Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

By the time Deshu’s group made it back to the burned-out garage, the story had already started changing shape in their mouths — the way stories do when the people telling them are still shaking too hard to speak in a straight line.

”His weapon ate our weapons,” one man kept repeating, staring at his empty hands like they belonged to a stranger. ”Just — turned them to dust. We didn’t even touch him.”

”He didn’t even wake up,” said another, quieter, almost reverent now that the fear had curdled into something closer to awe. ”Eight of us. In his room. And he went back to sleep.”

Vikram said nothing at all. He walked straight home, past the shelter, past the neighbors who called out asking if they’d found anything, and sat down beside his sleeping daughter, and didn’t move for a long time.

Deshu was the one who eventually gave the story its final shape, three hours later, in the crowded basement shelter where nearly forty residents had gathered for the evening meal — thin lentil soup stretched to feed too many mouths. He hadn’t meant to tell it as anything more than a warning, a cautionary tale about a building nobody should try to rob.

It came out sounding like a legend instead.

”There’s something in that building,” he said, voice low, the whole room leaning in without meaning to. ”Fourth floor. Room 404. We went in for the gear the janitor’s been giving out — figured we’d find a storeroom, maybe a guard or two. Instead we find a sword. A real one. S-rank, had to be, the pressure coming off it alone nearly put me on the floor. Couldn’t lift it. Eight of us, together, couldn’t budge it an inch.”

”So you left it,” someone said.

”We tried again,” Deshu admitted, and something in his voice made the room go very still. ”And whatever’s guarding that room woke up. Didn’t say a word. Didn’t even open its eyes, far as we could tell. Just—” he made a slow, helpless gesture with his hands, ”—turned every weapon we had into dust. All of it. In under two seconds. And then it went back to sleep like nothing happened.”

The room stayed silent for a long moment. Then a woman near the back, an older lady who’d lived three streets from that building her whole life, spoke up in a voice thin with disbelief. ”That’s the residential block. Ordinary people live there. I know families in that building.”

”Not anymore, they don’t,” Deshu said. ”Not ordinary, anyway. Something’s hiding in that fourth-floor apartment. Something that doesn’t need to fight to win. It just is, and everything around it breaks if it gets too close.”

By morning, the story had traveled to three more shelters.

By evening, it had a name.

Nobody knew who first called it the Sleeping Guardian. Rumors rarely have a single author — they grow the way loot piles do, one exaggeration stacked on another until the original shape is unrecognizable. What started as ”a guy with a heavy sword who didn’t wake up” became, within two days, a fully formed piece of neighborhood mythology, whispered in shelters and traded like currency among people desperate for any reason to believe the world hadn’t completely abandoned them.

”They say it never leaves the building,” one man told his cousin, huddled around a fire built from broken furniture. ”They say it doesn’t need to eat, doesn’t need to sleep — well, it sleeps, but that’s part of the trick. It only looks asleep. The moment anyone with bad intentions gets close, it’s already awake, already finished, before you even see it move.”

”I heard it’s not human anymore,” someone else added. ”Heard the building itself changed around it. Heard the vending machine in the lobby got sliced clean in half — not by a fight, just by the thing testing its own strength on a whim, like it doesn’t even understand how strong it’s become.”

That part, at least, was accidentally true, which was exactly the kind of detail that made the rest of the story feel more believable than it deserved to.

”My nephew tried to rob it,” someone whispered, two shelters over, the story now morphing Deshu’s group from eight desperate men into a vague, unnamed ”someone” for the sake of a better ending. ”Went in with a knife. Came out with nothing but his life, and even that felt like a gift. Said it didn’t even open its eyes.”

Suresh, the janitor, heard the rumors secondhand from a neighbor who’d stopped by the shelter for water, and very nearly choked on his tea.

”A hidden boss,” he repeated slowly, testing the phrase like it tasted strange in his mouth. ”They think Ethan is a hidden boss.”

”Not just any boss,” the neighbor said, wide-eyed and utterly serious. ”They’re saying he might be the strongest thing in the whole district. Maybe the whole city. The gear you’ve been handing out — people are saying that’s just what he throws away. His trash. Can you imagine what he actually keeps?”

Suresh thought about the courtyard, the mountain of Mist-Forged Blades and enchanted armor Ethan had discarded without a second glance, dismissed as ”junk” because a system window had labeled it common. He thought about the sliced vending machine, still sitting in the lobby because nobody had the heart — or honestly, the ability — to move the pieces.

He didn’t correct the rumor. He wasn’t entirely sure, at this point, that it was wrong.

Ethan, for his part, remained gloriously, blissfully unaware that his neighborhood had quietly voted him into legendary status.

He spent that particular afternoon exactly the way he’d spent every afternoon since the world ended: eating the last of a stale packet of crackers he’d found behind the fridge, watching his avatar clear a swamp dungeon on the little phone feed, and complaining out loud to no one in particular about the total absence of anything resembling a decent snack within walking distance.

He did notice, vaguely, that people in the hallway had started acting strange around him — a woman from 402 who used to nod politely now practically flattened herself against the wall when he passed, murmuring something that sounded suspiciously like a prayer. Mr. Bhatia, who hadn’t said two words to him in eleven years, actually bowed slightly when their paths crossed near the stairwell, which Ethan found deeply confusing but chalked up to apocalypse-related stress.

”Everyone’s being weird,” he told his phone, not really expecting an answer, watching his avatar mow down a boss-tier swamp toad in the corner of the screen. ”Like, weirder than usual. Is it a system thing? Did I unlock ’unsettling aura’ or something?”

[QUERY UNCLEAR]

[NO SYSTEM-RELATED ANOMALY DETECTED IN USER’S PHYSICAL PRESENCE]

[SOCIAL PERCEPTION FACTORS ARE OUTSIDE SYSTEM MONITORING SCOPE]

”Helpful as always,” Ethan muttered, tossing his phone onto the bed and heading toward the door with the singular determination of a man on a mission. He had, after all, run out of crackers, and the situation demanded immediate action.

He had no idea that stepping into the hallway now felt, to the people who saw him do it, like watching a sleeping dragon shift in its cave — that his casual, half-awake stroll toward the stairs had entire families on the lower floors quietly ushering their children back inside, that his simple search for a snack was, to the neighborhood at large, the terrifying possibility that the Sleeping Guardian had finally decided to wake up and walk among them.

He just wanted crackers.

The building held its breath as he passed.