Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

It started with the sky going dark at two in the afternoon.

Not sunset-dark, not storm-dark — a spreading, unnatural shadow that bled across Sector 4 from the east, thick and churning, blotting out what little pale sun the apocalypse still allowed. Every phone in the district buzzed at once with the same alert, tone sharp enough to cut through even Ethan’s afternoon nap.

[GLOBAL WARNING]

[MASSIVE MONSTER WAVE DETECTED]

[ORIGIN: EASTERN RIFT ZONE]

[TARGET SECTOR: 4]

[ESTIMATED ARRIVAL: 40 MINUTES]

[ESTIMATED THREAT SCALE: CATASTROPHIC]

[ALL CIVILIANS ARE ADVISED TO EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY]

Ethan sat up on the couch, blinking sleep out of his eyes, and stared at the notification for a long moment before his brain caught up with the specific geography involved.

”Sector 4,” he read aloud, frowning. ”Wait, isn’t that—”

He pulled up the settlement map Suresh had helped him piece together weeks earlier, cross-referencing it against the alert’s boundary lines, and felt something in his chest tighten in a way that had nothing to do with strength stats or teleportation ranges.

Sector 4 was where the bakery was.

Not just any bakery — the one two streets past the settlement market, the one with the cracked front window and the surprisingly resilient owner, an older woman named Meenakshi who’d somehow kept a wood-fired oven running through three weeks of apocalypse, turning out flatbreads and, on good days, something close enough to actual pastries that Ethan had started planning entire afternoons around the possibility of a fresh batch. It was, without exaggeration, the single most reliable source of joy left in his post-apocalypse existence.

”Okay,” Ethan said, standing up fast enough that his half-eaten chips scattered across the couch cushions. ”Okay, that’s — that’s not happening.”

Captain Priya Malhotra had already mobilized every hunter she could reach by the time Ethan made it outside, the Iron Wolves joined by scattered squads from three other guilds, all converging on Sector 4’s eastern perimeter in a hasty, improvised defensive line. Sandbags. Salvaged vehicles turned sideways as barricades. Every able-bodied fighter in a five-block radius, standing shoulder to shoulder against a horizon that had gone the color of a fresh bruise.

”Report,” Priya barked, scanning the eastern ridge through a pair of borrowed binoculars.

”Density readings are off the charts, Captain,” Arjun said, voice tight. ”This isn’t a normal wave. It’s — I’ve never seen a pre-wave shadow this size. Whatever’s coming, it’s coordinated. Something’s driving them.”

”Numbers?”

”Conservative estimate, low thousands. Could be higher. We don’t have the manpower to hold this line, not against something this size.”

Priya lowered the binoculars, jaw tight, doing the grim math every guild leader in the region had been forced to learn over the past three weeks — how many civilians could realistically evacuate in forty minutes, how many fighters she could afford to lose holding a line that might not hold anyway, how much of Sector 4 she was prepared to watch burn to save the rest of the district.

”Sound the evacuation,” she said finally. ”Full civilian pullback. We hold the line as long as we can, buy them time, and fall back the moment it breaks.”

Down the improvised barricade, Anika Reyes arrived with a hundred and fifty Crimson Blade fighters in tow, crimson-accented armor catching what little light the darkening sky still offered. She found Priya at the center of the line and fell into step beside her without ceremony.

”Reyes,” Priya said. ”Glad you made it.”

”Wasn’t going to sit this one out.” Anika’s eyes tracked the churning shadow on the horizon, growing visibly closer even in the few seconds they’d been standing there. ”Any word from him?”

She didn’t need to specify who.

”None,” Priya said. ”I sent a runner to his building twenty minutes ago. No response.”

”Of course not,” Anika muttered, though there was less bitterness in it than exhaustion. ”He’s probably asleep.”

Ethan was not, in fact, asleep. He was standing at the edge of the settlement market, having sprinted the entire way — actual, physical running, a level of cardio effort he hadn’t voluntarily engaged in since before the apocalypse began — watching the last of the market traders scramble to pack up and flee ahead of the encroaching shadow.

Meenakshi’s bakery sat two streets down, its shutter half-closed, the old woman herself visible through the gap, calmly wrapping loaves of bread in cloth and stacking them into a woven basket like the end of the world was a mild scheduling inconvenience rather than an imminent threat.

Ethan blinked directly to her doorway, the short-range teleport carrying him the last stretch faster than his legs could have managed, and startled her badly enough that she nearly dropped an entire loaf.

”You need to go,” he said, breathless despite the teleport, adrenaline doing most of the talking. ”Now. There’s a wave coming, it’s huge, everyone’s evacuating—”

”I heard the alert, beta,” Meenakshi said, unbothered, continuing to wrap bread with the unhurried precision of a woman who’d survived worse things than a monster wave in her long life. ”I am almost finished. Let an old woman pack her oven properly, it took me three weeks to get the fire right.”

”You don’t have three weeks, you have like—” Ethan glanced toward the horizon, where the shadow had grown close enough now that he could make out individual shapes moving within it, thousands of them, a churning mass that blotted out the remaining daylight entirely, ”—twenty minutes, maybe less.”

Meenakshi finally looked up at him properly, taking in the genuine alarm on his face, and something in her expression softened.

”You are worried,” she said, sounding faintly surprised by it.

”Yeah, I—” Ethan hesitated, oddly caught out by the observation. He wasn’t used to caring about outcomes with this much intensity; three weeks of effortless power had trained him into a kind of comfortable detachment from most of the apocalypse’s daily horrors. But this felt different. This was his bread. His bakery. The one small, warm, reliable thing he looked forward to in a world that had otherwise gone completely sideways. ”Yeah, I am. So can we go? Please?”

Something about the please seemed to move her more than the urgency had. She set down the loaf she was wrapping, took his offered arm without further argument, and let him guide her toward the settlement’s western exit, where the last stragglers were still filing out under the watchful, tense gaze of hunters holding a line that everyone could see, by now, was not going to hold much longer.

Behind them, the shadow rolled closer, close enough now that the ground itself had started to tremble with the approaching weight of thousands of monsters moving as one, close enough that Priya’s defensive line had gone deathly silent, every fighter bracing for an impact none of them were confident they could survive.

Ethan got Meenakshi to the evacuation point, handed her off to a group of settlement volunteers organizing shelter transport, and turned back toward the darkening horizon with an expression that had, somewhere in the last twenty minutes, shifted from casual disinterest into something considerably more focused.

”Okay,” he said quietly, mostly to himself, watching the wave’s leading edge crest the ridge line where Priya’s fighters stood their ground. ”Okay. That’s my bakery you’re threatening.”

He didn’t sprint this time. He didn’t blink, either — the wave was well outside his fifteen-meter range, and something about the moment felt like it deserved a proper approach rather than a shortcut.

He just started walking, hands loose at his sides, toward the one horizon in the entire apocalypse that had finally, genuinely, made him angry.