Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK
Chapter 34: Who Was That Caped Crusader?

Chapter 34: Who Was That Caped Crusader?

By the time news of the Sector 4 miracle reached the rest of the city, it had already grown three sizes too big for the truth to fit back inside it.

It started, as these things always did, with survivors — the evacuees who’d fled the market district and watched, from a safe distance, as a lone figure carved a horizon-spanning trench into the earth with a single sword swing. None of them had gotten a clear look at Ethan’s face. Most of them had been too far away, or too busy running, or too overwhelmed by the sheer physics-defying scale of what they were witnessing to catch anything more specific than "boy" and "hoodie" and "the sky itself tore open."

By evening, those scraps of description had already been reshaped into something considerably more mythic.

"They’re calling him the Trench Warden now," a runner reported breathlessly to Anika Reyes, back at the Crimson Blade’s guildhall, where half her fighters were still shaking off the adrenaline of the afternoon. "Someone at the west shelter says they saw wings. Someone else is saying he had a cape."

"He does not have a cape," Anika said flatly, rubbing her temples. "He has a hoodie. It’s stained. I’ve seen it up close."

"There’s already a betting pool on his true identity," the runner continued, undeterred. "Half the shelter thinks he’s a government black-ops asset. The other half thinks he’s some kind of reincarnated war god. Someone’s swearing up and down that he glows in the dark."

"He doesn’t glow."

"The sword glows."

Anika opened her mouth to correct that too, hesitated, and finally just sighed. "Fine. The sword glows. Everything else is nonsense."

Across the district, the story mutated at a pace that outstripped any attempt at correction. By nightfall, three separate shelters were independently circulating the theory that the mysterious "Trench Warden" was, in fact, several different heroes who’d banded together to face the wave — a coalition of legendary hunters too humble to claim individual credit. A rival theory, gaining traction near the settlement market, insisted it was a single ancient being, awoken from centuries of slumber specifically to protect the city, drawn out of hiding only by a threat grave enough to warrant it.

Nobody guessed bread.

Priya’s official report — filed that evening with as much clinical restraint as she could manage — did its best to correct the record, listing the confirmed engagement details: threat neutralized, civilian saved, trench formation approximately 4.8 kilometers, single combatant. She left the combatant’s name out of the report entirely, partly out of some instinct to protect him from the political attention that would inevitably follow, and partly because she genuinely wasn’t sure how to phrase "he did this because a bakery was in danger" in a way that wouldn’t get her report laughed out of the regional council chambers.

The council, for its part, convened an emergency session that ran late into the night, poring over satellite imagery of the trench — a wound so large it was visible from orbit, according to the one functioning satellite still relaying data — and debated, with growing urgency, exactly what kind of power had done this, and whether it represented salvation or an entirely new category of threat.

"We need to identify him," one council member insisted, jabbing a finger at the imagery. "If this level of destructive capability exists in an unregistered, unaffiliated individual, that’s not a victory. That’s an emergency."

"He saved the district," another countered. "Eight thousand hostiles eliminated in a single strike. Do you understand what that would have cost us otherwise?"

"I understand what it could cost us if he decides, one day, that he doesn’t like something we’re doing."

The debate continued for hours, dividing the council roughly in half between those who wanted to honor the Trench Warden with a formal commendation and those who wanted him found, contained, and thoroughly investigated before the city discovered it had traded one existential threat for another.

None of them reached him that night. None of them would have known where to look, even if they’d tried — the trail from the battlefield led, as it always did, straight back to an unremarkable residential building three streets from the market district, to a fourth-floor apartment with peeling paint on the door, where the single most powerful being currently on the planet was, at that exact moment, doing something considerably less dramatic than anyone searching for him could have imagined.

Ethan had walked home from the bakery — properly walked, on foot, mostly because the fifteen-meter range on his teleport skill made the whole trip more trouble than it was worth for a distance he could cover comfortably in twenty minutes — carrying a fresh loaf of bread Meenakshi had insisted on gifting him despite his protests that she really didn’t owe him anything.

"You saved my oven, beta," she’d said, wrapping the loaf in cloth with hands that were, for the first time all day, slightly unsteady. "The least I can do is feed you."

He’d eaten half the loaf on the walk back, savoring it with the specific, uncomplicated joy of a man who’d genuinely earned his breakfast supply chain today, and by the time he reached his building, the adrenaline of the afternoon had fully drained out of him, replaced by the deep, bone-heavy exhaustion that came from using his powers with actual intent for the first time in weeks.

He climbed the stairs — not bothering with the teleport, too tired to aim properly — nodded at Mr. Bhatia, who bowed so deeply in the hallway that Ethan genuinely worried about his back, and let himself into Room 404 with the singular focus of a man whose entire day’s ambitions had narrowed down to one final goal.

He kicked off his shoes without bothering to untie them, flopped face-first onto his bed still fully dressed, and was asleep within four minutes.

His phone, propped against the pillow as always, lit up quietly with the evening’s accumulated notifications — the avatar feed still grinding somewhere deep in a dungeon, oblivious as ever to the chaos its counterpart had caused in the waking world, alongside a small handful of system messages Ethan wouldn’t read until morning.

[TITLE AWARDED: WAVE BREAKER]

[TITLE AWARDED: TRENCH MAKER]

[REGIONAL THREAT INDEX UPDATED]

[USER CLASSIFICATION: STILL UNDEFINED]

[NOTE: THE ENTIRE CITY IS CURRENTLY DEBATING YOUR IDENTITY]

[NOTE: YOU ARE ASLEEP]

[NOTE: THIS IS ENTIRELY CONSISTENT WITH ESTABLISHED USER BEHAVIOR]

Outside, across a city still buzzing with rumors of capes and glowing wings and ancient war gods, three separate news broadcasts on Rohan’s salvaged radio speculated wildly about the identity of the "Trench Warden," each one more elaborate than the last. Shelter debates raged into the night. The regional council scheduled a follow-up session for the next morning, determined to find answers.

And in Room 404, the source of all that speculation slept soundly through it all, one shoe still half-on, a half-eaten loaf of bread sitting safely in his void inventory, utterly unaware that he’d just become the single most sought-after mystery in the entire district — and utterly unbothered by the fact, even if he had known.