Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

Meera didn’t let him walk away that easily.

She caught up in four long strides, mana-enhanced legs closing the distance despite her exhaustion, and fell into step half a pace behind Ethan as he wound his way toward the passage she’d pointed out. Behind her, the remains of her formation scrambled to follow, half-carrying their unconscious teammates, none of them willing to let this particular mystery walk out of their sight.

”Wait,” Meera said. ”Please. I have to ask — properly, this time. What’s your combat class?”

Ethan glanced sideways at her, mildly surprised she was still there. ”I told you. Unemployed.”

”That’s not a class,” Meera said, patience fraying at the edges. ”Unemployed isn’t a system designation. I’ve seen the registry. Every awakened human gets sorted into an archetype — Warrior, Mage, Ranger, Berserker, Summoner, dozens of subtypes under each. There is no ’Unemployed’ category. It doesn’t exist.”

”Well,” Ethan said, stepping over a loose rock in the tunnel floor, ”apparently it does now, because that’s what mine says.”

He pulled out his phone — mostly on reflex, to check how much further this shortcut went — and the status panel flickered up automatically in response to his attention, visible only to him. He held it up without thinking, more out of idle habit than any intention to prove a point.

[USER: ETHAN VERMA]

[CLASS: (UNEMPLOYED)]

[TITLE: ACCIDENTAL CATACLYSM]

[COMBAT STYLE: NONE DETECTED]

Meera couldn’t see the screen — it wasn’t rendering for anyone but Ethan, some private overlay only his system produced — but the way he casually tilted the phone toward her, expecting her to read text that simply wasn’t there for her eyes, told her everything about how little he understood the significance of what he was showing off.

”I can’t see that,” she said carefully.

”Oh.” Ethan shrugged and put the phone away. ”Right. It says Unemployed. Combat style: none detected. Which, honestly, tracks, because I don’t really do anything.”

”You just erased an S-rank anomalous boss with a yawn.”

”I stretched,” Ethan corrected. ”There’s a difference.”

Meera pressed two fingers against her temple, feeling the beginnings of a headache that had nothing to do with her depleted mana reserves. ”There is no meaningful difference between those two things in the context of what I just watched happen.”

They emerged from the tunnel a few minutes later into blinding daylight, stepping out onto the cracked pavement of Market Street — considerably closer to Ethan’s building than the intersection he’d originally entered through, which was at least one small mercy in an otherwise deeply inconvenient day. The gate they’d all originally come through, back at the main intersection, was visible a few blocks away, still hovering and humming in the sky, its edges beginning to flicker with the telltale instability of a closing rift.

Waiting at the mouth of this second exit, weapons still drawn from their earlier standoff, was the Iron Wolf squad — Priya at the front, having tracked the gate’s secondary exit point the moment her scanners flagged an unusual mana bloom nearby.

”There he is,” Priya said, lowering her rifle with an expression of profound, weary relief that was rapidly curdling back into professional alarm at the sight of Meera Kapoor and the battered remains of the Ashen Talon emerging right behind him. ”Kapoor? What happened to your squad?”

”Your civilian happened,” Meera said flatly. ”We were fighting an anomalous S-rank corrupted boss. He walked in looking for groceries and it died because he stretched.”

Priya closed her eyes briefly, like a woman absorbing news she’d somehow already known was coming.

”Right,” she said. ”Of course it did.”

The two guild leaders exchanged a look that carried an entire unspoken conversation — the particular, specific exhaustion of professionals who’d spent their whole careers building expertise around a set of rules that a nineteen-year-old in a stained hoodie kept breaking without noticing he was doing it.

”Ethan,” Priya said, turning to him with the deliberate calm of someone trying a new approach. ”Please. I’m not asking to threaten you, or recruit you, or anything like that. I just need to understand what’s happening. What is your class rank? Not your title, not your combat style. Your actual, official system rank. SS? S? Is there something above those that we don’t know about yet?”

Ethan considered the question with genuine effort this time, mostly because she’d asked nicely and he respected that.

”I mean, I could check,” he offered, pulling his phone back out. ”Give me a sec.”

He tapped through the status panel, scrolling past the stat block still cluttered with unresolved question marks, until he found the specific field she was asking about.

[OFFICIAL RANK CLASSIFICATION: (UNEMPLOYED)]

[NOTE: SYSTEM HAS ATTEMPTED RANK ASSIGNMENT 47 TIMES]

[NOTE: ALL ATTEMPTS FAILED DUE TO STAT OVERFLOW]

[NOTE: RANK REMAINS UNDEFINED]

[NOTE: PLEASE STOP ASKING]

Ethan actually laughed at the last line, a short, surprised bark of amusement. ”It says it’s tried forty-seven times and given up. It’s telling me to stop asking.”

”Forty-seven times,” Priya repeated slowly.

”Yeah. I think the system’s kind of embarrassed about it, honestly.”

Meera and Priya exchanged another look, this one heavier than the last. In six days, they’d both watched their entire understanding of power scaling get rewritten by hunters awakening into S-rank abilities that would’ve been considered miracles a week earlier. They’d built new mental frameworks, adjusted expectations, learned to treat ”unprecedented” as a Tuesday. And now they were standing on a cracked street, being told, quite plainly, that whatever this boy was, the system itself — the same system responsible for classifying every single awakened human on the planet — had simply thrown up its hands and refused to even try anymore.

”So there’s no ceiling,” Rahul said quietly, from somewhere behind Priya, voice tight with a kind of dawning dread that had nothing to do with monsters. ”Whatever he is — there’s no measured limit to it. Not even the system that ranks everyone else knows how strong he actually is.”

Ethan, blissfully unbothered by the weight everyone else seemed to be placing on this conversation, tucked his phone back into his pocket and shifted the rice bag under his arm, glancing down the street toward his building with the singular focus of a man whose day had already run three hours longer than planned.

”Look, I appreciate the concern,” he said, ”but I still don’t have eggs, my noodles are basically gone, and I’ve been in a cave for like twenty minutes dealing with rat things and a giant crystal guy who apparently didn’t like being called slow. So if there’s nothing else—”

”Wait,” Priya said, one last attempt. ”At least tell me — do you have any idea what you actually are? Even a guess?”

Ethan paused, genuinely thinking about it for the first time, tilting his head slightly as he considered the question with more sincerity than he’d given anything else that day.

”Honestly?” he said finally. ”I think I’m just really, really good at napping.”

He turned and walked off down the street toward his building, leaving two of the district’s most capable hunter squads standing in stunned silence behind him, staring after a boy who had just single-handedly redefined the upper limits of human power in the space of a twenty-minute grocery run — and who considered the whole encounter, on balance, a moderately disappointing errand.