Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK
Chapter 10: Slapped by a Passive Buff

Chapter 10: Slapped by a Passive Buff

Out in the hallway, Deshu’s group huddled in a tight, panicked knot, backs pressed against the wall opposite room 404’s now-closed door.

"We’re leaving," Deshu whispered, though his hands hadn’t stopped shaking. "Right now. We’re not touching anything else in that apartment, we’re gone."

"That sword," one of the men breathed, still staring at the closed door like it might open again and swallow them whole. "Neither of us could even move it. Four of us together couldn’t move it."

"That’s impossible," Vikram said, voice cracking. "Weapons don’t just weigh that much. Nothing weighs that much."

"He just—" the second man who’d tried to lift it swallowed hard. "He just went back to sleep. We’re standing in his room, armed, and he went back to sleep."

That detail, more than anything else, was the thing lodged sideways in every one of their throats. Not the impossible weight of the sword. Not the strange pressure that had radiated off the blade like heat off asphalt. It was the sheer, casual indifference of a boy who’d looked at eight armed intruders and treated them as less threatening than a bad dream.

Deshu should have listened to that feeling. He should have taken it as the answer it was and led his men straight back down the stairwell and out into the street, grateful to be alive, and never come near this building again.

Instead, hunger and desperation did what they always did to men with nothing left to lose. They made the wrong lesson sound reasonable.

"He’s not dangerous," Deshu said slowly, working the logic out loud like he was convincing himself as much as the others. "Think about it. If he was, we’d already be dead. He looked at us and went back to sleep. That’s not someone who fights. That’s someone who doesn’t care." He glanced toward the end of the hallway, toward the other apartment doors — 403, 405, 406 — normal, unremarkable doors that hadn’t produced anything terrifying. "The sword’s out of reach. Fine. But this whole floor’s supposedly stocked with gear the old janitor’s been handing out. We came for a stockpile, not one weapon. Let’s find it and go, quietly, before he wakes up again."

Vikram wanted to argue. Every nerve in his body was screaming at him to leave, to go back down the stairs, to go home and hold his daughter and never think about this building again. But Deshu was already moving toward 403’s door, testing the handle, and the rest of the group followed with the herd instinct of frightened men who’d rather stick together in a bad decision than stand alone in a good one.

The first apartment was empty — its owner among those hiding in the shelter downstairs — and mostly bare, save for a few pieces of the gear Suresh had distributed days earlier, tucked away for safekeeping. Deshu’s group grabbed what they could carry: a chestplate that gleamed faintly under the hallway light, a short blade with a runic hilt, a handful of items none of them fully understood the value of but recognized as valuable all the same.

Then, working up a confidence that had no business existing given the last five minutes, Deshu tried room 404’s door handle again.

It was, predictably, unlocked. Because Ethan had never once considered that his door needed to be otherwise.

"Just the sword," Deshu whispered, easing the door open a crack. "We don’t touch him, we don’t wake him, we just — figure out a way to move it. Blanket. We drag it out on a blanket if we have to."

It was, in retrospect, an astonishingly stupid plan, built entirely on the assumption that the sword’s weight was some kind of mechanical trick that clever positioning could solve. But desperation made poor engineers of even reasonable men, and Deshu’s group was not reasonable anymore. They were hungry, frightened, and one bad decision deep into a night that had already gone sideways twice.

They crept back into the room. Ethan hadn’t stirred — still buried under his blanket, breathing slow and even, the picture of a man completely unaware that anything in his life was currently at risk.

Two men grabbed the Void Sword’s hilt again, this time trying to tip it sideways rather than lift it, hoping leverage would succeed where brute strength had failed.

The moment the blade shifted even slightly off the wall — the first genuine attempt at removing it, rather than simply touching it — something in the room changed.

The air pressure dropped, sudden and absolute, like a held breath released all at once. A faint violet shimmer rippled outward from Ethan’s sleeping form, so soft it barely registered as light, more like a change in the quality of the air itself.

[PASSIVE SKILL TRIGGERED: VOID GUARDIAN (LV. 1)]

[THREAT DETECTED: ATTEMPTED THEFT OF BOUND ITEM]

[RESPONSE PROTOCOL: NON-LETHAL DETERRENCE]

Every weapon in the room shattered.

Not exploded — shattered, cleanly, all at once, like glass struck by a single perfectly aimed note. The knife Vikram had been gripping snapped at the hilt and crumbled into rust-colored dust between his fingers. The stolen pistol’s barrel folded in on itself with a soft metallic groan before splitting apart entirely. The runic short blade one of the men had looted from 403 cracked down its center and fell to the floor in two pieces, its glow extinguishing instantly. Even the two men still gripping the Void Sword’s hilt felt something snap through their hands — not pain, exactly, more like a jolt of pure static that made every muscle in their arms lock up and release, sending them stumbling backward onto the cluttered floor.

The whole thing took less than two seconds.

Ethan, mercifully, did not wake up. He shifted slightly under the blanket, mumbled something that might have been a complaint about the noise, and settled back into stillness.

The room, however, looked like a battlefield. Eight men stood frozen amid a scatter of crumbling metal dust, snapped blades, and one deeply confused pistol that no longer resembled a functional weapon in any sense. Nobody had been hurt. Not a scratch, not a bruise. But every single tool of violence any of them had carried into that apartment now lay in ruins around their feet.

Deshu stared down at his own hands, empty, the machete he’d been holding reduced to a fine gray powder sifting between his fingers.

"Out," he croaked, voice barely above a whisper, all pretense of a plan gone. "Everybody out. Now."

Nobody argued. Eight men fled room 404 in near silence, stumbling over each other in the doorway, leaving behind a small mountain of destroyed weaponry and stealing nothing at all — not the sword, not the gear from 403, not even the dignity they’d walked in with.

Behind them, sound asleep, the strongest being on the entire planet dreamed, as far as anyone could tell, about absolutely nothing in particular.

He would wake up an hour later, stretch, glance at the odd dusting of grey powder scattered across his floor, assume it was construction debris from somewhere in the building, and sweep it toward the corner with his foot before going to check if there was anything left to eat.

He never once suspected he’d been robbed. Mostly because, in the most literal sense possible, he hadn’t been.