Global Apocalypse: My System Is Always AFK

Colonel Dubey gave the order to fire twelve minutes after his opening broadcast, having received nothing back from the sanctuary but silence and, from General Iyer’s confused, caught-between-two-fires battalion, a repeated demand to stand down that he had absolutely no intention of honoring.

"They’re not responding," he told his artillery commander. "No surrender terms, no negotiation. Soften the shield first. Once it’s down, infantry moves in behind the smoke."

"Colonel, if the shield’s as strong as the rumors suggest—"

"Rumors," Dubey said flatly. "I’ve heard a boy sliced open a vending machine. I’ve heard he carved a trench with a sword. None of that tells me what a coordinated artillery barrage does to whatever’s actually protecting that building. We test it. Fire."

The six artillery pieces opened up in a staggered volley, shells arcing high over the government battalion’s confused, scrambling formation and screaming down toward the sanctuary boundary in a tight cluster meant to concentrate maximum force against a single point.

Ethan, standing just inside the courtyard wall, watched them come.

[INCOMING HOSTILE ORDNANCE DETECTED]

[6 ARTILLERY SHELLS, HIGH-EXPLOSIVE]

[VOID SHIELD: ACTIVE]

[NOTE: SHIELD RATED TO WITHSTAND S-RANK AND BELOW WITHOUT STRUCTURAL DAMAGE]

[NOTE: CONVENTIONAL ARTILLERY IS CONSIDERABLY BELOW S-RANK]

[THREAT ASSESSMENT: NEGLIGIBLE]

"Yeah," Ethan muttered, watching the shells streak in, "that’s what I figured."

The first shell struck the shield’s outer boundary roughly forty meters above the building and simply stopped — not absorbed, not detonated on contact the way conventional armor plating might have handled it, but caught, suspended for a fraction of a second against a barrier that refused, on some fundamental level, to acknowledge the shell’s momentum as a legitimate force worth yielding to.

Then it reflected.

The shell’s own kinetic energy, denied any forward progress, redirected itself along the shield’s curved surface with mathematical precision, and shot back out along almost exactly the angle it had arrived on — accelerating, if anything, as the barrier’s own passive energy compounded with the shell’s existing momentum.

It detonated squarely in the middle of Dubey’s own artillery formation.

The explosion tore through the front line of gun crews before any of them had time to process what was happening, the shockwave flattening two of the artillery pieces and sending shrapnel scattering across a battlefield that, thirty seconds earlier, had felt entirely one-sided in the militia’s favor.

"WHAT—" Dubey spun toward the wreckage, disbelief cracking his composure for the first time since the operation began. "Report! What just hit us?"

"Our own shell, Colonel!" a surviving crew member shouted back, ears ringing, staggering away from the wreckage of his own gun position. "It came back — it just came back—"

The remaining five shells struck the shield in rapid succession, each one meeting the exact same fate — caught, redirected, and hurled back along a mirrored trajectory toward whatever had fired it. Two more slammed into the militia’s own advancing infantry line, scattering soldiers who’d been moving up in formation behind the smoke that never actually formed. A fourth clipped the edge of an armored vehicle, flipping it onto its side in a shower of sparks. The last two detonated harmlessly against open ground, their trajectories skewed just enough by the shield’s curvature to miss anything else entirely.

Within eleven seconds, Colonel Dubey’s carefully assembled artillery advantage had reduced itself to smoking wreckage, self-inflicted, without a single shell ever actually touching the building it had been aimed at.

[HOSTILE ORDNANCE NEUTRALIZED: 6/6]

[METHOD: REFLECTIVE BARRIER REDIRECT]

[SELF-INFLICTED CASUALTIES: SIGNIFICANT]

[SHIELD INTEGRITY: 100%]

[NOTE: THIS OUTCOME WAS ENTIRELY PREDICTABLE]

[NOTE: THE SYSTEM DID TRY TO WARN THEM]

Ethan snorted at that last line, watching the chaos unfold across the battlefield beyond the courtyard wall. "You didn’t warn them. You warned me. There’s a difference."

[FAIR]

Along the government’s line, General Iyer watched the militia’s own artillery detonate against itself with an expression somewhere between professional horror and grim, reluctant vindication. He’d spent the last twelve minutes trying to disentangle his own battalion from a crossfire he’d never intended to be part of, and the sight of Dubey’s front ranks scattering in confused, bleeding disorder solved that particular problem far more thoroughly than any of his careful diplomatic instincts could have managed.

"Sir," his aide said, voice tight, watching through binoculars, "the shield just — it sent their own shells back at them."

"I saw it," Iyer said, lowering his own field glasses slowly. He thought, with a cold, sinking clarity, about his own arguments to the council — about accountability, about the danger of unchecked power operating outside government structure — and found them curdling into something considerably more urgent than theoretical concern. If a single boy’s passive defenses could turn an entire artillery barrage back on its own crew without him even lifting a weapon, then whatever threat Iyer had imagined this situation might represent had just been rendered, quite completely, beside the point.

"New orders," he said. "Full defensive posture. We are not engaging that shield under any circumstances, and we are not engaging Dubey’s forces directly either — not until we understand exactly what we’re standing in the middle of. Signal all units: hold position, weapons down, wait for further orders."

Dubey, for his part, hadn’t yet accepted the lesson his own artillery had just tried to teach him.

"Regroup!" he shouted, watching his surviving infantry scramble back into some kind of formation amid the smoking wreckage of half his gun crews. "Advance on foot — the shield can’t reflect a bayonet charge, get in close and—"

He didn’t finish the order.

The courtyard wall’s gate, thirty meters ahead of his scattered forces, opened with a soft, unhurried creak, and a lone figure stepped through it — hoodie stained, hair a mess, Void Sword resting loose against one shoulder, walking toward the smoking battlefield with the same unbothered, faintly irritated gait Dubey’s forces had been assured, through weeks of dismissed rumor, belonged to nothing more threatening than a lazy teenager.

Ethan stopped roughly twenty meters from the militia’s ragged front line, glanced at the smoking wreckage of their own artillery, and then at Dubey himself, standing frozen near his command vehicle.

"So," Ethan said, voice carrying easily across the sudden, uneasy silence that had fallen over the battlefield, "you brought tanks. To my building. Where I keep my snacks. Where four hundred people are currently trying to have a normal morning."

Dubey found his voice, though it came out considerably less commanding than he intended. "Stand down, boy, or—"

"I was asleep an hour ago," Ethan continued, unbothered by the interruption, rolling his shoulders in a slow, deliberate stretch. "You woke me up. With artillery. Do you understand how rude that is?"

He raised the Void Sword, the air pressure across the battlefield dropping instantly with the familiar, ear-popping suddenness that every hunter guild in the district had, by now, learned to recognize and fear.

"I’m gonna give you exactly one chance to leave," Ethan said, voice gone quiet and cold in a way that made even General Iyer’s disciplined battalion, watching from their own line, take an involuntary step back. "After that, we’re not doing ’Do Not Disturb’ anymore. We’re doing something considerably less polite."

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