Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

Priya Malhotra was halfway through a supply run when the sky flickered.

Not clouds. Not weather. The actual sky, like a monitor resetting, a thin grid of pale blue lines sweeping across the horizon in every direction at once. Every system interface on the planet — every hunter’s HUD, every guild terminal, every civilian’s basic status screen — froze mid-render.

Then, in letters large enough to blot out the sun over every major city on Earth:

[MANDATORY GLOBAL BROADCAST INITIATED.]

[THE ADMINISTRATIVE FRAMEWORK PRESENTS: THE WORLD RANKING SYSTEM.]

[ALL REGISTERED ENTITIES WILL NOW BE RANKED BY TOTAL COMBAT POWER. THIS IS NOT OPTIONAL.]

Priya dropped the crate she was carrying.

Around her, the entire settlement market went still — hunters, traders, refugees, all of them staring up at text that shouldn’t have been physically possible to render across an entire hemisphere simultaneously. Somewhere behind her, a vendor’s radio crackled with a news anchor’s voice trying, and failing, to sound calm.

”...confirming reports from every continent that the phenomenon is—yes, it appears to be global, we are now seeing—I’m being told the rankings are populating live—”

The sky-grid resolved into a scoreboard. Names. Numbers. Countries. A leaderboard the size of a continent, sorted in real time as billions of stat sheets across the planet got compiled, weighed, and slotted into place.

Rank 10. Rank 9. Rank 8.

Names Priya recognized — S-rank guild leaders, national champions, people who’d fought their way into legend over the last several months of hell on Earth. Meera Kapoor’s name flickered into rank 6, and even from here, Priya could hear the distant roar of an entire district cheering for her.

Rank 5. Rank 4. Rank 3. Rank 2.

The numbers kept climbing into territory that made her stomach twist — power levels that would’ve been apocalyptic six months ago, now casually filed under ”runner-up.”

And then, at Rank 1, the board tried to fill in a number.

It failed.

The digits didn’t populate. Instead, the space where a power level should’ve been simply displayed:

[???]

Below it, a name rendered in stark, glitching text, like the system itself was struggling to commit to it.

ETHAN VERMA — CLASS: (UNEMPLOYED) — LOCATION: [REDACTED FOR STRUCTURAL SAFETY]

Priya stared at it for a solid five seconds before she started laughing, quietly, helplessly, right there in the middle of the market.

Of course it was him.

Three thousand kilometers away, Director Elena Voss stood in the Global Hunter Coalition’s command center, watching the same leaderboard render across a wall of screens, and felt the temperature in the room drop about ten degrees despite the air conditioning having nothing to do with it.

”Confirm that,” she said, voice level through sheer force of will. ”Confirm the Rank 1 entry is not a rendering error.”

An analyst at the console below her didn’t look up. ”Confirmed three times, ma’am. The system attempted to calculate his combat power seven separate times in the last forty seconds. Each attempt failed. It’s not that the number’s too big to display. It’s that the number doesn’t resolve. At all.”

”That’s not possible,” said a general standing near the door — General Iyer, flown in for exactly this kind of emergency, looking like a man reliving a nightmare he’d already survived once. ”I’ve seen him in person. He reflected an artillery barrage without looking up from his phone.”

”With respect, sir,” the analyst said, ”I don’t think ’possible’ has applied to him since roughly Chapter One.”

Voss didn’t laugh, because laughing felt inappropriate given the circumstances, but she understood the sentiment. She’d read every report the Coalition had compiled on the subject: Verma, Ethan. Nineteen years old. No formal combat training. No guild affiliation. Solved an SSS-rank Calamity during what witnesses described as his lunch break.

And now the entire planet knew his name, his rank, and — thanks to a very unfortunate leak in the location-redaction protocol — a rough approximate district.

”Get eyes on the Citadel,” Voss said quietly. ”Every faction on that board just watched a nineteen-year-old outrank them by an undefined margin. Some of them are going to want to know why. Peacefully, I hope.”

She didn’t sound convinced.

Inside Room 404, Ethan was asleep.

He’d been asleep for the better part of an hour, curled up on a couch that had survived the droid incident purely by being in the next room over, one arm hanging off the edge, mouth slightly open, utterly unbothered by the fact that his name was currently visible from orbit.

[NOTICE: Global broadcast complete.]

[The subject’s identity, class, and approximate location have been disseminated to every registered hunter, government, and guild on the planet.]

[The system would like to note that it did not choose to do this. This was a direct override from Framework administrators several tiers above the system’s own clearance. The system is currently experiencing what it can only describe as professional embarrassment on the subject’s behalf.]

Ethan didn’t stir.

[The system will try again.]

[URGENT: SEVEN BILLION PEOPLE NOW KNOW YOUR NAME.]

Nothing.

[URGENT: YOUR RANK IS OFFICIALLY UNDEFINED. THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED. THE FRAMEWORK IS, IN THE SYSTEM’S BEST TECHNICAL ASSESSMENT, PANICKING.]

Ethan rolled over, dragging a cushion over his face, and mumbled something that the system’s audio logs later transcribed, with what could only be described as weary affection, as: ”five more minutes.”

[The system logs this response for posterity.]

[It has, at this point, stopped expecting anything else.]

It took Suresh knocking on the door — twice, then a third time slightly harder — to actually wake him up.

”Ethan,” Suresh said, stepping inside without waiting for an answer, phone already in his hand, screen turned so Ethan could see it the second his eyes opened. ”You should probably look at this.”

Ethan squinted at the screen. Blinked. Squinted again.

It was a photo someone had taken of the sky over the district — the massive, unmissable, still-glowing leaderboard, his name sitting at the top of it in letters roughly the size of a building, followed by a question mark where a power level should’ve been.

He stared at it for a long moment.

”They put my location on there?”

”Redacted,” Suresh said. ”Sort of. Everyone within four hundred kilometers has already figured it out anyway.”

Ethan groaned and let his head fall back against the couch cushion. ”So people are gonna show up.”

”People,” Suresh agreed, ”are already showing up. There’s a growing crowd forming near the eastern perimeter of the sanctuary. Guild banners. News crews. I counted at least three national flags.”

[The system would like to point out that this was, in fact, entirely predictable, and that it attempted to warn the subject approximately four minutes ago, but the subject was asleep at the time.]

Ethan pressed both hands over his face and exhaled slowly through his fingers, the exact sound of a man who’d just been told his day off was cancelled by forces entirely outside his control.

”Okay,” he said finally, voice muffled. ”Okay. Fine. Whatever. Just—” He gestured vaguely toward the door. ”Tell them I’ll deal with it after breakfast. I’m not doing crowd control before I’ve had tea.”

Suresh, to his credit, didn’t even blink. He’d stopped being surprised by that particular priority order somewhere around the militia siege.

”I’ll let the tea golem know,” he said, already turning to go.

Outside, past the shielded dome of the Citadel, past the growing wall of banners and cameras and hunters staring up at a sky that had just rewritten the entire planet’s understanding of power, the number beside Ethan’s name still refused to resolve.

[???]

The system, watching all of it unfold, allowed itself one final note before falling silent for the morning.

[The Framework wanted a leaderboard.]

[What it got, instead, was a very public admission that it has absolutely no idea what it’s dealing with.]

[The system, for once, relates.]