Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

The footage reached the Global Hunter Coalition’s central archive in Geneva eleven hours after the Eclipse Wyrm’s crash, uploaded by a drone that had been passively monitoring atmospheric anomalies across the Indian subcontinent as part of the Coalition’s ongoing effort to map the corruption event’s global spread.

Director Elena Voss watched the recording three times before she said anything at all.

”Run the analysis again,” she said finally, to the small team of analysts crowded around the monitoring station in the reinforced basement that now served as the Coalition’s operational headquarters. ”I want confirmation this isn’t corrupted footage.”

”We’ve already checked, Director. Triple-verified against two independent satellite feeds and the drone’s own telemetry. It’s real.”

The footage, grainy but unmistakable, showed a creature the Coalition’s own threat database had only recorded a handful of times globally — an Eclipse Wyrm, SS-rank, one of the corruption event’s most dangerous confirmed spawns — hovering over a residential district in India. And then, in the space of roughly ninety seconds, the creature simply dropped out of the sky, crashing into an empty field with enough force to register on seismographs three hundred kilometers away.

”Source of the gravitational anomaly?” Voss asked.

”Single point origin,” the lead analyst confirmed, pulling up a secondary readout. ”Ground level. No visible mechanism, no detected artillery or conventional weaponry. Whatever caused this came from a single individual standing in an open courtyard.”

Voss stared at the frozen frame — a small, indistinct figure, hoodie visible even at this resolution, standing with both arms raised toward the sky moments before the Wyrm’s descent began.

”That’s not possible,” she said, though there was less conviction in the statement than she wanted there to be. ”Tier-8 gravitational manipulation, deployed instantaneously, against a target that size, by a single unaugmented individual? Our own Coalition specialists can’t reliably produce localized gravity fields above tier-5 without dedicated ritual circles and multiple support casters.”

”There’s more, Director.” Her lead analyst pulled up a secondary file, cross-referenced against the Coalition’s growing anomaly archive. ”This isn’t an isolated incident. We’ve been quietly cataloguing reports out of that same sector for over a month. A trench formation nearly five kilometers long, appearing overnight. An SSS-rank Calamity — the first confirmed clear in recorded history — defeated in under four minutes. A defensive barrier protecting several hundred civilians that reflected an entire artillery barrage back on its own attackers without sustaining any measurable damage.”

Voss sat back slowly in her chair, the weight of the pattern settling in with the particular dread of someone who’d spent years building careful, evidence-based models of the corruption event’s global threat scaling, only to find every single one of those models rendered instantly obsolete.

”One individual,” she said. ”All of it, one individual.”

”That’s our working assumption, yes.”

”Do we have an identity?”

”A first name, unconfirmed. Ethan. No surname officially registered with any regional authority. The Indian Provisional Government reportedly offered him formal command of continental defense operations. He declined.”

Voss let out a slow, disbelieving breath. ”He declined.”

”The reported reason,” the analyst said, checking her notes with visible discomfort, ”was that the position’s proposed working hours were too early.”

The revelation moved through the Coalition’s global network within days, and reactions split along predictable lines across every major regional power. In Tokyo, the Eastern Hunter Concordat’s leadership convened an emergency session specifically to debate whether the anomaly represented an opportunity for alliance or a threat requiring immediate containment protocols. In London, the remnants of the European Defense Compact drafted three separate contingency plans, none of which their own strategists believed had any realistic chance of succeeding against a target capable of what the footage showed.

”The numbers don’t scale,” Voss told her assembled Coalition council, three days after the initial footage reached her desk, standing before a wall of projected data that had grown considerably more comprehensive — and considerably more alarming — with each passing hour of investigation. ”We’ve built our entire global threat-response framework on the assumption that even the most powerful known individuals operate within calculable bounds. Extreme outliers, yes, but outliers we can still model, predict, plan around.”

”And this individual doesn’t fit that model,” said Commander Okafor, representing the African Defense Coalition, arms crossed as he studied the projected footage.

”This individual doesn’t fit any model,” Voss said. ”We attempted to run standard threat projections based on his confirmed engagement history. Every single calculation produced an error state. Our systems simply cannot generate a meaningful power estimate. It’s not that the number is large. It’s that the number appears to be undefined.”

”That’s not reassuring,” Okafor said flatly.

”No,” Voss agreed. ”It isn’t.”

A representative from the newly reformed Pan-Pacific Guild Assembly leaned forward, voice tight with the specific frustration of someone whose entire professional framework had just been rendered meaningless. ”What’s the recommendation, then? Do we attempt contact? Containment? Do we simply pretend this individual doesn’t exist and hope he stays confined to one sector?”

”None of those options are viable,” Voss said. ”Containment is out of the question — we have no capability to enforce it, and attempting to would almost certainly provoke exactly the kind of confrontation we cannot survive. Pretending he doesn’t exist ignores a variable that could reshape the entire corruption event’s trajectory, for better or worse.” She paused, choosing her next words carefully. ”I recommend observation. Careful, respectful, non-intrusive observation. And, should the opportunity arise, cautious diplomatic contact — not to recruit him, not to contain him, but simply to understand him. To know what we’re actually dealing with.”

”And if he refuses contact the way he refused the Indian government’s offer?”

Voss considered the footage still frozen on the projection screen — a small, unassuming figure, hoodie and all, standing in an ordinary courtyard having just grounded a mountain-sized monster with a spell most Coalition specialists couldn’t safely attempt.

”Then we adjust,” she said. ”Because whatever this individual is, however he chooses to engage with the rest of the world, one thing has already become clear from everything we’ve gathered.” She gestured at the data wall, at the trench, the Calamity, the reflected artillery, the gravity that had pulled a sky-behemoth out of the air over something as mundane as a blocked window. ”He’s not trying to conquer anything. He’s not building an empire, recruiting an army, or seizing territory. Every single documented action traces back to something absurdly, almost comically personal — protecting a bakery, defending his own home, reclaiming a patch of sunlight.”

”That’s supposed to reassure us?”

”It’s the only genuinely reassuring thing in this entire briefing,” Voss said. ”A being with power this far beyond calculation, who could reshape the continent if he wanted to, and instead spends it protecting his neighbors and defending his own naptime. We should be grateful, gentlemen, that whatever this is—” she gestured at the frozen footage one last time, ”—it apparently just wants to be left alone.”

The room fell silent, each representative quietly absorbing the strange, uneasy comfort in that assessment — that the single most powerful individual any of them had ever recorded seemed to have no interest whatsoever in using that power for anything beyond the quiet, uncomplicated defense of a life he genuinely just wanted back.

None of them yet knew how quickly that assumption would be tested.