Geez, who starts to buff the party only after the battle has begun.
Also that "perception inhibition" is sus as hell. The game doesn't just conceal something from other players, it literally alters their thought process. That's not just unethical, but probably illegal too. Just imagine all the ways to abuse it...
The tech itself might well fall into "not illegal because no one's even realized they needed a law about it yet", unless some jurisdiction could twist their laws against drugging people to fit. The fact that people apparently aren't even
informed that this is possible in this game seems like it would seemingly open up room for lawsuits galore, and the actual circumstances of use definitely could fall afoul of all sorts of laws depending on the details.
But yeah, whenever one of these series implements mind-control in their VR like this I always have this reaction; just, WTH, man, people would not simply be okay with this, yikes...!
...That said in this case, as the commenter before me pointed out, it's still reasonably plausible that it isn't peception-blocking tech but actual
magic—it's already been a supernatural setting from the moment the MC reincarnated as a cat, after all, so why shouldn't it be one of the "the VR world is actually real" plots?—in which case this would actually be a quite-decent "not everything is as it seems" escalation chapter. We'll see.