Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

Not every faction that heard about the anomaly in the Indian sector shared Director Voss’s cautious, observational approach.

The Kuroyuki Order had survived the apocalypse’s first three weeks by adhering to a single, unshakeable operating principle: any variable powerful enough to reshape a regional power balance was, by definition, a threat that needed to be understood from the inside — quietly, directly, and without the delay of formal diplomatic channels. They were not a guild in the conventional sense. They didn’t register with any coalition, didn’t answer to any provisional government, and had built their reputation, in the years before the sky turned red, on a single specialty: infiltration and elimination of targets everyone else considered unreachable.

Their leader, a woman known only as Ren, had watched the Eclipse Wyrm footage exactly once before making her decision.

”The Coalition wants to observe,” she told her five-person strike team, gathered in a dim safehouse three kilometers outside the Indian sector’s sanctuary boundary. ”Observation tells us what a target can do. It doesn’t tell us what a target is — whether he’s a threat that needs neutralizing, or an asset worth approaching properly. There’s only one way to learn that with certainty.”

”You want to test him,” said Kaito, her second-in-command, already checking the seals on a set of daggers etched with suppression runes.

”I want to know if he can be reached,” Ren corrected. ”If a squad with our training can bypass whatever protects that sanctuary and stand over him while he sleeps, undetected, that tells us something no satellite footage ever could. If we succeed, we leave without harming him — a message, nothing more. Proof that even a being beyond calculation isn’t beyond reach.”

”And if we can’t bypass it?”

Ren considered the question for a long moment, thinking of the reflected artillery, the reported dissolution of intruders’ weapons weeks earlier, the sheer, calculated risk of the operation she was about to authorize.

”Then we’ll have our answer a different way,” she said. ”Prepare the team. We move tonight.”

The Kuroyuki Order’s approach to the sanctuary boundary was, by any objective measure, a masterclass in infiltration technique. Five operatives, each trained in suppression magic specifically designed to dampen mana signatures and evade detection wards, moved through the district’s darkened streets with a precision that made even the Iron Wolves’ most seasoned night patrols look clumsy by comparison.

They didn’t approach the sanctuary’s main perimeter, where Ethan’s Void Shield presented an obvious, impenetrable barrier that satellite analysis had already confirmed reflected or absorbed virtually any conventional force. Instead, Ren led her team along a route she’d spent two full days mapping — a series of half-collapsed utility tunnels running beneath the district, remnants of the pre-apocalypse municipal infrastructure that, according to old blueprints her team had salvaged from an abandoned government archive, ran directly beneath the residential block Ethan called home.

”The shield covers the structure and its immediate perimeter,” Ren whispered, crouched at the tunnel’s entrance, checking her suppression seals one final time. ”But shields anchored to physical structures rarely account for subterranean access points below the foundation line. If this holds true here as it has everywhere else we’ve tested it, we should be able to surface directly beneath the building itself.”

They moved through the tunnels in near-total silence, suppression magic muffling even the soft scrape of their boots against crumbling concrete, navigating by memorized maps and dim, shielded lightsticks that gave off no detectable mana signature. Twenty minutes into the passage, Kaito raised a closed fist, signaling a halt.

”Ren. Look.”

Ahead, where the tunnel map indicated they should have hit a solid concrete ceiling beneath the building’s foundation, there was instead a faint, barely visible seam in the rock — not a doorway, not a deliberate passage, simply a natural fault line in the old infrastructure that happened to align, almost too conveniently, with a gap in whatever boundary the sanctuary field maintained.

[NOTE: SANCTUARY FIELD BOUNDARY EXTENDS THROUGH SOLID MATTER]

[NOTE: SUBTERRANEAN COVERAGE IS PRESENT BUT ATTENUATED AT EXTREME DEPTH]

[NOTE: A SUFFICIENTLY SKILLED INFILTRATION TEAM COULD THEORETICALLY EXPLOIT THIS GAP]

Ren didn’t have access to that system notification, of course — nobody outside Ethan’s own interface ever did — but her own scanning equipment registered the same thing in cruder terms: a faint, barely-there weakening in the ambient suppression field, just enough of a gap for five highly trained operatives to slip through if they moved carefully and quickly.

”This is it,” she breathed. ”Move. Quietly.”

They surfaced through a narrow gap in the basement’s old foundation — the same basement Ethan had once used as an overflow storage room before the void inventory made it unnecessary, now repurposed by Suresh into additional shelter space for sanctuary residents, though thankfully empty at this late hour. The five operatives emerged into the dim room without triggering so much as a flicker from the building’s usual ambient wards, and Ren allowed herself a small, tight breath of genuine surprise.

”We’re in,” she whispered. ”The boundary held for everyone outside. It never accounted for someone coming from below.”

They moved up through the building with the same practiced silence, past sleeping residents on the lower floors, past Mr. Bhatia’s apartment, past the third-floor landing where a dozen desperate men had once frozen in fear weeks earlier under very different circumstances, and finally reached the fourth-floor hallway, Room 404’s peeling door standing exactly where every piece of intelligence had promised it would be.

Kaito tested the handle. Unlocked, as it had been for every intruder before them. He glanced back at Ren, silently confirming the plan one final time, and she gave a single, sharp nod.

They slipped inside.

The room was dim, lit only by the faint, ambient glow of a phone screen propped against a pillow, its light catching the edge of a Void Sword leaning against the far wall — the same legendary blade that had, according to every report Ren had studied, proven immovable to anyone who wasn’t its owner. On the bed, buried beneath a rumpled blanket, one arm flung carelessly off the mattress’s edge, lay the single most powerful individual currently confirmed to exist on the planet.

Sound asleep.

Ren stood at the foot of the bed for a long, silent moment, studying him — an ordinary-looking teenager, hoodie discarded on the floor, hair a mess against the pillow, breathing slow and even with the deep, untroubled rest of someone who had genuinely never once considered that anyone might be capable of reaching him here.

She raised a hand, signaling her team into position around the bed — not to attack, per her own explicit instructions, but simply to confirm, beyond any doubt, that they had accomplished what no satellite footage or secondhand report ever could: standing, undetected, within arm’s reach of a being the entire Global Hunter Coalition had declared beyond calculation.

Kaito drew a single, thin blade from his belt — a ceremonial gesture only, meant to be laid gently across the sleeping boy’s chest as proof of the infiltration, a silent message that even gods could be reached by those skilled enough to try.

He extended it slowly toward the bed.

And the moment the blade’s edge crossed some invisible, unmarked threshold a few inches from Ethan’s sleeping form, the air in the room shifted — a sudden, absolute stillness settling over everything, pressure building in a way that made every hair on Ren’s arms rise at once, a warning her body understood on some primal level long before her trained mind could process what was happening.

She had exactly enough time to think, with a strange, distant clarity, this was a mistake — before the entire room seemed to hold its breath, and something ancient and unbothered stirred, just barely, beneath the surface of Ethan Verma’s untroubled sleep.