Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

The next morning, Ethan woke up with a plan.

It wasn’t a grand plan. It didn’t involve dungeons, guilds, or any of the increasingly absurd political attention his existence seemed to be attracting. It involved, specifically, the small folding table he’d dragged into his room two days earlier, on top of which sat Rohan’s borrowed laptop, still charged from the movie night, hooked up via a tangle of cables to an old television he’d salvaged from the building’s abandoned common room.

He’d finally gotten it working. A real television. A real, if slightly flickering, screen bigger than his phone. And on it, thanks to Rohan’s hard drive, an entire folder of downloaded shows Ethan had been rationing like precious resources.

He settled onto his couch — an actual couch, not his bed, a genuine upgrade in apocalypse living he’d been quietly proud of since dragging it in from a neighbor’s abandoned unit — pulled up the first episode of a show he vaguely remembered enjoying before the world ended, and reached for the remote.

It wasn’t there.

He patted the cushion beside him. Nothing. He checked under the throw blanket, checked the small side table, checked the floor in case it had slipped down at some point during setup. Nothing. He finally spotted it — sitting, with the specific cruelty the universe reserved for remote controls everywhere, on top of the television itself, a solid twelve feet from the couch.

Ethan stared at it for a long moment.

He thought about getting up. He genuinely, sincerely considered it, weighing the actual physical cost of standing, walking twelve feet, grabbing the remote, and walking back, against the alternative currently sitting in his back pocket, freshly unlocked less than twelve hours earlier.

”No,” he said out loud, to absolutely no one. ”Absolutely not. I have a skill for this.”

He closed his eyes, pictured himself standing directly in front of the television, remote in hand, and blinked.

The world did its now-familiar flicker-blink, and Ethan found himself standing exactly where he’d intended, close enough to the TV that its warm static hum buzzed faintly against his skin. He grabbed the remote with the triumphant flourish of a man completing a heroic quest, and blinked back to the couch in the same smooth motion, landing squarely on the cushion without so much as spilling the water glass he’d left balanced on the armrest.

[SKILL USED: SHORT-RANGE VOID STEP]

[SKILL USED: SHORT-RANGE VOID STEP]

[NOTE: TOTAL DISTANCE COVERED: 24 METERS]

[NOTE: TOTAL DISTANCE THAT COULD HAVE BEEN COVERED BY WALKING: SAME]

[NOTE: TIME SAVED: APPROXIMATELY 8 SECONDS]

[NOTE: EFFORT SAVED: IMMEASURABLE, ACCORDING TO USER]

”Immeasurable,” Ethan agreed, settling back into the couch cushions with the deep, genuine satisfaction of a man who’d just optimized his own laziness to a degree he hadn’t previously thought possible. ”Exactly right.”

He pressed play. The episode started. He made it four minutes in before he realized, with the specific dismay of a man discovering a second inconvenience layered on top of the first, that he’d forgotten to grab a snack before sitting down, and his void inventory — despite holding an effectively infinite supply of perfectly preserved food — required him to physically reach in and retrieve items, which meant tapping his phone, which was sitting on the kitchen counter, four rooms and one hallway away.

He looked at the distance. He looked at the couch. He looked, one more time, at the sheer unnecessary effort of getting up.

”Okay,” he said, standing on principle rather than laziness this time, mostly just curious how far the skill could actually stretch. ”Let’s see what the range limit actually looks like.”

He walked to his bedroom doorway — technically outside the fifteen-meter range from the couch, he suspected — and pictured the kitchen counter.

Nothing happened.

[SKILL FAILED]

[TARGET EXCEEDS MAXIMUM RANGE (15M)]

[NOTE: TARGET WAS NOT VISIBLE FROM USER’S CURRENT POSITION]

[NOTE: LINE OF SIGHT REQUIRED]

”Ah,” Ethan said, mildly disappointed but respecting the mechanic. ”Line of sight. Fair enough, that’s a reasonable limitation.”

He walked the actual remaining few steps to the kitchen — genuine, honest bipedal locomotion, the way nature intended — grabbed a bag of chips from his void inventory, and blinked straight back to the couch from the kitchen doorway, this time well within range, landing with a satisfied thump against the cushions and immediately unpausing his show.

He spent the next hour perfecting his technique with the focused dedication most people reserved for actual survival skills. He learned that he could blink to the bathroom mid-episode without missing more than a few seconds of dialogue. He learned that blinking directly into his bed from across the room worked beautifully as long as he compensated slightly for the mattress’s give, after one embarrassing overshoot sent him briefly bouncing off the headboard. He even discovered, through a slightly panicked test, that he could blink to catch a falling glass of water before it hit the floor, a genuinely useful application that he immediately filed away under ”things I’ll do maybe once a year.”

He was mid-snack, fully absorbed in his show, when a knock came at his door — polite, hesitant, the specific knock of someone who’d clearly heard rumors about the room’s occupant and wasn’t entirely sure knocking was safe.

Ethan, without pausing his show, without even really thinking about it, blinked from the couch directly to the door and opened it, appearing so suddenly on the other side that Suresh — standing in the hallway with a small covered dish, some fresh vegetable dish he’d been generously sharing since the vending machine incident — actually stumbled backward with a startled yelp.

”Beta!” Suresh clutched the dish to his chest, heart visibly pounding. ”You— I heard nothing, no footsteps, you were just there—”

”Sorry,” Ethan said, not sounding especially sorry, taking the dish with a grateful nod. ”New teleport thing. Still figuring out the range on it.”

”You teleported to answer the door,” Suresh said, voice climbing somewhere between disbelief and genuine alarm.

”Efficient, right?”

Suresh opened his mouth, closed it, and settled instead for the particular expression he’d worn more and more often over the past three weeks — the look of a man who had stopped trying to reconcile the scale of Ethan’s power with the scale of Ethan’s ambitions, and had simply decided to accept both as separate, unrelated facts of the universe.

”Enjoy your food, beta,” he said finally, backing away down the hall at a pace that suggested he wasn’t fully convinced Ethan wouldn’t simply appear directly behind him next. ”Please. Try not to teleport too much. It is bad for an old man’s heart.”

”No promises,” Ethan called after him, already blinking back to the couch, dish balanced carefully in one hand, landing squarely on the cushion just as his show resumed from where he’d paused it.

He settled in, snack in one hand, borrowed vegetables in the other, television glowing warm in the dim apartment light, thoroughly convinced that in the grand list of possible applications for a spatial ability powerful enough to make hunter guilds across the region weep with envy, ”getting to the door without standing up properly” ranked somewhere near the top.

Outside, the world continued its slow, grinding apocalypse. Inside Room 404, the strongest being on the entire planet had, once again, found the single most understated way imaginable to use it.