Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

Ethan made it about ten steps back toward the bakery before the ground started shaking again.

He stopped, sighed, and turned around with the specific weariness of a man who’d already had one interruption too many this afternoon. ”You have got to be kidding me.”

The fissure that had birthed the Chitin Sovereign hadn’t sealed itself after the creature’s death — if anything, it had widened, cracks spreading outward across the battlefield like a spiderweb, and from somewhere deep beneath the earth came a low, grinding rumble that built steadily into something far larger than anything that had emerged so far.

[SECONDARY BREACH DETECTED]

[ORIGIN: DEEP RIFT ZONE]

[SCANNING...]

[HOSTILE FORMATION DETECTED]

[ENTITY COUNT: 8,412]

[NOTE: THIS APPEARS TO BE THE SOVEREIGN’S FULL BROOD SWARM]

[NOTE: THE SOVEREIGN’S DEATH HAS TRIGGERED A RETALIATION INSTINCT ACROSS THE BROOD]

[THREAT ASSESSMENT: MODERATE — NUMBERS COMPENSATE FOR INDIVIDUALLY LOW POWER]

Ethan stared at the number for a long moment. Eight thousand. More than double the original wave, and this time surging up out of the fissure in a single, unbroken tide that stretched from one horizon to the other, blotting out the last remaining light from the already-darkened sky, a churning black mass of claws and chitin and mindless, grief-fueled rage.

Along the shattered defensive line, what remained of the coalition forces stared at the horizon with the particular, hollowed-out despair of people who’d already spent everything they had and were now watching the bill come due twice.

”Captain,” Rahul’s voice cracked over the radio, barely audible over the growing roar. ”That’s — that’s not survivable. Not even with him. Nobody can hold a line against eight thousand—”

”Hold your position,” Priya said, though even she couldn’t keep the strain out of her voice. ”Watch him. Just — watch him.”

Ethan glanced back one more time at the bakery, safe for now, and then at the swarm rolling toward him like an incoming ocean, and felt something in his chest shift from irritation into a colder, more focused kind of resolve.

”Okay,” he said quietly, drawing the Void Sword a second time, the air pressure across the district dropping again with that same violent, ear-popping suddenness. ”You know what, fine. Let’s just end this properly.”

He didn’t walk into this one. He didn’t wade through the crowd, sword swinging in casual, half-effort arcs like he had with the first wave. He planted his feet, both hands settling into a proper grip on the hilt, and raised the blade high overhead, purple veins along its length blazing brighter than Ethan had ever seen them, bright enough now to cast long shadows across the entire ruined battlefield.

The swarm closed the distance in seconds, eight thousand mutated creatures converging on a single point with the mindless, unstoppable momentum of an avalanche.

Ethan brought the sword down in one clean, horizontal arc.

What followed didn’t look like combat, or a shockwave, or even an explosion. It looked like the world itself had been cut.

A line of pure, absolute violet light tore across the horizon, following the arc of the blade, and everything in its path simply ceased to exist in any coherent form — not dissolved into particles, not vaporized in a dramatic burst, but erased, the ground itself splitting open along the sword’s trajectory in a trench that plunged fifty meters deep and stretched, by the time the light finally faded, nearly three miles across the ravaged landscape beyond the market district.

The roar of eight thousand monsters cut off all at once, replaced by a silence so total and so sudden that it felt, to everyone standing along the defensive line, like the entire world had briefly forgotten how to make sound.

[HOSTILE FORMATION NEUTRALIZED]

[ENTITIES ELIMINATED: 8,412 / 8,412]

[METHOD: SINGLE DISPLACEMENT STRIKE]

[COLLATERAL: TRENCH FORMATION, APPROX. 4.8 KM LENGTH]

[EFFICIENCY RATING: THE SYSTEM HAS RUN OUT OF SUPERLATIVES]

[NOTE: THIS IS, BY A WIDE MARGIN, THE MOST DESTRUCTIVE SINGLE ACTION EVER RECORDED SINCE SYSTEM ACTIVATION]

Ethan lowered the sword slowly, staring out at the trench he’d just carved into the horizon, the massive scar stretching so far into the distance that its far end had genuinely vanished past the curve of visibility. Dust and displaced earth still drifted down from where the shockwave had thrown it skyward, settling in a slow, silent rain across the ruined battlefield.

”...Huh,” he said finally, mildly startled by his own handiwork. ”Okay. That’s a lot more than I meant to do.”

[NOTE: THE SYSTEM WOULD LIKE TO CLARIFY THAT ”MORE THAN INTENDED” IS A RECURRING THEME IN USER’S COMBAT HISTORY]

”Yeah, yeah,” Ethan muttered, sheathing the blade, watching the last of the dust settle over an emptied battlefield that had, minutes earlier, held enough monsters to level the entire district. ”Noted.”

Along the shattered remains of the defensive line, absolutely no one moved for a long, stretched-out moment.

Priya lowered her binoculars with hands that had gone numb, staring at a trench that stretched to the horizon and beyond, a wound cut into the earth itself with a single swing of a sword, and found that her mind had simply stopped generating the words necessary to process what she’d just witnessed.

”Four point eight kilometers,” Arjun said, voice hollow, reading off his scanner with the flat, disbelieving tone of a man reciting numbers he didn’t believe himself. ”The trench is four point eight kilometers long, Captain. One strike.”

”I saw it,” Priya managed.

Beside her, Anika Reyes had gone very quiet, staring out at the devastation with an expression that had finally, fully, abandoned any pretense of professional composure. ”Eight thousand hostiles,” she said slowly. ”Gone. In one swing. He erased an army with a single slash.”

”For bread,” Rahul added, still staring, voice cracking somewhere between hysteria and awe. ”He did this for bread.”

Down in the ruined intersection, Ethan was already walking back toward the bakery, entirely unbothered by the miles-long scar he’d just carved into the planet’s surface, mentally cataloging the day’s events with the priorities of a man whose actual concerns had never really wavered.

”Okay,” he called back over his shoulder, not quite loud enough to reach the barricade but audible to anyone close enough, ”sword’s back in its sheath, area’s clear, I think we’re good. Anyone know if Meenakshi’s still got that jam she was working on? The one with the local berries?”

Nobody answered him. Nobody, in that moment, was capable of answering him.

He reached the bakery’s open shutter, peered inside at the still-warm oven and the abandoned basket of half-wrapped bread, and allowed himself, finally, the small, satisfied smile of a man who had successfully protected the single most important supply line in his entire post-apocalypse existence.

Behind him, spread out across the horizon in a wound that would take geological surveys years to fully explain, sat silent, undeniable proof that the being responsible for it all considered breakfast a cause worth ending an army for.