Requiem of the Awakened

Malik had known silence before.

The grave offered it in endless measures. The battlefield served it after blood ran out. Even memory—his oldest companion—could fall quiet when the pain grew too sharp.

But this silence?

This one clung to him.

Because Soline walked beside him again.

And with every step, the world remembered her.

And forgot itself.

The others kept their distance.

Not out of fear, but reverence. Soline didn't command presence—she was presence.

She moved like memory made flesh. Every flicker of her gaze pulled at something inside Malik, something deeper than recollection. Something elemental.

Naomi finally broke the silence. "She's disrupting you."

"I know," Malik said.

Elaris nodded. "Your Echo signature's changed. We all feel it."

"It's temporary," Malik replied.

Soline turned her head. "No. It isn't."

Anacaona stepped forward. "Is she a threat?"

"No," Malik said, without hesitation.

Soline smiled faintly.

"But she is a beginning."

They didn't know it yet.

But the Guild had already launched their answer.

A force unlike any before.

A strike team born not of cultivation…

…but of erasure.

In a facility deep beneath the Atlantic trench, the Guild had built a program so secret, not even Guildmasters knew all its components.

Project Nullwake.

A creation born in desperation.

For decades, the Guild hunted the most dangerous anomalies—souls fractured by cultivation, Echoes that twisted against logic, bloodlines corrupted by time travel and spatial rebirth.

They didn't destroy them.

They harvested them.

Bound them to a single will.

Now, that will had a name.

Ashvan Del.

Ashvan wasn't born.

He was sculpted.

No soul of his own—just a shell, empty, filled with the best fragments of the Guild's worst enemies.

He had no memory.

No fear.

Only directive:

Erase Malik Graves.

Not kill.

Erase.

Remove from the Threads.

Unmake him at the foundation.

When Malik's strike on Sanctuary was confirmed, Nullwake was released.

Six members.

Ashvan at the head.

The others, echoes of failure given shape:

Tessien, who could sever ley lines with a breath.

Jorak, a fusion of cryo and void tech.

Viin, a temporal manipulator—her body constantly aging and regressing, impossible to predict.

Covenant, a twin entity sharing one body, able to write anti-memory in living minds.

And Theta, the one who said nothing, because he existed only when looked at directly.

They would arrive in three days.

Malik felt the ripple on the second.

He woke from a dreamless rest with cold sweat on his back and the Fourth growling low.

Something comes.

"I know," Malik whispered.

Soline stood at the window, bare feet against stone.

"They've broken the seal."

"What seal?" he asked.

She turned to him.

"The one you made. When you swore you'd never walk the path of unmaking again."

The others gathered quickly.

Naomi's flame writhed, restless.

Elaris sharpened her blades without looking at them.

Anacaona stood guard at the perimeter, already in stance.

"What is this, Malik?" Naomi asked. "We've fought Guild agents, Sovereigns, even Herald-class Unknowns. But this…"

"They're not alive," Malik said.

"They're not dead."

"They're Nulls."

Soline sat, hands folded.

"They were made for you. Not to oppose you—but to unmake you. Their existence is defined by your erasure."

Elaris flinched. "Can we even fight something like that?"

Malik looked at his hand.

The mark pulsed.

Flickered.

Dimmed.

Then returned.

"I don't know," he admitted.

And that scared them more than any confident lie.

They fortified the ruins of Aram Vale, an abandoned observatory city lost to time. Malik had once trained there in secret, back before he had followers or titles.

Now, it would serve as battleground.

A test.

Not of strength.

Of existence.

The Nulls arrived just before dusk.

Not with noise.

With stillness.

The air forgot how to echo.

The sky darkened, but no stars appeared.

One by one, they emerged—shifting in and out of memory.

Tessien disassembled part of the east wall just by touching it.

Viin blinked forward, her face young, old, scarred, pristine—all in the same instant.

Covenant whispered—and Anacaona forgot her mother's name.

Jorak summoned ice that cracked in reverse.

And Theta…

No one knew where he was.

Because the moment they looked, he wasn't.

Only Ashvan walked like a man.

But Malik saw it.

Emptiness.

A perfect hollow designed in his image.

The first clash was quiet.

Elaris moved like a phantom, her blades singing.

Viin matched her step for step—not by skill, but by knowing which moves would happen next.

They clashed in echoes, steel on probability.

Naomi summoned a wall of fire—Jorak consumed it, reversed it, and sent back frost in the shape of her fears.

Anacaona held the bridge, fending off Covenant's whispers with chants of Obeah, each syllable a wall against forgetting.

Malik didn't move.

Not yet.

Ashvan watched him.

Then spoke, for the first time.

"You are an error."

Malik smiled grimly.

"So are miracles."

They collided.

No explosion. No storm of light.

Just absence.

Where their fists met, space forgot how to behave.

Reality bent—not from force, but choice.

Malik summoned his summons.

They did not come.

Ashvan had erased the soul-path for six seconds.

In that time—

He struck.

And Malik bled.

Soline moved.

Not fast.

Right.

She intercepted the second blow and redirected it—not physically, but conceptually.

She sang a name Malik had forgotten.

And suddenly the summons returned.

All of them.

The Fourth screamed into the sky, wings tearing clouds apart.

The Third hissed from the ground, forming a thousand blades.

Obsidian roared from beneath, and even Soline blinked as the Fifth shimmered into view—a sword without edge, wrapped in memory.

Malik stood tall.

"I forgot who I was," he said.

"Thanks for reminding me."

Together, they turned the tide.

Elaris landed a cut across Viin's real arm.

Naomi burned Jorak's heart so slowly it crystallized.

Anacaona struck Covenant with a name from her bloodline that could not be erased.

Theta was cornered.

Then vanished forever.

Only Ashvan remained.

He stood, flickering.

Fading.

But not defeated.

"I am your undoing," he whispered.

"Maybe," Malik replied.

"But not today."

He touched Ashvan's chest.

Not with hatred.

With truth.

"You don't exist. You were made in error."

And for a moment, Ashvan's shell shook.

Because Malik believed it.

And Ashvan did not.

He collapsed.

Not in blood.

But in absence.

Unmade not by force, but by identity.

Silence fell.

Real silence.

The kind Malik hadn't heard in years.

The kind earned.

Later, as they rebuilt the vale's defenses, Malik sat beside Soline.

"You knew what they were."

"Yes," she said.

"Why didn't you warn me sooner?"

"Because you wouldn't have believed it. You had to see the void to understand your shape."

He looked up at the stars.

"More will come."

"They always do."

Malik touched the mark on his palm.

And for the first time in weeks, it didn't hurt.