Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

Gupta’s stall didn’t stay quiet for long.

By the time Ethan finally located his cooking oil — three stalls over, traded for a modest handful of monster cores he genuinely couldn’t be bothered to catalog — word of the Voidforged chest plate and the Mana-Well Signet had already rippled outward through the settlement with the speed of information that mattered to people who’d learned, over the past three weeks, exactly how rare ”matters” had become.

It reached the Crimson Blade guildhall by evening, carried by a runner too breathless to properly explain herself before Guild Mistress Anika Reyes cut her off with a raised hand.

”Slow down,” Anika said, though her eyes had already sharpened with interest. ”Start from the beginning. Voidforged alloy, you said?”

”A dozen pieces, Guild Mistress. Traded like scrap. There’s a signet ring too — Gupta’s still shaking, I heard, he had to close his stall early.”

Anika set down the report she’d been reviewing — casualty numbers from a failed gate clearing three districts over, the kind of grim reading that had become routine — and leaned back in her chair, considering.

She’d heard the whispers before. Every guild in the region had, by now. The Sleeping Guardian. The boy who’d walked through an F-rank gate unarmed and come out the other side having erased an anomalous S-rank boss with what witnesses swore was a yawn. She’d dismissed most of it as apocalypse mythology, the kind of story desperate people told each other to feel like the universe still had some order to it.

But Voidforged alloy didn’t lie. Voidforged alloy was a fact, sitting on a table in the settlement market, verified by an appraiser with thirty years of experience and a reputation for never exaggerating a grade in his life.

”Get my coat,” Anika said, standing. ”I want to meet this boy myself.”

She found him the next morning — or tried to, at least — standing outside his building’s cracked front doors at exactly 9 AM, having asked around the neighborhood the previous evening and gotten more than enough directions from residents eager to point a stranger toward Room 404 without personally having to knock on the door themselves.

Anika Reyes was, by any reasonable measure, an intimidating figure. Tall, sharp-eyed, dressed in crimson-accented combat gear that marked her as the leader of one of the region’s three surviving top-tier guilds, she’d built the Crimson Blade from eleven survivors to over two hundred in the space of three weeks through sheer competence and an unwillingness to lose people unnecessarily. She did not, as a rule, get nervous meeting anyone.

She rang the buzzer for Room 404 at 9:03 AM and got no response.

She tried again at 9:15. Still nothing.

By 9:40, having knocked, buzzed, and eventually resorted to calling up toward the fourth-floor window, she finally caught Suresh sweeping the lobby and asked, with the strained patience of a woman used to getting immediate answers, ”Is he even home?”

”Oh, he’s home,” Suresh said, not looking up from his broom. ”He just doesn’t wake up before noon. Ever. Come back later, ma’am. Much later.”

Anika stared at him. ”There’s an active apocalypse happening.”

”Yes, ma’am. He’s aware.”

She almost turned around and left entirely, half-convinced this was an elaborate waste of her morning, but the memory of that Voidforged chest plate kept her rooted to the spot. She was a guild leader with two hundred lives depending on her judgment. She could wait three hours for a lead this significant.

She waited three hours.

At 12:47 PM, Ethan finally emerged from his building, hair a disaster, hoodie inside out, moving with the unhurried shuffle of a man whose entire morning routine consisted of waking up and immediately regretting that the world still required him to be conscious.

Anika straightened up from where she’d been leaning against a wrecked car, and fell into step beside him with the practiced ease of someone who’d rehearsed this approach several times over the last three hours.

”Ethan Verma,” she said. ”I’m Anika Reyes, Guild Mistress of the Crimson Blade. I’d like a moment of your time.”

”Sure,” Ethan said, yawning, already scanning the street for signs of an open food stall. ”What’s up.”

”I’ve heard remarkable things about you,” she said, matching his pace. ”Voidforged alloy traded like scrap. An anomalous S-rank boss defeated in seconds. A system that reportedly can’t even assign you a rank. I’ll be direct — I want to offer you a position within the Crimson Blade. Not as a subordinate. As an equal partner, effectively co-leading operations, with full resource access and complete autonomy over your assignments.”

Ethan considered this with the seriousness of a man being offered a timeshare.

”What would that involve?” he asked.

”Dungeon clears. Gate containment. Protecting settlement expansion routes. We operate on a standard schedule — briefings at 0600, first deployment by 0700, typically two to three operations daily depending on threat activity in the sector.”

Ethan stopped walking.

”Zero six hundred,” he repeated slowly. ”That’s — what, six AM?”

”Correct.”

”In the morning.”

”Yes.”

He looked at her with an expression of genuine, wounded betrayal, like she’d just proposed something deeply, personally offensive.

”I don’t wake up at six AM for anything,” he said. ”I didn’t wake up at six AM before the apocalypse. I’m not gonna start now that the world’s actively trying to kill everyone. That seems like exactly the wrong time to start improving my habits.”

Anika blinked, momentarily thrown off the careful pitch she’d prepared. ”I— the schedule is flexible for high-value assets, obviously, we could adjust—”

”How flexible?”

”...Ten AM?” she offered, already sensing this negotiation was slipping somewhere she hadn’t trained for.

”Try again.”

”Noon,” she said, with the flat resignation of a woman who had led two hundred people through an apocalypse and was now losing a negotiation to a teenager’s sleep schedule. ”Briefings at noon.”

Ethan actually considered that one, tilting his head. ”What’s the pay look like.”

”Guild resources, priority loot rights, protection for anyone under your care, political leverage with the regional council—”

”Does it come with snacks?”

Anika stared at him for a long moment, genuinely unsure, for the first time in this entire conversation, whether she was being tested or whether the boy standing in front of her — the same boy who’d apparently erased an S-rank anomaly with a yawn — was simply, sincerely, asking about snacks.

”...I can arrange snacks,” she said carefully.

”Good ones? Not, like, protein bars.”

”Whatever you want, within reason.”

Ethan thought about it for a genuinely long moment, weighing noon briefings and unspecified snacks against the simple, uncomplicated joy of doing absolutely nothing whenever he felt like it, answering to no schedule, no guild, no chain of command.

”I appreciate the offer,” he said finally, ”but I’m gonna pass. I already have a job — I fight things when I feel like it, and mostly I don’t feel like it. That works pretty well for me.”

He resumed walking, leaving Anika Reyes standing frozen on the cracked pavement, watching one of the single most valuable assets in the entire apocalypse shuffle off toward a food stall in search of breakfast, having just turned down full guild leadership over the mention of a 6 AM start time.

”Wait,” she called after him, half out of professional obligation, half out of pure disbelief. ”At least tell me — if a real crisis hits. A genuine emergency. Would you help?”

Ethan paused, glanced back at her, and shrugged with the easy, unbothered confidence of someone who’d never once doubted the answer.

”Probably,” he said. ”If it’s not too much effort.”

He kept walking. Anika stood there a while longer, turning that answer over in her mind, and decided, against every instinct her career had built in her, that it was somehow the most reassuring thing anyone had told her in three weeks.