Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

The diplomatic exchange arrived four days later, and it arrived exactly on time, which Ethan appreciated more than he expected to, given his prior experience with anything system-related showing up unannounced.

The corridor reopened at dawn - properly this time, scheduled, stable, coordinated through a full day of back-and-forth negotiation between the system and the Threshold Accord that had involved more paperwork than Ethan had done in the entire rest of his post-apocalypse life combined. Three envoys stepped through, Kaia among them again, along with a woman introduced as a senior logistics coordinator and, trailing a half-step behind the other two, a young man who looked, if anything, more nervous than everyone else in the vault combined.

He was maybe twenty, dressed in worn but well-maintained gear that marked him as a hunter of some kind, and the moment his eyes landed on Ethan, he dropped to one knee on the ancient stone floor so fast it looked almost involuntary.

”Great Inheritor,” he said, voice tight with something that sounded uncomfortably close to reverence. ”It is the honor of my life to stand in your presence.”

Ethan stared at him for a long moment.

”Please stand up,” he said. ”You’re gonna hurt your knees on that stone. It’s not even comfortable stone. It’s, like, aggressively uncomfortable stone.”

The young man did not stand up. If anything, he bowed lower, forehead nearly touching the ground now, one hand pressed flat against his chest.

”My name is Devan Rao,” he said - a different Devan, evidently, from Kaia’s earlier companion, which Ethan filed away as mildly confusing bookkeeping for later. ”I trained my entire life hoping to one day be considered worthy enough to serve someone with even a fraction of the legacy you carry. I did not expect to ever actually stand before it.”

Kaia, watching this unfold with the weary patience of someone who had clearly tried and failed to prepare him for this moment beforehand, cleared her throat. ”Devan. He asked you to stand.”

”I heard him,” Devan said, still bowing. ”I am simply not yet ready to.”

Ethan looked helplessly at Suresh, who was doing an admirable job of keeping a straight face, and at Priya, who was not.

”Okay,” Ethan said, crouching down to Devan’s level instead, since standing over someone bowing that hard felt actively worse than just meeting him halfway. ”Look - Devan. I appreciate the enthusiasm. I do. But I need you to understand something important, and I need you to actually hear it, not just nod at it while staring at the floor.”

”Anything, Great Inheritor.”

”That title, first of all,” Ethan said. ”We’re not doing that. My name’s Ethan. Just Ethan. I don’t have a legacy, I have a very complicated basement and a system that keeps giving me bad news at inconvenient hours.”

Devan finally looked up, blinking, clearly trying to process a sentence that didn’t fit anything he’d apparently prepared for.

”But the terminal,” he started. ”The guardians. The corridor recognizing your-”

”I know,” Ethan said. ”I’ve heard the pitch. I got the same pitch from three actual cosmic administrators a few weeks ago, and I told them no too. It’s not personal. I just genuinely don’t want to be anybody’s inheritor of anything. I want breakfast. Have you had breakfast?”

Devan blinked again, thrown so completely off script by the question that he actually forgot to keep bowing, straightening up slightly out of pure confusion.

”I - no,” he admitted. ”We crossed at dawn, our time. There wasn’t a meal scheduled before departure.”

”Great,” Ethan said, standing back up and offering him a hand, which Devan took after a beat of visible hesitation, like he wasn’t entirely sure it was allowed. ”Come on. The golem’s been making way too much food since your world decided to start visiting mine, and somebody needs to eat it before Suresh starts rationing it out of guilt.”

[NOTICE: The system would like to note, for continuity, that this is a genuinely unusual approach to diplomatic protocol. It is also, based on every prior interaction the system has observed, entirely consistent with the subject’s established character.]

Breakfast, as it turned out, did more diplomatic work than four days of formal negotiation had managed.

Devan sat stiffly at first, clearly uncertain whether he was allowed to actually eat in Ethan’s presence or whether some unspoken protocol required him to wait, watch, or otherwise perform deference through an entire meal. It took the tea golem rolling up and depositing a plate directly in front of him with the same brisk, no-nonsense efficiency it applied to everyone, refugee and cosmic-legacy-adjacent hunter alike, for him to finally relax slightly.

”This is really good,” he said, sounding almost surprised, halfway through a plate of paratha the golem had produced with characteristic flair.

”Yeah, it’s got a whole thing going,” Ethan said, gesturing vaguely at the golem, which paused its rounds long enough to emit a small, pleased chirp of static before continuing on. ”Started as a tea machine. Developed opinions. It’s a whole journey.”

Kaia, seated nearby with her own plate, watched Devan slowly unclench over the course of the meal with the quiet satisfaction of someone whose diplomatic strategy had just been rescued by breakfast food.

”He’s not usually like this,” she said to Ethan, low enough that Devan, deep in conversation with Priya about hunter gear differences between their two worlds, didn’t quite catch it. ”He’s actually one of our better field hunters. Calm under pressure, good instincts. The moment we told him where this mission was going, though, he spent three weeks preparing speeches.”

”Speeches,” Ethan repeated.

”Formal address protocols. Proper honorifics. He’s got at least four different versions of a greeting memorized, ranked by how much respect the situation seemed to warrant.”

Ethan groaned quietly, rubbing his face. ”That’s exactly the kind of thing I’ve spent this entire apocalypse trying to avoid.”

”I know,” Kaia said, something knowing in her tone. ”That’s actually why I think this is working. He came in ready for a god-king. He’s getting a guy who offered him breakfast instead. That’s going to matter a lot more to him - and to the people back home who’ll eventually hear about this - than any speech he prepared.”

Ethan considered that, watching Devan across the table gesturing enthusiastically with a piece of paratha while describing some hunter technique unique to his own world, all traces of the earlier reverent stiffness gone entirely.

”I’m not trying to make a point,” Ethan said. ”I just genuinely don’t want people bowing at me over breakfast. It’s weird.”

”I know,” Kaia said again, smiling slightly for the first time since she’d arrived. ”That’s exactly the point I’m making.”

[NOTICE: The system would like to interject with a piece of information it has been holding since the meal began, uncertain of the right moment to raise it, given the generally pleasant atmosphere.]

Ethan glanced sideways, catching the shift in tone even through the system’s usual dry delivery. ”What.”

[While monitoring the exchange for translation accuracy, the system picked up a secondary transmission - not from the Threshold Accord’s official channel, but from somewhere deeper within Instance 7-Vel’s own architecture. It is faint, encrypted, and clearly not meant for broadcast to Earth at all. The system only caught it because it happens to be listening on a frequency that closely matches its own core signature.]

Ethan’s fork paused halfway to his mouth. ”What’s it say.”

[The system cannot fully decrypt it. What it can confirm is the sender’s designation, embedded in the transmission’s header, formatted in the exact same archival style as every entry the system has previously recovered from the terminal below.]

[USER: ARJUN MEHRA.]

[STATUS: ACTIVE.]

Ethan set his fork down slowly, the warm, easy atmosphere of the meal suddenly feeling very far away.

”Active,” he repeated. ”That’s not ’logged out.’ That’s not ’unconfirmed termination.’ That’s—”

[That is a live status flag, yes.]

[The system would like to be clear that it cannot yet confirm this is accurate, current, or even genuine - it may be an old, cached signature the network simply never updated. But if it is real, it means someone on Instance 7-Vel’s side of this entire situation has known, this whole time, that Arjun Mehra might still be alive somewhere.]

[And has been choosing, very deliberately, not to say so.]