Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

The next escalation arrived three hours later, while Ethan was in the middle of dinner — a genuinely nice meal, courtesy of the guild logistics network’s latest supply haul, that he’d been looking forward to all afternoon despite the lingering unease from the earlier intervention attempts.

His phone buzzed once, sharp and deliberate, cutting through the quiet clink of cutlery.

[ADMINISTRATIVE PROCESS: ESCALATED PROTOCOL INITIATED]

[TARGET: VOID INVENTORY ACCESS PERMISSIONS]

[ACTION: ATTEMPTING FULL LOCKDOWN]

Ethan set down his fork, watching the notification with a wariness that hadn’t fully faded since the earlier failed attempts. ”Okay, round two, apparently,” he muttered.

The response, when it came, wasn’t subtle. A dense, spreading lattice of golden code began materializing across his phone’s display — the system’s usual clean, bracketed text replaced by something considerably more invasive, lines of encrypted-looking script crawling across his void inventory’s interface like a slow, deliberate infection, sealing off menu after menu as it spread.

[LOCKDOWN SEQUENCE: 12% COMPLETE]

[LOCKDOWN SEQUENCE: 34% COMPLETE]

[LOCKDOWN SEQUENCE: 58% COMPLETE]

”That’s — that’s actually working?” Ethan said, alarm creeping back in as he watched the progress climb steadily, considerably faster than the scattered, easily-repelled attempts from earlier in the day. He tried tapping his inventory icon on reflex, found it unresponsive, the familiar scroll of items replaced by a solid wall of golden warning script. ”Hey, that’s not — I can’t even open it.”

[LOCKDOWN SEQUENCE: 76% COMPLETE]

[NOTE: THIS PROTOCOL APPEARS SIGNIFICANTLY MORE SOPHISTICATED THAN PREVIOUS ATTEMPTS]

[NOTE: THE SYSTEM IS ATTEMPTING TO COUNTER, BUT ENCOUNTERING RESISTANCE]

[NOTE: THIS IS CONCERNING]

Ethan stood up fast enough to knock his chair back, dinner forgotten, staring at his phone with the specific, focused alarm of a man watching something genuinely important slip out of his control for the first time since the apocalypse began. Months of accumulated loot, food storage, the entire foundation of the sanctuary’s material security — all of it locked away behind a wall of code that his own system, for the first time, seemed genuinely unable to break through on its own.

”Come on,” he said, tapping uselessly at the frozen screen. ”Come on, come on—”

[LOCKDOWN SEQUENCE: 91% COMPLETE]

His eyes flicked to the Void Sword, propped against the wall by the door where it always sat, purple veins pulsing their usual slow, steady rhythm — and some instinct, half-formed and entirely unplanned, made him cross the room and grip the hilt properly, the same deliberate two-handed hold he’d used against the Chitin Sovereign and the wave that followed it.

”You want my stuff,” he said, mostly to the phone, mostly to whatever administrative entity was somewhere out there watching numbers climb toward completion, ”you’re gonna have to go through this first.”

He didn’t have a plan, exactly — no absorbed tome had prepared him for fighting a lockdown sequence, no grandmaster spell existed for punching an encrypted lattice of hostile code. He just did what came naturally, the same instinct that had guided nearly every decision since the vending machine: he raised the sword, and he swung it, not at anything physical, but at the golden lattice crawling across his phone’s screen, treating the abstract threat exactly like he’d treat any monster standing between him and something he cared about.

The blade, impossibly, connected with something.

[LOCKDOWN SEQUENCE: INTERRUPTED]

[FOREIGN ENERGY SIGNATURE DETECTED: VOID SWORD]

[ANALYZING INTERACTION...]

The golden script across his screen shuddered, the smooth, methodical crawl of the lockdown’s progress suddenly fracturing into jagged, uneven bursts, lines of code scattering and reforming like something had physically struck the process mid-execution.

”Wait,” Ethan said, staring at the shift, hope flaring despite his confusion about what exactly had just happened. ”Wait, that actually did something—”

[VOID SWORD APPEARS TO BE INTERACTING DIRECTLY WITH THE LOCKDOWN PROTOCOL’S UNDERLYING CODE]

[NOTE: THE VOID SWORD IS NOT A CONVENTIONAL WEAPON]

[NOTE: THE BLADE APPEARS CAPABLE OF SEVERING CONCEPTUAL AND DIGITAL CONSTRUCTS, NOT JUST PHYSICAL MATTER]

[NOTE: THIS IS THE FIRST TIME THIS PROPERTY HAS BEEN OBSERVED]

The lockdown sequence’s progress bar, which had climbed steadily toward completion moments earlier, began to reverse — not slowly, not gradually, but in a sudden, cascading collapse, golden script dissolving into scattered fragments that the Void Sword’s blade seemed to be actively, hungrily consuming, drawing the corrupted code toward itself the way a drain pulls water.

[LOCKDOWN SEQUENCE: 67%]

[LOCKDOWN SEQUENCE: 41%]

[LOCKDOWN SEQUENCE: 19%]

[LOCKDOWN SEQUENCE: 3%]

”Yes,” Ethan breathed, watching the number keep falling, ”yes, come on, keep going—”

[LOCKDOWN SEQUENCE: NEUTRALIZED]

[FOREIGN PROTOCOL: FULLY CONSUMED]

[VOID INVENTORY: FULL ACCESS RESTORED]

The golden lattice vanished entirely from his phone screen, replaced by the familiar, comfortable scroll of his own inventory list, item counts and rarity tags exactly as they’d been before the whole ordeal began. Ethan let out a long, shaky breath, lowering the sword, staring at his phone with a mixture of relief and genuine, growing astonishment.

”It ate it,” he said slowly. ”The sword just — ate the lock code. Like it was food.”

[ACCURATE DESCRIPTION]

[NOTE: THE VOID SWORD APPEARS TO POSSESS AN INHERENT PROPERTY OF CONSUMING AND NULLIFYING FOREIGN ADMINISTRATIVE INTERFERENCE]

[NOTE: THIS PROPERTY HAS NEVER BEEN DOCUMENTED BEFORE BECAUSE NOBODY HAS EVER SUCCESSFULLY DRAWN A WEAPON AGAINST AN ADMINISTRATIVE-LEVEL PROCESS]

[NOTE: THE SYSTEM IS, FRANKLY, RATHER IMPRESSED]

Ethan sank back onto his couch, the adrenaline of the last few minutes slowly draining out of him, and found himself laughing — a genuine, disbelieving laugh, equal parts relief and the specific, giddy absurdity of having just successfully sword-fought an attempted software patch.

”Okay,” he said, once he’d caught his breath, glancing at the sword now resting across his knees, purple veins pulsing with what almost looked like satisfaction. ”You’re officially my favorite thing I own. Above the golem. Sorry, buddy,” he added, glancing toward the kitchen where his tea golem stood, motionless, patiently awaiting its next task, entirely oblivious to the crisis that had just unfolded a few feet away.

He picked his phone back up, scrolling through his fully restored inventory with the specific, protective relief of a man checking that nothing important had actually been lost, and found, buried among the usual notification cascade, one final line that made him pause.

[NOTE: THE ADMINISTRATIVE ENTITY RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS ATTEMPT APPEARS TO HAVE WITHDRAWN FOLLOWING THE FAILURE]

[NOTE: THIS DOES NOT MEAN THE THREAT HAS ENDED]

[NOTE: FURTHER ESCALATION SHOULD BE ANTICIPATED]

Ethan read that last line twice, the earlier relief settling into something steadier, more resolved. Whatever was out there — whatever ancient, deprecated administrative force had decided months into the apocalypse that his existence represented a bug worth erasing — had just lost its most sophisticated attempt yet, defeated not through some clever counter-hack or careful strategic planning, but through the simple, brute-force application of an S-rank sword to a problem that had, apparently, never expected to be fought physically at all.

”You know,” Ethan said, setting the Void Sword carefully back against the wall, giving its hilt an almost affectionate pat, ”I think whoever’s running this whole apocalypse thing is starting to realize they picked a genuinely terrible target.”

[NOTE: THE SYSTEM AGREES]

[NOTE: THE SYSTEM WOULD ALSO LIKE TO SUGGEST USER FINISH DINNER BEFORE IT GETS COLD]

[NOTE: THE GOLEM CAN REHEAT IT, BUT IT WILL NOT TASTE THE SAME]

Ethan glanced at his abandoned plate, still sitting on the table where he’d left it, and felt a small, genuine laugh escape despite everything. ”Yeah,” he said, sitting back down, picking up his fork like nothing extraordinary had happened at all. ”Priorities.”