Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK
Chapter 16: The Elites Are Sweating Blood

Chapter 16: The Elites Are Sweating Blood

The path toward daylight wasn’t as short as Ethan hoped.

It wound upward through a series of narrowing tunnels, the crystal veins in the walls growing brighter the higher he climbed, until the stone passage finally opened into a massive cavern lit by a natural skylight far above — a jagged crack in the rock ceiling letting in a shaft of genuine, actual sunlight that Ethan greeted like an old friend.

"Finally," he said, stepping into the open chamber. "Civilization."

It was not civilization. It was, in fact, considerably worse than the rat-thing nest two corridors back.

The cavern floor stretched wide, easily the size of a football field, and at its center, a battle was underway that looked less like combat and more like a controlled catastrophe. A dozen hunters — real ones, decked out in gear that made the Iron Wolves’ equipment look like costume props, glowing runic armor and weapons that pulsed with visible mana — were arranged in a tight defensive formation around a massive, hulking shape that towered three stories high.

The boss.

It looked like a golem built from fused crystal and bone, limbs the size of tree trunks, a single glowing red eye set into a face that had no other features, and every time it moved, the ground shook hard enough to rattle loose stone from the cavern ceiling. One arm swept sideways, and three hunters barely managed to dive clear before it demolished a stalagmite the size of a car into rubble.

"Formation Delta! HOLD THE LINE!" a woman’s voice cut through the chaos, sharp and commanding, though there was a fraying edge to it that hadn’t been there at the start of the fight. "Mana barriers, now, NOW—"

Ethan stood at the tunnel entrance, groceries under one arm, watching the scene with the mild interest of a man who’d stumbled onto a stranger’s very intense workout session.

The woman shouting orders — tall, silver-haired, wearing armor that radiated a visibly denser mana signature than the rest of her squad — was Meera Kapoor, guild leader of the Ashen Talon, one of the top three hunter guilds left standing in the region after the apocalypse thinned the ranks brutally. She’d brought her best eleven fighters into this "tutorial-adjacent" gate expecting exactly what the classification promised: manageable difficulty, decent loot, low casualty risk.

What they’d found instead, twenty minutes deep, was a boss that had no business existing in a zone this low-rated — an anomaly, a corrupted spawn, something that should have been sealed behind an S-rank gate and instead had shown up here, in what was supposed to be a routine clear.

"Captain, mana reserves at thirty percent!" one of her fighters called out, voice cracking with exhaustion. "We can’t keep this barrier up much longer!"

"Then we hit it harder!" Meera snapped back, though even she could hear how thin that plan sounded now, four fighters already down, dragged to the cavern’s edge by whoever could spare the seconds, bleeding and unconscious but alive, for now.

The golem raised both massive arms overhead, crystal cracking and reforming along its knuckles, and brought them down in a devastating double slam that sent a shockwave rippling across the cavern floor, cracking stone and knocking half the remaining fighters off their feet.

Sweat mixed with blood on more than one face in that formation. These were elite hunters — S-rank and A-rank fighters, the kind of names that made headlines even before the world ended — and every single one of them looked like they were staring down the very real possibility of dying in a tutorial zone.

Ethan checked his watch.

It was an old habit-turned-reflex, a leftover twitch from the days when he actually had places to be, and it took him a full three seconds of staring at the blank, non-functional face of a watch that hadn’t kept accurate time since before the apocalypse before he remembered it was broken and had been for months.

"Right," he muttered, tapping the dead watch face out of pure muscle memory. "Useless."

He glanced instead at his phone — still tucked in his hoodie pocket, avatar feed running quietly in the background — mostly just to check how long he’d actually been wandering this dungeon, because the grocery run had, by any reasonable measure, gone catastrophically off schedule.

[TIME ELAPSED SINCE ENTERING DUNGEON: 14 MINUTES]

[USER LOCATION: SUNKEN VEIN, DEEPER CHAMBER]

[HOSTILE ENTITY DETECTED: NAMED BOSS — "THE HOLLOWED WARDEN, CORRUPTED"]

[THREAT ASSESSMENT: NEGLIGIBLE]

"Fourteen minutes," Ethan sighed, shaking his head. "I’ve been in this dumb cave for fourteen minutes and I still don’t have eggs."

The golem’s massive red eye — the only feature on its blank crystal face — swiveled at the sound of his voice, tracking across the cavern until it locked directly onto the teenager standing at the tunnel entrance with a bag of rice tucked under his arm.

Meera’s head snapped around too, following the boss’s sudden shift in attention, and her stomach dropped at what she saw: a lone, unarmed civilian, standing directly in the path of the single most dangerous thing she’d encountered since the apocalypse began.

"CIVILIAN!" she screamed, already sprinting toward him despite the mana burnout screaming through her own limbs, despite every tactical instinct telling her this was a fight she couldn’t afford to split her attention on. "GET DOWN, GET BEHIND COVER—"

The Hollowed Warden didn’t wait for her to finish the sentence. It pivoted its entire massive frame toward Ethan, crystal joints grinding, and raised one tree-trunk arm for a strike that had, moments earlier, been powerful enough to crater solid stone.

Ethan looked up at the incoming three-story fist, sighed the exact sigh of a man whose grocery trip had officially gone on far too long, and shifted his weight a half-step to the side.

The Warden’s fist came down exactly where he’d been standing and obliterated a section of cavern floor into gravel and dust, the shockwave rolling outward hard enough to knock Meera clean off her feet mid-sprint.

When the dust cleared, Ethan was standing three feet to the left, entirely unbothered, one hand still holding his groceries, the other absently checking his broken watch again out of pure reflex.

"Fourteen minutes," he repeated, mostly to himself, deeply unimpressed by both the dungeon and his own life choices. "This is genuinely worse than the DMV."

Meera scrambled back to her feet, staring at the boy who’d just casually sidestepped a strike that had put four of her S-rank fighters in the dirt, and felt something cold and disbelieving settle into her chest — the exact same feeling Priya Malhotra had felt six days earlier, standing over a sliced-open vending machine.

"Who," she breathed, "are you?"

Ethan didn’t answer. He was too busy squinting up at the Hollowed Warden’s single glowing eye, weighing his rapidly thinning patience against the very real possibility that this thing was standing between him and the daylight exit for the rest of the afternoon.

"Okay," he said finally, shifting the rice bag to his other arm and rolling his neck with the resigned energy of a man about to do something he really, really didn’t want to spend the effort on. "Let’s just get this over with."