Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK
Chapter 31: Walking Into the Swarm

Chapter 31: Walking Into the Swarm

The wave hit the open ground between Ethan and the barricade like a tide crashing onto shore, and for one suspended second, every hunter along the defensive line braced for the sight of a boy being swallowed whole by three thousand mutated monsters.

Ethan walked into it.

Not charged. Not braced for impact, not dropped into some dramatic combat stance with the sword raised high — he just kept walking, the same unhurried, faintly irritated pace he used crossing a busy street, Void Sword held loose at his side like an umbrella he hadn’t decided whether he needed yet.

The first wave of creatures reached him — hulking, hunched things with too many joints, jaws wide, claws extended, moving with the mindless, overwhelming momentum of a stampede that had never once, in its entire existence, encountered something it couldn’t simply trample.

They found out differently in the span of half a second.

Ethan’s Void Aura, the same passive pressure that had dropped four elite zombies in the street weeks earlier, had grown considerably since then — no longer a localized shield but something closer to a standing wave of lethal density radiating outward from his body in a widening bubble. The front rank of monsters didn’t so much die as cease, crumpling mid-leap into drifting particles of red-black mist the moment they crossed some invisible threshold around him, their momentum carrying dissolving fragments forward into the ranks behind them.

[HOSTILE ENTITIES NEUTRALIZED: 40]

[HOSTILE ENTITIES NEUTRALIZED: 40]

[HOSTILE ENTITIES NEUTRALIZED: 52]

The notifications ticked by faster than Ethan could be bothered reading them, and he kept walking, straight into the heart of the wave, sword still mostly decorative at his side, more interested in the general direction of the market district behind the swarm than in any individual creature attempting to end him.

A larger shape broke off from the main body — something the size of a delivery truck, all corded muscle and jagged bone spurs, clearly one of the wave’s designated heavy hitters, and it barreled toward him with enough force to level a building.

Ethan finally lifted the sword, more out of mild annoyance at having his walk interrupted than any real concern, and swung it in a short, lazy arc that barely seemed to cost him any effort at all.

The shockwave that followed cracked the earth in a thirty-meter line, splitting the massive creature clean in half along a diagonal seam before it ever reached him, its two halves collapsing into the churning mass of smaller monsters around it and taking a swath of them down in the process.

[HOSTILE ENTITY NEUTRALIZED: ALPHA-CLASS BRUTE]

[COLLATERAL NEUTRALIZATIONS: 61]

"Fine," Ethan muttered, stepping over the wreckage without breaking stride, "you made me draw the sword properly. Happy now?"

Along the barricade, the defensive line had gone almost completely silent, every weapon still raised on pure reflex, but nobody firing, nobody moving, because there was, quite simply, nothing left for any of them to do.

"Captain," Rahul said, voice barely above a whisper, "he’s — he’s not even trying."

Priya watched through her binoculars, tracking the widening radius of dissolving monster particles that followed Ethan’s path through the wave like a wake behind a boat, and found herself, for the third time in three weeks, entirely without words for what she was seeing.

"He’s walking," she said finally. "He’s just walking through them."

The wave, for its part, had begun to show the first signs of something like collective animal panic — the creatures at the rear, still surging forward on instinct and whatever driving force pushed them from behind, colliding with a growing tide of their own dissolving front ranks, the entire formation losing cohesion as thousands of monsters that had never encountered resistance suddenly found themselves funneling around a single point that erased anything foolish enough to get close.

Some of them, remarkably, began to peel away — smaller, smarter creatures breaking off from the main body entirely, scattering toward the flanks in a desperate bid to avoid whatever was carving a hole through the center of their formation. It didn’t save them. Ethan’s expanding aura had grown wide enough now that even creatures attempting evasive maneuvers found themselves crossing its threshold anyway, dissolving before they’d covered more than a few meters of lateral distance.

Anika lowered her own weapon slowly, watching the chaos unfold with something between professional awe and genuine disbelief. "He said this was about breakfast."

"I believe him," Priya said. "I think that might be the most motivated I’ve ever seen him."

Deep within the churning mass, past the point where the wave’s cohesion had fully collapsed into panicked, directionless scattering, Ethan finally slowed his pace, glancing around at the diminishing horde with the mild satisfaction of a man clearing out an overgrown garden.

[HOSTILE ENTITIES REMAINING: 890]

[WAVE FORMATION: COLLAPSED]

[WAVE MORALE: NONEXISTENT]

"Nonexistent morale," Ethan read, mildly amused. "Good. That’s the correct response to seeing me."

A cluster of the remaining creatures, cornered and desperate, made one last coordinated rush — a dozen of them converging from multiple angles in a genuine, if hopeless, attempt at overwhelming force. Ethan sighed, the specific sigh of a man who’d hoped this part was over, and swept the Void Sword in a wide horizontal arc.

The blade didn’t just cut through them. The air pressure displaced by the swing alone was enough to flatten the entire cluster into the cracked earth, their bodies dissolving into particle mist before the physical edge of the sword had even reached the nearest of them.

[12 HOSTILE ENTITIES NEUTRALIZED]

[METHOD: DISPLACEMENT SHOCKWAVE]

[EFFICIENCY RATING: EXCESSIVE]

"Excessive is my whole thing at this point," Ethan said, sheathing the sword over his shoulder and continuing his walk toward the market district, no longer particularly bothered by the scattered remnants of the wave still fleeing in every direction around him. He wasn’t hunting them down individually — the ones smart enough to flee outside his aura’s radius, he let go, entirely uninterested in chasing down stragglers when his actual objective still waited somewhere ahead, patient and unburned, oven still warm.

He emerged from the far side of the collapsed wave’s wreckage into the empty market district, streets littered with the drifting last remnants of dissolving monster particles, storefronts and stalls all still standing, untouched, exactly as they’d been left in the evacuation.

The bakery sat exactly where he’d left it, shutter still half-closed, the basket of half-wrapped bread still sitting on the counter where Meenakshi had abandoned it.

Ethan stood in front of it for a long moment, breathing a little harder than he had been at the start of this whole ordeal, and felt something in his chest settle into place — not triumph, not the swelling satisfaction of a hero who’d just saved a district, but something quieter, more personal.

"Still standing," he said, mostly to himself, reaching out to gently push the shutter fully open, checking that the oven inside hadn’t gone cold. It hadn’t — still holding a faint, banked heat, three weeks of Meenakshi’s careful maintenance intact.

Behind him, back along the ruined battlefield he’d carved through in under ten minutes, the defensive line finally began to move again, hunters lowering weapons in stunned, disbelieving silence, staring at the empty ground where a wave numbering in the thousands had simply ceased to be a threat.

Priya keyed her radio with hands that weren’t entirely steady. "Stand down. Threat neutralized. Repeat, threat neutralized."

Nobody asked how. By now, across three separate guilds and half the district’s remaining population, that question had simply stopped being worth asking.