The Great Cat Kingdom.
Cat Castle.
Most players who built a guild did it chasing raw power.
The Great Cat Kingdom was the exception.
After claiming their castle stronghold, they had a full 700 points of NPC capacity to work with, and they didn’t spend a single one of it on valuable combat NPCs.
All six guild members poured every last point into making cats instead, building out the whole atmosphere of a cat kingdom.
The guild became famous across the entire server because of it.
You might not know who its members were, but you’d definitely heard the name Great Cat Kingdom.
Plenty of players made the trip just to sightsee, and pet a few cats while they were at it.
What nobody knew was that the guild was secretly hiding a World-tier item.
Proof that a small, unassuming guild could still accomplish something.
Of course, Roy knew the Great Cat Kingdom’s cat-NPC obsession was, at its core, a cover story.
Behind the scenes, they were a criminal outfit spreading information on how to slow down work, deliberately underperform on the job.
All six members belonged to the resistance.
They were trying to organize a non-violent non-cooperation movement, encouraging workers to slack off deliberately, letting output quality slide until the corporations were forced to compromise on better rest and pay.
Anything more aggressive than that was off the table.
Not that you could call the resistance weak for it.
Under tens of millions of suppression robots and a Skynet-level surveillance network, any real impulsiveness was suicide.
Structural problems this deep in a society were never going to be fixed by individual reform alone.
Take one of Ainz’s own guild members, for instance: Touch Me, the Ally of Justice.
He wasn’t a bad person at heart, but his actual job happened to be hunting down criminals exactly like Surshana.
The work was so miserable that, chasing some semblance of a happy life, Touch Me had clearly developed a kind of obsessive coping mechanism, shouting about the arrival of justice in-game just to comfort himself.
Society turning people into monsters.
That saying held up.
Slacking off.
Resistance.
Cats.
Combine all three, and you got the Great Cat Kingdom.
Surshana had once explained it like this:
“Cats are lazy every single day.
They’d never work hard at anything.
That fits our whole slacking-off philosophy perfectly.”
“Second, cats hiss and scratch.
That shows they push back too.”
“And last, cats are adorable.
You’ve got to fight this miserable world with something adorable.”
That whole crooked chain of logic was exactly how Roy had ended up becoming friends with them.
Still, friends were friends.
While he was still alive, Roy had never gone all-in on funding the resistance.
Sure, he was the eighth son of the Sigma family, but within the wider elite circle, he ranked at the very bottom.
Especially since all he did was play games, which got him shut out of that circle even further.
Aside from having some money, Roy’s actual standing in this world wasn’t high at all. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
In-game, he called the shots.
In reality, he was just a black sheep of the nobility.
Surshana, meanwhile, had come to treat Roy as something of a guiding light.
After all, Roy’s knowledge base genuinely outstripped his own, and he was happy to offer a bit of guidance:
“The Great Cat Kingdom’s great, and the cats are adorable.”
“Get players coming in to play with the cats, and sell them merchandise while they’re at it.”
“Worst case, try monetizing it through livestreams.
The Great Cat Kingdom’s already got a huge reputation.
Not cashing in on that would just be foolish.”
“You don’t know how to monetize an audience?”
Wait, you could do that?
The rest of them listened, stunned.
But they were the resistance.
Was running a business like this really okay?
Roy answered flatly:
“How are you supposed to run a resistance without money?”
“If the resistance is going to push workers into slacking off, it needs to cover the financial risk those workers are taking on.”
“You could easily set up an insurance company, a fully legal way to pay compensation to your members.”
“Only with enough financial backing can you actually build toward a bigger resistance.”
There was no denying it: Roy’s idea opened up a whole new door for Surshana and the others.
Their original goal had been more like spreading a message, almost missionary work.
And given that the Six Great Gods would later go on to found the Slane Theocracy in the New World, they clearly had some real talent for it.
Under Roy’s guidance, they spent money setting up an insurance company, using unemployment coverage to pay out affected workers, giving them the actual means to slack off and push back.
It didn’t amount to some sweeping victory, but they did land small wins at a handful of smaller companies.
Amusingly enough, one of those companies turned out to be tied to Ainz himself.
Ainz’s usual complaints about his awful company came down to this: a small firm, a monthly salary of just 150,000 yen, fine, but only three days off for New Year’s.
Thanks to Surshana and the others’ efforts, Ainz’s New Year’s break successfully stretched from three days to five.
Which meant Ainz had even more time to play the game, a small butterfly effect all its own.
To be fair, this world was genuinely dark, just not in the way most people assumed.
Ainz, for instance, had once mentioned that employees at mega-corporations in the eco-cities actually got summer vacation.
When Ainz ate a single 220-yen nutrient paste for a meal, it wasn’t because he couldn’t afford real food.
He just hated any expense that felt wasteful.
Even with all his manic spending on the game, Ainz still had savings.
Judging by his day-to-day expenses, putting away a million yen wasn’t out of reach.
His apartment even had a bathroom, a kitchen, a living room, the works.
The real darkness of this world was that its productivity and technology were already more than capable of fixing environmental collapse, more than capable of running a genuine universal welfare system.
It wouldn’t have even cost that much.
But the mega-corporate consortium simply refused.
They deliberately kept people in poverty, just to preserve the working class’s drive to keep struggling.
That was really all there was to it.
Surely nobody actually believed that a civilization capable of running cheap nanobots for a free online game couldn’t handle something as small as pollution.
Cheap, mass-produced nanobots were, on their own, technology godlike enough to launch an entire leap forward for human civilization.
The simplest possible use alone, ingesting nanobots to clear impurities from the body, was enough to let anyone live to 150 disease-free, and even 200 wasn’t out of the question.
Using nanobots to break down matter and clean up pollution sources was, by comparison, trivially easy.
It was only because people like Suzuki Satoru were basically clueless, with no idea how powerful this technology actually was, that they just kept quietly grinding away at their lives.
So the real crime of the mega-corporations was that, with productivity capable of sprinting society straight into a heaven on earth, they deliberately kept the existing structure exactly as it was.
They could have.
They simply chose not to.
Roy had been a good student in both his past life and this one, and naturally had more than enough knowledge to lay all of this out.
It genuinely inspired Surshana and the others, giving them real hands-on experience in the fight.
They’d just run out of money.
“So that’s how it is.”
“You pulled off a successful non-cooperation movement at a handful of small companies.”
“And once workers got fired and you paid out compensation for all of them, the company was basically staring bankruptcy in the face.”
“So you couldn’t keep the campaign going any further.”
Surshana flushed:
“I’m sorry you had to see us like this, Lord Joshua.”
“We’ve only got 500,000 yen left in the account now.”
“If you’re not interested in Ruinous Beauty, we’ll go ask around with the rest of the resistance.
We’re bound to find something you’ll like.”
Roy, understanding the situation now, made himself right at home and smiled:
“Come on, let’s sit down and talk this through.”
“I’m not buying your item, but I do actually need your help with something.”
Another resistance member, Kikotenshin Nekonyan, spoke up quickly:
“Lord Joshua, please, whatever you need.”
The one speaking was a young man dressed as a paladin, with hair dyed a striking blue-green.
His name alone explained exactly where the Great Cat Kingdom’s whole branding came from.
Roy said with a smile:
“I’ve got a top-secret piece of information.
You absolutely cannot let this leak.”
“If it does leak, I promise I’ll make as much trouble for you as I possibly can.”
“This stays between the six of you and nobody else.
Understood?”
Surshana’s expression turned serious, and he answered quickly:
“Don’t worry, Lord Joshua.
If even a hint of this gets out, you can let Touch Me haul every last one of us away himself.”
There it was.
That was exactly the reaction he wanted.
Roy was about to start lying through his teeth.
He’d decided to dress up a story convincing enough to guarantee they’d stay logged into the game right up through shutdown.