Players Invade Cyberpunk

Are those NPCs carrying bricks?

They're carrying the players' lives!

Their enthusiasm at work baffled those workers recruited from places like Taiping Continent. Where did these ultimate workaholics come from?

Not only do they work tirelessly from start to finish, but they also come over to steal their jobs and even send people to interfere with their construction progress using various means.

For example, through casual chatting

Chatting away with the workers, asking random questions and making small talk,

Or bringing drinks and instant noodles, maliciously damaging their alarm clocks to make them oversleep.

As soon as the sun is high, they come over to shoo people into the shade and take over the construction tasks.

It's winter, not summer, for heaven's sake!

In short, they try every trick in the book to stop them from working, exploiting every glitch possible to delay construction progress and steal more work.

But although these folks work like maniacs, they clock in and out on time, leaving work punctually — not a minute of overtime, just nine hours on the dot.

Such work hours would get someone fired on the first day in other companies.

In short, it's an abstract form of competitiveness.

In this case, how could players agree to keep recruiting NPCs for the construction site?

Doing a good deed shouldn't affect their task rewards, otherwise many players would certainly have an opinion about it.

The officer frowned, "Then we have no choice but to recruit ourselves... But going to Taiping Continent, those people mostly won't agree."

Sword Saint: "Relax, we're not Bodhisattvas saving the world, don't try to take everything upon ourselves, aren't you tired?"

"Just help when you can. If they want to come, they'll come, and if not, we won't force them. Maybe they have their own ways?"

In reality, it's not just the officer; the majority of players who want to start a business have their eyes on Taiping Continent.

It's a lawless land where rules ultimately bow to the barrel of a gun.

But players aren't afraid of guns. One local gang, the Voodoo Gang, has already been taken down by the players, and although some Haitians are dissatisfied, it won't change the overall warming relations with Horizon Corporation.

Right now, more than half of the workers on-site are Haitians, while the troublemakers have been sent to Big Sur for labor reform. They're not worried about them causing trouble.

If they can take advantage of the situation to expand players' influence in Taiping Continent, entering Dogtown in the future would be feasible.

Yes, many players have their eyes on Dogtown. On the forums, Hansen's Dogtown has been diagnosed as a high-level instance.

With such evil forces, a cancer in Night City right before their eyes, how can the model citizens of the city, the top ten gangs in California, sit idly by with such a menace?

As for the tangled interests behind it, and the associations with numerous companies and interest groups, how destroying Dogtown would impact them, and how many will come looking for trouble because of it...

All of that is absolutely none of the players' concern.

They're here to have fun, and anyone who dares to stop them from having fun will get brutally stomped on.

————

Almost all players had gone to work in Big Sur and Stone Ridge Mountain Town, making the normally bustling 24-hour office bar unusually quiet.

After all, it's early in the morning, and once the enthusiasm of those out-of-town mercenaries faded, they'd only come for drinks at night.

"100."

"200."

"300..."

Nina, who just hung the closing sign on the bar door, sat on the bed organizing her freshly-earned cash stack by stack.

Even though she'd stayed up all night, she was full of energy, with her attention all on the money.

"Woohoo!"

Finishing counting, Nina shouted with joy and tackled her sister, who had just entered the room, onto the bed.

"Nia, my salary for this month is 2675 Eurodollars! I finally have money QAQ!"

She was walking around the bar every day in that huge mech. The first month was rough, breaking lots of things, and her salary was almost wholly docked.

Because of this, every time Nina saw Lin Miao, she had to mentally complain for a while.

"And I heard the two big metal chunks will be taken to the workshop for remodeling in the next few days. We're finally free."

Although Lin Miao had opened up the maid costume options to players, until now, the nominations for Dangerous Wanderer and Eureka Raider remained high, firmly in the lead.

Even the highly popular cosplay costumes of Black-and-White Saber and Asuka's EVA pilot suit could only take second and third place.

In the end, what men love most is still mechs; women just get in the way of shifting gears.

The Red Barrel reinvested the numerous donations and support money they received from players back into mech design and development. The players were very envious of the high-performance Power Armors from Trauma Team and Huang Ban.

Sure, humanoid mechs might not be practical, maybe their costs are high, maybe their mobility and maintenance expenses are exorbitant, but as long as they look cool, that's not an issue for the players at all.

Despite the increase in mechanics at the studio, achieving a commercial-grade Power Armor with just the players' investment is a daydream, but it doesn't stop the players from striving in that direction.

Nia, slipping out of her sister's embrace, remarked flatly,

"So we won't be getting any tips for the next few days."

"Ugh... Don't bring up such buzzkill topics to ruin the mood..."

As soon as she heard the tips were flying away, Nina instantly felt staying inside wasn't so bad after all.

She carefully took out a metal box from under the bed, reluctantly placing the money inside, and before closing the lid, gazed at the cash with a reverent look.