Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

The World Tree had grown considerably over the following week, its silver canopy now stretching wide enough to shade a good third of the courtyard, its purifying influence extending its clean, crisp air out past the sanctuary boundary and into the surrounding blocks. It had become, without Ethan ever intending it, the single most popular gathering spot in the entire settlement — children playing beneath its branches, elderly residents sitting in its shade with the particular contentment of people who hadn’t breathed easy in weeks, a small, informal market even springing up nearby as traders realized foot traffic clustered wherever the tree’s influence reached.

Ethan, for his part, had claimed a specific patch of sunlight beneath his own bedroom window as his personal napping spot — not the courtyard exactly, but a particular angle of afternoon light that hit his couch through the window at just the right hour, warm and golden, perfect for the specific kind of deep, satisfied nap he’d spent the better part of a month perfecting.

He was three minutes into settling in for exactly that nap, blanket arranged just so, the light falling warm across his face, when the room went dark.

Not evening-dark. Not cloud-passing-over dark. A sudden, total absence of light, as though someone had thrown a massive tarp over the entire building, plunging his living room into a gloom deep enough that he had to blink several times before his eyes adjusted.

Ethan sat up slowly, blanket still half-draped over his legs, and stared at the window with the specific, deep irritation of a man whose one small, carefully cultivated pleasure had just been taken from him without warning.

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

He got up, crossed to the window, and looked out — and up, because whatever had eaten his sunlight was clearly not at street level.

Hovering directly over the district, close enough that its underside nearly grazed the tallest remaining buildings, was something that made even Ethan pause for a genuine, extended moment of assessment before reaching for any kind of response.

It was enormous — easily the size of a small mountain, a vast, leathery-winged creature with a body like fused obsidian and bone, its wingspan alone stretching wide enough to cast a shadow over what Ethan estimated to be nearly a third of the entire district. It moved with a slow, ponderous grace entirely mismatched to its size, wings beating in long, lazy sweeps that displaced enough air to rattle windows across multiple city blocks, and its underside — the part currently blocking Ethan’s entire afternoon — pulsed faintly with a deep, molten orange light, like something enormous and ancient breathing beneath its scales.

[HOSTILE ENTITY DETECTED]

[CLASSIFICATION: SKY BEHEMOTH — ”THE ECLIPSE WYRM”]

[RANK: SS]

[STATUS: STATIONARY — CURRENTLY HOVERING]

[THREAT ASSESSMENT: SIGNIFICANT (TO GENERAL POPULATION)]

[THREAT ASSESSMENT: NEGLIGIBLE (TO USER)]

Ethan stared at the creature for a long moment, genuinely more annoyed by the second assessment’s implied comparison than impressed by the first.

”Okay, cool, so it’s a big scary flying nightmare that could probably level the district,” he said, ”but the actual problem is that it’s blocking my nap window.”

Down in the courtyard, the reaction was considerably more panicked. Residents who’d been enjoying the World Tree’s shade scattered toward whatever cover the surrounding buildings offered, parents scooping up children, several of Priya’s guild fighters — stationed nearby as part of the ongoing supply arrangement — scrambling into defensive positions with weapons drawn, staring up at the massive silhouette with the particular dread of people who’d already spent a week and a half fighting an uphill battle against the corruption event’s doubled aggression and had absolutely no reserves left for something this size.

Ethan’s phone buzzed with a fresh wave of alerts, the district-wide emergency broadcast system finally catching up to what half the city could already see with their own eyes.

[GLOBAL WARNING]

[SS-RANK AERIAL ENTITY DETECTED OVER SECTOR 4]

[ORIGIN: UNKNOWN — POSSIBLE CORRUPTION EVENT SPAWN]

[ALL CIVILIANS ADVISED TO SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER]

[ALL HUNTER FORCES ADVISED TO AVOID DIRECT ENGAGEMENT — THREAT EXCEEDS CURRENT CONTAINMENT CAPACITY]

Priya’s voice crackled over a nearby radio, tense and urgent, coordinating a defensive perimeter she clearly had no confidence could actually hold against something this size. ”All units, fall back to secondary positions, do NOT engage the behemoth directly, repeat, do not—”

Ethan opened his window, leaned out, and studied the creature’s massive underside with the same critical assessment he’d give a stubborn stain on his ceiling.

”You’re really just gonna sit there,” he called up, mostly to himself, ”blocking the entire sky, for what, exactly? What’s the actual plan here?”

The Eclipse Wyrm, as if in answer, let out a low, resonant roar that rattled every remaining pane of glass in the district and sent a visible ripple through the air itself, its massive wings beating once, hard, in a gesture that felt less like an attack and more like a creature settling comfortably into a position it intended to hold.

[NOTE: THE ECLIPSE WYRM APPEARS TO BE ESTABLISHING TERRITORIAL DOMINANCE OVER THE SECTOR]

[NOTE: THIS BEHAVIOR IS CONSISTENT WITH THE ELEVATED AGGRESSION PARAMETERS FROM THE ONGOING CORRUPTION EVENT]

[NOTE: THE CREATURE SHOWS NO INDICATION OF LEAVING VOLUNTARILY]

”Territorial dominance,” Ethan repeated flatly. ”Over my block. Over my nap.”

He thought, briefly, about simply going back to bed anyway, curtain drawn, and letting the district’s guild forces handle it the way they’d handled countless other threats over the past month. But the thought lasted only a few seconds before the practical reality set in — this wasn’t some minor street monster his sanctuary field could quietly suppress. This was a creature large enough to genuinely threaten every single person still huddled below, and Priya’s exhausted, resource-strained fighters had no realistic chance of driving it off, not after a week and a half of the corruption event grinding their reserves down to nothing.

He glanced back at his ruined nap spot — blanket rumpled, sunlight gone, the whole carefully arranged afternoon collapsed into shadow — and felt his patience, already thin from the interrupted plans, finally run out entirely.

”You know what,” he said, pulling his hoodie on properly, ”no. Absolutely not. I don’t even need the sword for this. This is a sunlight problem, and I’m handling it like one.”

He blinked to the courtyard below, landing beside a startled Priya mid-radio-call, and looked up at the massive, hovering shape with an expression that had shifted, somewhere in the last thirty seconds, from mild annoyance into the specific, focused irritation reserved for things that interfered with his comfort.

”Ethan—” Priya started, radio still crackling with fallback orders, ”you can’t be out here, that thing’s rated SS, it could level the entire—”

”It’s blocking my window,” Ethan said, as though this explained everything, because to him, it entirely did. ”I had a whole afternoon planned. Sunlight, nap, maybe a snack halfway through. This thing just parked itself directly over my one good spot like it owns the place.”

Priya stared at him, radio still clutched in one hand, torn between the genuine terror of the creature looming overhead and the increasingly familiar, surreal experience of watching Ethan Verma treat a continental-level threat as a personal inconvenience.

”So what are you going to do?” she asked, already half-certain she wouldn’t like the scale of the answer.

Ethan rolled his shoulders, glanced up at the Eclipse Wyrm’s vast, shadow-casting bulk one more time, and cracked his knuckles with the calm, unhurried confidence of a man about to reclaim something that was, by his own accounting, rightfully his.

”I’m gonna go have a word with it,” he said, ”about personal space.”