Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

Ethan woke up hungry, which was, by this point, less a feeling and more a permanent state of being.

He shuffled into the tiny kitchenette down the hall, boiled water on the one working burner that hadn’t yet given up on life, and dumped in the second-to-last packet of instant noodles from his dwindling stash. He’d have to do another supply run soon — the thought of walking past the Iron Wolves’ watchful little surveillance post outside his building was mildly annoying, but not annoying enough to override the noodles.

He carried the steaming cup back to his room, grabbed the cheap plastic fork that came free in the packet, and settled cross-legged on his bed with his phone propped against the pillow, avatar feed running quietly in the corner.

[AVATAR STATUS: ACTIVE]

[CURRENT ZONE: ASH SPIRE, FLOOR 40]

[BOSS ENCOUNTER IN PROGRESS]

”Floor forty,” Ethan muttered, twirling noodles onto his fork. ”Fancy.”

He wasn’t really watching. He’d graduated, over the past few days, from wide-eyed fascination to the comfortable background-noise appreciation of someone who’d watched enough progression to trust the process. His tiny pixel avatar could be facing down literally anything at this point and Ethan’s blood pressure wouldn’t so much as twitch.

Which was, in retrospect, exactly the problem.

[BOSS ENCOUNTER: THE ASH TYRANT]

[RANK: S]

[BOSS DEFEATED]

[TIME: 1.1 SECONDS]

[MILESTONE REACHED: FLOOR 40 CLEARED]

[BONUS STAT ALLOCATION TRIGGERED]

[+999 STRENGTH]

[+999 STRENGTH]

[+999 STRENGTH]

The notification arrived exactly as Ethan lifted his fork to his mouth, mid-bite, noodles dangling.

He didn’t feel it coming. There was no warning tremor, no slow buildup like the density fluctuation from the evolution the night before. It just hit — a sudden, violent surge of raw physical power flooding down through his arm like his whole body had briefly plugged into something several sizes too big for it, muscles he didn’t know he had tensing all at once in a full-body flex he hadn’t consciously ordered.

His hand closed around the plastic fork.

The fork did not survive.

It didn’t bend gracefully or snap in a satisfying, dramatic way. It simply disintegrated — crushed instantly into a dozen jagged white shards that sprayed across his lap and the bedspread, noodles flying in a spectacular, saucy arc that painted a fresh stain directly onto his favorite hoodie, currently draped over the bed frame.

”OKAY,” Ethan said, very loudly, to an empty room.

He stared down at his own hand, fingers still curled in the shape of a fork he no longer held, tiny plastic fragments embedded harmlessly in his palm like he’d just crushed a stale cracker instead of a utensil. There was no pain. No cut, no blood, nothing. Just the faint tingling aftershock of strength that had arrived with all the subtlety of a truck through a living room wall.

[STAT INCREASE APPLIED SUCCESSFULLY]

[CURRENT STRENGTH: ??? (SIGNIFICANT INCREASE)]

[NOTE: PLASTIC UTENSILS ARE NO LONGER RECOMMENDED]

[NOTE: THIS RECOMMENDATION IS RETROACTIVE]

”You think?” Ethan said, holding up his ruined fork remains like evidence in a very strange court case. ”A warning would’ve been nice! Like a little countdown! ’Hey, incoming strength boost, please set down anything fragile!’ That’s not a hard notification to write!”

[SYSTEM APOLOGIZES]

[SYSTEM DOES NOT HAVE A PREDICTIVE WARNING FEATURE]

[SYSTEM SUGGESTS USER EAT MORE CAUTIOUSLY IN THE FUTURE]

Ethan glared at the panel like it had personally wronged him, which, in fairness, it kind of had. His noodles — his actual, precious, second-to-last packet of noodles — were now scattered across his bedsheet in a tragic puddle of broth, half of them soaking into the fabric, the other half draped sadly across his own knee like a war casualty.

He looked at the mess. He looked at his hand. He looked, very slowly, at the metal spoon still sitting in his kitchen drawer down the hall, and felt a genuine flicker of concern for the first time since this whole ordeal began.

”If I pick up a metal spoon right now,” he said carefully, ”is that spoon going to survive?”

[UNKNOWN]

[RECOMMENDATION: TEST WITH CAUTION]

”That’s not reassuring.”

He got up, carefully, moving with the exaggerated slowness of a man who genuinely didn’t trust his own hands anymore, and made his way back to the kitchenette. He picked a metal spoon out of the drawer — gently, gingerly, the way you’d pick up something you suspected might be electrified — and gave it the lightest possible squeeze.

The spoon bent. Not shattered, not vaporized, but the handle folded inward like warm clay under his fingers, curling into a shape no spoon manufacturer had ever intended.

”Huh,” Ethan said, mildly fascinated despite himself, turning the ruined spoon over in his hand. ”That’s actually kind of cool, ignoring the fact that I now can’t safely use silverware.”

He tried a fork from the same drawer — plastic backup stash, purchased in bulk before the world ended — and it crumbled the instant his fingers closed around it, same as the first.

By the time he’d tested his way through the entire cutlery drawer, Ethan had successfully destroyed four spoons, three forks, and one particularly unlucky butter knife, and arrived at the firm, hard-won conclusion that eating solid food had just become significantly more complicated for the rest of his natural life.

”Okay,” he said, standing in the kitchen amid a small graveyard of bent and shattered utensils, ”new rule. I eat everything by hand from now on. Soup’s gonna be a problem, but I’ll figure that out later.”

He returned to his room, salvaged what he could of the ruined noodle packet — surprisingly, most of it, since the actual noodles had mostly stayed clumped together despite the broth explosion — and ate the rest directly with his fingers, carefully, testing each motion like a man handling a bomb.

His fingers, it turned out, were fine holding food. Apparently the system’s newly installed +999 Strength only cared about objects that resisted, which meant soft noodles were safe and rigid plastic forks were, tragically, collateral damage in Ethan’s ongoing war against snack logistics.

He glanced at his phone, where the avatar feed had already moved on to Floor 41 without so much as pausing to acknowledge the chaos it had caused in the real world.

”You couldn’t have given me a heads up,” Ethan told it, mouth full of noodles, licking broth off his fingers with the wounded dignity of a man who’d lost three forks in the last ten minutes. ”One little ding. That’s all I needed.”

The avatar, predictably, did not respond. It simply kept fighting, kept climbing, kept quietly stacking impossible power onto a nineteen-year-old who was, at this exact moment, more concerned about cutlery casualties than the fact that he could now apparently crush industrial steel with a mildly enthusiastic handshake.

Outside his window, the red sky dimmed toward another evening, and somewhere across the district, Iron Wolf scouts logged another unexplained energy spike radiating from room 404 — brief, massive, and utterly without context.

None of them would ever guess it had been triggered by a plastic fork.