Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

Six days into the apocalypse, Vikram Rathod had run out of options.

He hadn’t started as a criminal. Before the sky turned red, he’d managed a small electronics repair shop two streets over, the kind of place that fixed cracked phone screens and overcharged for cheap chargers. He had a wife. A daughter, four years old, currently hiding in a basement with eleven other terrified strangers, subsisting on canned lentils that were running out faster than anyone wanted to admit.

He had also, in the last six days, watched three people in his building die trying to fight monsters they had no business fighting, watched a woman awaken as some kind of fire-manipulator and immediately get recruited by a hunter squad and never seen again, and watched everyone with actual power in this city quietly consolidate into groups that didn’t include people like him.

So when Deshu — a former scrapyard worker with a build like a retired boxer and connections nobody asked too many questions about — gathered eight desperate men in the ruins of a burned-out garage and told them about a building three blocks over that supposedly had a ”hidden stockpile,” Vikram didn’t ask what kind of stockpile. He just grabbed the kitchen knife he’d been sharpening every night since the world ended and went.

”It’s real,” Deshu said, pacing in front of the group, voice low and urgent in the dim garage light. ”My cousin heard it from a hunter squad — the Iron Wolves, they went in there two days ago, came out talking about swords worth more than the whole district. And there’s an old janitor there handing out gear like it’s candy. Word is he’s got a stockpile stashed somewhere in that courtyard.”

”Handing it out to who?” someone asked.

”Whoever’s smart enough to ask, apparently,” Deshu said. ”But we’re not gonna ask. We’re gonna take it. Eight of us, one old man and a building full of civilians who couldn’t fight a house cat. In and out before anyone even wakes up.”

Vikram gripped his knife tighter and thought about his daughter’s empty stomach, and didn’t ask any more questions either.

None of them had heard the rumor that mattered.

They’d heard about the gear — Suresh’s small, careful redistribution of Ethan’s discarded mountain had spread through the neighborhood over two days, whispered from shelter to shelter, growing more exaggerated with each retelling until the building was being described as a treasure vault. What they hadn’t heard, because it was too absurd to spread as efficiently as ”free legendary weapons,” was the other rumor — the one about the boy in room 404 who’d walked through a Level 10 zone unarmed, sliced a vending machine into scrap with a sword nobody else could lift, and dropped four elite zombies without breaking stride.

The Iron Wolves knew. They’d been watching the building from a discreet distance for two days, cataloguing, reporting up their chain of command, still trying to figure out what exactly they’d stumbled onto. But hunter squads didn’t talk to scrapyard workers and unemployed shop owners. The two worlds — the desperate and the powerful — had already started drifting apart in the six short days since the apocalypse began, and Vikram’s group existed entirely in the gap between them.

So at 2 AM, eight men in mismatched armor made from car parts and scavenged riot shields approached the building’s cracked front doors with kitchen knives, a stolen pistol with three bullets left, and the specific, dangerous courage of people who had nothing left to lose.

”Quiet,” Deshu whispered, gesturing them forward. ”Side entrance. Janitor’s supposed to sleep near the courtyard — if we’re fast, we grab whatever’s stockpiled and we’re gone before anyone upstairs even stirs.”

The side door was unlocked. Of course it was — nobody in the building had bothered locking anything since the world ended, because what was a lock supposed to do against the things roaming the streets outside. Deshu eased it open, and the group slipped into the dark hallway one by one, boots scuffing softly against cracked tile.

The courtyard, when they reached it, was empty — Suresh had long since distributed everything Ethan discarded, sharing it carefully with the building’s residents and a few trusted neighbors, keeping nothing for himself except a battered iron shortsword he’d started sleeping with beside his cot. No mountain of treasure waited for them. Just cracked concrete, a rusted swing set, and disappointment.

”There’s nothing here,” one of the men hissed.

”Then it’s inside,” Deshu said, already moving toward the stairwell, frustration sharpening his voice. ”Someone’s holding it. Room by room if we have to.”

Vikram followed, knife still gripped tight, telling himself this was still a good idea, still the only option he had left, even as some old instinct — the same instinct that had once told him not to walk down certain streets at night, back when the world had made sense — started whispering that something about this building felt wrong in a way he couldn’t name.

He didn’t know that four floors up, behind a door with peeling paint, an S-rank Void Sword leaned casually against a bedroom wall next to a pile of laundry, guarding nothing on purpose because it didn’t need to try.

He didn’t know that the building’s residents — the same people who’d fought over a mop handle six days ago — had started sleeping soundly for the first time since the apocalypse began, not because they’d gotten stronger, but because something in the building had quietly made sure nothing dangerous got close enough to matter.

He climbed the stairs anyway, heart hammering, knife shaking slightly in his grip, following eight desperate men toward a fourth floor that held the single most catastrophic miscalculation any of them would ever make.

On the third floor landing, Mr. Bhatia’s door creaked open a crack, drawn by the soft sound of unfamiliar footsteps in a stairwell that had been eerily quiet for two nights running. He peered out, saw the shapes of armed strangers moving upward in the dark, and — mop handle forgotten, courage entirely absent — quietly shut his door again and pressed his back against it, praying whoever they were wasn’t headed his way.

They weren’t.

Deshu had a hand-drawn map scrawled on a torn receipt, information bought cheap from a scared kid who’d overheard hunters talking outside the building two days earlier. It marked one location with a crude circle and three exclamation points, the kid’s best attempt at conveying urgency.

Fourth floor. Room 404. THE SWORD IS THERE.

”This way,” Deshu whispered, already moving past the third floor landing, past Mr. Bhatia’s trembling door, toward a set of stairs that led somewhere none of them were remotely prepared for. ”Almost there. Stay quiet, stay fast, and whatever you do—” he glanced back at his eight desperate, exhausted, hungry men, and finished the instruction that would define the rest of the night, ”—don’t wake whoever’s inside.”

Behind that particular door, at that particular moment, Ethan Verma was fast asleep, one arm dangling off the edge of his bed, phone propped against his pillow still quietly streaming footage of his avatar clearing its four hundredth sub-dungeon of the week, utterly, blissfully unaware that eight armed men were four minutes and one flight of stairs away from making the worst decision of their entire lives.