VoidHerald

The Paypocalypse 6: Teammates?

Added 2025-08-03 20:20:33 +0000 UTC

Previous Chapter

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“Be wary of morons. They always make a bigger mess than you would expect.”

Mortal Resources poster.

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Martin knew the other player was a creepy basement dweller the moment he looked at him. The human kind.

All the signs were there. The old idol t-shirt marred with grease and foodstains with the green sweater on top, the baggy jeans too big for him, the smell of desperation, the acne, the unkempt black hair, and the lurid gaze behind a pair of unfashionable glasses. Although he looked thirty or so, he was panting like a pig on a bed while trying to grope the only female in the room.

Speaking of the other person in the room, Martin might have mistaken her for a young and beautiful Asian woman if not for the cat ears growing out of her pigtailed brown hair. She was dressed in some kind of advanced purple and black cyberpunk skinsuit that covered most of her skin except for the shoulders. A metallic, feline tail akin to a whip sprouted from the back of her leggings.

In short, she was a catgirl. An actual catgirl.

Both stopped whatever they were doing when they noticed Martin on the threshold, staring at them in disbelief.

“Hey, get lost!” the other playtester said. “This room is taken!”

“Are you kidding me?” Martin asked with a rising headache. His mind just struggled to grasp the level of suicidal self-defeating lust involved. “You’re trying to have a sexy time in the middle of a warzone?!”

“Exactly, it’s now or never! I’ve wait—prepared thirty-four years for this! I deserve this!”

“Yamete kudasai, goshujin-sama,” the catgirl said in Japanese.

Martin tried to suppress his… disgust? Somehow, the word didn’t sound powerful enough. It made sense that other playtesters had picked or received different cheats, but was this really the first thing to come to mind when summoning an animal companion?

A smell of burned wood jolted Martin back to reality. He noticed smoke clouds flying past the bedroom window and reached out for it—ignoring his fellow playtester’s protests as he did—and peeked through the glass.

The emus were setting the building on fire.

Instead of storming the saloon as Martin had expected them to, the birds had put their two flamethrowers to good use and put the ground floor to the torch to the tune of, “Burn, monkey, burn!”

This was bad! It was only a matter of minutes until the flames worked their way up to the upper floors or caused the building to collapse. Martin and the others could try to leap over to the nearest building’s roof, but it would leave them exposed to the emu’s riflemen.

Should he use his Velvet Lounge perk to pull them all to safety? Wait, if the building burned down with the entrance he used to trigger Velvet Lounge along with it, would he be able to teleport back?

Martin glanced at the other people in the room and winced. The idea of being trapped in a closed space with those two for eternity sounded like a fate worse than death.

“W-why are you looking at me as if I were pathetic?!” the other playtester asked.

Because you are! Martin thought, but wisely bit his tongue rather than say it out loud. He instead asked, “What’s your name?”

“It’s Eddie,” the man replied.

“Okay, Eddie, take this.” Martin tossed the rifle he had stolen from one of the emus to his fellow playtester, much to his surprise. He nearly fumbled it, too. “If we move to the roof and force the emus to retreat by shooting back at them, then we can leap to the next building over and escape the fire.”

“Hey, who made you the leader?! I look at least ten years older than you, so why should I take orders-” Martin slapped Eddie before he could finish his sentence, shocking him; doubly so since his catgirl companion didn’t seem to react much. “Y-You slapped me! You bastard, you slapped me!”

“The emus have set the building we are in on fire!” Martin snapped at the idiot. Martin wasn’t a violent man, but something about Eddie wore on his nerves. “Do you want to burn along with the room?!”

“N-no, I just…” Eddie recoiled at Martin’s tone. “I’ve never wielded a gun before, Sir…”

Sir?

What was this feeling of pride and energy that swelled into Martin’s heart when the word escaped his fellow playtester’s mouth? That taste of fleeting authority over another employee?

Oh right.

This was how it felt to be a manager.

“Don’t worry, Goshujin-sama, you’ve nothing to fear with me around!” the catgirl said with a wide grin, startling both men in the room. “Your dear Tamamo will protect you!”

Martin blinked at her. “You can speak normally?”

Also, wasn’t Tamamo a fox name? Did the marketing department get it wrong?

“Oh yes, I can! I’m just contractually obligated to speak a few Japanese lines now and then to appeal to the unemployed human male eighteen to thirty-five year old virgin demographic!” She said that with such a charming smile that the implications flew straight over Eddie’s head. “I’ll shield you from those evil birdies!”

“Oh… oh right…” Eddie’s eyes widened, his confidence returning all of a sudden. “That’s right, it’s your job to protect me!”

And then he tossed his rifle to Tamamo.

“You’ve got to earn your keep, woman,” Eddie told his companion, using the exact same managerial tone Martin used on him earlier. “Kill those birds and make me some damn money!”

Martin found himself at a loss for words when faced with such a blatant act of irresponsibility, but Tamamo simply clicked off the rifle’s safety. “At your command, Goshujin-sama!”

“Just… just follow me,” a dejected Martin said as he quickly opened up the bedroom door and rushed towards the roof with the others in tow. Smoke had already begun to rise up the stairs from the fire spreading on the ground floor.

They reached the saloon’s roof, with its sign providing a limited amount of cover; but unfortunately not enough to prevent the enemies below from noticing them.

“Mein emu, mein emu!” one of the emu riflemen shouted upon spotting them. “The apes are running away!”

“Dust them!”

The emus opened fire at the roof, blasting part of the sign to pieces and sending wood shrapnel flying through the air. Martin realized that they had become slightly more accurate than before when a bullet nearly missed his face by an inch. He summoned credit cards into his hand while Tamamo returned fire with her rifle. Martin threw his projectiles with deadly accuracy and beheaded an emu rifle user, but the flamethrower-wielding troopers then raised their weapons at the roof. Martin and Tamamo had to step back to avoid a surge of flames.

“Are their magazines bottomless?!” Eddie complained, having ducked to the floor to avoid the bullets and doing absolutely nothing helpful. “They should have stopped to reload by now!”

“Don’t worry, Goshujin-sama, you’ve nothing to fear with me around!” Tamamo pressed a finger to her temple, and her cat ears began to light up with a neon glow. “Hack E-Rank Item!”

A purple pulse of magic erupted from her, and all of the emus’ weapons jammed all at once. Bullets stopped flying, the flamethrowers sputtered out, and the birds quickly figured out that they were now helpless.

Martin grinned ear to ear and then aimed. Sweet revenge awaited.

“R-retreat!” one of the emus shouted as he turned his back on the saloon and tried to bolt away. “Retr–”

Martin nailed him in the back of the head with a projectile of his own, cutting through the helmet and killing the bird in one strike. The others quickly dispersed across the street in a chaotic fashion under a hail of gunfire and deadly credit cards.

Tamamo shot a flamethrower user in the leg to prevent it from running off, and then finished it off by blowing up its weapon’s fuel tank. The resulting explosion shook the entire street and incinerated the bird. The bird screamed for a good few delightful seconds until it ended in a premature silence. Like all good things, it ended way too soon.

At least the smell of roasted emu was incredible. Martin could get used to it.

“That was amazing!” Martin congratulated Tamamo once they had sent the survivors packing. “How did you do that?”

“Thanks, and it was easy peasy!” She grinned in triumph, clearly pleased with the attention. “I changed their item’s status from ‘functional’ to ‘broken!’

Martin paled when he put two and two together. “You can hack the System?”

“Yup, to a point!”

Oh right, OP animal companion. Martin had forgotten the first part.

Unfortunately, the saloon’s structure began to shake from the fire weakening its foundations. Martin and the others quickly leaped over the next building’s roof—with Eddie nearly falling off as they did so—in the nick of time. They turned to look at the crumbling saloon.

And…

It did not fall.

The saloon’s ground floor had entirely burned, walls and support beams included, but the upper floors didn’t collapse in spite of having a void now separating them from the ground. The flames simply moved their way up the floating structure.

Another bug.

“Uh… anticlimactic, but appreciated.” Martin quickly reported the bug in the survey and earned himself another one hundred credits for his trouble. He could get used to the sweet sound of money falling into his account.

“Hey, how is it that my net worth hasn’t increased?” Eddie complained to Tamamo. “Are you hoarding the money?!”

“No, Goshujin-sama, I’m a Pet! Pets are like Buddyguards, all the money we earn goes to our master! And only your sorry as—I mean, only Goshujin-sama,” she said upon catching herself, “can buy my levels to upgrade me!”

“You only make money in this tutorial from reporting bugs,” Martin informed them.

“What? That's ridiculous!” Eddie protested. “We don’t even gain exp from killing monsters?”

You didn’t kill any. Martin suddenly realized it might have been wiser to shut up. Telling Eddie about the pay-per-bug method meant he likely now had competition for much-needed funds, assuming the System only paid once per report.

But then again… Eddie remained a fellow human being and employee in spite of, well, everything else, and Tamamo could pull her weight. Sticking together might be for the best, considering the enemies ahead.

“We should move before the birds return with reinforcements,” Martin suggested. “Let’s speedrun this tutorial.”

Martin wondered if there were any other playtesters around…

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Colonel E-138 of the Emu Empire military was pissed.

The First Emu War might have been a costly victory for his species, but the second would only end once the monkey menace had been cleansed from their ancestral lands. So said the Emperor. Their army enjoyed great numbers, state-of-the-art weaponry, and featherproof biological superiority.

So, how could their unit have been repelled?! How could they lose half their warband to a bunch of butt-scratching apes?! This affront would not stand!

“Mein emu, mein emu, what do we do?” one of his surviving soldiers asked in panic. “Our rifles are still jammed! This is a disaster, a disaster–”

“Shut up!” Colonel E-138 slapped his subordinate in the face with his wing. “Your cowardice dishonors our ancestors who died at Campion! Are you an emu, or a goddamn kiwi?!”

Nonetheless, his soldier was right; the loss of their weaponry put them in a pickle. They might as well be moving targets with no workable firearms, and the apes might have a way to disable their replacements. They were currently at a tactical disadvantage, and the filthy monkeys might reach the Emperor in a few hours unless stopped, or worse, find the artifact that had brought the Emu Empire low once before.

They needed to adapt. To change tactics, no matter how cruel.

“Unleash…” Colonel E-138 took a deep breath as he gave the fateful order. “Unleash the bear.”

May the gods have mercy on them all.

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