Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK
Chapter 30: Protecting the Supply Line

Chapter 30: Protecting the Supply Line

The defensive line came into view as Ethan crested the last low ridge before the market district—hundreds of hunters packed shoulder to shoulder behind sandbags and overturned vehicles, weapons raised, faces set with the grim resolve of people who knew, on some level, that the numbers weren’t in their favor.

Priya spotted him first, a lone figure in a stained hoodie walking calmly toward the front line while everyone else braced for impact.

"Is that—" she started.

"It’s him," Anika confirmed, watching Ethan approach with an expression somewhere between relief and disbelief. "Took him long enough."

Ethan reached the barricade and stopped beside Priya, hands still in his hoodie pocket, studying the approaching wave with the focused calculation of a man assessing a genuine problem for the first time in weeks.

"How bad is it?" he asked.

"Low thousands," Priya said. "Coordinated. Something’s driving them from behind, we don’t know what yet. We’re going to hold as long as we can and fall back to protect the evacuation."

"Fall back to where?"

"West perimeter. If we lose this line, we lose the market district. The bakery, the trading stalls, the supply routes we’ve spent three weeks building." Priya’s jaw tightened. "We lose Sector 4 entirely."

Ethan’s eyes flicked toward the market district behind them—toward the general direction of a bakery that, twenty minutes ago, he’d personally evacuated a stubborn old woman from, and which currently sat empty, oven still warm, loaves of bread stacked in a basket she hadn’t finished packing.

Something in his chest went very still and very focused.

"So if this line breaks," he said slowly, working through the implications with the seriousness of a man solving a genuinely important equation, "the bakery’s gone."

"Almost certainly," Priya said. "Along with everything else."

"And if the bakery’s gone..." Ethan trailed off, staring at the horizon, watching the wave’s leading edge grow closer, thousands of shapes now distinguishable as a churning mass of claws and teeth and hunger, rolling toward them like a living avalanche. "Then I have to cook my own breakfast."

Priya turned to look at him fully for the first time since he’d arrived. "...What?"

"I have to cook," Ethan said, and something about the word came out with genuine horror attached to it, the specific dread of a man confronting a fate worse than most apocalyptic scenarios. "Do you understand what that means? I burn water, Priya. I turned three forks into shrapnel last week just eating noodles. If that bakery’s gone, I’m looking at eating raw rice out of my inventory for the rest of my natural life."

Anika stared at him. "There is a monster wave numbering in the thousands about to hit this line, and you’re worried about breakfast."

"I’m worried about the bakery," Ethan corrected, already rolling his shoulders, already settling into the loose, ready stance of a man who’d finally found a motivation weighty enough to override three weeks of comfortable apathy. "Meenakshi’s been perfecting that oven fire for weeks. You know how hard it is to keep a wood fire consistent enough to bake actual bread in this economy? That’s not just breakfast, that’s — that’s infrastructure. That’s a supply line. You said it yourself."

"I said ’supply routes,’ not—"

"Same thing," Ethan said, cutting her off, eyes fixed now on the approaching wave with an intensity none of them had seen from him before. "That wave doesn’t get to take my bread."

He stepped forward, past the sandbags, past the front line of braced hunters, out into the open ground between the barricade and the incoming horde, and the entire defensive line watched him go with a mixture of alarm and the now-familiar, bone-deep resignation of people who’d learned, over three weeks, that stopping him was neither possible nor advisable.

"Ethan—" Priya called after him, some final instinct toward caution surfacing despite everything she’d already witnessed.

"I’m fine," he called back, without turning around. "Just gonna go handle the supply line issue."

"The wave is thousands strong—"

"Yeah, well." Ethan rolled his neck, the same gesture he’d made in the Sunken Vein weeks earlier, right before turning an anomalous S-rank boss into red mist with a stretch. "So is my breakfast schedule, and I take that pretty seriously."

The wave’s leading edge was close enough now that individual monsters had become distinguishable — hulking, hunched things with too many joints, smaller swarming creatures moving in dense packs at ground level, and, further back, larger shapes that suggested the wave had at least a few genuine heavy hitters embedded within its ranks. The combined noise of thousands of monsters moving as one had grown into a low, bone-rattling roar that vibrated through the cracked earth beneath everyone’s feet.

Ethan stood alone in the open ground between the barricade and the horde, hands still loosely in his hoodie pocket, and watched it come.

Behind him, along the defensive line, hunters exchanged glances, weapons still raised but attention now split between the approaching monsters and the singular, unarmed teenager standing directly in their path.

"Should we cover him?" Rahul asked, voice tight, already adjusting his aim toward the wave’s front ranks.

"No," Priya said quietly, something in her tone shifting from tactical concern into something closer to grim curiosity. "I don’t think he needs it."

"Captain, that’s a wave of thousands—"

"I know what it is," Priya said. "Just watch."

The wave’s front line reached the halfway point between the horizon and the barricade — close enough now that the ground itself trembled with every collective footfall, close enough that the roar had become deafening, close enough that even the most seasoned hunters along the defensive line felt their grip tighten on their weapons out of pure animal instinct.

Ethan finally pulled one hand free of his hoodie pocket, flexed his fingers once, testing the strength he’d been carrying around for three weeks like an inconvenient houseguest he’d never bothered to properly introduce to the neighbors.

[HOSTILE WAVE DETECTED]

[TOTAL ENTITY COUNT: 3,847]

[THREAT ASSESSMENT: NEGLIGIBLE]

[NOTE: USER MOTIVATION LEVEL: SIGNIFICANTLY ELEVATED]

[NOTE: CAUSE OF ELEVATED MOTIVATION: BREAKFAST-RELATED]

[NOTE: THE SYSTEM FINDS THIS SOMEWHAT VALIDATING]

"Damn right it’s breakfast-related," Ethan muttered, reading the notification with grim satisfaction, and reached back over his shoulder toward the sheath he’d started wearing more out of habit than necessity, closing his fingers around a hilt that had gone untouched in weeks. "Alright."

He drew the Void Sword.

The air pressure across the entire battlefield dropped instantly, a physical, tangible shift that every hunter along the defensive line felt in their bones — ears popping, breath catching, the specific, electric stillness that settles over a room right before something enormous happens. The black blade caught what little light the darkened sky still offered, purple veins along its length pulsing brighter than Ethan had ever seen them, almost eager.

Behind the barricade, Anika Reyes felt her mouth go dry.

"He’s never actually drawn that thing," she said quietly. "Not once. Not against the vending machine, not against the Warden, not against anything."

"He’s drawing it now," Priya said, watching the wave’s leading edge close the final stretch of open ground, watching Ethan settle into a stance that finally, for the first time in three weeks, looked like it belonged to someone about to fight.

"For a bakery."

"For his breakfast," Priya corrected, and found, to her own genuine surprise, that she couldn’t entirely argue with the priority. "I think, at this point, we should just be grateful he cares about something enough to bother."

Ethan raised the Void Sword, the wave now close enough to feel the hot, rank breath of its front ranks, close enough that the roar had become a physical wall of sound pressing against every eardrum on the battlefield.

"Alright," he said, quiet enough that only he could hear it, eyes fixed on the horde that stood between him and every future breakfast he intended to enjoy in peace. "Let’s talk about supply chains."