Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

While Ethan Verma slept the sleep of a man with zerosurvivalinstincts and infiniteplotarmor, the rest of the building was having a considerably worse night.

On the third floor, in the stairwell that smelled permanently of someone’s forgotten pickle jar, two grown men were locked in a death struggle over a broken mop handle.

”It’s mine,” hissed Mr. Bhatia, a retired bank clerk who had never raised his voice above library-whisper in the eleven years Ethan had lived in this building. He yanked the handle with both hands. ”I found it first!”

”You found half of it!” snarled the other man — Deepak, from 2B, who sold mobile covers from a cart and had apparently decided tonight was the night to become a warlord. ”The other half is under my bed!”

Around them, maybe fifteen more residents crowded the stairwell in various states of panic, clutching whatever they’d managed to grab in the chaos — a rolling pin, a golf club nobody remembered anyone in the building owning, a single roller-skate wielded like a mace by a very frightened uncle in pajamas. Outside, past the building’s cracked front doors, the red-tinted street groaned with things that used to be street dogs and were now considerably less friendly and considerably more toothy.

[GLOBAL BROADCAST]

[TUTORIAL DUNGEONS HAVE SPAWNED WORLDWIDE]

[ALL SURVIVORS ARE ADVISED TO CLEAR LOCAL TUTORIAL ZONES FOR STARTER EQUIPMENT]

[WARNING: TUTORIAL DIFFICULTY VARIES BY REGION]

Every phone that still had a flicker of battery lit up with the same message. Every person in that stairwell had read it in the last twenty minutes. And every single one of them had come to the same conclusion: a mop handle is better than nothing.

Nobody had gotten a system window like Ethan’s. Nobody had received a personal panel humming beside their pillow, offering deprecated apologies and idle-mode conveniences. As far as this entire building was concerned, the ”system” was a cruel joke that told them monsters were now real and offered exactly zero help doing anything about it.

Room 404 remained, throughout all of this, completely silent.

Ethan woke up because his stomach told him to.

Not the sound outside — the fighting in the stairwell had died down around 2 AM once Mr. Bhatia won the mop handle through sheer stubbornness and Deepak stormed off to go find ”better weapons, real ones” — but his own gut, growling with the specific betrayal of a body that had gone twelve hours without food.

He sat up, rubbed his eyes, and found the blue panel still floating patiently beside his bed, exactly where he’d left it.

[WELCOME BACK, USER]

[TIME ELAPSED WHILE INACTIVE: 11 HOURS 42 MINUTES]

[AVATAR STATUS: ACTIVE]

[GENERATING REPORT...]

Ethan yawned. ”Report on what.”

The panel, apparently taking that as an invitation, unfolded further, and a smaller window bloomed beside the first one — a tiny, pixelated figure rendered in pale blue light, no bigger than his thumb, standing in what looked like a crude 2D corridor made of jagged rock. It had Ethan’s general shape. Slightly better hair, honestly.

[YOUR AVATAR HAS CLEARED THE TUTORIAL DUNGEON]

[TIME TAKEN: 3 SECONDS]

[DIFFICULTY: TRIVIAL]

[REWARDS GENERATED]

Ethan leaned closer, more curious than alarmed, watching the pixel version of himself stand in front of a chest that had spawned in the corridor. The tiny avatar didn’t even open it dramatically. It just walked past, tapped the chest like it was mildly inconveniencing foot traffic, and the box exploded into loot particles that got sucked directly into a floating inventory icon.

”...Three seconds,” Ethan repeated. ”I’ve spent longer deciding what to microwave.”

[LOOT ACQUIRED]

[1x IRON DAGGER (COMMON)]

[1x LEATHER BOOTS (COMMON)]

[1x HEALTH POTION, MINOR (COMMON)]

[1x TUTORIAL COMPLETION TOKEN (UNIQUE)]

He blinked at the list. Then blinked again, because a fifth line appeared underneath, slightly delayed, like the system itself was double-checking the math before committing to it.

[SYSTEM ERROR — RECALCULATING DROP TABLE...]

[USER’S IDLE PROTOCOL HAS APPLIED A HIDDEN MULTIPLIER]

[MULTIPLIER SOURCE: UNKNOWN]

[MULTIPLIER SOURCE: NOT SUPPOSED TO EXIST]

[APPLYING ANYWAY]

The loot list flickered, deleted itself, and rewrote.

[LOOT ACQUIRED — RECALCULATED]

[1x IRON DAGGER (COMMON) → UPGRADED → VOID-TOUCHED DAGGER (RARE)]

[1x LEATHER BOOTS (COMMON) → UPGRADED → BOOTS OF SILENT STEP (RARE)]

[1x HEALTH POTION, MINOR (COMMON) → UPGRADED → HEALTH POTION, MAJOR (UNCOMMON)]

[1x TUTORIAL COMPLETION TOKEN (UNIQUE) → UPGRADED → TUTORIAL COMPLETION TOKEN (LEGENDARY)]

[NOTE: THIS SHOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE]

[NOTE: PLEASE DISREGARD PREVIOUS NOTE]

Ethan stared at the panel for a long moment, still half-asleep, still profoundly unimpressed by the concept of rare loot, because rare loot didn’t microwave itself into a snack.

”Cool,” he said. ”Does any of that turn into breakfast?”

[NEGATIVE]

[SUGGESTION: CHECK KITCHEN]

He appreciated that the system, glitchy as it was, at least had priorities in line with his own.

Ethan swung his legs off the bed, and as he stood, the floating chest icon near his inventory panel gave a small satisfying ding, the exact sound of a notification he hadn’t asked for but wasn’t mad about. A second, smaller pixel window popped up beside the first, showing the tiny avatar already standing at the mouth of a second, darker corridor — visibly bigger, visibly nastier, with something glowing red at the far end.

[AVATAR HAS AUTOMATICALLY QUEUED NEXT DUNGEON]

[TARGET: F-RANK ZONE, ”THE CRACKED HOLLOW”]

[ESTIMATED CLEAR TIME: 6 SECONDS]

[USER ACTION REQUIRED: NONE]

”Great,” Ethan mumbled, already shuffling toward his bedroom door, stepping over a pile of dirty laundry that had been building for a week and would probably survive the apocalypse better than most of humanity. ”Do your thing, little guy.”

He said it to the tiny pixel version of himself the way you’d talk to a Roomba. Not because he understood what it was doing. Just because it felt right.

Outside his door, the hallway was dead quiet — Mr. Bhatia had apparently taken his hard-won mop handle and barricaded himself in 3A, and the rest of the building had gone still with the kind of exhausted silence that follows a very bad night. Ethan padded down the hallway in his socks, ignored the faint smell of smoke drifting up the stairwell from somewhere below, and made his way to the shared kitchenette on his floor like a man on a singular, unbothered mission.

Behind him, unseen, his phone screen — dead, out of battery, forgotten on the nightstand — lit up on its own with one final line of text before going dark again.

[TUTORIAL DUNGEON: CLEARED]

[GLOBAL RANK FOR TUTORIAL CLEAR TIME: #1]

[GLOBAL RANK GAP TO #2: 4,997%]

[THIS RESULT HAS BEEN FLAGGED FOR REVIEW]

Nobody was around to see it. Ethan certainly wasn’t. He was in the kitchenette, opening a cabinet, discovering with quiet devastation that someone had already taken the last packet of biscuits sometime during the chaos of the night before.

”Are you kidding me,” he said, to an empty apartment, to a broken world, to a system somewhere quietly logging a global anomaly it did not yet have the authority to explain. ”This is worse than the monsters.”