Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

They hadn’t made it to room 404 that first night.

Deshu’s group reached the fourth floor landing at 2:14 AM, only to freeze at the sound of a baby crying somewhere down the hall — a young family in 407, still awake, still alert, the kind of witness eight armed men couldn’t afford. Deshu called it off with a hissed curse, and the group retreated the way they’d come, slipping back out the side door into the dark, empty-handed and furious.

”We come back tomorrow,” Deshu said, once they’d put two blocks between themselves and the building. ”Midday. Everyone’s guard drops during the day — people relax when the sun’s up, even now. We move fast, we’re in and out before anyone even registers what happened.”

It wasn’t a bad plan, as far as desperate plans went. Deshu had run enough scrapyard jobs in his old life to know that timing mattered more than force. What he didn’t know — what none of them could have known — was that the ”midday guard drop” he was counting on wasn’t a citywide phenomenon.

It was a very specific, very personal ritual belonging to exactly one resident of that building.

At 12:47 PM the next day, Ethan Verma was doing what he did every single afternoon of his entire adult life, apocalypse or otherwise: napping.

He’d eaten lunch — the last of his good noodles, a genuine tragedy he planned to address later — and had flopped onto his bed with the specific, practiced ease of a man who considered the early afternoon nap a non-negotiable human right. His phone sat propped against the pillow, avatar feed quietly running in the corner, showing his tiny pixel self mowing through what looked like a swamp-themed dungeon full of oversized toads. He wasn’t watching it. He’d drifted off within four minutes, one arm flung over his eyes to block out the thin line of light sneaking past the taped curtain.

The Void Sword leaned against the wall by the door, exactly where he’d left it three days ago, gathering the mild dust of complete disuse.

Downstairs, eight men were creeping up the stairwell for the second time.

This attempt went considerably smoother than the first. The fourth floor hallway was empty — most residents were either out foraging, hiding in the lower-floor shelter Suresh had organized, or, in the case of 407’s family, mercifully napping alongside their now-quiet baby. Deshu led the group past three doors, checking the crude map again, until they stopped outside a plain, unremarkable door with slightly peeling paint.

404.

”This is it,” Deshu whispered, pressing an ear to the wood. Silence on the other side. ”No one’s awake. Perfect.”

Vikram, hovering near the back of the group, felt the same wrong instinct from the night before creeping up his spine again, stronger now, insistent. He almost said something. He didn’t.

Deshu tried the handle. Unlocked, like every door in this building had been since the world ended. It swung open with a soft creak, revealing a dim, cluttered room — clothes on the floor, a desk with a dead monitor, the faint smell of instant noodles — and, propped against the far wall, unmistakable even in the dim light, a sword.

The Void Sword.

Deshu’s breath caught. Even from the doorway, even with no aura sensitivity to speak of, something about the blade made every hair on his arms stand up, an instinctive animal recognition that this was not a normal weapon. The pressure radiating off it, dormant as it was, pressed against the room like a held breath.

”There,” he whispered, pointing. ”Move. Fast. Grab it and go.”

Two of the men slipped past him into the room, boots silent on the cluttered floor, weaving around discarded chip bags toward the sword. Neither of them so much as glanced at the bed against the far wall, where a lump of blanket rose and fell with slow, even breathing, one bare foot sticking out from beneath the covers.

The first man reached the sword and grabbed the hilt with both hands.

It didn’t move. Not an inch. Not a centimeter. He might as well have tried to lift the building itself.

”It’s— it’s stuck,” he hissed, straining, both feet braced against the wall for leverage. ”Help me—”

The second man grabbed on too, and together they heaved with everything they had, the kind of desperate effort that came from six days of hunger and fear and a genuine belief that this single object might be the thing that saved their families.

The sword did not care about any of that. It sat exactly where it had been left, immovable as a mountain, while two grown men grunted and strained against four and a half tons of legendary steel that had already decided, on some level neither of them could perceive, that they simply weren’t worth acknowledging.

The commotion — the scraping boots, the labored grunting, the soft thud of someone’s shoulder knocking against the wall for leverage — finally did what six days of apocalyptic chaos hadn’t managed.

It disturbed Ethan’s nap.

He stirred, groaned, and pulled the blanket tighter over his head without opening his eyes, the universal reflex of a man who assumed the noise was someone else’s problem.

”...five more minutes,” he mumbled into his pillow.

Every single person in the room froze.

Deshu, still in the doorway, felt his stomach drop through the floor. The two men on the sword let go instantly, stumbling backward, and the room went dead silent except for the ragged breathing of eight men who had all, in the span of two seconds, remembered simultaneously that breaking into an apartment usually involved the possibility of the apartment’s owner being present.

Ethan cracked one eye open beneath the blanket, registered the shapes of several strangers standing in his bedroom in broad daylight, and processed this information with all the urgency of a man clocking that his roommate had left dishes in the sink.

”...are you guys lost?” he asked, voice thick with sleep, not even bothering to sit up. ”Building’s next door. This one’s residential.”

Nobody answered. Eight armed men stood frozen in a stranger’s bedroom, staring at a teenager who had just woken up from a nap to find intruders standing over his sword and reacted with less alarm than most people showed for a wrong-number phone call.

Vikram, knife still in hand, felt his mouth go completely dry.

”We’re—” Deshu started, voice cracking, ”we’re leaving. Right now. We’re sorry, we—”

”Cool,” Ethan said, already pulling the blanket back over his head, eyes sliding shut again. ”Close the door on your way out. And don’t touch the sword, it’s heavy.”

He was asleep again within thirty seconds, breathing slow and even, utterly unbothered by the eight armed strangers backing out of his room in stunned, shaking silence, none of them yet understanding just how close they’d come to something far worse than an awkward conversation — and how much worse it was about to get the moment they decided, out in the hallway, that they weren’t quite ready to leave empty-handed after all.