Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

The grocery mart, it turned out, was fresh out of eggs.

Ethan stood in front of the empty refrigerated shelf for a long, betrayed moment, staring at the little cardboard divider that used to hold egg cartons and now held nothing but a thin layer of dust and one very sad, cracked shell someone had dropped and never cleaned up.

”You have got to be kidding me,” he muttered.

He checked the shelf twice, as if the eggs might materialize out of pure spite if he looked hard enough, then wandered further into the store, past aisles that had been mostly looted clean over the past six days — bread gone, most canned goods gone, the snack aisle looking like a crime scene. He did manage to find a single overlooked jar of pickled onions and a bag of rice that had rolled behind a display stand, which he claimed with the grim satisfaction of a man salvaging what he could from a lost cause.

Outside, the Iron Wolf squad was still standing around the intersection in various states of shellshock, staring at the spot where an F-rank gate beast had simply ceased to exist, and at the gate itself, which continued to hang open in the sky, humming faintly, edges still crackling with unstable violet light.

Ethan walked back out through the mart’s shattered entrance, rice and pickled onions tucked under one arm, and glanced up at the tear in the sky with the mild curiosity of a man noticing a weather front rolling in.

”Huh,” he said. ”That thing’s still open.”

[GATE STATUS: DESTABILIZING]

[ESTIMATED CLOSURE TIME: 40 MINUTES]

[GATE INTERIOR CLASSIFICATION: TUTORIAL-ADJACENT DUNGEON ZONE]

”Tutorial-adjacent,” Ethan repeated, testing the phrase. He looked around the intersection — at the abandoned cars, the fleeing crowds long since dispersed, the hunters still too stunned to fully process what they’d just watched — and noticed, with the specific tunnel vision of a man on a mission, a small secondhand shop two buildings past the gate’s shimmering edge. A shop that, if he remembered right from the old world, used to sell dried snacks in bulk.

The problem was the gate hovered directly between him and it, a churning wound of black-violet light suspended at head height, humming with barely restrained energy that Priya’s entire squad was still treating with the reverent terror of people who’d watched three of their own die to something exactly like it.

Ethan considered walking around. He glanced left — a collapsed building blocked that route. He glanced right — a pile of wrecked cars, stacked two high from earlier chaos, blocked that one too.

He looked back at the gate.

”...it’s probably fine,” he said, to absolutely no one, and walked straight into it.

”WAIT—” Priya’s shout came half a second too late, her hand already reaching out uselessly toward a boy who’d already stepped through a dimensional tear like it was a beaded curtain in a cheap restaurant doorway.

The gate didn’t resist him. It didn’t so much as flicker. Ethan simply passed through the shimmering violet threshold and vanished from the intersection entirely, gone in the space between one footstep and the next, leaving the Iron Wolves staring at an empty patch of cracked asphalt where a teenager carrying rice and pickled onions had been standing a moment before.

”He just—” Arjun’s voice cracked. ”Captain, he just walked into an active gate. Unarmed. Carrying groceries.”

”I saw it,” Priya said, jaw tight, already running the numbers in her head and hating every single one of them. Tutorial-adjacent gates weren’t necessarily safe — the ”tutorial” classification referred to the entry difficulty, not the interior, and she’d read enough incident reports to know some of those zones scaled up brutally the deeper you went. ”Do we go in after him?”

”With what?” Rahul said, gesturing at their squad, still recovering from the beast encounter minutes earlier. ”Captain, whatever’s in there just ate an F-rank monster like it wasn’t there. If he needs saving, I don’t think it’s us who’s gonna do it.”

Priya stared at the gate, humming and pulsing in the sky, and made the only call that made sense given everything she’d learned about the boy from room 404 over the past week.

”We wait,” she said. ”And we watch.”

On the other side, Ethan found himself standing in a narrow stone corridor lit by faint blue crystal veins embedded in the walls, the air cool and still, carrying the faint mineral smell of somewhere deep underground despite the fact that he’d just been standing on a sunlit street two seconds earlier.

”Oh,” he said, blinking at his surroundings. ”This isn’t the secondhand shop.”

He looked back the way he’d come, but the entrance had already sealed itself shut behind him — no shimmering violet doorway, no glimpse of the intersection, just solid stone corridor stretching in both directions, dimly lit and silent except for a distant, echoing drip of water somewhere deeper in.

[LOCATION: TUTORIAL-ADJACENT DUNGEON, ”THE SUNKEN VEIN”]

[RECOMMENDED PARTY: 3-5 HUNTERS, RANK F-D]

[USER RANK: EXCEEDS DISPLAY PARAMETERS]

Ethan sighed, shifted the bag of rice under his arm, and started walking, because standing still in a dark tunnel accomplished exactly nothing and he still technically needed to find eggs eventually, gate or no gate.

The corridor opened, after a few minutes, into a wider chamber — low ceiling, more of those glowing blue crystal veins threading through the rock, and a scattering of small, hunched creatures that looked like rats if rats had been dipped in tar and given too many teeth. There were maybe fifteen of them, clustered around what looked like a crude nest of bones and scavenged debris.

They noticed him instantly. Beady red eyes turned toward the intruder in unison, and the whole pack surged forward with a chittering shriek, a wave of small, sharp-toothed bodies converging on the one warm-blooded thing that had wandered into their den.

Ethan didn’t stop walking. He adjusted his path slightly, the same minimal correction he’d used against the gate beast earlier, angling toward the far side of the chamber where the corridor continued.

The pack hit his passive aura like waves against a seawall — the leading rats simply crumpled mid-leap, dropping lifeless before their claws ever got within a foot of him, and the ones behind them tripped over the bodies of the first wave, shrieking in confusion as more of their pack simply dropped for no visible reason. Within seconds, the entire nest lay still around a boy who hadn’t broken stride once, still balancing a bag of rice under one arm like a man crossing a slightly busy parking lot.

[15 HOSTILE ENTITIES NEUTRALIZED]

[EXPERIENCE GAINED: NEGLIGIBLE]

”Yeah, yeah,” Ethan muttered, stepping over the small pile of bodies without looking down, continuing deeper into the tunnel. ”I get it, I’m built now, very impressive, can we find the exit.”

The corridor forked ahead, one path leading up toward a faint hint of daylight, the other spiraling down into darkness thick enough that even the glowing crystal veins seemed to give up trying to illuminate it.

Ethan glanced at the downward path, weighed it against his rapidly diminishing patience and his genuine desire to be home before lunch, and turned firmly toward the light instead.

”Nope,” he said. ”Grocery store first. Ominous dungeon depths later, maybe, if I remember.”

He never noticed the massive shape stirring somewhere far below in that darker tunnel — something ancient, something that had been sleeping in the Sunken Vein long before the gate ever opened, something that would have made even the Iron Wolves’ most seasoned hunters turn and run without a second thought.

Ethan just kept walking toward the daylight, already thinking about eggs.