Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

Suresh spent the next two days doing exactly what Ethan had asked of him, moving through the district’s guild network with the same quiet efficiency he’d always shown, distributing masterwork gear to squads he’d come to know well through weeks of coordinated supply drops. Priya’s fighters received a fresh set of enchanted weapons that made their eyes go wide with disbelief. Anika’s people got armor that, according to one stunned Crimson Blade quartermaster, ”should not exist outside a museum vault.” Meera’s battered Ashen Talon squad, still recovering from their losses in the Sunken Vein, received enough gear to fully re-equip their entire remaining roster.

He kept the armor Ethan had given him on the whole time, mostly out of habit at this point rather than any expectation that he’d personally need it. He was, after all, a janitor. A sixty-one-year-old man who swept floors and organized supply schedules, not a fighter. The armor felt good, warm and steady, but he assumed its purpose was symbolic more than practical — a reminder of the sanctuary’s protection, nothing more.

He found out how wrong that assumption was on the third day, while delivering the last batch of surplus gear to a Crimson Blade outpost near the district’s northern perimeter.

The dragon came out of nowhere — or rather, out of a gate that had been steadily destabilizing for the past two days, one of the many breach points the corruption event had accelerated past every guild’s containment capacity. It was smaller than the true apex predators Ethan’s avatar had encountered in deeper dungeons, rated only tier-7 by the outpost’s scanners, but ”only tier-7” still meant something the size of a bus, wings spanning the width of the street, scales like tempered steel, and a temperament made considerably worse by the same aggression parameters that had thrown the entire district into crisis.

Suresh was crossing the outpost’s open courtyard, arms full of the last crate of armor pieces, when the creature crashed down through the perimeter fence in an explosion of splintered wood and shattered concrete, sending the handful of Crimson Blade fighters stationed there scattering for cover.

”MOVE!” one of them screamed, already sprinting for the nearest barricade. ”Get clear, get—”

Suresh didn’t move fast enough. The dragon’s massive head swung around, locked onto the nearest visible target — an old man standing frozen in the open courtyard, clutching a crate of armor like it might somehow shield him — and lunged.

He didn’t decide to raise his arm. It happened on pure, animal instinct, the same reflexive flinch anyone makes when something enormous and lethal comes hurtling toward them, crate still clutched in one hand as the other came up in a useless, desperate gesture to shield his face.

The dragon’s jaws closed around his raised forearm.

And stopped.

Not the way a bite stops when it meets resistance — the way an entire freight train stops when it meets a wall that simply refuses, on some fundamental physical level, to acknowledge the collision as valid. The creature’s massive skull jerked backward, teeth grinding uselessly against armor that hadn’t so much as scratched, and a low, confused growl rumbled up from somewhere deep in its chest.

Suresh, still frozen in place, blinked down at his own forearm — intact, unbroken, the armor Ethan had handed him three days ago glowing faintly along its runic seams — and felt something in his chest lurch sideways with disbelief.

”...oh,” he said quietly.

The dragon reared back for a second strike, wings flaring wide, clearly unwilling to accept that its first attempt had failed. Suresh, operating on the same pure instinct that had raised his arm the first time, brought both hands up this time, crate abandoned on the ground, and braced himself for an impact he fully expected to end considerably worse than the last one.

The creature’s full weight slammed down against his raised arms.

Suresh’s feet skidded backward maybe half a meter, cracking the concrete beneath his boots — and that was the entire extent of the damage. He stood there, arms locked overhead, an actual tier-7 dragon’s full bodyweight bearing down against him, and simply held it, not through any combat training or fighting instinct, but through the sheer, borrowed weight of masterwork armor that had apparently been engineered to withstand exactly this kind of assault without so much as flinching.

”HOLY—” one of the Crimson Blade fighters, halfway to cover, skidded to a stop and stared. ”He’s — he’s blocking it! The janitor’s blocking a dragon!”

Suresh, for his part, had no idea what to do next. Blocking the strike had been pure reflex. Actually fighting a dragon was an entirely different proposition, one that a lifetime of sweeping floors had never remotely prepared him for. But some instinct — perhaps borrowed from the armor itself, perhaps simply the accumulated calm of a man who’d spent weeks watching Ethan handle far worse threats with barely a shrug — settled over him in the moment that mattered.

He shoved.

It wasn’t a technique. It wasn’t a trained maneuver. It was the same motion he’d use pushing a heavy supply cart, applied with a strength the armor had apparently decided to lend him without asking permission first, and the dragon — easily ten times his mass — staggered backward several full meters, wings flailing for balance, genuinely startled for the first time since crashing through the perimeter fence.

”Get back!” Suresh shouted at the scattered fighters, finding his voice at last, some deep well of composure surfacing from decades of quietly managing chaos far less literal than this. ”Regroup, get your weapons up, I’ll hold it!”

The fighters, stunned into obedience by the sheer impossibility of what they were witnessing, scrambled into a defensive formation behind him, weapons raised, watching in disbelieving silence as their outpost’s mild-mannered supply courier planted his feet against a tier-7 dragon and held the line like he’d been doing it his entire life.

The dragon lunged again. Suresh caught its foreleg this time, twisted with a grunt of genuine effort, and sent the creature crashing sideways into the outpost’s remaining fence line, buying just enough time for the regrouped fighters to open fire with weapons — the same masterwork weapons Suresh had personally delivered days earlier — that finally, properly, began cutting through the creature’s tempered scales.

Between Suresh’s improvised, armor-fueled defense and the squad’s newly upgraded firepower, the fight lasted less than three minutes. The dragon, wounded and disoriented, finally retreated back through the destabilizing gate rather than press an attack that had, against every reasonable expectation, turned against it.

Suresh stood in the wrecked courtyard afterward, breathing hard, staring down at his own hands like they belonged to someone else entirely.

The story reached the settlement market by evening, and it reached Ethan by the following morning, delivered breathlessly by a market trader who could barely get the words out fast enough.

”The janitor,” the trader said, ”your janitor, beta — he blocked a dragon. Bare-handed, more or less. Held it off long enough for the whole squad to survive. They’re calling him the Iron Warden now, some of them are saying he’s secretly been a hidden S-rank all along—”

Ethan, halfway through breakfast, nearly choked on his rice.

He found Suresh back in the lobby that afternoon, sweeping the floor with his usual quiet diligence, armor still resting against the wall nearby where he’d set it down after finally getting some rest.

”So,” Ethan said, leaning against the doorframe, ”I hear you fought a dragon.”

Suresh looked up, faintly embarrassed. ”It was mostly the armor, beta. I did very little, truthfully. I just — stood there, and it held.”

”You blocked a tier-7 dragon with your arm,” Ethan said, genuinely impressed despite himself. ”That’s not nothing. That’s the gear doing its job because you were brave enough to actually wear it into a real fight.”

Suresh set down his broom, considering that for a long, quiet moment. ”I did not feel brave, beta. I felt terrified.”

”Yeah,” Ethan said, smiling faintly, thinking back to his own first weeks of accidentally shattering vending machines and turning armies into red mist without ever quite understanding what he was doing. ”That’s usually how it starts.”