Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

The movie ended around 11 PM. Ethan had mostly stopped watching it by the second act, distracted by the occasional buzz of his phone as the system continued churning away in the background, still ”generating” whatever reward the Void Cave had produced.

He was brushing his teeth — one of the few pre-apocalypse rituals he’d stubbornly refused to abandon, mostly out of spite toward the end of the world — when the buzz finally came through with something resembling finality.

[REWARD GENERATION: COMPLETE]

[VOID CAVE CLEAR REWARD FINALIZED]

[APPLYING TO USER PROFILE...]

Ethan spat, rinsed, and grabbed his phone off the bathroom counter with toothpaste foam still at the corner of his mouth.

[TITLE AWARDED: VOID WALKER]

[TITLE EFFECT: PASSIVE]

[SKILL UNLOCKED: SHORT-RANGE VOID STEP]

”Okay, now we’re talking,” Ethan said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, genuinely interested for the first time all evening. He’d gotten titles before — ”Accidental Cataclysm” still sat somewhere in his status screen, unused and mostly decorative — but this one came with an actual mechanical description attached, which felt like a meaningful upgrade in system communication.

[SHORT-RANGE VOID STEP]

[DESCRIPTION: USER MAY INSTANTLY RELOCATE TO ANY VISIBLE POINT WITHIN 15 METERS]

[COST: NONE]

[COOLDOWN: NONE]

[NOTE: THIS SKILL IS TECHNICALLY CLASSIFIED AS SS-RANK SPATIAL MAGIC]

[NOTE: SS-RANK SPATIAL MAGIC TYPICALLY REQUIRES DECADES OF TRAINING TO MASTER]

[NOTE: USER HAS RECEIVED IT AS A PASSIVE]

[NOTE: THIS IS DEEPLY UNFAIR TO EVERYONE ELSE]

Ethan read that last line twice, snorted, and set his phone down on the bathroom counter to actually test the thing properly, because a skill description without a real-world demonstration was, in his experience, only half a skill.

He looked at the bathroom doorway, fifteen feet away by his rough estimate, pictured himself standing in it, and — mostly on a whim, half-expecting nothing to happen — thought the word there.

The world blinked.

There was no sensation of movement. No rush of wind, no blur of his surroundings streaking past, none of the dramatic buildup he’d half-expected from every teleportation scene he’d ever watched in a movie. One moment he was standing at the bathroom sink, toothbrush still sitting in its cup beside him; the next, he was standing in the doorway, several feet away, having experienced the transition as something closer to blinking than moving.

”Whoa,” he said, staring down at his own feet like they’d betrayed him. ”Okay. That’s — that’s actually really cool.”

He tried it again, this time aiming for his bed across the room, and blinked directly onto the mattress with a soft thump, bouncing slightly on the springs.

[SKILL USED: SHORT-RANGE VOID STEP]

[SKILL USED: SHORT-RANGE VOID STEP]

[NOTE: SYSTEM ADVISES CAUTION WHEN TELEPORTING NEAR FURNITURE]

”Noted,” Ethan said, grinning now, genuinely delighted in a way he hadn’t been since the void inventory discovery weeks earlier. This wasn’t just power. This was convenience, the single currency Ethan valued above almost everything else in his post-apocalypse existence.

He spent the next twenty minutes doing exactly what any reasonable nineteen-year-old with a newly acquired teleportation ability would do: testing it on every mundane task he could think of. He blinked from his bed to his kitchen counter to grab a glass of water. He blinked from the kitchen to the window to check if it was raining (it wasn’t, the sky just looked permanently ominous now, apocalypse standard). He blinked back to his bed, missed slightly, and landed on the floor beside it instead, which he decided was a targeting issue he’d need to work on rather than a flaw in the skill itself.

The real test came a few minutes later, when he realized his phone charger — one of the few functioning ones left in the building, carefully rationed between himself and two other residents on a strict schedule — was sitting on the kitchen counter, and his phone was down to eleven percent battery, and the walk from his bed to the kitchen suddenly felt like an entirely unnecessary use of his own two legs.

He closed his eyes, pictured the kitchen counter, and blinked directly there without ever standing up from his bed first.

He landed a little off-balance, catching himself against the counter edge, and let out a short laugh of pure satisfaction.

”This is it,” he announced to his empty apartment, snatching up the charger. ”This is the single greatest use of an SS-rank spatial ability in recorded history. Getting my charger without having to stand up first.”

[NOTE: THE SYSTEM WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT THIS SKILL COULD BE USED FOR MANY OTHER APPLICATIONS]

[NOTE: TACTICAL REPOSITIONING. EMERGENCY EVACUATION. COMBAT MANEUVERING.]

[NOTE: THE SYSTEM IS NOT SURPRISED, BUT IS SLIGHTLY DISAPPOINTED]

”Every skill has a purpose,” Ethan said, plugging his phone in with the smug satisfaction of a man who’d just solved a genuinely persistent inconvenience. ”Mine’s just efficiency-focused.”

He spent the rest of the evening blinking between his bed, the kitchen, and the window with the enthusiasm of a kid who’d just gotten a new toy, occasionally overshooting his target by a foot or two and adjusting his aim with the trial-and-error confidence of someone who’d clearly decided this skill was less a weapon and more a household convenience upgrade.

It wasn’t until nearly midnight, lying back on his bed after one final blink from the bathroom, that he actually stopped to consider the broader implications of what he’d just been handed.

[TITLE: VOID WALKER — ACTIVE]

[NOTE: TITLES OF THIS TIER TYPICALLY GRANT SOCIAL RECOGNITION WITHIN HUNTER HIERARCHIES]

[NOTE: FEW BEINGS ALIVE CURRENTLY HOLD A COMPARABLE TITLE]

”Social recognition,” Ethan repeated slowly, mildly concerned. ”Does that mean people are gonna start calling me that? Because I’ve already got ’the Sleeping Guardian’ floating around, and honestly that one’s fine, it’s got a nice ring to it. I don’t need a whole rebrand.”

The system, predictably, offered no comfort on that front.

[TITLE DISPLAY IS AUTOMATIC UPON MEETING CERTAIN THRESHOLD CONDITIONS]

[USER HAS NO CONTROL OVER PUBLIC PERCEPTION]

”Great,” Ethan muttered, closing his eyes, already deciding this was a problem for a version of himself that existed sometime after a proper night’s sleep. ”So now I’ve got two nicknames. Fantastic. Very manageable.”

He drifted off within minutes, one arm dangling off the bed, his phone charging peacefully on the nightstand beside him — retrieved via a teleportation ability powerful enough to make S-rank mages weep with envy, used exclusively, so far, for avoiding the minor inconvenience of standing up.

Somewhere across the district, in a guildhall lit by candlelight because the power grid still hadn’t recovered, Anika Reyes reviewed a fresh intelligence report about a strange, brief spatial energy signature that had rippled out from the residential block three separate times that evening — small, contained, and utterly without precedent — and added one more line to a growing file she’d quietly started keeping, titled, with the weary resignation of a professional who’d stopped questioning things weeks ago, simply: ETHAN.