Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK
Chapter 5: Out of Stock, Into the Fray

Chapter 5: Out of Stock, Into the Fray

Captain Priya Malhotra of the Iron Wolf Hunter Squad had seen a lot of things in the six days since the sky turned red.

She’d seen a housewife tear an elite zombie in half with a rolling pin after awakening as a C-rank Berserker. She’d seen a twelve-year-old summon a spectral tiger to fend off a horde while his mother screamed at him to come inside for dinner. She’d seen her own squad lose two members to a dungeon collapse that the system had rated, with breathtaking cruelty, as "Trivial."

She had not seen anything like the boy in the hoodie.

"Report," she said, crouched behind the wrecked bus with her rifle steady, watching the street where four elite zombies had dropped dead without a single visible strike. "Rahul, what did you actually see?"

Rahul — the one with the bleeding shoulder, now hastily bandaged with a strip torn from his own shirt — was still staring at the spot where the boy had disappeared into the convenience store. "He just... walked. Captain, he didn’t even look at them. They got close and just—" He made a vague gesture with his hand, like flicking away a fly. "Dropped. All four."

"Class?"

"Unknown. No aura signature I could read. Nothing on my scanner."

Priya had been a Ranked hunter for three years before the apocalypse hit — professional monster containment work, the kind most people didn’t know existed until reality itself became a containment problem. She knew what an S-rank aura felt like. She’d stood in a room with two of them once, at a closed-door briefing, and it had felt like standing too close to a running furnace. What she’d felt from the boy in the hoodie, from fifty meters away, was nothing. No signature. No pressure. No weight.

Which was, in its own way, far more terrifying.

"He went into the building across the street," said Arjun, her second-in-command, lowering his binoculars. "The old residential block. Captain, that thing they took down—" he nodded at one of the collapsed zombies, "—that’s a Lv. 34 elite. My whole squad together couldn’t solo one of those without losses."

"I know."

"So what do we do?"

Priya considered the question for exactly two seconds before making the only decision that made sense to a professional whose entire career had been built on identifying threats before they identified you.

"We follow him," she said. "Carefully."

The residential block’s front doors hung ajar, one hinge snapped from the earlier chaos. Priya’s squad moved through the entrance in standard formation — low, quiet, weapons ready — the kind of practiced silence that came from years of dungeon-clearing work, not six days of desperate improvisation.

They were not prepared for what greeted them in the lobby.

The vending machine — an actual, mundane, pre-apocalypse vending machine — had been sliced into four pieces so clean the cut edges gleamed like polished glass. Soda cans littered the floor in a slowly spreading puddle of fizz. The marble tile beneath the wreckage had cracked in a spiderweb pattern radiating out a full two meters, deep enough that Priya could see the concrete subfloor beneath.

And leaning against the wall near a dead elevator, propped up as casually as an umbrella left by the door, was a sword.

Priya’s breath caught somewhere in her throat.

She’d spent three years learning to read weapon-grade energy signatures the way most people read facial expressions. And the pressure radiating off that blade — even dormant, even just resting there — pressed against her chest like a physical weight, thick and cold, the kind of aura she associated with weapons that showed up once a generation in classified briefings and got their own dedicated containment protocols.

"Captain," Arjun whispered, voice gone tight. "That’s—"

"Don’t touch it," she said immediately, holding up a hand to stop him from taking even a single step closer. "Don’t get near it. Scan it. Carefully."

Arjun raised his wrist-mounted scanner with visibly shaking hands. It took four full seconds to process — an eternity for a device that usually gave instant readouts — before finally producing a result that made him audibly stop breathing.

"Rank... it says S-rank, Captain. Weight estimate—" he squinted, tapped the screen, assuming it was broken. "Four thousand kilograms."

"That’s not possible," Rahul said. "Nothing lifts an S-rank weapon that dense. Not even our strongest Guild Masters could—"

"Excuse me."

The voice came from the stairwell, casual and slightly annoyed, and every hunter in the lobby spun toward it with weapons half-raised on pure reflex.

Ethan stood on the third step, arms loaded with chip bags and a stack of noodle packets, blinking at the five armed strangers crouched in his lobby like he’d stumbled onto a very inconvenient flash mob.

"Are you guys, uh." He glanced at their armbands, their gear, the very serious expressions. "Delivery? Because I already got the chips myself, so."

Nobody answered. Every one of them was staring past him at the sword leaning against the wall, then back at him, then at the sword again, doing math that refused to add up.

Priya lowered her rifle a fraction — not out of trust, but because pointing a gun at something that had apparently one-shotted a vending machine into scrap felt, suddenly, like a very bad career decision.

"That sword," she said carefully. "Is it yours?"

Ethan followed her gaze, saw the Void Sword still propped exactly where he’d left it, and shrugged like she’d asked him whether the umbrella by the door belonged to him.

"Yeah. Some notification thing dropped it this morning. Used it to open the vending machine, actually — the coin slot’s been busted for like two years, total nightmare." He hefted his chips as evidence, as though this explained everything.

Rahul made a small, strangled noise.

"You used—" Arjun started, then stopped, restarted. "You used an S-rank legendary weapon. On a vending machine."

"It was locked," Ethan said, with the weary patience of a man explaining something obvious to slow children. "What was I supposed to do, wait for the coin slot to fix itself? We’re in the apocalypse now, man. Priorities."

Priya opened her mouth, closed it, and found herself, for the first time in her career, completely unable to formulate the next question.

She’d spent three years cataloguing threats by power level, by aura density, by combat record. None of her training had prepared her for a threat assessment that ended with he was thirsty.

"What’s your name," she finally managed.

"Ethan."

"Ethan," she repeated slowly, filing it away with the kind of grim significance usually reserved for names on classified watchlists. "What’s your class rank?"

He blinked at her, genuinely confused. "I don’t— I think it said Unemployed? The system’s kind of broken, honestly."

Behind her, Rahul made a sound like he was either laughing or having a minor breakdown. Possibly both.

Priya looked once more at the sliced vending machine, the four-ton sword resting against the wall like forgotten luggage, and the teenager standing on the stairs holding what appeared to be his entire week’s grocery supply.

"Right," she said, already dreading the report she’d have to file. "Of course it did."