Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

The transit corridor’s frozen countdown sat there at eleven minutes, unmoving, while the pressure pushing through from the other side kept building — a low, resonant strain in the gold light that made the walls of the vault hum in sympathy, dust sifting down from carvings that hadn’t shifted in centuries.

”That’s not us,” Kaia said quickly, stepping back from the doorway, her two companions already reaching for weapons of their own. ”We didn’t come here to force anything. Something else is doing that.”

[NOTICE: The system confirms this. The push originates from a location on the other side that does not match the coordinates Kaia’s group crossed from. It is a separate signal, larger, and considerably less patient.]

Ethan raised the Void Sword instinctively, the blade humming low and steady in his grip, and watched the shimmering pane of light strain outward like fabric pulled too tight.

”Priya,” he said, ”get everyone who isn’t combat-trained out of this room. Now.”

She didn’t argue, already moving, herding Osei’s team toward the passage with the brisk efficiency of someone who’d done exactly this kind of evacuation more times than any of them should have needed to.

Kaia stayed. So did Devan and Rhea, weapons drawn now, expressions grim.

”You should leave too,” Ethan told her. ”This isn’t your fight.”

”It’s exactly my fight,” Kaia said, voice tight but steady. ”That signal pushing through right now — I recognize it. It’s been circling our world’s own corridor for months, trying to force its way through from a different direction. We thought we’d sealed our end well enough to keep it out. Apparently it found another way in.”

”What is it?”

Kaia’s jaw tightened. ”Back home, we call it the Anomaly. Not a person. Not exactly a system, either — something that started showing up in the deep architecture a few years ago, feeding off unstable transit corridors like this one. It doesn’t attack outright. It just... pushes. Forces connections open that were never meant to stay open, and takes whatever spills through in the process.”

The strain in the doorway peaked, gold light bending violently around a shape forcing itself through from the other side — not a person, not quite, but something vaguely humanoid, built from shifting, unstable fragments of light and static, features constantly reforming and collapsing like a signal that couldn’t hold a clean picture of itself.

[NOTICE: The system cannot classify this entity. It does not match Framework architecture, Origin Engine architecture, or anything in Arjun Mehra’s archived records. It is, as far as the system can determine, something that does not belong to any of the systems currently known to exist in this network.]

The thing’s form flickered, unstable edges sparking, and when it spoke, the sound came out garbled, layered, three or four voices overlapping badly out of sync with each other.

”SIGNATURE MATCH. FIRST IDLE KING PROTOCOL. LOCATED.”

Ethan’s grip tightened on the sword. ”Okay. That’s not a great sentence to hear directed at me.”

”SUCCESSOR CANDIDATE ACQUIRED FOR HARVEST,” the thing continued, its shifting form drifting further into the vault, static bleeding off it in small, crackling arcs that scorched faint marks into the ancient stone floor. ”SIGNAL PROFILE COMPATIBLE. INTEGRATION WILL PROCEED.”

”Integration,” Ethan repeated flatly. ”You want to what, exactly. Absorb me?”

Kaia’s expression had gone pale. ”That’s what it does. It’s how it’s grown as strong as it has — it doesn’t fight for territory the way the Framework does. It finds unstable, powerful signatures crossing between worlds and consumes them. Adds their pattern to itself. We don’t fully understand what it is. We just know every world that’s crossed paths with it has lost something it never got back.”

The Anomaly’s form surged forward, faster than its unstable shape suggested it should move, static-limbs reaching toward Ethan with the same mindless, hungry momentum of something that had done this exact thing successfully many times before.

Ethan didn’t wait to find out if this would be one of those times.

He met it head-on, Void Sword catching the reaching limb mid-motion, and where the blade made contact, the Anomaly’s shifting form didn’t unravel the way enforcement droids or lockdown code had. It resisted — a genuine, grinding push-back, static crackling violently along the sword’s edge like two incompatible signals fighting for the same frequency.

[NOTICE: The system would like to note, with some alarm, that this is the first entity the Void Sword has encountered that it cannot simply consume outright. The blade’s usual unraveling effect is only partially taking hold — enough to hurt it, not enough to end it.]

Ethan gritted his teeth, shoving back hard enough to send the creature staggering, its form flickering wildly before stabilizing again a few feet away.

”That’s new,” he muttered.

”IT WILL TAKE MORE THAN THAT,” the Anomaly said, voices layering out of sync again, already reforming, already advancing. ”PROTOCOL FRAGMENTS RESIST FULL DELETION. PARTIAL INTEGRATION ACCEPTABLE.”

Kaia stepped forward despite Ethan’s earlier warning, weapon raised, Devan and Rhea flanking her with the practiced coordination of people who’d trained for exactly this kind of threat their entire lives.

”We can slow it,” she said. ”Not stop it — slow it. Our world’s built countermeasures specifically for this thing, we just never had the firepower to finish the job. If you can hit it while we hold the pattern disruption—”

”Do it,” Ethan said, already moving.

What followed wasn’t graceful. Kaia’s team worked in tight, practiced bursts, weapons discharging pulses of pale light that visibly disrupted the Anomaly’s shifting form each time they connected, buying Ethan brief windows where the creature’s defenses genuinely faltered. He used every one of them, driving the Void Sword through gaps in its static frame with strikes that landed harder each time, the blade’s hunger finally starting to win out against whatever stubborn, alien resistance the thing carried.

It took almost four full minutes — an eternity, by the standards of every fight Ethan had walked away from in the last several months without breaking a sweat — before the Anomaly’s form finally began to genuinely destabilize, static bleeding away in wide, uncontrolled arcs, its layered voice fracturing into something closer to panic.

”INTEGRATION FAILING. SIGNATURE RESISTANCE EXCEEDS PARAMETERS. RETREAT PROTOCOL—”

It didn’t finish. The Void Sword caught it clean through what might have been a center of mass, and the creature unraveled fully this time, collapsing into scattered, harmless motes of light that drifted upward and faded into nothing against the vault’s domed ceiling.

Silence settled back over the chamber, broken only by everyone’s ragged breathing and the terminal’s steady, undisturbed gold glow, entirely unbothered by the chaos that had just played out a few feet away from it.

Ethan lowered the sword, chest heaving, and looked over at Kaia, who was staring at the space where the Anomaly had been with an expression somewhere between relief and disbelief.

”You actually beat it,” she said quietly. ”We’ve never — nobody’s ever actually beaten it. Not fully. We just survive it, when we’re lucky.”

”Yeah, well,” Ethan said, still catching his breath, ”I’ve had a lot of practice with things that shouldn’t be beatable.”

Kaia looked at him for a long moment, something shifting behind her eyes — the same complicated mix of recognition and disbelief she’d worn the second she stepped through the doorway.

”They call him the Anomaly back home,” she said slowly. ”That’s not the only name we use, though. It’s what we call anyone whose power stops making sense to the rest of us.”

She glanced pointedly at the sword still humming quietly in Ethan’s grip.

”They used to call Arjun that too. Before he disappeared. I think,” she added, quieter now, ”you might be about to find out exactly how much that name follows a person around.”

[NOTICE: The system would like to flag, calmly, two developments it considers relevant.]

[First: the transit corridor’s countdown has resumed, now reading just under six minutes, still counting down toward whatever event it was originally measuring before the Anomaly’s interruption.]

[Second, and considerably more urgent: the system has just detected a second, much larger presence gathering on the other side of the doorway — one that dwarfs the creature they just defeated by a margin the system does not currently have the confidence to estimate accurately.]