Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK
Chapter 14: The F-Rank Gate Appears Nearby

Chapter 14: The F-Rank Gate Appears Nearby

The tear in reality opened at 9:12 AM, three blocks from Ethan’s building, directly above the intersection where the last functioning grocery mart in the district still had half its shelves stocked.

It didn’t announce itself gently. The air over the intersection simply split — a jagged, humming seam of black and violet light unzipping the sky in a shape that looked uncomfortably like a wound, wide enough to swallow a bus, edges crackling with unstable energy that made every phone within two hundred meters buzz simultaneously with the same automated alert.

[GLOBAL WARNING]

[DIMENSIONAL GATE DETECTED]

[LOCATION: SECTOR 12, INTERSECTION OF MAIN ROAD AND MARKET STREET]

[CLASSIFICATION: F-RANK GATE]

[ALL CIVILIANS ARE ADVISED TO EVACUATE THE AREA IMMEDIATELY]

Captain Priya Malhotra was on scene within four minutes, her squad deploying in a defensive perimeter around the intersection while civilians scattered in every direction, screaming, dragging children and grocery bags with equal desperation. She’d seen gates open before — three of them, in the six days since the apocalypse began — and every single one had been a nightmare of coordination, casualties, and improvisation against monsters that poured out faster than anyone could track.

"Containment positions!" she shouted, rifle raised, eyes fixed on the widening tear. "Arjun, get a perimeter scan, I want a threat classification before anything comes through!"

"Captain, it’s already classified — F-rank—"

"F-rank gates spawn A-rank surprises all the time, don’t get comfortable!"

The gate finished tearing open with a sound like the world itself groaning, and the first creature emerged — a lumbering, six-limbed beast the size of a delivery truck, its hide a mottled bruise-purple, mandibles clicking with a wet, hungry sound that carried across the empty intersection.

"Contact!" Arjun shouted. "Multiple signatures behind it, Captain, I’m reading at least a dozen—"

The Iron Wolves opened fire. Bullets sparked harmlessly off the creature’s hide, and it surged forward with a bellow that shattered the windows of the grocery mart, sending glass raining down onto the abandoned produce stands below.

This was, by every reasonable metric, an active combat zone. Sirens the city no longer bothered maintaining wailed uselessly somewhere in the distance. Residents fled in packed, terrified crowds, some clutching whatever weapons they’d scavenged, most just running.

Directly through the middle of all of it walked Ethan Verma, hands in his hoodie pocket, heading toward the grocery mart with the singular, focused determination of a man who had run out of eggs.

He’d heard the commotion from his building — hard not to, given that half the district seemed to be screaming at once — but hadn’t thought much of it beyond a vague, mild irritation that the noise had interrupted a perfectly good mid-morning stretch. It was only once he stepped outside and saw the actual crowd stampeding past him, wide-eyed and panicked, that he bothered asking anyone what was going on.

"Gate!" a woman screamed at him as she ran past, dragging a child by the wrist. "There’s a gate, get back inside, get back—"

"A gate," Ethan repeated, unbothered, watching her disappear around the corner. He glanced toward the intersection, where he could now see the jagged black tear hanging in the sky, distant gunfire cracking beneath it, and the six-limbed monster currently flattening a parked auto-rickshaw beneath one massive purple leg.

He considered this information with all the gravity of a man discovering road construction had blocked his usual route to work.

"Great," he muttered. "That’s exactly on the way to the store."

He kept walking.

Priya spotted him from behind the overturned delivery van her squad had repurposed as cover, and for one brief, horrified moment genuinely believed her eyes were malfunctioning.

"Is that—" Arjun started, following her gaze.

"Yes," Priya said flatly, watching the boy in the loose hoodie stroll directly toward the six-limbed monster currently smashing through parked cars twenty meters ahead, hands still in his pockets, expression somewhere between mild boredom and quiet determination. "That’s him."

"He’s walking toward it!"

"Of course he is." Priya didn’t even bother raising her voice to stop him. Six days of watching this boy operate had taught her, with brutal efficiency, that shouting warnings at Ethan Verma accomplished roughly nothing.

The beast noticed him at the same moment — swinging its bulk around, mandibles clicking, six eyes fixing on the lone figure approaching without so much as a weapon drawn. It let out a bellow that rattled the remaining windows on the block and charged, ground shaking under its considerable weight, a wall of purple hide and grasping limbs closing the distance in seconds.

Ethan did not stop walking. He did not speed up, either. He simply adjusted his path a few degrees to the left, the exact minimal correction a person makes when avoiding a puddle on the sidewalk, and kept his eyes fixed on the grocery mart’s entrance somewhere behind the monster.

The creature’s leading limb slammed down where Ethan had been standing half a second earlier and hit nothing but cracked asphalt.

It swung again, faster this time, mandibles snapping at empty air as Ethan’s minor course correction put him consistently, infuriatingly out of reach without him ever appearing to actually dodge anything. He wasn’t even looking at it. He was checking his phone, scrolling through the avatar feed with mild interest, mentally noting that his tiny pixel self had just cleared Floor 44 of the Ash Spire while the real Ethan navigated an actual apocalyptic monster with the same passive attention he’d give a low-hanging tree branch.

[HOSTILE ENTITY: SPATIAL RIFT BEAST]

[RANK: F]

[THREAT ASSESSMENT: TRIVIAL]

[USER ACTION REQUIRED: NONE]

"Yeah, I figured," Ethan murmured, sidestepping a third swing without looking up from his screen, the beast’s massive limb crashing through a bus stop bench instead.

Behind the van, Priya watched with an expression that had settled somewhere past disbelief into a kind of exhausted acceptance. "Arjun. Log this."

"Log what, Captain?"

"I don’t know yet. Just — log it. All of it."

The beast, growing increasingly frustrated at its inability to land a single hit on a target that wasn’t even bothering to run, reared back for a final, all-out charge, mandibles wide, all six limbs driving forward in a last desperate bid to close the gap.

Ethan, three meters from the grocery mart’s shattered entrance, finally looked up from his phone, mildly annoyed that the thing was still following him.

"Look," he said, to a creature that could not possibly understand him, "I just need eggs. Can we do this later?"

He didn’t swing the Void Sword — it was still leaning against his bedroom wall, four floors away, entirely uninvolved. He didn’t draw any weapon at all. He simply raised one hand, more out of irritation than intent, in the universal gesture of a man waving away an insistent salesman.

The passive pressure radiating naturally off his body — the same Void Aura that had dropped four elite zombies without effort days earlier — met the beast’s charge head-on, and the creature simply stopped existing in any coherent shape, its momentum carrying scattered, dissolving fragments another few feet forward before the last of it faded into loot particles that Ethan’s system absorbed without so much as a notification chime.

He didn’t look back to check. He was already inside the grocery mart, scanning the shelves for eggs.

Behind him, the Iron Wolves stood in stunned silence over an empty intersection, an unclaimed gate slowly sealing itself shut in the sky above, and absolutely no explanation whatsoever for what they’d just witnessed.