Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

By the time Ethan made it back to his building, arms full of chips and instant noodles, he’d already forgotten about the four zombies he’d apparently mulched without trying. What occupied his mind instead was a far more pressing question: the vending machine in the lobby.

It had always been broken — or rather, it had always worked, but the coin slot jammed if you didn’t hit it exactly right, and the one time Ethan had tried using his card reader, it ate the card and gave him nothing back. He’d hated that machine for two years. But it was also, as of this morning, the only source of cold soda left in a five-block radius that he hadn’t already looted, and Ethan’s spicy chips deserved a proper drink pairing.

He set his haul down on the lobby’s cracked marble counter and approached the machine like a man greeting an old rival.

”Alright,” he told it. ”Let’s see if the apocalypse fixed your attitude.”

It had not. The coin slot was still jammed, the machine’s little digital display flickering uselessly, glass front intact and mocking him with three full rows of soda cans he could see but not touch.

Ethan sighed the sigh of a deeply inconvenienced man and was about to give up — genuinely about to just walk away and go boil water for noodles like a peasant — when the system panel, which had been quiet since the street encounter, suddenly flared to life beside his head with a tone that was noticeably different from its usual bored diagnostic hum.

[24-HOUR AVATAR GRINDING CYCLE: MILESTONE REACHED]

[AVATAR HAS CLEARED 47 SUB-DUNGEONS DURING IDLE PERIOD]

[RARE LOOT THRESHOLD EXCEEDED]

[GENERATING BONUS REWARD...]

[GENERATING...]

[GENERATING...]

[ERROR: REWARD TIER EXCEEDS STANDARD PARAMETERS]

[OVERRIDE AUTHORIZED — SOURCE UNKNOWN]

[REWARD FINALIZED]

A beam of pale violet light unfolded in the middle of the lobby, right next to a potted plant that had been dying slowly since before the apocalypse and hadn’t noticed any difference. The light condensed, folded in on itself, and deposited something onto the cracked marble floor with a thud heavy enough that dust puffed up around the impact point and a hairline crack spread outward across three floor tiles.

[ITEM ACQUIRED: VOID SWORD]

[RANK: S]

[CLASSIFICATION: LEGENDARY, SENTIENT-ADJACENT]

[WEIGHT: 4,412 KG]

[WARNING: THIS ITEM CANNOT BE LIFTED BY ANY ENTITY BELOW SS-RANK]

[WARNING: THIS ITEM SHOULD NOT HAVE DROPPED THIS EARLY]

[NOTE: PLEASE DISREGARD PREVIOUS WARNING]

Ethan stared down at it.

It didn’t look like four and a half tons of metal. It looked, honestly, like a very nice cosplay prop — a blade nearly as tall as he was, black as a starless sky, with faint purple veins running along its length that pulsed slowly like a heartbeat. The hilt was wrapped in something that looked like leather but shimmered faintly when the light hit it wrong. It should have looked absurd, propped up against a soda machine in a crumbling apartment lobby. Instead it looked like it belonged there more than the lobby did.

”Huh,” Ethan said. ”Neat.”

He reached down and picked it up.

This was, according to every notification currently scrolling past his vision, physically impossible. A four-ton object should not have come off the ground for a nineteen-year-old with the upper body strength of someone who considered walking to the fridge cardio. The system itself seemed to agree, because a fresh wall of red text scrambled to catch up with reality.

[ERROR]

[ERROR]

[USER HAS LIFTED AN ITEM EXCEEDING THEORETICAL CARRY CAPACITY BY 8,900%]

[RECALCULATING USER STRENGTH STAT...]

[USER STRENGTH STAT: UNKNOWN]

[USER STRENGTH STAT: UNKNOWN]

[USER STRENGTH STAT: UNKNOWN]

[SYSTEM UNABLE TO DISPLAY VALUE]

[PLEASE STAND BY]

Ethan wasn’t reading any of it. He was too busy admiring how the sword felt weirdly light in his hand — not featherlight, not like a prop, but like something had quietly decided the effort of holding it wasn’t his problem to deal with. He gave it an experimental swing, and the blade cut a soft whistling arc through the lobby air that stirred the dying potted plant’s leaves and knocked a framed photo of the building’s original 1998 opening ceremony clean off the wall.

”Okay,” he said, mildly impressed. ”That’s a nice sword.”

Then he remembered the vending machine.

He turned, sword still in hand, and looked at the stubborn glass front with the same expression he’d give any obstacle between himself and carbonated sugar water. He didn’t think about it too hard — didn’t consider, even for a second, that he was about to swing a legendary S-rank weapon at a fifteen-year-old soda dispenser like it was a coconut he needed opened.

He just did it.

The Void Sword moved in a short, almost lazy arc, the kind of motion you’d use to swat a fly, not the kind of motion that should, by any law of physics, do anything more than dent sheet metal.

The vending machine came apart in four clean pieces.

Not shattered. Not crumpled. Sliced — the glass front, the metal casing, the coil mechanisms behind it, all severed along a perfectly smooth diagonal line, so precise that the top half of the machine sat balanced on the bottom half for a full second before gravity caught up and the whole thing slid apart, soda cans tumbling out onto the marble floor in a rolling, clattering avalanche.

The cracks in the floor tile spread another two feet in every direction. Somewhere above, a hanging light fixture swung gently from the vibration.

Ethan looked at the wreckage, then at the sword, then crouched down and picked up a can of soda that had rolled to a stop near his foot, completely unharmed.

”Cold,” he noted approvingly, popping the tab. ”Nice.”

[NOTIFICATION]

[STRUCTURAL DAMAGE DETECTED: LOBBY FLOOR TILE]

[STRUCTURAL DAMAGE DETECTED: VENDING MACHINE (DESTROYED)]

[CAUSE OF DAMAGE: S-RANK WEAPON USED ON C-RANK OBSTACLE]

[EFFICIENCY RATING: 0.0004%]

[THIS IS THE WORST WEAPON USAGE THE SYSTEM HAS EVER RECORDED]

Ethan read that last line, shrugged, and took a long sip of soda.

”Efficiency isn’t everything,” he said, to the empty lobby, to the humming panel, to the sliced remains of a vending machine that had personally wronged him for two straight years and was now very thoroughly avenged. ”Results matter.”

He gathered up the loose cans — nine of them, unbroken, rolling free across the cracked marble — and stacked them carefully on top of his chips and noodles. The Void Sword he simply left leaning against the wall near the elevator, propped up like an umbrella, four and a half tons of legendary weaponry resting casually beside a Please Use Stairs — Elevator Out of Service sign that had been posted there since long before the world ended.

He didn’t think twice about leaving an S-rank sentient-adjacent weapon unattended in a lobby full of desperate survivors.

He should have.

Because upstairs, on the third floor, Mr. Bhatia had finally worked up the courage to leave his barricaded apartment — mop handle in hand, ready to defend his territory — and was currently making his way down the stairwell directly toward the sound that had shaken the entire building.