of our entire medical network here on Aurelian."
She tapped the console, and a massive 3D holographic map of Aurelian's medical infrastructure bloomed in the center of the table.
"The original twenty-seven hive cities have all been successfully retrofitted into specialized industrial zones." She swiped a finger through the hologram, causing the hive icons to light up one by one. "Hive One is tackling heavy industry. Hive Two is pulling duty on precision manufacturing. Hive Three is our main food processing hub..."
"Every single industrial zone inside these hives is rigged with fully equipped medical clinics and emergency trauma centers, staffed by specialized industrial medics."
She paused for a beat, switching the projection to a new overlay. A map of the hundred-plus ground cities popped up, with every single settlement clearly pinned.
"And these surface cities all have their own specific operational focus. Some are dedicated strictly to agriculture, while others act as research hubs, administrative capitals, or entertainment and cultural centers."
"But the most important takeaway is this," [Studying Med is Worse Than Falling to Chaos] raised her voice slightly. "Every single zone, regardless of its size or purpose, is backed by a fully integrated medical network."
She pulled up a flurry of data charts.
"Here's the current spread of our medical assets on Aurelian IV: thirty-seven top-tier general hospitals strategically located across the major hubs. We've got three hundred and fifty-two specialized clinics handling trauma, maternity, pediatrics, geriatrics, you name it. There are over forty-four hundred community health centers blanketing the residential sectors."
"And we've got over eight thousand industrial med-stations up and running, meaning any worker on the clock is at most five minutes away from emergency care. We are fielding over fifty-two million hospital beds and a medical staff pushing twenty-eight million. Best of all, average life expectancy has skyrocketed from a miserable thirty years old just two decades ago, all the way up to seventy-nine."
A smug little smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. "But the real kicker? Our birth rate is up three hundred and seventy-one percent from twenty-three years ago, and infant mortality has tanked by ninety-four percent."
"Every single kid born on this planet gets cradle-to-grave medical coverage. Prenatal care, delivery, vaccines, routine physicals—all of it is completely free of charge."
She swiped the hologram away and looked around the room. "If you looked at Aurelian twenty-three years ago, you'd see a rotting, colossal corpse. Today? It's a thriving, healthy organism. And our medical system is the beating heart keeping it all alive."
A low murmur of absolute approval rippled through the conference room.
[Teaching Nurgle How to Read in the Warp], who was sitting right next to her, stood up next.
The player heading up the education system—also a woman—wore a sharp, tailored business suit and pushed up a pair of rimless glasses on her nose. Even though fixing bad eyesight in the Warhammer universe took nothing more than a cheap laser surgery, she clearly rocked the glasses for the smart, intellectual aesthetic.
"If the medical sector is the heart, then the education system is the brain."
She fired up her own holographic map, projecting a densely packed overlay of educational facilities for the room to see.
"Across the entirety of Aurelian, we are currently operating two hundred and ninety-five specialized universities." She tapped the screen, and the names of the campuses flashed in sequence: "Aurelian Central University, Aurelian First University, Dawn Institute of Technology, Dawn Medical College, Planetary Engineering University, the Interstellar Navigation Academy, the Academy of Agricultural Sciences..."
"Every single one of these colleges has a strictly defined curriculum, covering the spread from theoretical sciences to hard, applied tech."
She paused, flicking to the next slide.
"We've built out over thirty-four hundred secondary schools across all our major cities and larger settlements. And we've got a staggering sixty-three thousand primary schools up and running, meaning every school-aged kid on the planet is less than three kilometers from a classroom."
[Teaching Nurgle How to Read in the Warp] pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose.
"Aurelian IV is running on a mandatory ten-year education system. Six years of primary school to pound basic literacy and civic duty into their heads, followed by four years of secondary school strictly focused on vocational skills and career prep."
"Once they graduate secondary school, the student body hits a massive bottleneck. The high-achievers get to take the university entrance exams—and honestly, it's a total meat grinder. We see over ten million applicants taking the test every year, but we only have spots for about three hundred thousand. The acceptance rate is sitting comfortably under four percent."
"But if a kid flunks the exam, Crimson Dawn isn't just tossing them in the gutter."
She pulled up another chart.
"Aurelian is currently running over ten thousand vocational training schools. We cover everything—industrial manufacturing, agriculture, construction, logistics, public services—you name it. A secondary grad can easily pivot to a trade school for a year or two and roll right onto the assembly line as a skilled technician. Or they can dive straight into the workforce, signing on as apprentices and learning the ropes hands-on."
"Right now, out of our entire workforce, roughly twelve percent hold higher education degrees. A solid seventy-eight percent are trade school grads, and the remaining ten percent are actively leveling up their skills on the job."
She looked up, her eyes deadly serious.
"Overall, the system is holding together pretty well. We've basically made sure that every kid has a desk, and anyone with the drive to learn has a place to do it. We've given everyone the power to steer their own fate."
"But..." She paused, her tone dropping a few octaves. "Our population is exploding."
"Twenty-three years ago, Aurelian IV was hovering around twenty-three billion people. After everything we've built, that number has shot past twenty-nine billion. The birth rate climbs every single year. At this pace, we'll hit thirty-five billion within the decade."
"Our educational infrastructure is hanging on by a thread, but the strain is starting to show. We're bleeding teachers, running out of classroom space, and falling dangerously behind on upgrading our tech."
She stared down the rest of the room. "We need to expand outwards. Either we start aggressively breaking ground on new campuses here on Aurelian IV, or we set up off-world academic hubs to absorb the overflow. Because if we don't, the sheer weight of this population boom is going to totally crush our school system in ten years."